Buffalo Report articles and links 2007

This is a list of all, or nearly all, the entries that have been posted on BR. For the first few years we separated links and original articles, then we maintained the list to match the emails. The listings for 2002 and 2003 are a mess right now. When there's time we'll straighten them out. For now, this page contains the text of the postings for those two years, albeit in cockamamie order.

Carlene Hatcher Polite, 77 (NY Times). She was a dancer, a novelist and a member of the U.B. English department from 1971 to 2000. (31 December 2009).

Jonathan Dee: J.M. Coetzee, a Disembodied Man (NY Times). The Nobel laureate and quondam member of the U.B. English department has published a third autobiographical volume, Summer (26 December 2009)

BR's News Photo of the Year: Scorn in Hebron (NY Times). Rina Castelnuevo photographed a Jewish "settler" throwing wine at an Arab woman on a street in Hebron. Next to them both is an Arab store defaced with a large Star of David graffito. The cruel image is a grim and telling inversion of 1930s Germany, where Jews were attacked on the streets by arrogant young Nazis and Jewish-owned stores were defaced with swastika graffiti. The Hebrew name of the Star of David is "Mogen David." We wonder what brand of wine the young "settler" was arrogantly throwing that day. All that's missing is the armband. This photo has been widely seen in the Arab world, but it has received almost no publication in the US. The New York Times, however, chose it as one of its key photographs of the year. (25 December 2009)

FAIR's 2009 P.U.-Litzer Awards (Common Dreams). For the past 17 years, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting has issued a list of the years worst and most distorted moments of media malfeasance, spin, incompetence and groveling. This year's list leads off with Time's Joe Klein, includes the usual swinish and bombastic suspects (Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limburger, David Broder, Thomas Friedman) and many others who should be made to stand in the corner for a good long time. (25 December 2009)

Jonathan Raban: Sarah and Her Tribe (NY Review of Books). Nothing demonstrates how unfit John McCain was to be president of the United States as does his choice of the gagster from Alaska as his running mate: he's old and he's had cancer; she could easily have gotten the job before he ran out a four-year term. Eeeek!!! She appeals to the dumbest and least educated, the least analytical and most ideological of voters. Do you know how many of them there are? Lots. She talks and thinks in cliches, she knows nothing of history of politics or economics, she gets some men hot and women don't hate her for it. And, worst of all, she's not going away. "Having hoisted her banner of Commonsense Conservatism, and campaigned across the country by Lear jet and tour bus to promote Going Rogue, she's unlikely to assuage her compulsion to be a winner merely by selling more books than anyone else during 2009's holiday season. She is the stuff of democratic—with a small d—bad dreams." (A B.R. reader wrote us about this posting: "I'm reminded of the Duke and Dauphin conversation in Huckleberry Finn, where one says to the other "We got all the fools in town on our side, don't we? And haint that a big enough majority in any town?") (25 December 2009)

America's Secret Ice Castles (The Nation). U.S. Government secret prisons holding people without charge or ability to contact the outside world didn't disappear when Obama replaced Bush in the White House. They may even have increased in number. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, for example, maintains at least 186 unlisted and unmarked sites designed for confining individuals. These sites contain no beds or showers and "are not subject to ICE Detention Standards." Sound familiar? (25 December 2009)

Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols (BBC). Literally, this is the concert heard 'round the world, the most-listened to radio broadcast of the year: the BBC's annual Christmas Eve broadcast of "Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols" from King's College, Cambridge. The Festival was designed in 1880, first performed at King's in 1918, first broadcast by BBC a decade later. You can learn all about the Festival's history and design here. For this year's performance, click on the link. (25 December 2009)

PBS cancels Moyers (FAIR). PBS is cancelling "Now" and "Bill Moyers Journal," two of the very, very few independent, intelligent public affairs programs left on broadcast or cable television. The justifications thus far have had the character of blown smoke. With Moyers gone, the only interviewer left who is willing to engage serious people in serious conversation about matters of real importance will be Amy Goodman. Write or call PBS to let them know you resent this further dumbing down of the airwaves. (25 December 2009)

Christopher Caldwell: Arthur Koestler, Man of Darkness (NY Times). He is best known as a novelist but he "can fairly be said not to have had a literary bone in his body." "Scammell’s is an authorized biography and a sympathetic one. But the Koestler he depicts is consistently repugnant — humorless, megalomaniac, violent. Like many people concerned about “humanity,” he was contemptuous of actual humans. He ignored and snubbed his mother (who had pawned her last diamond to pay for his passage to Palestine), and he rebuffed every attempt to arrange a meeting between him and his illegitimate daughter. What made him such a creep? Perhaps alcohol — Koestler threw tables in restaurants and was arrested for drunken driving on many occasions. Perhaps insecurity — he was tormented by his shortness (barely 5 feet 6 inches) and used to stand on tippy-toe at cocktail parties. “We all have inferiority complexes of various sizes,” Koestler’s Communist editor Otto Katz once told him. 'But yours isn’t a complex — it’s a cathedral.'" (25 December 2009)

William R. Greiner, 1933-2009 (UB News Center). William R. Greiner, a member of the UB faculty for 42 years and president of the university for 13, died December 19 in Cleveland from complications following heart surgery. (25 December 2009)

Alison des Forges (1942-2009): Fieldwork (NY Times). Each December, in a special section called "The Lives they Lived," the NY Times Magazine profiles the life and work of a few people who died during the year, people who made a difference. Part of that section this year was devoted to human rights activist Alison des Forges, who died in the crash of a commuter plane near Buffalo on February 12. Alison and her husband Roger lived for decades in full knowledge that she might be murdered at any time because of her human rights work in Rwanda. As it turned out, she was killed by an incompetent cockpit crew on her way home from London, where she had been pressuring Parliament to act in some extradition cases. (24 December 2009)

Chuck Schumer, bird-killer (Politico). Chuck Schumer loves to tell the story of how as a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn he got into politics and found the Meaning of Life. So how do you explain this photo of Chuck holding a very dead pheasant in his right hand, an over and under shotgun in his left, with mossback Sen. Ben Nelson, grinning and gripping a shotgun of very different design at his side? Click here for Politico's take on that dazzling photo. (24 December 2009)

So is John McCain just a lying poseur or does he have Alzheimer's? (Political Wire). After Al Franken refused to join a unanimous consent vote to allow Joe Lieberman more time to justify his whoring for the insurance industry, the very rich John McCain said he'd never heard a senator do that before. McCain should have listened to the sound of his own voice years past: he did exactly the same thing himself in 2002. (19 December 2009)

Paul Krugman: Pass the Bill (NY Times). "A message to progressives: By all means, hang Senator Joe Lieberman in effigy. Declare that you’re disappointed in and/or disgusted with President Obama. Demand a change in Senate rules that, combined with the Republican strategy of total obstructionism, are in the process of making America ungovernable. But meanwhile, pass the health care bill." (18 December 2009)

Video of Al Franken shutting down logophile Lieberman (YouTube). Sen. Joe Lieberman ran out of time talking about how else he wanted to poison the health bill and please his insurance industry backers, so he asked "unanimous consent" for extra time. Al Franken refused, so Lieberman had to sit down, whereupon John McCain, who has busied himself since he lost his presidential bid doing everything in his power to create senate gridlock, got up and speechified about Franken's unique lack of comity. Aw, shucks. (18 December 2009)

It snowed in Paris (Le Monde). An inch or two of snow on the Niagara Frontier this time of year isn't enough to get the plows or the shovels out, but in and around Paris it's big news. Here are 18 readers' photos of this week's mild—but newsworthy, and sometimes very photogenic—snowfall in the heart of France. (17 December 2009)

Paul A. Samuelson, 94 (NY Times). He got his PhD at Harvard but they wouldn't hire him because he was a Jew, so he went down the street to MIT, where he was the center of the most powerful economics department in the country. He was the first American to win a Nobel Prize in economics, his 1948 textbook has been used by nearly everyone who has offered or taken an introductory college economics course. And last year, while the Chicago gang was alternately flopping about in confusion and blowing smoke, everything he said turned out to be right. (15 December 2009)

George McGovern: A sharp turn toward another Vietnam (Washington Post). George McGovern, one of the few U.S. senators to not only see the error of JFK's/LBJ's/RMN's Vietnam war but to have the courage and good sense to vigorously oppose it, sees Obama making the same mistakes now—and using some of the same rhetoric. Lyndon Johnson would have been a great president, had it not been for Vietnam. McGovern wonders if a similar ill-conceived policy will have a similar result for Obama. (14 December 2009)

Neal Gabler: Bill Moyers' thoughtful voice amid the din (LA Times). TV commentary is a country mostly populated by windbags, blowhards, bloviators, ideologues and/or all-around swine. There is one significant exception: Bill Moyers, who is intelligent, ethical, thoughtful, and honest. Bill O'Reilly hates him, dontcha know? (14 December 2009)

Uri Avnery: Spot the Difference (Gush Shalom). Guess which political entity at which time Israel most resembles? (Hints: that other political entity arose after a holocaust in which a third of its people were destroyed, made the army the center of its political identity, "strove to push out the national minority by creeping ethnic cleansing" and began by buying land but continued "by conquest and annexation?" (14 December 2009)

What Evo's Win Means (La Jornada). "The triumph of President Evo Morales and his party, the Movement for Socialism (MAS), in the Bolivian elections this past Sunday guarantees, with more than two-thirds of the vote, the reelection of the indigenous leader and the domination of his political organization in Bolivia's legislative chambers. Beyond these numbers, MAS's victory over the disintegrating and retreating parties of the right-wing oligarchy marks a historic landmark for a country that has been characterized by the racist marginalization and exclusion from power of the majority of its own people: the Quechua and Aymara ethnic groups. The commanding margin with which the president took power on Sunday represents both an indisputable expansion of the mandate that he received a little less than four years ago, and a validation of the ambitious political project to eradicate the oppression and discrimination that has blighted the nation for years." (14 December 2009)

Viruses That Leave Victims Red in the Facebook (NY Times) "It used to be that computer viruses attacked only your hard drive. Now they attack your dignity.Malicious programs are rampaging through Web sites like Facebook and Twitter, spreading themselves by taking over people’s accounts and sending out messages." (14 December 2009)

Jay Parini on Sofia Tolstoy's diaries (Guardian). Some guys you maybe don't want to be around. Sofia "paid a high price to be his wife. 'I was wondering today why there were no women writers, artists or composers of genius,' she writes on 12 June 1898. 'It's because all the passion and abilities of an energetic woman are consumed by her family, love, her husband – and especially her children. Her other abilities are not developed, they remain embryonic and atrophy. When she has finished bearing and educating her children her artistic needs awaken, but by then it's too late.' It was certainly too late for Sofia. A woman of intense feeling, a devoted wife and mother, someone who loved music and the arts, she had to contend with what she considered a gang of lunatics. She watched her husband slipping away from her, and was left on her own when, at 5am on 28 October 1910, Tolstoy stole away from his beloved estate, leaving his wife of 48 years. He would die in a tiny railway station some 80 miles from home, surrounded by his closest disciples, who refused Sofia entry when she tracked him down shortly before his death on 7 November." (14 December 2009)

When I'm 57-85 (NY Times). The life expectancy for Americans now is 75 for men and 80 for women. So what's life like once you're past your mid-50s and can no longer convince yourself you're still a kid? What illnesses, what difficulties, what relationships? What are the body stats and who's doing how much boozing? And who's getting how much sex and how do they feel about that? (14 December 2009)

James Heaney: Byron Brown's lousy attendance record (Buffalo News). Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown is chairman of the Buffalo Economic Renaissance Corp., an agency that has recently been the subject of a great deal of criticism and an FBI investigation because it has made so many bad loans to dubious lenders for questionable projects. The Brown administration has a worse record of job creation than any of his recent prececessors. Brown has missed more BERC meetings than he's attended and his deputy mayor, Steve Casey, gave up his seat on the board entirely. Perhaps they've been focussed on ripping off the Olmsted Conservancy to feed jobs to Brown's political campaign workers and neighborhood cronies—those who don't own restaurants and barber shops and who are, therefore, already recipients of his administration's largesse. (14 December 2009)

Alan Abramowitz: The Senate: Where Progressive Legislation Goes to Die (14 December 2009). Democrats have what is potentially a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, but that is meaningful only if all 60 Democrats vote the same way. Right now, for example, Connecticut's mushmouth Joe Lieberman, who votes on the Democrat side of the aisle but who often backs conservative Republicans on key issues, is promising to do everything he can to derail the health bill, whether or not it includes a public option. When it comes to health, he is totally in the pocket of Connecticut's insurance lobbyists. As long as there are snakes like Lieberman in the Senate, the power of the 60-vote majority is meaningless. Maybe it's time to change the Senate's antiquated rules, which privilege small states—and snakes in the grass. (14 December 2009).

Arts funding up under Obama (Chicago Sun-Times). After eight years of Bush's hacking away at arts funding, things are looking a bit better: the Obama administgration has provided $100 million in new funding for the arts, some of it continuing. The Endowments got their largest allotments in 16 years. (14 December 2009)

NEA report shows declining attendance in arts events nationwide (14 December 2009). Troubling news for arts organizations already struggling to keep afloat: for a variety of reasons—some, but not all, having to do with the economy—there has been a significant decline in the number of Americans going to museum shows, classical music concerts, opera, ballet, theater and jazz concerts. (14 December 2009)

David Thompson: The Death of Method Acting (Wall Street Journal). "The Method," the kind of acting taught at the Actors Studio that gave us Brando, Dean, Clift and early De Niro and Pacino, seems to have been trumped by people who want to act a role rather than inhabit its character. (14 December 2009)

Obama & the crashers (SNL). How did party-crashers Michaele and Tareq Salahi get their picture taken with a grinning Joe Biden? The Secret Service is investigating but Saturday Night Live already has the story. (7 December 2009)

Was Izzy Stone a KGB spy? (New York Review of Books). Was the great independent journalist I.F. Stone one of Stalin's secret agents? "Yes," insist John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr (on the basis of two notes by a former KGB agent). "No," insists D.D. Guttenplan (on the basis of all the rest of the evidence). 7 December 2009)

New York Rejects Marriage Bill for Same-Sex Couples (Human Rights Campaign). They talk about the Deep South being homebase for the religious ideologues, but New York is right at the head of the parade. The state's politics are so twisted by religious fundamentalism that New York remains the only state to ban no-fault divorces. The state senate's recent rejection of same-sex marriage is part of that same package of religious bigotry. (7 December 2009)

David Denby: The Ten Best Films of 2009 (New Yorker). David Denby, one of the few critics who skewered Quentin Tarentino's Inglourious Basterds for the stupid drivel it was, list 10 superb recent films that reward every minute you spend in the dark watching them. (7 December)

Uri Avnery: The Height of Kitsch (Gush Shalom). "The Germans do not forget the Holocaust. They are steeped in this subject all the time. It appears on TV programs, cultural discourse and art. That is as it should be. This monstrous crime must not be allowed to slip from memory. Young Germans must ask themselves again and again how it came about that their grandfathers and grandmothers were accessories to this enormous deed – those who took part in it, those who agreed silently and those who were silent out of fear or indifference. The German government – the present one like all its predecessors – draws from the Holocaust an unequivocal conclusion: Israel, the 'state of the victims', must be pampered. All its actions must be supported without reservation. Not a single word of criticism must be allowed....The time has come to ask some questions." (7 December 2009)

Documents reveal new information about destruction of torture tapes (The Hill). "Records obtained late last month by the American Civil Liberties Union reveal new information about the CIA's destruction of videotapes depicting the brutal interrogation of prisoners at CIA black sites, including the precise date the tapes were destroyed and evidence that the White House was involved in early discussions about the proposed destruction." Quelle surprise! (7 December 2009)

Majority of Americans Think Torture 'Sometimes' Justified (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty). A new Pew Research Center Poll finds U.S. isolationist sentiment at a four decade high, and the percentage of Americans favoring torture up to 54%, compared to 44% 10 months ago. Alan Dershowitz's message is being heard, alas. (7 December 2009)

Andrew Sullivan: Palin Puts the Trig Question Back on the Table (The Atlantic). Sarah Palin has been endorsing the Birthers, the idiot fringe that continues to insist that Barack Obama can't be president because he was really born in an African jungle. That foolishness invites examination of the real birther question that should have been answered in last year's election: who's the real mother of her "son" Trig? Thus far, there hasn't been an iota of evidence that it's the garrulous ex-governor. (7 December 2009)

MSNBC's Anti-War Censorship (FAIR). Ostensibly "liberal' MSNBC has now kept two high-profile talkshow hosts off the air solely on the basis of their opposition to the Iraq War: Phil Donahue and Jesse Ventura. (7 December 2009)

Patrick Lakamp: Getting ahead in the Masten District (Buffalo News). It is difficult to imagine a city administration more steeped in racial preference, cronyism and cynicism than Jimmy Griffin's, but in his first term Buffalo mayor Byron Brown left Jimmy in the dust. Since he became mayor, Jefferson Avenue, the heart of Brown's old Common Council district, has receivd 71% of all Buffalo Economic Renaissance Corporation funding. Four barbershops and a salon received $287,499 from the mayor, who obviously thinks about hair a lot. "Businesses in Fillmore, Niagara and North districts—districts as poor or pooreer than Mastern—received a combined 2 percent of the grants." In case you wondered why Byron Brown did so well in this year's primary in a district with a traditionally low primary turnout, now you know: your tax dollars bought Byron a lot of well-coiffed gratitude. (7 December 2009)

Patrick Lakamp: Making the most of Grant (Buffalo News). What's happening in one of the parts of the city the Byron Brown administration has decided to starve. In Brown's first four years in office, his administration gave four barbershops on one street in Brown's old neighborhood got more city funds than all of the Grant Street district combined. (7 December 2009)

Is it difficult to write well about sex? (BBC). Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, John Updike and Philip Roth have, at various times, been shortlisted for a literary award they don't much brag about: the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. Here's Roth's current prize line: "It was as if she were wearing a mask on her genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what she was not and was not supposed to be." Get ya hot? No? How about this dilly from Booker Prize winner John Banville: "She puts her hands flat against his chest and leans inot him in a simulacrum of a swoon, making a mewling sound." (7 December 2009)

Where are the Kindle books? (Guardian). Why are so many books of interest not available on Amazon's tree-saving device, the Kindle book reader? No Philip Roth, Dan Brown, Stephen King, John Grisham, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Toni Morrison or Thomas Pynchon. You can't get Sarah Palin either, but we'll not lament that lapse. (7 December 2009)

Peter Dreier: Remembering Bess Lomax Hawes (Huffington Post). Bess Hawes, who died Friday at 88, was born into the folk music business: her father was pioneering American folk music researcher John Avery Lomax and her brother was Alan. She was a member of the folksinging group The Almanac Singers, she taught thousands of kids to play guitar, and, as head of the Folklife Program in the National Endowment for the Arts she fought long and hard to see that traditional artists were accorded the honor and support their genius deserved. She ran the program with a constant smile and an iron hand, and even though she retired years ago, NEAA is still better for it. (1 December 2009)

Michaele Salahi's body contact picture album (Facebook). 100 or so photos of the tall oh-so-thin blonde, who with her husband Tareq crashed a White House state dinner last week, making body contact with the rich and famous: John McCain, Willard Scott, Prince Charles, Quincy Jones, Oprah, Donny Osmond, and oh-so-many more. And oh-so-many sparkling teeth! Most people get one of her long arms around their shoulder, some get a cheek rub, but Bill Clinton and Joe Biden get felt up. Click here for "Salahis speak!,"Lisa de Moraes' spot-on Washington Post column on the couple's puffball "Today" interview with morning lightweight Matt Lauer. It begins, "Aspiring reality-RV stars Michaele and Tarq Salahi kick off their Media Whoredome Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony live Tuesday morning on NBC's 'Today' show, guided by America's Sweetheart Matt Lauer." (1 December 2009)

Nathaniel Rich: The Nabokov scam (Daily Beast). "Let’s come clean—$35 is at stake, after all. Vladimir Nabokov’s posthumously published The Original of Laura (Dying Is Fun), despite its considerable width (nearly 2 inches) and heft (2 pounds, 11 ounces), its publisher’s description ('a novel in fragments'), and its advance praise ('a fascinating novel' says biographer Brian Boyd), is not a novel. Not remotely....To describe The Original of Laura as a novel would be like mistaking a construction site for a cathedral. Yes, the blueprints might call for flying buttresses and oriel windows, but for now it is only a mess of wheelbarrows, uncut limestone, and piles of sand." (1 December 2009)

Erie County's rotten jails (Buffalo News). Eries County Executive Chris Collins and Sheriff Timothy B. Howard have done everything they could to convince people that Erie County's two jails aren't the ratholes they in fact are. They brush off the "three suicides, 13 attempted suicides, more than 70 incidents of inmate-on-inmate violence (including assaults encouraged by authorities), beatings, shoddy medical care, sexual assaults against inmates and other abuses." They've stonewalled a federal investigation into the charges, letting Hollywood movie stars roam the jails and keeping federal observers out. It didn't work: new reports from the U.S. Justice Department and the State Commission of Correction document what Collins and Howard prefer you didn't know. (1 December 2009)

James Wolcott; I'm a Culture Critic...Get Me Out of Here! (Vanity Fair). "Reality TV gives voyeurism a bad name." "Amid the smoldering wreckage of the popular culture, the author blames Reality TV, which has not only ruined network values, destroyed the classic documentary, and debased the art of bad acting, but also fomented class warfare, antisocial behavior, and murder." (1 December 2009)

Obama's two-tier justice system (NY Times). Barack Obama campaigned on a platform that included a promise to restore the American justice system by closing Guanatanamo and any secret parts of the prison gulag still operating, and by seeing that suspected terrorists were given fair trials or were released. Thus far, few have been released, Guantanamo is still running, secret prisons still exist (see following item), and the justice system has been further complicated by what appears to be a two-tiered division of cases: when the government thinks it has a lock and can easily win (Khalid Shaikh Mohammed) it puts on an ordinary felony trial in federal court; when the evidence is weak or contaminated (Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri) it operates under the rules of the military commissions, a Kafkaesque Bush-era monstrosity in which the protections of the U.S. Constitution do not apply. (1 December 2009)

Afghans Detail Detention in 'Black Jail' at U.S. Base (NY Times). Remember those secret torture prisons set up by Bush and Cheney that were supposed to go out with Obama's inauguration? They're still up and running: windowless cells where the lights never go out, the Red Cross never gets to visit, and the only human contact is with the interrogators. (1 December 2009)

Dana Perino lies big (Political Wire). Wanna see history being rewritten? Here's a video of former Bush press secretary Dana Perino in a recent Fox News interview proudly saying, "We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term." Anchor Sean Hannity agreed, presumably following the Fox prime directive: always favor the lie to the inconvenient truth. Fox assumes, all too often correctly, that its viewers are stupid enough to believe anything someone sitting behind an anchor's desk says with a straight face. (1 December 2009)

Obama administration rejects land mine ban (Democracy Now!). Amy Goodman interviews Stephen Goose, co-founder of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which won the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize, about the Obama administration's decision to keep the U.S. the only nation in the world that hasn't signed or agreed to sign the international convention banning weapons that kill and mutilate civilians years after the wars in which they were deployed have ended. (1 December 2009)

Obama administration delays release of secret reports (Boston Globe). Bill Clinton signed an order that a large number of government documents—all of them now 25 years or older—were to be released December 31. George W. Bush, who ran the blackest White House in history, put that order on hold. Obama promised to honor Clinton's move toward transparency. But the spy agencies are dragging their feet and rather than get into a row with them, the White House has given them an unlimited exension. (1 December 2009)

Joe Conason: Mike Huckabee's fatally bad judgment (Salon.com). Mike Huckabee has a good sense of humor, a talent that caused many people who saw him on Comedy Central's "Daily Show" to miss the facts that he's not very bright and he's a religious ideologue. While governor of Arkansas, he regularly commuted sentences of some of the state's most violent and vicious criminals after they sucked up to Huckabee's Baptist preacher pals. One felon Huckabee cut loose because he made nice Jesus noise is now a fugitive suspected of gunning down four police officers in Parkland, Washington. (1 December 2009)

