Archives for December 2004

Remember the name Pablo Paredes. He’s an enlisted sailor who has protested the war in Iraq by refusing to board his ship for deployment to the Persian Gulf. More than anyone so far, Paredes recalls the Vietnam war resisters. He showed up four days ago on the naval pier in San Diego where the USS […]

Now meet the elf overseer at Macy’s world-famous store on 34th Street, where this former actor’s job is “to promote the annual rite of good cheer.” No matter that he used to play “monsters, murderers, even Dracula.” Or that in his office eight floors above Santaland, where he leafs through “The Elfin Manual,” he keeps […]

A reader writes in re: yesterday’s KERIK CONNECTION: “Bernard Kerik was named Iraq’s interim interior minister through a misunderstanding. As a former NYC cop, he was an expert on hookers, not hookahs. Thus are insurgencies born.” In re: HIGH COLONIC, he also writes: “Could an inside examination of Bush’s presidency be considered a solonoscopy?” And […]

Because Rev. Jerry Falwell invariably points 180 degrees in the wrong direction on any subject, whatever he says helps me set my compass. See, courtesy of Wonkette, The Biggest Decision of His Life, an interview that includes his typically flaky remarks (thoughts, if you like) about homosexuality. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

It’s worth catching Richard Clarke’s entertaining speech to the New York Society for Ethical Culture, which he gave last night in an event co-sponosored by Pacifica Radio. The former counterterrorism chief under both Bill Clinton and Georgie Boy had some funny lines. “If the old Cabinet was a closed circle, this Cabinet,” Clarke said, referring […]

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell got down the other night in Washington D.C. — or thought he did — when he paid tribute to Warren Beatty at the Kennedy Center Honors with a rap that went like this: I’m Colin Luther Powell.Public service is my thing.Don’t do it for the fame.Don’t do it for […]

Why can’t Rudy Giuliani’s former chauffeur and body guard become U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security? Well, he can. Everyone says Bernie Kerik will be confirmed. But should he be? Ellis Henican has doubts. And so does Fred Kaplan. Both also made their case this morning on Democracy Now! EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Give this man the Katie Couric prize. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

The editorials are starting to dribble in. They don’t address the irony of Georgie Boy’s call for “a full and open” accounting of the U.N. $64-billion oil-for-food program in Iraq — which would be a bagatelle, I suppose. But they do take up the issue as an attempt to mug the U.N. Philip Gourevitch calls […]

A recent article about a conference on the current state of classical music criticism by John Fleming, the performing arts critic of the St. Petersburg Times, has really pissed off my composer friend William Osborne. What bugged him was a recurring theme of the conference, namely that so many critics seemed willing to accomodate pop […]

Where are the editorials noting the irony of Georgie Boy’s call for “a full and open” accounting of the U.N. $64-billion oil-for-food program in Iraq? He’s never given a similar accounting of his own tainted $200-billion war for democracy in Iraq or any of the other questionable programs on his agenda. Besides, if you watched […]

Although she waited until today to say it, Alessandra Stanley is right: However sad it was to see Mr. Brokaw leave on Wednesday night, it was sadder to watch NBC milk the transition for every drop of bathos and promotional padding. On “Today” and a special “Dateline” this week, the changing of the NBC news […]

David Thomson, reviewing “Just Enough Liebling” in the Dec. 13 issue of The Nation, makes a candid confession of the sort you rarely ever hear from a reviewer. “I am bound to admit,” he writes, “that before this assignment I honored the name without knowing the books.” But Thomson (biographer, film scholar, movie critic, essayist, […]

A reader writes: Chomsky has a point. [Scroll to the end of SWITCHING NEWS CHANNELS.] But the overarching reason the Bush brigade will steer clear of a draft is that it would incite college students to go to the streets, burn their draft cards, and take up the Johnson-Nixon era chant, “Hell, no, we won’t […]

Now that Tom Brokaw is gone as NBC News anchor, his handsome successor Brian Edwards has already begun filling his shoes. “I feel the weight of history,” Edwards said in an interview this morning on the network’s “Today” show. It’s that kind of baloney that’s objectionable in him, not his handsomeness. But the truth is […]

George says the U.N. must come clean on the Iraq oil scandal. Hey, George, we’re still waiting for you to come clean on a few scandals yourself. Let’s see … Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Halliburton, WMD, etc. How about the whole damned Iraq war scandal, George? Here’s a deal: If Kofi tells all, you tell all. […]

Maybe I was over-turkified. Still can’t get a grip. Must be the tryptophan, or possibly the halo effect of Tom Brokaw’s protracted departure. His celebrity-style leave-taking as NBC News anchor, so long-winded and self-important, has been milked to a fare-thee-well. The fact that he has gone along with it or worse, encouraged it, would make […]