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 team—James Holdren as science advisor, Nobelist Steven Chu as energy secretary, Carol Browener overseeing energy and climate policy, and Lisa Jackson at EPA—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 triumph—a powerful new ally in the Senate, a relationship with President Obama—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 these…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 people—possibly as strong as the Vietnam war movement. It has made itself a pariah nation—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 exception—JFK—all the previous occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue have been WASPs, and most of them—including JFK—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 — like Sarah Obama, the stepgrandmother who only recently got electricity and running water in her metal-roofed shack — 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 don’t have an inquest into what happened during the Bush years — and nearly everyone has taken Mr. Obama’s remarks to mean that we won’t — this means that those who hold power are indeed above the law because they don’t face any consequences if they abuse their power. Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here. It’s not just torture and illegal wiretapping, whose perpetrators claim, however implausibly, that they were patriots acting to defend the nation’s security. The fact is that the Bush administration’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 asset—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 suffering—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 – under whatever pretext – 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 history—distilled from scores of interviews—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)