Anthony Grafton: A Nazi at Harvard (NYR Blog). Harvard, Colombia, and many others of America's oldest university's and colleges were remarkably slow to disengage from Nazi Germany. Part of the reason was deep-rooted dislike of Jews among the people who ran those institutions, part went to the character of American academic life. This sorry part of the history of the eastern elites has been documented by Stephen Norwood in his new book, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower. (25 November 2009)

Walter Isaacson: How Einstein Divided America's Jews (Atlantic). In 1921, "Albert Einstein’s first trip to America triggered the kind of mass hysteria that would greet the Beatles four decades later. But as newly published documents show, it also tore a sharp rift between European Zionists and some of their fellow Jews across the Atlantic, men like Louis D. Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, who felt that the best way for Jews to get ahead was to assimilate, not agitate for a Jewish homeland." (24 November 2009)

Chomsky interview (Guernica). "Noam Chomsky discusses his forthcoming book, the hypocrisy of neoliberalism, where he feels hopeful about democracy despite U.S. terrorism, and his friendship—okay, passing acquaintance—with Hugo Chavez and other 'pink tide' presidents." (24 November 2009)

Peter Brown and Geoffrey Garver: Economics without Ecocide (Montreal Gazette). The recent G20 meeting in Pittsburgh came up with a "Framework for Strong, Sustainable and Balanced Growth." But they failed to factor in one key element that may very well doom the entire perky enterprise. "Unfortunately, with the ecological base of the economy falling apart, the Pittsburgh framework will be looked back on as part of the fiddling going on as Rome burned - or, more aptly, as the planet heated up. Its fundamental flaw? It falls hopelessly short of addressing - or even recognizing - the real crisis facing the economy: The global ecological crisis, and the unwillingness of the global community to steer the economy away from ecological collapse." (24 November 2009)

Oscars' documentary short list once again snubs top docs (LA Times). Michael Moore wasn't surprised that his Capitalism: A Love Story, last year's top-grossing documentary didn't get a nod from the committee that pumps out Academy Award nominations for documentary films. Roger and Me didn't get one either, and neither did Hoop Dreams, Thin Blue Line, Grizzly Man or Tyson. (22 November 2009)

Bruce Jackson: Ha Jin in Babel. The writer Ha Jin (War Trash, Waiting, A Good Fall, The Bridegroom, Facing Shadows, Between Silences, etc.) appeared at Kleinhans Hall in Hallwalls' Babel series November 20. He talked about language, why he has done all his writing in English, why he wants to do the translations of his work into Chinese (going from English, a phonetic language, to Chinese, an ideographic language. requires a measure of freedom the author owns and an ordinary translator can never rightfully assume), and how specific works by other immigrant writers (Nabokov's Pnin, Roth's Call it Sleep) and writers about the land (Cather, e.g.) have influenced his own work. His hands moved constantly through the talk. Sometimes they seemed as articulate as the words. Here are some photographs from his evening at Kleninhans. (22 November 2009)

Stephen King: The Raymond Carver you never knew (NY Times). The best-known stories of Raymond Carver, "surely the most influential writer of American short stories in the second half of the 20th century," were hacked and otherwise mutilated before publication by Carver's editor, Gordon Lish. A new biography gets many of the facts of Carver's life right, and the new Library of America edition of his work presents for the first time the stories Carver actually wrote. (22 November 2009)

Surge in 'libel tourism' brings 11% rise in cases (Guardian). Great Britain's libel laws are so unbalanced in favor of plaintiffs that many publications based in countries that believe in freedom of the press no longer permit sale of their products there. Last year, defamation lawsuits reaching Britain's high court surged 11%. And those are only the cases that make it all the way through: many others are settled along the way because publishers don't want to face the risk of losing in court or go through the expense of eventual vindication. England may be a great place to visit, but you wouldn't want to publish there. (22 November)

University of California goes on life-support (NY Times). The top state university system in the nation is struggling to survive as California's initiative-driven fiscal mess, far worse than the other 49 states, threatens to suck so much support from the system that it can't come close to maintaining the level of excellence that brought it fame, Nobel Prizes and top faculty and students. This is exactly the kind of disaster U.B. President John Simpson's recent efforts to put the state's four university centers (Buffalo, Binghamton, Albany, Stony Brook) on a more rational footing is designed to avoid. The move is opposed by the university system's unions, which are controlled by the two- and four-year colleges, which want to keep resources from going to the university centers. (22 November 2009)

SUNY Weights the Value of Division I Sports (NY Times). SUNY's four research universities—UB, Albany, Binghamton and Stony Brook—were able to enter the big time of college sports in 1986, when the trustees lifted the system's ban on atheltic scholarships. The university centers could then recruit students for brawn as well as (or sometimes instead of) brains. The upgrade has had mixed results and the current New York State economic crisis some officials are wondering whether the cost of Division I sports is worth the price. Former UB President Steven Sample (1982-1991) was a strong advocate of UB's move to Division I. (Sample became president of USC in 1991 and managed that school into the academic big time), but the opportunity to do it didn't occur until Sample was succeeded by William Greiner. (17 November 2009)

Obama's Best Speech Ever (Political Wire). "President Obama's speech at Fort Hood may go down as one of his best ever," writes Taegan Goddard, host of the highly regarded Political Wire. "The president was able to balance his duties as Commander in Chief while consoling a nation in the aftermath of a terrible tragedy. That he was able to do this while taking away the focus on the shooter's religion was even more impressive." Click on the url for a video and full transcript. (10 November 2009)

What's in the House bill (Washington Post). With only a 5 vote margin, the House passed a health care bill late Saturday night. Abortion fanatics managed to make sure women's reproductive services would be prohibited or minimized. A single Republican—Anh Cao, who got elected in a Democratic district when his opponent was indicted and convicted for several felonies—crossed the aisle. All the other Republican maintained a solid front in their attempt to make sure the Obama administration fails at anything it attempts to do, no matter how importantant to the nation. Here's a brief summary of the major items that survived the last two weeks' intensive politicking. It won't tell you everything that's in the 2000-page bill, thanks be. (8 November 2009)

Failing the Midterms: Press overplays election results (FAIR). Republicans took the governorship in New Jersey and Virginia, and Democrats won two special elections for House seats in New Jersey and California, one of them a district that hadn't gone Democratic in living memory. The mainstream and cable press focused almost entirely on the two statehouse elections, and all but ignored the two House elections. The reporting and editorializing covered a story the press conjured up, not what actually happened. (What's more important—a governorship or a House seat? If three members of Congress had voted with the Republican block Saturday night, Obama's healthcare plan would be in the same cellar with Bill Clinton's.) (8 November 2009)

J.M.G. Le Clézuo: The Savage Detective (NY Times). "Claude Lévi-Strauss, anthropologist, writer and adventurer, died just over a week ago at age 100. He died discreetly, which was as he had lived, though he was the most eminent and probably the last French philosopher. His ideas had as much influence on his contemporaries as the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus....He expressed in his books the beauty and intelligibility of myths. And he kept in his heart the warmth and the modesty of the young man he once was, a man who was struck by a pessimistic sympathy for dying civilizations, dying people. Mr. Lévi-Strauss was — and would have liked to be remembered as — a simple witness to the course of modern time. He was never sure that what he had put to light would even survive the present, an inevitable and bitterly lucid truth elucidated in “Tristes Tropiques,” one of his most famous books: 'The world began without the human race and will certainly end without it.'" (8 November 2009)

Ben Macintyre: The internet is killing storytelling (London Times). Stories are the devices we use to learn, remember and organize knowledge and experience. Is there room for narrative in the constricted space of tweet, skim, browse, scan blog and text? (8 November 2009)

House Shames Itself on Goldstone Report (The Progressive). In case you're wondering how much power the Israel lobby still has in Washington, note the 344-36 House vote condemning the Goldstone report on war crimes in Gaza. The UN report by South African jurist Richard Goldstone has been universally praised for its fairness and comprehensiveness—save for Israel and the US. Goldstone found war crimes on both sides; Israeli officials insist that proves his bias, and the House of Representatives—well, with 36 exceptions, the House does as it's told. Dennis Kucinich, who is quoted at length in this article, was one of the few House members with sufficient cojones to stand up for the facts. There's a good Yiddish word that characterizes the behavior of the 344 members of the House who once again let lobbyists silence truth: shanda (8 November 2009)

Fruit juice is worse than Coke or Pepsi (LA Times). Officials worried about increasing obesity in schoolchildren have campaigned to replace sugar-laden Coke and Pepsi with healthy fruit juice. It turns out the fruit juice is worse than the junk drinks. A glass of apple juice has the fructose of six apples. 100% fruit juice is like drinking a glass of sugar water. Juices entered the American diet as a consequence of citrus overproduction in Florida: growers sought ways to get consumers to buy more of their product. Whole fruit juices sold fresh or frozen were a great idea—from the grower's point of view. For the rest of us, they just smooth the way to diabetes. You're thirsty? Try water. It's good for you. (8 November 2009)

Uri Avnery: A Line in the Sand (Gush Shalom). Barack Obama pledged during the campaign to end the US government's disregard of Israel's apartheid and expropriation policy toward its Palestinian citizens and prisoners. He's done the opposite: he's made nice while Netanyahu expands the settlement. "Perhaps he feels that the time is not ripe for provoking the almighty pro-Israel lobby. He is a politician, and politics is the art of the possible. It would be possible to forgive him for this, if he admitted frankly that he is unable to realize his good intentions in this area for the time being. But it is impossible to forgive what is actually happening. Not the scandalous American treatment of the Goldstone report. Not the loathsome behavior of Hillary in Jerusalem. Not the mendacious talk about the 'restraint' of the settlement activities. The more so as all this goes on with total disregard of the Palestinians, as if they were merely extras in a musical. Not only has Obama given up his claim to a complete change in US policy, but he is actually continuing the policy of Bush. And since Obama pretends to be the opposite of Bush, this is double treachery." (8 November 2009)

Lyndon Johnson's pants (PoliticalWire). An hilarious audiotape of LBJ giving the president of Haggar pants in Dallas, Texas, an order for pants, shirts and a jacket, with special instructions about the pockets (make them longer so his knife doesn't fall out) and crotch (make it longer so...well, listen to the tape). (4 November 2009)

Wiseman's Ballet (NY Times). The great documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman (Titcut Follies, High School, Central Park, Basic Training, Sinai Field Mission, Juvenile Court, and 31 others over the past 40 years) has a new film. This time he looks at the Paris Opera Ballet. It is, says NY Times reviewer A.O. Scott, "one of the finest dance films ever made." (4 November 2009)

Jon Stewart: Indecision 2009—Reindicision 2008 And Beyond (Daily Show). Once again, the best TV broadcast on election night was Jon Stewart who put the silly-putty hyperinflated overinflected hot air of Fox and CNN into perspective. Don't miss the superb send-up of the cable networks rhetoric and meaningless technotoys at the end by John Oliver, Sam Bee and Aasif Mandvi. (4 November 2009)

100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do (Part 1) (NY Times). Don't you hate it when you're having a serious conversation over dinner at a restaurant and the server comes over three or four times and interrupts you to say, "Is everything all right?" We always want to reply (and sometimes do), "It was until you interrupted us." Or when you're ordering wine and the waiter says, "Good choice." As if he'd have told you if you'd selected a vintage he didn't think expensive enough. Or you're made to feel like a cheapskate when the waiter asks "Bottled water or just tap?" Here is the first 50 of 100 such restaurant offenses. You might want to print it out and have it in your pocket for the next time the house spoils what would otherwise have been a fine dinner out. (4 November 2009)

Glenn Greenwald: A court decision that reflects what type of country the U.S. is (Salon.com). A U.S. appellate court has ruled that an innocent individual held incommunicado tortured by U.S. officials, then rendered to another country for more aggressive torture has no right to sue the U.S. for damages if the U.S. officials responsible claim they had "national security" in mind. That argument did hold at the Nuremburg trials. But Nuremburg didn't occur in a country with a Scalia-Thomas-Roberts-Alito-Kennedy Supreme Court holding the keys to the Bill of Rights. (4 November 2009)

Edward Rothstein: Claude Lévi-Strauss, 100 (NY Times). "Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western understanding of what was once called 'primitive man,' died overnight between Saturday and Sunday. He was 100." He was the most influential anthropologist of the 20th century. He had many imitators, none of whom got close. "Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s version of structuralism may end up surviving post-structuralism, just as he survived most of its avatars. His monumental four-volume work, Mythologiques, may ensure his legacy. The final volume ends by suggesting that the logic of mythology is so powerful that myths almost have a life independent from the peoples who tell them. In his view, they speak through the medium of humanity and become, in turn, the tools with which humanity comes to terms with the world’s greatest mystery: the possibility of not being, mortality." (3 November 2009)

Speeding bullets (Washington Post). The violent crime rate is lower than it's been for 20

years, but Americans are buying more bullets than ever. In the past year, "gun shops sold enough bullets to give every American 38 of them." Manufacturers can't keep up with the demand. (3 November 2009)

Uri Avnery: Count Me Out (Gush Shalom). Yitzhak Rabin was a warrior who came to believe that the greatest security for Israel lay in the road to peace. For that belief, he was murdered and the accord he worked on with Yasser Arafat in Oslo was doomed. "Rabin’s failure will find its expression at the memorial rally next week at the very place where we witnessed his murder, 14 years ago. The main speakers will be two of the gravediggers of the Oslo agreement, Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak, as well as Tzipi Livni and Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar, who belonged to the forces that created the climate for the murder. Rabin, I assume, will turn in his grave." (3 November 2009)

Is the End Near for the Right-Wing's Vice Grip on U.S. Israeli Policy? (AlterNet). Obama's national security adviser, retired Gen. Jim Jones, keynoted last week's J Street Conference "a gathering of progressive pro-Israel, pro-peace' activists." This may signal an end of the stranglehold on Washingon politicians long enjoyed by the very hawkish, very anti-peace AIPAC and its affiliates. The hawks tried to swift-boat the moderates, but this time it didn't work. For a long time AIPAC et al have peddled the canard that to be pro-peace was to be anti-Israel and therefore anti-semitic. Nonsense, say the moderate Jews of J street. Finally they're getting some traction in their attempt to introduce a measure of sanity in U.S. policy. (3 November 2009)

USC President Steven B. Sample to step down in August (LA Times). After 19 years as president of USC, Steven Sample has decided to retire. Before Sample's appointment, outside of LA USC was primarily known for its football teams (O.J. Simpson played there and was a Heisman Trophy winner). It is now very much in the academic big time, with a ninefold increase in its endowment and a huge increase in students' SAT scores. Before going to USC, Sample was president of UB 1982-1991 and was responsible for UB's admission to the prestigious Association of American Universities. (3 November 2009)

Urban Realist (Governing). Some rustbelt cities get it right. Click on the link for the Q&A with Jay Williams, mayor of Youngstown, Ohio. Instead of mooning about the past or blowing smoke about the present or finding ways to reward political cronies, Williams is taking smart, practical steps to make the smaller Youngstown viable and vibrant. (3 November 2009)

Peter Matthiessen: The Tragedy of Leonard Peltier vs. the US (New York Review of Books). Two FBI agents were shot to death when they were prowling around the Pine Ridge Reservation in June 1975. Bob Robideau and Dino Butler were acquitted Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Leonard Peltier was convicted on the same evidence in Fargo, North Dakota, and sentenced to two life sentences. The government's case against Peltier was dirty and the judge was hostile to him; he never stood a chance. Somebody had to do down for the deaths of those two FBI agents and Peltier was the only Indian they could make up a case about. He recently came up for parole. He was turned down and told he could reapply in 2024. He's spent more than 30 years in prison "for the unworthy purpose of saving face for the FBI and a US Attorney's Office that together botched the famous ResMurs case and mean to see somebody pay. And who better for this fate than a 'radical' AIM Indian who dared stand up to 'legally constituted authority' in defense of his humiliated people, as he was doing with such tragic consequences on that long-ago June day?" (1 November 2009)

Louis Menand: The Ph.D. Problem (Harvard Magazine). "You can become a lawyer in three years, an M.D. in four years, and an M.D.-Ph.D. in six years, but the median time to a doctoral degree in the humanities disciplines is nine years.... If doctoral education in English were a cartoon character, then about 30 years ago, it zoomed straight off a cliff, went into a terrifying fall, grabbed a branch on the way down, and has been clinging to that branch ever since. Things went south very quickly, not gradually, and then they stabilized. Statistically, the state of the discipline has been fairly steady for about 25 years, and the result of this is a kind of normalization of what in any other context would seem to be a plainly inefficient and intolerable process. The profession has just gotten used to a serious imbalance between supply and demand." (31 October 2009)

David S. Broder: Damaging option for liberals (Washington Post). Primarily to protect himself at home, Sen. Harry Reid has made the "public option" a states-rights option, going back to a notion of government the US abandoned decades ago, one in which politicians in some states could unilaterally decide to deny citizens rights enjoyed by citizens in other states. This is like saying Americans in blue states can have Social Security but Americans in red states cannot, or students in the South go to segregated schools but students in the North do not. Liberals shouldn't let the slothful senators get away with this. (30 October 2009)

Joe Conason: Why Lieberman & Bayh will filibuster against decent healthcare (Salon.com). Polls show that Connecticut and Indiana voters both strongly support a health care plan with a public option, yet Democrat Bayh and "Independent" Lieberman both plan to filibuster with the Republicans who hope to kill the plan. Why? Both of their wives have been paid huge sums of money by insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists. They've been bought and in exchange they've sold out the people who elected them. They're counting on voters having short memories. (30 October 2009)

Beware the Cost of War (100 Eyes). Photographs by 14 Israeli and Palestinian photojournalists. No captions, and none are needed. (26 October 2009)

Bill Moyers on justice and Justice (Bill Moyers' Journal). You only have to watch Bill Moyers' Journal for a few minutes to understand what a whitewashed, densanitized glob of pap PBS' Newshour has become. For every expert who got wisdom by experience on the ground or serious study, Newshour offers a political opposite, competent or not, interpreting the same issue 180 degreees out of phase, so every major story is perfectly neutralized and sanitized. Bill Moyers, on the other hand, thinks right and wrong are meaningful concepts, as are information and misinformation, so he regularly seeks out people whose opinions and information he thinks are valid or are at least worthy of serious consideration. This week, he talks with Justice Richard Goldstone, who did a solid report about war crimes by both sides in the course of Israel's most recent war against Palestinians (which was denounced by the Israeli government, which said it would do its own war crimes investigation and did--and came up with a guy who stole a credit card; the report was also trashed by the US State Department, not because there were any errors in it but because it was an inconvenient truth). Then Moyers does a beautiful obituary for U.S. District Court Judge William Wayne Justice, the man who told the State of Texas it had to obey the U.S. Constitution. Texas officials ignored and resisted him as much as they could, but he kept snapping at their asses up to the end. He was a real American hero. (26 October 2009)

Illinois prosecutors go after students who busted them for wrongful convictions (NY Times). Over the past decade, students in Northwestern University's Medill Innocence Project have uncovered evidence that got eleven condemned prisoners off of Death Row: they were innocent men sent there because of improper police work, most of it from Cook County—Chicago. The Cook County prosecutors have responded to this criminal dysfunction in their own justice system. No, they're not examining their own incompetence that let them send innocent men to the death house and they're not going after the Chicago cops who manufactured evidence in those same cases.They're going after the students who found the exculpatory evidence the cops and prosecutors missed and/or ignored. The Chicago daily papers never bothered to look into these convictions, so what right do those nasty students have to be poking around in grownups' affairs? (26 October 2009)

Joan Walsh: When Tim Russert mocked Bill Clinton—in song (Salon.com). Bill Clinton's presidency wasn't spoiled by his stupid dalliance with a White House intern, and neither was it spoiled by the hatred of the Prelapserian Right. The real villains of the piece, as Taylor Branch's new book about Clinton makes abundantly clear, were the reporters and editors of the liberal press that let themselves become running dogs for those who desired nothing more than that a Democratic president should fail. The New York Times led the charge, with Maureen Dowd spewing her hatred for the Clintons week after week, and the front page running news stories about corruption that never existed in fact. Since leaving office, Clinton has gotten back much of the respect that he threw away and that was stolen from him; the press hasn't done nearly so well. (26 October 2009)

Bruce Jackson: Spain Rodriguez & friends at the UB Poetry Room. Comix legend Spain Rodriguez (Trashman, My True Story, Nightmare Alley, Che) talked about comix art and history, as well as his own career, at the UB Poetry Room October 23 in connection with a large exhibit of his work that will be up there until the end of December. In addition to the regular audience for such events, this one was attended by several past and current members of the Road Vultures Motorcycle Club, of which Spain was once a member. Here are 20 photographs of the event. (25 October 2009)

Jerry Zremski: Schumer resuscitates public option plan (Buffalo News). Thanks in large part to Chuck Schumer, there may be a public option in the health plan after all. The insurance companies and Big Pharma spent millions trying to defeat it, but this time their bribes might not have been enough. Republicans, who are doing anything possible to ensure that the Obama administration fails, are almost unanimous in opposition. The hypocrite Congressman Chris Lee R-Clarence), a millionaire who enjoys a superb government-run health plan, says he is opposed because the government can't run anything effectively. Not if he can help it. (25 October 2009)

The Rock Obama (SNL). Barack Obama, as everyone knows, never loses his temper. Well, almost never, as is documented in this terrific opening skit from the October 17 broadcast of Saturday Night Live. The set-up is out of "Incredible Hulk" and the character is a carbon-copy of Alex Karras's Mongo in in Blazing Saddles. And the politics are spot-on. (23 October 2009)

Texas governor blocks inquiry into execution of innocent man (NPR). Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in Texas in 2004 for setting a fire that killed his three children. Recent investigations by competent fire experts conclude there was no arson; it was an accidental house fire. Texas Governor Rick Perry, who had one of those reports before Willingham's execution and who had received an advisory memo from his general counsel recommending clemency, but ordered the execution anyway, recently fired four members of the Texas Forensic Science Commission that was looking into what more and more looks like state-sanctioned murder. (22 October 2009)

Sarah Palin's LinkedIn page (LinkedIn). Where you learn that she has 500+ connections, , view her Full Profile, and learn that she is "Interested in: job inquiries, business deals, getting back in touch, expertise requets, and reference requests." You will learn that the only work experience of this fierce opponent of government has been for local and state governments. And you will have an opportunity to add Sarah Palin to your network. (18 October 2009)

Jon Stewart: Queer and Loathing in D.C. (Daily Show). Fox News ignores the gay rights march in D.C., that was every bit as big as the TeaBag march Fox News drummed up last month and which Fox covered all day long. But it did have five minutes of airtime for an empty lot, which gave it an excuse to attack Obama with more lies. (14 October 2009)

Eric Boehlert: Fox News is now the Opposition Party (Media Matters). "Rupert Murdoch's cable cabal is now, first and foremost, a political entity. Fox News has transformed itself into the Opposition Party of the Obama White House, which, of course, is unprecedented for a media company in modern-day America. That partisan embrace means the news media have to expand beyond typing up Fox News-ratings-are-up and the White-House-is-angry stories, and it needs to start treating the cable channel for what it is: a partisan animal. The press needs to drop its longstanding gentleman's agreement not to write about other news outlets as news players --not to get bogged down in criticizing the competition -- because those newsroom rules no longer apply. Fox News has exited the journalism community this year. It's a purely political player, and journalists ought to start covering it that way." (13 October 2009)

CNN fact-checks SNL & Jon Stewart skewers CNN (Daily Show). You know CNN news stinks, but sometimes it's difficult pinpointing exactly how and why. It's not just Wolf Blitzer, who pounds every other syllable, whatever the content, and treats the most serious and trivial stories exactly the same way. Jon Stewart to the rescue: he skewers CNN for "fact-checking" a recent Saturday Night Live skit, but never fact checking or even asking follow-up questions of Republican senators who tell one lie after another, particularly in the health care debate. The main CNN response to politicians' lies is "We'll leave it there." Is that journalism? We'll leave it there. (13 October 2009)

Insurers try to kill health reform (AP). It's spelled G-R-E-E-D. The only contribution health insurers make to health care in the United States is to themselves. They tithe all the medical transactions they can get their hands on. Were they just being paid to act as middlemen in complex financial transactions, their fees would be fair, but in fact their profits on our pain are huge, and they are fighting to keep them huge. They have long worked hard to prevent federal control of their parasitical industry. In 1991, they successfully killed the Clinton administration's attempt to bring about health reform, and they're up to the same mischief now. Congress, an institution that often seems to run on nothing but hot air and lobbyists' money, may very well fail us once again and, like last time, then blame the White House for the failure that resulted from nothing other than Congress's greedy collaboration with a greedy industry. (12 October 2009)

Michael Beebe and Robert McCarthy: Is Mark Sacha a disgruntled employee or a principled idealist? (Buffalo News). Erie County DA Frank A. Sedita III fired former deputy DA Mark Sacha because Sacha told the Buffalo News that both Sedita and his predecessor, Frank Clark, had shied away from prosecuting Tom Golisano's catspaw Steven Pigeon for election fraud. Sacha said there was plenty of evidence of such fraud. Clark says he didn't want to prosecute the case because the defense would claim there was a whole lot of similar fraud out there that Clark wasn't prosecuting; Sedita says he's not looking at election fraud because he doesn't have enough staff to deal with such cases. Try Clark's excuse with a different noun: what if the police could only catch a few child molestors, would that be a good reason for the DA to ignore those few? Sedita's isn't any more substantial: he runs a big office and he's got a huge staff; if he can't spare any staff to work on election fraud it's because he's made a policy decision that election fraud is unimportant or it would so displease important people it's not worth the heat. A few months ago billionaire Tom Golisano brought the New York State Senate to a standstill by dangling sugarplums before a few ambitious downstate politicians. Does his money rule the Erie County DA's office too? Hold your nose, folks. (12 October 2009)

Frank Rich: Two Wrongs Make Another Fiasco (NY Times). Warlover John McCain has spent his Senate career trying to rewrite the Viet Nam War, most of which he spent in a Vietnamese jail. He helped lie us in and out of Iraq and now he's trying to lie us into a huge troop expansion in Afghanistan. He (and the other two members of the Senate's "Three Amigos"—Lindsay Graham and Joe Lieberman) wants a full-scale expansion of the war in Afghanistan, which means far more troops than we ever had in Viet Nam, even though the bad guys we're presumably there to defeat (Al Quaeda) aren't there and we haven't an idea what "victory" might look like if we stumbled upon it on the way back from blowing up another village wedding. Those three hypocrites refuse to help Americans get a fair and decent health care system because it costs money, but they urge us to incur untold billions of debt for a war with no end over an issue no one can name. (12 October 2009).

