The Talking Dog

February 20, 2018, Happy birthday


To TD Mom.

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February 5, 2018, WTFF?


TD law school classmate Harvey Rishikoff has just been summarily sacked as the Guantanamo "convening authority" (i.e. civilian official in charge of the military commissions).

Mr. Rishikoff had intervened to stop the absurd "contempt" jailing of the chief defense attorney for the (absurd) Guantanamo military commissions, and tried to have a new facility built because of accusations that defense attorney-client conversations were monitored at existing facilities ... anyway, now that the President has reversed the last President's executive order to close Guantanamo, it seems open season on reason, and so, Harvey is out, as is another Pentagon official associated with the military commissions named Gary Brown.

The commissions, of course, are an absurdity, whose sole purpose is to whitewash American torture of prisoners in the years following September 11th, while still trying to use "evidence" obtained as a result of that torture. Most prisoners at Guantanamo will never face charges of any kind, of course, even as this President insists that they will never be released if he has anything to do with it.

Damned if I can figure out any of this.

*** Candace has more.***

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February 2, 2018, Groundhog Day


And so, at long last, the infamous "Nunes Memo" is publicly disseminated, which will, if you are a partisan Trump loyalist, lead you to the conclusion that based upon a Rube Goldberg-like series of events, a series of Republican officials (some of them appointed by Trump himself) have conspired to undermine the rule of law by engaging in a witch-hunt against "poor Carter Page"... how was he to know that innocent contacts with Russian operatives while serving in the Trump campaign could possibly make him a subject of interest... demonstrating that the Mueller investigation is hopelessly biased and Rod Rosenstein (Deputy Attorney General and in charge of the Mueller investigation because Atttorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself ) despite being a career public servant- and Republican- is hopelessly biased too and should (and likely will soon) be fired.

Or, of course, if you don't have your head up your ass, you realize that a good deal about highly sensitive procedure about how our law enforcement agencies gather intelligence has just been exposed to the public solely in order for a Congressman who is supposed to be entirely recused from the investigation into Trump campaign contacts with Russia because he may well be implicated in such investigation has, entirely on party line votes, taken it upon itself to throw something out there just to distract from that investigation.

And this just a day or two after an abortion called "The state of the union" speech, in which a "call for unity" promised to deport more people, build a wall, and just for the hell of it, rescind the Obama era (and not quite fully implemented) order to close Guantanamo, and not only keep it open, but send his political enemies there. All while the cowed media pretends that the whole shit-show is all perfectly normal.

And this after a month that had dozens of insane news stories, where a revelation of a payoff of $130,000 in hush money to a porn star to keep her affair with the President secret was no better than the fourth biggest story of that day.

And mind you, we are now only up to day 379 or so of the Trump era. Because every day seems the same now: as the at-one-time-funny Woody Allen observed, life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. And in the Trump era, we get both. Every day. In fact, several times a day. Every day. Over and over. And wake up again, and it's the same shit. Like... that movie.

Don't know. I'm trying to "do good," with an emphasis on trying to help new immigrants (particularly detained immigrants). Plus I spend way too much time with my friend Donald J. Putin. Maybe I should lay off trying to keep up with anything. It would make me happier, anyway. As for the rest of you, I implore you to try to do good on whatever micro-scale you can. Because we are in a shitload of evil right now. SO MUCH fucking evil. And so many of our countrymen not only pretend it's normal, but around 35%-40% of the country has never been happier now that racism and gratuitous cruelty is out in the open and official. So try to do good. Just try.

Sigh. And while the sun will come out tomorrow, so will the darkness. A lumine, people. A lumine. It's all I got.

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