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Executive Pay Limits May Prove Toothless (Washington Post). The Bush administration forced a last-minute change to the $700 bailout legislation that protects bonuses for the executives responsible for the financial collapse. When you're at the top in Bushland, failure doesn't get in the way of rewards. (16 December 2008)

Top 5 reasons Chu is a great energy pick (Climate Progress). After 8 years of federal energy and environmental policies driven by fossil-fuel industry greed and anti-science fundamentalist ignorance, the US is getting an environmental and energy team that is experienced, sane and competent. How radical! (16 December 2008)

Shoe-Hurling Iraqi Becomes a Folk Hero (NY Times). You don't need a bomb to make an explosive hit in asymmetrical warfare. (14 December 2008)

Iraqis Pick Up Their Shoes: Reaction From Around the Country (NY Times). Man-in-the-street reactions to the Great Shoe Toss in Baghdad. (14 December 2008)

Iraqi Reporter Throws Shoes at Bush, Calls him 'Dog' (Reuters). Apparently neither the Reuters reporter nor Bush knew this was more than mere hostile exhuberance. In the Arab world, shoe tossing is a gesture of extreme disrespect and contempt. When Saddam's statue in Baghdad was pulled down by US Marines, many Iraqis tossed shoes at it and whacked it with their shoes. US news commentators commented on the quaintness of the gesture. Hardly. (14 December 2008)

The battle in John Ashcroft's hospital room (Newsweek). Shortly after then-attorney general John Ashcroft came out of surgery, Andy Card and Alberto Gonzales came to his hospital room and pressured the drugged Ashcroft to sign a document legalizing extended wiretapping of US citizens. Ashcroft's deputy and the director of the FBI rushed to the room to keep them from getting what they wanted. Here's why they defied the White House. (14 December 2008)

Frank Rich: Two Cheers for Rod Blagojevich (NY Times). Illinois governor Rob Blagojevich is the class clown in Goniffery 101, primarily because he and his wife carried on like foul-mouthed idiots from home phones they should have known were tapped and because the stakes for which they were selling out were, in the grand order of things, so puny. The real thieves and murderers of recent years, the guys who lied us into war and took no responsibility for it and wrecked the economy while making themselves and their friends rich, and took no responsibility for that either, suffer no penalties at all. They were smart enough to steal the store, but not stupid enough to talk about it on the phone. Only one of the whole gang got caught doing anything felonious—Scooter Libby—and Bush immediately made sure he'd never do a day of jail time. All Scooter did was betray his country which, in the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld accounting system, is nothing, nothing at all. (13 December 2008)

Schumer and the Wall Street Gang (NY Times). Few, if any, Democrats in Congress gave as much support to Wall Street's anti-regulatory agenda as NY Senator Charles Schumer, which is one reason Wall Street contributions to the Democratic party increased by 50% last year. Schumer describes himself as a populist looking out for the middle class, but few work harder than he to protect the power and privilege of the brokers and bankers. He justifies that by pointing out that finance is New York's major industry and by arguing that Wall Street and Main Street are inextricably linked. That justification is a lot more difficult to defend now that Wall Street has gone down in flames, taking much of Main Street with it. (13 December 2008)

Robert J. McCarthy: Illuzzi site can be a bit of a sticky PR web (Buffalo News). Under that lame wanker of a headline is one of the great heretofore untold smarmy stories of Erie County politics. Joe Iluzzi runs a website on which he praises politicians who pay him and smears politicians who don't. How he has evaded an extortion indictment is one of the miracles of New York law enforcement and political pusillanimity. Everybody has tiptoed around him for years: in private every politician and judge you meet has total scorn for Illuzzi's operation, but you go to his site and there are ads from and paid photos of those same politicians. A gold star to Bob McCarthy and the Buffalo News for finally turning this rock over. One of Illuzzi's biggest clients is Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown. No surprise there. (13 December 2008)

Jerry Zremski: Republicans hit back at auto unions (Buffalo News). Republican senators deep in the pockets of Japanese auto companies with plants in their home (nonunion) states, and mindful that the UAW has funding Democrats far more than Republicans in national elections, did what they could last week to kill the American auto industry. Richard Shelby (RAla), Jim DeMint (R, SC) and the others tried to mask their glee in sanctimonious speechifying about responsibility, but it didn't work. (31 December 2008)

Monhola Dargis: Hope for a Racist, and Maybe a Country (NY Times). Dirty Harry went to Detroit, grew into his face, and what a trip he takes us on! Most movies coming out of Hollywood are video games writ large and loud, two hours of CGI trivia that is the movie equivalent of that bad old joke about Chinese food. Clint Eastwood, however, keeps making movies that work the mind and move the heart. In Gran Torino the master has done it again. (11 December 2008)

Spectator: In the kingdom of the blind... Congressional carelessness, laziness, and greed were prime factors in the financial meltdown, so it gets ever more difficult to listen to members of Congress wax sanctimonious about the excesses of Wall Street and incompetence of Detroit. They were all dancing the dance, deluding themselves that the music and they would go on forever. And we're paying the price for that foolishness. (12 December 2008)

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Christopher Lacaria: Full of Sound and Fury (Harvard Crimson). Harvard recently renamed and revamped its English program, shedding many of the classic requirements (see "English, Redefined, at Harvard" in the 8 December Inside Higher Ed). If history is any guide to the future, English departments at most other American colleges will follow in lockstep. For one Harvard senior, the new program guts rather than streamlines the undergraduate program. (11 December 2008)

Bruce Jackson: Erice Stonework. The paving stones in the Sicilian mountaintop town of Erice were laid by the Romans. Medieval buildings rest on ancient foundations. The Carthaginians built here, and so did Greeks, Arabs and others. The walls reveal stonework of residents going back more than two thousand years. Here are 12 images of that enduring craft. (11 December 2008)

NPR to Cut 64 Jobs and Two Shows (Washington Post). Contributions and support are down and the $230 million bequest from Joan Kroc produced zero income this year, so NPR is firing many seasoned reporters and editors and killing major efforts to reach beyond its traditional white over-45 audience. (11 December 2008)

Bangalore Backlash: Call Centers Return to U.S. (Washington Post). Tired of outsourced computer service center operators with accents so thick the call takes far longer than it should and you hang up frustrated and angry? Dell will guarantee an agent who speaks American English and who will take your call within two minutes—for an additional $99 (plus tax) a year with a new computer or $155.40 (plus tax) a year if you already own a Dell. Shouldn't support a customer can use without a struggle be part of the purchase price? (11 December 2008)

Hello Leno, goodbye scripted shows? (LA Times). Stupid game and warped "reality" shows have been displacing scripted narrative on prime-time TV for several years now. Changing viewer habits and reduced advertising revenue because of the financial meltdown have led NBC to an even more radical change: they're giving the 10 p.m. M-F slot to late-night comic Jay Leno. He's popular, his show is cheap to produce, and viewers are more likely to watch it in real time than later on TiVo or online, where they can skip the commercials. Everybody makes out—except the viewers, who have five more hours of drivel displacing five hours when substance might have occurred. (10 December 2008)

Joseph E. Stiglitz: Capitalist Fools (Vanity Fair). Five key mistakes under Reagan, Clinton and Bush II made the current financial disaster inevitable, writes Nobel economics laureate Stiglitz. It began when Reagan replaced Paul Volcker with Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve. It continued with irrational deregulation, the Bush tax cuts, degradation of all aspects of accounting, and finally Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's perfectly inept management of the $700 million bailout. Basically, the government failed to do its job every step of the way. (10 December 2008)

Trial by Absurdity (Washington Post). Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and long-term US torture victim at the Guantanamo gulag, along with four others, has offered to plead guilty if the US will execute him, thereby making them all well-publicized martyrs. But the wacky set of Rules Bush set up to avoid the US system of justice at Guantanamo seems to make it impossible for someone who isn't convicted by a tribunal to be executed: you can be executed if you say you're innocent but not if you say you're guilty. In that case, Mohammed and the others seem to be saying now, they won't plead guilty. So not only are the Guantanamo procedings illegal under US law, but they're also lunatic. (10 December 2008)

U.S. v. Rod R. Blagojevich and John Harris (US Department of Justice). The full federal complaint with details of the investigation dating back to 2002, including all the statements you've read with dashes or heard with bleeps--but without the dashes. As John Stewart noted on the "Daily Show": how stupid can you be to know you're under investigation and to use your own phone for stuff like this? (10 December 2008)

