Buffalo Report articles and links 2007
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How Blackwater Sniper Fire Felled 3 Iraqi Guards (Washington Post). According to Iraqi officials, a Blackwatger sniper murdered three guards on the roof of the Iraqi Media Network. The US State Department interviewed the Blackwater guards, who said they'd been fired upon and cleared them of wrongdoing. Iraqis say no one fired on the Americans. Blackwater has offered no apology compensation to the victims' families and the families can't sue in an Iraqi court because former US occupation commander L. Paul Bremer issued an edict saying no US mercenary could be held responsible by the Iraqi government for anything. (8 November 2007)
Yahoo taken to task over China (LA Times). Yahoo gave the Chinese government the names of its users, which resulted in some of them being jailed. "While technologicially and financially you are giants," said Rep. Tom Lantos to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and executive v-p Michael Callahan, "morally you are pigmies." At that point Yang bowed three times, each lower than the last, to the mother of a journalist locked up because of Yahoo's willingness to cooperate with Chinese authorities. (LA Times)
Sen. Charles Schumer: A Vote for Justice (NY Times). Senator Schumer is going to vote for Bush attorney general-designate Michael B. Mukasey even though Mukasey won't renounce Bush torture policies. Torture is unpleasant, Schumer says, but the Justice Department is a mess after 7 years of Ashcroft and Gonzales, and Mukasey is just the man to neaten up those littered halls. You can't, says Schumer, get everything, so he's going to take what he thinks is the best the American people can get. (But before you buy into this apparently reasoned position, see the following item.) (6 November 2007)
Senator Charles Schumer: Statement to Attorney General John Ashcroft about torture at a session of the Senate Judiciary Committee, June 8, 2004 (Buffalo Report). Sen. Chuck Schumer's willingness to back the nomination of Michael B. Mukasey is perhaps a good deal less puzzling in light of Schumer's comments on the legitimacy of torture to John Ashcroft more than three years ago. He echoed, almost word for word, Harvard torture advocate Alan Dershowitz's argument: torture is permissible when done by good people for good reasons, but it is impermissible if it is done by naughty people for naughty reasons; we're good people and we would only torture for the best of reasons, so it is okay to for us to torture. Not too often; only when it's called for. (6 November 2007)
Woody Allen: "Most of us need the eggs" (whysanity.net). The end of "Annie Hall," which utilizes the same logic as the two previous items. (6 November 2007)
Studs Terkel: The Wiretap This Time (NY Times). Some telephone companies have conspired with the Bush administration to do interceptions of electronic communications that are barred by the Constititution and by Federal law. Congress is moving to give those companies a pass on their conspiracy and their violations. Why would the Senate want to do that? Why would those senators want to keep Americans whose privacy has been violated illegally from having their day in court? (5 November 2007)
From the Desk of Donald Rumsfeld (Washington Post). The daily "snowflakes" (the 20-60 memos he circulated among his staff every day) suggest that the former Secretary of Defense was mad as a hatter. You're surprised, right? (5 November 2007)
Capital Cases Stall as Crosts Grow Daunting (NY Times). The need to provide the accused a fair and reasonable defense in capital cases is forcing some states to decide legal killing may not be such fun after all. (5 November 2007)
Terry Teachout: The Amateur as Critic (Commentary). Buffalo isn't the only city whose sole daily newspaper employs not one competent art, book, classical music, architecture or film critic. "Of all the changes that have taken place in English-language newspapers during the past quarter-century, perhaps the most far-reaching has been the inexorable decline in the scope and seriousness of their arts coverage. Not only have many newspapers done away with their book-review sections, but several major papers, including the Chicago Sun-Times and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, no longer employ full-time classical-music critics. Even those papers that continue to review fine-arts events are devoting less space to them, while the 'think pieces' on cultural subjects that once graced the pages of big-city Sunday papers are becoming a thing of the past." (5 November 2007)
Pamuk in D.C. (Washington Post). Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, who leads off Just Buffalo's Babel series later this week, gave an impassioned political speech at Georgetown University on October 29. It wasn't about the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians (mention of which got him into so much trouble at home) or the various US wars. Rather it was about the liberating power of literature. How radical and how unAmerican: words and ideas rather than guns and embargos. (5 November 2007)
Sandra Babcock: The Global Debate on the Death Penalty (Human Rights). The United States is more and more isolated in its refusal to end capital punishment. This year, Rwanda became the 100th national to declare that cool, deliberate killing by the state is uncivilized, and 29 other countries have done the same thing de facto. The change reflects a major shift in the death penalty paradigm, from a domestic penal policy to a human rights issue. (4 November 2007)
Joan Walsh: When waterboarding was a crime (Salon.com). After WWII, Japanese soldiers who waterboarded American POWs were tried as war criminals. So what contorted and delusional rationales have Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein worked up to convince themselves it's okay to approve a Bush nominee who refuses to say there's anything wrong with the practice? (4 November 2007)
Tom Robbins: Tall Tales of a Mafia Mistress (Village Voice). The key prosecution witness against an FBI agent accused of telling the mob who should be murdered next turns out to have done a good deal of creative writing. (1 November 2007)
If Bill O'Loughlin isn't an idiot he gives a superb imitation of one (BuffaloGeek). Erie County Clerk candidate Bill O'Laughlin (he who doesn't want illegal immigrants to drive and who wears an American flag in his lapel) left not one, but two ranting and raving voicemail messages on somebody's machine. It's hard to tell what set him off, but if this is any indication of how he'd behave if elected, we're voting for the other guy. (Sometimes he gets so frothy he's hard to understand--scroll down for a full transcript.) (31 October 2007)
U.N. again urges U.S. to end Cuba embargo (USA Today). By a vote of 184 to 4 (with one abstention), the United Nations again urged the U.S. to end its 46-year-old trade embargo against Cuba. The Bush administration maintains the embargo solely to placate the anti-Castro Cuban-Americans in south Florida. The only nations to endorse the U.S. embargo were Israel (which always votes with the U.S. in exchange for the U.S.'s inflexible veto of any Security Council resolution attempting to stop Israel's abuse of Palestinians), Palau, and the Marshall Islands. Micronesia abstained. (31 October 2007)
South America Ushers in the Era of La Presidenta (Washington Post). Macho no more: Chile and Agentina have now elected female presidents, and Paraguay and Brazil seem likely to do the same. (31 October 2007)
Arthur Kornberg, Biochemist, Dies at 89 (NY Times). He was one of three members of CCNY's graduating class who won Nobel Prizes (the other two were Herbert A. Hauptman and Jerome Karle). His discovery of how DNA is assembled ignited the biotechnology revolution. His son, Roger, won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2006. Something about the genes. (28 October 2007)
I Editor Author (NY Times). Do you really want to read a pre-Maxwell Perkins Look Homeward, Angel or pre-Gordon Lish What We Talk About When We Talk About Love? The folks who control the literary estates of Thomas Wolfe and Raymond Carver think so. (28 October 2007)
Ghada Karmi: Intellectual terrorism (Guardian). The poison spreads: continuing their attack on free speech and intellectual inquiry, Alan Dershowitz and friends bring their brand of McCarthyism and the dialog of hatred to Great Britain. (28 October 2007)
Esther Kaplan: The Culture War Descends on Columbia (The Nation). How did Columbia University become a running dog for David Horowitz and a suck for AIPAC? Lee Bollinger's shameless ass-kissing was bad enough, but now the whole university seems to be following his lead. (28 October 2007)
Another $200 Billion (NY Times). "President Bush waited until he had vetoed a relatively inexpensive children’s health insurance bill before asking for tens of billions of dollars more for his misadventure in Iraq. The cynicism of that maneuver is only slightly less shameful than the president’s distorted priorities. Despite a pretense of fiscal prudence, Mr. Bush keeps throwing money at his war, regardless of the cost in blood, treasure or children’s health care." And, if the past is any indication of the future, the Democrats will help him do it. (28 October 2007)
Israel approves Gaza power cuts (BBC). Israel controls all of Gaza's borders, territorial waters and airspace. It also supplies 60% of the area's electricity. In addition to its economic embargo, which among other things reduces the flow of badly-needed medical supplies for cancer patients and milk for children, the Barak government has now cut the amount of electrical power available to Gaza. Having failed to defeat Hamas on the battleground, the Israeli warriors now attack the women and children in Gaza. Click here for more on that from Gush Shalom. (28 October 2007)
Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff: Gaza electricity and fuel cuts: behind the propaganda (Haaretz). The real reasons Barak is tightening the screws on innocent civilians in Gaza, 80% of whom live below the poverty line. (28 October 2007)
FEMA Meets the Press, Which Happens to Be...FEMA (Washington Post/Common Dreams). FEMA got beat up pretty bad by the press after it botched Katrina recovery. What to do, what to do? They figured out a really creative way to deal with the press that solved all their problems, save for one thing: they got caught, and now they're more a laughing-stock than ever. (28 October 2007)
Rumsfeld hit with torture lawsuit while visiting Paris (RawStory). The Bush administration has made all kinds of clever moves to immunize and indemnify its key members from war crimes charges. The only problem is, the rest of the civilized world is still a world of laws, which means when ex-Bushies cross the borders they're at risk of prosecution, as Rummy just found out when he got slapped with a Center of Constitutional Rights lawsuit in Paris. Rummy's wisecracking was all he needed to deflect hard questions when he was Secretary of Defense; now, he needs a different technology. Click here for details on the lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights. (28 October 2007)
We must bomb Iran, says US Republican guru (Telegraph). The neocon founding fruitcake, Norman Podhoretz, is confident that we can bomb Iran with no negative consequences for the US and that bombing is a far superior way of dealing with Iran than diplomacy. Who is more pathological, Podhoretz, or President Bush, who gives him quality time, or Rudy Giuliani, who talks to him every day? (28 October 2007)
Texas judge fosters unsparing reputation (Boston Globe). There are many reasons Texas has executed more of its citizens than any other state, and nearly as many as all other states combined. One of them is judges who just don't like defendants in criminal cases. (28 October 2007)
