Robert Fisk: The demise of the dollar (The Independent). "In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar. Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars." (7 October 2009)

Thinking Literally (Boston Globe). According to some psychologists who have recently taken an interest in a subject writers and teachers of literature have been investigating for millennia (Aristotle writes of metaphor in his essay on tragedy, "The Poetics"), "metaphors aren't just how we talk and write, they're how we think. (5 October 2009)

The very arrogant Meg Whitman (LA Times). Billionaire Meg Whitman, who has never held political office or even voted but who hopes to buy the California governorship with some of the fortune she amassed at eBay, has said she intends to slash California's workforce "by at least 40,000 employees," a group she describes as "selfish and arrogant." Arnold Schwarzenegger has been totally disinterested in higher eduction and Whitman tends to do him one better: the law prohibits her from firing faculty and staff at state universities so she's promising to slash their operating budgets, which would force them to do it. As far as she's concerned, there are too damned many selfish and arrogant lower and middle class people going to college already. (5 October 2009)

Nobel Odds (Ladbrokes). The British online bookie Ladbrokes offers odds on 62 writers who've been suggested as possibilities for this year's Nobel Prize in Literature, which is to be awarded October 8. First is the Israeli Amos Oz, at 4:1, followed by the Algerian Assia Djebar and American Joyce Carol Oates at 5:1 and Philip Roth at 7:1. Thomas Pynchon is further down the list at 9:1, well ahead of Bob Dylan, Don DeLillo and Mylan Kundera at 25:1, Margaret Atwood at 40:1, Michael Ondaatje at 50:1, E.L. Doctorow at 66:1, and Cormac McCarthy and Maya Angelou at 100:1. (If the Nobel list doesn't open, click on the "Quick menu to betting" window and scroll down to the Nobel Prize.) (5 October 2009)

Paul Hipp: We're Number 37 (YouTube). A keen analysis of U.S. priorities by a guy who rocks but can't spell. (2 October 2009)

Bruce Jackson: Nick's "I"/Nick's Eye: Why they couldn't film Gatsby (Senses of Cinema). There have been three sound film versions of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and they're all awful. Here's why. (2 October 2009)

Polanski's guilty plea and his victim's grand jury testimony (Smoking Gun). It'll take you a while to get there, but be ready for a new definition of "cuddliness." (1 October 2009)

John Stewart on Democrats as lame wankers (Comedy Central). Democrats have a "super majority"—60 votes, with which they could pass any bill they wished. So what have they done with this new power for which they lusted and longed for so many years? Turned into Republican lapdogs. "The Democrats," Stewart says in this segment that nails their failure perfectly, "couldn't get laid in a house whose sole purpose is to have consequence and disease-free sex with legislators on finance committees." (1 October 2009)

McChrystal Rejects Lower Afghan Aims (NY Times). In a speech to the private International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, Gen. Stanley McChrystal stepped up his campaign to pressure Obama to give him 40,000 more troops in Afghanistan. Joe Biden's proposal to cut back the U.S. presence was, he said, "probably a short-sighted strategy." He implied that Obama was waffling by insisting on studying the issue rather than sending giving the general what he wants now: "People are making decisions, insurgents are making decisions, supporting nations are making decision." Obama reads a lot of history. Maybe it's time he read a book about Harry Truman and Douglas MacArthur. (1 October 2009)

Donn Esmonde: City should keep its hands off Olmsteds (Buffalo News). Buffalo's parks have never looked as good or been as healthy as they've been since the Olmsted Parks Conservancy took over their care and management. They do it with a lot of volunteers, and a budget that is half private contributions. It's an arrangement that works, and works very well. But Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown has sniffed the possibility of patronage jobs for his campaign workers, so he seems poised to wreck the whole thing. Esmond sums this stinker up in his final line: "I think the real problem, in City Hall's view, is not that the Conservancy does not fill enough positions with black people. It is that it does not fill enough positions with Brown people." (30 September 2009)

Conservancy defends work in Buffalo (Buffalo News). The Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy responds with impressive facts to the disinfomation being tossed about by Mayor Byron Brown and his flack Peter Cutler. (30 September 2009)

Garrison Keillor: Cut Republicans out of healthcare! (Salon.com). "When an entire major party has excused itself from meaningful debate and a thoughtful U.S. senator like Orrin Hatch no longer finds it important to make sense and an up-and-comer like Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty attacks the president for giving a speech telling schoolchildren to work hard in school and get good grades, one starts to wonder if the country wouldn't be better off without them and if Republicans should be cut out of the healthcare system entirely and simply provided with aspirin and hand sanitizer. Thirty-two percent of the population identifies with the GOP, and if we cut off healthcare to them, we could probably pay off the deficit in short order." (30 September 2009)

Spectator: Why do David Paterson and Andrew Cuomo carry Byron Brown's baggage? Byron Brown's administration has been a fiscal disaster for Buffalo and it is staggering under the weight of corruption and improper influence investigations. Yet the state's top Democrats can't do enough for him. Why? (29 September 2009)

France Divided Over Polanski Case (NY Times). Does being a Holocaust survivor and a highly-respected film director get a guy a pass on a 30-year-old rap for drugging, raping and sodomizing a 13-year-old girl? Some artists, politicians and ordinary people in France say yes, they do. Others say you get sympathy for the first, respect for the second, and jail for the third. (29 September 2009)

Polanski's attorneys may have ignited arrest fuse (LA Times). People have been wondering why the Los Angeles D.A.'s office has shown new interest in extraditing filmmaker Roman Polanski, who fled the country after his 1978 guilty plea in a nasty sex case. It turns out that recent agitation by Polanski's own attorneys—part of which faulted them for not actively pursuing him—encouraged them to reactivate the long-dormant case. (29 September 2009)

High Cost of Death Row (NY Times). Capital punishment doesn't deter murder (a Buffalo economist did a big fluffy study purporting to show that it does, but his work was thoroughly discredited by scholars of substance), it priviliges white victims, it is primarily given to indigent defendants, and it has often been ordered and sometimes applied in error. None of that has kept 35 states and the federal government from putting execution laws on their books. But cool, rational, considered killing by the state turns out to be hugely expensive and that—the pricetag for doing all those wrong things—has some of the states reconsidering their urge to engage in righteous kills. (29 September 2009)

Bruce Jackson: McChrystal's Infomercial: 60 Minutes and the General (Counterpunch).David Martin's 13-minute puff piece on U.S. Afghanistan commander Stanley McChrystal never rose above infomercial. Martin never asked a hard question, never followed up on an answer, and spent a great deal of time praising McChrystal and being awed in his many presence. McChrystal, on the other hand, used the segment as part of his very carefully wrought campaign designed either to get Obama to vastly increase US ground forces in Afghanistan, or to give McChrystal defensive talking points when the whole war goes south. Astonishingly, neither Martin nor the general uttered the words "Viet Nam" in relation to what is presently going on in that country no outside nation has ever conquered for very long. (28 September 2009)

Bob Woodward: McChrystal: More Forces or 'Mission Failure (Washington Post). A confidential report by the U.S. commander in Afghanistan says a change in military tactics and a lot more troops right away are necessary if the war is to be won. Woodward doesn't say if the report was leaked by people in the administration wanting to get people thinking the war is a loser or the commander wanting to put pressure on Obama to give him the troops he wants. Either way, it's got Viet Nam all over it. (28 September 2009)

Howard Kurtz: At Pentagon's Request, Post Delayed Story on General's Afghanistan Report (Washington Post). During which time parts of the report were redacted—but only, say government officials, for national security reasons. That's why they wanted the Pentagon Papers kept secret 40 years go. Or so they said. (28 September 2009)

Uri Avnery: The Drama and the Farce (Gush Shalom). "No point denying it: in the first round of the match between Barack Obama and Binyamin Netanyahu, Obama was beaten. Obama had demanded a freeze of all settlement activity, including East Jerusalem, as a condition for convening a tripartite summit meeting, in the wake of which accelerated peace negotiations were to start, leading to peace between two states – Israel and Palestine. In the words of the ancient proverb, a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. Netanyahu has tripped Obama on his first step. The President of the United States has stumbled. The threefold summit did indeed take place. But instead of a shining achievement for the new American administration, we witnessed a humbling demonstration of weakness. After Obama was compelled to give up his demand for a settlement freeze, the meeting no longer had any content." (28 September 2009)

Word Made Fresh: R. Crumb gives visual form to the first book of the Bible (bookforum). The great cartoonist R. Crumb has tackled Genesis and it's a match made in heaven, or whatever. "Among its many riches, Genesis is a book about bodies, a book where men and women constantly grapple with one another, where a servant swears an oath by putting his hand under his master’s thigh, where even angels are threatened with sexual violation. Crumb has long been the preeminent cartoonist of the body. His women are notoriously full-figured, with ample butts and protruding nipples (a motif he uses in this book). But more significantly, the bodies he draws—whether they are quivering or standing still, dancing or drooping—have a visceral impact few artists can match. That’s why he was the perfect cartoonist to illustrate the Book of Genesis, a fitting capstone to a great career." (28 September 2009)

Banks fight to kill proposed consumer protection agency (Mclatchy). The Obama administration is trying to establish a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency to protect ordinary people against usurious bank practices that help drag them into debt. The banks are spending big to make sure that doesn't happen. Consumer protection, from their point of view, is poison. Gordon Gecko lives! (28 September 2009)

Patrick Goldstein: Polanski an odd priority for DA (LA Times). With the state Legislature forced to make dramatic cuts in the prison budget and a three-judge federal panel having recently ordered California lawmakers to release as many as 40,000 inmates in response to the scandalous overcrowding of the California state prison system, it seems like an especially inauspicious time for the L.A. County district attorney's office to be spending some of our few remaining tax dollars seeing if it can finally, after all these years, put Roman Polanski behind bars." (28 September 2009)

Who Is a Terrorist? Depends who in the US government you ask (TRAC). "Eight years after 9/11, federal agencies can't seem to agree on who is a terrorist and who is not. The failure has potentially serious implications, weakening efforts to use the criminal law to combat terrorism and at the same time undermining civil liberties. Evidence of this surprising lapse has emerged from extensive analyses by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) of many thousands of records obtained from the federal courts and from two agencies in the Justice Department. Even for the government terrorism investigations that ultimately led to an actual prosecution for what often appeared to be serious crimes, TRAC found that the federal agencies differ markedly about who was labeled a terrorist and who was not." (28 September 2009)

Judith Warner: Why is "Cougar Town" so awful? Let us count the ways (NY Times). "It’s girls-gone-wild feminism for 40-somethings. It’s ridiculous and belittling and it stinks of another round of backlash. In the Cougar fantasy, in the figure of a woman who uses her younger mate to puff up her vanity and enhance her sense of power and control, you find all the most cartoonish aspects of boorish middle-aged masculinity. I’m sure we can generate better fantasies for ourselves." (25 September 2009)

Maira Kalman: And the Pursuit of Happiness (NY Times). The Great Kalman takes on the Big Apple's garbage and goop. (25 September 2009)

Judge-Prosecutor Affair, But No New Trial in Texas Death Penalty Case (NY Times). The judge and prosecutor were hopping in and out of bed, but it was Charles D. Hood, the defendant who is now on Death Row, who got screwed. Hood's lawyers got proof of the affair only this year, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected his appeal because he didn't raise the issue 19 years ago, when he couldn't have raised it because the judge and prosecutor hadn't been outed yet. The judge subsequently served on the appellate bench that rejected Hood's appeals. In Texas, justice is a screwing that goes on and on and on. (18 September 2009)

Marc Ambinder: Closing the Book on the Bush Legacy (Atlantic). "On every major measurement, the Census Bureau report shows that the country lost ground during Bush's two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country's condition improved on each of those measures during Bill Clinton's two terms, often substantially. The Census' final report card on Bush's record presents an intriguing backdrop to today's economic debate. Bush built his economic strategy around tax cuts, passing large reductions both in 2001 and 2003. Congressional Republicans are insisting that a similar agenda focused on tax cuts offers better prospects of reviving the economy than President Obama's combination of some tax cuts with heavy government spending. But the bleak economic results from Bush's two terms tarnish, to put it mildly, the idea that tax cuts represent an economic silver bullet." (16 September 2009)

Brown easily wins second term (Buffalo News). Incumbent Byron Brown beat challenger Michael P. Kearns 24,595 to 14,319. Now all he has to worry about are the various federal investigations into misappropriation of funds and extortion in City Hall. Things are back to normal. (16 September 2009)

Britain's lousy libel laws (NY Times). Britain's libel laws are heavily weighted against anyone challenging phonies in science and industry. This is having a chilling effect on the kind of public inquiry any democracy needs. (16 September 2009)

Animosity toward Obama based on race, says Jimmy Carter (Salon.com). Do you think for a minute Joe Wilson would have shouted "You lie!" if a white man had been giving that speech on health care to Congress? As Maureen Dowd pointed out a few days ago, what Wilson was really saying, and what his Republican brethren were endorsing, was "You lie, boy!"(16 September 2009)

