Hammer Mill Days

Which button do I hit again? The green one? Right. How about that one? Oh, right ... not the red button. Never hit the red button. Oh, hi. Just trying to get the hang of this internet thingy we all keep hearing about. It's like a series of tubes, I'm told, and I have a little trouble sorting out which one you toss the email into, which one you drop the blog posts into, and which one sucks up the podcast. Thankfully, we have our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee to sort it all out for us. And, of course, Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who is himself - like the internets - a machine. As you may already know, we've just cranked out another installment of our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, which runs roughly every month. (By which I mean, it does get posted every month, in a particularly rough form.) This month's show is packed full of all of that stuff you either like or hate, depending on whether you like or hate the podcast. Here's a little rundown: Ned T...

I'm going to write about a topic I haven't visited for some time in the vain hope that it would be corrected, now that we have left the George W. Bush administration in its deserved dustbin of history. (Save, that is, for within the W. Library, which is a central repository for the disastrous idiocy that was that presidency writ large, but I digress.) The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has re-entered the news cycle once again, owing in large part to an organized protest - a hunger strike - undertaken by more than 100 of its inmates. I have a few things to say about this shit hole, and I'll keep it brief. First: Why the hell is this place still open? I know, I know - Congress demagogue'd the issue of closing it down and bringing some of the still-accused to the U.S. for trial and likely eventual imprisonment. (There's a surprise - they demagogue everything!) The thing is, Obama has options, particularly with regard to those prisoners cleared for relea...