Craig hired lawyer months before his arrest (Idaho Statesman). Sen. Larry Craig hired a criminal lawyer four months before his arrest in Minneapolis on a minor sex charge. He says he talked to the lawyer about other things, but never about the arrest, which means either he is a flat-out liar or wins the Senator James Inhofe award for being even dumber than we thought possible. (28 October 2007)
US to Order Diplomats to Serve in Iraq (NY Times). GIs don't have any choice: if they're ordered to go to Iraq they have to go, else they face jail time. State Department diplomats are civilians, so they don't have to be posted anywhere they don't want to go. Lately, more and more of them are saying "no" to Iraq. It seems they prefer that the only Americans getting shredded by IEDs are GIs and Blackwater mercenaries. Now the State Department is drafting them for Iraq service: they won't go to jail if they just say no, but neither will they have a job any more. (28 October 2007)
R.B. Kitaj, Painter of Moody Human Dramas, Dies at 74 (NY Times). The painter who (according to Robert Hughes) "draws better than almost anyone else alive," and who once said, "I'd like to do for Jews what Morandi did for Jars" has died. For more on him, see the press release for the 2005 Marlborough Gallery exhibit "How to Reach 72 In a Jewish Art." (28 October 2007)
Malise Ruthven: How to Understand Islam (New York Review of Books). Shortly after the September 11, 2001, both Tony Blair and George W. Bush said such violence against innocent civilians was against the basic teachings of Islam. That would come as surprising news to many nonmoderate Muslims, if they were paying any attention to the likes of Blair or Bush or any other Westerners, which they're not. (22 October 2007)
Valerie Plame, Telling the (Edited) Inside Story (Washington Post). The most gorgeous undercover agent ever betrayed by the Bush White House (so far as we know) has published a book that tells the part of her story she can tell without being hauled off to jail, "Fair Game: MY Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House." (22 October 2007)
Robert Chalmers: Studs Terkel: The world's greatest interviewer (Independent). He's interviewed everybody, he's 95, he thinks Bush is an idiot, and he's never learned to drive ("Why should I have? The bus was there."). (22 October 2007)
SAS raiders enter Iran to kill gunrunners (London Times). Or people they say are gunrunners. Whatever the rationale, our colleagues in war, the Brits, have started bloody operations in Iran. The nose of the camel is in the tent. (22 October 2007)
State Department Struggles to Oversee Private Army (Washington Post). So when did we stop calling them "mercenaries"? Is this like calling squatters "settlers" and torturers "interviewers"? (22 October 2007)
Tighter Border Delays Re-entry by U.S. Citizens (NY Times). One more page one news story to give Osama the giggles: crossing the southern border is now like swimming in molasses. WHat was it Bush said? Oh yeah: "Mission accomplished." (22 October 2007)
Larry McMurtry: Diane Keaton on Photograph (New York Review of Books). The author of "Lonesome Dove" tells how he took Annie Hall out of a flower bed and to a rummage sale, and how she sees and preserves images that are about to disappear. (22 October 2007)
Pete Seeger: War songs medley, ending with "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" .(Smothers Brothers Show). Pete wrote this in 1967 about Lyndon B. Johnson and his pointless war in Vietnam, but translates perfectly to George W. Bush and his pointless war in Iraq. And click here for Pete singing "Bring 'Em Home," another Vietnam era song that could have been written this morning. (22 October 2007)
Bruce Jackson: Trucking Buffalo (Artvoice). How they screwed up the Peace Bridge expansion project. Astonishing--after all these years! (19 October 2007)
Peter Koch: Block Club (Artvoice). The Peace Bridge Authority wants to destroy a whole bunch of well-maintained West Side homes. The owners of some of those homes talk about what it looks like from their side of the PBA's wrecking ball. (19 October 2007)
Steve Stipanovich: The West Side vs. Black Rock — Which Neighborhood Should Die? (BuffaloRising). Both plaza plans—the one offered by the Public Bridge Authority and the one offered by the Ambassador Bridge Group—are stinkers. Why is a regional transportation project with major quality of life issues in the hands of two groups operating in secrecy and controlled by self-interest? (19 October 2007)
Walter Shapiro: How Hillary could tank (Salon.com). The weather can change on a dime in politics and the Democrats' Denver convention is still a long time away. Hillary has the lead, but she doesn't have a lock. Here are 10 ways it could go wrong. (16 October 2007)
Federal Enforcement Data Show Major Changes in How the Bush Administration has Enforced the Law (TracReports). The Bush administration has cut prosecutions of white collar criminals by 27%, corrupt officials by 14%, organized crime figures by 48%, drug pushers by 20%, and weapons violabors by 30%. The only major federal enforcement area that has gone up is immigration offences—by 127%. This is a revolutionary change in federal law enforcement practice. Is this what you were voting for in 2004? Do you feel safer because of it? (16 October 2007)
A mortal wound to tribal advantage (CapeCodToday). The governor of Massachussetts has come up with a device he hopes will help ordinary businesses cope with the kind of disproprortionate tax advantage George Pataki, Byron Brown and other myopic politicians have handed Indian tribes wanting to operate tax-exempt, minimum-wage-exempt, environmental-law-exempt, and all-the-rest-of-it-exempt gambling joints: play on a level playing field or you don't get to play at all. How radical. (15 October 2007)
Timothy Noah: Chris DeMuth, Hack Extaordinaire: The leader of President Bush's favorite think tank bids adieu (Slate). The American Enterprise Institute has provided the Bush administration some of its worst members (Dick Cheney, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, John Bolton, John Yoo, e.g.) and some of its dumbest ideas (invade Iraq, global warming is a fiction, e.g.). It's chief is now stepping down, perhaps because there is no more damage his organization might do to the American enterprise. (14 October 2007)
Stephen Colbert: I Am an Op-Ed Columnist (And So Can You) (NY Times). We don't ordinarily provide links to the New York Times' mistress of the snide aside, Maureen Dowd, here, but this one was too good to pass up: it has just three paragraphs of the cynical Dowd (one with a howling error in cutsey French), followed by 16 hilarious paragraphs from the greatest ironist working in television today, Stephen Colbert. (14 October 2007)
Uri Avnery: The Mother of All Pretexts (Gush Shalom). "For many, this is not just a Separation Wall between Israel and Palestine. It is a part of the world-wide wall between the West and Islam, the front-line of the Clash of Civilizations. Beyond the wall there are not men, women and children, not a conquered and oppressed Palestinian population, not choked towns and villages like Abu-Dis, a-Ram, Bil'in and Qalqilia. No, beyond the wall there are a billion terrorists, multitudes of blood-thirsty Muslims, who have only one desire in life: to throw us into the sea, simply because we are Jews, part of Judeo-Christian Civilization. With an official position like that - who is there to talk to? What is there to talk about? What is the point of meeting in Annapolis or anywhere else? And what is left to us to do - to cry or to laugh?" (13 October 2007)
Tim Rutten: Coulter's ant-Semitic comment too dangerous to ignore (LA Times). Who reads or watches Ann Coulter? Do you know anybody who does? It must be a part of the population we know nothing about, a big mass of dumb haters sitting around their tv sets thinking anorexic. The latest from Miss Meanie is that America would be a better country if all its Jews were "perfected" into Christianity. Here, finally, is a project worthy of AIPAC and those bigots in StandWithUs. (13 October 2007)
Doris Lessing: Questions You Should Never Ask a Writer (NY Times). Yale professor Harold Bloom seems to have had a hissy-fit over the Nobel Prize going to Doris Lessing. In this very smart piece on the debasement of language in politics and the academy she indicates why no one should pay the distraught professor any attention at all. (13 October 2007)
Watchdog of C.I.A. Is Subject of C.I.A. Inquiry (NY Times). The CIA's Inspector General is charged with investigating improper activity within the CIA—everything from internal corruption to actions by CIA agents prohibited by law. Recently, he turned his attention to illegal torture of CIA kidnap victims held in secret detention center. For this bit of mischief, the director of the CIA has ordered an inquiry of the Inspector General. The message seems to be: It's okay for the IG to look, but not for him to find anything. (13 October 2007)
Ex-Commander in Iraq Faults War Strategy: 'No End in Sight,' Says Retired General Sanchez (Washington Post). "This is how the general who ran the US military operation in Iraq for a year after the March 2003 invasion characterizes that war: "The administration, Congress and the entire interagency, especially the State Department, must shoulder the responsibility for this catastrophic failure, and the American people must hold them accountable. There has been a glaring unfortunate display of incompetent strategic leadership within our national leaders." Let's see how long it takes Fox News and Rush Limbaugh to turn him into a closet lefty and counterculture spy. (13 October 2007)
James Wood: Parade's End: The many lives of Nathan Zuckerman (New Yorker). Something about Philip Roth at his best brings out the worst reviewers, or the worst in otherwise good reviewers. That notorious snitch and narcissist Christopher Hitchens did a Portnoy all over Roth's "Exit Ghost" in putative review for Atlantic, and last week's NY Times had a review of by Clive James that misread the plot in its entirety. It's not all envy and myopia out there, however: James Wood, in this superb review from the New Yorker, gets it right. (11 October 2007)
Governor Sets His Sights on Revitalizing Buffalo (NY Times). NY Governor Eliot Spitzer has an $850 million development plan designed to revitalize Buffalo and Niagara Falls. Most of it is other people's money and money that was previously promised but never delivered. Whether he can go beyond Pataki's blather and actually deliver is yet to be seen. Most of the money seems to be for the Bass Pro sporting goods store (talk about welfare!) and for downtown condos—the kind of housing that favors upscale tenants with no children. Harvard economist Edward Glaeser pointed out that Spitzer is putting the money in exactly the wrong place. So what else is new? (11 October 2007)
Howard Zinn asks for help fighting attack on academic freedom at U. Michigan. An email from the historian Howard Zinn. StandWithUs, the group he mentions that is pressuring U Michigan Press to censor Joel Kovel's book and stop distributing Pluto Books, was involved in a hate mail campaign against three University at Buffalo professors a few years ago. Two of us were targeted because we sponsored a campus lecture by the historian Norman Finkelstein; the third was targeted because the StandWithUs didn't think she devoted enough time to the Jewish Holocaust in one of her classes. Academic freedom and the open examination of ideas is not very high on their agenda, as our experience here and Zinn's letter indicates. (11 October 2007)