Glenn Greenwald: Norman Podhoretz's false accusations of "dual loyalty" (Salon.com). The ideologue Norman Podhoretz, one of the neocon founding fathers, has a new book in which he insists that American Jews' primary political loyalty is to Israel. In recent television interviews, he has insisted that American Jews who won't serve Israel's interests before those of the U.S. were anti-semitic. Greenwald shreds the book and Podhoretz's whole kneejerk schtick. And Leon Wieseltier aimed the light of informed reason on Podhoretz's twisted logic in Sunday's NY Times Book Review. A sample: "But this is a dreary book. Its author has a completely axiomatic mind that is quite content to maintain itself in a permanent condition of apocalyptic excitation. His perspective is so settled, so confirmed, that it is a wonder he is not too bored to write." (14 September 2009)

The 50 Richest Members of Congress (RollCall). It's no surprise that John Kerry tops the list, with $167 million net worth: the lad married well. But how did Ted Kennedy's net worth go from $47.62 to $15.74 million in one year? #33 is WNY's Chris Lee. These numbers are all ballpark: the plutocrats on the Hill can list the value of something as $5-25 million, and they don't have to list the value of their homes. Some, such as John McCain, have a lot of homes. So these very large numbers are just the minimum these folks have on hand when they come to Washinton. With all those millions already in hand, why are most of them such whores for the lobbyists? (14 September 2009)

Geoff Kelly: Buffalo's Democratic primary (Artvoice). A solid analysis of why Mickey Kearns, whose campaign was on life support only a few months ago, now stands a very good chance of taking the mayor's office away from Byron Brown, who seems to be in personal and political meltdown. (11 September 2009)

NY Senate Republicans block ethics reform (NY Times). A few months ago, the New York State Senate became the laughing-stock of the nation when billionaire Tom Golisano dropped a few bucks in the chamber and the whole operation shut down for a month. That latest out of that group of scoundrels is that the Republicans in the group have successfully blocked any ethics reform. (11 September 2009)

Carl Paladino; Kearns offers alternative to city's poor administration (Buffalo News). "Mickey Kearns, a homegrown boy, is running for mayor in the Democratic Primary on Tuesday and your family’s future depends on your vote. We must end our decline and complacent acceptance of mediocrity, respect the horror of parents sending their children elsewhere for a job and stop electing the same incompetents and opportunists who have no experience or ability. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result each time. City Hall is wrought with endemic corruption and incompetence. Mayor Byron Brown sees our nightly murders as a photo op. He stonewalls the Common Council and press on the release of public records, but claims transparency. He met HUD’s scathing audit report by crying to Washington to silence HUD’s Steve Banko. Devoid of any vision or plan, he’s never even criticized the train wreck in Albany." (10 September 2009)

President Obama's speech on health care (NY Times). "I am not the first president to take up this call, but I am determined to be the last." It was a great speech about a critical issue. We are the only industrial nation without a decent health care system, and the primary reasons are greed in the health care industry and the willingness of Congress to be bought and sold. Nothing demonstrates what a collection of hypocritical scum-sucking dogs occupies nearly half the seats in the U.S. Capitol as a presidential address. When Obama came into the House chamber, Republicans and Democrats applauded wildly and members on either side of the aisle moved to the center to touch the flesh and perhaps appear on national television in proximity to power. But once the speech began, Republicans sat on their hands as one noble goal and good idea after another passed through the cynical space between their ears. The only thing they all seemed to approve was limiting payments to patients in cases of medical malpractice. (10 September 2009)

Peter Dreier: "Go Out And Make Me Do It" (HuffingtonPost). "President Barack Obama's address to Congress Wednesday night was not just a litany of policy prescriptions. It was a call to action. His approach took a page out of President Franklin Roosevelt's playbook. FDR once met with a group of activists who sought his support for bold legislation. He listened to their arguments for some time and then said, 'You've convinced me. Now go out and make me do it.'" (10 September 2009)

Paladino gets on the Kearns bandwagon (Buffalo News). Recent reports of corruption in the Byron Brown administration got too much even for frequent investor in local politics Carl Paladino. With less than a week to go in the campaign, Buffalo's biggest landlord has started writing checks to the financially-strapped Kearns campaign to buy some airtime. His surfacing comes the same day polls put Kearns almost in a dead heat with the very well financed Brown. (10 September 2009)

Another family values Republican brags about extra-marital sex (LA Times). This idiot did it before a live camera and he was so graphic in his comments he was out of office a day later. "Assemblyman Michael Duvall (R-Yorba Linda), whose remarks were videotaped in July during a lull in a Sacramento hearing, stepped down less than 24 hours after the tape spread online Tuesday night. In the video, the married family-values crusader from Yorba Linda talks in graphic detail about women he said he slept with -- at least one of whom appeared to be a lobbyist with business before the utilities committee on which Duvall sat as vice chairman." (10 September 2009)

How Bureaucracy and Bickering Brought Down Niagara Falls (Governing.com). Niagara Falls, Ontario, is a jewel; Niagara Falls, New York, is an economic sewer and visual nightmare. Here's why: :Simply put, Niagara Falls, Ontario, has benefited from decades of decisions by regional and provincial policy makers who have built on one another’s work. Niagara Falls, New York, has lurched through short-sighted, incompetent and sometimes corrupt municipal governance, failed stabs at regionalism, and flailing, inconsistent and outright destructive approaches by various arms of state government." (10 September 2009)

Al Franken's map (PoliticalWire). Al Franken can do something you can't do. (10 September 2009)

Gail Hornstein: Prune That Prose (The Chronicle Review). To call writing "academic" is to say it is barely readable at best. It doesn't have to be like that. Academics could write comprehensible English, if they bothered to. Here's how. (10 September 2009)

Donn Esmonde: Mayor's record is blunderful (Buffalo News). Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown is angry at the press for running stories about corruption and incompetence in his administration. If enough people read newspapers he wouldn't stand a chance of reelection next week, but they watch tv instead, and that is where Brown's war chest stuffed with bullion from people wanting (and getting) favors will pay off. But maybe lighting will strike and Mickey Kearns, the better candidate by far, will walk off with the job. "Buffalonians saw the election four years ago of a black mayor as sign of change," writes Esmonde, "and—in a racially positive way —it was. But the black mayor they elected is no change agent. Brown was the least reform-minded of the 2005 candidates. He is yet another product of a political machine who is, in my view, better at winning an office than he is at doing the job. A city badly in need of a progressive leader keeps getting stuck with between- the-lines bureaucrats." (9 September 2009)

Roger Ebert: A Bar on North Avenue (Granta). Film critic Roger Ebert has been writing lately about his boozing years, which ended when he joined AA in 1979 (he describes quitting in "My Name is Roger and I'm an alcoholic," posted on his Chicago Sun-Times blog.). Here, he memorializes the Chicago writers' & actors' favorite bar, O'Rourke's, the kind of glorious dump you can't hardly find any more, no matter how desperate you get. (8 September 2009)

Meet the knuckleheads of the U.S. Senate (Salon.com). Talking points on the dumbest, most cynical, most hypocritical and/or most useless members of the upper house: Jim DeMint, Jim Bunning, Joe Lieberman, Roland Burris, James Inhofe (BR's candidate for dumbest senator of them all), Herb Kohn, Tom Coburn, Chuck Grassley, Max Baucus, David Vitter, John Ensign and Jeff Sessions.

President Barack Obama: Remarks at a Back to School event in Virginia (White House). This is the speech Republicans had a nutsy over, the one they said was going to poison the minds of American children and drive the little runts into lives of depravity & whatever. We've read it two or three times now and just can't find the poisonous passages. Can you? Basically, he tells them to take school seriously because a good education makes a difference in their lives and the lives of everyone around them. Is that subversive? Or is it just that a black man from an ordinary background made it to the White House, is that what they really can't stand, what really drives them into these fits of idiocy and hatred? What is it: racism or stupidity? Both? (7 September 2009)

Editorial: The 2009 Buffalo Democratic primary: Vote for Michael P. Kearns. He's honest, he stands up on difficult issues, he's not a pay-to-play politician, he answers questions directly and without evasion. Just the opposite of the current mayor in all regards. The primary is September 15.

Spectator: Byron Brown and "Legacy Stuff": Whose problem is it? Every time Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown gets caught siphoning money out of federal grants for city hall cronies he says "this stuff has been going on for 30 years." Maybe it's time for HUD and other federal agencies to take a hard look at how their support for one of the nation's poorest cities has been diverted to the pockets of political cronies of the mayor. (7 September 2009)

Brown reportedly intervened with police to assist Stokes (Buffalo News). Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown has insisted he did nothing out of the ordinary to help Leonard Stokes, who seems to have squandered several hundred thousand dollars of the city's money on a restaurant operation for which he wasn't the least bit qualified. Banks rejected Stokes' loan applications, whereupon a senior Brown staffer not only gave him boxes of city money, but helped him try to run the joint. When the Buffalo News exposed this scandal, Brown kept saying he knew nothing about it, he never did anything special for Stokes. That was, it appears, too much for some members of the Buffalo police department: they, or someone close to them, leaked to the News the story of how Stokes was busted for using a stolen disabled parking hangtag, whereupon Mayor Byron Brown stopped the investigation cold. When asked about his interference in this criminal arrest Brown kept insisting that such questions were "politically motivated." We don't know about the motivation, but surely they have political implications: a mayor's staff gives away public money to an operation bankers say is a dog after which the mayor himself gets the owner of that operation out of trouble with the cops, then lies about it. No wonder you're seeing more and more Mickey Kearns signs around town. (6 September 2009)

Uri Avnery: Tutu's Prayer (Gush Shalom). Longtime Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery disagrees with Ben-Gurion University politics professor Neve Gordon, who recently published an article in the L.A. Times advocating a boycott of Israel, similar to the one mounted against the apartheid policy of South Africa years ago. Avnery called Desmond Tutu to ask if that earlier boycott had really been effective in the fight against apartheid. It was absolutely essential, Tutu told him. Avnery still disagrees with Gordon, mainly, it seems, because the apartheid situation in Israel is much worse than it was in South Africa and because Israel as a nation is far more paranoid. (For comments on the academic attacks on Gordon, see "Israel and Academic Freedom" in the 31 August Inside Higher Ed). (7 September 2009)

Yes, there are health care death panels (California Nurses Association). The Republicans working night and day to kill health care reform are half-right: there are indeed health care death panels making life and death decisions in direct opposition to physicians' recommendations. But they don't work for the government. They're the private insurors which, in California, reject 22% of all claims. (7 September 2009)

A brief history of climate change and conflict (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists). "In recent years, many foreign affairs experts have attempted to demonstrate the linkages between climate change and the social tensions that can lead to conflict. While critics may believe this is simply a fad in international affairs, history suggests otherwise. Over the last few millennia, climate change has been a factor in conflict and social collapse around the world. The changing climate has influenced how and where people migrate, affected group power relations, and provided new resources to societies while taking away others. Such circumstances cause large-scale alterations in lifestyles and illustrate pathways from climate change to conflict." (7 September 2009)

Glenn Beck debuts as Fox News art critic (Modern Art Notes). Fox News makes the Examiner and those other supermarket checkout tabloids seem journalistically sane and responsible. "Beck, who is best-known for hysterical, tearful, racial rantings that have cost his program nearly five dozen sponsors in the last few months, tore into the 'progressive' Rockefeller(s) on the charge that they were responsible for delivering 'communist' and 'fascist' art to New York. Beck went on to suggest that 'Rockefeller' (which one or ones was not made clear) was a communist-sympathizer, a fascism-supporter and a hater of America." Do you know people who watch Fox on a regular basis? Can you imagine what the inside of their mind must look like now? Brrrrrrrr. (7 September 2009)

Ali H. Soufan: What Torture Never Told Us (NY Times). Former vice president Dick Cheney has been insisting in recent speeches that the torture program he helped establish provided the US critical information in the war on terror. Torture, argues Cheney, is a necessary part of our armamentarium, and bringing torturers into the criminal courts would be a travesty. Nonsense, say Soufan, who was a key member of the FBI's terrorism investigations. Not only has Cheney been lying about accomplishments of his torture program, but shutting down of the normal investigation in favor of the torturers probably kept us from learning a great deal of important things we otherwise would have. Cheney's torture regime made us less, not more, safe, and it turned us into a criminal nation in the process. (For more and the press and Cheney's lies, see the August 28 FAIR media advisory, "Cheney's Fodder.'"(6 September 2009)

Lights Out at the Penitentiary (Wall Street Journal). For decades, the states have been using prisons as a triple-edged solution to unemployment: they've been a place to dump unemployed urban minority men and a way to employ rural white men and feed the states' construction industries. But with the states up against the financial wall, that easy solution is more and more being seen as part of the problem, so the rate of new prison construction has slowed and some states are looking at ways to get some of those people they'd hidden from sight back into the world. (6 September 2009)

Floyd Abrahams and Trevor Potter on corporations and the First Amendment (Bill Moyers Journal). During last year's presidential campaign, some deep-pocket corporations produced a vicious anti-Hillary Clinton film that was eventually blocked by a lawsuit. Do corporations have the same First Amendment rights as an individual (and can they therefore use their vast resources to influence elections) or, since they are creations of law, are their rights more limited? Longtime First Amendment advocate Floyd Abrahams says there should be no limits on corporations, while former federal election committee chair Trevor Potter says the First Amendment doesn't give corporations, whose only interest is making money and whose owners are often foreign (hence otherwise banned from advertising in political campaigns), the same rights as individuals. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case next week. (6 September 2009)