A Novelist Whose Fiction Comes From Real Life (NY Times). A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, an award she won in 1990 for Possession. “It’s a terrible poison, writing. You just get to the point of your novel where you see the metaphor unfolding and you see the next three pages right in front of you, and the phone rings from school. And that completely interrupts your rhythm. Both E. Nesbit and Olive [a character in the new novel based on Nesbit] were more selfish than I am. They’re convinced that their work is so important. I’m not like that, really. I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world....But not to me.” (10 Ocrtober 2009)

Bruce Jackson: A.S. Byatt in Buffalo (BabelPhotos). 24 photographs from novelist A.S. Byatt's presentation Friday night at Kleinhans Music Hall, the first event in Just Buffalo's spectacular "Babel" series. Click here for photos of the previous eight writers in the series.

Nobel Committee Peace Prize press release (Nobel Prizes). How long, do you think, will it take the cynical and xenophobic Republicans to use this honor as further proof of Obama's inadequacy? How long before Glen Beck and the other Fox racists sneer about Obama finding excuses to make one more foreign trip? Or to smear him because furriners like him? (9 October 2009)

Ray changed tense. Raymond Federman—friend, novelist, critic and retired UB faculty member—died in San Diego this week. Ray lost his family to the Nazis, came to the US in 1947, did a PhD on Samuel Beckett, and was at UB with his wife Erika from 1964 to 1999. During that time he became a guru in experimental writing circles. His novels, most of which dealt with his loss in the Nazitime, were discovered by the Germans and much of his work was translated there. One of the great pleasures of his later years was that the French finally noticed him and took him seriously as a French writer. In a way, he got to go home. Some of his friends had an 80th birthday celebration for Ray last year in Buffalo, at which time Buck Quigley wrote about him for Artvoice in "Federman at 80." And here are 14 photographs of Federman during his Buffalo years—13 of them by Bruce Jackson, 1 by Diane Christian. Ray had a web page that was active until 2001. More recently he'd been keeping in touch with the world through Federman's Blog. The final entry, dated 10/06/2009 7:51 PM, is pure Moinous.When Beckett died Ray wrote "Sam changed tense" and after that, every time one of our friends died, one of us would say or write to the other, "_____ changed tense." Somehow, it never got corny, but the gag is herewith retired. (7 October 2009)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pigeon fundraiser for Brown cancelled (Buffalo News). Rochester billionaire Tom Golisano tried to buy his way into the New York governor's mansion three times, but it didn't work. He had a lot of money, but not that much. The last year or two, he tried to buy a legislature that would behave the way he thought it should and do the things he wanted it to do; that didn't work either. So this year he seems to have decided to just screw everything up and throw New York State government into utter chaos, and that has worked very well because he only had to buy a couple of people to make that trainwreck come about. His point man in all this was former Erie County Democratic chairman Steve Pigeon. Pigeon was supposed to hold a $500/$1000 a ticket fundraiser for his goodbuddy Buffalo mayor Byron Brown in his Admiral's Walk home this week, but apparently the stench from the Albany mess crossed the state and Brown's people have taken flight. (19 June 2009)

Supreme Court makes age-bias suits harder to win (LA Times). Bad presidents do a huge amount of harm while they are in office (the past 8 years, e.g.), and through their judicial appointments they can continue doing vast harm long after they've gone back to the farm. George H.W. Bush, in what was a breathtaking fuck-you to minorities and civil rights advocates, replaced the great Thurgood Marshall with Clarence Thomas, a man who had all the breaks coming up because he came from a minority background and who has since done everything he could to abolish any judicial preference or rectification of wrong for anyone who has suffered because of minority background or any other status singled out for special prejudice. He couldn't do it alone: he is helped of late by Bush fils' Court appointments. Their latest is a decision, with the opinion written by Thomas, making it far more difficult for individuals who have been discriminated against because of age to use the courts to find justice. Business owners cheered. (19 June 2009)

American Radical: The Life and Times I.F. Stone (Democracy Now!). The great independent investigative journalist died 20 years ago this week. Amy Goodman remembers his life and work, and airs a great Newshour interview with Stone and his historic speech at the 1965 Berkeley anti-war teach-in. (19 June 2009)

Jane Mayer: The Secret History (New Yorker). The only thing that will let Dick Cheney be remembered as something other than Torturer-in-Chief is another major terrorist attack, at which point Cheney will leap up and tell everyone that if chickenhearted Obama had just maintained the torture like a real man the attack wouldn't have happened. And the same right wing ideologues now paying him to utter foolishness like this, such as the American Enterprise Institute, will leap up and applaud the bloodshed in self-righteous joy. In this article,CIA chief Leon Panetta responds to Cheney's wishful thinking. Panetta has the difficult, perhaps impossible, task of running the CIA while dealing with the public's demand that those who were Cheney's agents in the torture program be held accountable, and all the while Cheney (who with Bush got far more Americans and Iraqis slaughtered and maimed than the 9/11 murderers) will continue sniping from the sidelines. (19 June 2009)

Average age 32: the classical audience in Paris (ArtsJournal.com). That is about half the average age of classical music audiences in the U.S. Classical record sales in France are 9% of the market; in the U.S. it's below 1%. When Michelle Obama was in London she took her kids to see The Lion King, a Hollywood export; Carla Bruni-Sarkozy goes to performances of modern dance and opera. (19 June 2009)

Lieberman to Clinton: Israel Won't Freeze Settlements (CommonDreams/Haaretz). Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that Israel has no intention of backing off its Lebensraum program of expropriating Palestinian land for Israeli settlements. (19 June 2009)

Uri Avnery: When He Says Yes—What Does He Mean? (Gush Shalom). "Netanyahu declared that 'our hand is extended for peace.' ...That was Ben-Gurion's method. Before every provocation he would declare that 'out hands are extended for peace,' adding conditions that he knew were totally unacceptable to the other side." The fact that the settlers uttered barely a peep after the speech proves how empty of meaning it really was. (19 June 2009)

Both states must be real (Economist). Bowing to pressure from the Obama administration, Israel's prime minister Binytamin Netanyahu grudgingly accepted the idea of a two state solution to the bloody stalemate in Palestine—but only if the solution is massively unbalanced, with the Palestinians giving up a lot and the Israelis giving up nothing. A real solution to that continuing tragedy will take more than empty words. (19 June 2009)

Kenneth Turan: "Whatever Works" (LA Times). Woody Allen's new film, "Whatever Works," doesn't, says LAT film critic Turan in this scathing review. (19 June 2009)

Online, who owns what? (Variety). Everything, it seems, is available on YouTube. Is that great news or depressing evidence that in the digital age artists can be ripped off at will? Participants in The World Copyright Summit tried to figure out how to match individual rights with the possibility of infinite access. (19 June 2009)

Ronald Bailey: The Invisible Hand of Population Control (reasononline). Garrett Hardin's 1968 essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons," is a hugely influential essay that justifies selfishness and isolationism. Recent evidence suggests that not only are the consequences of Hardin's argument cruel and brutal, but his argument is faulty in its core assumption about population growth. He assumed humans were animals like any other; it turns out, however, that human population responds to economic and social conditions, not just the availability of meat. (19 June 2009)

Couric to Stewart on 'Daily Show': 'Why Aren't You My Executive Producer?" (PoynterOnline). The blogosphere has been full of a really stupid Daily Show piece on the New York Times this week by Jason Jones—a 30-second gag strung out for more than five minutes. This Daily Show exchange between Jon Stewart and CBS anchor Katie Couric is far wittier on both sides and far more informative about the dire straits of major news organizations. (12 June 2009)

A Change is Gonna Come (Playing for Change). Crank up the speakers. Clarence Bekker and Grandpa Elliott, with the PFC Band, in a grand duet in New Orleans, the 9th installment of great music from the folks who brought you last year's astonishing "Stand By Me" video. With links to all the other episodes and info on all the performers. (12 June 2009)

Trudy Lieberman: Who Will Be at the Table? (Columbia Journalism Review). The press and the opinionators have been flogging the insurers in the current health care crisis, but they've maintained nearly total silence on AMA's huge efforts to scuttle Obama's health plan. They organization wants to kill the public option entirely. Why would they want to do that? Maybe the same reasons they doggely opposed Medicare and Medicaid years ago. Why the press silence this time around? (12 June 2009)

The Taking of Pelham 123—Why remake a Seventies classic? (The Independent). John Huston famously said it was stupid to remake a film that had been done really well the last time: you've got nowhere to go but down. Better to remake a flop. The very expensive new version of The Taking of Pelham 123 underscores the difference between recent gimmicky thrillers, most of which are based on frenetic cutting and in-your-face special effects, and the great thrillers of the 1970s, grounded in detail, character, plot and acting. (12 June 2009)

How to go viral (Salon.com). Susan Boyle's very short media career was a classic "nanostory": an event of minimal, if any, significance that is briefly the focus of viral web and media attention, followed by silence as the web traffic and media mouthpieces move on to the next meaningless time and space filler. (12 June 2009)

Ira Chernus: AIPAC Wall Beginning to Crack (Truthout). In living memory, Congress has never challenged AIPAC's pressure to go along with Israel's lebensraum rationale for stealing Palestinian lands and forcing Palestinians to live in an ugly approximation of apartheid. AIPAC would pour money into the campaigns of congressmen with few Jewish constituents to ensure that they hewed to the party line. But, like a lot of other things, that may be changing with Obama in the White House. He doesn't get intimidated very easily, and he knows how to argue back.(12 June 2009)

Gail Collins: Bring on the Tarantulas (NY Times). "I cannot tell you how inspiring it is to see the fate of the legislative agenda hinging on a person who is under indictment for stabbing his girlfriend with a broken glass.... I keep reminding people that unlike Illinois, none of our governors have been indicted for trying to sell a U.S. Senate seat. And unlike Illinois, none of our governors’ wives have tried to raise money for her husband’s legal defense team by eating a tarantula on a reality TV show." (12 June 2009)

Snub fueled Pigeon role in coup, Democrats say (Buffalo News). Sometimes it's difficult to tell who is driving the car in the curious partnership of former Erie County Democratic Party chairman Steve Pigeon and Rochester billionaire Tom Golisano. Golisano has the money to underwrite campaigns and buy legislators; Pigeon knows who can be bought and who is worth buying. He also has ambition and grudges. In the carnival that is the current meltdown of the New York State Senate, he seems more than Golisano's catspaw. According to some Democratic sources, he caused the trainwreck because he couldn't get the patronage he thought he deserved. So how is this different from the days he was Erie county Democratic boss, using the public payroll to reward cronies and friends? (12 June 2009)

Phil Spector Unplugged (The Smoking Gun). Phil Spector was famous for wearing the ugliest fright wigs in Hollywood. When he checked in at California's North Kern State Prison Reception Center to begin his 19-year murder sentence last week, he had to leave the wig at the gate. Now we know why he wore the fright wigs. (10 June 2009)

Tom Golisano gets himself a Senate (NY Times). For the past few years, Rochester billionaire Tom Golisano has been spending big around New York State, trying to buy a legislature that would perform the way he wanted it to. When he met with New York's new Senate Majority Leader, Malcolm A. Smith, a few months ago, Smith arrogantly fiddled with his Blackberry which got Golisano so pissed off he had his chief political operative Steve Pigeon get two other Democrats to change alliegance, throwing control of the State Senate back to the Republicans, costing Smith his leadership position, and throwing New York government into chaos. It's unlikely Golisano got these clowns to flip just by flashing a pretty smile. Last month, Golisano said he was so angry at New York's tax structure he'd moved his residence to Florida. Now we learn that he left Pigeon here to burn the fields he'd left behind. (10 June 2009)

UB202 bill in trouble in Albany (Buffalo News). The NY State Senate passed UB President John Simpson's ambitious UB2020 bill, but it's running into molasses in the Legislature. Right now, 90% of all tuition increases go to Albany and are used for non-SUNY expenses; Simpson's bill would let that money stay at UB to fund student aid and faculty expansion. The bill is opposed by United University Professions, the union representing SUNY staff, which offers all sorts of airy reasons why the Legislature should vote no except the real one: UUP is dominated by far by the two- and four-year colleges and sees UB2020 as the first step in the four university centers breaking out from under their contract domination. Downstate legislators are far more afraid of offending the union than they are in interested in helping Western New York's ailing economy, so this very good bill may go down for the same reasons so many other good bills go down and bad bills pass in Albany: greed, folly, laziness and political ambition. (8 June 2009)

David Carradine, Actor, Is Dead at 72 (NY Times). He was found dead, hanging naked in a Bangkok hotel room closet. The Times, with its usual delicacy in these matters doesn't mention the second rope and what part of Little Sparrow it was attached to—which is why we have The Smoking Gun. (5 June 2009)

James Heaney: Official in One Sunset mess gets additional duties (Buffalo News). All the bankers and accountains said the One Sunset project was a trainwreck waiting to happen, whereupon Michelle M. Barron, an official in Byron Brown's administration, not only poured public money into it but actually worked in the place, probably on city time. The restaurant tanked as soon as it opened and Barron, instead of being fired, was given more responsibility by city hall. An office controlled by Mayor Byron Brown investigated this stinker perpetrated by another office controlled by Mayor Byron Brown and found nothing amiss. And now Brown is sitting on two of the three reports--presumably public documents--that contain the facts of the case. (5 June 2009)

For Their Own Good (St. Petersburg Times). For decades Florida's reform school for boys was an institution in which sadistic officials systematically engaged in unspeakable tortures. Young lives that were supposed to be fixed were instead ruthlessly twisted. In this moving video (7:54), some of the victims talk about their live at the Florida School for Boys in Marianna, and their anger that the man who oversaw it all recently had a school named in his honor. (5 June 2009)

Barack Obama: On a New Beginning (whitehouse.gov). The full text of his June 4 speech at Cairo University. We've got a president who can give an intelligent speech on a complex topic to an audience not cherrypicked by political handlers, a speech without lies or hypocrisy. A new beginning indeed! How did we survive eight years of Bush-Cheney? (5 June 2009)

Michael Moore: Goodbye, GM (MichaelMoore.com). The worst thing, says documentarian Michael Moore, would be for the bankruptcy and bailout to help GM do a better job at what it wasn't doing very well before. GM and the rest of the anachronistic auto industry should become what we need, not a fitter version of what it once was. It should convert to producing mass transit and energy-efficient vehicles and end our addiction to ever more expensive environmentally noxious fossil fuel. (3 June 2009)

Keith Olberman: Fox News' killer complicity (MSNBC). You don't have to go to the Middle East to see a successful terrorist campaign at work. Just tune in Fox News and look at how they beat the drum for the lunatic violence that resulted in the murder of Dr. George Tiller and the denial to countless women of medical help they desperately need and to which they are legally entitled. Most people in the media have danced around O'Reilley's explicit contribution to this terrorism and violence. Not Keith Olberman, who, in this terrific commentary, nails it, and suggests something you might do to fight back. (For starters, when you're in restaurants, like Pistachio on the University at Buffalo Campus, which has one of its tv sets tuned to Fox all the time, tell them you're there for lunch, not far-Right indocrination.) (3 June 2009)

Amy Goodman: Dr. George Tiller (1941-2009): Murdered Abortion Provider Remembered for Lifelong Dedication to Women's Reproductive Health (Democracy Now!). Five women who knew and worked with the murdered physician talk about him, his life, and his dedication. (3 June 2009)

Robert Fisk: Police state is the wrong venue for Obama's speech (Independent). "Maybe Barack Obama chose Egypt for his "great message" to Muslims tomorrow because it contains a quarter of the world's Arab population, but he is also coming to one of the region's most repressed, undemocratic and ruthless police states. Egyptian human rights groups – when they are not themselves being harassed or closed down by the authorities – have recorded a breathtaking list of police torture, extra-judicial killings, political imprisonments and state-sanctioned assaults on opposition figures that continues to this day. The sad truth is that so far did the US descend in moral power under George W Bush that Obama would probably have to deliver his lecture in the occupied West Bank, even Gaza, to change the deep resentment and fury that has built up among Muslims over the past eight years. This, of course, Obama will not do." (3 June 2009)

Misquoting Sotomayor: Media let right-wing critics frame debate (FAIR). The Right can't get Sonia Sotomayor on her qualifications or her record, so ideologues like Charles Krauthammer, and stentorian stenographers like Lou Dobbs, and lazybones commentators like Howard Kurtz have either been making up things she never said or did or repeating as fact such made up stories. And nobody in the mainstream press is calling them on it. Instead, the mainstream press has been reporting the lies as if they were facts. So the Right, with nothing to undergird its hate campaign, has taken over the public dialog, simply because the press has been too lazy to differentiate between fact and fiction. If not the press, then who? (3 June 2009)

Michelle Goldberg: The far-right's violent return (Guardian). The fundamentalist hate-talk spewed out every day by media slime like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Rielly has taken a homicidal turn. Their minions didn't win in the ballot box and can't win in the courts, so they've taken up murder. (3 June 2009)

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

Jerry Rosenberg, Jailhouse Lawyer, Dies at 72 (NY Times). He was known in the joint as "Jerry the Jew" and he was maybe the best jailhouse lawyer ever. He was also NY's longest-serving convict. One of his most innovative cases was one he lost, with himself as the client. He had, he told us, open heart surgery. When he came out of the anaesthetic the doctors told him that his heart had stopped and they'd almost lost him. "You were dead and we brought you back." "Will you put that in writing?" Jerry said. They did, whereupon Jerry filed a habeus corpus demanding immediate release from prison on the grounds that he had completed his life sentence. The court, he said, was amused, but not convinced. (3 June 2009)

Christopher Benfey: review of Brad Gooch's Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor (New Republic). A rich cousin paid for Flannery O'Connor's trip to Lourdes. O'Connor, who rarely left her mother's farm near Milledgeville, Georgia, went. And she prayed—not to be relieved of the lupus that would kill her at 39, but for help with the novel she was then trying to write. (3 June 2009)

Glenn Greenwald: Backlash grows against Obama's preventive detention proposal (Salon.com). Obama's plan to move Guantanamo detainees to the US maxi-maxi prison in Canon City has drawn two kinds of opposition. One is stupid and hypocritical: Republicans who are all a-twitter that these as-yet-unindicted torture victims will somehow escape a US prison from which no one have ever escaped, and thence disrupt the nation. That whole campaign is just a lot of smoke blown by Republicans who will do anything to deflect discussion of prisoner treatment from illegal torture and detention by the Bush administration. The other kind of opposition, which includes members of Congress and which is growing rapidly, comes from people who are noticing that Obama is finding various excuses to extend the worst aspects of the Bush system of non-justice other than torture: indefinite detentions without formal charge or trial and military commissions. Moving prisoners on indefinite hold to cells on the mainland changes nothing other than where the cells happens to be located. (26 May 2009)

Philip Gourevitch: The Abu Ghraib We Cannot See (NY Times). Release of a new set of torture pictures, argues the editor of Paris Review and co-author, with Errol Morris, of "The Ballad of Abu Ghraib," would tell us nothing we do not already know, and would confuse things we do know that we are still not attending to properly. The real evil of Abu Ghraib is documented not in the photographs (which do not show the worst of it) but the words (which tell it all), including Dick Cheney's continued bragging about how much good torturing others did for us. It is true, Gourevitch also argues, that the torture program was the result of a few bad apples--but they were at the top, not at the bottom, and thus far not one of them has been held accountable for anything. (24 May 2009)

Diane Christian: Looking at Torture. Obama op

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

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

Alexander Cockburn: How Long Does it Take? (Counterpunch) "How long does it take a mild-mannered, antiwar, black professor of constitutional law, trained as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, to become an enthusiastic sponsor of targeted assassinations, 'decapitation' strategies and remote-control bombing of mud houses the far end of the globe? There’s nothing surprising here. As far back as President Woodrow Wilson in the early twentieth century, American liberalism has been swift to flex imperial muscle, to whistle up the Marines. High explosive has always been in the hormone shot." (23 May 2009)

Obama's national security speech (Political Wire). On May 21, while Dick Cheney got ready to lead a retro circlejerk at American Enterprise Institute, President Barack Obama gave an excellent speech on national security at the National Archives Museum. (21 May 2009)

Elmore's back (LA Times). Elmore Leonard's first crime novel, The Big Bounce, was rejected 84 times. He just published Road Dogs, his 43rd novel. The other 42 are all in print and most of them have been made into movies. He smokes Virginia Slims. (17 May 2009)

Cheney said Gitmo detainees revealed Iraq--al Quaida link (McClatchy). Further evidence that the Bush administration's torture program wasn't undertaken to discover new information, but rather to justify the invasion of Iraq. (Have you noticed how quiet Harvard torture-advocate Alan Dershowitz has been of late?) (17 May 2009)

David Simon on why the blogs won't do and why the press won't survive under the current structure of greed (Democracy Now!). David Simon, creator of HBO's "The Wire," recently testified to a Senate committee on the inadequacy of the Internet as a news generating source (it does fine as a parasite) and the fatal consequences of the current economic structure of the journalism industry. A sampler: "High-end journalism is dying in America. And unless a new economic model is achieved, it will not be reborn on the web or anywhere else. The internet is a marvelous tool, and clearly it is the information delivery system of our future. But thus far, it does not deliver much first-generation reporting. Instead, it leeches that reporting from mainstream news publications, whereupon aggregating websites and bloggers contribute little more than repetition, commentary and froth. Meanwhile, readers acquire news from aggregators and abandon its point of origin, namely the newspapers themselves. In short, the parasite is slowly killing the host." While that's going on, conglomerates and chains are killing the newspapers from the other side. (7 May 2009)

Michael Tilson-Thomas: I vant to buy a chicken (NY Times). In which the quondam Buffalo Philharmonic conductor encounters Greta Garbo and a five-poud chicken in the old Balducci's. (5 May 2009)