Nick Turse: Slum Fights: The Pentagon Plans for a New Hundred Years' War (TomDispatch). "The Pentagon has evidently decided to prepare for 100 years more of...war against various outposts of a restless, oppressed population of slum-dwellers one billion strong and growing at an estimated rate of 25 million a year. All of these Urban Operations experts are preparing for an endless struggle that history suggests they can't win, but that is guaranteed to lead to large-scale destruction, destabilization, and death. Unsurprisingly, the civilians of the cities that they plan to occupy, whether living in Karachi, Jakarta, or Baghdad, have no say in the matter." (11 October 2007)
Jimmy Carter: US tortures prisoners, "I know it" (RawStory). If you change the definition of torture so it doesn't cover the torture you're doing, then you can, with a straight face, do what Bush does: claim the US doesn't torture. But that wordplay, says former president Jimmy Carter doesn't change the reality, which is that the current president of the United States has authorized torture and the people who work for him are doing it. (11 October 2007)
Rebecca Traister: Chicks behind the flicks (Salon.com). "Ten of Hollywoods most powerful women sit down to discuss the state of the movie business—why there aren't more female directors, why blowing things up is fun, and more." (11 October 2007)
Terry Eagleton: Rebuking obnoxious views is not just a personality kink (Guardian). British novelist Martin Amis has argued that British Muslims should be subject to travel restrictions, strip-searching, and other forms of harrassment. He has the idea that if life is made awful enough for British Muslims they'll work night and day to stop terrorism. British writer Terry Eagleton took Amis to task for this racist idiocy. The British press climbed all over the story—but the story they climbed all over was what they defined as an Amis-Eagleton academic spat rather than Amis's racism and repressiveness. It's as if they caught the Fox News bug. (10 October 2007)
Secrecy defense prevails in torture case (LA Times). Khaled Masri sued the US government for damages, claiming he had been kidnapped by CIA agents in Europe, then shipped to a prison in Afgrhanistan where he was tortured for several months, then released when they realized they had kidnapped and torturedthe wrong guy. The White House argued that the case shouldn't be heard at all because it dealt with White House secrets. The Supreme Court agreed, so Masri will never get his day in court. Civil libertarians are furious over the Catch-22 tautology: you can't look into secret White House illegal behavior because it's secret White House behavior. (10 October 2007)
Draft Gore (draftgore.com). Tired of yelling "None of the above!" when you watch the presidential debates? Some people are trying to get the guy who really won the 2000 election to give us a real choice. (10 October 2007)
James Michaels, Longtime Forbes Editor, Dies at 86 (NY Times). Jimmy Michaels (a Buffalonian who long ago worked for the Buffalo Evening News), was a legendary editor and reporter. He had an uncanny ability to shorten any story and have the story be better for it. He filed the first wire service story out of India on Gandhi's assassination. He was also a terrific cook. (8 October 2007)
J. Hoberman: Endgame: Philip Roth evokes Samuel Beckett in a farewell to alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman (Village Voice). "Taking its title from a Shakespeare stage direction, Exit Ghost may be the most literary text Roth has ever written. 'Fiction for him was never representation,' Zuckerman says of Lonoff. 'It was rumination in narrative form.' And so it is for Roth. Exit Ghost ponders the proliferation of cell phones as well as cancerous cells; imagining death, Zuckerman composes a glorious sentence that segues into the final installment of He and She (and Exit Ghost). Thus, the author struggles to secure his place in eternity. As iterated by Exit Ghost and reiterated by the Library of America, Roth has become his oeuvre. In that context, this book is a triumph." (8 October 2007)
Martinis, Steak and History (Washington Post). Maureen Dowd had a really stinky review of Arthur Schelsinger, Jr's. diaries in the NY Times this past weekend—she quoted some great anecdotes from the book, but her review was almost entirely about Dowd and how witty she could be, and she faulted the book for being diaries rather than something else. Hard to blame poor dead Arthur S. for THAT. Here's a review from the Washington Post that is about the book instead of the book reviewer. Much more useful. (8 October 2007)
Uri Avnery: Two Knights and a Dragon (Gush Shalom). Alan Dershowitz and AIPAC have been doing all they can to smear the very solid scholarship in John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy." They couldn't challenge the facts in the book, so they've charged them with closet anti-Semitism, using their usual syllogism that goes: "Anyone who criticizes Israel is an anti-Semite. X criticized Israel. X, therefore, is an anti-Semite and everything he/she/they say/says should be ignored." It's lousy logic, but they say it loud and long, and after a while some people get worn down. In this article, former Knesset member, journalist, and one-time Israeli war hero Uri Avnery says why and how, from an Israeli point of view, Mearsheimer and Walt are right on the money. (8 October 2007)
Seymour M. Hersh: Shifting Targets: The Administration's plan for Iran (New Yorker). Even before 9/11 Dick Cheney was lusting to attack Iran; he may soon get his rocks off. The White House has been redefining its failed Iraq war as a step in dealing with Iran, which in fact poses no threat to the United States, but facts are not now, nor have they ever been of pressing interest in the Bush White House. There has been an increase in attack planning at the White House. Iran "experts" now have the desks and access Iraq "experts" had until that war went south. Bush recently met for 45 minutes with that lunatic Norman Podhoretz (father-in-law of Bush national security adviser Elliott Abrams), who recently wrote in Commentary that Ahmadinejad is a Hitler-like revolutionary who can be dealt with only by a US initiated war. They'll say Hersh has it all wrong, which they've said before. He's never been proven wrong about what they've been up to. (8 October 2007)
Paul Krugman: Conservatives are Such Jokers (NY Times). Why do Bush & Co. think Bush's veto of S-Chip, which would have provided health insurance to 3.8 million children who are now not covered, funny? (8 October 2007)
Securing the homeland (Chicago Tribune). In "The Terror Presidency," Jack Goldsmith, who was Bush's quondam adviser on the legality of presidential action, details how Buch, Cheney, Ashcroft, John Woo, et al, capitalized on the 9/11 attack to vastly increase presidential power and, ironically, weakened the presidency in the process. (8 October 2007)
Sean Gardiner: Fall Guy (Village Voice). Bill Phillips—the key Knapp Commission informant (and UB American Studies MA graduate) who long insisted his conviction for a double murder was a frameup done as payback because he had testified against other cops—has gotten paroled after 32 years in prison. (8 October 2007)
Liliana Segura: What Makes Criminal Suspects Give a False Confession? (AlterNet). What was special about the Central Park Jogger case wan't that several innocent young men were sent to prison for years after intense, and in some cases, illegal police pressure. It was, rather, that the truth eventually came out and they were released from prison sentences they shouldn't have been serving in the first place. How many other men and women are serving somebody else's time merely because cops and prosecutors were desperate to bring cloture to a high profile case? (8 October 2007)
Michael Scherer: The presidential primary scam (Salon.com). "It's far worse than you think — worse than hanging chads, faulty Diebold machines, and billionaires who bankroll last-minute attack ads. The American system for nominating a presidential candidate has about as much in common with actual democracy as Donald Duck has with a lake mallard. It's not just that this year's primaries have been further front-loaded, or that the early primary states aren't representative of the nation at large. There is only passing fairness. There is only the semblance of order. There is nothing like equal representation under the law. The whole stinking process was designed by dead men in smoky parlors and refined by faceless bureaucrats in hotel conference rooms. It is a nasty brew born of those caldrons of self-interest known as political parties. At every stage, advantage is parceled out like so much magic potion." (8 October 2007)
Erwin Chemerinsky: Dumped over an Op-Ed (LA Times). UC Irvine chancelleor Michael V. Drake said the reason he withdrew the university's offer to Duke University law prof Erwin Chemerinsky to be UCI's new law dean, was that Chemerinsky was "too politically controversial." The only example Drake offered, Chemerinsky says, was an op-ed in which Chemerinsky criticized then-Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales's attempt to keep potentially innocent prisoners from appealing death penalty convictions. If that is the reason Drake killed the appointment, what a bum UCI has for a chancellor. And if there are other reasons he won't tell the truth about—what a bum UCI has for a chancellor. (15 September 2007)
Texas Company Signs Iraq Oil Deal With Kurds (CBC). Hunt Oil Co.—the CEO of which sits on the Halliburton board and is a major fundraiser for George W. Bush—has signed the first petroleum exploration agreement for northern Iraq. (15 September 2007)
Corrie family asks court to reinstate case against Caterpillar (International Herald Tribune). Rachel Corrie was crushed to death in 2003 by a Caterpillar bulldozer built specifically to destroy Palestinian homes. Duke University law professor Erwin Chemerinsky has represented Corrie's family pro bono in their lawsuit against Caterpillar. Attorneys for Caterpillar have argued that the U.S. government paid for the killer bulldozer, and the U.S. Justice Department joined them in opposing the lawsuit. Chemerinsky was recently asked to be the dean of the new University of California at Irvine law school. This week, the chancellor or UCI rescinded the invitation. The UCI chancellor insisted he did it on his own, that he'd been subject to no outside pressure. (15 September 2007)
Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele: Billions over Baghdad (Vanity Fair) "Between April 2003 and June 2004, $12 billion in U.S. currency—much of it belonging to the Iraqi people—was shipped from the Federal Reserve to Baghdad, where it was dispensed by the Coalition Provisional Authority. Some of the cash went to pay for projects and keep ministries afloat, but, incredibly, at least $9 billion has gone missing, unaccounted for, in a frenzy of mismanagement and greed. Following a trail that leads from a safe in one of Saddam's palaces to a house near San Diego, to a P.O. box in the Bahamas, the authors discover just how little anyone cared about how the money was handled." (14 September 2007)
Michael Klare on the Internal War for Control of Iraq's Oil (Democracy Now!). All the attention to the bloody warfare between Iraq's Sunnis and Shiites has, perhaps deliberately, sidelined what the war is really about: control of one of the world's largest oil reserves. There is a reason the Bush administration built the world's largest US embassy in Baghdad, and "spreading democracy" is not it. (14 September 2007)