Edward M. Kennedy Jr.'s eulogy for his father (MSNBC). There has been a lot of eloquent and witty speechifying about Teddy Kennedy this week. The only one that comes close to this superb eulogy is the next item in this list. (29 August 2009)

Obama's Eulogy for Kennedy (White House). That full text of the President's eulogy at Teddy Kennedy's funeral Click here for a video. (29 August 2009)

Philippe Bolopion: Les Kennedy, une histoire americaine (Le Monde). To this French writer the Kennedy tradition didn't die with Ted Kennedy. Rather it was passed on to and has been embodied by Barack Obama, president of "an America that is reconciled, more just, respected in the world because it is a bearer of hope." (29 August 2009)

The Kennedy Memorial Service (Political Wire). Videos of some of the speakers at the memorial service at the Kennedy Library the evening before Teddy Kennedy's funeral. Joe Biden was superb, worth watching through all 10:36. The most bizarre moment came at the end of John McCain's comments (you can move the slider to get get there): Teddy's widow Vickie got up to thank him but McCain breezed right by her, paying her no attention at all. Orrin Hatch, one of Teddy's closest friends in the Senate, comes off as close to a human being as you'll ever see him get. Chris Dodd, Teddy's weekend sailing buddy, is nearly as moving as Biden. They did not include, alas, superb remarks by longtime Kennedy pal (and former US Senator from Iowa) John Culver and Mass. governor Deval Patrick. (27 August 2009)

Kennedy Asks John Ashcroft about Torture Memos-2005 (YouTube). Watch then-attorney general John Ashcroft slip, slide and lie while Ted Kennedy tries (unsuccessfully) to get him to tell even a teensy-weensy bit of the truth in a senate hearing on Bush torture policy. (27 August 2009)

Biden on Kennedy (Political Wire). If you think Joe Biden is a narcissistic blowhard and all politicians are cynics, take a look at Joe Biden's moving remarks on Ted Kennedy's life and death. It may cause you to rethink both. (26 August 2009)

Edward Kennedy, 77 (NY Times). "He was a Rabelaisian figure in the Senate and in life, instantly recognizable by his shock of white hair, his florid, oversize face, his booming Boston brogue, his powerful but pained stride. He was a celebrity, sometimes a self-parody, a hearty friend, an implacable foe, a man of large faith and large flaws, a melancholy character who persevered, drank deeply and sang loudly. He was a Kennedy." (26 August 2009)

The CIA torture report (CIA). A PDF of the full 259-page C.I.A. inspector general's report, kept secret since it was prepared in 2004, detailing abuses inside C.I.A. prisons. The report was made public by the Department of Justice on 25 August, 2009. Click here for commentary on the report and other documents from the NY Times Lede blog, including reports from the CIA claiming torture worked. (25 August 2009)

Neal Gabler: 'Truth' vs. 'facts' from America's media (LA Times). Just about everything that's coming out of the insurance companies, Obama-hating Republicans, and the lunatic Right about Obama's healthcare plan is bullshit, plain and simple, yet most of the mainstream press gives it equal space/time with the truth. Why propagate lies? Several reasons, says Gabler, but three seem primary: fear that the greedyguts insurance companies and Obama-hater and crackpots will get cross with them if they fail to give their lies equal time, ignorance, and laziness. The First Amendment does you good only if you take the trouble to use it, guys. (24 August 2009)

Stephen T. Banko: Obama vs. the liars. President Barack Obama is trying to get a broad health care program that of necessity interferes with the free ride long enjoyed by parasitical insurers, Big Pharma, and other so-called "providers." Those who oppose reform and their hired dupes, as well as Republicans who will do anything to wreck Obama's presidency, are filling the airwaves with false rumors and outright lies, and they're helped by a national print and electonric press that rarely rises about stenography and often sinks into hysterical opportunism. But Obama has one weapon his predecessor would never have used: a willingness and ability to confront the public directly with the truth. (22 August 2009)

Brown's team agrees to provide data sought by News (Buffalo News). For over a year the Buffalo News has been filing Freedom of Information requests for information from the Buffalo mayor's office and for over a year the pay-to-play Byron Brown administration has been stonewalling. Every so often Brown's flack, Peter Cutler, issues a totally disingenuous statement wrapped in gibberish, but until this week Brown has continued to refuse to let anyone look at what are supposed to be public documents. Now he says he's willing to obey the law after all. Perhaps he's feeling the pressure from the One Sunset scandal, in which as top Brown administration official channeled huge amounts of public money to a pal's failing restaurant operation. Perhaps he's noting the increasing enthusiasm for the campaign of Mickey Kearns, who is challenging him in the fall election. Kearns doesn't have any money, but a lot of people, the Buffalo News and Artvoice are all backing him because he offers something the Brown administration can't or won't: candor and competence. (22 August 2009)

CIA Used Gun, Drill in Interrogation (Washington Post). The most surprising thing in this report isn't that the CIA used a broader range of torture techniques than we'd previously been told or that everybody in government has been fighting tooth and nail to keep the rest of us from learning about the hideous procedures the Bush administration embraced in the name of "democracy." Rather it is the reason CIA didn't stop torturing once it became clear that the waterboarding and mock-executions weren't producing any useful information. If they changed the way they treated prisoners, people might think they had been wrong to torture them in the first place, so they went on torturing, even though they were increasingly convinced of torture's futility. The most important thing wasn't learning the truth about anything; it was avoiding embarassment. (22 August 2009)

Amy Goodman: Troy Davis and the Meaning of 'Actual Innocence' (truthdig). The U.S. Supreme Court has ordered a federal district court in Georgia to consider the huge mass of evidence pointing to the innocence of condemned prisoner Troy Davis, who has been on Georgia's death row for nearly two decades.There is no physical evidence against Davis and every witness against him but two (one of whom might be the acual killer) has recanted, claiming police coercion and intimidation. All the lower courts refused to consider the new evidence and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (along with Clarence Thomas) argued that mere proof of innocence is insufficient grounds to overturn a death penalty that was achieved without proceedural error. The rest of the Court, happily, rejected this deadly sophistry and Davis will get a chance to clear his name. (Click here for the majority opinion on Davis's habeas corpus petition, written by Justice Stevens, and click here for Scalia's dissent, joined by Thomas.)

Neve Gordon: Boycott Israel (LA Times). "It is indeed not a simple matter for me as an Israeli citizen to call on foreign governments, regional authorities, international social movements, faith-based organizations, unions and citizens to suspend cooperation with Israel. But today, as I watch my two boys playing in the yard, I am convinced that it is the only way that Israel can be saved from itself. I say this because Israel has reached a historic crossroads, and times of crisis call for dramatic measures. I say this as a Jew who has chosen to raise his children in Israel, who has been a member of the Israeli peace camp for almost 30 years and who is deeply anxious about the country's future.... Nothing else has worked. Putting massive international pressure on Israel is the only way to guarantee that the next generation of Israelis and Palestinians -- my two boys included -- does not grow up in an apartheid regime." (22 August 2009)

UB Reporter on fall 2009 Buffalo Film Seminars (UB Reporter). Charlotte Hsu comments on the 15 films in the 19th series of classic films hosted by Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson at Buffalo's Market Arcade Theater. (22 August 2009)

Espada taps $350,000 (Albany Times Union). Joining billionaire Tom Golisano's plot to get control of the New York State Senate, Democrat state senator Pedro Espada, Jr. (Bronx) announced he would henceforth vote with the Republicans, a move that shattered the Democrats' recent ascendancy into the Senate majority. After a few weeks of utter chaos in Albany, Espada announced that he was moving back to the Democrat side of the aisle. It was all for the good of the state, he said. Now it appears it was more for the good of Pedro Espada. His decision to put the pieces back where they were before he got up and danced to Golisano's tune earned him $350,000 with which he can hire friends, increase the salaries of friends already on his payroll, and buy things. Your tax dollars at work. (22 August 2009)

Criminal prosecutions of illegal aliens continues to climb (TRACImmigration). Here's a report that should bring joy to the icy heart of CNN's immigrant-hating Lou Dobbs: the Obama administration is filing criminal charges against 30% more aliens than the xenophobic Bush administration did a year ago. (22 August 2009)

Steve Early: Sanders Shows Congress How to Avoid Tar & Feathering at August Tea Parties (Z Space). The great Bernie Sanders demonstrates how Fox News's TeaParty frothers and the anti-healtcare protonazis can be stopped from keeping sanity and reason out of public discourse. (22 August 2009)

Jon Stewart on Barney Frank & the Tabletop Lady (Daily Show). If you've watched any of the healthcare town hall meetings you are (a) hugely impressed at the organizing ability and disruptive skills of the interests that will do anything to keep Americans from getting a decent healthcare system, (b) awed at the stupidity of well-meaning citizens who may actually believe the drivel they're spewing, or (c) both of the above. Usually, the screamers, yellers and fruitcakes trump sanity and reason, but they went down in silly flames when they tried that crap on Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank. Later, Fox News tried to use the event to attack Frank, only the footage it said it would document its fictional accusation didn't seem to exist. Jon Stewart guides us through it all. (22 August 2009)

Colbert interviews Barney Frank's dining room table (Colbert Nation). Steven Colbert riffs on the same idiotic encounter, then interviews a subject far more intelligent and articulate than the jabbering twit in the audience: a French provincial dining room table. (22 August 2009)

Joyce Marcel: Like Arguing With a Table (CommonDreams). This is an interesting piece on the total collapse of American political journalism, and it include the full comment of Barney Frank to the twit that has appeared as nothing but a brief sound-bite on the news and comedy shows: "As you stand there with a picture of the president defaced to look like Hitler, and compare the effort to increase health care to the Nazis, it is a tribute to the First Amendment that this kind of vile, contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated. Trying to have a conversation with you would be as interesting as trying to argue with a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it." (22 August 2009)

Hard times for academic arts (NY Times). Arts programs in universities tend to be small and marginally funded: unlike the lab sciences, there is little external funding to help support them. Even though they're cheap in comparison to the physical and health sciences, universities more and more are slashing their budgets enough to cripple or destroy otherwise viable programs. It's a facile, but finally foolish, economy, but try explaining that to a dean out of Physics who has some fellow labrat screaming for additional assistants to work on his half-funded NSF grant. (10 Ausut 2009)

Mike Seeger, 75 (NPR). Mike was one of the beautiful people. He was a superb musician, a great collector and presenter of classic American music, and a dear friend. He, his half-brother Pete, and his sister Peggy, each came at traditional music in a different way, and we are in more debt than we know to all three of them. (9 August 2009)

Bruce Jackson: Mike Seeger in Buffalo, 1977. Seventeen photographs. (9 August 2009

Geoff Kelly and Matthew Quinn: Mickey Drops his Gloves (Artvoice). An interview with Buffalo mayor candidate Mickey Kearns. His campaign has gotten off to a slow start--mainly because nearly all the developers in town are giving money to Byron Brown, as they have been for the past several years, because they know that's the only way they'll get city contracts. Several investigations into Brown administration misuse of public funds are now underway or about about to get going, but they may not go public in time to help Kearns. The Brown team has also been forcing city hall workers to campaign for Brown on their own time. How can a guy with no money compete with that kind of muscle? Kearns is trying and perhaps enough people will listen to him before the primary. (9 August 2009)

Joan Walsh: But seriously, folks: Obama death panels? (Salon.com). The latest from Palin is that Obama's health coverage plan would include panels that would sentence defective babies to death. The mainstream press covered that foolishness as if it were anything but Arctic lunacy. One key reason the anti-healthcare crowd and the Birthers get such traction among the gullible is almost no one in the mainstream press calls them out for the liars and manipulators they are. (See the following item for a notable exception.)The real news about those people isn't what they say but the fact that they're saying it: their lies are meaningless; the fact that they're lying isn't. Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann give it a name nightly, but they're preaching to the converted, just as Billo the Clown does (reversing the signs) for his crowd of believers over on Fox. A recent NY Times article on disruption of health-care meetings began with a description of the violent campaign, then immediately went into a 'but on the other hand Republicans say...' That's not journalism; that's laziness. Little wonder readers continue to abandon newspapers. "They "need to look for a way to reinvent themselves, to stop circling the drain economically and ethically. Wouldn't it be great if more of them would take a wild risk, and tell the truth consistently? But I don't see many trying – and if they can't do it now, when the truth is clear and the lies are flying – I can't see how they ever will." (9 August 2009)

Frank Rich: Is Obama Punking Us? (NY Times). The secret of successful legislation in America has nothing to do with the public good, with justice, with good government or any of those civics class words: it is giving politicians money, lots of it, and these days, nobody is spreading more money around Washington than the health industry: the parasitical insurance industry, the overpriced pharmaceutical industry, the greedyguts private hospital industry. Everybody in Washington is into them, and they are collecting. "The best political news for the president remains the Republicans. It’s a measure of how out of touch G.O.P. leaders like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are that they keep trying to scare voters by calling Obama a socialist. They have it backward. The larger fear is that Obama might be just another corporatist, punking voters much as the Republicans do when they claim to be all for the common guy. If anything, the most unexpected — and challenging — event that could rock the White House this August would be if the opposition actually woke up." (9 August 2009)

Steven Pearlstein: Republicans Propagating Falsehoods in Attacks on Health-Care Reform (Washington Post). Here's something rare: an article in the mainstream press calling out the Republican lies about Obama's health-care plan for what they are: "The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they've given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They've become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems." The only thing wrong with Pearlstein's excellent assessment of American political cynicism is that it appeared in the business section rather than above the fold on page 1. (9 August 2009)