Sharon Otterman: A Reader's Guide to the Blagojevich Complaint (NY Times). What all the legal talk in the item above is all about in ordinary English. (10 December 2008)

Blagojevich the gonif (NY Times). Some crooked politicians are so crooked they give ordinary crooked politicians a bad name. The latest to join that elite group seems to be Democrat Rod R. Glabojevich, governor of Illinois, who has been arrested on federal corruption charges. Acccording to the complaint, he had everything on sale from Obama's replacement to seats on state boards and commissions. All he wanted in return was a lot of money and lifetime jobs for himself and his wife. He had been elected in 2002 as a reformer to replace Republican George Ryan, who was convicted of racketeering and fraud in 2006. (9 December 2008)

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Bush's criminal legacy (Washington Post). The most obvious aspects of a presidency—foreign relations, the economy, programs supported or killed or mutilated—aren't necesessarily the most enduring. Every president appoints judges to the federal bench and those appointees remain in place long after the president who appointed them has become of historical interest only. George W. Bush, for example, has turned the federal appellate courts into a system where the most egregious misbehavior by police and prosecutors is regularly endorsed and ratified. It will take a full two terms of Obama to return the system to one where ideas of justice rather than ideology prevail. (8 December 2008)

Barry Nolan: 'He Kept Us Safe'—Unless You Count the Dead People (Common Dreams). WSJ columnist and Republican flack Peggy Noonan says that historians looking back on the Bush years will have to praise him for having kept us safe. Do you wonder how people can still vote Republican? Now you know: totally ignore reality. Noonan manages to forget that Bush got more than 4000 GIs killed, 30,000 mutilated, lost New Orleans to incompetence and put a bullet in the heart of the economy. How conveeeenient. (8 December 2008)

Stephen T. Banko: Harry Taub and Dick Keane. Remembering two of Buffalo's finest, both of whom died recently. (8 December 2008)

Roger Ebert: Death to film critics! Hail to CelebCult! (Chicago Sun-Times). "A newspaper film critic is like a canary in a coal mine. When one croaks, get the hell out. The lengthening toll of former film critics acts as a poster child for the self-destruction of American newspapers, which once hoped to be more like the New York Times and now yearn to become more like the National Enquirer. We used to be the town crier. Now we are the neighborhood gossip. The crowning blow came this week when the once-magisterial Associated Press imposed a 500-word limit on all of its entertainment writers. The 500-word limit applies to reviews, interviews, news stories, trend pieces and 'thinkers.' Oh, it can be done. But with 'Synecdoche, New York?'" AP, says Ebert, wants writers to focus on celebrity twitter, which can be done short and stupid. (8 December 2008)

Scary bailout money info graphic (Voltage). We've heard (and appropriately oohed and aahed) about how the bailout cost more than the Marshall Plan, Louisiana Purchase, space program, S&L Crisis, Korean War, New Deal, Iraq War, and Vietnam War COMBINED, but the words weren't as awesome as this simple pie-chart graphic. Some snipers have said that the population of the US is larger now than during the Vietnam War, Korean War, and the New Deal—but so what? People are taller, too. There's a world of red in the left-hand pie. Thanks, Dubya. (7 December 2008)

Michael Ratner: Obama should prosecute Bush officials who designed torture policy (The Progressive). President-elect Barack Obama was, during the campaign, unambiguous in his opposition to Bush's torture policy. Was that opposition real or just words? If it is to have any meaning, writers the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Obama should treat the torturers like the war-criminals they are. Do you think there's a chance he'll do that? Do you think you can sing and fly like a tweety-bird? (6 December 2008)

Letter to Obama on US Cuba Policy. A group of business organizations—U.S. Chamber of Commerce, U.S. Council for International Business, Grocery Manufacturers Association, Business Roundtable, American Farm Bureau Federation, and others—have asked President-elect Obama to end the hateful and hurtful U.S. blockade of Cuba. This will be another test of whether all his talk about reason and decency was anything more than talk. In most of the sane world, U.S. Cuba policy has been continuing evidence that the U.S. is a vengeful bully. Obama could change that, and he should. (6 December 2008)

Richard M. Nixon: The Watergate Tapes (Berkeley). The latest releases from the library of the Man Who Drove Pat to Drink. Conversations between the president and his goons about how to derail the Watergate investigation, and more. (6 December 2008)

Jewish settlers in West Bank fear an Israeli withdrawal (LA Times). Young squatters on West Bank Palestinian land have grown increasingly militant as more and more external pressure is applied to Israel to start treating the Palestinians decently. The squatters have been attacking Palestinians whose property they want as well as Israeli soldiers trying to stop them from taking it. They're looking anxiously to the February election: if Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni wins, the opposition to their illegal settlements will continue; if far-right Benjamin Netanyahu wins, they're hoping for a pass. For more on this, see Israeli soldiers evict Jewish settlers in West Bank: 250 extremist squatters, forced by soldiers out of a house they were illegally occupying in Hebron, responded by torching Palestinian houses and shooting up a Palestinian neighborhood. (4 December 2008)

College May Become Unaffordable for Most in U.S. (NY Times). This is grim news: the U.S. is already one of the few countries where younger people are less educated than older people. And, because of the economic mess, that disparity is about to get even worse. (4 December 2008)

"Prop 8 - The Musical" (funnyordie.com). John C. Reilly and a glorious singing & dancing throng help Californians get ready for the next election, when they'll have an opportunity to overturn that stupid, hate-mongering, anti-American Proposition 8. (Thanks, L.) (3 December 2008)

Buffalo Film Seminars spring 2009 screening schedule. The18th series of films and open discussions begins January 13 with Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr, and includes classics by Preston Sturges, Akira Kurosawa, Jean-Pierre Melville, Robert Altman, Andrei Tarkovsky,. Larisa Shepitko, Pedro Almodovar and others. (3 December 2008)

Odetta, Voice of Civil rights Movement, Dies at 77 (NY Times). She'd been seriously ill for some time but hoped to sing at Barack Obama's inauguration. There would have been no more appropriate musical voice to mark that moment. (3 December 2008)

Odetta: The Last Word (NY Times). A lovely 20 minute-video conversation (with songs) taped in 2007 with the folksinger and civil rights activist who died Tuesday. (3 December 2008)

Jame Hamsher: 10 Ways the Corporate Media Tried to Make You think Obama Was a Liberal (AlterNet). If we'd been paying better attention, the Gates and Clinton appointments might not have been such a surprise. (3 December 2008)

Glenn Greenwald: The ongoing disgrace of NBC News and Brian Williams (Salon.com). Frequent NBC News military affairs commentator Gen. Barry McCaffrey comments as an "objective analyst" on "war policies in which he has a substantial (and concealed) financial stake." NBC News and its anchor Brian Williams are aware of this deception and conflict but have decided it's not the sort of thing worth telling the public about or sufficient reason for curtailing McCaffrey's airtime. McCaffrey's conflicts and his NBC airtime were the subject of a big expose in this week's NY Times (see the next item) but info on this has been around at least since April 2003, and NBC has consistently ignored it. (1 December 2008)

David Barstow: One Man's Military-Industrial-Media Complex (NY Times). Retired General Barry McCaffrey is a frequent analyst on NBC News. He gives some of the best analysis money can buy: a lot of corporations are paying him a lot of money to provide NBC (and government officials still on the job) opinions that will make them rich. He has earned his keep: since 9/11, McCaffrey has appeared nearly 1,000 times on NBC and its cable channels. NBC isn't troubled by this egregious conflict of interest. It has conflict-of-interest rules, NBC says, but they apply only to employees on salary, not to people NBC puts in front of a camera and identifies as objective and independent analysts. (1 December 2008)

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Sean Penn: Mountain of Snakes (Huffington Post). The first interview President Raul Castro gave a foreign journalist ("We want Obama"), a conversation with Hugo Chavez, reflections on the press and its fictions, the presidential campaign, and lots more good stuff. (1 December 2008)

Uri Avnery: Barak Ovadya, Candidate (Gush Shalom). "The Israeli Obama. What will he look like, the Israeli counterpart of Barack Obama? What will be his attributes?" (30 November 2008)

