Now that The Wall Street Journal is reporting general news as never before, one of my small pleasures is to compare matching stories in The New York Times. The comparisons are not always exact, but they are revealing just the same. Here, for example, are two excerpts. Both show the so-called Straight Talker for what […]
Happy Birthday, Magna Carta,
Except in the White House
From The Writer’s Almanac (last item): On this day in 1215, King John of England put his seal to the Magna Carta, one of the first historical documents to state that subjects have rights beyond the power of their rulers. The right to a trial by jury and the right of habeas corpus, which prevents […]
You Be the Judge
Which lede do you like? 1. Jess Bravin in The Wall Street Journal: The Supreme Court ruled that foreign prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay may challenge their detention before a federal judge, a historic decision that rebuffs the Bush administration’s years-long effort to curtail the legal rights of terrorism suspects. 2. Linda Greenhouse in The […]
Obamafication
Mark Morford usually gets it right. (He’s one of the savviest, funniest columnists around.) This time he flubbed it, methinks. Musta taken a happy pill when he wrote his latest. It appeared this morning: Barack Obama isn’t really one of us. Not in the normal way, anyway. This is what I find myself offering up […]
Of ‘Victims, Perpetrators, Observers’
By William Osborne, guest blogger This spring the Vienna State Opera presented an exhibit exploring its collaboration with Nazism during the Third Reich. The International Herald Tribune published an excellent Associated Press article about it entitled “Vienna State Opera comes to terms with its purge of Jews 70 years ago.” The article begins this way: […]
Having It Both Ways
Guess where this sentence is from: [T]he half-Kenyan-by-way-of-Hawaii candidate, who only recently completed a beer-and-bowling tour to impress blue-collar Midwesterners, has committed more fully to showing off his inner Jew. It comes from a front-page news feature in this morning’s New York Times. If I hadn’t read it myself over breakfast, I might almost have […]
What Barricades?
Read a book, see a flick, eat too much, drink plenty vino, keep my nose clean, and generally laze about. Such is the simple life. So I almost forgot to remember. Daniel Cohn-Bendit (once known as Danny the Red) put it this way the other day: Why not stop talking about May ’68? All I am hearing is […]
Take two aspirins and call us in the morning
The lead editorial in today’s New York Times — “The Torture Sessions” — makes some excellent points about the secret White House meetings revealed earlier this month by ABC News. Here’s one: The amount of time and energy devoted to this furtive exercise at the very highest levels of the government reminded us how little […]
Sirius clichés
Do you have a subscription to Sirius Satellite Radio? I don’t. Never listened to it either. Until yesterday, when I was invited to be a guest on “The Blog Bunker.” It airs on Sirius Indie Talk Channel 110, which is described as “political talk for people who hate political talk.” EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Uh, Sock It to ‘Em
Isn’t this cute. Aw gee. Update: April 21 — Now have a look at “Murdoch, Ink,” Newsweek’s huge takeout about the actual WSJ that hit the street today. In the orotund prose of magspeak: With its increased focus on politics, international news, culture and sports, Murdoch’s reconceived Journal represents nothing short of a formal declaration […]
Read ‘n’ weep
Robert Parry explains how the United States became a Banana Republic. A reader writes: “Thank you. Parry’s article is incisive in overview and on the mark in particulars. Excellent.” He continues: One example of Parry’s thesis — that “sophisticated manipulation of information is what would do the Republic in” — is waterboarding being dismissively defined by journalistic leaders as “simulated drowning” […]
Endless war on the installment plan
The aaaeulc keeps it going … six months at a time. Click the link. It’s a smart video from moveon.org. Postscript: I see I completely overlooked the ABC News report on the top war criminals in the White House. It’s not as if we didn’t already know who they are. But the report — in […]
Don’t pop the cork yet
The other day we said that if David Petraeus can spin the Iraq menu this time around, he ought to be promoted from four-star general to five-star headwaiter. Well, no promotion for heem. He couldn’t spin it. Petraeus himself conceded in his parting remark to the Senate Armed Services Committee, “The Champagne bottle has been pushed […]
Bon appetit!
The best analysis I’ve read about the failed Iraqi army assault on the Shiite militias in Basra far surpasses anything I’ve seen in The New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Los Angeles Times. Written by M.K. Bhadrakumar, a former career diplomat in India’s Foreign Service, it ran a couple of days ago in […]
From rent-a-car to rent-a-Sunni
As we were saying, it’s the American way: Let me emphasize that our new Sunni friends insist on being paid for their loyalty. I have heard, for example, a rough estimate that the cost in one area of about 100 square kilometers is $250,000 per day. And periodically they threaten to defect unless their fees […]
To Our Pipsqueak Leaders One Mo’ Time
The LA Times says it’s silly of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to declare a 40-hour moratorium on violence to mark the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Maybe so. But will somebody please give the editorial board a brain enema? Its own pieties need to be flushed out, not to […]
A Most $ub$tantial Weapon
It takes 1,750 words on Maliki’s Basra screwup to get to the money (and the money graf). But there it is, finally — the bribes to the tribes, a key tactic used by the U.S. military to suppress the Iraqi insurgency — in the next-to-last paragraph of today’s NYT frontpager: Maliki was pressed by U.S. officials “to seek an […]