Regular readers know that on this blog… it’s always about me. And hence, you get to hear about Mrs. TD taking me out to dinner for my birthday (joining other 10-26’ers as Hillary Clinton, Pat Sajak, Jaclyn Smith, and on some calendars… Leon Trotsky)… at not merely the same restaurant, but we are told at least, the very same table as my more famous and more powerful college classmate and his wife on their “date night.”. And speaking of him… the Grey Lady has issues with the seeming embrace of teh national security state… and as always, Glenn Greenwald has...

An occasional theme here is the sheer wondrousness of the military-industrial-Congressional-entertainment complex, the vast organic conspiracy between big money and our Government to make sure that Government operates to make sure that it operates in the interests of big money (and not in the interests of, well… anyone else). A case in point is what ls likely to happen to “the Franken Amendment,” a popular (it passed the Senate 68-30, with lots of support in the House as well) measure offered by Minnesota’s new junior senator Al Franken that would limit the ability of federal military contractors to shield themselves...

No, I’m not talking about baseball. I’m talking about the Supreme Court of the United States taking its fourth major Guantanamo detainee related case, Kiyemba, a case that stands for nothing short of whether when the Supreme Court makes a ruling of Constitutional magnitude that a feckless Congress and a faithless President (two faithless Presidents in this case) simply don’t like… that ruluing can be made meaningful. Simply put, Ricardo Urbina, a federal district judge in Washington, following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Boumediene, held that a group of (then 17, now… less than that!) Uighur detainees from China, who...

I don’t know what to say, other than my heart goes out to the families of those involved in the three deaths at this year’s Detroit Free Press/Flagstar Marathon. Last week, the death of a 23 year old man at the Baltimore Marathon at the 25th mile (around 2 hours or so before I reached that point) marked at least the fourth time in which I have been involved in a race with at least one fatality (last year’s ING New York Marathon had two). One of the Detroit deaths– a man in his 60’s who evidently fell on his...

Is right twice a day. And while not right quite that often, when no less a troubling figure than former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan “I know all about the financial precipice and debacle we are in because I CAUSED it” Greenspan tells us that big banks should be broken up, it’s kind of like if the CEO of ExxonMobil complained about the difficulties of oil drilling under all that extra water that for some reason got so deep lately … in other words, it’s doubtless something we have to listen to, albeit, way, way too late, regardless of the...

Another day, another case alleging prisoners tortured and abused at the hands of the United States Government, and another assertion by the Obama Administration that the Bush Administration and its officials be shielded from such a suit. In this case, the lawsuit was brought by the families of two detainees who were found dead in their cells in 2006. While there is certainly legal “flux” in just how responsible the government might be legally in tense situations such as GTMO (or even stateside prison settings) where mental health starts to deteriorate and conditions go untreated, the Obama Administration makes it...

As last year’s winner Professor Paul Krugman tells us, with its choice of two social scientists, Indiana University’s Elinor Ostrum (first female Nobel economics laureate) and U.C. Berkeley’s Oliver Williamson for the Nobel economics medal, the Nobel committee was recognizing the preeminence of economic thought that dominated the field prior to World War II (and the Great Depression), to wit, a view that how institutions are formed, legal structures, incentives and so forth… matter, and that it’s not a bunch of mathematical econometric models (most of which don’t work anyway). In short, it seems, that with the world’s currently being...

The Grey Lady treats us to this profile of a man who just won’t go away: Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Omar’s reputation as incorruptible, and a fierce fighter (who, after an eye was wounded during a battle against the Soviets, removed that eye and kept fighting, according to the story anyway)… who has shown a remarkable military sophistication despite being only semi-literate… are all legendary. Omar is either a military genius in his own right, or he has been made one care of friends in the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. The result is the same: a once wildly unpopular...

The flip-side of the failure of “change we can believe in” to actually close Guantanamo Bay on time is that those brave souls who have volunteered to represent GTMO detainees on their own dimes have to put up with not only right-wing abuse, but probable spying on them by our government. Wilner v. NSA is one such case, and quite frankly, as I have communicated with the majority of plaintiffs at some point, maybe I should be a party too (for all I know, the government is spying on me for no other reason… and perhaps you for no other...

I suppose his efforts at commencing the rather long-term prospect for eventual nuclear disarmament are laudable. Then again, his prolongation of not merely two wars, but also his insistence on preserving the unchecked “martial powers” of his predecessor… would seemingly make President Obama a very odd choice to win the Nobel Peace Prize. But he did anyway. Hey, we seem to have “grade inflation” everywhere else… why not this? Assuming unemployment or the federal deficit ever come down, maybe next year he’ll get a Nobel for economic science. Or if he ever fully quits smoking… maybe medicine. Or, perhaps, he...