Bruce Jackson: Who shrank the Peace Bridge? (Artvoice). "How a bird-brained notion has put us in the weeds again." (1 May 2008)
Geoff Kelly: Don't Surrender the Front (Artvoice). For the past 80 years, The Front, the crown jewel of Frederick Law Olmsted's magnificent park and parkway system in Buffalo, has been mutilated by public works developers and all but abandoned by city officials. The plaza part of the Peace Bridge expansion project gives the community a chance to rehabilitate some of what has been lost or to let the abominations continue. It's not at all clear yet which way things will go. (1 May 2008).
Rod Watson: Forget race when talking of competence (Buffalo News). Buffalo developer Carl Paladino has spent a small fortune driving African Americans from offices in city government. That never stopped the sweetheart deals and largesse he enjoyed from city officials. But his recent racist attack on Buffalo schools head James Williams may finally have been too much even for the yes-men at City Hall. (1 May 2008)
How George Steiner was wilted by grammar (Guardian). In case you ever wondered how devoted to language George Steiner really is: in a chapter on multilingual sex-talk in his new book, he recalls the time he was distracted "in, as it were, mid-flow" when the lover used a "tricky subjunctive pluperfect." (1 May 2008)
Edward McClelland: So long, Canada (Salon.com). How the Bush administration turned a good neighbor into a foreign country. (1 May 2008).
Philipp Sands: The Green Light (Vanity Fair). "As the first anniversary of 9/11 approached, and a prized Guantánamo detainee wouldn’t talk, the Bush administration’s highest-ranking lawyers argued for extreme interrogation techniques, circumventing international law, the Geneva Conventions, and the army’s own Field Manual. The attorneys would even fly to Guantánamo to ratchet up the pressure—then blame abuses on the military. Philippe Sands follows the torture trail, and holds out the possibility of war crimes charges." (1 May 2008)
Mike Fitzgerald; The War Within: Experts Say Millions could Seek Treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CommonDreams). They tally numbers of the dead and if you look hard you can find some numbers about the maimed and mutilated. But no one knows how many of Bush's GI victims are maimed and mutilated with PTSD, or how much those injuries will cost in human terms and dollars in the decades to come. (1 May 2008)
Tom Englehardt: Petraeus, Falling Upward (TomDispatch). General David Petraeus' most successful campaign was the one in which he conned the US media into thinking that his Iraq war policy hasn't been a disaster in every regard. You don't get medals for success in that kind of war, you get something better: a promotion. (1 May 2008)
Former Guananamo prosecutor says trials tainted (Reuters). "The former chief prosecutor fo the Guantanamo war crimes tribunals testified on Monday that the tribunals were tainted by political interference and evidence obtained through prisoner abuse. ...[He] said political appointees and higher-ranking officers pushed prosecuors to file charges before trial rules were even written." (1 May 2008)
Rev. Jeremiah Wright speech to the National Press Club (Chicago Tribune). The cable newstalk shows have had a four-day orgy around sound-bites from Rev. Jeremiah's National Press Club remarks. Did they get the right four-second clips? He's a transcript of his entire speech so you can make up your own mind. (1 May 2008)
Frank Rich: How McCain Lost in Pennsylvania (NY Times). The pundits are carrying on as if John McCain is way ahead in the fall election. They're just running their mouths because they don't have anything else to do and they've got all that airtime to fill. McCain doesn't stand a chance of taking Pennsylvania in November, and once he's on a stage debating with Obama it isn't likely he'll captivate many of many independents (who are mostly leaning Democratic) or Republicans who don't want a war-idiot president. Absent some unlikely revelation about corruption or Spitzerism, the only way the Democrats will lose, says Rich, is if the Clinton forces get vindictive and undermine Obama rather than working for him. (27 April 2008)
Is the Marine less dead if the Pentagon banishes camera from the funeral? (Washington Post). Lt. Col. Billy Hall's family wanted the press at Hall's funeral in Arlington. No way, said the Pentagon. Do that and people might start thinking there are families connected to those names and numbers of GI's killed in Iraq. (25 April 2008)
U.S.: the convict society (NY Times). With 5% of the world's population, the US has almost 25% of the world's convicts. The reason: prison time for offenses other countries don't punish with prison and sentences longer than just about everybody for everything. Punishment advocates point to falling crime rates and say the ever-expanding prison society accomplished that. They remain silent on neighboring Canada's falling prison population and falling crime rate. Prisons are silent welfare for rural America, so politicians love them: they provide secure jobs for rural areas and increase those areas' census numbers, getting them disproporation amounts of state and federal aid. (23 April 2008)
Glenn Greenwald; Media's refusal to address the NYT's 'military analyst' story continues (Salon.com). Last Saturday the New York Times ran a devastating 7000-word story about the way the Pentagon has gotten war shills on regular and cable news shows as experts and consultants. ABS, NBC, CBS, CNN and all the others are equally guilty: they've given Bush's shills free airtime, just as if they were valid news sources. How have the networks responded to this revelation of professional and ethical failure? The same way they've responded to nearly every other revelation of hype, lying, manipulation, deception and corruption in Bush's wars: silence. If the news doesn't get spoken of on the news, it's not news, right? (23 April 2008)
Clinton Outduels Obama in Primary (NY Times). If you listened to Hillary Clinton's victory speech last night you might have thought her pulling a 5% victory of Barack Obama out of a 20% lead a few weeks ago was an overwhelming confirmation of her candidacy and ever more racist, fear-mongering and saber rattling campaign style (recent speeches, e.g., have featured Louis Farrakhan, Osama bin Laden, and a threat to destroy Iran entirely). (23 April 2008)
The Low Road to Victory (NY Times). The New York Times editorial page, which endorse Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, seems to be having second thoughts.
Michael Moore: My Vote's for Obama (if I could vote)... (MichaelMoore.com). "Over the past two months, the actions and words of Hillary Clinton have gone from being merely disappointing to downright disgusting. I guess the debate last week was the final straw. I've watched Senator Clinton and her husband play this game of appealing to the worst side of white people, but last Wednesday, when she hurled the name 'Farrakhan' out of nowhere, well that's when the silly season came to an early end for me. She said the 'F' word to scare white people, pure and simple. Of course, Obama has no connection to Farrakhan. But, according to Senator Clinton, Obama's pastor does -- AND the 'church bulletin' once included a Los Angeles Times op-ed from some guy with Hamas! No, not the church bulletin! (22 April 2008)
David Barstow: Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand (NY Times). The Pentagon uses torture and drugs to screw up the minds of the prisoners at Guantanamo, some of whom are guilty of nothing other than being tortured and drugged at Guantanamo. For you, the Pentagon has another mind-altering technique: retired colonels and generals, endlessly reiterating propaganda points on television talk shows, pretending merely to be expressing their opinions or reporting facts. (22 April 2008)
Joshua Holland: Jimmy Carter Was Right to Meet with Hamas (AlterNet). The Idiot Right is busy attacking Jimmy Carter this week because he keeps insisting that talking with pepople is better than shooting them or blowing them up. "Carter's crime was to sit-down with leaders of Hamas last week to explore the possibility of waging peace in the Middle East. For many Israel-hawks, it wasn't a first offense; Carter is guilty of viewing the Palestinians as human beings and for condemning human rights abuses on both sides of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. 'Any side that kills innocent people is guilty of terrorism,' he told an audience at Cairo's American University after his sit-down with members of Hamas." (22 April 2008)
Torture Victim's Records Lost at Guantánamo, Admits Camp General (CommonDreams). It is unlikely that any Americans will ever be tried as war criminals—that's a fate reserved for officials in countries that are occupied after they've lost a war. But, hey, you never know, which is perhaps why the Pentagon has been disappearing ever more physical evidence of its methodical abuse of prisoners of war in its offshore detention camp in Cuba. (22 April 2008)
Uri Avnery: The Lion and the Gazelle (Gush Shalom). Last week was Passover. Does it matter, asks Uri Avnery (onetime Irgun fighter, longtime Israeli journalist and peace activist), that the Exodus from Egypt never took place? (22 April 2008)
White House delay on ship speed limit endangers whales (Independent). Why is Dick Cheney blocking legislation to protect the right whale, a mammal in danger of extinction? (22 April 2008)
ABC's Debate Debacle (FAIR). Were George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson auditioning for Fox News? It took them 50 minutes to get to the first question of substance in the April 16 Clinton-Obama debate, and even those questions were slanted, stupid or distractions. (22 April 2008)
Hendrik Hertzberg: Bitter Patter (New Yorker). "Last Wednesday’s two-hour televised smackdown in Philadelphia between the two remaining Democratic candidates for President, which might have been billed as the Élite Treat v. the Boilermaker Belle, turned into something worse—something akin to a federal crime. Call it the case of the Walt Disney Company v. People of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (and of the United States, for that matter). Seldom has a large corporation so heedlessly inflicted so much civic damage in such a short space of time. (22 April 2008)
Garry Wills: Two Speeches on Race (New York Review). Abraham Lincoln at the Cooper Union in New York on February 27, 1860, and Barack Obama at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008. The two men, and the two speeches, have a great deal in common. (15 April 2008)
Barbara Koeppel: Clinton's Experience: Fact and Fancy (Consortium News). Hillary Clinton claims she's the candidate of experience? What experience, exactly? Certainly not landing under sniper fire in Bosnia or brokering the Northern Ireland peace deal. Then there's her support of NAFTA (which she currently denies), her refusal to consider a single payer health system, her long membership on the board of union-busting WalMart. And, the fact that Barack Obama has been an elected official longer than she has. (15 April 2008)