Tom Engelhardt: The Petraeus Moment (TomDispatch). Who, other than the Congressional bloviators and the Washington Press, gave a hoot what beribboned four-star general David Petraeus had to say during the big dog-and-pony show in Washington this week? Everyone knew that Petraeus was in town to provide spin for the White House on an Iraq policy Petraeus helped formulate. What, other than "things are getting better," could he possibly have said? Certainly not the truth. Why would this White House start telling the truth now? Petraeus is no idiot; he is a general who hopes to be president. Nonetheless, his performance was, as another famous loser, MacBeth's, famously put it, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." (14 September 2007)
Patrick Cockburn: The Fakery of General Petraeus: What Iraqis Think About the Surge (CounterPunch). A few uncomfortable facts Petraeus forgot to mention. (14 September 2007)
Patrick Cockburn: Petraeus wants to be president (CounterPunch). He wasn't reporting in Washington this week; he was auditioning. 2008, he told a member of the Iraqi Interior Ministry, is "too soon" for his run, but 2012, after the Democrats spend four years trying to put together the wreckage left by the Bush administration, might be just right. (14 September 2007)
Alex Koppelman: The real reason Bush is withdrawing troops from Iraq (Salon.com). It has nothing to do with his claimed successful "surge" or "purge" or whatever it is. It's because the army has run out of troops, can't dig up any more, and can't convince the poor reservists whose lives and family finances have been wrecked by multiple deployments to extend their sentences—er, enlistments. (14 September 2007)
Obama's Iraq Speech (NY Times). Obama wants to start pulling the troops out of Iraq, but he wants to leave a bunch of them behind, which means the "new" position he said he was announcing in Iowa a few days ago doesn't differ at all from Hillary Clinton's, or, for that matter, George W. Bush's. The article includes a link to the text of the speech.(14 September 2007)
Tony Karon: Is a Jewish Glasnost Coming to America? (TomDispatch). Attacks by Israeli mouthpieces and frontmen on those who criticize Israeli policies have been heating up in frequency and savagery--e.g., the attack on Jimmy Carter for his recent book, the jihad against Norman Finkelstein, the nearly-successful attempt to suppress Joel Kovel's book, the claims that Tony Kushner, Tony Judt and Richard Cohen were part of a "new anti-Semitism," and the current campaign against Johhn Mearsheimer and Steven Walt's The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. But, argues Tony Karon, rather than an indication of increasing power of those who prefer blind, silent assent to public discussion, this flurry of activity may in fact indicate the breakdown of what to now has been an astonishingly successful campaign for silence. (14 September 2007)
Dennis Potter interviewed by Melvyn Bragg (Guardian). Video of the great playwright's last interview, which took place April 5, 1994, two months before his death. (14 April 2007)
James Brown and Pavarotti (You Tube). With strings! And a girl-group! (14 September 2007)
Dr. Susan Block: Gay Old Party Outs Itself While Many Ask, Is U.S. Run by Secret Homintern? (CounterPunch) "Recent Republican sex scandals continue to function as amusing Weapons of Mass Distraction from ongoing Republican fiscal, diplomatic and military fiascos. An intriguingly large portion of these scandals are gay, or, lest we offend those members of the Gay Old Party who prefer to define themselves as 'not gay,' let us say that they are 'homoerotic.' Just about all of those GOP public servants caught in the homoerotic act are screamingly homophobic. They also tend to be religious, often active religious leaders with wives and families and huge constituencies who speak out against same-sex marriage and express very little political tolerance for their openly gay brethren-in-desire....Meanwhile, what about the fact that Dick Cheney's phone number is listed numerous times on the DC Madam's phone bill? Is the major media refusing to touch that because it's just 'straight' sex? After all, Louisiana Senator David Vitter was only spanked, not sacrificed. Or is it because this Dick is just too big to expose?" (14 September 2007)
Furor disrupts plans for UCI School of law (LA Times). Shades of DePauw and Norman Finkelstein! The chancellor of UC Irvine has withdrawn the invitation to liberal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky to become the first dean of the university's new law school. It seems Chancellor Drake just discovered that Chemerinsky is a liberal and, worse, has written articles reflecting that orientation. The faculty is in an uproar, saying this amounts to a brutal incursion on academic freedom. Drake keeps insisting he's not responding to outside pressure, a claim no one seems to take seriously. (14 September 2007)
Jubilation as UN Adopts Historic Statement on Native Rights (OneWorld). Only the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand voted against the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the result of 22 years of diplomatic negotiations. Click here for the news release on the Declaration from the UNGA website. (14 September 2007)
Why Is Bush's Kid Brother Neil Getting Federal Funding? (Alternet). Well, you know why. But it still stinks. (14 September 2007)
Archive Sues to Recover 5 Million Missing White House E-mails (National Security Archive). You remember the millions of emails that Karl Rove and his White House minions that were sent on Republican National Committee email accounts that curiously went missing? Now it turns out that some 5 million actual White House emails went missing too. Nixon was sent packing over a seven-minute tape gap. These guys are transcendant. (6 September 2007)
Geoff Kelly: Working Overtime (Artvoice). One more betrayal of the city by Buffalo mayor Byron Brown: add to his total collapse on the Peace Bridge design, his total collapse on the Seneca casino, his abandonment of the waterfront plan to get a big box bait store the latest: his refusal to comply with Buffalo's living wage ordinance. He as all in favor of paying city workers a living wage when he was Masten District councilman, but now that he's a mayor working to be a congressman, all that is history. (6 September 2007)
Peter Koch: Babel (Artvoice). Thanks to a grant from the Oishoi Foundation and smart programming by Just Buffalo, Orhan Pamuk, Ariel Dorfman, Derek Walcott and Kiran Desai are giving readings in Buffalo this year. (6 September 2007)
Stephen T. Banko: Telling a "Story" Doesn't Alter the Facts. President Bush, says New York's most decorated Vietnam veteran, is using the misguided, failed U.S. war in Southeast Asia to justify continued pursuit of his misguided, failed war in Iraq. He misunderstands both wars. (2 September 2007)
Immanuel Wallerstein: The Vietnam Analogy. "George W. Bush is showing both desperation and malignity by invoking the Vietnam analogy to justify the continuing presence of the United States in Iraq. For a very long time, the Bush administration has denied the analogy. They did this for obvious reasons....George W. Bush is preparing the future. The president that withdrew from Vietnam was a Republican, Gerald Ford, and he did so after a long drawdown of U.S. troops by another Republican president, Richard Nixon. Bush is not going to withdraw the troops. But he's pretty sure that the next president will be forced to do so. And he's pretty sure that the next president will be a Democrat. So he's laying the groundwork for the "stab in the back" accusation. We shall be hearing a lot about this accusation in the decade to come." (2 September 2007)
Ken Belson: Like Many Before It, Drive-In Near Buffalo Reaches 'The End' (NY Times). Netflix and cable have made the Buffalo Drive-In as anachronistic as the empty steel mills on the shores of Lake Erie. (2 September 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)
Sci-fi films are as dead as Westerns, says Ridley Scott (Times UK). Perhaps the director of Blade Runner hasn't seen the new remake of 3:10 to Yuma. (2 September 2007)
Bruce Fisher: Choosing an Identity (Artvoice). In August 1851, the western terminus of the Erie Canal, the very place Buffalo mayor Byron Brown now argues should be given to a big box fishing supply store, was the site of one of the great ante-bellums confrontations over slavery. (2 September 2007)
The great persuader (Guardian). "When the world's best-known historian turns his attention to today's political problems, it's worth listening. Eric Hobsbawm celebrated his 90th birthday this summer with a book of essays, Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism, in which he surveys the world since 9/11, imparting lessons 'the author has learned, not least from living through and reflecting on much of the past century.'" (2 September 2007)
Laura M. MacDonald: America's Toe-Tapping Menace (NY Times). Who's the real pervert in the Larry Craig career trainwreck—the not-very-bright anti-gay senator who got into a "did not/did too" argument with a Minneapolis cop,or the cop, who seems to spend a huge amount of time hanging out in public toilets trying to entrap people not for indecent acts, but for engaging in ambiguous signaling that may or may not indicate an interest in such acts? Wolf Blitzer and all the stars at CNN headlined this story as if it were as important as, say, an attorney general who couldn't open his mouth without perjuring himself or a president dragging us deeper and deeper into a losing war he got us into with an argument of lies. The times indeed are out of joint. (2 September 2007)
Nat Hentoff: History Will Not Absolve Us (Village Voice). "If and when there's the equivalent of an international Nuremberg trial for the American perpetrators of crimes against humanity in Guantánamo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the CIA's secret prisons, there will be mounds of evidence available from documented international reports by human-rights organizations, including an arm of the European parliament—as well as such deeply footnoted books as Stephen Grey's Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program (St. Martin's Press) and Charlie Savage's just-published Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy (Little, Brown)....If we, the people, are ultimately condemned by a world court for our complicity and silence in these war crimes, we can always try to echo those Germans who claimed not to know what Hitler and his enforcers were doing. But in Nazi Germany, people had no way of insisting on finding out what happened to their disappeared neighbors. We, however, have the right and the power to insist that Congress discover and reveal the details of the torture and other brutalities that the CIA has been inflicting in our name on terrorism suspects." (2 September 2007)
Matt Taibbi: The Great Iraq Swindle (Rolling Stone). "How is it done? How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini? Ask Earnest O. Robbins -- he knows all about being a successful contractor in Iraq." (2 September 2007)
Welcome to the new US embassy (UK Times). Bigger than any of Saddam's palaces, the new US embassy sits on 104 walled acres. "It is a fortress within the fortress that is the green zone...This is the largest US embassy built—roughly the size of the Vatican City—and at $600 million the most expensive." Unlike the rest of Baghdad, it has 24-hour electricity, fresh water, and a sewage system that works. Your tax dollars at work. (2 September 2007)
Gen Sir Mike Jackson attacks US over Iraq (Telegraph). In a new book, "the head of the British Army during theinvasion of Iraq, has launched a scathing attack on the United States for the way it handled the post-war administration of the country.