Will Alaska pay price for ousting Stevens? (McClatchy). Alaska is, by far, the nation's biggest federal welfare client. A third of the house and household income derive from Federal dollars; overall, Alaska gets 70% above the national average. The D.C. hustler and backhome gatekeeper for all that largesse the rest of us have been footing the bill for is that Ted Stevens, who was not only convicted of 7 felonies in federal court last month but who was also turned out by the voters who apparently decided they'd had enough of entrenched goniffery. The conviction and the election--that's all to the good. But what happens to Alaskans now? Will they have to start playing by the same rules as the rest of us? Are they hardy enough for that? (30 November 2008)

Palin's Georgia pal (Alaska Daily News). Sarah Palin is in Georgia, stumping for chickenhawk racist Saxby Chambliss, and it isn't playing very well for her back home. Chambliss rode to office on a Carl Rove campaign in 2002 based on convincing voters that incumbent Sen. Max Cleland, who lost both legs and his right arm in Vietnam, hadn't done enough for his country. Folks in Alaska, who know that Palin has a son in Iraq, are wondering why would she pimp for such a smarmy piece of work? (30 November 2008)

Obama answers liberal critics on personnel choices (Boston Globe). Save for the Secretary of State slot, how is Obama's cabinet different from one the far more hawkish Hillary Clinton would have put together? Many of Obama's liberal supporters are getting more and more uncomfortable as those top jobs get filled with old familiar faces. Obama says the times require experience. But isn't it experience that got us in this mess? Obama says he's just being pragmatic, which is that what the politicians always say when someone brings up an ethical issue. (30 November 2008)

H.D.S. Greenway: Borrowing from Lincoln's genius (Boston Globe). Barack Obama may be taking a page from Lincoln's "team of rivals" idea, documented by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in her best-selling book of that name. But is Hillary Clinton (who insisted on appointing her entire staff because, apparently, she didn't trust Obama enough to work with him on those choices) a 21st century William Seward? Bringing her into the cabinet will bring along the confidence and support of many of those still-unconverted Clintonites. But what happen if Hillary and Bill go too much their own way and Obama has to fire her? (30 November 2008)

Cheap oil, but at what cost? (Chicago Tribune). Canada is tapping a vast new oil source that is profitable to produce even with prices at $50 a barrel. But this oil extracted from "dense, tarry deposits known as oil sands, ranks as what environmentalists call the dirtiest oil on the planet. Extracting it causes widespread ecological damage—and could accelerate global warming." Canadian environmentalists are fighting oil sand development and oil companies are leaning on Canadian politicians the same way they've leaned on members of Congress here. (30 November 2008)

KY anti-terror law requires God be acknowledged (Lexington Herald-Leader). "Under state law, God is Kentucky's first line of defense against terrorism. The 2006 law organizing the state Office of Homeland Security lists its initial duty as 'stressing the dependence on Almighty God as being vital to the security of the Commonwealth.' Specifically, Homeland Security is ordered to publicize God's benevolent protection in its reports, and it must post a plaque at the entrance to the state Emergency Operations Center with an 88-word statement that begins, 'The safety and security of the Commonwealth cannot be achieved apart from reliance upon Almighty God.'" The director, producer and writers of Dumb & Dumber acknowledged defeat. (30 November 2008)

MSNBC Puts on Canned "Doc Bloc" as Mumbai Burns (OpenLevinson). MSNBC was great fun during the recent presidential campaign—Olbermann's escalating outrage was matched by his ever more floral prose and then Rachel Meadow came along to provide a rare and refreshing taste of intelligent irony on the evening news. Both of them catered to the political left, just as Fox catered to the political right, with the one difference being that Fox often lied while Olbermann and Meadow tended to stick to the facts. Between the two was Wolf Blitzer barking away at CNN, carrying that pen with which he never writes, surrounded by screens, scrolls, inserts and overlays like a teenager's game fantasy gone amok. But when the Mombai Massacre took place MSNBC was stuck running canned "Caught on Camera" reruns. Dreadful, boring stuff, preprogrammed for a holiday weekend. Microsoft and NBC set up MSNBC to be a hot center of up-to-the-minute news in a world of stuffy and canned network newscasting, but when it came to a real news event MSNBC couldn't get out of its holiday stupor. (30 November 2008)

Paul Krugman: What to Do (New York Review of Books). Getting out of the global financial mess will take more than pouring tons of money down bottomless holes. It will take ideas—which is presently in even shorter supply than ready cash. (26 November 2008)

IDF Killed Wanted Palestinians Despite Court Guidelines (Haaretz). In direct violation of High Court of Justice guidelines, Israel Defense Forces assassinated wanted Palestinians, even when they could have taken them prisoner and even when the illegal killings resulted in the deaths of bystanders. (24 November 2008)

SNL does Rahm Emmanuel (NBC/PoliticalWire). White House chief of staff designate is reputed to have a killer mouth. SNL comic Andy Samberg envisons his first meeting with the press after the job is official. (24 November 2008)

World Leaders Won't Shake George Bush's Hand (YouTube). At the G20 everybody was shaking hands—except George W. Bush. Whaddaya think? Was he being shunned or has he developed a new fear of hand-delivered germs? (24 November 2008)

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A Lifetime of pictures (Google). FDR, Marilyn Monroe, the Great Depression, Vietnam, great moments in jockery, cowboys, ballerinas, old-time doctoring: Google has acquired Life magazine's entire photo archive and they're posting every one of them—including a huge number that were never published—on the web. Many are posted at a resolution that will make a pretty fair small print. (21 November 2008)

Mark Danner: Frozen Scandal (New York Review of Books). "Scandal is our growth industry. Revelation of wrongdoing leads not to definitive investigation, punishment, and expiation but to more scandal. Permanent scandal. Frozen scandal. The weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist. The torture of detainees who remain forever detained. The firing of prosecutors which is forever investigated. These and other frozen scandals metastasize, ramify, self-replicate, clogging the cable news shows and the blogosphere and the bookstores. The titillating story that never ends, the pundit gabfest that never ceases, the gift that never stops giving: what is indestructible, irresolvable, unexpiatable is too valuable not to be made into a source of profit. Scandal, unpurged and unresolved, transcends political reality to become commercial fact.

Judge Declares Five Detainees Held Illegally (NY Times). A federal judge ordered the Bush administration to release five prisoners held at Guantanamo for nearly seven years on bogus, constantly changing, charges. The US criminal justice system has severe penalties for people who steal somebody's money. Why are there no penalties for people who steal years of peoples' lives? (21 November 2008)

Cal study finds ex-Guantanamo prisoners broken (San Francisco Chronicle). The punishment doesn't end when illegally-held prisoners are released from the US gulag at Guantanamo. A study of former prisoners found many "physically and psychologically traumatized, debt-rideen and shunned in their communities as terror suspects. Two-thirds report debilitating psychological problems and many report recurring or constant physical pain from torture during their detention. (21 November 2008)

Laurel E. Fletcher and Eric Stover: Guantanamo and Its Aftermath: U.S. Detention and Interrogation Practices and their Impact on Former Detainees. (Human Rights Center, U. Cal, Berkeley). The full 136-page report on Guantanamo practices and consequences. (21 November 2008)

The Detainees (NY Times). "Of the 779 people who have been detained at Guantánamo, at least 525 have been transferred and approximately 250 remain, according to the U.S. Department of Defense. The Pentagon has declined to release a list of the detainees currently at Guantánamo. By reviewing thousands of pages of government documents, court records and media reports, The Times was able to compile its own approximate list." Here are the names, citizenship and status of the prisoners in the Guantanamo gulag. (21 November 2008)

Plan to shutter newsstand pierces heart of Harvard Sq. (Boston Globe). The most famous out-of-town newstand in the country is shutting down. Too few people are reading newspapers these days for the operators to keep the shop open. (21 November 2008)

New friendly fire coverup: Army shreds files on dead soldiers (Salon.com). "Last month, Salon published a story reporting that U.S. Army Pfc. Albert Nelson and Pfc. Roger Suarez were killed by U.S. tank fire in Ramadi, Iraq, in late 2006, in an incident partially captured on video, but that an Army investigation instead blamed their deaths on enemy action. Now Salon has learned that documents relating to the two men were shredded hours after the story was published. Three soldiers at Fort Carson, Colo. — including two who were present in Ramadi during the friendly fire incident, one of them just feet from where Nelson and Suarez died — were ordered to shred two boxes full of documents about Nelson and Suarez. One of the soldiers preserved some of the documents as proof that the shredding occurred and provided them to Salon. All three soldiers, with the assistance of a U.S. senator's office, have since been relocated for their safety." (21 November 2008)