ACLU queries Harvard's police (Boston Globe). Why did a Harvard police undercover officer take photographs of protesters at a rally in support of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip? Are they working for the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force? If so, why? (15 April 2008)
Area C strikes fear into the heart of Palestinians as home are destroyed (Guardian). In the confiscated Palestinian land designated as "Area C," 18,472 housing units were built for the squatters in Israeli settlements, but only 91 housing permits were issued to Palestinians wanting to build homes on their own land. In the process, 1,663 Palestinian buildings were destroyed by the Israelis. The Israelis are also uprooting trees, destoying water cisterns and stone terraces used by the Palestinian farmers. If this were done by blacks against whites or whites against blacks in Africa, the US government would be screaming "racism, racism, racism." So why the silence from the White House and the presidential candidates? (15 April 2008)
A Block in Baghdad Mourns Its Own (Washington Post). Last week, President Bush gave a crowing victory speech at the Air Force Museum. He said things were going very well in Iraq, the surge had worked, tranquility was in the air. Tell it to the neighbors of this family, slaughtered by U.S. troops shooting at someone else. (1 April 2008)
Ex-Terror Detainee Says U.S. Tortured Him (60 Minutes). Murat Kumaz was sold to the Americans for $3000. Even though the FBI and US intelligence said he was innocent, US officials tortured him and kept him prisoner for 5 years. How do you define a terrorist organization? How about a government that buys people, then locks them up and tortures them for 5 years? (1 April 2008)
Elizabeth Drew: Molehill Politics (New York Review of Books). In this fight, the Clinton camp is the more aggressive of the two, and it's adept at what might be called molehill politics: making a very big deal in the press about something that's a very small deal—such as a single word in a mailing or a slip-up by an aide. Clinton's strategists pounce on whatever opportunity presents itself to attack Obama, and try to knock him off his own message, and his stride. Clinton's approach resembles her tactics in the White House, in which her inclination was to attack (which caused a number of problems, and was one of the reasons her health care bill was defeated). The Obama camp has sometimes been slow, and even reluctant, to respond, because if he attacks her personally (which the Clinton campaign would like him to do), he's not Barack Obama anymore. ...It's been long said among politicians that "the Clintons will do anything to win." Unfortunately, they are increasingly proving the point." (30 March 2008)
Phoebe Damrosch: A waitress's revenge (Telegraph). "Celebrities love to be allergic to things, including any or all of the following: nuts, fish with scales, fish without scales, shellfish, all fish, wheat, dairy, sugar, chocolate, egg yolks, duck eggs, onions, garlic, pineapple, mango, peppers, fennel - the list goes on. Either that or they are so bored by good food that they have to spice it up by asking for an all-mushroom tasting menu (as a famous newsreader did). Celebrities are not as attractive in person - but they usually have the best hair, skin and shoes in the room." (30 March 2008)
Dith Pran: The Last Word: A Video Interview and Profile (NY Times). The photographer who was the subject of "The Killing Fields" says, on his deathbed, what we should do now. (31 March 2008)
Glenn Greenwald: Michael Mukasey's tearful lies (Salon.com). "Michael Mukasey has conclusively proven himself to be an exact replica of Alberto Gonzales -- slavishly loyal to every presidential whim and unbound by even the most minimal constraints of truth while serving those whims. Speaking in San Francisco this week, Mukasey demanded that the President be given new warrantless eavesdropping powers and that lawbreaking telecoms be granted amnesty. To make his case, Mukasey teared up while exploiting the 3,000 Americans who died on 9/11."(30 March 2008)
Obama Back Into Lead in Democratic Race (Gallup). Barack Obama has advanced to an eight percentage point lead over Hillary Clinton, tying his largest lead to date, indicating that he has weathered the Wright flap and she is still taking the hit for her fake memory about arriving in Bosnia under fire. Meanwhile, both Democrat candidates lag John McCain among registered voters, reminding us that a lot of registered voters are pretty stupid about voting. (29 March 2008)
Cliff Schecter: The Top Ten Craziest Things John McCain Has Said While You Weren't Watching (AlterNet). Reporters who cover the McCain campaign full-time say the thing that impresses them most about the Senator is how much he lies. He makes a lot of mistakes, he says some very goofy things, but more importantly, he lies. Here are some samples of all three. (29 March 2008)
Robert Kuttner: Obama v. Krugman (American Prospect). What's with NY Times/Princeton economics prof Paul Krugman's hostility toward Obama's recent speech on the financial crisis and what to do about it? That speech, says Kuttner, "showed real understanding and subtlety in grasping how financial 'innovation' had outrun regulation, as well as a historical sense of the abuses of the 1920s repeating themselves. Obama is one of the few mainstream leaders -- Barney Frank is another -- calling for capital requirements to be extended to every category of financial institution that creates credit. This is exactly what's needed to prevent the next meltdown, but if it were put to a vote now, it would be rejected by legislators from both parties because they are still in thrall to market fundamentalism and Wall Street. That's where presidential leadership comes in." Is Krugman's denial of what was actually said the act of an economic analyst or a Clinton flack? (29 March 2008)
Barack Obama at Cooper Union (YouTube). Obama's March 27 speech on the economy that Paul Krugman wouldn't understand. (29 March 2008)
Abstinence only strikes again (Salon.com). Tedra Osell takes aim at a particularly stupid anti-birth control op-ed in the Buffalo News. (29 March 2008)
Amy Goodman: Body of War (truthdig). "Democracy Now!" host Amy Goodman comments on the new film by Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro about George W. Bush's mutilated Iraq war veterans, "Body of War." (29 March 2008)
Ray McGovern: Frontline's War: Too timid, too little and too late (Counterpunch). When it comes to looking at Bush's war in Iraq, Frontline, the PBS documentary/news program that used to put out some penetrating examinations of important subjects, serves up pablum. (29 March 2008)
Stanley Fish: Denouncing and Renouncing (NY Times). The best essay yet on the media-created phony-baloney Jeremiah Wright foolishness. "This denouncing and renouncing game is simply not serious. It is a media-staged theater, produced not in response to genuine concerns – no one thinks that Obama is unpatriotic or that Clinton is a racist or that McCain is a right-wing bigot – but in response to the needs of a news cycle. First you do the outrage (did you see what X said?), then you put the question to the candidate (do you hereby denounce and renounce?), then you have a debate on the answer (Did he go far enough? Has she shut her husband up?), and then you do endless polls that quickly become the basis of a new round. Meanwhile, the things the candidates themselves are saying about really important matters – war, the economy, health care, the environment – are put on the back-burner until the side show is over, though the odds are that a new one will start up immediately." (25 March 2008)
Gary Kamiya: Rev. Jeremiah Wright isn't the problem (Salon.com). It's the idiot flag wavers. "This is absurd. We're worrying about someone in Row 245 who refuses to stand up for "The Star Spangled Banner," while the people who are singing loudest and waving the biggest flags are the ones who got us into the mess we're in today. Wright isn't the problem. Stupid patriotism is the problem." (25 March 2008)
Hillary in Bosnia (CBS). Ouch! Hillary Clinton last week talked about landing in Bosnia under sniper fire and running in a crouch to the waiting vehicles. The event was, alas, filmed by CBS. Click on the link for a flash file of the news report and click here for Clinton's rationale of the discrepancy.(25 March 2008)
Adeline Levine: Your call is very important to us... Check your phone bills. It probably won't do you any good, but check them anyway. (25 March 2008)
Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris: Exposure: The woman behind the camera at Abu Ghraib (New Yorker). Were it not for Specialist Sabrina Harman's interest in photograph, Abu Ghraib would be a name known to hardly anyone.You've seen many of her Abu Ghraib pictures, and one in particular: "The image of Gilligan achieves its power from the fact that it does not show the human form laid bare and reduced to raw matter but creates instead an original image of inhumanity that admits no immediately self-evident reading. Its fascination resides, in large part, in its mystery and inscrutability—in all that is concealed by all that it reveals. It is an image of carnival weirdness: this upright body shrouded from head to foot; those wires; that pose; and the peaked hood that carries so many vague and ghoulish associations. The pose is obviously contrived and theatrical, a deliberate invention that appears to belong to some dark ritual, a primal scene of martyrdom. The picture transfixes us because it looks like the truth, but, looking at it, we can only imagine what that truth is: torture, execution, a scene staged for the camera? So we seize on the figure of Gilligan as a symbol that stands for all that we know was wrong at Abu Ghraib and all that we cannot—or do not want to—understand about how it came to this." (24 March 2008)
Thomas Walkom: Is Bush the worst U.S. president ever? (The Star). Yeah. (24 Marcch 2008)
Uri Avnery: Two Americas (Gush Shalom). The great Israeli peace activist, journalist and Irgun veteran explains why he hopes Obama becomes the next US president: "If McCain is a continuation of Bush, Hillary is an extension of the entire present American political system, the present policy and the present routine. But the world needs another America. The name of another America is Obama. Full name: Barack Hussein Obama.The very fact that this person can be a serious contender for the presidency at all restores my faith in the possibilities inherent in America. After the excesses of Senator Joe McCarthy there was President John Kennedy. After Bush there can be Obama. Only in America....A personal note: as an optimist from birth, I like Obama's optimism. I prefer a candidate who brings hope over one destroying hope. Optimism spurs to action, pessimism produces nothing but despair. America needs a complete overhaul. Not just a wash, not just a wax job, not just a new coat of paint. It needs a new motor, a change of the entire leadership, a reappraisal of its position in the world, a change of values. Can Obama do this? I hope so. I am not sure. But I am quite sure that the other two will not." (23 March 2008)