Edward Klein: The Lion and the Legacy (Vanity Fair). "Senator Edward Kennedy’s diagnosis of brain cancer, in May 2008, touched off an extraordinary medical battle—and a veiled rivalry over who might succeed him as symbolic head of America’s fabled dynasty. Would it be R.F.K.’s oldest son, Joe? J.F.K.’s daughter, Caroline? Or the senator’s second wife, Victoria? An excerpt from the new book Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died reveals the family’s shifting dynamics, the confrontation that led Caroline to drop her political bid, and the triumphant, grueling winter of the last Kennedy brother." (5 May 2009)

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

Ontario boosts arts council budget by $5M (CBC News). Last week Great Britain announced a £40 million increase in support for the arts; this week, Ontario followed suit by upping provincial support for the arts by $5 million. Both governments gave the same reasons: the arts are a major sector in the economy and are as deserving of support as any other sector. Contrast that to Erie County, where County Executive Chris Collins is using the financial meltdown as an excuse for extortion: he's refusing to let cultural organizations have the money the Legislature voted them unless they let him place his political apparatchiks on their boards. (4 May 2009)

Israel Loses Prize 'Free Press' Status (Media Line). "Israel's media freedom ranking has been downgraded from 'free' to 'partly free,' the first time the Jewish State has lost its status as the only Middle Eastern nation with a "free" press. In a report released over the weekend to coincide with World Press Freedom Day today, Washington-based non-profit Freedom House lowered Israel's rank from 59 to 72 out of 195 countries surveyed, citing restrictions on journalists' freedom of movement, increased self-censorship during wartime and 'biased reporting.' The report found the Middle East to have the lowest level of press freedom in the world, with three in every four Middle Easterners living in one of 15 'not free' Middle Eastern nations." (5 May 2009)

Deb Reich: No Talking, Dammit! (Counterpunch). Israeli officials and their American assets (such Rep. Barney Frank on the May 4 HBO Real Time with Bill Maher) argue that with all its faults, Israel is the only country in the Middle East that honor freedom of speech. Neither the officials nor the Franks go on long enough. The sentence about freedom of speech in Israel needs a clause going something like unless you're a woman who is willing to talk to young IDA conscripts having ethical questions about being forced to serve in a brutal army of occupation. In that case, freedom of speech is supended and the politzei (4 May 2009)

Scott Reynolds Nelson: Attribution Lacking (Chronicle of Higher Education). The Internet has made plagiarism far easier than it used to be: the perp can find things to steal with far less work and there's no need to waste time typing when you can just cut & paste. But the Internet has also facilitated catching the scoundrels at it. (3 May 2009)

Stefany Anne Golberg: Final Edition: In praise of the newspaper obituary (The Smart Set). The obituary pages in some newspapers is little more than the late lamented's brief c.v. in paragraph form (the Buffalo News rarely even lists the cause of death, preferring instead, "died after a long illness"). But in some papers, the NY Times among them, the obits offer the paper's wittiest, most trenchant and most informative writing. At major papers, obits for the rich and famous are prepared long before the event that occasions their publication, which is why they are often so polished: there's been time to revise and tune and when the moment comes, all that is needed is a bit of updating and info on where, when and from what. "Obituaries aren’t interesting because of what they say about death. They’re interesting because of the funny and pathetic way they purport to deal with the unfathomable. Obituaries are little fairytales we tell ourselves, while imagining our own lives as one day complete enough to write about. An obituary, any obituary, transforms lives into stories, with interesting characters, a cohesive plot, and most importantly, a good ending. This is what we’ve got as humans — not the ability to understand or be at one with death, but the ability to generate lots of stupid crap to fill in the empty space of the unknown. Obituaries can do that as much as anything, and maybe we can think of them both in the Franklinian and Aristotelian sense: They might not complete life nor make it eternal, but they can make us feel better about living in the constant and terrifying presence of death." (3 May 2009)

Interrogation Debate Sharply Divided Bush White House (NY Times). As the torture program developed, several top level Bush administration officials—Condi Rice among them—came to think it was wrong, illegal or both, and argued against it. Dick Cheney argued for it to the very end. If we used the same desiderata that we used to select which Nazi officials would go in the dock at Nuremberg, how do you think Dick Cheney would fare? (3 May 2009)

Jacob Weisberg: All the President's Accomplices: How the country acquiesced to Bush's torture policy (Slate). It was the Bush administration that desired and organized the torture archipelago, but they couldn't have gotten away with it if Congress hadn't rolled over and said, "Whatever." The press is now carrying on as if there have been some new, horrific revelations. No. The documents by which the Bushies justified themselves to themselves may have been secret but the practice was revealed early on and in great detail by Seymour Hersh in April 2004, and shortly thereafter by the NY Times. We all knew about it. The only question now is, will any of the villains be made to pay for it? (3 May 2009)

Chris Collins continues extortion of Erie County culturals (Buffalo News). Erie County Executive Chris Collins campaigned as a reform-minded businessman, but now that he's got the job he turns out to be just one more thug. He continues to use funds the legislature allocated for public support of the arts to shoehorn his cronies onto their governing boards. He's targeted eight agencies. For seven of them, he is demanding one or two board memberships, but he is demanding three on the board of the organization that gets the least funding of the eight—the African American Cultural Center. What's going on there? (1 May 2009)

Jason Larkin and Jack Shenker: Gaza Laid Bare (Guernica). The Israeli blitzkrieg of Gaza killed a few militants and more than a thousand civilians. It also targeted food-processing plants, hospitals, schools, water wells, and the zoo. Here are photos showing some of the non-human damage: a wrecked hospital, a dead camel, dead chickens. Nothing was spared. (1 May 2009)

Walter Shapiro: This President is No Cable Guy (Politics Daily). Four things categorize 24/7 cable news (CNN, CSNBC, MSNBC, FOX): it is hyperbolic, it generates very little information on its own, it focuses more on performance and sets than information and analysis, and is, if you pay attention to it for very long and don't simply use it as noisy wallpaper, very boring. The gaudy sets and the yelling, Wolf Blitzer's punched out clauses, O'Reilley's rants, even Rachel Maddow's studied irony, all become audio an video white noise, using a few facts or factoids from the daily press to ratify political positions their distinct audiences had when they turned the tv set on (if they ever turned it off). Bill Clinton loved it; George Bush fed it. But Barack Obama thinks it is a waste of time, and deals with it accordingly. He'd rather have news conferences and addresses to the nation in which he gets his comments directly to the American people, without cable's ideological filters. Quel homme! (Fox, by the way, was the only major network that refused to broadcast the president's speech Wednesday night. It could not have its mission blurred by facts.) (1 May 2009)

Spain Opens Inquiry on Guantanamo (NY Times). Fox News blowhard-in-chief Bill O'Reilly has been bragging that he terrorized Spain into dropping its indictment proceedings against six Bush officials involved in the torture gulag. Not only was O'Reilly wrong about that, but he was wrong about what else Spain was up to, which he said was nothing. Now it turns out that the country's most prominent investigative magistrate has opened a much broader inquiry into US human rights abuses at Guantanamo. (29 April 2009)

Arlen Specter: The Need to Roll Back Presidential Power Grabs (New York Review of Books). The issue of NYROB in which Arlen Specter's article on the presidency appears is dated May 14, but the subscribers' email with the article went out April 27 and the print edition arrived a few days before that. It was a surprise seeing Specter in NYROB, where the political articles are almost always sane, informed and liberal—i.e., as far away from the Republican party as one might get without going radical. It all made sense a day later, when Specter announced on April 28 that he was moving his desk to the Democrat side of the Senate chamber. This article in NYROB is his application essay—at once distancing himself from the Bush administration (which he supported far more than his statements this week suggest) and letting the Democrats know that he intends to oppose any attempt by Obama to continue Bush's most abusive political tactics. (29 April 2009)

Joan Walsh: Specter's "Happy 100 days!" gift to Obama (Salon.com). Will the last Republican left please turn out the lights? (29 April 2009)

Leonard Cassuto: Pete Seeger, America's Teacher (Inside Higher Ed). The great man is about to turn 90 and he's still doing what he's been doing for 70 years: performing at just about any interesting venue he can find (such as the concert at the Lincoln Memorial on the eve of Barack Obama's inauguration, singing Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" with Bruce Springsteen), and fighting whatever wrong or evil he comes across (whether is it local or global). Here's one of the more interesting piece written to celebrate his long career and great contribution. (28 April 2009)

Andrew O'Hehir: Those ignorant atheists (Salon.com). Professional atheists like Richard Dawkins and the besotted Christopher Hitchens share one important characteristic with religious fundamentalists: none of them know much of anything about the religious traditions they either fanatically embrace or enthusiastically deny. Terry Eagleton's wonderful new book —Reason, Faith, and Revolution—exposes them all as dilettantes and frauds. (28 April 2009)

Geithner, Member and Overseer of Finance Club (NY Times). Treasury secretary Timothy F. Geithner knows everybody there is to know on Wall Street. Geithner is the administration's point man on the financial system's bailout: Obama is pretty much following the bailout policy Geithner suggested last June. Some wonder if there is enough light between Geithner and the bankers for him to be the watchdog we very much need. (28 April 2009)

Newspaper Death Foretold by Warren Buffett!!! (Slate). Newspapers are in trouble: nearly all of them have declining readership and adversiting revenue (some in the double digits), and several have shut down in the past year and a number of others are on life support. Publishers blame 24/7 news channels and the Internet for their industry's failing health. But the hyperbole and fiction on Fox, the absurd sets and posturing on CNN, and the web only accellerated a process that began much earlier. Four years before the Internet came along, investor Warren Buffet (his company owns the Buffalo News) predicted this decline in what was once a monopoly industry. (28 April 2009)

Annie Lowrey: The Torture Timeline (Foreign Policy). "Having trouble keeping track of all the memos, executive orders, and policy decisions that led the United States into the moral low ground? FP brings you the ultimate guide to the Bush administration's journey to the dark side." With links to all the key documents. (27 April 2009)

Reagan's DOJ Prosecuted Texas Sheriff for Waterboarding Prisoners (truthout). The Bush administration waterboarding isn't a crime. They've insisted that the Japanese soldiers we executed for waterboarding American prisoners in WWII were evil people waterboarding for evil reasons, while our waterboarders were good people waterboarding for good reasons (the Dershowitz Defense). How to reconcile that with the decision of Republican hero Ronald Reagan to prosecute a Texas sheriff for waterboarding prisoners and having his Justice Department stick with it until the evildoer got ten years and his deputies four years in prison? (27 April 2009)

Adam Kirsch: Vistas of Perfection: The self-dissatisfied life and art of James Agee (Harvard Magazine). He rarely stopped talking, rarely bathed, and drank and smoked himself to death. He invented modern film criticism. He wrote the script for John Huston's African Queen.In his books, he never did anything twice. He worked at the heart of American capitalism (Fortune Magazine) yet produced the most enduring document about America's poor during the Great Depression, one of the two prose masterpieces to come out of the US during that decade. (27 April 2009)

Andrew Delbanco: The Universities in Trouble (New York Review of Books). The economic collapse has had devastating effect on all sections of higher education, from community colleges to the elites. Endowments deliver less, rich alumni have less money to give, students have less money for tuition and other expenses. Classes are larger, tuition and fees are higher, staff is smaller, hiring is frozen, libraries are losing staff. "In short, the financial crisis not only is threatening the livelihood of faculty and staff but is also degrading the experience of students. And despite the big hit on the big endowments, the further you go down the hierarchy of prestige, the worse the effects." Tenured faculty is mostly insulated from the worst of this: they won't get a pay raise and they may have to work a few more years before retiring, but few will suffer salary cuts. Graduate students are in dire straits: reduced retirements means fewer slots opening for them. And many students now won't be able to attend college at all. The damage is spectacular--but it mainly highlights a pattern that has been developing for some time: fewer and fewer non-rich Americans get to go to college. (27 April 2009)

Brits increase support for the arts to combat recession (The Stage). US arts organizations are staggering in the current recession: their endowments are delivering less, donors have less money so they're parting with less, and government funding agencies are cutting back across the board. In Great Britain, where the arts are seen as necessary rather than optional, the government increased arts funding by £40 million ($58.4 million US). They've always seen the arts as far more central to civil life than we: the Arts Council was created during the blitz, the huge bombing campaign of civilian targets in Britain by the Germans in WWII. (27 April 2009)

Lit Critics Who Peer Under the Covers (NY Times). Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick's ideas about gender for a while kept her from finding an academic job, but that changed: she was part of Stanley Fish's spectacular (albeit transitory) English department at Duke, and was, until her death a week ago, an English professor at CUNY. Her work led to what is generally called "queer theory," and has had influence rangeing far beyond the hothouse world of academic conversation and argument. (27 April 2009)

Mel Gibson's family values (Salon.com). "Holy Week ended with a big bang in the conservative Catholic community. Robyn Moore, Mel Gibson’s wife of 28 years and mother of their seven children, filed for divorce in Los Angeles. With no prenuptial agreement, she is likely to get a settlement worth somewhere around half a billion dollars. Seems like a small price for 28 years of living with Mad Max and his homophobia, anti-Semitism and ultra-orthodox Catholicism....Why is it that these right-wing family-values guys are always the worst sinners? Newt Gingrich, Ted Haggard, Larry Craig and now Mel Gibson." (27 April 2009)

Akiva Eldar: If I were a Palestinian (Haaretz). If Israelis honored their own constitution and Palestinians accepted and lived by its principles, the current horrowshow in Israel might quickly resolve itself. But the Israeli government has no interest in being a government of law, and the Palestinians are prevented by that same government from living in the protection of Israeli law. Law that protects only the privileged, isn't law. (27 April 2009)

Lieberman says US will accept any Israeli policy decision (Haaretz). Either Israel's new foreign minister, the extreme-right Avigdor Lieberman, is delusional, or we're all in more trouble than we thought. "Believe me, America accepts all our decisions," he told a Russian newspaper. (27 April 2009)

Frank Rich: The Banality of White House Evil (NY Times). It turns out that the real reason the Bush administration tortured wasn't to get information about possible future terrorist acts, but rather to get one of their victims to say that there really was a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attackers, which would mean there was a reason for the invasion of Iraq after all. But not even torture was good enough to validate that war. Bush's unnecessary war in Iraq killed far more Americans and many times more Iraqis than the 9/11 terrorists. Time for Obama to stop looking at his legacy and start admitting there are a bunch of thugs out there who the Nuremburg rules would have us put in the dock, where they very well belong. (27 April 2009)

Joe Conason: Torture and truthiness (Salon.com). The only justification offered by Dick Cheney and his Fox tv sucks for the Bush-Cheney torture regime is that it works, it produces information not otherwise obtainable, and that it foils the nefarious. Bullshit. There is no evidence that the torture program prevented one terrorist attack. All it accomplished was it increased hatred and contempt for the US in much of the world and got a lot of GIs killed. (It's not just Fox news that bought the Cheney lies hook, line and sinker: take a look at this piece of Cheney stenography by former Buffalo News Washington editor Doug Turner). (27 April 2009)

Torture? It probably killed more Americans than 9/11 (The Independent). "'The reason why foreign fighters joined al-Qa'ida in Iraq was overwhelmingly because of abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and not Islamic ideology,' says Major Matthew Alexander, who personally conducted 300 interrogations of prisoners in Iraq. It was the team led by Major Alexander [a named assumed for security reasons] that obtained the information that led to the US military being able to locate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa'ida in Iraq. Zarqawi was then killed by bombs dropped by two US aircraft on the farm where he was hiding outside Baghdad on 7 June 2006. Major Alexander said that he learnt where Zarqawi was during a six-hour interrogation of a prisoner with whom he established relations of trust. Major Alexander's attitude to torture by the US is a combination of moral outrage and professional contempt. 'It plays into the hands of al-Qa'ida in Iraq because it shows us up as hypocrites when we talk about human rights,' he says." (27 April 2009)

Spanish Torture Indictments Dead? (FAIR). No. Fox News bloviast Bill O'Reilly is taking credit for the decision by a Spanish prosecutor to back off the indictments of six Bush administration officials for enabling the US torture program. The only problem with O'Reilly's gloating is, in Spain, it isn't the prosecutor who decides whether or not a case will go forward; it's the investigating judges, and the judges have given no intention at all that they have any interest in letting this one go. What seems to have happened here is, the prosecutor responded to Barack Obama's request that Spain drop the prosecutions, but the judges aren't wrapped up in the system of international politics and favors, their concern is justice. Thus far, and as usual, Bill O'Reilly is just running his mouth. (25 April 2009)

Simon Reynolds: The unlimited dreams of J.G. Ballard (Salon.com). The visionary author of SF/dystopic novels Crash, Concrete Island, High Rise, and the autobiographical Empire of the Sun, has died at 78. Click here for the NYT obit. (23 April 2009)

Jack Cardiff, cinematographer, 94 (Guardian). The Oscar-winning British cinematographer who shot some of the best films by John Huston (The African Queen) and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (A Matter of Life and Death/Stairway to Heaven, The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus), has died at 94. Click here for a list of his films as cinematographer and director.

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

Border net catches few terror suspects (Times Union). Remember those WWII movies in which the scary jackbooted police went through trains demanding that people prove they were people who shouldn't be arrested on the spot? Welcome to 2009 on the U.S.-Canadian border. Said one sheriff: ""They're getting $60 million to keep terrorists out of the U.S. and they're using that 60 million to apprehend brush pickers." (23 April 2009)

Even the day jobs are drying up in Hollywood (Variety). People getting laid off at the film studios because of the recession aren't finding much once they hit the streets: the area's restaurants, bars and retailers have been hit even worse and there are virtually no temp jobs. (23 April 2009)

Glenn Greenwald: U.N. torture official on America's legal obligations to impose accountability (Salon.com). The Nuremberg prosecutions, according to a wide range of legal experts, provide a clear precedent for prosecution of not only the legal craftsmen behind Bush's torture program, such as John Yoo, but also the torturers themselves. (23 April 2009)

Interrogation tactics got the OK early on (LA Times). Not only did senior Bush administration officials (including Condi Rice and John Ashcroft) approve CIA torture interrogations before the legal documents drawn up to provide cover for such abuses, but they excluded both the State and Defense departments from the meetings in which the policy was adopted. Secretary of Defense Colin Powell was specifically kept out of the torture loop. (23 April 2009)

Gary Kamiya: Torture works sometimes--but it's always wrong (Salon.com). Yes, torture well done can often extract information that might not otherwise have been extracted or have been extracted so quickly. But so what? Is the high cost worth the minimal return? Proponents of torture, like philosophers in a classroom and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz in television interviews and op-eds, argue the ticking bomb hypothesis: if a terrorist has planted a ticking bomb in a school, doesn't the greater good of saving the little children override the wrong of administering torture. It might, says Kamiya, if the ticking bomb situation ever happened in the real world, which it never has and in all likelihood never will. The ticking bomb hypothesis is mere sophistry in the classroom, but vicious and brutal when it enbables real torturers to abuse real human beings. (23 April 2009)

Torture Tape Inplicates UAE Royal Sheikh (ABC News). The Bush administration isn't the only torture freaks out there: "A video tape smuggled out of the United Arab Emirates shows a member of the country's royal family mercilessly torturing a man with whips, electric cattle prods and wooden planks with protruding nails." Of course, the sheikh seems to have been doing it just because he liked it, while we waterboarded one of our prisoners over a hundred times after he'd already told us everything he knew because...because...now what was the reason we kept on doing it and doing it and doing it? (23 April 2009)

Uri Avnery: A Little Red Light (Gush Shalom). Will Avigdor Lieberman be successful in his make Israel more respressive and more racist? It's a possibility, says Israeli war hero and peace leader Avnery. "We should candidly confront the phenomenon he represents. If one believes that his utterances sound fascist, one has to ask oneself: is there a possibility that a fascist regime might come to power in Israel? The initial gut-feeling is a resounding NO. In Israel? In the Jewish State? After the Holocaust which Nazi fascism brought upon us? Can one even imagine that Israelis would become something like the Nazis? When Yeshayahu Leibowitz coined, many years ago, the term “Judeo-Nazis”, the entire country blew up. Even many of his admirers thought that this time the turbulent professor had gone too far. But Lieberman’s slogans do justify him in retrospect." (23 April 2009)

'Sinful' city buses stoned by ultra-Orthodox Jews (The Independent). Move over, Taliban: "It is an all too familiar scene: the Israeli bus, travelling near predominantly Palestinian East Jerusalem, is pelted with stones that smash windows and startle passengers. Except this time the stone-throwers are not Arabs but Jews. The violence is part of an unholy war in which strident elements of the ultra-Orthodox community in Mea Shearim are trying to force Israel's leading bus company – and, by extension, Israeli society – to defer to their strict religious teachings and sensibilities." They're also demanding segregated seating for men and women on all Israeli bus lines, rather than just some of the bus lines, as now.(23 April 2009)

Crossing a Line (Inside Higher Ed). Another Jewish professor has been strapped to the "antisemite" rack because he suggested there might be historical parallels to the recent Israeli action in Gaza, or at least that earlier events might inform one's thinking about that action. A UC Santa Barbara professor sent students in an undergraduate course on sociology and globalization an email containing an article criticizing Israel's blockade of and military actions in Gaza, along with photos of the Warsaw ghetto under the Nazi military and Gaza under the Israeli military. Two students were so upset at the email they resigned from the course and made complaints. They were backed up by the Anti-Defamation League's Santa Barbara office, which argued that the professor's writings were protected by the First Amendment—except when they illigitimately criticized Israel. ("Illigitimate" criticism of Israel for the ADL is a subject that seems to know no bounds.) The University, instead of checking the facts at the departmental level, immediately leapt to a major investigation of him, his teaching and his ideas. The professor continues to insist he is not antisemitic and that criticism of Israel is not equivalent to antisemitism, and says he will not obey the ADL's demand that he repudiate his ideas or his method of teaching. (23 April 2009)

Lou Carlozo: I am the news today, oh boy: A recession writer gets laid off (True/Slant). The Chicago Tribune assigned reporter Lou Carolozo to do a blog called "The Recession Diaries," in which he documented the impact of the recession on his own family. Then the Tribune laid Carlozo off, along with 50 editorial staff writers, so he wrote and posted a final piece about how he became the subject of his own story. Truth that close to home was intolerable to the Tribune's publishers: they quickly pulled the piece from the website. Those same publishers are presently trying to get a bankruptcy court to allow them to give $13 million in bonuses to Tribune executives. (23 April 2009)

Ali Soufan: My Tortured Decision (23 April 2009). Dick Cheney insists the information tortured out of Abu Zubaydah provided life-saving information that would not have been provided otherwise. Dick Cheney is a liar. Ali Soufan, a former FBI supervisor, was part of an FBI/CIA team that interrogated Zubaydah from March to June 2002. They used traditioina interrogation methods only: talk. Everything valuable that he revealed, including the role of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and existence of Jose Padilla, was revealed in that period. Once the torture started in August 2002, nothing further of use was discovered. (23 April 2009)

What If Fox News Covered Other Protests the Way They Covered the Tea Parties? (AlterNet). The anti-tax/anti-Obama Tea Party protests this week were entirely a creation of Fox News: Fox set them up, Fox promoted them relentlessly 24/7, then Fox covered them as if they were news. The surprising part wasn't how few demonstrators they turned out or how stupid the demonstrators turned out to be. It was how much of the saner, more responsible press covered this Fox agitprop as if it were a real event. Click here for the AP story, as it appeared in the 16 April Buffalo News: these folks were just doing stenography for Fox. The only news coverage we saw that really exposed this foolishness for what it was, was Jon Stewart and John Oliver on Comedy Channel's "Daily Show." (17 April 2009)

Frances Kissling: Nunsense (Salon.com). Rome has started a new Inquisition, this time targeting nuns who think. Little wonder that the number of Roman Catholic nuns has declined from 180,000 in 1965 to 67,700, and the average age of those who remain is around 70. (17 April 2009)

