Voice of America reports that a number of Republicans have defied the veto threat of US President George W. Bush and voted to repeal the new media ownership rules that were predicted to lead to further media consolidation and a decline in the diversity of viewpoints and perspectives. I am sure that this doesn’t mean […]
The BuzzFlash.com web site has an interesting interview with Robert Baer, former CIA case officer, and author of the book Sleeping with Devil: How Washington Sold our Soul for Saudi Crude. It’s pretty scary, when you think about it for a second. Saudi Arabia has 25 percent of the oil supply. At this point in […]
I am afraid I’m finding “Baghdad Burning“, the blog of an “girl from Iraq”, pretty much required reading these days, if only as a way to counterbalance our inevitably continuous exposure to the US administration’s inanities. Of particular interest: “Friends, Americans, Countrymen…“. And this: “Under the Palm Leaves“. And all the rest… And for a […]
Fred Kaplan writes for Slate: The opportunity presented by 9/11 may not be irretrievably lost, but it has been muffed, and its recovery will require more decisive signals than Bush has so far sent. It will also, to be fair, require a less prickly world-weariness on the part of the French and Germans. Maybe they […]
Richard Drew, the Associated Press photographer who took the picture of that man falling down after having jumped from his office window in the World Trace Centre on September 11, 2001, wrote a good column in the Los Angeles Times about his and people’s response to the event and the photograph.
The Falseness of Anti-Americanismby Fouad Ajami
I find it mind-boggling that such an article even gets published (in Foreign Policy). Instead of trying to address any of the valid issues raised by people both inside and outside the US, the author simply pits the US (the good) against the rest of the world (the bad, i.e. mostly France and Arab countries, […]
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman says, “I told you so“, and, of course, he’s right. He was right all along. Does Mr. Bush care to admit that he was wrong? Not one bit. I didn’t even bother to listen to his televised address on Sunday. It was bound to be more of the same. […]
Funnily enough, I found the transcript of the chat with Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten on September 8 much funnier than the original column that the chat was about. Is it bad, Doctor?
It’s hard not to sympathize with the French when it comes to chocolate and new European rules that allow manufacturers to include up to 5 percent of vegetable fat (other than cocoa butter) and still call the end product “chocolate”. Is it the “end of chocolate as a chocolatier knows it“? It’s quite obviously the […]
The September 7 issue of the Washington Post has a strange column by Gene Weingarten. It’s hard to tell how serious Mr. Weingarten actually is. If he’s really serious about anything that he wrote in this column, then his analysis of U.S./France relations is singularly superficial and flawed. If, on the other hand, there is […]
In an August 19 article for the Denver Post, Ed Quillen argues convincingly that copyright laws are more harmful than no laws at all, and primarily serve the interests of lawyers and major entertainment companies (i.e. their executives and shareholders, mostly). When a law that is supposed to protect creators and creativity actually ends up […]
It’s a bit mean, but it’s really funny — and scary at the same time, of course: “Power outage traced to dim bulb in White House” by Greg Palast, Workingforchange.com
Today’s edition of the Wall Street Journal‘s Best of the Web column includes a long item on the recent death toll caused by the heat wave in France (which French authorities put at close to 3,000 deaths). Then James Taranto writes: Might it be noteworthy that the French are claiming almost the same number of […]
Notes about the grand project that some are using as an excuse to justify unilateral action