Robbing the cradle of civilization, five years later (Salon.com). You may remember that part of the collateral damage of Bush's destruction of Iraq's civil government was widespread looting of Mesopotamanian antiquities. It's still going on. Every day innocent civilians are murdered and irreplacable antiquities are stolen. It's the price the Iraqis are being forced to pay for importing George W. Bush's brand of democracy abroad. (20 March 2008)
Scott McLemee: The Truth? I Can't Handle the Truth! (Inside Higher Ed). "Harvard University Press has just issued a book promulgating a JFK assassination conspiracy theory." Maybe next they'll publish a book saying 9/11 was a Pentagon conspiracy. And another saying Bush's Iraq war wasn't about oil. The possibilities for lunatic prose are limitless. (20 March 2008)
Why Are Winter Soldiers Not News? (FAIR). "Dozens of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars gathered in Silver Spring, Maryland last weekend for the Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan hearings (3/13/08-3/16/08), where they offered harrowing testimony about atrocities they had witnessed or participated in directly. The BBC predicted that the event, organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War, "could be dominating the headlines around the world this week" (3/7/08). The hearings were covered as far afield as the U.K. (Guardian, 3/17/08), Australia (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 3/14/08), Croatia (Javno, 3/16/08), and Iran (Press TV, 3/14/08). Yet there has been an almost complete media blackout on this historic news event in the U.S. corporate media." (20 March 2008)
Mr. Obama's Profile in Courage (NY Times). An editorial about Obama's race and religion speech. "There are moments — increasingly rare in risk-abhorrent modern campaigns — when politicians are called upon to bare their fundamental beliefs. In the best of these moments, the speaker does not just salve the current political wound, but also illuminates larger, troubling issues that the nation is wrestling with. Inaugural addresses by Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt come to mind, as does John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech on religion, with its enduring vision of the separation between church and state. Senator Barack Obama, who has not faced such tests of character this year, faced one on Tuesday. It is hard to imagine how he could have handled it better." (20 March 2008)
Barack Obama: A More Perfect Union (Obama '08). The prepared text for and a video of Senator Barack Obama's March 18 Philadelphia talk on race and religion. (20 March 2008)
Justices overturn Louisiana Death Sentence (NY Times). By a vote of 7-2, the Supreme Court threw out a Louisiana death sentence because the prosecutor had systematically excluded blacks from the jury. Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia found nothing wrong with the prosecutor's behavior and voted to uphold the sentence. (19 March 2008)
President Bush's March 17 speech on his terror wars (White House). According to Bush, the war has been a resounding success and doesn't cost as much as people say. We are, he says, doing a fabulous job fighting the terrorists in Iraq who weren't there until he made it possible for them to be there. And, he says in concusions, the best way to honor the squandered lives and mutilated bodies is to squander more lives in this war he says we can win. If a patient in a psychiatric hospital were this out of touch with reality they'd shake their heads and up his dosage. (19 March 2008)
Juan Cole: Five years of Iraq lies (Salon.com). Has any American president squandered so many lives and so much national treasure on a war grounded in and maintained by one huge lie after another? And now comes John McCain, anxious to ratify and perpetuate the lies and the slaughter. (19 March 2008)
Diane Christian: Perversity. How to read the Story of Spitzer (15 March 2008)
Newton Garver: Bruce Jackson's philosophic entanglements. Is the editor of Buffalo Report a crypto-Wittgensteinian? (14 March 2008)
Ozone Rules Weakened at Bush's Behest (Washington Post). While you were distracted by Elliot Spitzer's doxy, President Bush was illegally forcing the EPA to raise the ozone limits it had set to protect wildlife, parks, farmland and us. (14 March 2008)
I don't believe in atheists (Salon.com). An interview with foreign correspondent Chris Hedges on why he finds Neocon hawk fundamentalist atheists like Christopher Hitchens every bit as dangerous as Christian fundamentalists. (14 March 2008)
McCain supports Bush veto of bill banning harsh interrogation tactics (San Francisco Chronicle). Torture was bad when they were doing it to him, but us doing it to Muslims? What the hell. That doesn't count. It's the Alan Dershowitz School of Torture: if good folks like us do it for the best of reasons, how can it be evil? and how can we be evil? (14 March 2008)
William Fisher: We Don't Do Torture--Epecially in Debates (CommonDreams/InterPress). How come the presidential debates have never touched on presidential signing statements, separation of powers, military commissions, Guantanamo, torture, and all that other vile stuff? (14 March 2008)
Pentagon Report on Saddam's Iraq Censored? (ABC News). The report on the Joint Forces Command website saying that a U.S. military study had found no direct connection between Saddam Hussein and al Quaeda (big surprise) has been pulled off the website and the accompanying press has been cancelled. This is consonant with Bush administration Unpleasant Fact Policy: if the facts don't support the president's speeches, kill the facts. Click here for a summary of the report the White House would prefer you didn't see. (14 March 2008)
Fox anti-Obama virus spreads (FOXAttacks). Fox smearmeister's have been airing a lot of lies about Barack Obama. No surprise there; they air a lot of lies about a lot of things. But look at Robert Greenwald's take on how MSNBC, CNN, NY Times, and other news outlets pick up the FOX virus and spread it further. (14 March 2008)
Susan Dominus: Emperor's Club Sold an Oymoron: High-Class Prostitution (NY Times). "Whatever fantasy Eliot Spitzer thought he was buying, he surely knew it wasn’t the one the Emperor’s Club was selling. He may not have known how to outsmart the software that tracked his financial transactions, but he certainly knew from his work as a prosecutor that young women who sell themselves on Web sites for that kind of money aren’t successful swimsuit models whose upper-middle-class parents showed them their way around a salad fork early on."
Robert Fisk: The cult of the suicide bomber (Independent). "Few players in the 'war on terror' are more chilling, or misunderstood, than suicide bombers. Yet the true scale of their grisly activities has never been properly calculated. Five years after the invasion of Iraq, Robert Fisk details the shocking extent of the most widespread campaign of self-liquidation in human history." (14 March 2008)
The bowel movement (Salon.com). Here's a real shitty story, sometime to take your mind off what Bush has done to the country and what Spitzer has done to his career. It asks the vital question: "What is your poo telling you about your health?" (12 March 2008)
Sex Infections Found in Quarter of Teenage Girls (NY Times). "The first national study of four common sexually transmitted diseases among girls and young woman has found that one in four are infected with at least one of the diseases." And not one of the four is good old fashioned clap, which could be cured with one simple shot of antibiotic. (12 March 2008)
Justice Department press release on the Emperors Club VIP prostitution case (NY Times). "Manhattan U.S. attorney chargers organizers and managers of international prostitution ring. (10 March 2008)
The unsealed Hookergate complaint (NY Times). A pdf of the Federal complaint regarding the Washington, D.C. prostitution operation. (10 March 2008).
David Simon on cutting "The Wire" (Salon.com). "The Wire," one of the best dramatic series on television ever, aired its final episode Sunday night. Among other highspots, it featured the best Irish wake ever filmed, and the stiff was good enough to get up after the singing. In this interview, prime-mover David Simon talks about the series, and about why your home-town newspaper is so bloody awful. (10 March 2008)
Robin Morgan: Sticking it to Hillary (Women's Media Center). How much have the mainstream media been poisoning their coverage of Hillary Clinton because of her gender? It's not just that Clinton-hating harridan Maureen Dowd. It's the boys too, all of them. Even that good ole liberal Carl Bernstein, with his complaints about her ankles. (3 March 2008)
Phyllis Bennis: Iran in the Crosshairs: How to Prevent Washington's Next War (Foreign Policy in Focus). "Washington watched as 2007 came to a violent and inglorious end. U.S. wars raged in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S.-backed Israeli occupation suffocated Palestinians, U.S.-allied governments in Pakistan and Kenya faced national explosions over false democratization and stolen elections, and U.S. corporate-driven poverty and resource wars ravaged Africa. Powerful forces in the United States had already begun to critically reassess what they saw as the diminishing value of the Bush administration’s reckless global interventionism." So will Bush/Cheney start a third disastrous war to make sure their successors inherit a world in flames and a US economy in the toilet? Here's the introduction to a new primer, with a link to the full report. (3 March 2008)
Grape expectations (Boston Globe). The key factor in the taste of a great wine may be what you think the bottle cost. (3 March 2008)
Video Capture Near Plane Crash in Hamburg (NY Times). Your almost-worst landing nightmare, rescued by a pilot right out of the movies. (3 March 2008)
Are Antidepressants Faith-Based Treatment? (AlterNet). Do you believe, really believes, that your Prozac or Zoloft is making you less depressive? If you're depending on either drug, stop reading now: neither, it seems is any better than a placebo, are both are hard to kick because part of the withdrawal is serious irritable bowel syndrome. The reason the have such good press is because studies showing "cure rates" are exactly the same for no treatment at all have been suppressed by the drug manufacturers, medical journals and FDA. (28 February 2008)
Fort Erie mayor slams Ambassador bridge group for "seriously flawed" plan (Niagara Falls Review). The Ambassador bridge people from Detroit have been telling residents of Buffalo's West Side that their plan to build a bridge alongside the International railroad bridge will mean no one will lose a home to eminent domain. What they haven't seen fit to mention is that a bridge has two ends and the people on the Canadian end of their plan seem to want no part of it (27 February 2008)
The plagiarist Alan M. Dershowitz vs. the scholar Frank J. Menetrez (Counterpunch). Dershowitz responds to Menetrez's February 11 documentation of Dershowitz' plagiarism with his usual devices of arguing charges that weren't made, pettifogging and misdirection. He doesn't lay a glove on Menetrez who, in a well-reasoned response to Dershowitz, lays Dershowitz's game bare, and recapitulates the proof of plagiarism as well. How much longer can Harvard keep holding its nose on this one? (27 February 2008)
