By JAN HERMAN Parsing words is the liar’s last resort. So Cheney Boy had nowhere else to go to justify his absurd claim that the Iraq insurgency was in its last throes. “If you look at what the dictionary says about throes, it can still be a violent period, the throes of a revolution,” he said on […]

Earlier this week in Monday Morning Quarterback, a regular correspondent wrote that Joe Biden “has the experience and the smarts to be a fine president.” I myself like the Democratic senator’s shoot-from-the-lip style. But voting for him over Hillary because “the Clinton baggage [might] make her easy to defeat,” as our correspondent noted, is another […]

Regarding

A labor arbitration hearing has been finalized for July 7 to settle the case brought against National Public Radio by the union representing a staff editor who was disciplined for his supervision of a David D’Arcy report about the Museum of Modern Art’s involvement with a painting looted by the Nazis. That’s a mouthful, but […]

The demonization of Bill Moyers is not limited to conservative venues. It also finds a warm, comfy outlet on supposedly liberal PBS. George Neumayr, executive editor of the hardline right-wing American Spectator Magazine, was given ample time last night to spew his venom on PBS’s NewsHour in a softball interview with Jeffrey Brown. But that’s […]

Prompted by Time magazine’s Inside the Wire at Gitmo, about an interrogation at Guantanamo’s Camp X Ray in which a sleep-deprived prisoner is kept awake “by dripping water on his head or playing Christina Aguilera music,” the legal eagle at Underneath Their Robes has filed a confidential opinion that asks, Is Christina Aguilera’s Music “Torture”? […]

Need some entertainment on a Monday morning? How about ABC chief White House correspondent Terry (“Bulldog”) Moran, right, questioning White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan the other day? I don’t know which to admire more, Moran’s tenacity or his sense of humor. As reported by Editor & Publisher, here’s how that went: MORAN: Scott, is […]

“Watching the Sunday morning’s talk shows provided possible answers to some political riddles,” regular correspondent Alan Edelson writes. He continues: There was John McCain on Meet the Press, talking on and on about how proud he had felt supporting George W. Bush in 2004, when we knew how much he detested Bush for the slimy […]

Will two hearings — one official, the other not — be seen by historians as a turning point in ending the Bush regime’s misrule and bringing its ring leaders to justice? It would be nice to think so. And maybe they will be, judging from “Who We Are,” the lead editorial in this morning’s New […]

A reader writes, in re: Myth vs. Fact: Is Africa the Lost Continent? “What about all the aid that gets appropriated by corrupt governments in Africa instead of used for its original intent?” Boy, I’m so glad you asked. One of the points Jeffrey Sachs made, which I did not recount, is that the mismanagement […]

Congressman John Conyers Jr., far left (courtesy of the daily Kos — have a look at this), was barred from delivering a petition to Georgie Boy that demanded an explanation of the Downing Street Memo. The ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Conyers yesterday convened a meeting of House Democrats about the memo and […]

By Jan Herman Economist Jeffrey Sachs was his usual stellar self earlier this week at the Council on Foreign Relations — calm, cogent, full of facts (all of them broken down into relevant categories), persuasive, angered by the Bush regime — contemptuous of it I’d say, but he managed to keep his contempt in check […]

Any fan of Paul Desmond, let alone his biographer, rates a big welcome in my book. Doug Ramsey joins the

“Exhibit A” of a “domesticated” press. That’s what former CIA analyst Ray McGovern calls this morning’s Washington Post editorial, which describes the main revelation of the Downing Street memo as “vague but intriguing.” In other words, it doesn’t believe that “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” to invade Iraq. McGovern, who ripped […]

I never thought I’d be glad to hear from a Goldwater Republican, much less agree with him. But Straight Up reader M. Paulding has changed my mind. He writes in response to Battle of the Prewar Memos: The second DSM [Downing Street Memo] is more damning than the first, despite Sanger’s observation. I’m a conservative, […]

More Camp X Ray frolics: An 18-year-old Saudi camper of Chadian descent who was just shy of his 15th birthday when he was seized in Pakistan by local authorities has told his lawyer “he was beaten regularly in his early days at Guantánamo, hanged by his wrists for hours at a time and that an […]

Another prewar memo, written July 21, 2002, two days before the famous Downing Street memo, has come to light. Here it is, as posted by The Sunday Times of London. Now compare Walter Pincus’s report on it in Sunday’s Washington Post with David Sanger’s in this morning’s New York Times. The difference is night vs. […]