Karl Rove: The Long View (National Review). With all the bad news about the war, the stock market, the environment, and toe-tapping in airport toilets, we thought you needed a laugh. In this no-holds-barred account, Bush's brain tells us why Dubya is one of the nation's greatest presidents. (2 September 2007)
Uri Avnery: A bruised reed (Gush-shalom). The latest from the Israeli soldier-turned-peace activist. "At this moment, we are at the height of our power. Our connection with the US, which is still all-powerful, gives us a standing much beyond our natural capabilities. This is the time to change the chips for money, exchange our temporary gains for permanent assets. To give up the occupied territories and make peace, establish good relations with our neighbors, strike deep roots in the region, so that we will be able to hold on when the will and ability of America to protect us at all costs has evaporated. That is even more true if we take into consideration the rise of Islamic radicalism, which is a natural reaction to the actions of the American-Israeli axis. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the main cause for this earthquake, which may one day unleash a tsunami. Both we and the Americans would be well advised to start work soon on removing the causes of this natural phenomenon." (2 September 2007)
Robert Fisk: The forgotten holocaust (The Independent). Photographs now published for the first time document the 1915-1917 Turkish genocide upon the Armenians. Hitler used that first Holocaust of the 20th century, to justify his own genocide. "Who," he asked rhetorically in 1939, "speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" (29 August 2007)
How T-Force abducted Germany's best brains for Britain (Guardian). Some nations triumphant in war loot the losers' physical wealth. The Brits at the end of WWII were more sophisticated than that. (29 August 2007)
Bush Wants $50 Billion More for Iraq War (Washington Post). Bush seems confident that Democrats in Congress won't have the political will to shut down his Iraq folly. The US is now spending more than $3 billion a week on his lunatic war. How many schools, bridges, hospitals and parks does $3 billion a week buy? What does the term "conservative president" mean to you? If you saw his speech this week, did you think you finally knew what someone who is "mad as a hatter" looks like? Is Congress any saner? Are you scared yet? (29 August 2007)
Sue Weutcher: 'City Lights to open Buffalo Film Seminars (UB Reporter). Notes on the fall series of Buffalo Film Seminars, which opens Tuesday with Chaplin's greatest film. (23 August 2007)
Bruce Jackson: Targeting Delaware (Artvoice). Why is Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown fielding a political nonentity against Mike LoCurto? (23 August 2007)
Geoff Kelly: Following the Money (Artvoice). A lot of money is changing hands in Buffalo this election season. Artvoice editor Geoff Kelly takes a look at who is buying and who is selling. (23 August 2007)
Norman Finkelstein: Remembering Raul Hilberg (Counterpunch). A personal memoir about Raul Hilberg, the founder of Holocaust studies, from a scholar Hilberg defended time and again when the Jewish Lobby had liberals running for cover. (23 August 2007)
Daniel Lazare: Jailing Nation: How Did Our Prison System Become Such a Nightmare? (Nation/AlterNet). "How can you tell when a democracy is dead? When concentration camps spring up and everyone shivers in fear? Or is it when concentration camps spring up and no one shivers in fear because everyone knows they're not for "people like us" (in Woody Allen's marvelous phrase) but for the others, the troublemakers, the ones you can tell are guilty merely by the color of their skin, the shape of their nose or their social class? Questions like these are unavoidable in the face of America's homegrown gulag archipelago, a vast network of jails, prisons and 'supermax' tombs for the living dead that, without anyone quite noticing, has metastasized into the largest detention system in the advanced industrial world. The proportion of the US population languishing in such facilities now stands at 737 per 100,000, the highest rate on earth and some five to twelve times that of Britain, France and other Western European countries or Japan. With 5 percent of the world's population, the United States has close to a quarter of the world's prisoners, which, curiously enough, is the same as its annual contribution to global warming." (23 August 2007)
ADL on the language of genocide (Boston Globe). The Anti-Defamation League recently fired its New England regional director because he acknowledge the genocide of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in the second decade of the 20th century. The director of the ADL insisted the mass killings were "atrocities or massacres." After a great deal of negative reaction, he's grudgingly decided genocide really did occur. (23 August 2007)
Fearing the Nazis again (LA Times). The bitter past is savaging many aging Holocaust survivors. Unbearable memories they've successfully kept at bay for decades burst out in their weakened final years. (23 August 2007)
Harvard Endowment Reports 23% Gain for Fiscal Year (NY Times). Don't you wish you had their broker? He's Mohamed A. El-Erian. Harvard now has $34.9 billion in the kitty. (23 August 2007)
Phyllis Bennis: Why the Anti-War Movement Doesn't Embrace the Iraqi Resistance (ZNet/Alternet). "Alexander Cockburn (helped by Lawrence McGuire) makes three major points in his 'Support Their Troops?' column in The Nation. In my view one is right, one is wrong, one is preposterous, and linking the three of them only confuses the issue. His first point is that the U.S. peace movement doesn't embrace the Iraqi resistance. Right. The second is the U.S. peace movement is 'pretty much dead.' Wrong. And the third is that publicly sympathizing with the Iraqi resistance fighters will somehow create the still-missing 'necessary critical mass to have a real movement.'" (23 August 2007)
Coaches Caught By an E-Mail Trail (InsideHigherEd.com). How many times do we have to tell you: if you're going to lie, cheat and steal, don't use the office email and office computer. Purdue has fired an assistant coach for writing one of her athlete's papers. The coach had deleted the incriminating emails and IMs from her email account, but they were still on her hard drive. (23 August 2007)
Juan Cole: Pitching the Imperial Republic: Bonaparte and Bush on Deck (TomDispatch). "It is no accident that many of the rhetorical strategies employed by George W. Bush originated with Napoleon Bonaparte, a notorious spinmeister and confidence man. At least Bonaparte looked to the future, seeing clearly the coming breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the likelihood that European Powers would be able to colonize its provinces. Bonaparte's failure in Egypt did not forestall decades of French colonial success in Algeria and Indochina, even if that era of imperial triumph could not, in the end, be sustained in the face of the political and social awakening of the colonized. Bush's neocolonialism, on the other hand, swam against the tide of history, and its failure is all the more criminal for having been so predictable." (23 August 2007)
Walter Shapiro: Fred Thompson's revealing back story (Salon.com). "In his Watergate memoir, the would-be president is remarkably honest about his conflict as a loyal Republican confronted with his president's perfidy. Imagine such a Republican today." (23 August 2007)
The vanishing coalition (The Independent). As the US death toll in Iraq nears 4000 (not counting the dead mercenaries) Bush's coalition of the killing is beginning to disintegrate. (23 August 2007)
US general blames Britain for Basra crisis (Telegraph). The US and Brits are starting to finger point over their mutual Mideast disaster. Will they next start trying one another as war criminals to prove that it was the other guy who was more guilty than they? (23 August 2007)
Michael Neumann: In Memoriam: Raul Hilberg (Counterpunch). His "Destruction of the European Jews" remains the classic documentary study of how the Nazis industrialized the administration of death. Recently, he stood up for Norman Finkelstein when Harvard law professor and torture advocate Alan Dershowitz undertook a jihad against Finkelstein's scholarship. (15 August 2007)
Michael T. Klare: The New Energy Pessimism (TomDispatch). If Cheney is successful in launching a war against Iran, world oil prices will go through the roof. Given the wreckage his policies have wrought in the American economy, social fabric and international standing, maybe we should start considering him Osama bin Laden's most successful mole rather than his most vigorous antagonist. (15 August 2007)
Femme Fatale: "Love, Lies, and the Unknown Life of Mata Hari (Washington Post). The most famous spy in European history wasn't a spy at all. She was executed for sharing her bed, not France's secrets. (15 August 2007)
Heinz Barth, 86; former SS officer, Nazi war criminal (LA Times). Among other things, Barth murdered everyone in the French village of Oradour-sur-Clane, all 642 men, women and children. He served 14 years in prison after his real identity was disclosed in 1981. When he got out of jail he said "I have paid enough." Hardly. But at least he paid something. Rare enough these days. (15 August 2007)
Robert Kuttner: First Gonzales, then Bush (American Prospect). Attorney General Alberto Gonzales changes his tesimony every time he appears before Congress. The only constant is, nobody ever thinks he's telling the truth or doing anything other than stonewalling. So impeach him. Congress has the power to do it. And then impeach the President and Vice President for having lied us into a murderous war, and kept us in it. If the Republicans can impeach for a blowjob, why can't the Democrats impeach for slaughter? "If the Democratic leadership in Congress works up the nerve to impeach Gonzales, the process would make it less unthinkable to imagine impeaching Bush -- and could well elicit more evidence of impeachable conduct. Even if Bush retained office, public attention would be focused on his misdeeds and those of Cheney. Republicans would be forced either to abandon Bush as they ultimately abandoned Nixon, or to defend odious actions. Either way, they would pay dearly in 2008. At worst, Bush would toss Gonzales overboard before the waters rise around his own neck." (15 August 2007)
Gonzales could get say in states' executions (LA Times). Thanks to a little-noticed provision in the reauthorized Patriot Act, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales may be able to forces states to speed up executions by shortening the appeals process. Just like when he and Bush worked the same magic in Texas, which has now put to death more of its citizens than any other state. (15 August 2007)
Wolfowitz 'Tried to Censor World Bank on Climate Change' (CommonDreams/Independent). You can't keep up with the villainy of this administration: "The Bush administration has consistently thwarted efforts by the World Bank to include global warming in its calculations when considering whether to approve major investments in industry and infrastructure, according to documents made public through a watchdog yesterday. On one occasion, the White House’s pointman at the bank, the now disgraced Paul Wolfowitz, personally intervened to remove the words “climate change” from the title of a bank progress report and ordered changes to the text of the report to shift the focus away from global warming." (15 August 2007)
Fatigue cripples US army in Iraq (Guardian). Bush's long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced an exhausted military, short on equipment, officers, and energy. And it is shredding the soldiers' families as well. (15 August 2007)
James Carville: How Karl Rove lost a generation of Republicans (Financial Times). While George Bush was wrecking the US economy his chief political operative, Karl Rove, was wrecking the Republican party. "If the trends hold, the one thing that we can be sure of is that Mr Rove’s political grave will receive no lack of irrigation from future Republicans." (15 August 2007)
Gates Foundation aids Iraqi scholars (Financial Times). Iraqi terrorists have been targeting academics, perhaps because they think an educated populace is a danger to authoritarian theocracy. As a result, there has been an exodus of Iraqi academics. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is helping some of them move to other countries. This is good for the academics, who won't get murdered in their classrooms or labs, but bad for Iraq, which can ill afford to lose their knowledge and wisdom. One more cost paid by Iraq for George W. Bush's gratuitous war. (15 August 2007)
Amy Stuart: Garden walks a world apart: Buffalo, N.Y. (San Francisco Chronicle). How can Buffalo have something as nice as this while indulging itself in that music-hating monument to monstrous kitsch, the Allentown "Art" Festival," only a mile away? (15 August 2007)