Bush angers environmentalists with last-minute rule changes (LA Times). Corrupt and cynical to the last, Bush is stacking up changes in federal rules designed to rape and pillage the environment. He's got no political capital to lose by feeding his industrial base the nation's environmental treasure. Bill Clinton used his last days to shore up environmental protections; George W. Bush is using his to smash them. Dante would need new circle for these guys. (21 November 2008)

New Rule Would Discount Warming as Risk Factor for Species (Washington Post). The Bush administration has consistently dragged its feet or gone into deep denial about the reasons for and consequences of global warming. As one of his final gifts to the nation, Bush is changing the Endangered Species Acts so "federal agencies would not have to take global warming into account when assessing risks to imperiled plants and animals." What if they had a tribunal that tried government leaders for environmental crimes and abominations, something on the order of Nuremburg? Do you think Bush-Cheney would be so cavalier with the planet? (21 November 2008)

Waxman expected to advance Obama's climate agenda as new energy committee chairman (LA Times). Democrats have elected LA liberal Henry A. Waxman to replace auto industry pimp John R. Dingell as chair of the energy and commerce committee. This is payback for Dingell, who has long blocked or impeded legislation that would have forced Detroit to make more energy efficient and cleaner vehicles, which is one reason Toyota and Honda cleaned Detroit's clock. (21 November 2008)

Naomi Klein on the Bailout Profiteers and the Multi-Trillion-Dollar Crime Scene (Democracy Now!). "What we’re really seeing," says Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, "is a resurrection of the entire discredited free trade agenda.... The shock of this crisis being used to resurrect all of these discredited deals. The Colombia free trade deal, the International Monetary Fund, the Doha round, they’re all coming back from the dead at precisely the moment that we should be actually burying, for good, this whole agenda of deregulation." (21 November 2008)

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Obama on "60 Minutes" (CBS/Political Wire). A president who can answer serious questions about difficult issues thoughtfully and intelligently, with wit and specificity: imagine that! (18 November 2008)

Agony and Ecstasy: The Art World Explained (The Nation). In Seven Days in the Art World, Sarah Thornton tries to figure out why one picture is pretty and another is "art," why one can barely be given away and the other fetches millions. It's a great supplement to Howard S. Becker's recently resissued and updated classic, Art Worlds (18 November 2008).

Administration Moves to Protect Key Appointees (Washington Post). The Bush administration is working to convert dozens of political appointees to civil service positions, which means they get to keep their jobs when the Obama administration comes in. They're focusing particularly on appointees who will maintain the Bush administration's environmental abominations through the Interior Department, but similar efforts are taking place at Labor, HUD and other agencies. The practice isn't new—it goes back at least to the Reagan administration—but that doesn't make it any less invidious. (18 November 2008)

Read 'Em and Bleep? Carlin's 'Seven Words' Spell Trouble (Washington Post). The Kennedy Center recently honored the late George Carlin. Part of the ceremony included a video of his famous "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" routine, which he first performed in 1972. Apparently you can't say them in Washington's Kennedy Center either: the audience in the theater saw a video about seven words—all of which were all bleeped. (18 November 2008)

Dick Cavett: The Wordsmith of Wasilla (NY Times). Cavett discusses the flurry of recent tv appearances by the former-candidate who, on one of them, uttered this masterpiece of Boreal gibberish: "My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars." His comment on the statement: "It's admittedly a rare gift to produce a paragraph in which whole clumps of words could be removed without noticeably affecting the sense, if any." (18 November 2008)

Uproar Over Federal Drilling Leases Next to Parks (AP/CommonDreams). When Bush administration officials got caught auctioning more than 50,000 acres of oil and gas parcels adjacent to major national parks the official in charge said she'd do something about the problem. She did: she talked to the people who complained about the violation, then went right on with the auction. (18 November 2008)

Nicholas von Hoffman: $2 Trillion Handed out by Paulson and Bernake, But Who Got It, Nobody Knows (The Nation/AlterNet). Who got the money? What conditions were put on the gifts or loans? What collateral was offered to guarantee it? Nobody knows, except two guys, one of whom will soon be out of government. (18 November 2008)

Nicolai Ouroussoff: Saving Buffalo's Untold Beauty (NY Times). Buffalo has a mayor and a county executive who have deluded themselves into thinking that a tax-exempt gambling joint will be this Rust Belt city's salvation. The city is, apparently unbeknownst to either of them, one of the country's great living architectural museums: it has some of the best work by Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Daniel Burnham, Eliel Saarinen, H.H. Richardson, Frederick Law Olmsted and others . If the bedazzled mayor and county executive could focus on that treasure, rather than the flashing lights of electronic slot machines, they might start doing something useful. (17 November 2008)

A Senior Fellow at the Institute of Nonexistence (NY Times). You know that great story about Sarah Palin saying Africa was a country told by Martin Eisenstadt, McCain policy adviser and senior fellow at the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy? You know, the story that went everywhere on the web (not here, happily) and made it to MSNBC and other 24/7 news stations? It was a phony. She never said it. There is no Martin Eisenstadt. There is no Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy. And neither are there many fact checkers at most blogs or MSNBC. The same clowns were responsible for the story a few months back about the player who wanted to set up a gambling casino in the Green Zone in Baghdad (we did fall for that one. Sorry 'bout that.). (13 November 2008)

Would Obama hire you? Here's the questionnaire the Obama team is asking people who want administration jobs to fill out. It asks just about everything except your age when you had your first sexual experience. Would you pass the test? Would you want a job that required you to reveal this much about your life? Would you want a job that require, before you could even apply, you to devote days and even weeks documenting every trivial detail about just about everything you'd ever done, said or written? Would you want a govenment populated by people who could pass the implicit test behind this questionnaire? Would you ever want to know people that squeaky-clean? (13 November 2008)

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Chris Hedges: America the Illiterate (TruthDig). "We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and cliches. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities. There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book." (11 November 2008)

Ehud Olmert: "The Time Has Come to Say These Things" (New York Review of Books). Shortly after he resigned as Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert gave an interview to the daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, in which he acknowldged something the rest of the world has been trying to tell Israel for years: "We must make these decisions, and yet we are not prepared to say to ourselves, 'Yes, this is what we must do.' We must reach an agreement with the Palestinians, meaning a withdrawal from nearly all, if not all, of the [occupied] territories. Some percentage of these territories would remain in our hands, but we must give the Palestinians the same percentage [of territory elsewhere]—without this, there will be no peace." "Including Jerusalem?" the interviewer asked. "Including Jerusalem," Olmert replied. (11 November 2008)

Joseph Stiglitz: Let's throw away the rule book (Guardian). Warren Buffett got a good deal when he bought into Goldman Sachs, says Nobel laureat Stiglitz. But the U.S. taxpayer got a stinker of a deal when treasury secretary Paulson "figured out how to recapitalise the banks in such a way that it may not result in resumption of lending." It's time for a new Bretton Woods, a restructuring of the way the entire world's economy works. (11 November 2008)

Al Gore: A Climate for Change (NY Times). These five steps, says the Nobel laureate and former vice-president, will free us from our killing (and growing) dependence on fossil fuels. (11 November 2008)

A Quiet Windfall for U.S. Banks (Washington Post). While everybody was distracted with the $700 billion banking bailout, the Treasury Department slipped the banks a $140 billion tax break at your expense. (11 November 2008)

David Katz: Election night, 2008 (BarackObama.com). Terrific photos from Obama's Flickr site of the Obamas, Bidens and the top campaign staff as the vote was coming in, as they went to Grant Park, and during Obama's speech there. (11 November 2008)

Bill Ayers: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been (In These Times). "Obama’s political rivals and enemies thought they saw an opportunity to deepen a dishonest perception that he is somehow un-American, alien, linked to radical ideas, a closet terrorist who sympathizes with extremism—and they pounced.... On the campaign trail, McCain immediately got on message. I became a prop, a cartoon character created to be pummeled...The good news was that every time McCain or Palin mentioned my name, they lost a point or two in the polls. The cartoon invented to hurt Obama was now poking holes in the rapidly sinking McCain-Palin ship." (11 November 2008)

Eduardo Galeano: Hopes and Fears (The Progressive). "Will Obama sign and abide by the Kyoto agreement, or will he continue to allow the biggest polluter on the planet to pollute with impunity? Will he govern for people, or for automobiles? Will he shift the devastating course of a way of life in which the few steal the destiny of the many? ...Will Obama, the first black President of the United States, realize the dream of Martin Luther King, or the nightmare of Condoleezza Rice? This White House, which is now his house, was built with the labor of black slaves. Let’s hope he never forgets that." (11 November 2008)