William F. Buckley is Dead at 82 (NY Times). "Mr. Buckley’s winningly capricious personality, replete with ten-dollar words and a darting tongue writers loved to compare with an anteater’s, hosted one of television’s longest-running programs, “Firing Line,” and founded and shepherded the influential conservative magazine, National Review. He also found time to write more than 45 books, ranging from sailing odysseys to spy novels to celebrations of his own dashing daily life, and edit five more. The more than 4.5 million words of his 5,600 biweekly newspaper columns, “On the Right,” would fill 45 more medium-sized books. Mr. Buckley’s greatest achievement was making conservatism — not just electoral Republicanism, but conservatism as a system of ideas — respectable in liberal post-World War II America. He mobilized the young enthusiasts who helped nominate Barry Goldwater in 1964, and saw his dreams fulfilled when Reagan and the Bushes captured the Oval Office. To Mr. Buckley’s enormous delight, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the historian, termed him 'the scourge of liberalism.'" (27 February 2008)
Noam Chomsky: The Most Wanted List (TomDispatch). There was rejoicing in US and Israeli military circles after the murder of Imad Moughniyeh in Damascus last week. He was, it was said, one of the world's deadliest terrorists. Most of the world, however, has a very different opinion about who occupies that role. (27 February 2008)
The three trillion dollar war (London Times). Remember when Bush proudly described himself as "a war president?" He's sent us the bills to prove it: "The cost of direct US military operations - not even including long-term costs such as taking care of wounded veterans - already exceeds the cost of the 12-year war in Vietnam and is more than double the cost of the Korean War. And, even in the best case scenario, these costs are projected to be almost ten times the cost of the first Gulf War, almost a third more than the cost of the Vietnam War, and twice that of the First World War. The only war in our history which cost more was the Second World War, when 16.3 million U.S. troops fought in a campaign lasting four years, at a total cost (in 2007 dollars, after adjusting for inflation) of about $5 trillion." (27 February 2008)
Joe Feuerherd: I vote for Obama. Will I Go Straight to...? (Washington Post). If you vote for a pro-choice candidate, say 98% of the US bishops, you may be voting away your chance for eternal salvation. According to them, only John McCain gets you to the happyplace. "So what's a pro-life, pro-family, antiwar, pro-immigrant, pro-economic-justice Catholic like me supposed to do in November? That's an easy one. True to my faith, I'll vote for the candidate who offers the best hope of ending an unjust war, who promotes human dignity through universal health care and immigration reform, and whose policies strengthen families and provide alternatives to those in desperate situations. Sounds like I'll be voting for the Democrat -- and the bishops be damned." (27 February 2008)
Howard Zinn: Election Madness (The Progressive). There's a lot wrong in the US these days, a lot of things that need fixing. You should spend your two minutes in the voting booth pulling the levers, but don't fall into the media-hyped fallacy that your responsibility stops there. (27 February 2008)
LA Times/Bloomberg poll: McCain has edge over Democrats (LA Times). Remember that Pete Seeger song that had the chorus "When will they ever learn? Oh when will they ever learn?" Not yet, apparently: if the election were held today, John McCain, who remains convinced we could and should have won the Vietnam war if we'd just been willing to keep up the bombing and killing and dying, would beat either Clinton or Obama. The day after the 2000 election, the Daily Mirror of London's cover read: "Doh! Four more years of Dubya. How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB? U.S. Election Disaster." They may get to use that front page again. (27 February 2008)
Bush's Anti-Choice Clone (AlterNet). McCain isn't just anti-Choice; he is also opposed to contraception. (27 February 2008)
Nader gears up to throw it to the Republicans once again (NY Times). Ralph Nader, who made it possible for five members of the Supreme Court to give the 2000 election to George W. Bush, is at it again. He can't win; all he can do is take votes away from the Democratic candidate, as he did in 2000. He was a good guy once, back when his enemies were industrial cynics and greedyguts. Of late, he's been after everybody; he's alte cocker ego run amuk. Ordinarily that would be just sad or amusing, but his 2000 egotrip helped produce too many dead Iraqis and Americans for him to be either any more. (25 February 2008)
Two on Creeley. (NY Times and London Review of Books). Two smart reviews of the recent University of California Press publications of the works of the late Robert Creeley: Stephen Burt: What Life Says to Us (a review in the London Review of Books of the two volumes of Collected Poems of Robert Creeley and Selected Poems: 1945-2005, edited by Benjamin Friedlander), and August Kleinzhler: What is Left Out, (a review of the Friedlander edition.) (25 February 2008)
Why the moon went red (mreclipse.com). If you watched the spectacular lunar eclipse you may have wondered why, when the eclipse was total, the moon was a dark red disk rather than just a dark nothing. Mr Eclipse explains all. And he provides a calendar of upcoming penumbral, partial and total lunar eclipses out to 2015. (If you missed Tuesday's show you can catch the repeat on December 21, 2010.) (21 February 2008)
Ike Ehrlichman, longtime movie booker, 87 (Buffalo News). Ike Ehrlichman was the man behind most of the interesting film screenings in Buffalo for the past 40 years. Hardly anyone but the theater owners knew his name, but without him those theaters would have been dull places indeed. He was one of the last Rollidex and 3x5" index card operators. He was so busy he never had time to bother with computers. (21 February 2008)
Judge Shuts Down Web Site Specializing in Leaks (NY Times). A San Francisco judge has shut down the website Wikileaks.org, which has become famous in pixelland for posting documents government and corporate villains would prefer nobody outside their circles of power knew anything about. It's a futile gesture, because the site is fully mirrored, and you can get to it by just going to the Internet Protocol address (http://88.8.13.160/). (21 February 2008)
Niagara Falls restaurants' closings tied partly to casino (Buffalo News). Even though everyone without a vested interest tells him otherwise, Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown still insists the proposed Seneca gambling joint/hotel/entertainment complex a few blocks from city hall will bring jobs to the city. If he took a ride up to Niagara Falls and counted the recent restaurant failures maybe he'd have to start facing reality. On the other hand, thinking back to last year when he was the only person in Buffalo saying his son wasn't the driver that had banged into all those parked cars in his neighborhood, maybe not. (It's the "Who you gonna believe, me or your lyin' eyes" school of political thinking.) (18 February 2008)
Steven T. Banko: Dialogue, not monologue, needed to name the courthouse. Buffalo's getting a new Federal courthouse. Let's break with tradition and name it for one of the peacekeepers rather than one of the good killers. (18 February 2008)
Diane Christian: War Corrupts (Counterpunch). "Take it from Achilles, heroism is a hoax." (17 February 2008)
Jorge Guitart: Ten Poems. The latest from Buffalo Report's Poetry Institute. (18 February 2008)
U.S. Military Deaths in Iraq at 3,963. (NY Times). Almost 4,000 members of the U.S. military have died since George W. Bush's needless invasion of Iraq. There is no accurate count of how many Iraqis have been killed. Or how many Iraqis and Americans have been mutilated. How many Americans died in the U.S. on 9/11? (18 February 2008)
'Wikileaks.org' taken off line in many areas after fire, court injunction (Wikinews). "The website WikiLeaks.org has been taken off line in many parts of the world. Wikileaks is a website dedicated to leaking documents that are 'anonymous, untraceable, uncensorable.' Several factors have taken the site off line including DDoS attacks, which was followed by a fire which took out the main servers hosting the site in Sweden, and a restraining order on the domain name 'WikiLeaks.org' issued in the United States." (18 February 2008)
Jonathan Schwarz: Bill Kristol's Obscure Masterpiece (TomDispatch). Bill Kristol is a right-wing ideologue famous for being wrong on almost everything. But, as this article demonstrates, he is far more malign than that.The New York Times recently hired Kristol as an op-ed columnist, presumably operating on the theory that Those-Who-Get-It-Wrong need fair representation in the Times's editorial pages. (This is on the order of the comment from a Buffalo News reporter responding to someone going on about an especially stupid Mary Kunz Goldman column: "Of course the editors know how stupid those columns are. They're not stupid. But circulation is down and they decided stupid readers needed someone in the paper they could identify with.") (18 February 2008)
Rules for Lawyers of Detainees Are Called Onerous (Washington Post). The US is about to try some of its Guantanamo Bay prisoners, but as more and more crippling restrictions are placed on defence lawyers it becomes clear that the conclusion of the trial is already foregone. Elsewhere they call it "kangaroo courts." Here we call it Bush-league justice. (18 February 2008)
Secrecy Plea Ties Up Torture Flights Case (CommonDreams/SF Chronicle). A company charged with transporting prisoners overseas to be tortured is seeking dismissal because the CIA torture program is secret. Which means the instrument for keeping the people running and operating the secret US torture program safe from prosecution is that their torture program is secret. Um.... (18 February 2008)
Hillary & Barack on Cuba (Candidate Cuba Watch). Hillary Clinton is Bush-lite on the Cuba question: either she really fears the Commie menace 90 miles off our shores or, more likely, she fears angering the aging Cuban emigres in Florida (who aren't going to vote Democrat anyway). Barack Obama, on the other hand, says he's for decency and sanity in US Cuba policy: knock down the barriers, let the families visit, let the daylight in. (18 February 2008)
Uri Avnery: An End Foreseen (Gush Shalom). "A wise person once said: 'A fool learns from his experience. An intelligent person learns from the experience of others.' To which one could add: 'And an idiot does not even learn from his own experience.' So what can we learn from a book which shows that we do not learn from experience?" ...After all, the end is not in doubt. The only question is how much more killing, how much more destruction, how much more suffering must be caused before the occupiers arrive at the inescapable conclusion.
