Author: briggs

  • is it just me that thinks we’ve lost our minds?

    During all the recent news hoopla about the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui I kept trying to remember what he actually did. Did he fly the planes? (No, those guys are all dead). Did he plan the attacks? (Hmmm, wasn’t that Osama bin Laden?). Did he aid and abet any of the dead guys who flew…

  • P.S. to F.Y.T. PG&E

    “The new team” now running Enron, according to spokesman Harlan Loeb, believes a proposed settlement with federal regulators that would prevent disclosure of evidence that reveal how Enron gamed the energy trading markets during the California energy crisis, is “the best deal for creditors.” The audiotapes, email, and other documents detail how Enron’s energy traders…

  • well fuck you too PG&E

    Emerging from the basement where I am on flood watch, I went out to the dripping mailbox to fish out our soggy load of coupons, bills, and bank card come-ons, including the Pacific Gas & Electric Company invoice for the month of March. March, the “40 days and 40 nights” of relentless rain in which…

  • watching the detectives

    Tony Soprano shoulda thought of it: hiring a couple of NYPD detectives as mob assassins. But it was “Tony” Casso who thought of it first. In today’s installment of an entertaining and wryly horrific series, Alan Feuer at the NYT brings us the courtroom finale to the trial of Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, found…

  • ghost workers of America

    I read with interest a review in the Sunday S.F. Chron by Noam Lupu of Louis Uchitelle’s new book, “The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences” which looks at the now common-place American phenomenon of worker layoffs and the effects of these layoffs on ordinary Americans. The statistics are startling but it’s the stories that…

  • what would Mr. Rogers do?

    can you say “habeas corpus“? What if King Friday got taken away to a secret jail in the middle of the ocean by the Central Intelligence Agency? And the government said King Friday could not file a writ of habeas corpus because he had no rights. Because Congress just happened to sort of incidentally take…