Randy Kennedy: Voices Silenced, Faces Preserved (NY Times). Buffalo optometrist Milton Rogovin refused to testify before HUAC in 1958, after which his business tanked, he and his wife Annie were ostracized. (when we invited them to our wedding in 1973 Annie called up and said, "Are you sure you want to invite us? People don't invite us to things.")—and Milton became a documentary photographer, for which the HUAC witch-hunters deserve our enduring thanks. Now, a half-century after he was black-listed and four months before his hundredth birthday, his photos are in the Getty and the Library of Congress, he's a candidate for the National Medal of Arts, and his portraits of poor and working class individuals in Buffalo, Appalachia, Mexico, Chile and elsewhere are internationally known. (9 August 2009)

Alex Beam: A tale told by an idiot (Boston Globe). What might the Bard have made of the alarum & arrest in that "most gentil and parfit place" Cambridgeham and consequent beer-quaffing on the White House lawn? (8 August 2009)

Two town halls turn into near-riots (Salon.com). Glenn Beck mind-slaves, Tea Party goons, and and groups and organizations trying to block health reform have adopted a technique from the Nazi Party's political playbook: when the opposition makes arguments you can't counter, don't let them make their arguments; disrupt their meetings with room-packing, yelling, and even violence when useful. What bullying swine. (8 August 2009)

Joseph Stiglitz: Keep shovelling that stimulus (Globe and Mail). John McCain and other Republican hypocrites are attacking Obama's fiscal recovery plan—not because it isn't working but rather because it is. The last thing "patriots" like McCain want is improvement in ordinary lives while the Democrats are in power. Nobel-laureate Joseph Stiglitz also has arguments with Obama's recovery moves: from his point of view, they're too little, too slow and too meek. (8 August 2009)

Susan King: The many faces of Sammy Glick (LA Times). The late Budd Schulberg's great creation—the greedy, manipulative, ruthless Sammy Glick—never made it to the screen: all the attempts to put What Makes Sammy Run? on the screen have collapsed. But, says King, Schulberg's influence has nonetheless been great: Sammy appears in such caracters a Jeremy Piven's Ari in "Entourage," Tim Robbin's Griffin Mill in "The Player" and many others. King may miss the point of her own article: it's not that these other tv and feature film characters picked up on Schulberg's narrative, but rather that Schulberg and all the rest of them were writing about a very real kind of person found then and now in the very real television and film industries. Which is to say, it's not that Schulberg made it up and they copied, but rather that they looked around and documented what they found. (8 August 2009)

Milton Rogovin (NY Times). The Times' Lens blog features the work of Buffalo's centenarian (in 4 months) documentary photography, Milton Rogovin. Click here for hi res files of many of Milton's photos, along with a huge amount of information about Milton and his work. (7 August 2009)

David Pogue: Is Google Voice a Threat to AT&T? (NY Times). Apple/AT&T may be heading into bad antitrust territory with their (futile) attempt to keep iPhone users from taking advantage of Google's astonishing new service. (6 August 2009)

Getting it wrong on Cronkite (NY Times). Newspaper editors like to say that one of the key differences between newspaper journalism and what passes for journalism on the web is fact-checking: newspaper reporters and editors double- and triple-check everything to make sure they're not just pooling ignorance or sharing misinformation. So how come the New York Times article on Walter Cronkite had seven glaring errors after the reporter and five editors checked it over? What are they smoking over there? (3 August 2009)

Israel Evicts Palestinians From Homes (NY Times). All atrocities don't draw blood, but they cut to the heart nonetheless: Israeli riot police forced two Palestinian families to leave their homes in East Jerusalem Sunday. Why? Israeli squatters wanted the homes for themselves, so the Palestinians had to give up what was rightfully theirs. The Jews who moved in did so on the basis of forged deeds. As far as the Israeli courts are concerned, a forged Jewish deed trumps the rights of a family that has been living in a house for 57 years. The Israelis have an apartheid wall, they have a state-endorsed Lebensraum program, they have state-enforced ethnic ghettos. What's next? (2 August 2009)

Uri Avnery: A Jeremiad (Gush Shalom). Avnery tries to respond to Dov Yermiya, who near the end of a long letter wrote: “Therefore I, a 95 year old Sabra (native born Israeli Jew), who has plowed its fields, planted trees, built a house and fathered sons, grandsons and great-grandsons, and also shed his blood in the battle for the founding of the State of Israel, Declare herewith that I renounce my belief in the Zionism which has failed, that I shall not be loyal to the Jewish fascist state and its mad visions, that I shall not sing anymore its nationalist anthem, that I shall stand at attention only on the days of mourning for those fallen on both sides in the wars, and that I look with a broken heart at an Israel that is committing suicide and at the three generations of offspring that I have bred and raised in it.” Avnery tries--but the old war hero and long time peace activist is whistling in the dark. (2 August 2009)

Maira Kalman: And the Pursuit of Happiness (NY Times). The draw & com

ment genius has done it again. This time riffing on Benjamin Franklin and other inventors. (31 July 2009)

Joe Conason: Will Bill and Betsy kill again? (Salon.com). Bill Kristol never stops grinning, even when he is lying, which is much of the time. Nearly all his political predictions are wrong and most of his putative facts are made-up, yet he is invited on talk shows—not just slimy ole Fox and decaying CNN, but the others—as if he had information to offer. He is currently campaigning to kill reasonable health care for Americans. Why? He likes to do that. The only national reporter who took him on for the mendacious slug he is was Jon Stewart on the Daily Show earlier this week. Kristol never stopped grinning, not even when Stewart nailed him to the wall. We'll post that as soon as it become available. Is it possible that Kristol is the last of the Communist secret agents, working night and day to destroy the American way? He is, after all, the guy who discovered the twit from Alaska and convinced John McCain she would reinflate his flaccid campaign. (31 July 2009)

CNN's Dobb's spreads lies about Obama's birthplace and his ratings plunge (New York Observer). CNN's xenophobe Lou Dobbs continues flogging the discredited conspiracy-theory story that Barack Obama's mother bore him in Africa, then rushed the infant to Hawaii to get a phony birth certificate so he could, more than four decades later, become the first African American president of the US. A lot of right-wing nut cases believe this foolishness, as do 44% of registered Republicans, but most sane Americans are aware that there is more than sufficient documentary evidence that everything Obama and his mom said about his birthplace is true and there is not a shred of evidence that what Dobbs has been "reporting" again and again is anything but silly-putty. It's all about racism: how else could a black man become president of the U.S. except by some kind of trickery? If you can't find the trickery (the election, this time, is unchallengeable), then make it up and put the burden on the other side to disprove it. Yeah, that's it: if they can't disprove an absurdity, then the absurdity must be true, right? Yeah—in Dobbsville. Were Dobbs on Fox, his ratings would probably go up with a story like this, but he is, alas, on CNN, which still makes some claims to being a news network, which is why CNN viewers are just turning him off. (31 July 2009)

Donn Esmonde: 'Pay to play' gives Brown upper hand (Buffalo News). Buffalo mayor Byron Brown (several of whose departments are currently under federal investigation for mismanagement of funds) has raised more than $1 million for his reelection compaign, comparied to less than $100,000 for his opponent, Councilman Mickey Kearns. Little surprise, given that the Brown administration is notorious for only giving contracts and permits to developers and operators who pony up big bucks. It's not exactly a bribe, as least this part of Brown's money isn't; it's just a cost of doing business in Buffalo. The lock the Brown administration has on developers is so tight that even Carl Paladino, a Buffalo developer who is a frequent political contributor, a vociferous Brown opponent, and a man who usually doesn't scare, seems afraid to give a dollar to Mickey Kearns, who seems cursed by his reputation as a honest man. How many developers want a mayor who can't be bought? Which brings us back to why the feckless Byron Brown has a million bucks to play with. (31 July 2009)

Rahul K. Parikh, M.D.: The Huffington Post is crazy about your health (Salon.com). Arianna Huffington's Huffington Post is one of the biggest blogs on the web. Some of its most popular stories have to do with medical issues. One problem: when it comes to medical issues, Arianna Huffington is a nutcase and will push almost any crackpot scheme that comes along, and often gives the crackpot inventor of the crackpot scheme prime real estate on her site. One recent example: a long article on preventing flu by taking a lot of deep enemas. Yeah, enemas, which Huffington seems enamored of. Isn't preventing a respiratory ailment by flushing out the colon the equivalent of having one's head up one's ass? (31 July 2009)

California's higher education system could face decline (LA Times). California's budget has tanked as badly as New York's and it has been incapable of curbing its growing prison costs, so the major institutional cuts in the near future will be to the state's higher higher education system. If Albany can be kept from continuing its recent pillaging of SUNY's budget, and if legislation can curb the restrictions on the graduate centers imposed by union pressure from the two- and four-year colleges, New York may finally get what Nelson Rockefeller wanted when he started it all 60 years ago: the nation's top public system of higher education. That's two big ifs and they both involve two organizations with enormous self-interest, so the odds of the dream coming to pass remain slim. But now that California is slipping into the sea, the odds are better than they were. (31 July 2009)

Bruno Freschi on the Darwin Martin House and Buffalo architecture (Artvoice). A video of the first part of Buck Quigley's interview with former U.B. dean Bruno Freschi, part of which was printed in Artvoice last week. Freschi remains one of the great visionaries about Buffalo architecture. (31 July 2009)

Apple is Growing Rotten to the Core (TechCrunch). Google has a spectacular new product: Google Voice. It does everything you ever wanted in a phone calling and messaging system: free calls in the US, one phone number that works with any and all your phones, personalized greeting on voicemail, forwarding voicemail, voicemail transcripts, call recording, conference calling, and on and on and on. And it is free. Google Voice is so good that Apple, which promised to make the apps for its popular iPhone open to anyone with a good program, has banned and blocked it. Apple's partner, AT&T, of course hates Google Voice, which is why Apple reneged on its promise to its iPhone customers. (28 July 2009).

Ed Ou: Under a Nuclear Cloud (GettyImages). During the Cold War, the Soviet Union used the steppes of northeast Kazakhstan to test its nuclear weapons. Over 400 atmospheric and underground weapons were detonated. It did nothing to protect or even alert the civilians living in the region. Once of the things they were curious about was the effect of all that radiation on humans. The effects, as these photographs show, were horrific. (26 July 2009)

Cheney wanted to use the army to invade Lackawanna (NY Times). When the FBI told the White House that it had discovered what it thought was a group of potential Al Qaeda plotters in a Buffalo suburb in 2002, Vice-president Dick Cheney and John C. Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer who was able to find a legal rationale for any Constitutional abuse the administration wanted to mount, came up with a plot to send the army in to arrest five unarmed men. It wasn't because the FBI couldn't do the job—there was never any doubt of that—but rather because Cheney worried there wasn't enough evidence to convict them at trial and he thought having the army take them prisoner would sidestep the legal difficulties. Bush nixed the plan. You thought Bush was a nightmare as president; you were right. What would it have been if Bush had a coronary and his maniacal veep and his sidekick Yoo got to pull these stunts without having to run them by anybody first? (26 July 2009)

Inside Bush and Cheney's Final Days (Time). In the last days of the Bush administration, Dick Cheney lobbied hard, and finally unsuccessfully, to get his boss to pardon his former chief of staff Scooter Libby. Libby had carried water for Cheney in the plot to discredit Joe Wilson, who had put the lie to the Bush administration's phony yellowcake uranium story (a lie offered in support of the lie that Saddam Hussein was trying to make a nuclear weapon), by blowing the cover of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, a covert CIA agent. After this article appeared, Cheney issued a statement saying Libby was an honorable man, pure as the driven snow, innocent of everything. He shouldn't have been convicted, Cheney said, because someone else had blown Plame's cover. That's not his real reason: his real reason is he was and remains convinced that anything done by the White House is permissible and legal. If it weren't, why would God have created John C. Yoo? (26 July 2009)

Bruce Jackson: Rumsey Daylilies 2009. The early fall snowstorm in 2006 that mutilated or destroyed so many of Buffalo's trees changed many of the city's micro-ecological systems. The fence along our driveway used to get direct sunlight beginning in late morning, when the sun cleared the two oaks on the east side of the yard; those oaks are gone now, so the fence is aglow by eight a.m. As a result, the thin morning glory vine that previously ran along our fence only at the end of the daylily season is now three vigorous colonies that developed the same time as the daylilies.In addition, two new hybrids appeared, both of them with short stems and different petal structures from the plants surrounding them. Click here to see it all. (26 July 2009)

So Long, Snail Shells (Washington Post). Paper mail is going the way of the newspaper, and for the same reason: more and more people are getting information, connecting with one another, and buying and selling on the Internet. In the past 20 years, the post office had scooped up 200,000 blue mailboxes and converted them to scrap; only 175,000 remain. In 2006, the Postal Service handled 213 billion pieces of mail; they expect to handle 170 billion in 2010. The Service has consolidated routes, pushed early retirement, and now wants to cut back to five-day delivery. When was the last time you wrote to a friend in a medium that required a stamp rather than a Send button? (25 July 2009)