Every drop of blood spilt is a drop of blood wasted." (18 February 2008)
Peter Dreier: If McCain's a Moderate, I'm The Easter Bunny (Huffington Post). John McCain's handlers are touting him as a moderate. The guy was a POW, he beat cancer, he's got a good sense of humor, he's got an attractive, rich wife. That doesn't make him a moderate, it only makes him a POW who beat cancer, cracks jokes, and married well. Look at his voting record, not his PR: the guy is reactionary and dangerous. He backs Bush all the way on Iraq, he still thinks we could have won (won what?) in Vietnam if we'd just killed more people there, and he's probably looking at Iran with lust. (18 February 2008)
The 'Great Mystery' of Iraq's WMDs (FAIR). Why is CBS still insisting that Saddam never told us he had no WMDs before the US invasion that plunged us into the current mess? Of course he did. And he did it on CBS. (18 February 2008)
Frank J.Menetrez: The Case Against Alan Dershowitz (Counterpunch). Here's a well-documented analysis of plagiarism and dissembling by Harvard University law professor and torture advocate Alan Dershowitz. Harvard found a neat way to avoid holding him accountable for his academic sins: it decided to ignore them in their entirety. "As of this writing, Dershowitz appears to have succeeded in protecting his own career by destroying Finkelstein's. It is now probably too late to remedy all of the harm that Dershowitz's conduct has caused, both to the review of Finkelstein's tenure application and to public perceptions of Finkelstein and his work. But some sort of acknowledgement or apology by Harvard concerning Dershowitz's wrongdoing might go some distance toward clearing the air and making amends." (16 February 2008)
Barbara Ehreneich: Unstoppable Obama (Barbara's blog). Why Hillary's staff is going crazy. (16 February 2008)
Mister Denial wants another go (CNN). Ralph Nader, who gave Florida to George W. Bush in 2000, is thinking of offering himself for our consideration one more time. Why? (4 February 2008)
Uri Avnery: From Stalingrad to Winograd (Gush Shalom). The Winograd commission produced exactly the results Ehud Olmert planned for it to produce: nobody, however deserving, got nailed for anything. "In the 40 years of occupation, the Israeli army has lost the kind of officers that led it in the 1948 and 1967 wars, people like Yitzhak Sadeh, Yigal Allon, Yitzhak Rabin, Ezer Weitzman, Matti Peled, Haim Bar-Lev and David Elazar, to mention just a few. Their place has been taken by a mediocre, faceless group, gray but arrogant technicians, people of shallow thinking, colonialist and extreme right-wing attitudes, with an ever increasing percentage of knitted kippa-wearers. That is the group the report speaks of - but without saying so. It is an occupation army in which a negative natural selection process operates - everyone who does not feel comfortable in this milieu just leaves. As in any army, the atmosphere prevailing at the top - good or bad - trickles down the ranks to the meanest soldier. This is not an army of Stalingrad fighters defending their country - this is an army of Winograd fighters. An army which no genius can 'repair', as demanded by the commission. Because all the faults stem from the original sin: the occupation." (3 February 2008)
Gambling on the presidency (Open Secrets). The President picks the Secretary of the Interior and the Secretary of the Interior has a lot of influence on the expansion and operation of Indian gambling joints. Here's a chart showing how they've been spreading their campaign contribution money around. Rudy Giuliani got far more than anyone else; no surprise there. John McCain was second and Hillary Clinton third. Barack Obama, who is on record as saying casinos are not smart economic development, is far down the list. Click on some of the other industries in the display box for some interesting realignment, e.g., education, where Obama gets five times as much as Giuliani and nine times as much as McCain. In the Nevada primary campaign, Clinton attacked Obama for his opposition to gambling and his insistence that it particularly harms poor communities. (1 February 2008)
Makau Mutua: Kenya at the brink of collapse (Boston Globe). "Former UN secretary general Kofi Annan appears to be the last hope for Kenya if the country is to avoid a civil war. Annan must secure from Odinga, Kibaki, and their respective supporters a political settlement to end the violence. They have three options: a recount of the ballots to establish the true winner, a rerun of the election, or a power-sharing agreement in which Odinga becomes the prime minister and Kibaki retains the presidency but cedes substantial powers to the Legislature. Unless the two principals respond to Annan, one of the most beautiful places on earth will be left in the ruins of a biblical catastrophe." (1 February 2008)
Iraqi policewomen get to keep their guns (LA Times). Caving in to religious zealots, Iraqi police officials recently ordered policewomen to turn in their guns. The critical response was so great, however, the officials backed off and the women get to keep their guns—for now. (1 February 2008)
Jeffrey Toobin: Death in Georgia (New Yorker). Cool, rational, state-managed killing has gotten so expensive it just isn't as much fun as it used to be. (30 January 2008)
Susan Stuart: A Human Pledge (Nation). A very good essay on Robert Creeley's work and the recent publication of his Selected Poems, edited by Creeley's longtime friend Ben Friedlander. It's also a very good antidote to Charles Simic's earlier pinched and narcissistic review that was published, surprisingly, by New York Review of Books. (30 January 2008)
Gary Kamiya: Bush's delusions die in Gaza (Salon.com). The mass jailbreak of Gazans into Egypt revealed the bankruptcy of both Israel's policy of collective punishment and Bush's attempt to make Mideast peace. (30 January 2008)
George Soros: The worst market crisis in 60 years (Financial Times). "The current financial crisis was precipitated by a bubble in the US housing market. In some ways it resembles other crises that have occurred since the end of the second world war at intervals ranging from four to 10 years. However, there is a profound difference: the current crisis marks the end of an era of credit expansion based on the dollar as the international reserve currency. The periodic crises were part of a larger boom-bust process. The current crisis is the culmination of a super-boom that has lasted for more than 60 years....Although a recession in the developed world is now more or less inevitable, China, India and some of the oil-producing countries are in a very strong countertrend. So, the current financial crisis is less likely to cause a global recession than a radical realignment of the global economy, with a relative decline of the US and the rise of China and other countries in the developing world. The danger is that the resulting political tensions, including US protectionism, may disrupt the global economy and plunge the world into recession or worse." (30 January 2008)
Bush asserts authority to bypass defense (Boston Globe). In case you thought the Lone Star Warrior was winding down the militant lunacy our of respect for the collapsing economy and dead GIs and Iraqis produced by his administration, check this out: "President Bush this week declared that he has the power to bypass four laws, including a prohibition against using federal funds to establish permanent US military bases in Iraq, that Congress passed as part of a new defense bill." (30 January 2008)
Choate students say no to Rove (NY Times). Choate headmaster Edward Shanahan tried to force Choate seniors to accept Karl Rove as their commencement speaker. They'd have none of it: some said they wouldn't attend, some said they'd go but they'd turn their chairs around, others said they'd prefer Stephen Colbert. Shanahan dug in his heels, but finally (and grudgingly) backed down. (29 January 2008)
George Packer: The Choice (New Yorker). "The Clinton-Obama battle reveals two very different ideas of the Presidency. (28 Januay 2008)
Senators Challenge DHS on Border Stops (Washington Post). Is screwing up a well-functioning border under false pretenses a felony? It ought to be. "In announcing an end to the 'honor system' under which Americans and Canadians can enter the United States simply by presenting a driver's license or declaring their citizenship, Chertoff wrote to lawmakers that people had made 1,517 false claims of U.S. citizenship at land crossings in the past three months. That included one man with an outstanding arrest warrant for a homicide charge in California. A spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection acknowledged this week, however, that only 20 of the recent cases -- and 210 out of 31,060 false claims in the past three years -- occurred at the border with Canada. The other 99 percent came at the Mexican border." (26 January 2008)
Amy Goodman: The Invisible War (truthdig). In the past decade more than 5 million people have died in the Congo. Hundreds of thousands of women and young girls suffer rape and mutilation. Why don't the US and other industrialized countries do something about it? We don't want to interfere with the supply of coltan--essential for cell phones. (26 January 2008)
Immigration officials detaining, deporting American citizens (McClatchy). How did Immigations and Customs Enforcement officials convince themselves that a small-town drifter with a Southern accent, one who had been born in Minnesota, was an illegal immigrant from Russia, and therefore someone who could be detained and deported? Add this to the Bush administration's policy of shipping prisoners abroad for torture and keeping others virtually without legal reprentation in offshore US prisons and you wonder if it isn't time to rewrite the text at the base of the Statue of Liberty. (26 January 2008)
Johann Hari: Don't be fooled by the myth of John McCain (Independent). A lot of liberal Republicans and some liberal Democrats like John McCain because unlike the rest of the Republican presidential-candicate pack he doesn't hate immigrants, he opposes torture, and he recognizes the threat to the planet from greenhouse gases. But those few token gestures toward decency shouldn't trump his lunatic belief that the Vietnam war was not only just but winnable and that we should "bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran." Nor should we forget that the key to his consistent election success is his wife's fortune and his eagerness to take handouts from lobbyists: in every election he has outspent his opponents. (26 January 2008)
Kevin Frying: A rare look inside prison walls (Reporter). "Photographs of Arkansas prison by Bruce Jackson are on view at Duke (26 January 2008)
Bill Moyers: King, LBJ and Hillary (PBS). Hillary Clinton got a lot of flack lately for something she never said, and she didn't get credit for the correct thing she did say. Bill Moyers puts it right by giving the full text of her remark, and then providing a moving narrative of a key point in American history, which he witnessed first-hand. (22 January 2008)
In Matters Big and Small, Crossing Giuliani Had Price (NY Times). People say Rudy Giuliani is vicious, vengeful, arrogant and petty. Here are some documented stories that illustrate what they're talking about. (22 January 2008)
Uri Avnery: Look Who's Talking (Gush Shalom). Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, is espousing the two-state solution Uri Avnery proposed when he was a member of the Knesset 40 years ago. Getting it right, even 40 years late, is a good thing--or is it just one more trick by a politician who will do anything to keep his job? It it just words in the air or will there be action to back it up? (20 January 2008)
Border rules will make U.S. safer, Chertoff says (Globe & Mail). Last month, Congress delayed the Bush administration's border passport requirement for a year. Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff has decided to ignore that Congeressional action. He says it will make the US safer. And, he says, what's the big deal? Doesn't everybody carry a birth certificate or passport all the time anyway? The contempt and scorn these guys have for everybody else never fails to astonish. (19 January 2008)
Peter Dreier and Kelly Candaele: To Bring Change, Political insiders and Outsiders Need Each Other (Huffington Post). "Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have recently been arguing whether Martin Luther King Jr. or President Lyndon Johnson was more important for securing civil rights legislation. Their campaigns and the press have turned this tempest into a controversy over race. But it is really a dispute about political strategy and the role of social movements and protest in American society. As Obama (a former community organizer) and Clinton (who wrote her college senior thesis about the legendary organizer Saul Alinsky) no doubt know, all important progressive change requires both outsiders and insiders." (19 January 2008)
Endangered turtle could put snag in resort casino project (Boston Globe). Massachussetts casino opponents may have a new weapon in their armamentarium: the 10-pound north red-bellied cooter. Whatever works. (19 January 2008)
Ridley Scott film faces $50m lawsuit as police claim 'We've been framed' (London Times). There's a dynamite scene in Ridley Scott's hit film "American Gangster" in which DEA agents shoot a guy's wife, beat his wife, and steal his money. The only problem, say the reirted DEA agents who are presently suing Scott, none of it ever happened. The scene, like most of the rest of the movie, is a Hollywood fantasy. (19 January 2008)
Inmate's freedom may hinge on secret kept for 26 years (Chicago Tribune). Lawyer-client privilege is as absolute as the confessional, right? Is it as secure as the grave? What if a client gives a lawyer an affidavit swearing he committed a murder for which the lawyer knows another man was convicted?