DoJ's August 2002 torture memorandum (Office of Legal Counsel). The Bush administration had the curious notion that if they got their lawyers to write memos saying torture was legal, that alone would make the torture they authorized legal. There would be something so loopy about that it would be comic, were the consequences not so severe: real individuals were subject to horrible mistreatment and American intelligence officers and military personnel who took part in that mistreatment were debased by what they had done and what they had become. The only good thing about this, like the photographs and films the Nazis left behind of their concentration camps, we have evidence that they generated themselves with which to know them for what they were. (16 April 2009)

Marilyn Chambers, 56 (NY Times). She was famous for beaming beautifully at a baby on boxes of Proctor & Gamble's Ivory Snow. Then she stepped behind the green door and became a lot more famous. (14 April 2009)

Jeff Scher: Welcome Back (NY Times). Spring isn't just getting warmer; it's also the time when color comes back. Here's a lovely animation celebrating the liberation of the light. (14 April 2009)

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

Eric Hobsbawm: Socialism has failed. Now capitalism is bankrupt. So what comes next? (Guardian). "The 20th century is well behind us, but we have not yet learned to live in the 21st, or at least to think in a way that fits it. That should not be as difficult as it seems, because the basic idea that dominated economics and politics in the last century has patently disappeared down the plughole of history. This was the way of thinking about modern industrial economies, or for that matter any economies, in terms of two mutually exclusive opposites: capitalism or socialism." And we are faced with an environmental crisis of almost unimaginable severity. Time for a new model entirely. (13 April 2009)

A great Glenn Gould video (Google). Here's a real treat: a 47-minute downloadable video of Glenn Gould playing Bach's "Goldberg Variations." Make sure your open the screen wide enough so you see the full frame of the video image. (13 April 2009)

Collins seeks more control on cultural boards (Buffalo News). Erie County Executive Cris Collins is demanding that agencies receiving aid from the county allow him to place his political cronies on their boards of directors. What a power-grubbing extortionist this rich guy with new ideas has turned out to be. (13 April 2009)

Juan Cole: The great right-wing freak-out (Salon.com). How did Sean Hannity, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh and William Kristol deal with President Obama's generally successful trip to Europe, Turkey and Iraq last week? By lying: they made up things he didn't say or do, then faulted him for saying or doing those things he didn't say or do, and then they told us that his having done and said those things he hadn't done or said put the American Empire at risk. How odd that in an age when nighttime network tv is turning to reality shows, talk radio and cable news more and more turns to lunatic frenzy and fantasy. (13 April 2009)

Doron Rosenblum: We have become slaves (Haaretz). "When we read about the Israelites wandering through the desert for 40 years, it seems like a cruel and unbearable punishment. But our own generation and two or three others have also been wandering through the desert. Our country does not know peace, safe borders or quiet. Unlike the Israelites, we are not certain whether the Promised Land still lies ahead, or perhaps we have already past it. Maybe if we realized how similar we are to the generation of Israelites sentenced to die in the desert before they reached the Promised Land, we would change our policies." (13 April 2009)

Kate Michelman: A System From Hell (The Nation). The husband, a retired college professor, was crippled by Parkinson's; the daughter was paralyzed in a horse-riding accident. In no industrialized country in the world would the family have had to endure the medical and fiscal hell that followed. If you thing comprehensive health coverage is something that only applies to other people because you've got a good plan, read this: these folks had a good plan. This nightmare could be yours. (13 April 2009)

Arundhati Roy: The silence surrounding Sri Lanka (Boston Globe). The government of Sri Lanka has already killed several thousan Tamils and it is now gearing up for "a brazen, openly racist war. The impunity with which the Sri Lankan government is able to commit these crimes unveils the deeply ingrained racist prejudice that is precisely what led to the marginalization and alienation of the Tamils of Sri Lanka in the first place. That racism has a long history, involving social ostracization, economic blockades, pogroms, and torture. The brutal nature of the decades-long civil war, which started as a peaceful, nonviolent protest, has its roots here." And once again the international press is maintaining an almost perfect silence about the slaughter of the innocents. (13 April 2009)

Mark Danner: The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means (New York Review). "Philip Zelikow, who served the Bush administration in the National Security Council and the State Department and then went on to direct the 9/11 Commission, remarked in an important speech three years ago that these officials, instead of having that debate simply called in the lawyers: the focus, that is, was not on 'what should we do' but on 'what can we do.' There is a sense in which our society is finally posing that "what should we do" question. That it is doing so only now, after the fact, is a tragedy for the country—and becomes even more damaging as the debate is carried on largely by means of politically driven assertions and leaks. For even as the practice of torture by Americans has withered and died, its potency as a political issue has grown. The issue could not be more important, for it cuts to the basic question of who we are as Americans, and whether our laws and ideals truly guide us in our actions or serve, instead, as a kind of national decoration to be discarded in times of danger. The only way to confront the political power of the issue, and prevent the reappearance of the practice itself, is to take a hard look at the true "empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years," and speak out, clearly and credibly, about what that story really tells." (13 April 2009)

Jane Mayer: The Bush Six (New Yorker). A year ago British barrister Philippe Sands predicted that six top Bush administration officials would be arrested on international charges of torture. The first phase of that prediction came to pass when Spain announced it was beginning exactly such proceeding agains Yohn Woo, Douglas Feith, Alberto Gonzaels, David Addington and two others. They won't take any comfort from what Sands has to say now. (13 April 2009)

Obama to keep Bush's hostile border rules (Globe & Mail). Bad news for Buffalo, Toronto and southern Ontario: Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told a Canadian audience that the Obama administration had no intention of abandoning the Bush administration's border paranoia: the days of easy crossings back and forth are over, she said. (13 April 2009)

Ph.D. admissions cut (Inside Higher Ed). Another sign of the crippled economy: many universities are slashing new Ph.D. admissions. Some school officials say that when the money flows again they'll bring the student levels back up. Believe it when you see it. This is one more short-term solution that will have long-term consequences: even if the economy is good ten years from now, that missing cohort won't be there doing research. (13 April 2009)

Spock's treat (Alamo Drafthouse Cinema). Trekkies and other gathered at the Fantastic Fest in Austin to see Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, ten minutes of the new Star Trek film, and listen to the filmmakers. After the opening talk, Star Trek II began, but something was wrong: the film was scratched, it seemed warped, and then it seemed to be burning up in the projector. A few minutes of confusion and carrying on, whereupon Leonard Nimoy made a surprise appearance on stage carrying a large hexagonal object. The audience went berserk, and for good reason. Watch the second of the three videos in this item and you'll know what it was. (8 April 2009)

Is Spitzer running? (PoliticalWire.com). Eliot Spitzer appeared on the "Today Show" to talk about his fall from power and about the causes and consequences of the financial meltdown and how Obama is handling both. His successor, David Paterson, has the lowest ratings of any New York governor in memory. So is Spitzer simply apologizing and making his very real financial expertise available in a medium mostly populated by windbags, or is he testing the waters for a comeback? (6 April 2009).

President Pryor (YouTube). As this segment from the 1977 "Richard Pryor Show" proves, Obama didn't give the first African American presidential press conference after all. (2 April 2009).

How stupid is Miss Universe? (NY Times). Did you ever watch a Miss Universe contest on television and wonder if those contestants were really as stupid as they seemed? This blog posting by this year's champ about her "incredible experience" cheering up the troops in Guantanamo where the water is "soooo beautiful" may help you decide. (2 April 2009)

Archie Green, 91 Union Activist and Folklorist, Dies (NY Times). Archie reinvented the field of folklore: he convinced the stuffy academics that it wasn't merely a relic of the past but was instead a kind of knowledge as alive and important as ever. He single-handedly got Congress to create the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress. Right up to the end, he kept on agitating and writing books and firing off letters to politicians telling what to do. (31 March 2009)

Spanish Court Weight Inquiry on Torture for 6 Bush-Era Officials (NY Times). "A high-level Spanish court has taken the first steps toward opening a criminal investigation against six former Bush administration officials, including former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, on whether they violated international law by providing a legalistic framework to justify the use of torture of American prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, an official close to the case said. The case was sent to the prosecutor’s office for review by Baltasar Garzón, the crusading investigative judge who ordered the arrest of the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. The official said that it was 'highly probable' that the case would go forward and that it could lead to arrest warrants." One of the other names under review is Berkeley law professor John C. Yook, who wrote most of the key memos rationalizing the torture program. If indictments come down it is unlikely that any of the six would be arrested in the United States, but they very well might be if they traveled anywhere in Europe or much of the rest of the world. Yoo says legal proceedings against the torture theoreticians and enablers would cripple the ability of the U.S. to defend itself against its enemies. With friends like Yoo, who needs enemies? (28 March 2009)

Obama's March 24 press conference (White House). Video of President Obama's 56-minute March 24 press conference. The two New York Times reporters who commented on the press conference complained that Obama wasn't emotional enough, that he didn't put on an entertaining show, that he just presented information and analysis, like a teacher; those idiots should be reassigned to monitoring traffic in Secaucus. Obama's measured analyses and reasoned and informed responses made two things painfully clear: The Previous Occupant was a blathering dolt, and the press, which covered his lame-wanker press conferences as if they were serious encounters, failed us miserably. (25 March 2009)

Israeli soldiers used Palestinian children as shields in Gaza blitzkrieg (Guardian). The Guardian has uncovered further evidence of Israeli war crimes in Gaza, including putting children in front of tanks to keep Hamas from shooting at them and sending them into houses ahead of Israeli soldiers. (23 March 2009)

Soldier says rabbis pushed "religious war" in Gaza (AlertNet). "Rabbis in the Israeli army told battlefield troops in January's Gaza offensive they were fighting a 'religious war' against gentiles, says one army commander. So the troops killed a thousand civilians, destroyed food supplies, wrecked homes. Maybe Bob Dylan put it best: "And you never ask questions/when God's on your side...." (23 March 2009)

Palestinian Doctor, Peace Advocate, Recounts Israeli Attack on Home that Killed 3 Daughters, Niece (Democracy Now!). A full-text transcript and video. Watch the video. It'll break your heart. After you see it, the article about the rabbis urging religious war (and Uri Avnery's article below about Israel's total war against Palestinians) won't be abstract. (23 March 2009)

Art Spiegelman wants a blood test (moreintelligentlife.com). The creator of Maus and some of the New Yorker's most memorable covers talks about his new book, his life, his work, and why "he hates the term 'graphic novel' because he claimed it's misleading. 'I’m called the father of the modern graphic novel. If that’s true, I want a blood test.... 'Graphic novel' sounds more respectable, but I prefer ‘comics’ because it credits the medium. [‘Comics’] is a dumb word, but that’s what they are.” (23 March 2009)

IRS Audit Rate for Millionaires Plummets (TRAC/IRS). Perhaps this is the Bush administration's parting gift to the Club: last year, IRS audits of people with an income of $1 million or more dropped by at least 19%, perhaps considerably more. (23 March 2009)

The latest on lefties (Washington Post). Did you know that 5 of the most recent 7 US presidents were lefties? That lefties do better in fights? That there are left-handed fish? Now you do, and there's more.... (23 March 2009)

James K. Galbraith: No Return to Normal (Washington Monthly). The daily press and cable tv talkaholics are rating Obama's success or failure to deal with the economic mess every day. That's nonsense, says economist James Galbraith: nothing is going to get really fixed for years, perhaps 20 of them, and any economic plan that isn't conceived as a long-term strategy addressing basic structural issues is doomed, taking our economy with it. (23 March 2009)

Who owns the rain? (LA Times). Not you, say Colorado officials. According to them, the rain that falls on your house, on your head, on your land belongs to various groups that have bought rights to waterways big and small. If you want to scoop up or otherwise gather a bit of it to make a pot of tea or clean your undies, well, they have the right to make you pay for it. For what fell on you from the sky! (23 March 2009)

Uri Avnery: A Judicial Document (Gush Shalom). In a week in which the Israeli government abandoned captive soldier Gilad Shalit, the Labor Party decided to join an ultra-right government which includes fascists, and the former president of the country was indicted for rape, nobody noticed a judicial document in which the Israeli Minister of Justice for the first time stopped bullshitting about what the Israeli government is doing: "The State of Israel," he wrote, "is at war with the Palestinian people, people against people, collective against collective." They have truly become what they beheld--and so I want them to return the nickles I put in those blue boxes when I was a kid, which I now know were taken from me under false pretenses. (23 March 2009)

John Simpson: In a Crisis, Our Nation Must Have an Ambitious Education Strategy (Chronicle of Higher Education). Banks and investment companies aren't the only casualties of government inattention and carelessness. The American system of higher education gets no long-term planning or investment. Today's young people have no more education than their parents' generation did, and many have far less. While Europe and the rest of the world are developing systems of higher education appropriate to the modern world, higher education in the US often serves as a mere piggy bank for state officials looking for agencies whose budgets can be raided for other purposes. The long-term costs of this neglect may do more harm to the national good than the current financial disaster. (20 March 2009)

More Accounts of Gaza Killings Released (NY Times). Testimony by Israeli soldiers about deliberate killing of unarmed civilians and wanton destruction of Palestian homes continues to emerge. Defense Minister Ehud Barak said these murders and destruction of homes were exceptions. His evidence for that? "The Israeli Army is the most moral in the world, and I know what I'm talking about because I know what took place in the former Yugoslavia, in Iraq." Gibberish, right? Well, how would you defend your government in the face of evidence like that? Click here for the version of this story that appeared in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.(20 March 2009)

Eliot Spitzer: The Real AIG Scandal (Slate). The AIG bonuses are outrageous, but they're nickles and dimes compared to the real ripoff that nobody is yet talking about. Where is the huge AIG bailout going? To the same banks and investment firms that already received billlions in TARP money. All those bums whose greed brought this disaster about are double-dipping to the extent that they're not going to lose anything at all, while the rest of us see lost jobs and higher taxes. (20 March 2009)

Getting By on Just $53,826 A Week (The Smoking Gun). Marie Douglas-David, 36, asked the court to increase her $43 million post-nuptual agreement with George David, 66, saying that wasn't enough to cover her weekly expenses of $53,826. Those weekly expenses, detailed in the attached affidavit, include $30 for newspapers and other reading matter, $4000 for clothing, $2209 for a personal assistant, $8000 for travel and $600 for flowers. To prove she's not profligate, she subsequently revised her estimate of her weekly outlay to a mere $30,262. (20 March 2009)

Weight loss bottom line: Fewer calories (Harvard Science). Your waistline doesn't care whether you lighten up on carbs, protein or fat, or none of them, says this new Harvard study: the single factor determining whether and how much weight you're going to lose is the number of calories you're ingesting. (19 March 2009)

Computer Experts Unite to Hunt Worm (NY Times). Most stories about monster computer worms and viruses are just that—stories that wind up as notes on Snopes.com explaining that this canard is no more true than the first time panicked chain emails went out warning everybody about a danger that didn't exist. But the "Conficker" worm infecting an unknown number of Windows systems does exist, and many of the world's top computer experts are working very hard to keep it from spreading any further. Aren't you glad you switched to a Mac? We are. (19 March 2009)

Robert Dreyfuss: Is the Israel Lobby Running Scared? Or Killing a Chicken to Scare the Monkeys (TomDispatch). For a few days, members of the Israel Lobby hit squad gloated over their successful torpedoing of Charles Freeman's appointment as chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Freeman had committed what from their point of view the unpardonable sin of telling the truth about Israel, so they launched a huge amount of PR weaponry to bring him down. There were articles in all the usual AIPAC outlets, and they even got Chuck Schumer to be their mouthpiece for part of the action. But they may also have shot themselves in the foot. After two years of vigorous denial that the Israel Lobby exists, they've just proved to everyone's satisfaction that they surely do exist, and that their interests may not coincide with those of the US. And Freeman didn't go quietly: "The tactics of the Israel lobby," he said, "plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth. The aim of this lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views." (18 March 2009)

Uri Avnery: The Rape of Washington (Gush Shalom). The Israeli press last week was full of stories surrounding the sex crimes of former President Moshe Katsav. It relegated to the back pages the far more important story of the Rape of Washington in the shameful Freeman affair. "The full meaning of this episode should not escape anyone. It was the first test of strength of the lobby in the new Obama era. And in this test, the lobby came out with flying (blue-and-white) colors. The administration was publicly humiliated. The White House did not even try to hide its abject surrender. It declared that the appointment had not been cleared with the President, that Obama had no hand in it and did not even know about it. Meaning: of course he would have objected to the appointment of any official who was not fully acceptable to the lobby. The portrayal of the power of the lobby by Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, has been fully vindicated." (16 March 2009)

Ben Bernke's Greatest Challenge (60 Minutes). Text and video of the fascinating first interview (two parts, 26 minutes) with the chairman of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve System. (16 March 2009)

Ron Silver, 62 (NY Times). Ron Silver—political activist, actor, UB graduate—died March 15 of esophageal cancer. A longtime liberal, he played torture-advocate Alan Dershowitz in Reversal of Fortune and Henry Kissinger in "Kissinger and Nixon," and he was an advocate for Ronald Reagan's whacko "Star Wars" scheme , a supporter of Rudy Giuliani for NYC mayor in 1994 and, in 2004, was a featured speaker at the Republican National Convention supporting George W. Bush for a second term. "Ron's politics, as far as I know, were not shared by anyone he knew, except for the people he knew because of his politics," his brother said. "He told me that he did vote for Barack Obama in the end." (16 March 2009)

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

Mark Danner: US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites (New York Review of Books). The Red Cross has published the 43-page the ICRC Report on Treatment of Fourteen "High Value Detainees" in CIA Custody, which documents, with utmost reliability, some of the US torture practices during the Bush/Cheney administration. This is an issue Obama is trying very hard to turn away from, but he can't get away from the stink any more than George W. Bush can."We think time and elections will cleanse our fallen world but they will not," writes Danner. "Since November, George W. Bush and his administration have seemed to be rushing away from us at accelerating speed, a dark comet hurtling toward the ends of the universe. The phrase 'War on Terror'—the signal slogan of that administration, so cherished by the man who took pride in proclaiming that he was 'a wartime president'—has acquired in its pronouncement a permanent pair of quotation marks, suggesting something questionable, something mildly embarrassing: something past. And yet the decisions that that president made, especially the monumental decisions taken after the attacks of September 11, 2001—decisions about rendition, surveillance, interrogation—lie strewn about us still, unclaimed and unburied, like corpses freshly dead." (15 March 2009)

"Put up the shotgun, Paw. Levi done left town." (NY Times). The trailer-trash shotgun wedding of the year: since mama Sarah didn't get elected VP there's no need for the family to walk daughter Bristol and her paramour Levi Johnson down to the town clerk's office. Or else Levi just took flight figuring that since Sarah wasn't VP she didn't have the Secret Service agents to drag him back. In any case, the wedding is off.

Another score for the Israel Lobby (NY Times). Charles W. Freeman Jr. was in line for a top U.S. intelligence post—until the Israel Lobby noticed that he had criticized Israel's treatment of Palestinians. The Lobby made noise, the Obama administration made a sudden course correction, and that was the end of Charles W. Freeman Jr., who had "severed his financial and professional ties to several organizations to re-enter government." So what now? Only toadies need apply. Click here for the Washington Post version of the story. (12 March 2009)

Former Buffalo police chief to be US drug czar (NY Times). R. Gil Kerlikowski, currently Seattle chief of police who previously headed the Buffalo PD has been appointed head of the Office of National Drug Control by President Obama, signaling a shift from punishment to treatment as the dominant national drug control policy. (12 March 2009)

Seymour Hersh on Cheney's death squad ( MinnPost). Journalist Seymour Hersh told a University of Minnesota audience about a secret US government death squad that operated around the world and reported only to Vice President Dick Cheney. And you thought the guys who did the paranoid James Bond movies made this stuff up. (12 March 2009)

Queens Doctor and Cousin Are Guilty of Murder (NY Times). We don't ordinary post run-of-the-mill wife-husband murder for hire stories on BR, but the part in this one about the wife missing her husband's murder because she was distracted assembling the spy camera with which she planned to blackmail her cousin the hitman cried out to be shared. (11 March 2009)

Eminem as torture machine (NY Times). Binyam Mohamed, who was imprisoned by the Bush administration for 7 years, never charged, then recently released, said the worst part of his treatment in Pakistan, Morocco, Afghanistan and Guantanamo wasn't being slashed with a scalpel or the other physical abuses. Rather it was being chained and forced to listen to the same Eminem album at high volume again and again for an entire month. (10 March 2009)

Women, keep drinking (Spiked). An Oxford University study concluded that even one drink a day increased the risk of cancer in women. Scary stuff—or it would be if the conclusion was supported by the data, which it isn't. The only thing noteworthy about the study, and another one just like it, is how the press accepted it uncritically. (10 March 2009)

Alaska vs. truth (Truthout). A simple cost-free test could determine absolutely whether or not William Osborne is guilty of the brutal rape and kidnapping for which he has spent 16 years as a prisoner in Alaska. Alaska officials are fighting tooth and nail to keep the test from being administered. Why would they do that? The only answer the state has given is: we are not willing to answer that question. The Supreme Court is considering whether that is sufficient justification for Alaskan prosecutors to get away with this vicious foolishness. (10 March 2009)

Prison Spending Outpaces All but Medicaid (NY Times). Corrections spending quadrupled in the past 20 years, outpacing education, transportation and public assistance. It was $47 billion last year alone. In the same period, crime went down 25%. One in every 31 adults in the U.S., 7.3 million individuals, is in prison, or on parole or probation. 1.5 million of those individuals are in prison, the primary function of which seems to be to provide employment in rural areas. (10 March 2009)

Gershon Baskin: Encountering Peace: Political dead ends (Jerusalem Post). "Our continued missed opportunities, our overconfidence and our arrogance have led us into a dead end. Eight years of the Bush administration and three years of the Olmert regime have left Israel in a far worse strategic situation than we were before. The public has grown used to living in a state of false security - appearances of personal security have been given prominence over real strategic security gains, which are perceived as including painful concessions. As a result we have engaged in policies that have weakened those who want to make peace with us, and the self-fulfilling prophecy of 'no partner' emerges with equal potency as the Arabs claim that they too have no partner. The people of Israel elected a right-wing government which can but does not want and the Palestinian people elected a Hamas-led government that also probably could but doesn't want. Some people say we get what we deserve; perhaps that is true." (10 March 2009)

Conn Hallinan: Ethnic Cleansing and Israel (Counterpunch). Lawless settlers terrorizing Arab families and stealing their land land, a government that turns its eyes and even encourages this murderous pursuit of lebensraum, a school system that more and more teaches a history that never happened, politicians who want to empty the country of people who have lived there forever solely on ethnic grounds, a troubled economy, and a younger generation brought up on fear and hate: the dream has turned into nightmare, and repeats the hated European past. (10 March 2009)

Global Financial Assets Lost $50 Trillion Last Year (Bloomberg). This is the equivalent of one year of the entire world's GDP. And the crisis isn't close to being over. By the end, if there is one, who do you think will have done more harm to ordinary people around the world—terrorists or the greedy politicians and investors who killed the regulatory agencies and let all this happen? (10 March 2009)

These courts give wayward veterans a chance (LA Times). Buffalo's veterans' court has become a national model for dealing with ordinary kids twisted out of shape while serving the country in Iraq and Afghanistan. (10 March 2009)

Gary Kamiya: John Yoo is sorry for nothing (Salon.com). John Yoo doesn't know why everyone is so upset about his role as chief legal theorist in the Bush administration's program of torture, detention without legal justification, secret tribunals, kidnappings, etc., ad naus. What's a president's lawyer for, if not to help his boss get around troublesome roadblocks, like the U.S. Constitution and generally accepted notions of human decency? (10 March 2009)

Terror-War Fallout Lingers Over Bush Lawyers (NY Times). Absent the justice of Dante's hell, should John Yoo and his ilk—lawyers who used the art and skill to empower the Bush administration's violations of Constitutional and human rights—be prosecuted or merely scorned? (10 March 2009)

Bonnie Fuller: Why Wimpy David Brooks Insulted Michelle Obama's Biceps! (Huffington Post). You know David Brooks: he's that weasely Republican flack on PBS "Newshour" who always turns his eyes away from the camera and everyone at the table when he's lying or distorting, which is often. He is currently on a tear about Michelle Obama's upper arms, which upset him to no end. Between warthog Rush Limbaugh and scairdy-cat Brooks, the Republican party is in dire straits. Good. (9 March 2009)

Lorrie Moore: How He Wrote His Songs (NY Review of Books). There's a fine new biography of "Donald Barthelme—sparkling fabulist and idiosyncratic reinventor of the [short story] genre, practitioner of swift verbal collages, also sometimes dubbed minimalism"—by Tracy Daugherty. Barthelme was a now-and-then part of the very hot Buffalo arts scene 40 years ago.(9 March 2009)

Why Did the New York Times Kill This Image of Henry Kissinger? (Not for His Naked Butt Cheeks!) (AlterNet). Why were Howell Raines & Co. so terrified of drawings? The NY Times paid more than $1 million for terrific editorial drawings from David Levine, Jules Pfeiffer, Charles Addams, Maurice Sendak, Edward Gorey, Ralph Steadman, Larry Rivers, Saul Steinberg, Ben Shahn, Art Speigelman, Andy Warhol, Garry Trudeau and more. A new book published by Columbia University Press presents 320 of them. There's one of a lightbulb with a copyright © symbol on it that executive editor Howell Raines (he who uncritically ran Judith Miller's bogus articles about Saddam's WMD on page one) killed because it made him think of a bare breast and a nipple. Another editor killed a thermometer showing a temperature of almost 100 degrees because it reminded him of ejaculation. (9 March 2009).