The Born Identity (Daily Show). A reporter on the Lou Dobbs show (CNN) cited incontrovertible evidence that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. The following night, on the same show, xenophobe Lou Dobbs ranted, as he had several times before, about Obama's doubtful citizenship. CNN used to be a good source of news; more and more it's trivia, lies, and board game graphics. The Daily Show blows them away just about every night with more incisive commentary on more issues. Here the commentary is on Dobbs as a source of disinformation. (25 July 2009)

Skip Gates Speaks (The Root). Skip Gates is interviewed on The Root, the blog he edits, about his arrest and what followed. (24 July 2009)

The Gates arrest report & mug shot (Smoking Gun). According to this report, Skip Gates got arrested not because he was uncooperative in the house or even because he mouthed off to the cop in the house, but because he mouthed off to the cop on the porch in front of other people. Cops just hate that. They'll arrest you for that even if they've got no other reason to arrest you. You knew that. (24 July 2009)

The Gates Case and Racial Profiling (NY Times). Several experts comment on the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates by Cambridge, Mass., police. Gates got home from a long trip and couldn't get his front door open. He and the cab driver pushed and shoved but it wouldn't give. A neighbor called the police and reported two black men trying to force their way into Gates' house. Nobody, Gates included, is faulting her: what she was reporting was what she thought was an attempted break-in; the black part was her describing what she was seeing; presumably she would have made a similar call, with a different adjective, if two white men were behaving the same way. By the time the police came, Gates had gotten in the back way, he and the cabbie got the front door open, and the cabbie had left. Here's where the accounts differ. Gates says he showed his Harvard ID and driver's license when asked; the cop says he wouldn't show anything, that he just mouthed off. Gates, the officer said, came out on the porch, continuing the verbal abuse, whereupon he cuffed him and took him off to jail. The charges were later dropped. Would the cop have arrested Gates if he had been white? Even if Gates did mouth off, shouldn't the cop have tried to cool things down instead of escalating them? The he-said/he-said will never be proven one way or the other, but one important result is a situation in which many people of color find themselves in again and again has now become a major public issue because this time it involved a person of status and power. Which shows you that status and power are good things to have. They even get the president of the United States saying the cop who arrested you was "stupid." (click here for President Obama's 22 July comments on the event.)(23 July 2009)

Jeff Sharlet: Sex and power inside "the C Street House" (Salon.com). It isn't a group of foreign terrorists making mischief on American soil you should be worried about. Rather, it's The Family, a group of evangelical Christians that, among other things, maintains a house in Washington where members of Congress cheating on their wive can screw their girlfriends with impunity. But the sexual improprieties are only a small part of The Family's activities. More important and more extensive are their disdain for democracy and relentless pursuit of power. Past members included Strom Thurmond, Herman Talmade and Pat Robertson's father. Current politicians involved with The Family include such ideologues, idiots and/or bigots as Jim DeMint, Lindsey Graham, James Inhofe, John Ashcroft, Ed Meese and others. Most are Republicans but there are also a few Democrats, such as Rep. Mike McIntyre (NC) who wants the 10 Commandments in public places. And of course Sen. John Ensign, who not only cheated on his wife but did it with his oldest friend's wife, then forced her out of her job when he got caught and later had his family bribe her to keep quiet about it. But he does attend prayer meetings. (23 July 2009)

Peter Maguire: Interview with a genocide photographer (AmericanSuburbX). Only seven of the 14,000 people who entered S-21, the Khmer Rouge's notorious torture, interrogation and execution center. Every man, woman and child murdered there had to sit for a formal portrait before they were killed. More than 7000 of those chilling images are online (click here for the official Tuol Sleng site). In this article, Columbia historian Peter Maguire interviews the photographer, Nhem En, about his horrific oeuvre. (23 June 2009)

Bruno Freschi talks about Buffalo's architectural heritage and promise (Artvoice). Bruno Freschi, former dean of UB's School of Architecture, got the restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright's Martin House in motion, provided the inspiration that blocked the bone-headed anachronistic Peace Bridge twin span expansion plan, and came up with some of the earliest smart thinking about what to do with Buffalo's derelict waterfront. He visited for a few days recently. This article is a transcript of the first part of a long conversation Artvoice's Buck Quigley had with him about all those continuing issues, and it provides a link to a long video of the rest of the fascinating encounter. (22 July 2009)

Obama's health care press conference: the full video (whitehouse.gov). All those Republican friends of yours who give you all those good reasons why they voted for George W. Bush twice and why they hate Obama now—can you take them the least bit seriously as anything but greedyguts trying to protect their moneypockets? This guy brings to the White House two things we haven't seen in years, both of which they loathe: intelligence and human decency. (22 July 2009)

Study Finds Record Number of Inmates Serving Life Terms (NY Times). You may not remember it, but there was a time when California was the intelligent state: it was ahead of everybody else in public eductation, environmental protection, and all sorts of good things. Then it turned stupid, beginning with the passage of a citizen's proposition—Proposition 13 in 1978—that amended the state constitution to set real estate taxes ridiculously low. Year by year, California was able to provide fewer and fewer services to its citizens, and year by year, Californians passed more citizen's propositions, operating under the very simple-minded principle that a state could make major changes in public policy one place without affecting the rest of the system. Proposition 184, passes in 1994, was "three strikes and you're out": three felony convictions, no matter for what, no matter how short the sentences, get you a life sentence. One man with two minor felonies went to prison for life for his third--theft of a pizza. Now 20% of California prisoners are doing life sentences, and the state that won't pay taxes is taking more and more money from education and the environment to pay the stupid bill. California leads the pack on lifers, but the category is up just about elsewhere: they're now about 10% of the national prison population, most of them latino or black. (22 July 2009)

Palin's Resignation: The Edited Version (Vanity Fair). Sarah Palin's resignation speech was breathy, only occasionally coherent, platitudinous, full of factual errors and more than a little gibberish. If you listened to it, you got a very good sense how much a creature of highly-paid speechwriters her vice presidential campaign was. Vanity Fair's editors had a go at whipping the speech into something a politician with an ear wouldn't be ashamed to have given. (22 July 2009)

Gershon Baskin: Encountering Peace: Oh, no, Jerusalem (Jerusalem Post). A new Jewish neighborhood is being built (by an American) on Palestinian land in Jerusalem. Israeli Prime Minister Beinyamin Netanyahu rejected a U.S. demand that the project be halted on the grounds that "Jerusalem is the capital of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. Our sovereignty over it cannot be challenged..." He's wrong, or he's lying. It is challenged by everybody: not one foreign government has its embassy in Jerusalem. Jerusalem now is one of the most segregated cities in the world. Netanyahu is proud of that. For Jews of honor and decency it is, as my Tante Zaidie, may she rest in peace, used to say, a shanda. (20 June 2009)

Brown's cash advantage more than 60-1 (Buffalo News). Buffalo mayor Byron Brown has more than $1 million to spend on the September Democratic primary, living proof that giving developers and other big spenders exactly what they want pays off. In addition, his senior staff has been forcing city hall workers to campaign for Brown on their own time. All challenger Mickey Kearns has on his side has decency, honesty and no strings attached. How will that play in September? Will Buffalonians be able to see through the media blitz Brown is sure to mount? Will federal officials get on the extortion of city hall employees in time to do Kearns any good? Stay tuned. (20 July 2009)

Uri Avnery: The Johnny Procedure (Gush Shalom). Israeli generals are doing everything they can to discredit the increasing number of reports of war crimes against civilians coming from soldiers who took part in the Gaza War. They ask one absurd rhetorical question after the other, but never counter the basic facts. How can they? That war was a brutal slaughter of civilians—and there are pictures to prove it. The Israeli army is still terrorizing the Palestinians trapped in Gaza by severely limiting fresh water (while Israeli squatters in nearby settlements have swimming pools and gardens) and blockading medical supplies. (20 July 2009)

Glenn Greenwald: Celebrating Cronkite while ignoring what he did (Salon.com). Walter Cronkite's death reminds us of a breed of journalist almost unknown in these suckass times: journalists like Cronkite, David Halberstam and Hunter S. Thompson who weren't at all afraid to say when they thought politicians were lying through their teeth, journalists who didn't spend their time flopping and fawning over people with a lot of money or in high office. That didn't stop the floppers and fawners from eulogizing Cronkite at self-serving length. (20 July 2009)

Walter Cronkie on his biggest regret (Newseum). In a 1996 video interview he tells the Newseum that his biggest regret is that he and his colleagues didn't manage to pass some standards on to the generation that followed. It shows. (20 July 2009)

Edward M. Kennedy: "The Cause of My Life" (truthout). No one in Congress has fought as hard and long for universal health coverage as Teddy Kennedy. He knows as much as anyone about the medical disasters that can derail a life: he was in a plane crash that crushed verbebrae, broke ribs, collapsed a lung and put him in a hospital for months; his son had bone cancer; and Kennedy now has a kind of brain cancer that is almost always fatal. He and his family have always had the best medical treatment available, which is why he and his son are still alive. Access to such treatment, he says, shouldn't be the privilege of those lucky enough to have inherited money or land in jobs with good insurance programs, and he's going to work right to the end trying to give all Americans access to the same level of medical care citizens in nearly every other industrialized country have long enjoyed as a right. The Republicans are unmoved: they're doing what they can to block health care reform (Republican senator Jim DeMint (SC) said, "If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."). (20 July 2009)

Barack Obama: Remarks by the President to the NAACP Centennial Convention (Whitehouse.gov). He's got the verbal agility of Bill Clinton, the ethical sensibility of Jimmy Carter and the social awareness of LBJ before he got bogged down in the Big Muddy. Here's a sample from this speech to the NAACP at its centennial meeting: "We've got to say to our children, yes, if you're African American, the odds of growing up amid crime and gangs are higher. Yes, if you live in a poor neighborhood, you will face challenges that somebody in a wealthy suburb does not have to face. But that's not a reason to get bad grades -- (applause) -- that's not a reason to cut class -- (applause) -- that's not a reason to give up on your education and drop out of school. (Applause.) No one has written your destiny for you. Your destiny is in your hands -- you cannot forget that. That's what we have to teach all of our children. No excuses. (Applause.) No excuses." (Click here for the MSNBC video). (20 July 2009)

Major Cities' Plummeting Crime Rates Mystifying (Washington Post). Violent crime rates across the nation have been plummeting, and police, as always happens, have been taking credit for it. But, with only a few exceptions, there changes are the same in jurisdictions where police have done this or that and jurisdictions where they haven't, in states where the incarceration rates have gone up, gone down, stayed the same. Few public officials taking credit for this (or reporters uncritically quoting them) note that most violent crime is committed by young men, and the nation's continuing wars over the past seven years have taken a huge number of young men off the streets and put them in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in military hospitals. (20 July 2009)

Tom Wolfe: One Giant Leap to Nowhere (NY Times). Why did the US space program tank after the triumphal lunar landing in1969? For a few minutes it seemed headed for the stars, but then the budget was pillaged for Congressional pork and never restored. NASA's real mission faded not for lack of scientific skill, says Wolfe. They had plenty of scientists. What they were fatally short on was philosophers. The last good one they had was Werner von Braun—a former member of Hitler's Wehrmacht with a thick German accent. No way he was going to get that loot out of Congress. (20 July 2009)

AFI's video portal (AFI.com). The American Film Institute has set up a video site with great clips from its various events, the most recent of which is Bob Dylan performing at the AFI Life Achievement Award event for Michael Douglas. (20 July 2009)

Antichrist: a work of genius or the sickest film in the history of cinema (Guardian). Danish director Lars von Trier, who savaged Nicole Kidman in "Dogvilles," has a new movie in which he savages everything. "Antrichrist opens," writex Xan Brooks, "simultaneously, with a blaze of unsimulated sex and the death (simulated, one hopes) of a child, who topples from an upstairs window and cannons into the snow below. Bedevilled by guilt, his unnamed parents – He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) – retreat to a cabin in the woods called Eden. There, matters go from bad to worse. Oppressive Defoe winds up hobbled and impotent, while Gainsbourg runs clean off the rails and starts hacking at her own genitals with a pair of scissors. Sitting in the dark of the Cannes Palais, the audience yelped and howled and covered their eyes. Legend has it that at least four viewers fainted dead away in their seats....Antichrist was accused of rampant misogyny; of being 'an abomination'; 'easily one of the biggest debacles in Cannes film history'. Variety labelled it 'a big fat art-film fart'. For the critics at Time magazine, the film 'presented the spectacle of a director going mad.''' Brook's introductory comments are followed by responses from several women artists and academics. These range from Gillian Wearing's "This is the only film I have seen that clearly seems directed by someone with mental health issues" (she likes the film), to Julie Bindel's "Watching this film was like having bad sex with someone you loathe." (20 July 2009)

Tim Rutten: Frank McCourt's career rose from 'Ashes' (LA Times). Frank McCourt, author of the hugely successful "Angela's Ashes" (2 million copies in hardcover!), died a month shy of his 79th birthday. There are some questions about the truth of much of the book, as well as the stories McCourt told about its genesis. When you tell a story that well, does factual true matter? Probably not. (20 July 2009)