Peter Schjeldahl: Local Color (New Yorker). There's a great new William Eggleston exhibit at the Whitney–drawn from nearly a half-century of his work. Eggleston "shoots like a shutterbug and executes like a painter. Synthetic gorgeousness iconizes pictures that flaunt the nonchalance of snapshots. His art attained full power in one of his first dye-transfers, printed in the early nineteen-seventies from a transparency made in the sixties: a supermarket lad awkwardly collecting shopping carts in late-afternoon sun that sets his reddish ducktail-combed hair and adolescent flesh uncannily aglow. The subject is a dreary fact. The content is erotic truth that Plato would have endorsed." (11 November 2008)

Keith Olbermann: Gay marriage is a question of love (MSNBC). And Prop-8, the campaign for which was largely underwritten by the Mormon church, is an expression of hate. (11 November 2008)

Preacher Roe, 92 (NY Times). He was the greatest spitballer of them all, back when the Dodgers were in Ebbetts Field and most of the team used public transportation to get there. (11 November 2008)

Frank Rich: It Still Felt Good the Morning After (NY Times). "So even as we celebrated our first black president, we looked around and rediscovered the nation that had elected him. 'We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,' Obama said in February, and indeed millions of such Americans were here all along, waiting for a leader. This was the week that they reclaimed their country." (9 November 2008)

Another Parting Gift (NY Times). The Cheney/Bush administration has only a few weeks left to rape and pillage the country and, if this latest outrage in Utah is any indication, they plan to use every minute of it. No ex-president or ex-vice president has ever been brought to account for greed, viciousness and carelessness while in office, and these two villains know it and are counting on the tradition of misplaced gentility to continue. (8 November 2008)

Newton Garver: Massacre at Porvenir: A catalyst for transformation in Bolivia. (8 November 2008) "Morales has achieved all this through negotiation and reiteration of high principles, without using armed force to threaten or suppress his opponents. It is a refreshing model of political leadership. It is also apparent that, although during his first year in office he depended heavily on the support of Venezuela and Cuba, he has now come to rely more heavily on UNASUR and on Michelle Bachelet. Such a change bespeaks a regional rather than a Marxist ideology - or perhaps it represents pragmatism rather than ideology. The intense negotiations with his adversaries to obtain their backing for the new CPE shows a priority of constitutionalism over personal power. In all these ways Morales is proving to be a leader radically different form Castro or Chavez. It is now high time for the US to change our policies toward Bolivia." (8 November 2008)

Colbert loses it over Obama (Comedy Central/Huffington Post). No one stays in character better than Comedy Central's Steven Colbert, who puts on his right-wing commentator disguises as soon as he leaves the house in the morning and never takes it off until he's safely back home that night. But even he dropped the mask when Obama passed 270 electoral votes Tuesday night. While John Stewart carried on, he twice took off his glasses, puttered with irrelevant objects, looked down, wiped his eyes and was apparently speechless with delight. (6 November 2008)

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Barack Obama: Change Has Come to America (Real Clear Politics). A president who can think intelligently and say complex things coherently (yes, he can!). Here's the full text of Obama's Hyde Park speech to the nation and the world. (5 November 2008)

Hockey Mama for Obama (YouTube). The election is over and the hockey puck with lipstickwill be off the air for a while, but this final fabulous comment on everything about her is too good to pass up. Especially if you liked Evita. (5 November 2008)

Obama Appeal in Muslim World May Tone Down Militants (Bloomberg). Much of the world is relieved that the US has a elected a president who sees the US as a member of a global community, one not locked into the racist xenophobia that crippled and contaminated US foreign policy the past eight years. (5 November 2008)

Stevens (the felon) leads Begich by thin margin (Alaska Daily News). Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, convicted of several felony counts in D.C. a week ago, is leading his Democrat opponent Mark Begich by 4000 votes with 99% of the precincts counted. But 40,000 absentee ballots and 9000 early ballots haven't been counted yet, so Begich might pull it out. If Stevens maintains his lead and wins, then the Senate is all but certain to kick him out next year, whereupon there will be a special election for his seat in Alaska. If that happens, Sarah Palin is likely to run and, given the huge Republican majority in the state, likely to win. The only good thing about that is we'll get to see more Tina Fey on SNL. (5 November 2008)

So Little Time, So Much Damage (NY Times). The Bush administration has only a few weeks of real power left, so they've gone into overdrive to do as much damage as possible to civil liberties, abortion rights and environmental controls; they're also doing what they can to fatten the holdings of banking and industrial friends. (4 November 2008)

The man who listened: Studs Terkel May 16, 1912- October 31, 2008:Studs Terkel dies (Chicago Tribune); Edward Rothstein: An appraisal of Studs Terkel (NY Times); Stewart McBride: Studs Terkel (Christian Science Monitor); So long, Studs (Chicago Sun-Times) (3 November 2008)

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Pranking Palin (Canadian Press). A Quebec comic called Sarah Palin and pretended to be the President of France. You thought Palin was kind of hot-looking and also kind of ignorant? It turns out she's profoundly ignorant, and a twit as well. The article ends with a link to the hilarious 6-minute radio broadcast but if it's slow loading, click here for another. (2 November 2008)

The Undecided: Sheepish, Proud or Set to Flip Coin (NY Times). Several million Americans eligible to vote next Tuesday still tell pollsters they are "undecided." Assuming they're not lying, does this mean we've got several million J. Alfred Prufrocks running around loose? Or does Too Stupid to Process More Data Than Anybody Needs have to be a new voter categor? (2 November 2008)

The Electoral College Map (Princeton Election Consortium). Those maps of the US you see in newspapers and on tv news shows with Obama states in blue and McCain states in red distort more than they illustrate. That's because most of the land is in the heart of the country but most of the population is at the left, right and top. When it comes to electoral votes, Connecticut (7 electoral votes) is bigger than Montana and North Dakota combined; it is bigger than Kansas, Nebraska, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah and Alaska. Teensy Rhode Island (4 votes) is bigger than Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming and Alaska. So here's a map of the US that puts things in the kind of perspective you need for the next few days. (30 October 2008)

Craig Lambert: Richard Wilbur—Poetic Patriarch (Harvard Magazine). Richard Wilbur, 87, is still at it, writing every day on his L.C. Smith manual typewriter. He just started a new teaching job. Wilbur was part of a dazzling group of young writers at Harvard right after WWII: Maxine Kumin, John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Frank O'Hara, Robert Bly, Donald Hall and Adrienne Rich. With other students like that to hang out with, who needed the professors? (30 October 2008)

Wassup 2008 Commercial (YouTube). Even if you don't drink beer, watch it to the end. (28 October 2008)

Pennsylvania Republicans Send False Anti-Obama E-mail (NY Times). The Republican party has targeted Pennsylvania Jews with an email campaign claiming Obama "tought members of Acorn to commit voter registration fraud" (a lie) and suggesting that a vote for Obama might bring on another Holocaust. They also faulted Obama for his "failure" to get Bill Ayers locked up by the FBI (Ayers isn't wanted for anything, so this would be sort of like the Gestapo just picking up people who had distasteful political views 40 years ago), and faulting Ayers for saying things he never said. One of the signers was Judge Sandra Schwartz Newman, a member of McCain's national taskforce monitoring Election Day voting. How do you spell slimebag in Pennsylvania and the McCain campaign? (28 October 2008)

Paul Krugman: Desperately Seeking Seriousness (NY Times). The McCain campaign has been grounded in trivia: he's gone after Obama's friends, attacked him for being a "celebrity," insisted he was a socialist, and, for himself, has claimed that he's a "maverick," a term totally without meaning, and he chose the absurdly unqualified Sarah Palin as his VP. But the economic crisis is serious, not trivial, and people know that, and that is why the McCain campaign is tanking. "Will the nation’s new demand for seriousness last? Maybe not — remember how 9/11 was supposed to end the focus on trivialities? For now, however, voters seem to be focused on real issues. And that’s bad for Mr. McCain and conservatives in general: right now, to paraphrase Rob Corddry, reality has a clear liberal bias." (27 October 2008)