Backlash Over Book on Policy for Israel (NY Times). When John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt published their analysis of the pro-Israel lobby and US foreign policy last year, they were immediately attacked (by representatives of that same lobby) as anti-semites. Never mind the facts: they criticized Israel so therefore they were anti-semites. Now the book version of their study is about to hit the bookstores and the usual suspects are again doing their best to prevent public discussion of the matter. (15 August 2007)
See Who's Editing Wikipedia—Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign (Wired). The great thing about Wikipedia is anybody can contribute and edit. That's also the worst thing about it. Wikipedia tries to keep up with self-serving corporations, government agencies and politicians, but that, as you might expect, is an endless task. (15 August 2007)
Censored films recover their naughty bits (London Times). Britain's censors have, over the years, done their best to keep British citizens from getting too aroused in darkened theaters. They banned entirely "The Last Woman," which ends with Gérard Depardieu castrating himself with an electric breadknife (the Times article itself can't quite manage to specify what he does, calling it "mutilates his body" instead). They also banned the great Jean Harlow film, "Red-Headed Woman," and the Japanese erotic classic "In the Realm of the Senses." They cut 14 minutes of Mae West's wisecracks from "She Done Him Wrong" and 23 minutes of Greta Garbo in "Flesh and the Devil." But now they're greenlighting everything & the Brits are finally seeing how the rest of the world does it. (15 August 2007)
Bernadette Medige: DIBELS and other Nonsense Words that Sent Your Kid to Summer School. Maybe you remember when kindergarten was fun. The Bush administration has turned it into an educational hell. It is imposing DIBEL, a new test educators are using to test the reading ability of young children. It punishes children who read intelligently and well, who read for meaning or sense, or who have accents that differ from their teachers', and it rewards children who are adroit in gibberish. Sounds idiotic? It is. Here are the bizarre details. (9 August 2007)
Be Yourselves, Girls, Order the Rib-Eye (NY Times). How the $60 Kobe beef burger became part of Manhattan's mating ritual. (9 August 2007)
Bill Benzon: Graffiti Aesthetics: Five Easy Pieces (The Valve). Some of the most interesting art isn't in museums. It isn't inside anything. (9 August 2007)
Barack Obama Ain't Nothin But a War Ho' (Black Agenda Report). In an attempt to out-hawk Hillary Clinton, the "peace candidate" from Illinois, Senator Barack Obama, is proposing that the US invade Afghanistan. Like George W. Bush, he now seems convinced that the only solution to a world full of war is more war in more parts of the world. That metallic sound you just heard was the halo hitting the concrete. (9 August 2007)
Filmmaker & Journalist John Pilger on Propaganda, the Press, Censorship and Resisting the American Empire (Democracy Now!) What good is freedom of the press if the press itself has no interest in freedom? "Liberal Democracy is moving toward a form of corporate dictatorship," says Pilger in this fascinating interview. "This is an historic shift, and the media must not be allowed to be its façade, but itself made into a popular, burning issue, and subjected to direct action. That great whistleblower Tom Paine warned that if the majority of the people were denied the truth and the ideas of truth, it was time to storm what he called the Bastille of words. That time is now." (9 August 2007)
German journalists face prosecution over rendition documents (The Independent). German prosecutors are is going after 17 German reporters who quoted from classified documents having to do with the illegal transportation by US officials of terror subjects to secret US prisons or countries where they could be tortured without fear of criminal prosecution. (9 August 2007)
Transatlantic travellers' trials (Financial Times). It has become significantly more difficult for foreigners to visit the US since 9/11. It is arguable whether or not the most stringent of the changes has made the US any safe, but no one argues that the rules have made the US more isolated in the world. And now the EU may be so annoyed that it will retaliate with similar regulations of its own to be imposed upon American travelers. One more little win for bin Laden. (9 August 2007)
Patrick Cockburn: Disaster looms as 'Saddam dam' struggles to hold back the Tigris (The Independent). US papers record murders and bombings in Iraq, but say little about anything else. The Iraqi population is threatened not only by the civil war now in progress, but by a vicious collapse of the infrastructure since the fall of the Saddam regieme. Major cities go days without electricity and water and critical structures--like this major dam north of Mosul--are in imminent danger of total failure. (9 August 2007)
Karim Sadjadpour: The Wrong Way to Contain Iran (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace). As part of its strategy of containing Iran, the Bush administration plans to sell its Arab allies $20 billion worth of weaponry. This is based on a major misunderstanding of the nature of Iran's influence in the region, and will in the long run make the situation more, rather than less, dangerous. (9 August 2007)
Bush May Try to Cut Corporate Tax Rates (Washington Post). If you're middle class, the AMT is in all likelihood adding more to your federal tax burden every year. Federal social services and infrastructure support are being slashed to underwrite Bush's military adventurism. Nonetheless, Bush wants to make significant cuts in corporate tax rates. What's wrong with this picture? (9 August 2007)
Tribe proposes Vegas-style casino in Garden Grove (LA Times). An Indian tribe with no land or money wants to build a billion-dollar casino near Disneyland, and (just like Buffalo's Mayor Byron Brown) some local politicians are going berserk with greed and dreams of political sugarplums. An attorney who represents another part of the same tribe describes the promoter as "a man who is all hat and no cattle." The town in question, Garden Grove, previously saw failed attempts to put up a Latino theme park, a replica of London Bridge across a fake river, and a museum dedicated to the late King Hussein of Jordan. (9 August 2007)
Tim Shorrock: America under surveillance (Salon.com). Democrats in Congress folded last week (again) and gave Bush the widened surveillance powers he wanted. It turns out he doesn't just have the govenment listening to everything we do: his administration is doing a spectacular amount of domestic looking as well. The US, in fact, may be at the top of all the countries the Bush administration has targeted for surveillance. Your tax dollars are supporting the worst aspects of 2001's HAL computer and Orwell's 1984. (9 August 2007)
Overstretched US cuts aid to Israel (Telegraph). It's no secret that the Bush administration has spent so much money on its bungled Iraq war there has been no money to repair the US's decaying infrastructure—e.g. the bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis (and thousands of others waiting to join it in the water) and the still undefended New Orleans. Now we learn that, for the same reason, the Bush administration is having to renege on its promises of military aid to its closest allies, like Israel. It looks like Bush and Cheney are going to divert all the national treasure into that sinkhole, except of course for the truckloads going to Halliburton et al. (9 August 2007)
Raul Hilberg, 81, Historian Who Wrote of the Holocaust as a Bureaucracy, Dies (NY Times). Holocaust deniers flee his "The Destruction of the European Jews" for the same reason vampires of folklore flee the cross: it turns them into dust. (9 August 2007)
Donn Esmonde: Proximity to casino is no economic plus (Buffalo News). The Senecas' temporary downtown casino has been open for five weeks and it's had approximately 50,000 walk through its doors. And how many of those losers have patronized any businesses in the neighborhood? Approximately zero. A tiny percentage of the take goes to Buffalo, but far more is sucked out of town. Meanwhile, Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown claps his hands and calls this development. And you thought Tony Masiello had a problem with reality. (4 August 2007)
An interview with Noam Chomsky: On Responsibility, War Guilt and Intellectuals (Counterpunch). "Maybe the most elementary of moral principles is that of universality, that is, If something’s right for me, it’s right for you; if it’s wrong for you, it’s wrong for me. Any moral code that is even worth looking at has that at its core somehow. But that principle is overwhelmingly disregarded all the time. If you want to run through examples we can easily do it. Take, say, George W. Bush, since he happens to be president. If you apply the standards that we applied to Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, he’d be hanged. Is it an even conceivable possibility? It’s not even discussable. Because, we don’t apply to ourselves the principles we apply to others." (4 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)
Diane Christian: Winning (Counterpunch). Bush and his cronies go on endlessly about the need for the US to "win" in Iraq and to "win" in the war against terror. But what does the word "win" mean in such contexts, and what does that facile rhetoric really mean in the face of the real and specific deaths suffered by the victims of that rhetoric? (3 August 2007)
1940s killer denied parole (Chicago Tribune). William Heirens has been locked up for 61 years for a brutal triple murder. If he'd said he was sorry he'd done it the parole board would in all likelihood have let him go free. But he has insisted all along on his innocence. He's said that he was 17 years old when he was arrested and was terrorized into confessing. Because he won't apologize, the parole board just turned him down more than two dozen times. Is he a vicious killer the parole board is keeping in prison because he won't admit to his crimes or an innocent loser doomed to die in prison because he won't bend over and plead guilty to a crime he didn't do? (3 August 2007)
John Stewart: When Dick Cheney smiles, an angel gets water-boarded (therawstory.com). Forget Wolf Blitzer with his pencil that never needs sharpening because he never writes with it. Forget Newshour, ABC, CBS, and NBC. The only program that gave competent coverage to the Senate testimony of Donald Rumsfeld and CNN waltz by Dick Cheney was Comedy Central's "Daily Show." (3 August 2007)
Analysis says war could cost $1 trillion (Boston Globe). Bush turns out to be the most profligate president in American history. He's pissed away $1 trillion in the wrong war against the wrong opponent in the wrong place—and he lost it. The weirdest thing is, his basic supporters consider themselves "conservatives." (3 August 2007)
Russia claims North Pole (The Independent). A few years ago, the neoconservative fruitcakes whose theories have undergirded the Bush administration claimed outer space as U.S. territory. Nobody other than they themselves took this with any seriousness. But now the Russians have literally turned the lunacy upside down: they've sent submarines to the Polar floor and have claimed the North Pole as Russian territory. It's all a consequence of global warming and new access to Arctic oil fields. The economic, ethnographic and ecological consequences of the coming war for the far north are huge and grim. (3 August 2007)
Engineers See Dangers in Aging Infrastructure (NY Times). So why isn't there money to maintain the US infrastructure, like the I35W bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis? Because it's being spent on Bush's war of choice in Iraq. If the Cold War were still on, we could speculate that Bush & Co. were Commie moles, for who else would have done the US more harm from within than these guys have done? (3 August 2007)
Michael Schwartz: The Benchmarks That Matter. The American Military's Lose-Lose Dilemma in Iraq (TomDispatch.com). The White House waves any transient decline in any of the Iraq distaster indicators as evidence that the Bush/Petraeus "surge" is working. In fact, the surge has been a miserable failure, and things are about to get worse. (1 August 2007)
Anne Nivat: Life in the 'red zone' (International Herald Tribune). Most reporting about life in Iraq comes out of the Green Zone, the heavily guarded compound where the Westerners live and where the huge new US embassy is being built. Few reporters venture elsewhere in Iraq because it is too dangerous and too uncomfortable: most of the time there's no electricity, no running water, no air conditioning. But that is the hell brought about by the American war, the one in which most Iraqis now live. French reporter Anne Nivat took a look at the Iraq the Bush administration would prefer you do not see. (1 August 2007)
Film Great Ingmar Bergman Dies at 89 (Guardian).
