The full-page newspaper ad for THE CONCERT FOR JOHN KERRY at Radio City Music Hall had a star-spangled banner wrapped around an electric guitar. Black background. White type. It said: “A Change Is Going to Come.” It said there will be performances by Jon Bon Jovi, Whoopi Goldberg, Wyclef Jean, John Mellencamp, Bette Midler, James Taylor and […]
Archives for June 2004
THE MEA CULPA VERDICT
Now that Daniel Okrent, the public editor of The New York Times, has given us his opinion about the Times’ mea culpa, what’s the verdict? Okrent writes, “I think they got it right. Mostly.” He blames the paper in general for hyping its dead-wrong reports that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction during the […]
SPEAKING OF CONSPIRACIES
Joseph Califano Jr. has written a new memoir, “Inside: A Public and Private Life,” which makes some startling claims about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. A longtime political insider who started out as one of Robert McNamara’s Pentagon “whiz kids,” Califano was privvy to much that is still not completely understood about the […]
KEYSTONE SAUDIS
Brian Whitaker describes the problem of catching terrorists in Saudi Arabia — or rather not catching them — in a London Guardian report headlined “Paying the price for incompetence.” Think of it as the Keystone Kops, Saudi-style. What “often happens in the kingdom,” he writes, “[is] a case of the police stumbling on a plot by […]