Stephen Moss: Death of a madman driven sane by chess (Guardian). Maybe Bobby Fischer didn't go crazy after Reykjavik 1972. Maybe he was crazy all along, but it was only the order of the chessboard that let him pretend he was in touch with the world. Then he lost touch with the chessboard. (19 January 2008)
Sue Wuetcher: Notes on the spring 2008 films in the Buffalo Film Seminars (UB Reporter) (18 January 2008)
Bobby Fischer, Chess Master, Dies at 64 (NY Times). He turned into an America-hating anti-Semite paranoid in recent years, but when he was a kid he made a chessboard as hot a playing field as any of the NFL's Astroturfed megaliths. (18 January 2008)
Chertoff attcked for 'grow up' comment on secure ID (Buffalo News). The latest from the Bush administration paranoid xenophobes: Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, the guy who sunk the shared border management plan that would have made the Peace Bridge user-friendly again, has ruled thaat any adult entering the US by land will now have to show both a driver's licence AND a birth certificate. When he was hit with the logical objections to this foolishness he said his critics should 'grow up,' which is typical of the kind of mature response generated by Bush appointees at their most arrogant. (18 January 2008)
Uri Avnery: The Hands of Esau (Gush Shalom). "Which of the two men is the leader of the greatest power on earth and which is the boss of a small client state? A visitor from another planet, attending the press conference in Jerusalem, would find it hard not to answer: Olmert is the president of the great power, Bush is his vassal. Olmert is taller. He talked endlessly, while Bush listened patiently. While Olmert anointed Bush with flattery that would have made a Byzantine emperor blush, it was quite clear that it is Olmert who decides policy, while Bush humbly accepts the Israeli diktat. And Bush's flattery of Olmert exceeded even Olmert's flattery of Bush. Both, we learned, are 'courageous'. Both are 'determined'. Both have a 'vision'. The word 'vision', once reserved for prophets, starred in every second sentence. (Bush could not know that in Israel, 'vision' has long become a jocular appellation for highfaluting speeches, usually in combination with the word 'Zionism'.) The President and the Prime Minister have something else in common: not a word of what they said at the press conference had any connection with the truth." (18 January 2008)
Israeli pianist Daniel Barenboim takes Palestinian citizenship (Haaretz). Here's something that must have driven the blood-spillers and squatters nuts: "Daniel Barenboim, the world renowned Israeli pianist and conductor, has taken Palestinian citizenship and said he believed his rare new status could serve a model for peace between the two peoples. 'It is a great honor to be offered a passport,' he said late on Saturday after a Beethoven piano recital in Ramallah, the West Bank city where he has been active for some years in promoting contact between young Arab and Israeli musicians. 'I have also accepted it because I believe that the destinies of ... the Israeli people and the Palestinian people are inextricably linked,' Barenboim said. 'We are blessed - or cursed - to live with each other. And I prefer the first.'" (18 January 2008)
White House Study Found 473 Days of E-Mail Gone (Washington Post). A blesséd miracle, that's all it can be, a blesséd miracle. Right up there with the erased CIA torture tapes. (18 January 2008)
Jonathan Steele: Welcome, Mr President, to the misery you've created (Guardian). "In eight years Palestinians have seen the bald eagle of enlightened US power degenerate into a phony, biased, cynical lame duck." (18 January 2008)
Bruce Jackson: Ron Reinas: "It's Not About Trucks" (Artvoice). The first half of an interview with the Peace Bridge general manager about the bridge expansion project and the proposed reconfiguration of the U.S. plaza. (Peace Bridge Chronicles #91). (17 January 2008)
50 Years of Pissing People Off (Village Voice). Nat Hentoff is still at it. Hooray! "His politics, Hentoff once wrote, are 'libertarian socialism,' two words that in theory seem to be as compatible as the NRA and ACLU, but in practice could have much of interest to say to each other. Because Nat Hentoff has never allowed his thought to harden into ideology, he's never lost his talent to agitate us and make us rethink our own positions—to make sure that our minds watch ourselves. And if he's contradicted himself occasionally, very well then, he's contradicted himself." (17 January 2008)
Elaine Lorillard, dead at 93 (London Times). She founded the Newport Jazz Festival because (a) she loved jazz, (b) there wasn't much to do in Newport in the summer, and (c) she could afford it. (17 January 2008)
The coddled "terrorists" of South Florida (Salon.com). There's a gang of terrorists in Florida who spend their time shooting guns and hatching plots. In their midst is a man who blew up a plane full of civilians and tried to blow up a tourist hotel. But they're good terrorists, terrorists who vote Republican and who contribute to the Republican party, so Bush's police give them a pass. (17 January 2008)
Tom Engelhardt: The Corpse on the Gurney: The "Succeess Mantra in Iraq (TomDispatch). " The whole discussion of, and argument about, 'success' in Iraq is, in fact, obscene. Given what has already happened to that country -- and will continue to happen as long as the U.S. remains an occupying power there -- the very category of "success" is an obscenity. If violence actually does stay down there, that may be a modest godsend for Iraqis, but it can hardly be considered a sign of American 'success.'" (17 January 2008)
Robert Fisk: Bloody reality bears no relation to relation to the delusions of this President (Independent). "Twixt silken sheets – in a bedroom whose walls are also covered in silk – and in the very palace of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, President George Bush awakes this morning to confront a Middle East which bears no relation to the policies of his administration nor the warning which he has been relaying constantly to the kings and emirs and oligarchs of the Gulf: that Iran rather than Israel is their enemy....It was illusory, of course, like all the words that the Arabs have heard from the Americans these past seven days, ever since the fading President began his tourist jaunt around the Middle East. You wouldn't think it though, watching this preposterous man, prancing around arm-in-arm with the King, in what was presumably meant to be a dance, wielding a massive glinting curved Saudi sword, a latter-day Saladin, who would have appalled the Kurdish leader who once destroyed the Crusaders in what is now referred to by Mr Bush as 'the disputed West Bank.'" (17 January 2008)
U.S. fence creates river of ill will on Texas border (Chicago Tribune). While the borders between nations in Europe grow ever more open, the Bush administration makes the nothern and southern borders of the U.S. ever more hostile. How many terrorists, exactly, have tried to get into the U.S. by wading across the Rio Grande? (17 January 2008)
Perilous Journalism in the Persian Gulf: Uncritical coverage of Strait of Hormuz incident (FAIR). At the beginning of Bush's get-acquainted trip with the Middle East, the White House issued reports of a near-attack of huge US warships by five small Iranian boats and hinted that it was a provocation for war. The provocation seems all on the White House side, but nonetheless all the major US print and tv media outlets parroted the White House misinformation. What good is a free press if the press doesn't stop to ask questions? Stenography isn't journalism. (17 January 2008)
Eric Hobsbawm: Diary (London Review of Books). The famous historian looks back on two years in the transient dream of Weimar. "All attempts to make the Weimar Republic look more firmly established and stable, even before the world economic cataclysm broke its back, are historical whistling in the dark. It moved briefly through the debris of a dead but unburied past towards a sudden but expected end and an unknown future. For our parents it promised only an unrecoverable past, while we dreamed of great tomorrows; my ‘Aryan’ schoolmates in the form of a national rebirth, Communists like myself, as the universal revolution initiated in October 1917." (17 January 2008)
Russell Jacoby: Big Brains, Small Impact (Chronicle of Higher Education). "Yet let us accept, for the moment, the argument that humanities departments house more leftists than Home Depot or the police department. Shouldn't this be something that conservatives celebrate, not decry? Doesn't this mean that the system works elegantly, not poorly? Are these professors the successors to the last generation of intellectuals? If so, society has successfully insulated them. They inhabit a protected environment where they can neither harm each other nor reach outsiders. As academic intellectuals subvert paradigms and deconstruct narratives in campus symposia, conservatives take over the nation. Brilliant!" I17 January 2008)
Too tough? Tactics in suburban policing (Philadelphia Inquirer). A three-part series on how white cops in white suburbs of Philadelphia suspend civil rights when they encounter African Americans. (17 January 2008)
Library of Congreess picks 25 more classic movies (Globe & Mail). This year's selections for the Library of Congress's National Film Registry include The Naked City, In a Lonely Place, 12 Angry Men, Bullitt, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Back to the Future, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Dances With Wolves (huh?), Days of Heaven, The House I Live In (an anti-discrimination Sinatra short), The Sex Life of the Polyp, The Women, Wuthering Heights and 12 more (28 December 2007)
Ashley Pettus: A Cultural Symptom? Repressed Memory (Harvard Magazine). If "repressed memory" ('I was sexually violated for years, then forgot it for decades, them remembered it in time to accuse somebody') is a real psychological condition, why is there no factual report of it or fictional version of it before 1786? (28 December 2007)
Spectator: Why Schumer is so nice to Mukasey...CIA zanies...their torture centers and ours...Hevesi's wife, Giuliani's mistress, and Cuomo's silence. Buffalo Report's man on the inside intented to maintain sweet seasonal silence, but Mukasey's cynicism, Schumer's hypocrisy, Cuomo's indifference to Giuliani's corruption, and a few other matters forced him to send this year-end message. (28 December 2007)
Uri Avnery: Help! A Cease Fire! (Gush Shalom). Now Hamas is really pissing off Olmert and Barak. They're offering a total cease-fire in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank. How can you make never-ending war when your enemies insist on making peace and your friends (the US) issue reports saying the nuclear threat you say you are defending against never existed in the first place? (28 December 2007)
Andrew Sullivan: The torture tape fingering Bush as a war criminal (TimesOnline). "Any reasonable person examining all the evidence we have - without any bias - would conclude that the overwhelming likelihood is that the president of the United States authorised illegal torture of a prisoner and that the evidence of the crime was subsequently illegally destroyed. Congresswoman Jane Harman, the respected top Democrat on the House intelligence committee in 2003-06, put it as simply as she could: “I am worried. It smells like the cover-up of the cover-up.” It’s a potential Watergate. But this time the crime is not a two-bit domestic burglary. It’s a war crime that reaches into the very heart of the Oval Office." (24 December 2007)