Ingmar Bergman, director who captured life's motion, dead at 89 (San Franciso Chronicle).
Ingmar Bergman, Master Filmmaker, Dies at 89 (New York Times)
Michael Moore got it right (McClatchy). The health insurance industry has been barraging local newspapers with letters-to-the-editor challenging the facts in Michael Moore's "Sicko." The problem is, they don't like the facts in "Sicko," which Moore has spot on. (1 August 2007)
Lieberman escalates attack on Iraq critics (The Hill). Al Gore made a lot of mistakes in the 2000 election, not the least of which was selecting this Bush-suck as his running mate. Lieberman is worse now than he was then. (1 August 2007)
NSA Spying Part of Broader Effort (Washington Post). The Bush administration has been doing a huge amount of secret spying since shortly after 9/11. A government official admitted this as part of the White House strategy to protect Attorney General Alberto Gonzales from perjury charges based on his recent inconsistent testimony before Congress. This is Alice in Wonderland gone amok with Humpty-Dumpty at the switch. The main theme seems to be, "We do all kinds of things in secret so you can't nail us for perjury because you can't ask us questions about the things we're lying to you about." If the subject at hand weren't deliberate subversion of the basic principles of U.S. government it would be comical and absurd. But the subject is deliberate subversion of the basic principles of U.S. government and there is nothing comic about it, and the only absurd aspect is the continuing inability of Congress to deal with it. (1 August 2007)
Michaelangelo Antonioni (London Times). He made fatuous, rich, bored, emotionally paralyzed Italians fascinating. Not an easy thing to have done. And he filmed the best tennis match with no tennis ball ever ("Blowup," 1966), the best blown-up house Death Valley ever saw ("Zabriskie Point" 1970), and the strangest ending to a Jack Nicholson movie ("The Passenger" 1975). (1 August 2007)
Meet the $101.7 million dream team (Boston Globe). Thirty years ago, to protect one of their mob snitches, the FBI framed four innocent men for a 1965 gangland murder. Two of the men died in prison; the other two grew old there. A US district court judge in Boston couldn't give back to any of them the lives government agents stole from them, but she did the best she could. She awarded $101.7 million in damages. (30 July 2007)
Western revival looks back to simpler life (London Times). There's a herd of new westerns on the horizon: "Seraphim Falls" with Liam Neeson and Pierce Brosnan, a remake of "3:10 to Yuma" with Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, "The Assassination of Jessie James by the Coward Robert Ford" with Brad Pitt, "No Country for Old Men" from the Coen brothers, and "Boone's Lick" with Tom Hanks and Julianne Moore. With US foreign policy in a shambles, the president in pathological delusion, the attorney general lying, and Congress incapable of taking a moral stand on anything, little wonder that the Dream Factory harks back to a time when justice was predicated on something as simple and mindless as the ability to whip it out faster than the other guy. (30 July 2007)
Jimmy Breslin: Impeach George Bush to stop war lies, deaths (Newsday). Don't Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer read Jimmy Breslin? So why are they both be so wimpy on the evil in the White House and on this cruel and evil war? What do they think when they read Breslin saying, "And in Washington we had this Bush, and it is implausible to have anyone who is this dumb running anything, smirking at his country....On his PBS television show the other night, Bill Moyers said he was amazed at Sara Taylor of the White House staff saying that she didn't have to talk to a congressional committee because George Bush had ordered her not to. 'I took an oath to uphold the president,' she said. That president had been in charge of a government that kidnapped, tortured, lied, intercepted mail and calls, all in the name of opposing people who are willing to kill themselves right in front of you. You have to get rid of a government like this." (30 July 2007)
Gonzales's Truthfulness Long Disputed (Washington Post). Albert Gonzales began lying to Congress during his confirmation hearing, but that was nothing new. He's been lying or suffering convenient memory loss to protect Bush for more than a decade. (30 July 2007)
Walter F. Mondale: Answering to No One (Washington Post). A highly-respected former US senator and Jimmy Carter's vice president reflects on the time when the White House "told the truth, obeyed the law and kept the peace." Seems like a report from another country, which perhaps it is. (30 July 2007)
An uncensored "On the Road" (Independent). Penguin is about to publish an uncensored version of Jack Kerouac's 1957 classic "On the Road." They'll restore the real names (we'll have Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, John Clellon Holmes and Neal Cassaday instead of Sal Paradise, Carlo Marx, Old Bull Lee, Tom Saybrook and Dean Moriarty) and replace some of the gay encounters and drug capers the original publisher thought too raw for midcentury American sensibilities. (30 July 2007)
Peter Bogdanovich: "I'm Hard to Get, John T." (New York Observer). There's a new dvd of Howard Hawks' "Rio Bravo" (1957), the movie he made with John Wayne and a very sexy Angie Dickinson because he hated "High Noon" (1952), with what he considered a very unprofessional character played by Gary Cooper and a very unsexy wife played by Grace Kelly. Parts of "Rio Bravo" are as downright corny and improbable as they were 50 years ago (e.g. the songs by Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson), which is why the movie is every bit as much fun as it was when it came out. (30 July 2007)
Nato plans smaller bombs for Afghanistan (Financial Times). Nato has decided that coalition forces have been killing far too many civilians in Afghanistan, a fact Afghanistani civilians have noted for several years now. In the hope of reducing the number of unintended deaths, Nato is shifting to smaller bombs. Of course, they'll still have to drop them on the right houses, which has not always been the case thus far. (30 July 2007)
MI5 'is keeping bomber alive' (Scotsman). The 27-year-old physician who tried to blow up the Glasgow airport last month has third degree burns on 90% of his body, and is pretty much dead, but MI5, the British CIA, is keeping him on life support because they don't want to anger British Muslims they fear might get angry if he died. One would think that the British Muslims who would get angry enough to do public harm if he died of burns caused by his own petrol bomb are already angry enough and don't need the fact of him succumbing to his own design to push them over the edge. The latest word is that MI-5 has ordered shark skin implants costing £20,000 to keep him breathing. The US has no monopoly on Silly-Putty. (30 July 2007)
Bush Aide Blocked Report: Global Health Draft In 2007 Rejected for Not Being Political (Washington Post). This is one of those items that tells you why we have that Lily Tomlin quotation on the BR masthead. There are lies of commission (e.g. the Attorney General's performances before Congress the past year) and lies of omission, as the "surgeon general's report in 2006 that called on Americans to help tackle global health problems [that] has been kept from the public by a Bush political appointee without any background or expertise in medicine or public health, chiefly because the report did not promote the administration's policy accomplishments." (30 July 2007)
CNN's Blitzer Failed to Notes Hayes' False Iraq-Al Qaeda Reporting, Cheney Connections (Common Dreams). Why did CNN's Wolf Blitzer let "Weekly Standard" writer Stephen F. Hayes tell one lie after another about Bush and Cheney's false statements about the [nonexistent] Saddam—Al Qaeda connection and [nonexistent] Saddam's weapons of mass destruction? Why didn't Blitzer even note Hayes' frequent flack-work for the Bush administration? Why didn't Blitzer identify Hayes' as a writer for the weekly newspaper that has long been the primo neocon house organ? And why does Blitzer hold that pencil all the time? He never writes anything with it. (30 July 2007)
Children of Darkness (NY Times). Here's a New York City you never saw, and probably never will. Check out the urls, too, expecially Miru Kim's, the naked lady with what must be the toughest soles in the five boroughs (29 July 2007)
Tom Segev: Scandal in the third grade (Haaretz). Israeli education authorities are making sure Arab and Jewish primary schools do a good job of teaching history. But not the same history. (23 July 2007)
Uri Avnery: A Trap for Fools (Gush Shalom). The heroic Israeli peace activist deconstructs a recent Bush speech on the Palestine problem. He finds it is devoid of relevance, substance, sense, but brimming over with hypocrisy and hype. So what else is new? No doubt Bush, when he gave the speech, several times put his right hand over his heart, fingers spread, then smiled, paused and leaned into the camera to let the full measure of his deep emotion and sincerity sink in. That gesture is, in Bush body-language, the surest indicator of him being maximally full of shit. (23 July 2007)
Noam Chomsky: Imminent Crises: Threats and Opportunities (Monthly Review). "The crises we face are real and imminent, and in each case means are available to overcome them. The first step is understanding, then organization and appropriate action. This is the path that has often been followed in the past, bringing about a much better world and leaving a legacy of comparative freedom and privilege, for some at least, which can be the basis for moving on. Failure to do so is almost certain to lead to grim consequences, even the end of biology’s only experiment with higher intelligence." (23 July 2007)
Peter W. Galbraith: Iraq: The Way to Go (New York Review of Books). "Iraq after an American defeat will look very much like Iraq today—a land divided along ethnic lines into Arab and Kurdish states with a civil war being fought within its Arab part. Defeat is defined by America's failure to accomplish its objective of a self-sustaining, democratic, and unified Iraq. And that failure has already taken place, along with the increase of Iranian power in the region." And how are the authors of this evil war dealing with their failure: by adapting the strategy of the authors of the failed war in Vietnam: instead of accepting their own responsibility and blaming the decision-makers and military authorities who got it all wrong, thereby squandering countless lives and dollars, they are blaming the American people. (23 July 2007)
Carl Hiaasen: Stuck in Iraq, with no good options left (Miami Herald). "This is the story of the war in a nutshell -- misbegotten, misrepresented and mismanaged. Stoned on his own delusions, the president still talks of installing a functioning democracy in a country throttled by civil war and aflame with ancient religious grievances. Newly doubt-ridden Republicans in Congress speechify about a 'new direction,' but do nothing. Democrats call for a staged withdrawal, but can't muster the votes to make it happen. Meanwhile, the Iraqi government remains paralyzed and rudderless. Car bombs continue to explode in open markets, killing and maiming innocents by the score. The Shiites and Sunnis keep on kidnapping, torturing and executing each other. And American soldiers, caught in the middle, keep on dying. The total now surpasses 3,600, with roadside bombs being the leading cause of death." (23 July 2007)
With Iraq on Fire, Rest of World on Hold (McClatchy/Common Dreams). The Bush administration is so busy trying to salvage something out of its failed Middle East policy that it has all but abandoned major diplomatic work in the other 90% of the world. (23 July 2007)