A Work in Progress: The Teen Brain (Harvard Magazine). "Your teenage daughter gets top marks in school, captains the debate team, and volunteers at a shelter for homeless people. But while driving the family car, she text-messages her best friend and rear-ends another vehicle. How can teens be so clever, accomplished, and responsible—and reckless at the same time?" (22 October 2008)

Feds Rush to Ease Endangered Species Rules (AP/CommonDreams). The Bush Administration is going out heads unbowed in a display of the cynicism that has characterized them for the past seven years eight months and two days. The latest is an attempt to destroy as many rules protecting endangered species as possible, a move consistently rejected by Congress but pushed by drillers and scoopers for who animals are just things you shoot when you're bored. (22 October 2008)

RNC shells out $150K for Palin fashion (Politico). The jes' plain folks hockey puck with lipsstick spent more than $75,000 on one Palin shopping spree in Neiman Marcus and $4716 on hair and makeup. These are the folks who kept 24/7 talk shows buzzing over John Edwards' $400 haircut. (22 October 2008)

Obama Recasts the Fund-Raising Landscape (NY Times). The Obama campaign raised a record $150 million in September, bringing their total to over $600 million, nearly what candidates in both major parties raised in 2004. After they get trounced November 4, McCain and the Republicans will whine that it was all that money buying all those commercials that did it. Once again they will have missed the point: the reason Obama has all that money to spend is because millions of Americans, even in these stressed times, are going deep into their wallets to get the change they want, which means ridding themselves of Republican cynicism and venality. (20 October 2008)

Lefty Rosenthal, Kingpin in Las Vegas, Dies at 79 (NY Times). He was the real life prototype of Robert DeNiro's character, Ace Rothstein, in Martin Scorsese's film of Nicholas Pileggi's book Casino. They didn't have to make much up. (19 October 2008)

Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama (MSNBC). Colin Powell's statement about the presidential campaign on NBC's "Meet the Press" is is perhaps the most eloquent endorsement of Barack Obama's campaign and critique of the McCain campaign's eccentricity, racism and demonizing anyone has yet offered on any major news or talk show. It's a great boost for the Obama campaign. Is Powell's well-reasoned endorsement enough to rehabilitate Powell in the opinion of those who remember his UN speech insisting there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Not likely, but this was a good thing for him to have done anyway. If the McCain campaign continues claiming that Obama doesn't have the experience to lead the nation or is contaminated by his passing contact years ago with Bill Ayers, all the Obama campaign need do in response is play the parts of Powell's statement perfectly demolishing those bogus charges. (19 October 2008)

Sarah Palin on SNL (NBC). Sarah Palin's appearance on "Saturday Night Live" was perfect synecdoche for Sarah Palin's campaign: a huge amount of hype leading up to it and nothing of substance when you get there: mostly, Palin looks back and forth, reads a few east lines off the teleprompter, one of which is the show's standard intro, "Live, from New York, it's Saturday Night!" Tina Fey, happily, did another of her superb Palin sendups. And that was it, save for a very brief bit on the news segment of the show where Palin rocked back and forth in her seat while third trimester Amy Poeler did a fabulous rap routine that highlighted what an insult to the American body politic Sarah Palin represents. (19 October 2008)

Drunk, Dangerous, and at the Keyboard (NY Times). You know Rule #1 of late night email: "Never hit Send after the second martini; wait until morning and be sure you meant all of that." And maybe something got you to forget that rule and you're still red-faced over it. Google to the rescue: Mail Goggles, a new option for users of Gmail, is the equivalent of a trigger-lock with a breathalyzer. Now the only thing to remember is: for those late-night emails use the Gmail account, not the office account. (19 October 2008)

Annie Proulx: No longer at home on the range (LA Times). The author of "Brokeback Mountain" and The Shipping News has had enough of Wyoming. Too much mud on the road to her ranch too much of the year. The nearest town is Saratoga, where hardly anybody knows who she is, her four kids have never read any of her work, and she gets too much mail from men who insist they're straight and know more about her characters than she does. (18 October 2008)

McCain's hate calls (Washington Post). The McCain campaign has launched a barrage of vicious hate robo-calls in battleground states. One goes: "Hello. I'm calling for John McCain and the RNC because you need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge's home and killed Americans." Another call accused the Democrats of wanting to "give civil rights to terrorists." Actually, it's the Constitution that does that. What a slime-bag McCain turned out to be. (18 October 2008)

Palin's oval office (Palinaspresident). What would it be like if Palin got to be president? Here's a preview. Move your cursor around this picture and click anyplace you find a hot link--on the chairs, the front of the desk, the windows, the door, the globe, the bridge to nowhere, the red telephone etc. (18 October 2008)

Beluga Whale Protection Bolstered; Palin Objects (NY Times). Despite attempts to save the beluga whale already in place, the population continue to deline, so the National Marine Fisheries Service want to do what can be done to avoid extinction. Sarah Palin, John McCain's hockey puck with lipstick, objects because saving the whale might inconvenience oil and gas developers. (17 October 2008)

UB Humanities Institute Annual Conference: "The Other Side of Reason: The History of Madness Today", Oct. 31-Nov. 1 (UBHI). "Taking its inspiration from the recent publication of the complete English translation of Michel Foucault’s History of Madness, this conference aims to examine various histories of madness and what 'madness' means today. Foucault reinvented history as a discourse capable of articulating the intimate yet hostile relationship between madness and reason, especially on the far side of the most ambitious attempts to uphold rationality as the basis of human institutions. The questions raised by History of Madness seem especially timely in an era that increasingly invokes 'reason' to adjudicate unforeseen ethical and political crises. Yet the urgency of contemporary predicaments all too easily rationalizes the speedy elimination of 'madness,' thereby prompting a return to forms of violent confinement—such as 'indefinite detention'—that were the object of Foucault’s original critique." The conference ends with a screening of Frederick Wiseman's classic documentary, Titicut Follies. (17 October 2008)

McCain & Obama at the Alfred E. Smith Dinner (NY Times/MSNBC). If John McCain had his campaign scripts written by the same guy who wrote his hilarious comedy routine at this annual political roast he might not be so far behind in the polls. And he reads it really well, with none of the wandering into gibberish that characterized so many of his responses in the third debate. Obama's comic routine is so-so, but the straight part at the end is one of the best speeches he's given anywhere. Watch the video. (17 October 2008)

Warren E. Buffett: Buy American. I Am. (NY Times). America's top investor tells you what to do with all that cash you've been hiding under the mattress. (17 October 2008)

Surfing the Internet Boost Aging Brains (NY Times). Guilt be gone!! When the doc asks "Have you been exercising" no need to hang your head in shame when you mumble, "Mostly at the computer." A new study shows that Googling is good for your brain health, that it stimulates and may even improve brain function. We'd write more, but we have go to look something up online....(16 October 2008)

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Garrison Keillor: Let the leader lead (Salon.com). "The American people are poised to do something that could not be imagined 10 years ago, or even five, which is to vote for the best man regardless of his skin color and elect him president. The campaign against him is not one that anybody will point to with pride in years to come. It is a long trail of honking and flapping and traces of green slime, as if a flock of geese had taken up residence in the front yard. But Barack's cool poise in the face of blather is some sort of testament to American heart and humor. The man has walked tall and his wife has turned out to be the brightest figure in the whole political parade, an ebullient woman of quick wit and beautiful spirit. Bravo, Michelle. Onward, America. We've all seen plenty of the worst -- the sly cruelty, the arrogant ignorance, the fascination with trivia, the cheats, the weaselish and piggish and the buzzardly -- but we can rise above it if we will only recognize a leader when one comes along and have the sense to let him lead." (15 October 2008)

Bruce Jackson: Raymond Federman. 13 photographs of novelist and Beckett-scholar Raymond Federman, along with friends Leslie Fiedler, Rene Girard, Al Cook, Olga Bernal, Michel Foucault, Sheila Lloyd and Ted Pearson. Federman, who taught at UB until his retirement in 1999, will be in Buffalo this weekend for an 80th birthday celebration at Hallwalls. (15 October 2008)

Supreme Court turns down Troy Davis (Amnesty International). The Supreme Court has decided that the strong possibility of innocence is not a sufficient reason to interfere with an execution. All but two of the witnesses against Troy Davis, who is scheduled to be killed by the state of Georgia Friday night, have recanted or contradicted their testimony, and many of them said they were pressured by police to give false testimony. Only two witnesses have not recanted, one of them a man implicated in the killing himself by 9 witnesses. (15 October 2008)

