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If you decide to remove that page from your site, disavow will not be necessary.  Once the links point to a 404 page, they wouldn't count against you.

You could leave the page on your site, and use majesticseo.com, ahrefs.com, opensiteexplorer.org, and webmaster tools to compile as many of the links pointing to that page as you can -- then disavow them.  But first, check your analytics and see if anyone ever visits that page anyways.  If the traffic is 0 or anything you're worth parting with... just remove the page and 301 it to his homepage  That's a hilarious idea, btw.

If your main goal is to rank on google.com (and it sounds like it is), then you should go with the .com domain.

However, you should be aware that exact keyword matched domains are not as powerful as they used to be.  Google released an update to the algorithm that specifically targeted exact match domains and lowered the value that they provide.  You will not receive a significant chance of ranking higher just because your domain exactly matches the search query.

Although this particular post is 1.5 years old, it's still extremely relevant and has a lot of great info if you'd like to read more beyond my answer:

http://moz.com/blog/the-exact-match-domain-playbook-a-guide-and-best-practices-for-emds

Are the footer links internal links to other pages on your own site, or external links to other websites in your network?  If they're internal, there's nothing wrong it.  If they're external, you are basically passing almost no value to those other sites.  They may even potentially be seen as spammy links.

1. Do footer links have any value?  Very little value.  It's best to avoid trying to get a bunch of footer links.
2. Is this an old dated practice that no longer works?  Correct.  Footer links is an old and dated practice.
3. If we remove the footer links should we expect to see if have an impact on our SEO traffic?  You shouldn't expect a drop in SEO traffic from getting rid of a footer link.

If you don't make them VERY unique from the originals, the new site won't perform very well.  If the new site consists of nothing but 250 blog posts that were already discovered on other websites, you won't get good results.  Simply keyword optimizing the posts won't be enough.  They should be entirely re-written to avoid potential problems with Panda.

I'm not sure what you mean by this -- Would the articles need to be completely taken by all current publishers?

Matt Cutts has said that a penalty CAN follow you to your new domain if you just simply recreate the site on a new domain exactly as it was on the penalized domain.

Do you know why you were penalized?  Was it for duplicate content, poor site quality, spammy backlinks, or something else?  When did your rankings drop?  Mid-August?

If you put disallow: / in your robots.txt file, you will tell bots not to crawl the homepage plus ALL interior pages.  You'd be shooting yourself in the foot (or head, really).

Are you sure the redirect is setup properly?  Is it definitely a 301 redirect, or maybe a 302 (temporary)?  How long ago did you implement the redirect?  If the 301 redirect is setup properly, and you're still seeing the homepage in the index, you might just need to wait for it to drop out.

What's your backlink profile look like?  There's literally a million questions that I could ask you but without being able to see the query, the websites, or the backlink profiles, it is really REALLY tough to pinpoint the issue.

How to see if your site has received a manual penalty from Google?  Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools (http://www.google.com/webmasters).

From within there you will be able to see if the website has received a manual penalty from Google.  Once you've got the account setup and verified, look on the left menu for "Search Traffic" and then "Manual Actions".  If there is a MANUAL penalty imposed, you'll see it there.  It will either be "partial" or "site-wide".  The former means that only some pages are affected.  The latter means that all pages are affected.

If you have a manual penalty, you will NEED to do outreach to get links removed, and THEN you submit a disavow for the ones you were unable to remove.  You're right, most spam sites won't have contact info, but you can check http://www.who.is and find an email address in most cases.  You will more than likely not get the result you're looking to get if you forego the link removal process and skip straight to a disavow.

One last note, if there's no manual penalty in Google Webmaster Tools, then the site may be penalized algorithmically.  If you know there are spammy links in place, you should act as if you were penalized manually, with the only difference being that you won't be submitting a reconsideration request to Google.  If the site quality is poor, you will want to research Panda recovery options.

By the way, www.SubconsciousMind.com doesn't seem to exist.  So either you typo'd the name, or you have an ever bigger problem on your hands now

Where are you seeing the trailing slash?  If I go to threewaystoharems.com in my browser, there is no trailing slash.  I do see a trailing slash if I do a Google search for "site:threewaystoharems.com" but that is normal.  Every website will show that trailing slash.

I think you might be obsessing over a non-issue  Let me know if i am misunderstanding.