Jimmy Carter: The words of God do not justify cruelty to women (The Observer). The Southern Baptist Convention, like the Catholic Church and many other religious organizations and groups, consistently discriminates against women. After six decades as a member of the Convention, Jimmy Carter, long-time deacon and Bible teacher, had enough of it. He has severed his ties with the organization, saying that the discrimination was grounded in the bigotry of men, not the word of God. What a better world it would be if only more so-called "men of God" took the time to actually read the Book(s). (20 July 2009)

A.E. Hotchner: Don't Touch 'A Moveable Feast' (NY Times). Scribner has published a new version of Ernest Hemingway's lovely last book, "A Moveable Feast," newly edited by one of Papa's grandsons. The lad has removed some chapters he thinks don't present his grandmother as he thinks she should have been presented and added other material he thinks makes the book work better. Scribner used to be one of the great publishing houses, but this is scummy stuff that should be shredded, not sold. Maybe, Hotchner (who was very much involved in preparation of the original, the book Hemingway wanted published) writes, this "should be called 'A Moveable Book.'" (20 July 2009)

Todd S. Purdum: It Came from Wasilla (Vanity Fair). If you saw Sarah Palin's breathy, bubbly and incoherent press conference last week, you maybe wondered how anybody could take this silly twit seriously as a political candidate. Perhaps choosing her as a running mate was the best indicator of how ill-suited for the presidency John McCain was. She is ignorant, vicious, vindictive, mendacious and, most of all, ambitious. What's left of the Republican party loves her and so does the lunatic right (a bit of overlap there). McCain's staff learned early how much the boss had screwed up. Here's the inside story on that meltdown, and more on the Winker than you can read without laughing. But restrain yourself: this is a country that elected George W. Bush twice, so this jerk is no joke. (7 July 2009)

The Yes Men Say No (Tikkun). The Jerusalem Film Festival invited The Yes Men, two nice Jewish boys, to show their new film, "The Yes Men Fix the World." They very much wanted to go, but their dismay at Israel's state-sponsored violence and oppression, the continued state support of illegal settlements, and the Israeli government's blockade of food and medical supplies to the prisoners of Gaza, won out. (7 July 2009)

Staffer at SEC Had Warned Of Madoff (Washington Post). How, ruined investors ask, could the SEC not have figured out that Bernie Madoff was running a Ponzi operation? It turns out they're asking the wrong question: SEC did figure out that something was very wrong in Madoff's empire, whereupon the investigator who posed the questions he couldn't answer was transferred to another area entirely and her boss married Bernie Madoff's niece. And SEC had several times ignored warnings about the Ponzi scam from Harry Markopolos. So the questions to ask about SEC isn't how it missed Madoff's scam but why it ignored the very good evidence it had that he was running one, and what is going to happen to the people who refused to let SEC what it was presumably set up to do. (2 July 2009)

Pina Bausch, German Choreographer, Dies at 68 (NY Times). If you saw Pedro Almodovar's Talk to Her you've seen segments of two of Pina Bausch's astonishing works: Cafe Muller and Mascura Fogo. She was one of that small group of great choreographers whose work dissolves the regrettable modern boundary between dance and drama. (1 July 2009)

Letter from Tehran:A Personal Journey through Chaos and Madness, During the Ten Days after Iran’s Election . Perhaps you saw Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus and remember the scene where every Roman slave says "I am Spartacus." This week, in Tehran, brave people are saying, "I am Neda."A correspondent in Tehran writes that there was no electricity today, cell phone contact was cut off, internet access is spotty and martial law is cranking up. We're not hearing much about any of this. It's not that no newsworthy things are happening; rathers it's that no information is getting out through the usual channels. Here's a report from the ground. (30 June 2009)

Timothy Snyder: Holocaust: The Ignored Reality (New York Review of Books). Time to rethink the Holocaust, which was far worse than you perhaps think. "The emphasis on Auschwitz and the Gulag understates the numbers of Europeans killed, and shifts the geographical focus of the killing to the German Reich and the Russian East. Like Auschwitz, which draws our attention to the Western European victims of the Nazi empire, the Gulag, with its notorious Siberian camps, also distracts us from the geographical center of Soviet killing policies. If we concentrate on Auschwitz and the Gulag, we fail to notice that over a period of twelve years, between 1933 and 1944, some 12 million victims of Nazi and Soviet mass killing policies perished in a particular region of Europe, one defined more or less by today's Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. More generally, when we contemplate Auschwitz and the Gulag, we tend to think of the states that built them as systems, as modern tyrannies, or totalitarian states. Yet such considerations of thought and politics in Berlin and Moscow tend to overlook the fact that mass killing happened, predominantly, in the parts of Europe between Germany and Russia, not in Germany and Russia themselves." (29 June 2009)

Craig Lambert: Shuttered Behind Bars (Harvard Magazine). "The faces haunt one—eyes gazing back at the lens with a resignation so profound as to have passed beyond caring. These are unusual photographic portraits in which 'the sitter has no interest in the photo, and the photographer has no interest in the photo,' says Bruce Jackson. “Yet these pictures show someone in a very vulnerable situation.” That situation is one of incarceration at Cummins Prison Farm in Arkansas; the portraits are ID photos taken of (and by) inmates between 1915 and 1940. Sixty-two of the pictures are of prisoners from the Cummins women’s unit. With digital technology, Jackson has restored the images and published 121 of them in a new book, Pictures from a Drawer: Prison and the Art of Portraiture." (29 June 2009)

Crocodile's Tears (Haaretz). This week's Gush Shalom message highlights the hypocrisy of the world's reaction to the Iranian election. The column of titles on the left side provides links to a dozen other recent weekly messages, all worth a look. (29 June 2009)

SCOTUS vs. the liberal 9th (LA Times). The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is probably the most liberal of the ten Federal circuit courts. It frequently favors the poor, the underdogs in rulings involving government and powerful corporations. Little surprise, then, that the Republican-dominated Supreme Court overturns 9th Circuit rulings more often than any other circuit. (29 June 2009)

Coroner; No Sign of Trauma, Foul Play in Jackson's Death (Washington Post). The scene at Michael Jackson's house could have been lifted from Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust, particuarly the Belgian couple in a crowd that included Superman and Marilyn Monroe impersonators: they "waited at the wrong end of the line. For what, they weren't sure. It was their first day on vacation and they just had to see, they said. 'In Belgium, not many people can say, 'Wow, I was here when Michael Jackson died.'" (27 June 2009)

Mark Sanford's press conference (Huffington Post/MSNBC). Michael Jackson's death has driven a lot of fun stuff to page two or out of the paper entirely. Most news stations ran bits and pieces of this astonishing 18-minute ramble, broken for the bloviators to bloviate about what Sanford seemed to be saying, but now they're doing Michael Johnson 24/7. It's worth the time to see and listen to Sanford's entire performance yourself. It is major evidence for the real difference between Republicans and Democrats. Eliot Spitzer abandoned the New York governorship because he got caught patronizing a hooker, while this fruitcake who cannot carry a thought through a single long paragraph disappeared from his job for a week while cavorting in South America with his girlfriend but says there's no reason he should quit his job. And then there is that day-glo hypocrite John Ensign in Nevada, the first senator to call for Bill Clinton's resignation after Monica went public: Ensign, who not only had an affair with an employee who was the wife of one of his oldest friends but doubled her salary while it was going on, says he sees no reason why he should give up his job either. (27 June 2009)

Maira Kalman; "And the Pursuit of Happiness" (NY Times). All your adult life you've felt guilty because you've never read a really smart biography of Thomas Jefferson, one of the small group of guys who invented this country. The astonishing MK gets you off the hook, and it will only take five minutes. (26 June 2009)

Michael Jackson's life was infused with fantasy and tragedy (LA Times). At mid-afternoon Thursday, all the major newspaper websites and the 24-7 screens were busy with Farah Fawcett's career and death and South Caroliina Governor Mark Sanford's bizarre fling and even more bizarre press conference attempting to convince a bemused bunch of reporters that he was marginally sane. The news of Michael Jackson's collapse that came across the wires about 5:30 and then the news of his death not much later changed all that: MSNBC and Fox kept running the same footage over and over and over, speculating, pontificating, and generally blowing smoke. By the next day, all the major newspapers had joined in: the top half of the NY Times web site was Michael Jackson summaries, reminiscences and reactions. Here's the main story for Jackson's longtime hometown paper, which includes a 48-photo slideshow. (26 June 2009)

JibJab: He's Barack Obama (jibjab.com). A theme song for the first sane, competent and cool U.S. president in nearly a decade. (26 June 2009)

Twitter on the Barricades: Six Lessons Learned (NY Times). CNN began its coverage of the Iran election with just about nobody on the ground—the network didn't think it important enough until it was called out in a mass of Tweets, by which time it was too late to send reporters so it did the next best thing: it became the Network of Tweets, with reporters spending hour after hour reading them aloud and commenting to one another on how much work it was sifting through the thousands of messages for some that had real information. Twitter has been a potent factor in the Iran story, but not nearly as much as CNN would have us believe; it's just that Twitter seems to be CNN's only current sources. So what is Twitter really good for, and how can you tell? Here are six things to keep in mind when you quote it, or believe someone who gets his information from Tweets. (21 June 2009)

Jason Horowitz: Obama Redefines the Debate for New York's Israel Boosters (PolitickerNY). In Israel, the debate on the settlements is vigorous and continual, but in the U.S. anyone who questions the wisdom or ethics of expropriating Palestinian land and homes for settler Lebensraum is attacked by AIPAC and such organizations as the Los Angeles-based Zionist witch-hunting group Stand With Us. (On its web site, Stand With Us claims a Buffalo chapter, but all information about that chapter is missing: no names, no phone number, no address, no nothing, which means either SWU is making it up or the Buffalo group is working underground.) Most New York politicians fall dutifully in line, and never publicly question the Israeli government's actions against Palestinians. Barack Obama may be changing all that. (21 June 2009)

The Muse of Place and Time: An Interview with William Christenberry (AmericanSuburbX). Bill Christenberry has been using the landscape and built environment of his central Alabama home as the basis for his photography, sculpture and painting for 50 years, and he isn't close to exhausting it or himself. For years he worked with a Kodak Brownie, proving Walker Evans's adage that it's the eye, not the camera, that finds the picture. Then his friend Lee Friedlander talked him into wide format, and he proved Evans's adage once again. He is, more than any other American photographer, the genius of time and transience. He visits a place again and again and again: the building ages, changes color, disappears in the kudzu, reappears as something else. The only constant is the artist's gaze. (20 June 2009)

Older stuff, mostly local, or by BR authors....

James Estrin: A Wide View of a Hellish World (NY Times). About Bruce Jackson's Widelux photos from Cummins prison. (3 June 2009)

Diane Christian: Looking at Torture. Obama op

poses torture. He also opposes releasing photographs of torture carried out by Americans during the Bush administration. He says publication of those images would put Americans at risk. Hiding this evidence of Dick Cheney's evil may do us even greater harm. (23 May 2009)

Newton Garver: Two More for Evo. "April was a difficult month for Evo Morales, but he emerged stronger than ever. Although Evo Morales has been in office three years longer than Barack Obama, their circumstances are in some ways similar. Both were elected by large majorities, both brought hopes following years and years of frustration and anguish (centuries in Bolivia), both possess intelligence and savvy, supported by impressive teams, both retain very high approval ratings, and both also have very high (and growing) disapproval ratings. So Evo and Barack face a similar problem: how to nurture hope and continue to progress in the face of an increasingly adamant and intransigent opposition - and one that controls the upper chamber as well as the vast resources of established privilege.In such contexts, victories are remarkable, compromises are inevitable, and success not only deserves applause and gratitude but also fans the flames of opposition. (23 May 2009)

Bruce Jackson: Allen Ginsberg talks with Diane Christian about Robert Creeley's poetry, Boulder, 1984. A Flash gallery of 17 photos of the poet Allen Ginsberg made during filming of the documentary "Creeley" in 1984. (4 May 2009)

Bruce Jackson: The Babel Photos. Flash galleries of all eight writers in the first two seasons of Just Buffalo's spectacular Babel series: Orhan Pamuk, Ariel Dorfman, Derek Walcott, Kiran Desai, Chinua Achebe, Michael Ondaatje, Marjane Satrapi, Isabel Allende, plus a series sampler. (23 April 2009)

The new casino lawsuit. After the Bureau of Indian Affairs did a Humpty-Dumpty by changing the meaning of some key words having to do with gambling eligible land, the National Indian Gaming Commission issued a third ruling giving the Senecas permission to run a gambling joint in downtown Buffalo. A federal judge had ruled the two previous permissions invalid, which meant the Buffalo gambling operation was therefore illegal. Instead of holding all of them and their pettifogging lawyers in contempt, he threw everything out, so the casino opponents have returned with a third lawsuit covering the same ground, this time including an argument against Humpty-Dumpty vocabulary building. Here's the full text of that lawsuit. (14 April 2009)

Seneca Gaming ousts Snyder as chairman in surprise move (Buffalo News). Seneca gambling boss Barry Snyder was dumped by the corporation's directors this week. This comes after several senior officials of the Seneca gambling operation quit or were pushed out because they apparently wouldn't sign on to some of the stinky business deals they were asked to endorse. See the related story about the land sale fraud that may have triggered Snyder's outster: Gaming official tied to land sale fraud. (16 March 2009)