David Foster Wallace: Wiggle Room (New Yorker). Pages from the late novelist's unfinished final work. (2 March 2009)

D.T. Max: The Unfinished: Davis Foster Wallace's struggle to surpass 'Infinite Jest' (New Yorker). "In his final hours, he had tidied up the manuscript so that his wife could find it. Below it, around it, inside his two computers, on old floppy disks in his drawers were hundreds of other pages—drafts, character sketches, notes to himself, fragments that had evaded his attempt to integrate them into the novel. This was his effort to show the world what it was to be 'a fucking human being.' He had not completed it to his satisfaction. This was not an ending anyone would have wanted for him, but it was the ending he chose." (2 March 2009)

Israel's death squads: A soldier's story (The Independent). "The Israeli military's policy of targeted killings has been described from the inside for the first time. In an interview with The Independent on Sunday, and in his testimony to an ex-soldiers' organisation, Breaking the Silence, a former member of an assassination squad has told of his role in a botched ambush that killed two Palestinian bystanders, as well as the two militants targeted...As the uprising unfolded, targeted assassinations became a regularly used weapon in the armoury of the Israel military, especially in Gaza, where arrests would later become less easy than in the West Bank. The highest-profile were those of Hamas leaders Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi in 2005, and of Said Siyam in the most recent offensive. But the targeting of lower-level militants, like the one killed in the operation described by the former soldier, became sufficiently common to attract little comment." (2 March 2009)

Britain admits collusion, new torture claims emerge (The Independent). "Britain faces fresh accusations that it colluded in the rendering and alleged torture of a second UK resident now being held at Guantanamo Bay. The new claims bring further pressure on ministers to come clean about the scale of the Government's complicity in the rendition and torture of dozens of terror suspects captured by the Americans after 9/11." (2 March 2009)

Laughing Past the Grave (Obit). De mortuis nil nisi bonum: 'don't speak ill of the dead,' they say. And why not? "As Bette Davis said of Joan Crawford, "Just because a person's dead doesn't mean they've changed." (2 March 2009)

Mustafa Barghouthi: The Return of Benhamin Netanyahu (Huffington Post). "The return of Benjamin Netanyahu of the right-wing Likud party does not bode well for the prospects for a comprehensive and lasting peace between Israel and Palestine. Throughout his campaign, the cornerstone of Netanyahu's policy toward the 'Palestinian Question' suggests an intention to deepen the conflict rather than solve it." (3 March 2009)

Stan Lipsey: Layoffs at the Buffalo News. Newspapers have been experiencing for years what the rest of the country has been going through the past eight months. Subscriptions and ad revenues are down, so most newspapers have cut back on size, content and staff. Last week, the venerable Rocky Mountain News closed shop. Thus far, the Buffalo News has handled the problem of a declining readership by eleminating its evening edition, closing its southtowns office, less expensive junior hires to replace some retirees, not replacing some retirees at all, and buyouts. According this internal memo from to publisher Stan Lipsey, that's no longer enough, so the News is now planning 52 layoffs. (2 March 2009)

The worst of Zyglis (Buffalo News). As noted in the previous item, one way struggling newspapers save money is by replacing departing senior staff with far less expensive (and sometimes far less competent) junior hires. That's what happened a few years ago when the Buffalo News replaced the great editorial cartoonist Tom Toles, who'd gone to the Washington Post, with recent Canisius graduate Adam Zyglis. Zyglis had none of Toles' wit, political sophistication or drafting ability, but then, he didn't cost very much. Since he's been on the job, Zyglis hasn't gotten any funnier and he hasn't picked up much political sophistication, but his drawing has evolved into cruel caricature: eyes bulge, huge noses protrude, bony fingers grasp, lips drip. His work perhaps reached a nadir with this February 24 cartoon of New York governor David Paterson trying to hammer nails into a chair but instead hammering them into his thumb, fingers, head and necktie, and, to make matters worse, taking replacement parts from the wrong box. Blood drips from the governor's banaged hand and only three of the chair's legs touch the floor. Get it? A blind governor can't see the heads of the nails or read the label on the box. A laugh riot. (2 March 2009)

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

Mine waste trips up Alaska gold rush (LA Times). What's more important, clean water or gold? Alaskans are finding out that a little-known Bush anti-environment regulation is solidly on the side of gold and may even gut the Clean Water Act. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin hails the project as a "godsend." (2 March 2009)

What the Wind Blew In (NY Times). In her new book, Frankly, My Dear: "Gone With the Wind" Revisited, Molly Haskell argues that "the quntessential Hollywood movie, has long deserved to be rescued from critical disain and given its correct place among American pop masterpieces, like 'The Godfather' and 'On the Waterfront' and 'E.T.,' that enlighten as much as they entertain." (1 March 2009)

Obama: Reaching Outside the Bubble (Washington Post). Barack Obama spent two years getting into the Oval Office. Now he spends part of every day scheming how to get out of it. (1 March 2009)

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

Paul Krugman: Bobby Jindal, a.k.a. Butthead (NY Times). "Leaving aside the chutzpah of casting the failure of his own party’s governance as proof that government can’t work, does he really think that the response to natural disasters like Katrina is best undertaken by uncoordinated private action? Hey, why bother having an army? Let’s just rely on self-defense by armed citizens. The intellectual incoherence is stunning. Basically, the political philosophy of the GOP right now seems to consist of snickering at stuff that they think sounds funny. The party of ideas has become the party of Beavis and Butthead." (25 February 2009)

"I Met the Walrus": John Lennon on peace and violence (Paste). "In 1969, 14-year-old Beatles fan Jerry Levitan tracked his idol, John Lennon, from a Toronto airport to his room at the King Edward Hotel. Inside, he convinced Lennon to do an impromptu interview. Thirty-eight years later, Levitan teamed with director Josh Raskin to create and edit a five-minute short film entitled I Met the Walrus based on the interview." The short, which you can see here, was nominated for an Oscar this year. (25 February 2009)

Analyzing Obama's Speech to Congress (NY Times). "Interactive video and transcript of President Obama's address to a joint session of Congress on Feb. 24, 2009, with annotations from New York Times reporters." (25 February 2009)

Amnesty calls on US to suspend arms sales to Israel (Guardian). The Hellfire missiles, white phosophorus artillery shells and other ordinance Israeli troops used to kill civilians in Gaza last month was provided by the United States. Time for the U.S. to stop playing the enabler, Amnesty says. (25 February 2009)

Citing Cost, States Consider End to Death Penalty (NY Times). The occasional killing of an innocent person didn't bother them; the ethics of cold administration of state-sponsored death didn't bother them; the racial disparity didn't bother them. Money bothers them: putting someone on death row costs three times as much as putting the same person in a cell with a life sentence and there is less money now than last year so some states are deciding that executions are a luxury they can't afford. (25 February 2009)

More Mailer letters (New York Review). Norman Mailer writes to Alfred Kazin about sex, Arnold Kept about Saul Bellow's idea deficit, Jack Henry Abbott about everything, and Helen Morris about his 10 favorite books. (24 February 2009)

Dread is rising in Harvard's hole (Boston Globe). Harvard now owns 350 acres in Alston, just across the Charles River from Cambridge. Its stadium and some of its schools are there, but most of the property was houses, stores and shops. The plan was to use the property for a massive expansion of the university. But Harvard lost one-third of its endowment in the recent crash and its president, Drew Faust, last week announced a major slowdown in all expansion projects (along with a moratorium on faculty raises and other money-saving measures). That leaves much of Alson an urban wasteland, home now only to an increasing population of rats. (24 February 2009)

Joel Kovel purged at Bard College. Another prominent scholar and highly-regarded teacher has been kicked out of a college job for criticizing Israel. The last time it was historian Norman Finklestein, who was forced out of DePaul University in 2007 after a relentless jihad led by Harvard toture-advocate Alan Dershowitz; Dershowitz had earlier unsuccessfully lobbied the University of California Press to cancel publication of Finkelstein's book, Beyond Chutzpah. This time the pro-Zionist hate group Stand With Us, which vigorously (and viciously) attacks academics who question Israeli violence against Palestinian civilians and theft of Palestinian lands (your editor was one of its hate-mail targets a few years ago), unsuccessfully pressured University of Michigan Press to cancel US distribution of Kovel's Overcoming Zionism. Now Bard College has decided that Kovel's arguments about Zionism make him unfit to continue in the position he has held for 21 years—distinguished professor with a named chair. In a letter that follows an introduction to the mess by four prominent authors, Kovel chronicles the purge and lists some of the political affiliations of his purgers. It's a shanda. (21 February 2009)

Spectator: Bipartisanism is a joke. Republicans controlled the government entirely for six of the past eight years, and they controlled most of it for the other two. They got us into two wars, neither of which was paid for by taxes but was instead funded by borrowing. Now that Obama is trying to get us out of the fiscal sewer their relentless cynicism, greed and shortsightedness created, their only response is: More tax cuts for the rich. John McCain wanders around in total denial and the leader of the Republican Party seems to be that pill-popping oaf Rush Limbaugh, who wishes on the air that Obama will fail. The only good thing is there is another election in two years, so even more of those cynics can be removed from the public payroll. (21 February 2009)

Soros sees no bottom for world finanial "collapse" (Reuters). "Renowned investor George Soros said on Friday the world financial system has effectively disintegrated, adding that there is yet no prospect of a near-term resolution to the crisis. Soros said the turbulence is actually more severe than during the Great Depression, comparing the current situation to the demise of the Soviet Union." (21 February 2009)

Blackwater Changes Its Name, Shall Now Be Called the Knights Who Say 'Xe' (AlterNet). What do you do when you're running an army of mercenaries that gets a bad name because it keeps on murdering innocent civilians? You imitate Monty Python and hope the guys who give out government mercenary contracts will think (or pretend) you're somebody else. (14 February 2009)

Miles O'Brien: Thoughts on Ice and Aviation... (Milesobrien's blog). The smartest thing we've seen on what may have brought Continental 3407 down. (13 February 2009)

Why McCain got so many votes and why GWB got elected twice (Gallup.com). Remember that scene in Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles where the black sheriff escapes an angry white mob by pointing his own gun at his own head and threatening to blow his own head off if the mob doesn't back off? "Someone help that poor man," someone cries. The sheriff gets inside the jailhouse, wipes his brow, breaks into a broad grin and says, "They are so dumb!" Well, they were, and are: Gallup finds that only 39% of Americans believe in Darwin's theory of evolution and 25% of Americans do not believe it. 36% haven't been able to decide, 45% didn't know that Darwin and the theory of evolution were connected, 1% couldn't come up with an answer to any of the questions. The scale of belief/disbelief is directly keyed to education and religiosity, which comes as no surprise, and perhaps explains why Republicans were adamant about keeping aid to education out of Obama's recovery package: they want 'em ignorant and gullible. (13 February 2009)

Alison Des Forges, Human Rights Advocate, Is Dead at 66 (NY Times). She was returning to Buffalo on Continental Flight 3407, which crashed as it approached the airport. (12 February 2009)

Joaquin Phoenix on Letterman 2-11-09 (YouTube/CBS). So whaddaya think, is this the greatest Andy Kaufmann sendup ever or is Joaquin Phoenix more stoned than anyone you've ever seen who was still vertical? (12 February 2009)

Darryl Pinckney: What He Really Said (New York Review of Books). "The pride with which people came away from the Mall was owing in great measure to their profound respect for President Obama. As much as he tried to merge into his message, or to lower expectations of what he'll be able to accomplish, I was moved by the thought that we hadn't seen his like before. "A black man in charge," my taxi driver marveled. When I watched President Obama sign the executive orders establishing a way to proceed to close Guantanamo, I wondered if black and white people would see the same thing, after all, in those white guys standing around their, our, black president. It makes a difference to all of us; it will change America, even Black America, and maybe also the expectations of leadership in a new generation in Africa. Glory." (12 February 2009)

Uncovering the Perks of Albany's Fallen G.O.P. (NY Times). Just when we thought we had a handle on how cynical and corrupt New York politicians were, new facts come along to show that we hadn't a clue. They're worse. Until last year's election, Republicans had controlled New York's State Senate for the past, which is perhaps why Democrats (and the rest of us) never knew that Republican Senators had 800 parking spaces while the Democrats had only 30, as well as a secret tv studio in queens churning out Republican political propaganda, a secret printing plant with 75 employees in Albany, and an army of as many as 1500 workers doing whatever was needed to keep the Republicans in power. Your tax dollars at work. (12 February 2009)

The New Climate of Timidity on Campuses (Chronicle of Higher Education). We've always known that the claim by right-wing yahoos like David Horowitz that liberal professors use classroom time to poison the minds of the young was nonsense. It now appears that professors in fact sin in the opposite direction: they've become so skittish about being criticized they don't take on complex political and ethical issues, resulting in university campuses devoid of intellectual vitality. (12 February 2009)

Paul Krugman: The Destructive Center (NY Times). "What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who flip their houses? A proud centrist. For that is what the senators who ended up calling the tune on the stimulus bill just accomplished." (12 February 2009)

James Galbraith: Bailed-Out Banks Should Be Declared Insolvent (Democracy Now!). Rather than bailing out troubled banks, says UT economist and professor of public affairs and government James Galbraith, the government should declare them insolvent, replace the management that did the damage, accurately assess the real and imaginary holdings, and get the credit market going again. If that doesn't happen, a lot of taxpayer money is going to be wasted. Galbraith also comments on the way a few senators managed to gut the recovery package. (12 February 2009)

Alexander Zaitchik: Is Howard Dean Getting Screwed and Why? (Alternet). Howard Dean invented the political model that got Barack Obama into the White House, and he headed the Democratic National Committee that got the Democrats control of Congress. So why is he pointedly excluded from everything now? Is it that the Gang from Chicago just don't like his Yankee style? Whatever the excuse, it seems mean-spirited and not ultimately useful. (12 February 2009)

Is Obama following Bush's lead on records decisions? (McClatchy). Before and since his election Obama promised a "new era of openness in our country," so why is his Justice Department fighting access to court records of torture at Guantanamo during the Bush years? For the San Francisco Chronicle's take on the same story see Under Obama, same stance on rendition suit. (12 February 2009)

The love that dare not bark its name (Salon.com). Why you need a dog. (12 February 20009)

Video Paradiso: how an Italian town rescued a priceless film collection (The Independent). How 50,000 videotapes from the East Village made it to a 17th century former Jesuit college in the Sicilian town of Salemi, the government of which includes a "councillor for nothing" and a "department for creativity." (February 12, 2009)

Israel vote deals a setback to U.S. peace effort in Mideast (LA Times). The near-tie between Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party or Tzipip Livini's right-of-center Kadima party dooms peace negotiations in Israel for some time to come. The apartheid and killing will continue. (February 12, 20009)

Uri Avnery: Dirty Socks (Gush Shalom). Israel votes for a new prime minister this Tuesday. The choices, says quondam war hero and long-time peace activist Uri Avnery, range from bad to worse to much worse. And that reminds him of an old British army joke: "'I have some good news and some bad news,' the sergeant in the joke tells his men. 'The good news is that you are going to change your dirty socks. The bad news is that you are going to exchange them among yourselves.'" (8 February 2009)

David Sirota: Obama's team of zombies (Salon.com). "Little did we know that 'team of rivals' was what George Orwell calls 'newspeak': an empty slogan 'claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts.' Obama's national security team, for instance, includes not a single Iraq war opponent. The president has not only retained George W. Bush's defense secretary, Robert Gates, but also 150 other Bush Pentagon appointees. The only 'rivalry' is between those who back increasing the already bloated defense budget by an absurd amount and those who aim to boost it by a ludicrous amount. Of course, that lockstep uniformity pales in comparison to the White House's economic team -- a squad of corporate lackeys disguised as public servants" (8 February 2009)

Flight 1549 Tapes (NY Times). If you click on "Complete Audio" you'll get the real-time tape, which is pretty ordinary with a lot of total silences until 12:26 in, when the pilot reports having hit birds, after which you'll hear several guys who did very well under pressure. (6 February 2009)

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

Charles McMillion: The "FDR Failed" Myth (Institute for America's Future). Amity Shlaes and other right-wing historical revisionists are trying to paint FDR's reforms as wrong-headed and ineffectual. Only WWII, they say, pulled the US out of the Great Depression. Nonsense. FDR's reforms worked, and they worked in the moment. He got into trouble only when he backed off in 1937, listening to conservatives in Washington. As soon as he got back on track, the gains in the economy resumed. Shales makes a good argument, but she's just blowing smoke. (4 February 2009)

Lukas Foss, Composer at Home in Many Stylistic Currents, Dies at 86 (NY Times). UB's music scene in the 1960's was on fire, in large part due to Foss, who headed the university's Creative Associates and was also conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra from 1963 through 1970. (2 February 2009)

Maira Kalman: And the Pursuit of Happiness. The Inauguration. At Last (NY Times). A lovely graphic set that explains what the inauguration was all about. Plus a bible question we should have asked on January 20. (2 February 2009)

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

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

Immanuel Wallerstein: Remaking America: The Ambiguities of Obama. "Obama is off to a very shaky start. The belief that he is ready to push for a fundamental remaking of America has weak evidence in its favor, despite his intelligence and his intellectual openness. The United States is getting good grammar. It needs bold remaking." (2 February 2009)

Uri Avnery: Black Flag (Gush Shalom). "A Spanish judge has instituted a judicial inquiry against seven Israeli political and military personalities on suspicion of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The case: the 2002 dropping of a one ton bomb on the home of Hamas leader Salah Shehade. Apart from the intended victim, 14 people, most of them children, were killed. For those who have forgotten: the then commander of the Israeli Air Force, Dan Halutz, was asked at the time what he feels when he drops a bomb on a residential building. His unforgettable answer: 'A slight bump to the wing.'" And then there is the gang that gave us Gaza.... It's good to bring war criminals to justice, writes war hero Avnery (he recalls Israel kidnapping Adolph Eichman in Argentina, then trying and executing him in Israel for crimes he committed in Europe before Israel existed), but it would be far better if Israel tried its war criminals at home. (2 February 2009)

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

We watch FOX so you don't have to (NewsHounds.us). Sure: you know that the running mouths on FOX News are biased, bigoted and mendacious, and if you watch Olbermann you get one or two prime pieces of FOX misinformation dissected for you every day. But that's still not enough to trounce the idiot in the office (or family) who imbibes more FOX than Keith has time to neutralize, the guy who listens to you explain why what he just quoted is absurd and then says, "Well, what about...." and goes on to recite another bit of utter foolishness that veers so far from fact and reason you're left speechless. Help is here. The good (perhaps masochistic) folks at NewsHounds watch FOX religiously and expose and unravel their most interesting lies and distortions. (28 January 2009)

Time Running Out for a Two-State Solution (60 Minutes). A Palestinian physician can never return to his birthplace or visit his family a few miles from where he now lives because Israel's Apartheid Wall and troops won't let him. An Israeli squatter on Palestinian land in the West Bank gleefully tells a CBS reporter that she and the other squatters are going to be successful in their mission to destroy any hope of a two-state solution and that enough Israeli soldiers back them so the government won't drive them out. Israeli soldiers night after night force their way into a Palestinian home, terrorizing the parents and the children. Every Israeli politician now running for major office talks tough. And neither the politicians nor the squatters gives a damn about the cost to the rest of the world of the hatred and loathing their violence engenders, feeds, and encourages. God, as the squatter pointed out to the CBS reporter, is, after all, on their side. (26 January 2009)

Joseph Romm: Real science comes to Washington (salon.com). For eight years U.S. science policy has been based on denial, ignorance, greed and voodoo religious fundamentalism (which is perhaps redundant with the first two items in this list). Obama's superb science teamÂ—James Holdren as science advisor, Nobelist Steven Chu as energy secretary, Carol Browener overseeing energy and climate policy, and Lisa Jackson at EPAÂ—ends all that. Thus fair, the mainstream press seems to have no idea what a radical team this is. (26 January 2009)

Robert Parry: George W. Bush's Sci-Fi Disaster (consortiumnews.com). In retrospect, George W. BushÂ’s presidency could be viewed as a science-fiction disaster movie in which an alien force seizes illegitimate control of a nation, saps its wealth, wreaks devastation, but is finally dislodged and forced to depart amid human hope for a rebirth. There was even a satisfying concluding scene as a new human leader takes power amid cheers of a liberated populace. The alien flees aboard a form of air transportation (in this case, a helicopter), departing to the jeers of thousands and many wishes of good riddance." (26 January 2009)

Chris Smith: The Zany Adventure of (Senator) Caroline Kennedy (New York Magazine). The best piece we've seen yet on the Kennedy-Paterson trainwreck. "In two months politics in New York devolved from dysfunctional to chaotic, tarnishing every major player involved. And sometimes it seemed that David Paterson wanted it exactly that way. His style of governance, a dizzy mix of ingratiation and trickeration, has turned what could have been a moment of triumphÂ—a powerful new ally in the Senate, a relationship with President ObamaÂ—into a slapstick fiasco, a fitting sequel to the way Paterson got the job in the first place. Politics is often a contest of half-truths, where the winner is the best bullshitter. But thanks to Paterson and a cast of dozens, the fight to become the next senator became instead a world-class festival of lies." (25 Jan 2009)

Uri Avnery: On the Wrong Side (Gush Shalom). As Israel turns ever more to the right and ever more militant, says Israeli peace movement leader and quondam war hero Avnery, the era of unquestioning, kneejerk U.S. support and the power of the Lobby may be coming to an end. "The Gaza War, during which tens of millions of Americans saw the horrible carnage in the Strip (even if rigorous self-censorship cut out all but a tiny part), has hastened the process of drifting apart. Israel, the brave little sister, the loyal ally in BushÂ’s 'War on Terror', has turned into the violent Israel, the mad monster, which has no compassion for women and children, the wounded and the sick. And when winds like these are blowing, the Lobby loses height." (25 January 2009)

Patrick Cockburn: In Israel, Detachment from Reality is the Norm (Counterpunch). The new animated documentary "Waltz with Bashir" shows how Israeli troops lit the night sky while Lebanese Phalangists at Sabra and Chatila slaughtered 1700 Palestinian men, women and children. In Gaza, the Israelis did the slaughtering themselves. "Israeli society was always introverted but these days it reminds me more than ever of the Unionists in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s or the Lebanese Christians in the 1970s. Like Israel, both were communities with a highly developed siege mentality which led them always to see themselves as victims even when they were killing other people. There were no regrets or even knowledge of what they inflicted on others and therefore any retaliation by the other side appeared as unprovoked aggression inspired by unreasoning hate." (24 January 2009)

Gabriel Kolko: Understanding Gaza (Counterpunch). "How will history describe the Israeli war against the Palestinians in Gaza?," asks Gabriel Kolko, the leading historian of modern warfare (and quondam UB faculty member). "Another Holocaust, this time perpetrated by the descendants of the victims? An election ploy by ambitious Israeli politicians to win votes in the February 10 elections? A test range for new American weapons? Or an effort to lock in the new Obama Administration into an anti-Iranian position? An attempt to establish its military 'credibility' after its disastrous defeat in the war with Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006? Perhaps all of theseÂ…and more. But one thing is certain. Israel has killed at least 100 Palestinians for each of its own claimed losses, a vast disproportion that has produced horror in much of the world, creating a new cause which has mobilized countless numbers of peopleÂ—possibly as strong as the Vietnam war movement. It has made itself a pariah nationÂ—save in the United States and a few other countries. Above all, it has enflamed the entire Muslim world....Now former victims and their descendants are the executioners" (24 January 2009).

