Suspicious al-Qaeda "Letter" in the UK Telegraph
Back in August BooMan noted along with Ron Suskind that a certain reporter at the UK Telegraph was rather consistently on the receiving end of CIA disinformation. Ron Suskind has a new book coming out...
View ArticleWho Would've Thought, It Figures
Last month, the New York Stock Exchange suspended trading on BearingPoint because its stock price had fallen too low. Yesterday the price was 3.45 cents a share. Alejandro Lazo writes in today's...
View ArticleOn Sunsets
Among the zanier aspects of Americans' intermittent attempts to bring democracy to America is that of the two major political parties we've settled on -- thinking they must be the correct parties to...
View ArticleGates and the National Defense Strategy
For what have been described as reasons of "continuity," President-elect Obama has chosen to retain Robert Gates as his Secretary of Defense, at least for the short term. It's of no small interest,...
View ArticleFrom Sunday Talk: Blair and Obama on Terrorism
This exchange between Wolf Blitzer and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair on CNN's "Late Edition" Sunday was a perfect, just perfect, example of the problem with the rhetoric that surrounds and...
View ArticleCan Video Games be Art?
One of my occasional musings: do video games, or could they, count as art in the same way that painting, poetry, music, theater, film, and so on, do? If so, what are the aesthetic criteria of video...
View ArticleSpecter Wants to Slow Holder Nomination
Zachary Roth at TPM Muckraker catches a story in The Hill. Specter wants to delay the Holder nomination for Attorney General. In a speech on the Senate floor today, reports The Hill, Specter...
View ArticleWorld's Coral Reefs Dying
We can add another tale to the growing list of truly alarming environment stories that would have seemed like science fiction twenty years ago, but nowadays often elicit a "ho hum" as our capacity for...
View ArticleThe Day the Dearth Stood Still
In the January issue of Harper's Magazine (not online yet), Linda J. Bilmes, lecturer in public finance at Harvard's Kennedy School, and Joseph E. Stiglitz, 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics...
View ArticleCheney Gives Middle Finger to Levin, Senate, U.S., World
GlowNZ has a diary on the rec list about Vice President Cheney's vile interview with Johnathon Karl at ABC today, but I'd like to emphasize another aspect of the interview: its timing. The rare Cheney...
View ArticleThanks, But No Thanks
From the New York Times:Bush Prepares Crisis Briefings to Aid ObamaBy PETER BAKER Published: December 16, 2008WASHINGTON — The White House has prepared more than a dozen contingency plans to help guide...
View ArticleA Sign of a Free Society
On Sunday, Bush offered an opinion about Muntadhar al-Zeidi's shoe-throwing that was consistent with his long-held, somewhat idiosyncratic views on the nature of freedom and democracy.Martha Raddatz:...
View ArticleNYT Editorial Board Calls for Torture Prosecutor
The New York Times editorial board calls for the appointment of a prosecutor to investigate possible illegalities by members of the Pentagon and others responsible for approving policies that led to...
View ArticleHeckuva Job, Downie
The occasion of Mark Felt's -- also known as Deep Throat's -- passing has occasioned a number of pieces in the Washington Post. One is by Leonard Downie, Jr., executive editor of the Post from 1991...
View ArticleThe Uses of Afghanistan
In August of this year, Jane Mayer was doing interviews to promote her book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals. During an interview with...
View ArticleSarah Chayes on Afghanistan
On Sunday, I argued that the US presence in Afghanistan was inextricably entwined with a set of disastrous foreign and domestic policies favored by right-wing ideologues and dubbed, as a whole, "The...
View ArticleOf ICBMs, Sesame Street, and Arrogance
On Dec. 24, Tom Partiff at the Guardian reported that Russia was implenting plans to build 70 new nuclear ICBMs with multiple warheads over the next 3 years. According to Ruben Sergeev, an expert...
View ArticleHits and Misses: 2008
I've been blogging since 2005; making me a relative newcomer but, I suppose, not a novice anymore. What I've noticed is that each year seems to bring with it unique challenges and lessons. The...
View ArticleFriday Night at the Best and Worst Movies of 2008 (EVER!!!)
According to Roger Ebert, 2008 was an unusually good year for film. In making his best-of list for the past year, Ebert found it necessary to double the usual length of the list:I am violating the...
View ArticleMidday Open Thread
Louis Braille was born 200 years ago today. There don't seem to be many tributes about it, but the Australian has a nice one: The Frenchman, who lost his sight when he was four after an accident in his...
View Article