Bruce Jackson: Delaware Park 6x6. Last summer, it was hard to explain to visitors the extent of damage done by the freak snowstorm a few years ago that mutilated or killed most of the city's deciduous trees. That's because we had a wet spring and most of the surviving trees came back with a richer than usual burst of greenery. But in winter, you see it: the broken limbs, the almost total absence of symmetry. The wooded sections of Frederick Law Olmsted's Delaware Park are still beautiful in winter, but not the same way as before. Here are 12 images of the park near the sledding hill on a January Sunday. (2 March 2009)

Mine waste trips up Alaska gold rush (LA Times). What's more i

Nancy J. Parisi: Incarcerated images (Buffalo Spree). Photographer Nancy J. Parisi reviews Bruce Jackson's current exhibit at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. (26 February 2009)

Bruce Jackson: Lukas and Cornelia Foss, Paradise Island 1971. Six photographs of the late composer, Lukas Foss, two with his wife, Cornelia, taken on a vacation with three other couples on Paradise Island, Nassau, in 1971. (8 February 2009)

Newton Garver: Bolivia's new constitution. Evo Morales's astonishing revolution in Bolivia (which began with his own election in 2005, the first elected Indian president ever) continues with a new constitution and a new limit on agricultural land holdings. Last year, opposition (likely supported by the US) tried to get rid of him in a recall election but the result was an increase in his approval rating from 62% to 67% and loss of office by three of six opposition governors. The Obama administration seems to have none of the Bush administration's antagonism to Morales; rather, they seem to have hardly noticed the fact that it is there. (2 February 2009)

Newton Garver: A Bolivia Timeline. The key dates and terms you need to know to make sense of what is going on in and with Bolivia. (2 February 2009)

Bruce Jackson; Give Obama, Clinton time to get bridge plaza right (Buffalo News). Shared border management is the only sensible solution to the mess at Peace Bridge Plaza. It makes environmental, economic, and aesthetic sense. "Sensible" wasn't a significant factor in the Bush years, but it is now that Obama's in the White House and HRC is secretary of state, so it's time to restart that stalled process. (30 January 2009)

Geoff Kelly: Pictures from a Drawer (Artvoice). Artvoice editor Geoff Kelly interviews Bruce Jackson about his two new books and his current photography exhibition at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. (23 January 2009)

"This Land Is Your Land" Like Woody Wrote It (Truthout). Just about everybody knows Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land"--but the text everybody knows has been bowdlerized over the years to make is innocuous. Woody Guthrie was anything but innocuous. When Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen led two million people, including then president-elect Obama, at last Saturday's concert at the Lincoln Memorial, they restored Woody's words (perfectly appropriate for a president who seems dedicated to restoring decency and honesty to the White House). Here's a video and the text. (23 January 2009)

How the Bush administration impeded FOIA (Suits & Sentences). The Clinton administration granted 61% of Defense Department and 64% Department of the Interior freedom of information requests; for the Bush administration those moments of public access dropped to 48% and 47%. Quel suprise. (On Day 2, President Obama issued a memorandum to heads of executive departments and agencies reversing that policy.) (23 January 2009)

Three more Obama Executive Orders ending the torture regime (Whitehouse.gov). The White House has posted Obama's three January 22 Executive Orders: "Review and Disposition of Individuals Detains at the Gauntanamo Bay Naval Base and Closure of Detention Facilities," "Review of Detention Policy Options," and "Ensuring Lawful Interrogations." (23 January 2009)

Obama's Executive Order letting the sunlight in (Whitehouse.gov). George W. Bush issued executive order 13233, significantly reducing public access to presidential records. He locked up not only his own documents but also those of all other presidents. On his first day as president, Barack Obama issued two Executive Orders. One revoked Executive Order 13233, thereby removing the shroud of secrecy and darkness the Bush administration had cast over the White House; the other reintroduces ethics to the White House. (21 January 2009)

We Are One (HBO). The January 18 concert at the Lincoln Memorial: Denzel Washington, Tom Hanks, Garth Brooks, Sheryl Crow, Renee Fleming, Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder.... (you may want to wait a day or two on this one: it was downloading VERY slowly today, probably because everyone with an ear & a heart was checking it out) (19 January 2009)

Cummins Wide (Albright-Knox Art Gallery). Your editor has a photography exhibit at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. The official dates are Jan 23-May 10, but it's open now. (19 January 2009)

Sue Wuetcher: 'Vampyr' to open film series (UB Reporter). The Buffalo Film Seminars return for their 18th series of screenings and discussions of classic films. (10 January 2009)

Digital memories can be fleeting (Globe and Mail). Everybody's taking pictures of everything—but very little of it will last. Those digital memories are mostly transitory. "Without really realizing it, we've engaged in a great project of memory-making for our civilization. It's nice to think that, if and when things come to a grinding halt, our records will live on after us. But as we abandon the finite treasures of printed photos for bucket loads of endless digital snaps, our pictures become almost as fleeting as our intangible memories. The more comprehensive our digital world gets, the more likely it is to wink out - just like us." (9 September 2008)

Bruce Jackson: Shutting it down (Artvoice). The Senecas have put their Buffalo casino construction project on indefinite hold, a consequence of changing conditions in the economy in general and the lawsuit they lost in Federal court in particular. Buffalo developer Carl Paladino may, quite unintentionally, have been responsible for the shutdown. (3 September 2008)

Bruce Jackson: Stop stalling, says the judge (Artvoice). In his August 27 ruling Judge William M. Skretny rejected all of the arguments and motions offered by attorneys representing the National Indian Gaming Commission and the Department of the Interior in the Buffalo Seneca casino case. He didn't buy their suggestion that NIGC was beyond the law or that a change in Bureau of Indian Affairs rules they knew about but kept secret from him should undo his prior ruling that the Buffalo casino was and remains illegal. He told them to stop diddling around and take corrective action, which seems to mean to shut it down. He gave casino opponents some of what they wanted (he told the NIGC to start obeying the law) but he didn't rule out the possibility of this coming up again if the Senecas and the city of Buffalo engaged in the long environmental and economic impact study they have worked long and hard to avoid. (Error note: the article several times says the judge's earlier opinion in the case came down July 6; the correct date is July 8.) (27 August 2008)

Senecas suspend construction of casino in Buffalo and hotel in Salamanca (Buffalo News). Seneca spokesmen say this suspension has nothing to do with Judge Skretny's August 26 ruling (click on the link below for the full text of that ruling and the article above for an analysis of it). They need a huge amount of money for those two projects, the cost of borrowing has been going up, and Wall Street has been finding gambling joints less and less interesting. But the lawsuit is surely a factor in the difficulty they're having getting funding for those projects. (27 August 2008)

Judge Skretny to the Feds: The Buffalo casino is illegal, so shut it down (U.S. District Court). U.S. District Court Judge William M. Skretny has ordered the National Indian Gaming Commission to comply with National Indian Gaming Commission regulations in the case of the Senecas' Buffalo casino, which means they are to shut it down. The government had argued that the judge had no right to tell the Department of the Interior and the National Indian Gaming Commission how to behave in this case and, moveover, they'd changed their rules recently, so he should just step aside and let them handle everything. The judge was having none of that foolishness. He denied their motions entirely and granted the plaintiffs' request that the NIGC be told it had to do its job. Here is a pdf of the ruling, which came down Tuesday morning. We'll have an analysis of it later today or tomorrow. (26 August 2008)

Bruce Jackson: Silence in the Court: Where the Casino Case Stands (Artvoice). A further update on the current status of the citizens' lawsuit against the gambling interests in Buffalo. (Casino Chronicles #48b) (21 August 2008)

Bruce Jackson: Don't talk to me, judge tells attorneys in Buffalo casino case. Judge William M. Skretny has cancelled oral argument scheduled for August 21 in the Buffalo casino case. Casino opponents have asked him to take steps to shut down the Senecas' Buffalo gambling operation now; lawyers representing the gambling interests have asked him to toss out his ruling that the Buffalo gambling operation is illegal and let the permitting process start over from square 1. A lot of briefs and supporting briefs and arguing briefs have been going back and forth. The judge has decided that with all he's read there is no need for him to waste an afternoon listening to these lawyers talking about the same stuff. He's going to move directly to a decision on both motions, which he will issue on or before August 26. (15 August 2008)

Senecas may slow expansion of casinos (Buffalo News). The Seneca gambling operation has been busy expanding its Niagara Falls and Allegany operations and building what it hopes will be its Buffalo casino-entertainment complex. The Buffalo operation may be shut down next week when US District Judge William M. Skretny, who has already ruled that the Federal gambling permit was improperly issued, hears oral arguments from both sides about what steps to take next. The Senecas are now saying they may pull back on some of their expansion plans. The casino industry as a whole is having a bad year because of a drop in discretionary income and increase in travel costs, but the Seneca Buffalo casino is designed to prey primarily on customers from the immediate area, so it may be Niagara Falls and Allegany that go on hold. On the other hand, the cost of borrowing in the casino industry has been climbing and the Senecas may have decided that it makes more sense to expand a thriving operation (Niagara Falls) than to put $330 million into an operation that will never attract substantial out-of-town business (Buffalo). (15 August 2008)

Bruce Jackson: Hamdan's Secret (Counterpunch). Salim Ahmed Hamdan's trial in the U.S. Guantanamo gulag was mostly secret: the press was let in only occasionally, some witnesses and accusers weren't present and therefore couldn't be cross-examined or even identified, and Hamdan's statements from 40 interrogation sessions (some of them lasting days) were never made public. But from whom were all these secrets being kept? Hamdan had been Osama bin Laden's driver; he was taken prisoner in Afghanistan in November 2001. The only thing he knows that Osama doesn't know, the only secrets he has, have to do with the techniques—including torture—with which the Americans extracted information from him. The secrets he has are about us, and the truth is being kept not from Obama, who knows perfectly well that the Bush administration has a policy of torturing prisoners, but from us. Do you wonder why? (9 August 2008)

Bruce Jackson: Daylilies and morning glories. One result of the October 2006 snowstorm that mutilated and killed so many of Buffalo's trees is a lush growing season this year as trees and bushes do what they always do when they've been pruned by man or nature. Along our driveway fence the light patterns have changed because two great shading oaks are gone and many branches of what's left were snapped off in the storm. Before the snowstorm, the morning glories came in at the end of the daylily season; this year they came in at the same time and sometimes the hairy morning glory vines wrapped around the smooth daylily stalks and buds. By the end of the six-week growing season you could see the entire life cycle on single stalks: bud, flower, dessicated wilted flower, and bare nub where dead flowers had fallen away. And all the while—between this summer's heavy rains—the flowers would seem to fill with liquid light in the morning and evening sun, hold it no more than a few minutes, then empty at the same instant flowers inches away suddenly filled with a variant of the same light. It was a fine summer show, a great distraction from the idiocy of war and mediocrity of local politics. Just click on the "slideshow" button and you'll see 47 of this summer's daylily and morning glory moments from Buffalo Report World Headquarters. (29 July 2008)

Bruce Jackson: Another bite of the apple and swiftboating Margaret L. Wendt (Artvoice). After a federal judge said the Seneca Gaming Corporation's Buffalo casino was illegal, the Seneca Nation of Indians' attorneys came up with a great idea: tell the judge he didn't know what he was talking about and there were new rules that changed the game, so the judge should move everything back to the beginning, pretend the lawsuit never happened, and let the Nation get a third authorization to gamble on the land he'd already said was not gambling-eligible. While that legal maneuvering was going on someone started a smear campaign against the Margaret L. Wendt Foundation, the primary source of funding for downtown casino opponents. (Casino Chronicles #46) (24 July 2008)

Senecas attempt end-run around Judge Skretny's casino order. In a letter dated July 16, SNI President Maurice Johns, Sr., asks National Indian Gaming Commission Chairman Philip Hogen for a reconsideration of their Class III Gaming Ordinance because the Nation believes Judge Skretny's ruling is reversible and also because of some changes in Department of the Interior regulations. In response, the US Justice Department filed a motion on July 22 asking Judge William Skretny to take back his July 8 decision vacating the prior Ordinance from NIGC, which made the Senecas' Bufflao gambling operation illegal. If the judge were to agree (which is not likely), the whole process would begin all over again, except this time the Senecas wouldn't be vague about the location of their Buffalo operation: they would point to the blue steel shed with its 24/7 slots and the heavy construction going on behind it. (22 July 2008)

Bruce Jackson: Showdown: US Marshals vs. the Indians at Buffalo Creek? (Artvoice). Last week federal Judge William M. Skretny voided the gambling ordinance the Indian Gaming Regulatory Commission issued for the Seneca Nation of Indians Buffalo casino project. That means the Buffalo casino is illegal. The Senecas said the judge's decision meant nothing to them and they would continue doing "business as usual." The Indian Gaming Regulatory Commission refused to respond to mail from the lawyer for the plaintiffs in the casino case. So now the plaintiffs have gone back to Judge Skretny, this time asking him to put teeth into his July 8 decision. They want him to tell the IGRC to shut down the Seneca's Buffalo gambling shed and, if IGRC doesn't act, they want him to have US marshals do the job. (17 July 2008)