Robert Richter: McCain and Rolling Thunder: War hero or war criminal? (Counterpunch). If Telford Taylor, chief US prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials had his way, the self-proclaimed hero John McCain would have been tried as a war criminal. McCain talks a lot about his years as a POW; he almost never talks about the bomb he dropped on heavily populated areas just before he crashed his plane. (15 October 2008)

Khaled Hosseini: McCain and Palin Are Playing With Fire (Washington Post). "I -- and, I suspect, millions of Americans like me, Republicans and Democrats alike -- couldn't care less about Obama's middle name or the ridiculous six-degrees-of-separation game that is the William Ayers non-issue," writes Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. "The Taliban are clawing their way back in Afghanistan, the country that I hope many of my fellow Americans have come to understand better through my novels. People are losing their homes and their jobs and are watching the future slip away from them. But instead of addressing these problems, the McCain-Palin ticket is doing its best to distract Americans by provoking fear, anxiety and hatred. Country first? Hardly." (15 October 2008)

Bulls, Bears, Donkeys and Elephants (NY Times). If you want to help your wallet, vote Republican; if you want to help the downtrodden and peripheral, vote Democrat--right? That's the common wisdom. The only problem is, as in so many other instances, that kneejerk dodo CW has his facts wrong. An examination of economic activity under the last 8 presidents shows that an investment of $10,000 under Democratic presidents only would have grown to $300,671 (up 8.9% annually) , while the same amount invested under Republican presidents only would have grown to a mere $11,733 (down 0.4%) annually. So if you want to get rich, help the poor and sleep well at night, vote Democrat, which is what most of Buffalo Report's readers are going to do anyway. But now you have the kind of fact that might move your Republican friends to vote as rationally as you. (15 October 2008)

Frank Schaeffer: McCain's attacks fuel dangerous hatred (Baltimore Sun). An open letter to John McCain from the author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of it Back. "Your rallies are begging to look, sound, feel and smell like lynch mobs," Schaeffer writes. "If you do not stand up for all that is good in America and declare that Senator Obama is a patriot, fit for office, and denounce your hate-filled supportrs when they scream out 'Terroris' or 'Kill him,' history will hold you responsible for all that follows." (13 October 2008)

Peggy Seeger: Sarah's Hard_Rock_Candy. In this MP3 (3.9MB), folksinger Peggy Seeger imagines what would happen if the hobos who sang "Big Rock Candy Mountain" rewrote the classic song for the current presidential race. (12 October 2008)

Joseph E. Stiglitz: Reversal of Fortune (Vanity Fair) "What has happened to the American economy," writes Nobel laureate Stiglitz, "was avoidable. It was not just that those who were entrusted to maintain the economyÂ’s safety and soundness failed to do their job. There were also many who benefited handsomely by ensuring that what needed to be done did not get done. Now we face a choice: whether to let our response to the nationÂ’s woes be shaped by those who got us here, or to seize the opportunity for fundamental reforms, striking a new balance between the market and government." (11 October 2008)

Troopergate report: Palin abused power (Anchorage Daily News). "A legislative investigation has concluded that Gov. Sarah Palin abused her power in pushing for the firing of an Alaska state trooper who was once married to her sister, or by failing to prevent her husband Todd from doing so." She had the legal authority, the report says, to fire the state's public safety commissioner, but her pressuring officials to punish the trooper and allowing her husband to apply such pressure was an abuse of her authority. The report also found that officials in the Palin administration improperly avoiding testifying in the case. Palin had initially promised full cooperation with the legislation, but after receiving the Republican Party vice presidential nomination, she stonewalled. (11 October 2008)

Branchflower Report to the Legislative Council. A pdf of the full 263-page report on Palin's abuse of power to the Alaska legislature (11 October 2008)

Ayers = Keating? (FAIR). The media have been giving equal time and equal weight to the Ayers story (McCain and Palin are insisting that Obama hangs around with a terrorist) and the Keating story (McCain and four other senators tried to get federal regulators to back off an investigation into the S&L mess). But the two stories aren't equal. For starters, Obama isn't guilty of any of the made-up charges McCain and Palin are using to crank up the screamers at their rallies, but McCain is very much guilty of being part of the mess that resulted in our last big bank failure. Two stories don't deserve equal time if one of them is a lie and the other one is true. (10 October 2008)

New McCain Ad Slams Obama on Ayers, Economy (NY Times). As McCain grows ever more desperate, his campaign ads grow ever more vicious, full of lies and distortions and bits and pieces taken out of context and turned upside down. And McCain-Palin political rallies grow ever more raucous and racist. The only thing missing are the armbands and stiff-arm salutes—but the campaign has several weeks to run so perhaps we'll yet see that as well. (10 October 2008)

John Cleese: Ode to Sean Hannity. It took a Brit to nail Fox's slug-in-chief. Keith Olberman got to read it aloud on Wednesday's "Countdown" on MSNBC. (9 October 2008)

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The Choice (New Yorker). Tim Dickinson's article in this week's Rolling Stone (see below) gives you more than enough reasons to pull any lever in the booth other than the one that says "John McCain." This editorial from the October 13 New Yorker provides the best argument we've yet seen why you should pull the lever marked "Barack Obama." It's a primer on the moral, ethical, and conceptual failures of the Bush administration and the McCain campaign, and the huge advantage Obama has over McCain in intelligence, character and experience (crashing four airplanes and being a POW isn't the kind of experience a presidential aspirant needs, no matter how much shuffling John argues otherwise). (9 October 2008)

Greg Mitchell: The Dishonesty of David Brooks (Editor&Publisher). David Brooks is the shifty-eyed guy on PBS Newshour who smiles a lot while he's saying something nasty, manipulative, disingenuous or downright untrue—kinda like John McCain. Last week he wrote in the NY Times that Palin had done a wonderful job in the debate with Joe Biden, but at an event later in the week he said she was "not even close" to being VP material. He's never written a word in the Times saying what he really thinks, nor has he said it on Newshour. Add 'hypocrite' to the list. (9 October 2008)

U.S. Study is Said to Warn of Crisis in Afghanistan (NY Times). The Bush administration made a key decision early in its bungled war on terror: it all but abandoned the pursuit of Bin Laden in Afghanistan and support for the recovering Afgahanistan government in favor of its war in Iraq, which had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks that justified all this hurly-burly in the first place, but which had a lot of oil in the ground. A National Intelligence Estimate set for release after the election documents the disastrous effects in Afghanistan of that stupid and greedy choice. (9 October 2008)

'SNL' wants laughs, not votes (LA Times). Cantcha have both? Youbetcha. Since Tina Fey started her sendups of the Hockey Puck With Lipstick the ratings for "Saturday Night Live" have soared. And they're even planning a few election runup primtime specials. (9 October 2008).

Gail Collins: Clearing the Ayers (NY Times). "John McCain traces the rancorous tone of the presidential campaign back to last summer when he invited Barack Obama to have lots and lots of town-hall meetings with him all around the country. When Obama turned him down, obviously McCain had no choice but to start depicting his opponent as a terrorist-loving advocate of talking dirty to kindergarteners." (9 October 2008)

Spectator: "All hands on deck": for John McCain, it's a relative term. While his shipmates were dealing with the dead, the dying and the still smoldering fires, John McCain went to Saigon drinking scotch with an NY Times reporter, telling him how bravely he'd behaved the past few days. (9 October 2008)

Tim Dickinson: Make-Believe Maverick (Rolling Stone). If you read nothing else about John McCain, read this. Actually, after you read this you won't have to read anything else about John McCain. You'll know all you need to know about him. "In his current campaign, McCain has become the kind of politician he ran against in 2000. He has embraced those he once denounced as 'agents of intolerance,' promised more drilling and deeper tax cuts, even compromised his vaunted opposition to torture. Intent on winning the presidency at all costs, he has reassembled the very team that so viciously smeared him and his family eight years ago, selecting as his running mate a born-again moose hunter whose only qualification for office is her ability to electrify Rove's base. And he has engaged in a 'practice of politics' so deceptive that even Rove himself has denounced it, saying that the outright lies in McCain's campaign ads go 'too far' and fail the 'truth test.'" (8 October 2008)

The electoral count, & more (Electoral-vote.com). It's electoral votes that matter, and the best site watching that widening spread is Electoral-vote com, which also provides up-to-date poll recaps on senate seats at play and some house seats. Their estimate the morning after the second debate: McCain 174 and "That one" 349. (8 October 2008)