Pope Rehabilitates Holocaust Denier (NY Times). The Vatican logic seems to be that if you toe the Vatican religious line, any kind of fruitcake personal behavior is permissible and acceptable: "Pope Benedict Saturday rehabilitated a traditionalist bishop who denies the Holocaust, despite warnings from Jewish leaders that it would seriously harm Catholic-Jewish relations and foment anti-Semitism. The Vatican said the pope issued a decree lifting the excommunication of four traditionalist bishops who were thrown out of the Roman Catholic Church in 1988...The four bishops lead the ultra-conservative Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), which has about 600,000 members and rejected modernizations of Roman Catholic worship and doctrine. The Vatican said the excommunications were lifted after the bishops affirmed their willingness to accept Church teachings and papal authority....One of the four bishops, the British-born Richard Williamson, has made a number of statements denying the full extent of the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews...In comments to Swedish television broadcast Wednesday, he said 'I believe there were no gas chambers' and only up to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, instead of 6 million." Pope Benedict recently authorized a mass that includes a prayer for the conversion of the Jews. What's next, Inquisition Redux? (24 January 2009)

Robert Darnton: Google & the Future of Books (New York Review of Books). Sometimes, suggests noted historian and now Harvard Libraries director Robert Darnton, it's hard to know if you're looking at the savior or the destroyer. The recent settlement among Google, authors and publishers "creates a fundamental change in the digital world by consolidating power in the hands of one company. Apart from Wikipedia, Google already controls the means of access to information online for most Americans, whether they want to find out about people, goods, places, or almost anything. In addition to the original 'Big Google,' we have Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Images, Google Labs, Google Finance, Google Arts, Google Food, Google Sports, Google Health, Google Checkout, Google Alerts, and many more Google enterprises on the way. Now Google Book Search promises to create the largest library and the largest book business that have ever existed." (23 January 2009)

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

Animal tools (Wired.com). Anthropologists are fond of saying "Man is the tool-making animal." Anthropologists need another cliche: a wide variety of animals use a wide varieties of tools: chimps use spears, toothpicks and clubs; gorillas use walking sticks; dolphins fish with sponges; birds use fishing sticks; burrowing owls use mallal dung to attract beetles; Egyptian vultures use rocks to open ostrich eggs. Here are videos of all of that, and more. (23 January 2009)

How Israel drowns dissent (Guardian). Israel halted its slaughter in Gaza last week in order not to have inauguration headlines sharing space with more stories about the deaths of women and children, but that doesn't mean anything like peace or civility is returning to the region. Things have gotten uglier even on the Israeli side of the Apartheid Wall, e.g. this: "During a peaceful anti-war vigil outside a Tel Aviv air force base, several members of the fire brigade turned on one protester, drenching her relentlessly with water from their hoses, before approaching her and ordering her into the station in order to 'give us all head.'" (23 January 2009)

On being an atheist watching the inauguration (Greta Christina's Blog). There's one minority that even the Obama administration seems dedicated to screwing over: the 15% of Americans who don't believe in God. If the Founding Fathers had been invited to Tuesday's inauguration (or any of the other major events connected with it) they'd have been certain they'd arrived at the wrong party in the wrong country. (23 January 2009)

David Remnick: Going, going, gone (New Yorker). There were several unforgettable moments in the inauguration. One was Rev. Joesph Lowery's closing prayer. Another was that helicopter slowly rising above the mall and then flattening out and moving away and blesedly out of sight. (23 January 2009)

Inhofe Declares Victory over the U.N.-MoveOn-Soros Global Warming Conspiracy (Think Progress). Sen. James inhofe (R-OK), the dumbest member of the U.S. Senate, went on egonomaniac-ideologue Bill Bennett's talk show to tell the world that he had won his battle against the false prophets who have been scaring people with talk of global warming and his consequences. (23 January 2009)

The 25 Most Influential Liberals In the U.S. Media (Forbes). This list is from Forbes, so it is in part utterly whacko. It contains, for example, the noted drunk snitch and warhog Christopher Hitchens and the noted biter and hater Maureen Dowd. There are curious omissions: Ted Kennedy, Robert Reich, Al Gore and Barack Obama among them. But the list does include WSJ's Gerald Seib, Gleen Greenwald, Hendrick Hertzberg, Bill Moyers, Rachael Maddow, Arianna Huffington, Paul Krugman and the only political journalist other than Moyers and Maddow who can look a camera straight in the eye and tell it like it is: Jon Stewart. (23 January 2009)

Obama's echoes (US News & World Report). Did you have a feeling of deja eu now and then listening to Obama's speech? If so, you get a political flashback gold star: the speech was full of phrases and lines out of recalling previous addressed by Bush, Clinton, Carter, JFK, FDR and Lincoln. And, given the occasion, why not? (23 January 2009)

Death rate of West's old-growth forests doubled (msnbc). "The mortality rate of old-growth forests across the West has more than doubled in recent decades, and those forests are now losing more trees than they gain, according to a new study that identified the most probable cause as warming temperatures. The trend is happening at every elevation, in trees of different sizes and of various species, researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey and universities reported in the peer-reviewed journal Science." (23 January 2009)

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

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

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

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

In First Family, a Nation's Many Faces (NY Times). With one exceptionÂ—JFKÂ—all the previous occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue have been WASPs, and most of themÂ—including JFKÂ—have been rich. "Now the Obama family has flipped that around, with a Technicolor cast that looks almost nothing like their overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly Protestant predecessors in the role. The family that produced Barack and Michelle Obama is black and white and Asian, Christian, Muslim and Jewish. They speak English; Indonesian; French; Cantonese; German; Hebrew; African languages including Swahili, Luo and Igbo; and even a few phrases of Gullah, the Creole dialect of the South Carolina Lowcountry. Very few are wealthy, and some Â— like Sarah Obama, the stepgrandmother who only recently got electricity and running water in her metal-roofed shack Â— are quite poor." (21 January 2009)

Barack Obama's Inaugural Address (Whitehouse.gov). Video and text. (22 Jan 2009)

Noam Chomsky: "Exterminate all the Brutes": Gaza 2009 (ZNet). This is a long article but it is well worth the time. It analyzes, more acutely than anything we've seen, the rationale and ultimate cost of the recent Israeli slaughter in Gaza. Here's a sample from the opening and end: "On Saturday December 27, the latest US-Israeli attack on helpless Palestinians was launched. The attack had been meticulously planned, for over 6 months according to the Israeli press. The planning had two components: military and propaganda. It was based on the lessons of Israel's 2006 invasion of Lebanon, which was considered to be poorly planned and badly advertised. We may, therefore, be fairly confident that most of what has been done and said was pre-planned and intended. That surely includes the timing of the assault: shortly before noon, when children were returning from school and crowds were milling in the streets of densely populated Gaza City. It took only a few minutes to kill over 225 people and wound 700, an auspicious opening to the mass slaughter of defenseless civilians trapped in a tiny cage with nowhere to flee.....One of the wisest voices in Israel, Uri Avnery, writes that after an Israeli military victory, "What will be seared into the consciousness of the world will be the image of Israel as a blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to commit war crimes and not prepared to abide by any moral restraints. This will have severe consequences for our long-term future, our standing in the world, our chance of achieving peace and quiet. In the end, this war is a crime against ourselves too, a crime against the State of Israel. There is good reason to believe that he is right. Israel is deliberately turning itself into perhaps the most hated country in the world, and is also losing the allegiance of the population of the West, including younger American Jews, who are unlikely to tolerate its persistent shocking crimes for long. Decades ago, I wrote that those who call themselves "supporters of Israel" are in reality supporters of its moral degeneration and probable ultimate destruction. Regrettably, that judgment looks more and more plausible." (20 January 2009)

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

Big stars rock the Lincoln Memorial (LA Times). There was an epic concert celebrating the New Occupant in front of the Lincoln Memorial Sunday. Ir was grand in all regards, but the moment that got your editor's heart a-fluttering was when Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger and Pete's grandson led everybody in Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land." If ever was a song that was the opposite in all regards to the spirit of the Evil Empire now leaving D.C. that song is it. Some years back some people were lobbying to have "This Land is Your Land" made the national anthem, given that its core sentiment is grounded in sentiments a lot friendlier than that unsingable song about the bombs bursting in air. It'll never happen but for a while there at the end of the Reflecting Pool Sunday afternoon it was nice to think about. (19 January 2009)

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

Paul Krugman: Forgive and Forget? (NY Times). When asked about official inquiries into potential crimes by the Bush White House, Obama says our task is to move on, to look to the future, not to the past. That, says Nobel-laureate Krugman, doesn't serve the future well at all. "If we donÂ’t have an inquest into what happened during the Bush years Â— and nearly everyone has taken Mr. ObamaÂ’s remarks to mean that we wonÂ’t Â— this means that those who hold power are indeed above the law because they donÂ’t face any consequences if they abuse their power. LetÂ’s be clear what weÂ’re talking about here. ItÂ’s not just torture and illegal wiretapping, whose perpetrators claim, however implausibly, that they were patriots acting to defend the nationÂ’s security. The fact is that the Bush administrationÂ’s abuses extended from environmental policy to voting rights. And most of the abuses involved using the power of government to reward political friends and punish political enemies." (19 January 2009)

Martin Luther King: Why I Cannot Be Silent (AlterNet). MLK's April 4, 1967, speech opposing the Vietnam war is as current as it was the day he gave it. You just have to change a few nouns: for Vietnam substitute Afghanistan or Iraq or Pakistan or Gaza or any of the recent, current, or upcoming killing fields. (19 January 2009)

Gazan Doctor and Peace Advocate Loses 3 Daughters to Israeli Fire (NY Times). Israeli soldiers killed three children of a physician "who has devoted his live to medicine and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians." That'll teach him. Israeli officials later insisted hostile fire was coming from the direction of house where the children were. What evidence is there about the hostile fire? Why else would they have shot up the house and killed those children? (19 January 2009)

Neve Gordon: How to sell 'ethical warfare' (Guardian). There has been a great deal of opposition to the Gaza brutality among Israelis, but virturally none of it is aired on Israeli television and over 700 Israelis have been jailed for protesting the slaughter. Isn't this the sort of stuff we condemned Fidel Castro for, as well as the apartheid government in South Africa? (19 January 2009)

Rulings of Improper Detentions as the Bush Era Closes (NY Times). In the past three months alone, at least 24 Guantanamo prisoners have been set free because courts determined they weren't guilty of anything other than having been accused, often anonymously, of evil intentions or thoughts. One young man was held for six years on charges by two other Guantanamo prisoners that he had been a member Qaeda cell in London when he was 11 years old; he was arrested when he was 14 and has been there ever since. The primary evidence for the dangerousness of most prisoners in the Guantanamo gulag has been that the Bush administration chose to lock them up in the Guantanamo gulag. Nearly all the recent releases got out because of habeus corpus proceedings, which the Bush administration strongly opposed on the grounds that the courts didn't have the right to interfere with presidential suspension of Constitutional guarantees. It's a miracle the Republic survived eight years of those bastards. (19 January 209)

Keith Olbermann: 8 years of the Bush administration in 8 minutes (MSNBC). You can't remember all the times Bush botched it, blew it and/or sold it. You just remember your favorites. Here, in eight appalling minutes, Keith Olberman adduces one after the other after the other. When does deadly greed and incompetence rise to the level of felony? The Republicans raked Bill Clinton over the coals and did all they could to crewk his administration because he wouldn't tell a special prosecutor on a fishing expedition that he'd had his joint copped in the White House. Why are they (and the Democrats) so impeccably silent about this 8-minute list of far greater abuses, abominations and atrocities? (18 January 2009)

Joe Conason: he real reason Bill Clinton pardoned Marc Rich (Salon.com). The fustian Arlen Specter carried on about the Marc Rich pardon during Eric Holder's nomination hearing before the Judiciary Committee as if he was hot on the trail of a major ethical issue. He was blowing smoke, as usual. Rich's pardon had nothing to do with his wife's contributions and Holder couldn't talk about it for the same reason Bill Clinton couldn't talk about it: Clinton was at the time desperately trying to revive the Mideast peace talks and the Israelis leaned heavily on him to pardon their Mossad assetÂ—Marc Rich. Clinton knew he'd get heat for the pardon but thought a move toward peace was worth it. All of which the blowhard Arlen Specter knew when he waxed oh so self-rightous at Holder's hearing. (16 January 2009)

Geoff Kelly: Who is Syaed Ali? And why is Byron Brown so angry at him? (Artvoice). Syaed Ali criticized Buffalo mayor Byron Brown. At 7 a.m. on a November morning a team of Buffalo cops arrived at his house. The took every electronic gadget they could find, as well as his credit cards and deodorant. They also took Syaed Ali. They took him to the State A.G.'s office and then to the FBI and then to their own HQ. They told him if he asked for a lawyer, asked to see his family or tried to leave he would be charged with a crime. They wouldn't let him go to the bathroom. After a while they turned him loose but they've never returned his property. None of the cops will talk about the event. The judge who issued the search warrant won't talk about it. Byron Brown won't talk about it, presumably resting on the principle of res ipsa loquitir,which translates (roughly) as "Why did they give me a police force if not to terrorize people who criticize me?" This is a huge proactive leap for a politician who specializes in smiling at cameras at ribbon cuttings. (15 January 2009)

Israel Strike Hits U.N. Complex in Gaza (NY Times). Israeli gunners attacked a UN building in Gaza with phosphorus ordinance, which not only sets fires that are difficult to put out but also causes horrific burns to human flesh. At the time this story was filed, Israel was claiming the attack was an accident, but by midmorning the official line had changed to a claim that they had been receiving enemy fire from the building. This is a gambit the US military has used scores of times in Iraq. "Why did you blow up that building full of women and children?" "Terrorists were shooting at us from that building." "But the only bodies found were women and children." "Terrorists are sneaky bastards. They shoot and run away as soon as we start shooting back. The deaths are their fault. It's all their fault. We blew up those women and children in self defense." The death toll in Gaza now is over 1000 Palestinians and 13 Israelis, with 4 of the latter killed by friendly fire. (15 January 2009)

John Stewart: Six Days Seven Nights (Daily Show). The best parsing on US

television of the hypocrisy, mendacity and sheer loopiness in Bush's exit television appearances. (14 January 2009)

Bob Woodward: Detainee Tortured, Say U.S. Official (Washington Post). "The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a 'life-threatening condition.'" (14 January 2009)

Evidence in Terror Cases Said to Be in Chaos (Washington Post). It's a good thing Obama is closing Bush's Guantanamo gulag. According to a declaration filed in federal court by a former military prosecutor, "the system of handling evidence against detainees at Gauntanamo Bay is so chaotic that it is impossible to prepare a fair and successful prosecution." So other than putting a bunch of guys, some of them guilty as sin and some of them perfectly innocent, through hell for years and shredding America's reputation as a land that honors justice, what did it all accomplish? (14 January 2009)

Citizen's Briefing Book (Office of the President-Elect). Barack Obama says he's interested in what we think and that he wants government to deal with issues we think important, not just issues that rise to the surface within the beltway. Does he mean it? Time will tell. For starters, he's set up a web page on which people can make suggestions, and comment and vote on suggestions that have already been made. The Current Occupant didn't even pretend to care what we thought. (14 January 2009)

Leading Israeli Scholar Avi Shlaim: Israel Committing "State Terror" in Gaza Attack, Preventing Peace (Democracy Now!). "The assault on Gaza is entering its nineteenth day, with no end in sight. Israel continues its intense bombardment of the territory as Israeli troops edge closer to the heart of Gaza City. Nearly 1,000 Palestinians have been killed, more than 4,400 injured, many of them women and children. Thirteen Israelis have died over the same period, ten of them soldiers." Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman speaks "with Oxford professor Avi Shlaim. He served in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and is widely regarded as one of the leading authorities on the Israeli-Arab conflict." It was Israel, says Shlaim in this remarkably informed and wise interview, who broke the cease-fire, not Hamas, and it is Israel that has since 1967 transformed itself into a colonialist country that uses terrorism as a political weapon, and it is Israel that has consistently blocked any continuing peace settlement in Palestine. (14 January 2009)

Susan Estrich: Israel cannot give in (Buffalo News). Estrich has everything going for her but the facts. We don't usually post pieces that are this racist, mendacious and all-around stupid. But it's such a fine example of the kind of PR syllogizing that is regularly offered to justify Israel's terrorist attacks in Gaza we thought it deserved some of BR's pixels. No one likes to kill and maim women and children, Estrich argues; a few bad guys force Israel to do it, therefore the bloodshed is not only just but necessary. If you read this, you'll probably want to watch Amy Goodman's interview with Avi Shlaim, which will help you return to the world of fact and reason. You should watch that interview anyway. (14 January 2009).

Israel Shuts Out World Press (Spiegel). "The Israelis have shut the world press out of the Gaza Strip, forcing journalists to rely on Arab media and informants on the ground. The situation is making objective reporting on the war close to impossible." (14 January 2009)

Terrorism on the NY Times Op-Ed Page (FAIR). New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is advocating punitive attacks on civilians as a way to "educate" Hamas. Killing and maiming civilians in order to influence the behavior of a political entity is a pretty good definition of terrorism. (14 January 2009)

Frank Rich: Eight Years of Madoffs (NY Times). You think Bernie Madoff is King of the Ponzis with his $50 billion ripoff? He's small potatoes compared to what the Bush administration has drained out of the US treasury the past eight years. We know what's going to happen to Madoff. What about the Bush gonifs? (12 January 2009)

Bono: Notes from the Chairman (NY Times). Sinatra was great right to the end. Here's why. (12 January 2009)

Gotti neighbor dissolved in acid (Salon.com). Remember that guy who accidentally ran over mobster John Gotti's young son and then was seen no more. It turns out there is a very specific reason he was seen no more. Drive carefully. (11 January 2009)

Glenn Greenwald: Bill Moyers on Israel/Gaza (Salon.com). Greenwald comments on and provides links to Bill Moyers poignant essay on the Gaza bloodbath, as well as interesting notes on the US Security Council vote last week urging a cease-fire (Cheney argued for a veto, Rice argued for a yes vote, Bush decided to abstain), a comparison to the deaths in the Gaza bloodbath and South Ossetia last year, and more.

Rashid Khaladi: What You Don't Know About Gaza (NY Times). Starting with what this bloodbath is really about. (11 January 2009)

Uri Avnery: How Many Divisions? (Gush Shalom). If you read nothing else to counter the relentless barrage of propaganda coming out of the Israeli war machine read this, from quondam Israeli war hero and longtime peace activist Uri Avenry (who more and more seems the last sane and ethical public figure in Israel). There's nothing new going on in the Israeli action in Gaza, he writes: the actions and rationale of the Israeli government call to mind the German siege of Leningrad (it was hiding members of the Red Army from the Wehrmacht) and London during the blitz (it hid Churchill and his gang "misusing the millions of citizens as a human shield. The Germans were compelled to send the Luftwaffe....") Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of all of this is Israeli citizens, who are mostly literate and educated, are now believing government propaganda that had been made up just to befuddle the European and American press. Lies have become truth and truth is buried in the rubble, along with the dead women and children. This is a war, Avnery says, that Hamas cannot lose. "In the end, this war is a crime against ourselves too, a crime against the State of Israel."(10 January 2009)

Israeli War Crimes Mount (AlterNet). Israeli jets and tanks have attacked schools, hospitals, universities, mosques and ambulances as part of its relentless war against Palestinians crowded into the tiny Gaza strip, an area which Israeli authoritizes have previously systematically starved and isolated with a powerful deadly blockade. They say it's necessary to perform this slaughter because Hamas rocket teams have taken refuge among the children and the sick on the assumption that no civilized nation would slaughter hundreds of children to get at a few generally feckless rocket teams. So much for assumptions. Who says people don't learn from history? If only we could figure out a way to get them to learn from the right side. (10 January 2010)

Indyk vs. Finkelstein on Israel's Gaza war (Democracy Now!). This is a terrific encounter, one that perfectly illustrates why the U.S. has failed to broker any kind of peace in Israel. Former U.S. ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk explains to Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman why Israel's Gaza behavior is legitimate and legal. Scholar Norman Finkelstein responds with facts illustrating why Indyk is just blowing smoke. Indyk responds with an ad hominem attack on Finkelstein. One key fact Finklestein mentions that has been all-but-ignored in the US press: it wasn't Hamas missiles in violation of the cease-fire that set off this present massive retaliation against the civilian population of Gaza. The cease-fire was broken by Israel when it attacked Gaza on November 4. That was election day in the US, which the Israeli military government knew perfectly well, so the story of that November Israeli incursion into Gaza, which resulted in several Palestinian deaths, went unreported. Israel just picked up the narrative when the U.S. press was no longer distracted, blaming the victim for the increased punishment. (10 January 2009)

Joe Klein: The Bush Administration's Most Despicable Act (Time). The two key theorists whose legal arguments rationalized the Bush Administration's torture program are Berkeley law school professor John Yoo and Harvard law school professor Alan Dershowitz. Yoo argued that torture was permissible because anything the White House did was de facto legal; Dershowitz argued that torture was permissible so long as it was done by well-meaning people for the right reasons. The bottom line from both was: Torture is permissible and, in some circumstances, desirable. If the Bush torture memorial Klein imagines here is ever built, they can go on it, along with the trio who made it all happen: Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. (10 January 2010)

Naomi Klein: Want to End the Violence in Gaza? Boycott Israel (AlterNet). Parallels between apartheid era South Africa continue to mount: increased ghettoization of the native population, increased taking of native property, increased ethic ghettoes, contruction of an apartheid wall, increased violence against civilians, etc., etc., ad naus. And, as with South Africa, ordinary political discourse continues to discourage the unending abuse, e.g. the failure of the UN to condemn the violence. Perhaps, says The Shock Doctrine author Naomi Klein, it's is time to implement a nonviolent technique that was instrumental in ending South Africa's brutal apartheid regime: a broad-based economic boycott. (10 January 2009)

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

Nothing to Fear: Adam Cohen on "FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America" (Democracy Now!) "The current economic crisis has often been cited as the worst the country has seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt took his oath of office in March 1933, over 10,000 banks had collapsed, following the stock market crash of 1929. One-quarter of American workers were unemployed, and people were fighting over scraps of food." Democracy Now! host Amy goodman speaks with Adam Cohen, author of Nothing to Fear: FDRÂ’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America (10 January 2009)

Paul Krugman: The Obama Gap (NY Times). Obama's economic recovery plan, says Nobel laureate Krugman, is far too small to do the job and far too much of it is going to business tax cuts, which deliver little bang for the buck. (10 January 2009).