Bruce Jackson: The Casino Craps Out (Artvoice). "The small casino currently operated in downtown Buffalo by the Seneca Nation of Indians is an unlawful operation. The Senecas own the land and it benefits from and carries the special conditions regulating land that, in federal law, is 'Indian country.' But it is not the narrowly defined and strictly regulated kind of Indian country on which gambling can take place. The Senecas can build whatever they like there—hotels, theaters, shops, hospitals, schools, anything at all. They can even build a gambling joint. But they cannot legally permit anyone to gamble in it. So ruled US District Court Judge William M. Skretny, in a 122-page decision (127 pages with the front matter) rendered Tuesday afternoon in federal court in Buffalo." (9 July 2008)

Judge William M. Skretny: Decision and order in Citizens Against Casino Gambling et al v. Philip N. Hogen et al. (9 July 2008). The learned and elegant 127-page decision saying the Seneca gambling operation in Buffalo is illegal. Click here for a 5-page summary of the issues and conclusions. (9 July 2008)

Stewart Ain: A Pariah In Exile (The Jewish Week). Have you wondered what happened to historian Norman Finkelstein, the DePaul University professor whose career was destroyed by Harvard law professor and torture advocate Alan Dershowitz? (9 July 2008)

John J. LaFalce: Indian casino gambling is controversial, especially in Congress. Two Michigan Democrats had a battle-royal in Congress over casinos this week. John Dingell wants a casino in Port Huron and he tried an end run around the law with a measure that would bypass the required review by the Department of the Interior; John Conyers opposed the bill, both because he opposes gambling in general and because he doesn't want another casino in his district, which includes Detroit. The House backed Conyers (and the law), defeating the proposed bypass by a vote of 121 to 298 (Brian Higgins, of course, voted to bypass the review). This has implications for Buffalo because it restates Congress's strong opposition to Indian gambling operations created outside the very specific law Congress passed regarding what kind of Indian land could have casinos and what kind of Indian land could not host Indian casinos. The Seneca Nation of Indians has been claiming that the Seneca Settlement Act of 1990 was a land claim, hence its land purchase in Buffalo fits the definition of casino-eligible property. Former Congressman LaFalce, who was co-author of that Act, says the reverse is true: the Act was not a land claim, Congress never intended it to create gambling land, and the Buffalo operation is illegal. "To say that the 1990 law permits casino gambling in Buffalo" he writes, "would be a pernicious distortion of the law." The lawsuit against the Buffalo casino is now in federal court and a decision endorsing or contradicting LaFalce's position may be rendered within the next few weeks. (16 June 2008)

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).

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)

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)

Diane Christian: War Corrupts (Counterpunch). "Take it from Achilles, heroism is a hoax." (17 February 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)

Sue Wuetcher: Notes on the spring 2008 films in the Buffalo Film Seminars (UB Reporter) (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)

Geoff Kelly: The Story is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories, by Bruce Jackson (Artvoice). A review. (13 December 2007)

Huffington Post refutes torture defender's anti-Israel accusations (RawStory). Harvard torture advocate Alan Dershowitz is now claiming that the reason some people object to his advocacy of torture is because they don't like his opinions on Israel. Ho ho ho. (23 November 2007)

Dershowitz back on the torture campaign trail (RawStory). This is a dilly of a fast-talking interview with Harvard torture advocate Alan Dershowitz, who is once again taking to the airwaves praising waterboarding done by the right people under the right cirumstances to the right victims. He claims Thomas Jefferson backs him on all the way. As always, he justifies everything with his "ticking bomb" reductio ad absurdum argument for torture, even though no Bush administration torturer has ever heard a bomb tick. The one good thing is he has not relaxed his sanitation standards: he still thinks the needles he wants stuck under bad peoples' fingernails should be sterilized. Only bad torturers use dirty needles. (19 November 2007)

Bruce Jackson: Orhan Pamuk at Just Buffalo (Picasa). The Nobel laureate opened Just Buffalo's BABEL series at Asbury Hall in The Building Formerly Known as The Church 8 November. Here are some photos of Pamuk and some others at the reception and the talk. When the page comes up, click on "Slideshow" and the images will go by at 4 second intervals. (10 November 2007)

Bruce Jackson: Trucking Buffalo (Artvoice). How they screwed up the Peace Bridge expansion project. Astonishing--after all these years! (19 October 2007)

Geoff Kelly: Buffalo Film Seminars (Artvoice). The editor of Artvoice interviews with Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian on the "hugely popular series." (2 September 2007)

Bruce Jackson: Targeting Delaware (Artvoice). Why is Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown fielding a political nonentity against Mike LoCurto? (23 August 2007)

Bruce Jackson: Bad metaphors, bad government (Artvoice). Buffalo mayor Byron Brown, the waterfront commissioners who gave away the cobblestone district waterfront in return for a taxpayer-underwritten big box bait and tackle store, and the casino hypesters and hustlers are each offering Buffalo one more bogus "silver bullet." In addition to everything else wrong with their economics and social dynamics, they've got the wrong metaphor. (3 August 2007)

Albright Sets Right Course (Buffalo News). Another attempt to introduce reason and balance into the ugly attack on the Albright-Knox started by ex-Buffalonian Tom Freudenheim and force-fed (and funded) by retired UB English professor Carl Dennis. (26 February 2007)

Elizabeth Licata: They're no keepers of mine (Buffalo Spree Blog). "A mob with pitchforks is descending on the Albright-Knox. 'Save the antiquities!' is their rallying call. But I wonder if they understand the real implications of their activism on behalf of a few seldom-seen artifacts. I also wonder—as good friends in the arts community have observed—where these people were when arts organizations throughout the region lost their funding, first from the city of Buffalo, next from the county of Erie. You’d think a group calling itself the 'art keepers' would care about public support of the arts, but we didn’t hear a peep from them then." (23 February 2007)

Bruce Jackson: Undoing Dennis's Damage. What you can do if you signed Carl Dennis's anti-Albright-Knox letter before you found out how misguided it is. (23 February 2007)

Bruce Jackson: The War Against the Albright-Knox (Artvoice). An error-laden opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal has set Buffalo poet Carl Dennis on a misguided war against the directors and staff of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Here's some of what's wrong with Dennis's attack, along with key facts he and his followers have ignored, glossed over or not bothered to learn. And here's why anyone who really cares about the Gallery should, if asked to sign Dennis's anti-Albright Art Gallery letters, just say no. (22 February 2007)

Newton Garver: Politics and Apartheid. "Jimmy Carter'’s most recent book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, has raised a storm of criticism from the Derschowitz-AIPAC wing of American Judaism, stung by his even-handed recounting of events and conversations, as well as his straightforward presentation of the failure to implement UN Security Council resolutions....But it is a feature of partisans and their pride in their side to regard evenhanded unjudgmental presentations as themselves intrinsically outrageous....Carter'’s message is one of hope, not fear, as is characteristic of steps to

Newton Garver: Decider vs. Negotiator. Dubya prides himself on being "the Decider," and he seems to have disinterest in or contempt for the Negotiator. Deciders don't have to talk to anybody; Negotiators can't do anything without looking at and listening to the other side. Bush has no need or desire to look or listen to anything outside his own skull. All the worse for Iraq and for us. (5 February 2007)

Diane Christian: Dying Well. Saddam went to his death with more dignity than any of the hooded killers, who carried on like gloating goons. And what did it accomplish? "Saddam’s dying well strikes to the deeper issue of acts and ends and agency. The President who relentlessly became ‘a war president’ embraced killing and destruction as a solution to ‘evil.’ His nemesis, Saddam Hussein, embraced killing and destruction for political power. What ends justify what means? It is hard to make a man you kill look evil. He looks vulnerable. You look evil. Because you kill. And you don’t wipe out ‘bad’ killing with ‘good’ killing, you echo it." (3 February 2007)

Recent items of interest

Seminoles plan huge casino, entertainment complex in Coconut Creek (South Florida Sun-Sentinel). It started out as an apparently innocuous land deal. But if the Seminoles can get the land declared sovereign territory it will grow into a huge tax-exempt entertainment complex that will make the casino operators rich and wreck the local economy. Pretty much like what Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown signed onto here. Except in Coconut Creek, the local officials are fighting to save their city rather than rushing to sell it out. (30 January 2007)

Phil Fairbanks: Casino ruling could eliminate the perks (Buffalo News). If the Seneca Nation fails in its attempt to get its downtown Buffalo property declared sovereign territory fit for gambling, patrons in whatever they build there will not be exempt from state and local taxes, health codes, insurance requirements, anti-smoking regultions, zoning laws and everything else that every other citizen is subject to. That would mean they'd be operating on a level playing field, which would, in all likelihood, render the property of no interest to them whatsoever. (30 January 2007)

Dan Herbeck and Jerry Zremski: Judge revokes permision for city casino (Buffalo News). Responses to Judge Skretny's ruling that the Senecas can't gamble on their Buffalo Creek property. The article cites a poll last year showing 55% of Buffalo residents approve of a downtown casino but it doesn't mention that the poll was done shortly after the Seneca Gambling Corporation mounted a month-long 24/7 disinformation advertising barrage on nearly all Buffalo commercial radio and television stations. (13 January 2007)

Sue Wuetcher: Audiences set lineup for spring Buffalo Film Seminars (UB Reporter). Notes on the 14 classic films selected by the Buffalo Film Seminars audience for the Seminars' 14th season. (12 January 1007)

Diane Christian: It's rape. "Let's stop using the word war to describe our action in Iraq....'Iraqi Freedom'  was not a righteous war but a preemptive attack rationalized on faulty ideas, imaginations, and greed. Better to think of it as rape. We raped Iraq. We began our action  with forced,  non-consensual penetration and despoilation of that country. Our Vice President publically imagined they wanted us and would welcome us, would love us and our intentions. Guilt followed, and more delusion, and stubborn refusal to admit the action. So stopping the rape, getting out, is where the figure flags. Rather than withdrawing and taking a shower, we've continued the rape and recast the story....No face-saving fiction is credible now. We need to face our face as rapist and despoiler and change it. However well-meaning and heroic we might wish to appear, intentions cannot transform the actions of barbarism and terror. Rape is a love story only for sociopaths." (Christmas Day 2006)

John J. LaFalce on Buffalo casino (Buffalo News). A Buffalo News Q&A with one of the authors of the Federal legislation used to get the Seneca gambling joint into downdown Buffalo. They've got it all wrong, he says: the law doesn't come close to permitting what's now in process, so the Federal judge considering the lawsuit should shut it down. Ignore the almost incoherent question that opens the Q&A: LaFalce comes up with a rational response in spite of it. (24 December 2006)

Bruce Jackson: Saying "Oh!": John Mohawk 1944-2006. How our friend was wrapped in the garden blanket of earth. (20 December 2006)

Bruce Jackson: Brice Marden: four photographs. (5 December 2006). Four photos of the painter Brice Marden, one with Diane Christian, taken in West Shokan, NY, 1995. (5 December 2006)

Buffalo Film Seminars spring 2007 schedule. Our 14th series consists of audience favorites from the 182 films we've screened and discussed in the past seven years.

Bruce Jackson: Israel and Us: An interview with Phyllis Bennis (Artvoice). The first part of a two-part interview with Phyllis Bennis, a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and a widely respected expert on the politics of the Middle East. (29 November 2006)

Bruce Jackson: Dancing with Paladino (Artvoice). The only Buffalo businessman of stature who has publicly backed a downtown Seneca casino says why he loathes the downtown casino Buffalo might be actually be getting, Mayor Byron Brown's deal with the Seneca gambling operation that would help that casino get up and running, and the one reporter who has for five years said this was a stupid, dysfunctional and corrupt deal. (9 November 2006)

Newton Garver: Progress in Bolivia. Evo Morales works his way through one economic, social and political problem after the other. Despite many internal and external challenges, his popularity remains high and he continues making unexpected progress in Bolivia. (4 November 2006)

Bruce Jackson: Normalizing Torture (Counterpunch). Alan Dershowitz, John Woo and George W. Bush have rationalized America as a nation that tortures legally. (3 November 2006)

Alan Dershowitz v. Bruce Jackson on Torture (Counterpunch). Dershowitz responds to Jackson, saying he never said what he said. Jackson counter-responds to Dershowitz, saying of course you did. Hissy-fit. (3 November 2006)

Arborgeddon (Artvoice). Photos of and comments on Buffalo's October surprise. (19 October 2006)

Bruce Jackson: A report from Buffalo: Thundersnow. What happened when natural things got out of order. (18 October 2006)

Bruce Jackson: images of Buffalo's thundersnow. A radio reporter coined the term "thundersnow" to describe the bizarre electrical storm and blizzard that dumped two feet of snow on the region last Thursday and Friday. The snow came before the trees had dropped their autumn leaves, which resulted in such massive weight that 90% of the trees in the city were damaged or destroyed. Here are photos, the first of early evening at the beginning of the storm when the trees are bowing gracefully, then later as the limbs started to crack, then a day and two days after that, when the snow had mostly gone and the wreckage was everywhere. (Click on the right arrow in the lower right corner to start the slideshow.) (16 October 2006)

Diane Christian: Zarqawi's Face. "We are invited to stare at Zarqawi's dead head for standard warrior and political reasons. Like the medieval heads atop the pikes to warn of the punishment for treason (Thomas More), or the 200 Philistine foreskins David used to buy the king's daughter, or the scalps or genitals or ears in the notched belts of conquerors, the enemy body is a bounty harvested by the victors who win by killing. Be they the king's good servants, the fearless and untamed warriors, the men or women without restraint, they're the living, the enemy is dead. The message is we win. The message is a lie." (10 June 2006)