Naomi Klein: The Shock Doctrine in Action in New Orleans (Naomiklein.org). For thousands of New Orleans residents Katrina was and continues to be a disaster. For a small group of businessmen and politicians, it was an opportunity. The small group is very busy taking advantage of that opportunity, and making sure that the benefits are kept from those who took all the punishment. Think of the way 9-11 provided Bush's flagging presidency all it needed to grow fat, rich and arrogant at the expense of everybody who wasn't part of the team, in and out of government. Like that. (23 December 2007)
Sacha Baron Cohen: Killing off Borat (Telegraph). The reclusive guy you know as Ali G and Borat makes a rare appearance in his own skin. (23 December 2007)
At 71, Physics Professor Is a Web Star (NY Times). Did your physics prof beat students with cat fur or fire a cannon loaded with a golf ball at a stuffed monkey wearing a bulletproof vest or ride a fire-extinguisher-propelled tricycle across the classroom? (23 December 2007)
California prison releases "DOA" (Sacramento Bee). California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to cut the state's prison population, now 178,000, by 28,000 over the next two years. Both Republican and Democrats in the legislature oppose the cuts. They say releasing the prisoners early conflicts with their correctional philosophy. It would also get in the way of $7.9 billion in new prison spending, and it would piss off the very powerful police and corrections officer organizations. Just as in New York, prisons in California are a major rural employer; they mint jobs in counties where nothing else is happening. Politicians love them, and they get to be sanctimonious when they lobby to pull more people off city streets to justify building ever more of them. (23 December 2007)
Former CIA officer probed over waterboarding interviews (McClatchy). Instead of abandoning a prisoner torture program that has dishonored the nation, or punishing the officials responsible for torture or those responsible for destroying evidence of it, the Department of Justice is going after a former intelligence officer who admitted on tv that the Bush administration was in fact doing it. The big crime for these guys isn't starting a needless war on false pretenses, lying to the nation, slaughter of innocent civilians, torture, etc. ad naus. It's telling the truth. (23 December 2007)
James Agee on It's A Wonderful Life (20 December 2007). One of the worst aspects of this time of year is the number of times Frank Capra's terminally treacly It's a Wonderful Life is there waiting to attack the innocent channel surfer. It's everywhere, and Clarence always gets his bloody wings. To attack it is to be a grump. It is, after all, the most American of American Christmas films, the most redeeming of redemption stories. Bah. Humbug. It turns out that James Agee, who invented film criticism, hated the film too. From now on, when anybody mentions Frank Capra's Christmas treacle, we'll send him the url for this astute review, and you'll be able to do it too. (20 December 2007)
Paul Brians' Common Errors in English Usage (Paul Brians). All of them: exorcise/exercise, flouder/founder, French dip with au jus, into/in to, perverse/perverted, abstruse/obtuse, ambiguous/ambivalent, avenge/revenge, continual/countinuous... (19 December 2007)
Bloodbrothers 3 (Army Times). It's not just the guys who get blown up who are being destroyed by Bush's Iraq lunacy. (19 December 2007)
Campaigning while female (Salon.com). Noted bottom feeder Drudge has busted Hillary Rodham Clinton for the unpardonable sin of being a 60-year-old woman who hasn't had a face lift or botox injections. His fellow bottom feeder, and quondam drug fiend, Rush Limbaugh concurs. (19 December 2007)
Senate passes budget bill that includes Iraq war funding (CNN). Once again the Democrat majority climbs the battlements, fires blanks, and then gives Bush everything he wants. (19 December 2007)
Destruction of CIA tapes may have violated a court order (LA Times). A federal judge wants to determine if the CIA violated a court order when it destroyed videotapes of prisoners being tortured. The White House says the court has no business looking into this because the torture took place in a secret CIA prison, the entire purpose of which is to engage in illegal procedures in places where courts can't get at them. That's called Bush-league logic. (19 December 2007)
Stop junk mail for good (Salon). Late November and early December is the deluge season for junk mail. Some catalogs arrive multiple times, and they're fat and heavy. And environmentally vicious: the 103.5 billion pieces of junk mail delivered by the U.S. Postal Service this year produced greenhouse-gas emissions "are equal to those of 3.5 million cars. (That figure doesn't include emissions from transporting and disposing of the stuff.) Beyond that, each year junk mail production in the U.S. consumes more than 96.7 billion gallons of water and more than 100 million trees." Several organizations will help you turn off this deluge, some for free, some for a small fee. It takes a few minutes to go through the lists and enter the data, but nothing like the time you waste again and again dealing with that unwanted trash. (17 December 2007)
Eric Arnesen: A tide of hatred (Chicago Tribune). Jean Pfaelzer's "Driven Out: The War Against Chinese Americans" documents the abuse, exploitation, harassment and hatred of Chinese immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (17 December 2007)
Uri Avnery: To Die With the Philistines? (Gush-shalom). Fulfilling Ariel Sharon's curse, Israel is poised to attack Gaza, a battle which will result in the deaths of a few hundred Israeli soldiers and thousands of Palestinian fighters and civilians, and which will accomplish nothing except to increase the suffering, losses and hatred on both sides. Is there another way? Yes, says Avnery, but it will take desire for something more than blood. (16 December 2007)
Red Cross: Israel is holding Palestinian population hostage (Occupation Magazine). "The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) criticized the Israeli closure and occupation of Palestinian land, which has left hospitals unable to treat the sick and injured, and has left farmers unable to work their land. The Red Cross called on Israel to `lift the retaliatory measures which are paralyzing life in Gaza, and to stop targeting the civilian population." (16 December 2007)
Mark Benjamin: Inside the CIA's notorious "black sites" (Salon.com). "A Yemeni man never charged by the U.S. details 19 months of brutality and psychological torture—the first in-depth first-person account from inside the secret U.S. prisons." (16 December 2007)
Bush wants power to control promotion of military lawyers (Boston Globe). Seeking to end the inconvenient independence of uniformed attorneys who have raised objections to White House policies toward kidnapped and tortured prisoners held in military prisons, the Bush administration is trying to take control of the Judge Advocate General corps' promotion procedure. That would mean any lawyer who didn't do what the White House wanted might face a career that was suddenly a dead end. This carries through on John Yoo's complaints about JAG independence before he left the Bush administration and joined the Berkeley law faculty. (16 December 2007)
Karen Anderson: So How Do We Get to Berkeley? Spend Big on SUNY, Panel Says (NY Times). It's time for Albany to stop playing small-town politics with SUNY and to start treating higher education as seriously as do California and Michigan. That starts with ending the artificial forced democracy among all 64 campuses and letting the four university centers do their job. (16 December 2007)
Activists hail 'landmark' New Jersey death penalty ban (AFP). Last week New Jersey became the first US state in four decades to vote to abolish the death penalty. (16 December 2007)
Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed (PRWatch). The amount of fake news included without any indication that it is corporate propaganda on national newscasts such as FOX and local newscasts such as Buffalo's WKBW and St. Louis's KTVI, is increasing. This executive summary includes links to video footage of 36 phony news reports that were aired, a map of the 77 stations that aired them, and an itemized list of the 77 stations. (16 December 2007)
Benjamin Schwarz: His Second Act (Atlantic). Have you listened to Frank Sinatra's Capitol recordings lately? You should. They're the best recordings by "the greatest vocalist in the history of American music," the man who "elevated popular song to an art." (13 December 2007)
Ominous Arctic Melt Worries Experts (CommonDreams/AP). Last year, top scientists predicted total summer melting of Arctic sea ice by 2040; this year, scientists are predicting that will happen by 2012. Oil companies and Asia-Europe shippers are ecstatic; circumpolar Inuit fear their traditional lifestyle will melt with the disappearance of the ice and the coming of the big ships and drilling rigs; and all the while more and more polar bears are drowning. (13 December 2007)
Bitter Divisions Exposed at Climate Talks (NY Times). The UN's Bali climate conference on global warming may end with no agreement on anything, primarily because of Bush administration obstructionism. (13 December 2007)
Israeli minister cancels UK trip in fear of arrest (Guardian).Israel's public security minister, Avi Dichter, headed Shin Bet, Israel's internal security agency in 2002, when Shin Bet attacked a house in Gaza. They were after a Hamas military commander. They killed him, and they also killed 13 civilians, including children. British law allows the arrest of people suspected of serious human rights violations anywhere in the world, so Dichter has decided not to risk being called to account. (13 December 2007)
Greg Grandin: The Unholy Trinity: Death Squads, Disappearances, and Torture—from Latin America to Iraq (TomDispatch). The Bush administration's policies of kidnapping and torture, and the perversions of language with which they decorate those policies, are atrocities but not new. They are direct descendants of long-standing US policies in Central and South America and in Vietnam. Perhaps the primary difference is the earlier acts of state terrorism were always denied, while now we have a vice-president and law professors at Harvard (Dershowitz) and Berkeley (Yoo) openly justifying and rationalizing them. (13 December 2007)
Army blocks 'narratives' of heroism (Baltimore Sun). The US Army and Marine Corps have awarded about 350 Silver Stars to GIs for heroism in Iraq and Agfhanistan. Each of those awards is accompanied by a one- or two-page narrative describing the event and the deeds. Usually, governments want the heroic deeds of soldiers known, but the US government insists that these reports be kept secret. Why? The Defense Department has given the Baltimore Sun one silly excuse after another. Is the secrecy just part of the White House idea that if we don't know the specifics of this six-year war we won't know what a murderous enterprise it really is? Is it like banning photographers from military funerals or the depots where the coffins of the newly-dead are off-loaded? (13 December 2007)
