The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Blog

  • Health of the Republic: Down 3% to 12%

    Calling Orwell…. Calling George Orwell… Or maybe Kafka is a better target. US military prosecutors have asked for — and now have been granted — a blanket order preventing the defense counsel of a Gitmo detainee from discussing the identity of any prosecution witness with anyone, the defendant included. The defense argues (correctly!) that this contrary to typical process in American courts, not to mention an affront to the values embodied in the Constitution. The prosecution argues that there is absolutely no attempt to hide the operation of the trial from public scrutiny.

    This would be more convincing if the prosecution hadn’t made that argument via a series of emails explicitly meant, themselves, to be secret.

    Secret trials. Secret witnesses. Collusion between judge and prosecutor to achieve a result result politically useful for the present party. Prisoners whisked off to a legal limbo far removed from the usual apparatus of justice. I would have sworn that the Unites States had beaten the USSR in the Cold War. Now it turns out we just stole their methods. Yay, democracy!

  • Proud of My Congressman

    How often do you get to write a headline like that these days? I happen to be served by Rush Holt (Democrat and former nuclear physicist), and Congressman Holt has been — unlike almost all of his peers — quite active in protecting the rights and the security of all Americans. To be colloquial, Rush really has his head screwed on right. The national party would do well to listen more to him and people like him — people who recognize that caving into Republican demagoguery is about the only thing that can guarantee defeat. It’s bad for the party and it’s bad for the nation.

    As an example, I offer this piece written by Holt to refute pernicious “mistakes” proffered by Joe Klein and his ilk, about the RESTORE Act that seeks to redress the current imbalance of power wielded by shadowy and unaccountable officers. I’d suggest checking it out.

  • Worthy of note

    Just another “me-too” blog post 🙁 but I saw this at Talking Points Memo and thought it worthy of being flagged. My God, has there ever been a worse administration? What we know makes them as the worst ever, and now we see, there’s a whole lot they’re trying to make sure we never know…

  • Review: Marc Cohn at the Highline Ballroom

    As is my wont whenever Marc Cohn wanders into the New York-Philadelphia corridor, I went to see him perform — this time, at the Highline Ballroom in lower Manhattan. True to form, it was a fantastic show with Marc the consummate showman. The opening act was Amy Correia and this time, Marc played with a full band.

    More below the fold.

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  • “Miles Away” — Marc Cohn

    I know there’s always something

    We have to go through

    That has some deeper meaning

    Right now I just can’t say

    I know there’s a lesson in here somewhere

    I’m gonna think a lot about it later

    Right now I’m miles away

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  • Dishonest or just dumb?

    An article in today’s NY Times caught my eye: “FCC Planning Rules to Open Cable Market” says that the FCC has laid the legal groundwork to re-regulate the cable industry. It struck me because this is quite atypical for the FCC and for the Bush administration in general. Apparently, in the Cable Communications Act of 1984, Congress empowered the FCC to act once the cable industry matured to a certain size: “at such time as cable systems with 36 or more activated channels are available to 70 percent of households within the United States and are subscribed to by 70 percent of the households to which such systems are available, the Commission may promulgate any additional rules necessary to provide diversity of information sources.” (http://www.publicaccess.org/cableact.html)

    Predictably, now that that point has been reached and surpassed, the cable industry is whining about the burdens the FCC may impose. But to do it, they apparently need to distort not just policy but basic math as well.

    More below the fold.
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  • Recycled: What’s So Wrong About Military Tribunals, Anyway?

    Another piece written some time ago (circa 2002 January) that reads chillingly a propos today. This was written before the series of judicial rebukes to the President’s overreaching constitutional “doctrine” of unlimited executive power. Sadly, those rebukes have not rendered the points raised moot.

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  • Waterboarding

    I don’t like me-too blogs but every once in awhile, someone writes on a topic in a way that exactly captures my own feeling, a way that I could never match, much less trump. This piece by Joe Galloway is one such.

    My God, how did we come to a point when Senators and Representatives of the United States Congress cannot seem to comprehend what “torture” is? Seven years ago, I would never have believe we could fall so far so quickly — and I fancied myself a student of history and a cynical observer of human nature.

    I weep for my Republic. I truly do.

  • Recycled: Just Wrong

    Long before this blog, I kept an equally-erratic literary journal called A Voice in the Wilderness. And while nothing written there was particularly world-shattering, I don’t want it to get lost in the mists of cyberspace. So to do my part to save the planet, I’m going to recycle and reuse that content, putting the save-worthy stuff here on Mongrel Dogs. Today we start with a piece written in reaction to an op-ed in the Washington Post written by one Victoria Toensing, on 2002 September 23, about the then-nascent Bush policy of secret detention and arbitrary arrest. Sadly it’s five years later and we are five years deeper into the pit, the cause of liberty even more undermined by its alleged defenders.

    The piece is reproduced below the fold.
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  • Alternate History: The Speech that Wasn’t

    In preparing my second Convocation speech, I spent most of the summer at a loss. Once I had changed apartments, I sat down in earnest. Eventually, I ended up jettisoning my original effort and producing the speech as given. But in case you wonder what could have been, below I’ll post the speech I nearly gave. There are two caveats:

    • I shamelessly cannibalized this for any rhetoric I thought actually worked, so the actual speech and this one overlap somewhat.
    • I abandoned this and never finished editing or, indeed, writing it. So the thing given is unpolished and the quality comparatively low.

    Without further hedging, let me give you the Speech that Wasn’t.
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