Respond to the Ayers smear (supportbillayers.org). The McCain campaign's attempt to smear Barack Obama by slandering Bill Ayers is right out of Joe McCarthy's playbook: when you can't get an opponent by telling the truth, you tell lies about somebody he knows and then blame your opponent for the lies you've just told. Neither McCain nor the Hockey Mom mention that Bill Ayers is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at University of Illinois at Chicago, the author of 17 books, a highly regarded teacher, and all sorts of other honorable and praiseworthy good stuff. Why would they? Facts just get in the way of the smears and lies. A number of academics have endorsed a statement supporting Bill Ayers and condemning the character assassination. (8 October 2008)

Michelle Goldberg: Flirting her way to victory (Guardian). Other than Keith Olberman, no major league American journalist, commentator or newsreader has had the cojones and network backing to say without qualification what a bad name Sarah Palin gives trailer trash. Folks abroad are astonished that a huge number of American citizens take her at all seriously. This fair and balanced evalution of Palin from a British commentator begins, "At least three times last night, Sarah Palin, the adorable, preposterous vice-presidential candidate, winked at the audience. Had a male candidate with a similar reputation for attractive vapidity made such a brazen attempt to flirt his way into the good graces of the voting public, it would have universally noted, discussed and mocked. Palin, however, has single-handedly so lowered the standards both for female candidates and American political discourse that, with her newfound ability to speak in more-or-less full sentences, she is now deemed to have performed acceptably last night." (8 October 2008)

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Who You Callin' a Maverick? (NY Times). The Maverick family of Texas—the source of the word that John McCain and Sarah Palin have been pasting all over their foreheads—have had enough. A maverick is a frisky unbranded calf. McCain's too old and stuffy for that and Palin only knows the word because they taught it to her in the prep sessions. The Mavericks of Texas, the real Mavericks, are progressive, card-carrying members of the ACLU, folks with good liberal politics and huge respect for civil liberties—and they oppose the war in Iraq. What do the Mavericks say about John McCain? "He's a Republican. He's branded." (6 October 2008)

The VP debate they should have aired: Tina Fey and Queen Latifah on SNL (NBC). The guy playing McCain is awful and the lines he reads are stupid, but Tina Fey's sendup of Sarah Palin at the VP debate and Queen Latifah's sendup of moderator Gwen Ifill are hilarious. (5 October 2008)

An Interview With Norman Finkelstein (Dissident Voice). "ThereÂ’s no 'intellectual' battle with Dershowitz." says Finkelstein in this ranging interview. "On his part thereÂ’s no summoning of facts or elegant use of logic. ItÂ’s just bar mitzvah speeches. He doesnÂ’t know anything, I doubt if heÂ’s read more than a half-dozen books on the topic. I donÂ’t entirely fault him. You canÂ’t defend high profile spousal murderers like O.J. Simpson, high profile sexual predators like Jeffrey Epstein, and high profile mass murderers like Radovan Karadzic, yet still have time left over to do serious scholarship. What he does is entertainment; itÂ’s a circus. HeÂ’s like Hitchens. No one really cares about the facts Hitchens brings to bear. He could be making one case today and the opposite case tomorrow. Would anybody notice? TheyÂ’re just interested in the rococo tapestry he weaves around the facts." (5 October 2008)

This time, Roe vs. Wade really could hang in the balance (LA Times). Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens is 88. If he's replaced by an anti-abortion justice, as he surely will be if McCain is elected, that new judge will join Alito, Roberts, Scalia and Thomas in making sure that America becomes the only industrialized nation in which women must endure unwanted pregnancies and bear unwanted children. (5 October 2008)

US cuts funding for condoms in African clinics (Mail&Guardian). The US rationale is that the agency distributing the condoms also supports forcd abortions or coercive sterilization in China, which the organization says is completely untrue. There seems to be no evidence to back up the US claim, which officials say will lead to an increase in abortions in Africa. Even though there are only a few months left, they're not getting any saner in the Executive. (4 October 2008)

Becoming a target for Israel's 'Jewish terrorists' (The Independent). The terrorists who tried to kill him and perhaps his family with a pipe bomb, said Holocaust survivor and Israeli combat veteran Zeev Sternhell last week, weren't gangsters or Muslims. They were Israeli extremists, the same thugs who murdered Yitzhak Rabin, trying to make sure no one hears arguments against the expropriation and occupation of Palestinian lands and abuse of Palestinian families. (4 October 2008)

Uri Avenery on the Sternhell pipe bomb attack (Gush Shalom). "Israeli Fascism is alive and kicking," writes Israeli war hero and peace activist Uri Avnery. "It is growing in the flowerbed that produced the various religious-nationalist underground groups of the past: the group that tried to bomb the Muslim shrines on the Temple Mount, the underground that tried to assassinate the Palestinian mayors, the 'Kach' gang, the perpetrator of the Hebron massacre Baruch Goldstein, the murderer of peace activist Emil Gruenzweig, the murderer of Yitzhak Rabin and all the underground groups that were uncovered at an early stage before their deeds could bring them to public notice. These acts cannot simply be attributed to individuals or 'rogue groups'. There exists a definite fascist fringe at the margin of Israel's political society. Its ideology is religious-nationalist, and its spiritual leaders are mostly 'Rabbis', who formulate its world view and the practical application." (4 October 2008)

Garrison Keillor: Where is the outrage? (Salon.com) "McCain now decries greed on Wall Street and suggests a commission be formed to look into the problem. This is like Casanova coming out for chastity....Some say the tab might come to a trillion dollars. Nobody knows. And Mr. McCain has not one moment of doubt or regret. He switches from First Deregulation Church to Our Lady of Strict Vigilance like you might go from decaf to latte. Where is the straight talk? Does the man have no conscience?...Mr. McCain seems willing to say anything, do anything, to get to the White House so he can go to war with Iran. If he needs to recline naked in Macy's window, he would do that, or eat live chickens, or claim to be a reformer." (4 October 2008)

Frank Rich: Pitbull Palin Mauls McCain (NY Times). Last week the few sane Republicans left were desperately hoping McCain would dump Palin and replace her with someone they didn't have to apologize for when they greeted their teenage children at breakfast. This week, as McCain continues to spin out of control and gets ever more random and loopy, they're hoping that he'll be the one to disappear so they can have a candidate who is just arrogant and ignorant and vicious. (4 October 2008)

Joe Conason: The dumbing down of the GOP (Salon.com). Democrats are disgusted and terrified that 72-year-old John McCain, who has twice had a kind of cancer that frequently returns and is often fatal and who walks like every step is a more difficult task than the one preceding it, has picked as his running mate at cliche-slinging winking twit who doesn't read newspapers and who seems to have no knowledge of world affairs beyond the facts that Canada is on the dry side of Alaska and Russia is on the wet side of Alaska. But what about Republicants? She's their candidate. They should be disgusted, terrified and insulted. Why are they just mumbling and saying how happy they are when she gets through another day avoiding a press conference and survives a debate by desperately babbling obviously-memorized talking points? (4 October 2008)

McCain's Health (The Real McCain). A scary Robert Greenwald video documentary on the need for the public to know the truth about McCain's medical condition (he's had melanoma surgery four times, he has several other serious conditions, he's on a bunch of medications) and the vigor with which the McCain campaign has struggled to keep the facts from coming out. Also the text of the letter signed by 2,759 doctors and 54,215 other people urging the release of those records. (4 October 2008)

Palin's wink, you betcha (The Guardian). According to some Florida voters, Palin's cute girlie gestures have set feminist gains back a decade. (4 October 2008)

O.J.'s going to prison (Las Vegas Sun). 13 years to the day after a Los Angeles jury acquitted him of double murder, former Buffalo Bills running back O.J. Simpson was convicted in Las Vegas of 12 felony and misdemeanor counts. Click here for the NY Times account of the trial and Simpson's rise and fall. And click here for the reaction in L.A. (4 October 2008)

The electoral map (NY Times). Forget the polls; they tell you almost nothing you need to know. The polls leading up to a one vote win by one candidate in California and a million-vote win by the other in New York will show the guy who won New York ahead, but since California has 55 electoral votes and New York only 31, the polls would have had the results backwards. What you need to know is how the voters are siding in each state and what the implications of that are for the candidate who reaches the magic number of 270. The day this is posted Obama is ahead in the