Glenn Greenwald: New poll reveals how unrepresentative neocon Jewish groups are (Salon.com). "A new survey of American Jewish opinion, released by the American Jewish Committee, demonstrates several important propositions: (1) right-wing neocons (the Bill Kristol/Commentary/ AIPAC/Marty Peretz faction) who relentlessly claim to speak for Israel and for Jews generally hold views that are shared only by a small minority of American Jews; (2) viewpoints that are routinely demonized as reflective of animus towards Israel or even anti-Semitism are ones that are held by large majorities of American Jews; and (3) most American Jews oppose U.S. military action in the Middle East -- including both in Iraq and against Iran." (13 December 2007)
Geoff Kelly: The Story is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories, by Bruce Jackson (Artvoice). A review. (13 December 2007)
Iraqi policewomen are told to surrender their weapons (LA Times). The religious fundamentalists are pushing women out of police work. This means there will be no one to pat down female suspects and rape investigations will evaporate. One of Bush's key justifications for all this war and death was to bring Iraqi's "freedom." Maybe we didn't hear the entire sentence. Maybe it was "fundamentalist Iraqi guys." (11 December 2007)
New Jersey Nears Repeal of Death Penalty (NY Times). Outside of Texas, most American voters think the death penalty is savage, supid and inefficient, but most American politicians are afraid to vote against it because they worry that those same voters won't think they have he-man conjones. It looks like New Jersey lawmakers have the cojones to do the right thing. (10 December 2007)
Stephen T. Banko: Dead Soldiers. They're still filling the body bags. Why? (7 December 2007)
Waterboarding is a venerable U.S. torture tradition. A friend sent along this 1902 cover from the first Life Magazine of GI's waterboarding Cuban prisoners while soldiers from other countries comment, "Those pious yankees can't throw stones any more." (7 December 2007)
CIA destroys torture interrogation tapes (NY Times). It didn't happen if there's no record of it having happened, right? (7 November 2007)
Convict nation (NY Times). One in every 31 adults in the U.S. is in prison, jail or on supervised release--a total of 7.38 million people. (6 December 2007)
Dilip Hiro on Bush's Losing Iranian Hand (TomDispatch). According to the latest National Intelligence Estimate, the Bush administration was just making it up all along about the ostensible Iranian nuclear threat. But you knew that, right? With this NIE, even the intelligence community is taking defensive action against the lunatic White House. (6 December 2007)
Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities (National Intelligence Council). The NIE reporting that Iran's nuclear program stopped four years ago. (6 December 2007)
Giuliani advisor: Doubt the NIE! (Salon.com). The NIE shows that the Bush administration's rationale for war with Iran was based on fiction, hype, and Cheneyism. How does Rudy Giuliani's top foreign policy advisor, the lunatic Norman Podhoretz, repond to that? By saying it proves you can't trust the intelligence community because they're all too willing to subvert lunatic fantasy with mere facts. (6 December 2007)
Israelis officials reject U.S. findings on Iran (McClatchy). Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak lines up with New York lunatic Norman Podhoretz against the NIE. It really hurts a guy when an excuse for war gets exposed as one more fantasy. (6 December 2007)
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt: Elizabeth Hardwick, Writer, Dies at 91 (NY Times). (6 December 2007)
David Denby: High Fliers (New Yorker). Julian Schnabel's astonishing film about Jean-Dominique Bauby, the editor of French Elle, gives transcendant filmic meaning to "life of the mind." (1 December 2007)
Benjamin Schwartz: Toiling in the Dream Factory (Atlantic). "Moviemaking in Hollywood's classical period was colossally complex, backbreakingly difficult, obscenely expensive—and it almost always failed." (1 December 2007)
Canadian court rules US is no longer a safe country for refugees (Federal Court of Canada). Canada and the U.S. had an agreement declaring both countries equally safe havens for refugees, the immediate effect of which, refugees in the U.S. had an increasingly difficult time moving into Canada because, presumably, they were already in a safe place. But Canada's Federal Court declared Thursday that the agreement is invalid because the U.S. engages in torture and turns people over to third countries to be tortured. Here is the full 150-page opinion. (1 December 2007)
Veterans' Suicides: a Hidden Cost of Bush's Wars (AlterNet). GI suicides are at a 26-year high. The army insists that PTSD has nothing to do with it, that the suicides are a result in an increase of "Dear John letters" and incompetent parenting. (1 December 2007)
Matt Taibbi: Mike Huckabee, Our Favorite Right-Wing Nut Job (Rolling Stone). The chief competitor for the shape-shifting Mitt Romney and ethically-challenged Rudy Giuliani for the Republican nomination is Mike Huckabee, who is "full-blown nuts, a Christian goofball of the highest order. He believes the Earth may be only 6,000 years old, angrily rejects the evidence that human beings evolved from 'primates' and thinks America wouldn't need so much Mexican labor if we allowed every aborted fetus to grow up and enter the workforce. To top it off, Huckabee also left behind a record of ethical missteps in the swamp of Arkansas politics that make White water seem like a jaywalking ticket." (1 December 2007)
Citing Statistics, Giuliani Misses Time and Again (NY Times). Rudy Giuliani quotes lots of statistics, all of them meant to show what a great job he did as mayor of NYC. The statistics he quotes indeed show that. The only problem is, they're all wrong or made up. Is he delusional, does he have a lousy memory, is he a pathological liar, or is it all three? (1 December 2007)
Joan Walsh; Don't ignore Shtup-gate! (Salon.com). Joe Conason argues that Rudy Giuliani's parlaying 9/11 into lucrative consulting deals from Qatar is more important than Giuliani's using the New York Police Department as a private taxi service for his mistress. But why can't the press give both aspects of Giuliani's lack of ethics and abundance of greed equal attention? (1 December)
Tim Rutten: CNN: Corrupt News Network (LA Times). "The United States is at war in the Middle East and Central Asia, the economy is writhing like a snake with a broken back, oil prices are relentlessly climbing toward $100 a barrel and an increasing number of Americans just can't afford to be sick with anything that won't be treated with aspirin and bed rest. So, when CNN brought the Republican presidential candidates together this week for what is loosely termed a "debate," what did the country get but a discussion of immigration, Biblical inerrancy and the propriety of flying the Confederate flag?" (1 December 2007)
A Million Little Writers (02138). Some of Harvard's celebrity academics publish books, articles, op-eds and everything else at a dazzling rate. How do they do it? A few are geniuses, who really do knock that stuff out in their own, which is why they are at Harvard. Some, particularly in the Law School, plagiarize, which saves a huge amount of time, if you don't get caught doing it. And some have perfected the system favored by some Renaissances artists, using lot of little elves who do the bulk of the research and sometimes the bulk of the writing as well. (29 November 2007)
Michael Scherer: You want to know how dumb Wednesday's Republican "debate" was? Here's how dumb it was (Salon.com). It took 10 minutes to get to the first question. CNN's camera cut to Chuck Norris in the audience twice, once to show he was there, the second time to provide fair & balanced coverage while the Men were discussing gays in the military. The audience seemed mainly concerned about being tough with illegal aliens, kind to guns, and the word of God. (29 November 2007)
From Smoking Boom, a Major Killer of Women (NY Times). Does anyone need any more conclusive evidence than this that cigarettes are deadly? Women didn't used to smoke, and neither did many of them die of lung disease; then they started to smoke, and lots more of them died of lung disease. Duh. So why (your editor asks rhetorically) does Congress still give tax subsidies to tobacco farmers and pass laws to lock up marijuana smokers? (29 November 2007)
Joseph E. Stiglitz: The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush (Vanity Fair). "When we look back someday at the catastrophe that was the Bush administration, we will think of many things: the tragedy of the Iraq war, the shame of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the erosion of civil liberties. The damage done to the American economy does not make front-page headlines every day, but the repercussions will be felt beyond the lifetime of anyone reading this page." (29 November 2007)
Civil Libertarians Warn of 'Patriot Act Lite' (InterPress). An anti-terrorism bill now racing through Congress with no debate could allow neoMcCarthyites in Congress (on both sides of the aisle) to crack down on universities trying to examing and discuss government policies. This potentially repressive bill is the brainchild of a California Democrat. The House passed it 400-6. Now it goes to a Senate committee chaired by Joe Lieberman. And Bin Ladin giggles in his cave. Or tent. Or hotel room. (29 November 2007)
Vast Nazi archive opens to public (AP/Yahoo). "After more than 60 years, Nazi documents stored in a vast warehouse in German were unsealed Wednesday, opening a rich resource for Holocaust historians and for survivors to delve into their own tormented past." So why did it take 60 years to open the door? Surely it wasn't that the officials of the eleven countries that controlled the archive were trying to protect the innocent. (29 November 2007)
DNA Evidence Freees a Woman Convicted of Killer Her Daughter (NY Times). But the Erie County DA wants to retry her anyway. Why? Because he can. (29 November 2007)
Glenn Greenwald; Everything that is rancid and corrupt with modern journalism (Salon.com). Time Magazine columnist Joe Klein got a huge fact hugely wrong. To "correct" the error, Time printed a statement on its web site paraphrasing something the Democrats said and something the Republicans said about a different fact entirely. Time's attitude seems to be that if both sides are represented, if it's reporting is "balanced," there is no need to report the truth. Is there a greater journalistic silliness than that? To put that another way: Here's the reason "Democracy Now!" is so much more interesting and useful than "Newshour" and Time Magazine. (28 November 2007)
Jon Swift: Journalism 101 (jonswift blog). A "reasonable conservative" lists the 20 rules of modern journalism that ensure both sides of every issue get fair and equal treatment, whether or not those two sides deserve fair and equal treatment or if there even are two sides. (28 November 2007)
Former N.C. Chief Justice Takes Up Prisoner's Case (Washington Post). Lee Wayne Hunt has been in prison for 22 years for murder on the basis of an FBI bullet-matching report that has since been totally discredited, and the testimony of two people who weren't there and who received plea deals in exchange for their testimony. The lawyer for Hunt's co-defendant has testified that his client told him Hunt had nothing to do with the killings, but he couldn't reveal that before because of attorney-client privilege. Prosecutors are fighting to keep the case from being reconsidered and are instead going after the attorney who told the truth after his client died. Frank Clark, the Erie County, NY, prosecutor, is in a similar fight to keep facts from overturning a faulty conviction. Why do those guys do that? Why are they more interested in winning than in justice? (28 November 2007)
James Wood: Movabl