Broader Privilege Claimed in Firings (Washington Post). The White House says executive privilege licenses it to stonewall the congressional investigation into the Administration's firing of federal prosecutors for political reasons. Which is to say, "We're above the law so don't bother us." Where is THAT in the Constitution? (23 July 2007)
Bush Approves New CIA Methods (Washington Post). It's not the fact of our torture program that distinguishes us from other countries. Other countries torture, we know that. The whole point of Bush's rendition program is to get people to places more vigorously than they can be tortured in US federal detention facilities without worrying that the torturers will subsequently go to jail. The US is unique in that it is now the only country in the world with a global torture strategy, one that the president of the United States has just proudly ratified. (23 July 2007)
Katherine Evan: Rorchach and Awe (Vanity Fair). "America's coercive interrogation methods were reverse-engineered by two C.I.A. psychologists who had spent their careers training U.S. soldiers to endure Communist-style torture techniques. The spread of these tactics was fueled by a myth about a critical 'black site' operation." (23 July 2007)
A racist Jewish state (Haaretz). "Every day the Knesset has the option of passing laws that will advance Israel as a democratic Jewish state or turn it into a racist Jewish state. There is a very thin line between the two. This week, the line was crossed. If the Knesset legal counselor did not consider the bill entitled 'the Jewish National Fund Law' as sufficiently racist to keep it off the agenda, it is hard to imagine what legislation she will consider racist." (23 July 2007)
Geoffrey O'Brien: A Northern New Jersey of the Mind (New York Review of Books). Plot was only incidental to "The Sopranos." The series was about much more than that. Here, six weeks after the famous 20 silent seconds of black screen, is first really good take on the entire series. (23 July 2007)
Phantom Voters in New York (NY Times). Perhaps the biggest welfare operation outside the 5 boroughs is New York's prison system, which parks a huge number of NYC felons (a large portion of whom are doing obscene time under New York's draconian Rockefeller drug laws) in rural counties, thereby serving as the largest single employer for the state's rural residents. As this NY Times editorial points out, those rural communities are tapping the political till twice: by claiming the convicts as "residents," they pad out their political power, getting disproportionate representation in (hence disproportionate benefits from) Albany. (23 July 2007)
Nicholas Lemann: Reversals (New Yorker). With one exception, Bush has failed at everything: his war to control Iraq's oil has created a new generation of terrorists and crippled US power abroad, he failed at privatizing Social Security and rationalizing Immigration. His one success is in shifting the 5-4 balance of the Supreme Court to the right, and most of us will be the worse for it. (23 July 2007)
Bruce Jackson: Can the Senecas Buffalo Judge Skretny? (Artvoice). The National Indian Gaming Commission told U.S. District Court Judge William M. Skretny to stay out of their territory, whereupon the Seneca gambling operation lit up 119 slot machines and a Perry Street sign saying "CASINO" at it's windowless steel shed in downtown Buffalo. Casino opponents, led by Citizens for Better Buffalo and represented by a team of lawyers, resubmitted the lawsuit Judge Skretny sidestepped last January. The Buffalo News ran an editorial getting all the major points wrong. Meanwhile, Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown sits in his office, hopingall the lawsuits go away soon so he'll have some minimum wage patronage jobs to hand out, thereby proving he is powerful and creative and a successful urban planner. They won't and he isn't. (20 July 2007)
Michiko Kakutani: An Epic Showdown as Harry Potter Is Initiated Adulthood (NY Times). "The Sopranos" and Harry Potter checking out in the same summer! What epics are left? ( 20 July 2007)
Tom Johnson: The Long Road...to Nowhere. The New York Times, after having again and again made Judy Miller and its front page available to the White House for propaganda on the run-up to the Iraq war, has decided it is time to admit we've blown it and get out. They also propose an alternative—which is every bit as bad as what we've got going now. (17 July 2007)
Uri Avnery: A Stupid War (Gush Shalom). The Israeli army is now preparing for the war it recently lost in Lebanon. Lebanon, meanwhile, is destabilized, the region is less safe, and last year's warriors are this year's finger-pointers. George Bush and Ehud Olmert, who stood to profit from an Israeli triumph, now have more difficulties with which to deal than before."Almost every war is stupid. The last war was more stupid than most. The next war, if there be one, will be even stupider." (17 July 2007)
Cheney Pushes Bush to Act on Iran (Guardian/CommonDreams). Dick Cheney doesn't want to leave office without starting one more major bloodbath. Secretary of State Condi Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates think he's kill-crazy, and for a while they had Bush convinced to give diplomacy a chance. But now Cheney's voice seems to be drowning out theirs. The US has now deployed half of its warships close to Iran. (16 July 2007)
Get them by the throat (Guardian). What's the best movie opening ever? Here are 11 contenders. (16 July 2007)
Bell tolls for Hemingway treasures as Cuban house caught in sanctions trap (Guardian). The Bush administration's hatred of Fidel Castro and/or indebtedness to the Cuban exile community in Florida is so great that it is doing all it can to let Hemingway books, manuscripts and memorabilia be destroyed. Those guys don't read novels, so maybe they don't even know who Hemingway was. (16 July 2007)
William Kristol: Why Bush Will Be a Winner (Washington Post). We always thought William Kristol was something of a fruitcake. Unfortunately, he's also been influential. His Weekly Standard has been a consistent neocon house organ. Here's his latest: a list of reasons why the Bush presidency has been successful. See? He is a fruitcake. (16 July 2007)
Why can't 50% of the Republicans reality test? (NY Times). 92% of Democrats and 50% of Republicans think Bush's war for Iraqi oil has gone into the sewer. 8% of anything can miss the point, so there's no need to explain the Democrats. But why do half the Republicans polled think the war is going well? They can't all watch Fox News and nothing else. Or can they? (15 July 2007)
La Marseillaise (Wikipedia). Everything you want to know about one of the great songs. And what better day to post it? (14 July 2007)
Dr. Susan Block: Hookergate II: The Senator and the Veep (Counterpunch). Why did Dick Cheney call D.C. Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey's escort service? Was he getting himself or a friend serviced? Was it an oil & lube or everything at once? Who's worse, that sniveling hypocrite and Republican senator David Vitter or Bill Clinton? Inquiring minds want to know. (14 July 2007)
8 of 9 GOP presidential candidates boycott NAACP (Frameshop). The NAACP invited all the presidential hopefuls to two presidential forums, one for Republican candidates, one for Democrats. All the Democrats showed up for their. Only one of the Republicans thought NAACP worth his time—Tom Tancredo. (14 July 2007)
Detainee Transfers Concern Senators (Washington Post). Democrats on the Hill are trying to keep Bush from transferring Guantanamo prisoners to countries where they'll be tortured. (14 July 2007)
The Terminator seeks to terminate mental services for the homeless (LA Times). California prison budgets keep growing so the Terminator wants to economize by killing a highly praised program that has helped thousands of mentally ill street people break the cycle of hospitalization and jail. (14 July 2007)
Under legal attack in Pa., Nader smells political payback (McClatchy). Ralph Nader, the millionaire who lied to his Florida supporters and thereby gave the 2000 election to Bush (he promised his senior staff he'd bail out if there was a chance votes for him would tilt the election to Bush; the time came and he refused to drop out), is complaining that the people who are suing him for the $61,000 he owes them are doing it for political reasons. Maybe they are, but he does owe them the money, and he's doing everything he can to keep from paying his debt, even claiming political persection. But it's not persecution if you're guilty, is it? (11 July 2007)
Former Surgeon General Says He Was Muzzled (NY Times). "The first U.S. surgeon general appointed by President George W. Bush accused the administration on Tuesday of political interference and muzzling him on key issues like embryonic stem cell research. 'Anything that doesn't fit into the political appointees' ideological, theological or political agenda is ignored, marginalized or simply buried,' Dr. Richard Carmona, who served as the nation's top doctor from 2002 until 2006, told a House of Representatives committee....Carmona said some of his predecessors told him, "We have never seen it as partisan, as malicious, as vindictive, as mean-spirited as it is today, and you clearly have worse than anyone's had.'" Click here for the Washington Post coverage of the story. And click here for a transcript and RealAudio link of Carmona's interview on PBS Newshour. (11 July 2007)
Michael Moore tears Wolf Blitzer a new one (YouTube). Wolf Blitzer had Michael Moore on to talk about his new film "Sicko." Blitzer's program began with a hugely distorted intro. Moore responded by challenging Blitzer on everything, including Blitzer's incorrect challenges to Moore's previous film three years ago, "Fahrenheit 9/11." Then Moore went on from there. Few Blitzer guests get to tell Blitzer how distorted and hypocritical his presentations are. Moore pulls it off. "When," Moore says, "are you going to apologize to the American people for not telling the truth to them?" Blitzer never answers him. This may take a while to download, but it's well worth the wait. (The clip is also on DailyMorion.com) (10 July 2007)
'SiCKO' Truth Squad Sets CNN Straight (MichaelMoore.com). Some of the lies told by CNN about "SiCKO" and the facts CNN was misrepresenting, hiding, obscuring, obfuscating, or otherwise suffering the indignities Michael Moore pointed out. (10 July 2007)
Paul Krugman: Health Care Terror (NY Times). Fox News has turned the British Muslim terrorist doctors case into an argument against universal healthcare. What bloody swine. Go see Michael Moore's "Sicko," his best film to date. "This isn’t one of those cases where we face painful tradeoffs — here, doing the right thing is also cost-efficient. Universal health care would save thousands of American lives each year, while actually saving money. So this is a test. The only things standing in the way of universal health care are the fear-mongering and influence-buying of interest groups. If we can’t overcome those forces here, there’s not much hope for America’s future." (10 July 2007)
Jamey Gambrell: Putin Strikes Again (New York Review of Books). Thirteen reporters have been murdered since Putin took power. All of them were working on stories critical of government or big business. (Remember when Bush said he looked into Putin's eyes, saw his soul, and knew they could work together?) (10 July 2007)
One more White House perjurer: Alberto Gonzales (Washington Post). "As he sought to renew the USA Patriot Act two years ago, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales assured lawmakers that the FBI had not abused its potent new terrorism-fighting powers. 'There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse,' Gonzales told senators on April 27, 2005." He was lying. (10 July 2007)
Trove of F.B.I. Files on Lawyers Guild Shows Scope of Secret Surveillance (NY Times). For six decades the FBI covertly spied on an organization of lawyers associacted with the labor movement and liberal causes. They even had a spy working within the organization who let them know about legal strategy planning. (10 July 2007)