Buffett's Buffalo News offers second buyout round (Reuters). Like most US newspapers, Buffalo's only daily is suffering shrinking ad revenue and declining readership. Unlike most newspapers, which have laid staff off, the News has been offering buyout packages. This time the buyouts are reaching into the newsroom. (9 January 2009)

Red Cross Reports Grisly Find in Gaza (Washington Post). Not only is the Israeli war machine mercilessly bombing women and children in Gaza, some of them in UN schools the coordinates of which had been given to the Israelis specifically to avoid such unnecessary slaughter, but it is actively preventing the Red Cross from reaching sites where civilian survivors desperately await aid.(8 January 2009)

Nat Hentoff's Last Column (Village Voice). The owners of the Voice fired their most venerable columnist, Nat Hentoff, who has been a regular at the weekly for 50 years. Nat won't be in the Voice any more but, he's not even thinking of retiring ("To what?" Duke Ellington said to him when Hentoff asked if he'd thought about retiring) and he's still got his skunk suit, which he intends to wear. (7 January 2009)

One more attempt to plug Wikileaks (Business Day). Wikileaks is an informal group of people with sophisticated software skills and high intolerance to governmental and corporate secrecy. They regularly get and publish to the web documents banks and police agencies, for example, would prefer the rest of us didn't get to see. They recently posted documents on South African banks in which they uncensored a great deal of information the banking officials thought had been successfully hidden. Now the South African Competition Commission is trying to hit the Wikileakers with criminal charges. The only problem is, nobody knows who they are. (7 January 2009)

Paul Krugman: This Looks Like the Start of a Second Great Depression (NY Times). If Congress follows its usual pattern of fighting any fiscal policy other than tax cuts for the wealthy, it may very well plunge us into GD Redux. (7 January 2009)

Linda Mamoun: Israeli Militants Poised to Resettle Gaza After Assault (AlterNet). Israeli squatters who were forcibly removed from Palestinian land four years ago are looking at the current invasion of Gaza as a road back to the homes they shouldn't have been in in the first place. For them, the bloodshed going on now is all about lebensraum.(7 January 2009)

Bloomberg in Sderot (NY Times). This has got to be one of the freakier stories of the week: NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg flew to Israel on his private jet after Israel's air and tank attacks against Gaza. Those attacks have thus far resulted in at least 500 deaths, many of them civilians. The planes, which are said to have pinpoint accuracy in their bomb guidance systems, have blown up mosques, the university and private homes.The purpose of Bloomberg's trip was apparently to make points with Jewish voters back home. He went to the Israeli town of Sderot, where he asked a Palestinian child who was a patient in the hospital there, "Do you have 'Sesame Street' here?" The poor kid didn't have a clue what this rich American idiot was jabbering about, so Bloomberg put a stuffed Big Bird into the child's hands and moved on. He later declared that the civilian suffering was the fault of Hamas. Then he got into his own big bird and went home. (4 January 2009)

Chris Hedges: Party to Murder (TruthDig). "Can anyone who is following the Israeli air attacks on Gaza," asks Hedges, who was for seven years the NY Times Mideast correspondent, "the buildings blown to rubble, the children killed on their way to school, the long rows of mutilated corpses, the wailing mothers and wives, the crowds of terrified Palestinians not knowing where to flee, the hospitals so overburdened and out of supplies they cannot treat the wounded, and our studied, callous indifference to this widespread human sufferingÂ—wonder why we are hated? Our self-righteous celebration of ourselves and our supposed virtue is as false as that of Israel. We have become monsters, militarized bullies, heartless and savage. We are a party to human slaughter, a flagrant war crime, and do nothing....Israel uses sophisticated attack jets and naval vessels to bomb densely crowded refugee camps and slums, to attack a population that has no air force, no air defense, no navy, no heavy weapons, no artillery units, no mechanized armor, no command and control, no army, and calls it a war. It is not a war. It is murder." (4 January 2009)

Uri Avnery: Molten Lead (Gush Shalom). It was Israel, not the Palestinians, who broke the (pseudo-) cease-fire, insists Israeli war hero turned peace activist Uri Avnery. "The main requirement for any cease-fire in the Gaza Strip must be the opening of the border crossings. There can be no life in Gaza without a steady flow of supplies. But the crossings were not opened, except for a few hours now and again. The blockade on land, on sea and in the air against a million and a half human beings is an act of war, as much as any dropping of bombs or launching of rockets. It paralyzes life in the Gaza Strip: eliminating most sources of employment, pushing hundreds of thousands to the brink of starvation, stopping most hospitals from functioning, disrupting the supply of electricity and water. Those who decided to close the crossings Â– under whatever pretext Â– knew that there is no real cease-fire under these conditions." (4 January 2009)

Cullen Murphy and Todd S. Purdum: Farewell to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House (Vanity Fair). "The threat of 9/11 ignored. The threat of Iraq hyped and manipulated. Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Hurricane Katrina. The shredding of civil liberties. The rise of Iran. Global warming. Economic disaster. How did one two-term presidency go so wrong? A sweeping draft of historyÂ—distilled from scores of interviewsÂ—offers fresh insight into the roles of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and other key players." (4 January 2009)

Michael Lewis and David Einhorn: The End of the Financial World as We Know It (NY Times). Harry Markopolos, a Boston investment officer, tried for nine years to convince the SEC that Bernard Madoff was a fraud. The SEC ignored Markopolos with impeccable consistency. Similar warnings went out about the rest of the financial mess and they were likewise ignored by those who should have listened and acted. And now Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is tossing billions of your tax dollars into the laps of the villains and scoundrels who caused this bloody mess and there is virtually no accountability attached to any of his largesse (at your expense). This really smart analysis of where we are and how we got here concludes with several cogent recommendations about what a sane government would be doing next, including firing the enforcement booby who never smelled the smoke until the house was burnt to the ground and replacing him with Harry Markopolos. (4 January 2009)

Frank Rich: A President Forgotten but Not Gone (NY Times). Perhaps the most astonishing thing about George W. Bush's failure is that it is, in all regards, worse than you thought, worse than your hyperbole, worse than you can make up. Through it all he remains "a narcissist with no self-awareness whatsoever. ItÂ’s that arrogance that allowed him to tune out even the most calamitous of realities, freeing him to compound them without missing a step. The president who famously couldnÂ’t name a single mistake of his presidency at a press conference in 2004 still canÂ’t." (4 January 2009)

Harold Pinter: Art, Truth and Politics (2005 Nobel Prize lecture)."When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimeter and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror - for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us. I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory. If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man." (28 December 2008)

Thor Steingraber: How the arts can nourish a struggling nation (Boston Globe). One of the Republicans' little known achievements has been an almost total gutting of the work and mission of the National Endowment for the Arts. In part because of hate campaigns by homophobes like Jesse Helms and Pat Buchanan, and in part because conservatives just don't like the non-herd mentality of artists, funding for individuals has been wiped out in favor of broad public projects, many of which should be coming out of National Endowment for the Humanities instead. Bush appointee Dana Gioia's chairmanship is about to run out. Here's an opportunity for Obama to make a real difference in an important part of American life the Republicans did their best to kill. (28 December 2008)

Henry Kissinger and Richard M. Nixon: "We can bomb the bejesus out of them all over North Vietnam" (National Security Archive). Newly released recordings of Kissinger's telephone conversations show him gleeful about the tonnage of bombs dropped on North Vietnam and apparently confident, as late as 1972, that continued bombing of civilian targets would win the war. Plus bits and pieces of some of the other 30,000 pages Kissinger never thought would be made public.(28 December 2008)

Abduction Illuminates Criminality in Mexico (Washington Post). The last place rich people want to be these days is Mexico, where the crooks don't just steal the things rich people have but also rich people themselves. More than 5,300 people have been killed in Mexico's drug war this year and perhaps 500 people are kidnapped each month. Mexican kidnappers are noted for their brutality: while waiting for their money they rape and/or mutilate their victims, and sometimes they tire of waiting for the money to arrive and kill them and go after someone else. The most recent kidnapping of note is Felix Batista, who was in Mexico scouting potential clients for his kidnappees' middleman business and giving lectures on how to avoid being kidnapped in the first place andd what to do if you are kidnapped. If he gets out alive, he can henceforce use first-person narratives for part of those lectures. (27 December 2008)

David Cole: What to Do About the Torturers? (NY Review of Books). "In the long run, the best insurance against cruelty and torture becoming US policy again is a formal recognition that what we did after September 11 was wrong—as a normative, moral, and legal matter, not just as a tactical issue. Such an acknowledgment need not take the form of a criminal prosecution; but it must take some official form. We have been willing to admit wrongdoing in the past. In 1988, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, officially apologizing for the Japanese internment and paying reparations to the internees and their survivors. That legislation, a formal repudiation of our past acts, provides an important cultural bulwark against something similar happening again. There has been nothing of its kind with respect to torture. We cannot move forward in reforming the law effectively unless we are willing to account for what we did wrong in the past." (26 December 2008)

David Sirota: Why is Fox lying about FDR? (Salon). The rogues and scoundrels at Fox News have taken to claiming that "Historians pretty much agree" FDR's policies did the US economy more harm than good. Where does such foolishness come from and why do they do it? In part, they're taking cues from the grumpy Amity Shales and her now-discredited agit-prop book on the Depression and FDR. (Shales has even been a guest on Newshour, which is pushing the idea of 'balance' into the muck.) Au fond, it's about making things as difficult as possible for Obama, an attempt to turn as many people as possible against the moves he's promised to start making as soon as he's inaugurated. They should move Fox's HQ to K Street so these guys can be at home with the other pimps and dissemblers. (26 December 2008)

Groups soliciting funds to buy BLM leases (Deseret News). Tim DeChristopher derailed the Bush administration's late-term attempt to sell developers 13 parcels of government land at bargain-basement prices to oil and gas developers. He just bid so high the developers stopped raising their auction paddles and by the time the government found out that DeChristopher didn't have any money, the auction was over. Now the one part of the government is deciding whether to hit him with a felon false statement charge and another part is scrambling to find a way to sell off the land before the new administration takes over and scuttles who whole rapacious boondoggle. (26 December 2008)

Michael Pennington: Harold Pinter (The Independent). Harold Pinter, the Nobel Prize winning playwright, who was also a highly regarded director, screenwriter, actor and cricketer, died last week. Pinter was also a political activist, as was clear from his Nobel acceptance speech in which he excoriated the Bush administration's war and torture policies. "Harold Pinter was thought to be frightening," writes Pinter friend Michael Pennington, a well-known British actor, "but really, like Chekhov, an encounter with him made you want to be simpler, more yourself. For all his fabled belligerence, this was a man of enormous warmth, who made you feel that we were, after all, about something. To have known him was a joy and enrichment; to have been of the same profession has been the greatest privilege." (25 December 2008)

Bush's negative Christmas present (LA Times). Our almost-ex-president gave a politically connected real estate developer the gift that is treasured more than a no-bid contract: a presidential pardon. Then Bush found out that the recipient was (a) dirtier than he thought when he rubber-stamped the pardon and (b) people knew about it, so on Christmas eve Bush announced was taking the pardon back. There is some question about the legality of that: the Constitution says the president may issue pardons; it says nothing about negating them. The White House is taking the position that even though Bush signed the pardon it wasn't valid until a piece of paper was delivered to the recipient. That's not in the Constitution either, or anywhere else. (25 December 2008)

Kerry Trueman: Maybe Vilsack Won't Suck? (Huffington Post). Foodies had a bad case of indigestion when Barack Obama named "bio-fuelish, feedlot friendly Tom Vilsack Secretary of Agriculture" last week. But an organic farmer long active in Iowa environmental issues says Gov. Vilsack is a centrist Democrat who listens, one who progressives and environmentalists can work with. (22 December 2008)

AP Study Finds $1.6B Went to Bailed-Out Bank Execs (NY Times). Gordon Gecko ("Greed is good!") is a saint compare to these greedy and arrogant top banking execs ("top" in how much of the banks' money they spent on themselves and took home). Dante, we need you now! (22 December 2008)

White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire (NY Times). A lot of fools and villains made the housing meltdown inevitable, starting with and maybe especially President George W. Bush himself. (20 December 2008)

Marjorie Cohn: Why Was Cheney So Quick to Admit He's a War Criminal? (AlterNet). Maybe he thinks Bush will pardon him or Obama won't prosecute him. But, by law, the president can't immunize himself or his staff for crimes he authorized, and Obama, is Constitutionally obligated to faithfully execute the laws. If he does his job, he won't stand in the way of a legitimate criminal inquiry. But what presidents should or should do and what they actually or don't do aren't the same thing at all. If they were, we wouldn't be in this wretched mess. (18 December 2008)

The Torture Report (NY Times editorial). Obama should, but probably won't, initiate criminal charges against Rumsfelt, Gonzales, Addington and other Bush administration officials for their role in creating and maintaining the Torture Archipelago. (18 December 2008)

Stand by Me (YouTube). The economy's in the sewer, the wars continue, the Holy Land is no less an unholy mess than this time last year, and the Arctic continues to melt, but something truly astonishing happened in the U.S. this year and, who knows, other good things might follow. Here's a tune to celebrate the election, the season, good buddies, and a future that has a chance of being better than the past. It begins on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, then radiates from there. (Click here for Bill Moyers' interview with Mark Johnson, who produced this remarkable piece.) (18 December 2008)

Toss a shoe at Bush (VG Net). A contribution to international discourse from Norway's largest newspaper: slide the black bars for angle ("Vinkel") and force ("Styrke") and let it fly ("Kast Skoen"). (16 December 2008)

Waterboarding was appropriate, says Cheney (Chicago Tribune). As the new guys get set to take over the administration, Vice President Dick Cheney gives ABC News a rare interview. He agrees with everything he said and did since 9/11: the Iraq war, the US mistreatment of prisoners, and the Guantanamo gulag were all necessary, appropriate and useful. This is a guy absolutely confident that his successors won't have the stomach for a war crimes trial. (16 December 2008)

David Plouffe on how Obama won the nomination (Portfolio). A long, informative interview with Obama's campaign manager by Lloyd Grove. (16 December 2008)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The electoral map (NY Times). Forget the polls; they tell you almost nothing you need to know. The polls leading up to a one vote win by one candidate in California and a million-vote win by the other in New York will show the guy who won New York ahead, but since California has 55 electoral votes and New York only 31, the polls would have had the results backwards. What you need to know is how the voters are siding in each state and what the implications of that are for the candidate who reaches the magic number of 270. The day this is posted Obama is ahead in the polls by 10%, but on the electoral map he's ahead of McCain by 30%. (3 October 2008)

Frank Rich: McCain's Suspension Bridge to Nowhere (NY Times). "What we learned last week is that the man who always puts his 'country first' will take the country down with him if thatÂ’s what it takes to get to the White House. For all the focus on Friday nightÂ’s deadlocked debate, it still canÂ’t obscure what preceded it: When John McCain gratuitously parachuted into Washington on Thursday, he didnÂ’t care if his grandstanding might precipitate an even deeper economic collapse. All he cared about was whether he might save his campaign. George Bush put more deliberation into invading Iraq than McCain did into his own reckless invasion of the delicate Congressional negotiations on the bailout plan. By the time he arrived, there already was a bipartisan agreement in principle. It collapsed hours later at the meeting convened by the president in the Cabinet Room. Rather than help try to resuscitate Wall StreetÂ’s bloodied bulls, McCain was determined to be the bull in WashingtonÂ’s legislative china shop, running around town and playing both sides of his divided party against CongressÂ’s middle. Once others eventually forged a path out of the wreckage, heÂ’d inflate, if not outright fictionalize, his own role in cleaning up the mess his mischief helped make. Or so he hoped, until his ignominious retreat." (28 September 2008)

McCain and the gambling lobbyists (NY Times). As if Buffalonians didn't have enough reasons to vote against John McCain here's one more: he's long been in bed with gambling industry operators and lobbyists. When he was depressed after failing in his 2000 presidential bid he went to one of the casinos his Senate committee oversees and, surprise of surprises, went home with thousands of dollars he didn't have when he walked in. Annus mirabilis! (27 September 2008)

Bruce Jackson: Chinua Achebe at Babeville. 15 photographs of the proflicic Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, best known for his 1958 novel Things Fall Apart (translated into 50 languages) and winner of the Man Booker International Prize in 2007, taken September 26, 2008, the evening he opened the second round of readings in Just Buffalo's "Babel" series at Babeville in Buffalo. (27 September 2008)

Paul Newman Dies at 83 (NY Times).

Michael and Robert Meeropol: A Statement. The sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg reflect on the trial and execution of their parents. (26 September 2008)

Bejing issues warning over peace prize choice (The Independent). If you think all the pretty fireworks and coordinated drumming at the Olympics were an indication that the Chinese government was about the loosen the iron grip with which it rules the country, forget it. The tourists are gone and it's back to business as usual. "The Chinese government has intervened in the choice of recipient for the Nobel Peace Prize, warning the Nobel committee not to give the award to the jailed dissident Hu Jia. Mr Hu and his wife, Zeng Jinyan, live under house arrest in Beijing with their infant daughter and have been included in the early list of favourites for this year's accolade, which is due to be announced in two weeks. He is China's most renowned human rights defender and has spoken out on Aids, Tibetan autonomy and free speech. In April, Mr Hu was jailed for three-and-a-half years for "incitement to subvert state power" by writing articles about freedom and talking to foreign journalists." (26 September 2008)

"I ghost-wrote letters to the editor for the McCain campaign" (Salon.com). Did you ever read McCain/Palin letters to the editor in your local newspaper and wonder why they all seemed to have been written by the same person even tho they had different signatures? (In Buffalo, extend that to letters in the Buffalo News about the casino and Peace Bridge.) It's because they were written by the same person, or team of persons working from a playbook or set of talking points. Some newspapers vet those letters to make sure they're at least saying something specific or new rather than just rephrasing what another letter said a few days or weeks ago; others (again, v. the letters in the Buffalo News about the casino and Peace Bridge) print variants of the same letter over different signatures again and again and again without ever, apparently wondering how that miracle of redundant prose came about, or being concerned about being used for organized hype. (26 September 2008)

Robert Fisk: Detained, Beaten, and Tortured in Name of 'War on Terror': Six years in Guantanamo (The Independent/CommonDreams). "Sami al-Haj walks with pain on his steel crutch; almost six years in the nightmare of Guantanamo have taken their toll on the Al Jazeera journalist and, now in the safety of a hotel in the small Norwegian town of Lillehammer, he is a figure of both dignity and shame. The Americans told him they were sorry when they eventually freed him this year - after the beatings he says he suffered, and the force-feeding, the humiliations and interrogations by British, American and Canadian intelligence officers - and now he hopes one day he'll be able to walk without his stick. The TV cameraman, 38, was never charged with any crime, nor was he put on trial; his testimony makes it clear that he was held in three prisons for six-and-a-half years - repeatedly beaten and force-fed - not because he was a suspected "terrorist" but because he refused to become an American spy." (26 September 2008)

Greenhouse gas emissions shock scientists (LA Times). "The world pumped up emissions of the chief human-produced global warming gas last year, setting a course that could push beyond leading scientists' projected worst-case scenario, international researchers said Thursday. The new numbers, which some scientists called 'scary,' were a surprise because experts thought an economic downturn would slow energy use. Instead, carbon dioxide output rose 3% from 2006 to 2007. That amount exceeds the most dire outlook for emissions from burning coal and oil and related activities as projected by a Nobel Prize-winning group of international scientists in 2007." (26 September 2008)

Israel asked US for green light to bomb nuclear sites in Iran (Guardian). And for once, happily, George W. Bush just said "No." (26 September 2008)

Afghan President pardons men convicted of bayonet gang rape (The Independent). They were sentenced to 11 years for raping a man's wife in front of witnesses after they kidnapped the family's son (who has never been seen again). The family lost their son, their honor and their home, and Hamid Karzai cut them villains loose. (26 September 2008)

Kathleen Parker: Palin Problem: she's out of her league (National Review). Yeah, the National Review in Buffalo Report! Who'd a thought it possible? But even the very conservative and very racist National Review gets into BR when it runs a column detailing Sarah Palin's incompetence and suggests that, for the good of the country and motherhood, she withdraw from the race (because John McCain would look like an idiot if he fired her, which he already looks like for having recruited her, and which he probably can't do anyway since the convention is over) Can you imagine that bulldog with lipstick having being sufficiently aware of what a disaster she is to withdraw at this point? Dream on, National Review. Dream on, John McCain. (26 September 2008)

Joel Stein: Off on the Great Schlep (LA Times). "If you need proof that this is the most important election in a generation, get this: Jewish grandkids are flying to Florida to visit their grandparents -- without being guilted into it -- to talk their elders out of voting for John McCain." (Click here for Sarah Silverman's video riff on this travel plan.) (25 September 2008)

"As Putin rears his head" (Salon.com). This will take your breath away. Watch Katie Couric try to keep a straight face as the simple-minded, impeccably ignorant twit John McCain picked as his vice president tries to answer questions and comes up with one gibberish or vapid or mindless or information-free response after another. She makes Dan Quayle look learned and wise. It's like the worst SNL parody of the perfectly incompetent candidate for office you ever saw, all the worse because it's real. (Click here for the LA Times commentary on the Palin-Couric parody of an interview, "Palin talks to Couric--and if she's lucky, few are listening. And click here for Atlantic Monthly's James Fallows praise of Couric for the way she handled the interview. And click here for a graphic that depicts Sarah Palin's theory of international geopolitics.) (25 September 2008)

Sarah Palin Idiotically Answers Four Questions (Wonkette). You've known why McCain has worked so hard to keep his choice for Veep away from reporters. Here's living proof. When she was hauled out for photo ops at Ground Zero they accidentally led her in talking range of reporters. "We will not take the easy way out here," write Wonkette, "what follows is the entire transcript of her first-ever taking of questions from the press corps, with our comments. Why didnÂ’t we just cherry pick a few extra-dumb sentences and hit 'publish'? Because itÂ’s all extra dumb. Your new vice president of vapidity, Mrs. Palin, started off with some numbskull grade-school-vacation recitation they mustÂ’ve hammered into her big-haired head all night long, Gitmo style." And this on the day John McCain was doing everything but feign a tummyache to get out of Friday's debate with Obama! (25 September 2008)

Bill Emmott: The US can afford to pay for this rescueÂ—but little else (Guardian). Bush is going out with a deficit supernova: the lingering cost of his Iraq war was bad enough (it's mostly paid for with loans, which is why the dollar is weak, which is why oil is so high), but now the Wall Street rescue will more than double that debt. So what is Obama going to pay for all those good things with? He can't borrow any more. Will he have to reverse himself on taxes? Bush Redux McCain doesn't have to worry, since he's promised nothing specific, other than continuing the Iraq war to "victory." (23 September 2008)

McCain's campaign manager paid $2mil by Fannie & Freddie (NY Times). John McCain has been talking like the Wall Street mess was brought about by a bunch of D.C. scoundrels he never saw or met doing things about which he never knew or heard. He must be blind and deaf: Rick Davis, his campaign manager and longtime adviser, was paid $34K per month for five years to serve as president of an advocacy group Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac set up to lean on key D.C. senators, among them John McCain. At some point the press will stop being bedazzled by his twittering Alaska moosedresser, and all this stuff he's been ducking and hiding from will perhaps start to stick. (22 September 2008)

Alan Wolfe: Why McCain lies (Salon.com): "Like so many of John McCain's critics, I find myself astonished at the sheer brazenness of the lies he tells. But this is not because McCain is more dishonorable than Bush. It is because the conditions under which a truthful Republican could be elected in 2008 are much more difficult than they were in 2000. Through sheer incompetence and cronyism, George W. Bush showed Americans just how dangerous conservatism can be. Because he did, those conservatives who would succeed him face even more difficult obstacles placed in their path to power. In the past, they might have gotten away with lying occasionally. This will no longer do. Expect, therefore, as the country turns to the debates ahead, that John McCain, when addressing issues of foreign policy around which he has been remarkably honest, will begin to lie in that area as well." (22 September 2008)

Aaron Sorkin Conjures a Meeting of Obama and Bartlet (NY Times). Ordinarily we wouldn't post anything by the NY Times's B-word Incarnate Maureen Dowd because of the bad karma even the slightest contact is likely to incur, but sometimes you just gotta do the nasty thing to get to a good place. This time there are just three lines of the BWI before the great "West Wing" creator Aaron Sorkin takes over with his report of a conversation between Barack Obama and the best president the US has had in living memory, Jed Bartlet. The best part is Bartlet's long summary of the McCain campaign near the end, which gets to the heart of the matter, such as it is, better than any of the pundits, including the BWI. (21 September 2001)

Alaskans angered that Palin is off-limits (LA Times). The McCain campaign has pretty much taken over the Alaska governor's office. They've sent a team up to Alaska to field questions, handle PR, and do damage control. They've been spreading disinformation about former Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan, who Palin fired after he wouldn't fire her former brother-in-law. They've told people in the governor's office to refuse to testify at a state legislative inquiry into the Monegan affair. Alaskans don't much like outside interference, and this small army of outside political goons who've turned their state house into an extension of McCain's campaign office has many of them in a furor. (21 September 2008)