The traditional celebration of European success through superior fire-power and lack of native germ resistance Columbus Day, of which this would be the 515th anniversary, believed to be the day that Columbus’s mini-armada landed in the Bahamas, took place on the 12th of October, before our last liberal President (Nixon) started to make every holiday save the three confined to their calendar days (1 January, 4 July and 25 December) a Monday holiday (as a liberal, Nixon liked the idea of giving the workers some contiguous time off, which stimulated tourism to boot!). I spent part of my own Columbus...

Thus is the logic of the current round of Presidential denials that the United States of torturers America… engages in torture (after a whole new round of secret torture memos was just unearthed) [h/t to Candace.]. Because waterboarding, or starving people, or subjecting them to freezing temperatures or loud noises or sleep deprivation or all of this at the same time while holding them in solitary confinement for years, or anything else that everyone else in the world universally regards as torture… isn’t torture, because a conscienceless political whore with a law degree says it isn’t, so it isn’t. This...

What else can you say about the sudden resurgence of the once anemic Hillary fundraising machine, which has caught up with solid debate performances and not-ready-for-primetime party opponents… giving Hillary a lead in quarterly fundraising and a 33% poll lead over Obama. The Scaife-Wallace-Murdoch media machine (and, btw, Murdoch personally seems to like former Walmart board member Hillary Clinton) now has its knives out for Hillary (hence the perverse obsession with her clothing and cleavage). OTOH, it also looks like a lot of their steam is gone– they might well be willing to concede 2008. Why else would they mau...

My friend Candace (she’s interviewed here) reports that the Supreme Court of the United States has accepted her original petition for habeas corpus on behalf of her client Abdul Hamid Al-Ghizzawi; the petition itself may be found here. Candace was nice enough to let me make some editorial suggestions with respect to this petition, some of which actually made it in there; hence, I take more than a rooting interest in this particular case. We’ve been in legal never-never land for so long that it’s often hard to remember those naiive days when many of us actually believed that the...

Today marks 16 years of happily wedded bliss for Mrs. TD and I (though some in the Bush Administration question the validity of our marriage based on its venue of origin). And a hearty Mazel Tov and happy B’nai Mitzvot to TD Niece and Nephew.

In “Operation Deja Vu All Over Again”, misguided American forces mistakenly believed that the no longer relevant (if they ever were) Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri (didn’t we get him back in Iraq?) were having a big pre-Ramadan Qaeda-con-fab at… wait for it… the Tora Bora caves in Afghanistan. Unbelievably, our military ordered an attack! Fortunately, the misguided plan to remove the number one excuse for why we are in Iraq (and let’s face it, as Rush would say, any service member who questions our mission or particularly wishes it to ever end is a “phony soldier”– and probably...

I was actually kind of proud of dear old alma mater for having more cojones than Mike Bloomberg (himself a Hopkins grad and Hahvahd MBA); the Lord Mayor decided to invoke bullsh*t “security concerns” to deny Iranian wildman president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad an opportunity to lay a wreath at Ground Zero… I mean, let’s face it… the last thing this country, or this city needs, is even the remote possibility of coming to understanding and reconciliation with people we disagree with, especially when our political overlords and the punditocracy need bogeymen. I guess we saw how well that sort of thing...

Taking time out from its busy schedule of not providing leave or relief for overtaxed troops, not cutting funding for the Iraq war, not providing health insurance for children, not addressing the sub-prime mortgage crisis, and so forth, etc., etc. the Senate took some time yesterday to address the most burning and important issue of our day: condemning Moveon.Org. The 72-25 vote meant that around half the Democrats joined in the ritual jumping-on-board-with-Bush-and-Cheney’s-talking-points. (To use “feckless” to describe these “Democratic” senators, some of whom owe their jobs to MoveOn’s help, would be a disservice to feckless people; but I digress…...

The talking dog commenced posting exactly six years ago today, making it one of the oldest still extant blogs. Indeed, it is so old that the term “blog” was not in vogue at its commencement. Discuss.

The only reaction that I find even remotely appropriate to the news that O.J. Simpson has been arrested in connection with armed robberies in Las Vegas is, in internet parlance, to LMAO. Simpson, as you will recall acquitted for the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, though found civilly liable for them by a different jury, is already in the news these days because of his “hypothetical” tell-all book (“If I did it” to which the Goldman family has acceded by judgment of a bankruptcy judge and to which they have called it “If I did...