Earlier this week I wrote a story about a program run by the Pentagon’s Office of Public Affairs. This program seeks to bypass the mainstream press by working directly with…
Six Questions (with a nod to Ken Silverstein) for James Moore, Author of Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential and The Architect: Karl Rove and the…
These days I have taken to starting the day with a survey of the Alabama newspapers to see how they’re covering some of the matters I am following. I travel…
The blogosphere ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous, but one of the safest ports of call has consistently been Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish. He offers a mix of serious…
Doctor Johnson proposed to define the word ‘oats’ thus: ‘A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.’ And I replied: ‘Aye, and…
Anyone wanting to know why nearly fifty state attorneys general from around the United States have petitioned the Congress demanding an investigation into the outrageous, politically motivated prosecution of former…
Harper’s No Comment writer Scott Horton appears tomorrow (Thursday, July 19) on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman to discuss the Bush Administration’s war on journalists and particularly the case of…
Robin Snead as told to Victor Ozols, “What It Feels Like . . . to Find Spalding Gray’s Body,” Esquire, August 2007: I got in touch with his wife, and…
Here at No Comment we deal with current events, politics, foreign policy, pre-Baroque sacred music, philosophy and literature… and we dispense a foolproof cure for those who just can’t manage…
The Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan will be holding parliamentary elections this August and is hoping to make a positive impression with the international community about its progress towards democracy. If…
In Graham Greene’s World War II-era classic, everything starts when the protagonist guesses the correct weight of a cake at a fair and walks off with his prize, not knowing…
America’s armies have always relied in some way on contractors. However, the dramatic expansion of the role and number of contractors in Iraq is changing the culture of American warfare.…
We marched comfortably along, through glades and over brooks which I could not remember to have seen before–which puzzled me and made me wonder–and yet we did not come to…
Today the machinery of justice in America strains under a heavy hand of misdirection coming out of Washington. And now Congress has decided to take up one of the most…
Just out: Vanity Fair’s Katherine Eban provides a polished, probing account of the Bush Administration’s use of torture techniques, and how it bamboozled and coerced medical professionals into disregarding their…
“Black facing rest of life in prison, say experts,” The Daily Telegraph, July 17, 2007 While a United States government prosecutor suggested in court last week that, by “conservative” estimates…
North Korea may have just shut down its reactor, but here’s something new to worry about: Kazakhstan, the Caspian country ruled by a man who has just effectively declared himself…
Word in Washington is that an overwhelming majority of Congressional Republicans are now prepared to turn on the White House over its criminal mismanagement of the Iraq War. They’ve put…
The old adage was that a society had to choose: guns or butter. You can’t have both. However, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were determined to prove that false. In…
Q: When does the U.S. Department of Justice, once one of the most highly respected law enforcement organizations in the world, behave like an organized crime family? A: When it’s…
In the current issue of Harper’s, I described how the Bush Administration has waged a relentless war against the Rule of Law in connection with the Guantánamo detainees—attempting to overturn…
Before observing his deeds, let us cast a brief glance into his soul and find there the key to his political life… He was no “people person,” because he never…
Caught in the Web, 1860. A White House report showed that only eight of eighteen benchmarks for progress were being met in Iraq, but President Bush asked Congress to wait…
Following on No Comment’s “Setting the Stage for the Next War” (June 21, 2007), we hear further murmurings about possible conflict with Iran from across the Atlantic. The international community…
The great chronicler of the corruption of language, George Orwell, noted in Politics and the English Language (1946) that “political language . . . is designed to make lies sound…
The Bush Administration has installed hacks across the federal bureaucracy, with Michael Brown, the man who helped destroy New Orleans while director of FEMA, as only the most notorious example.…
Today forty-four attorneys general from forty of the fifty states of the Union petition the United States Congress [PDF] demanding a formal inquiry into the prosecution of Don Siegelman, the…
On July 5, I posted a little piece on Martin Heidegger’s cabin in the woods, located outside of Freiburg, drawing on a wonderful essay written by Leland de la Durantaye,…
Ah, what a cesspool of folly and foolishness, what preposterous fantasies, what corrupt police tactics, what inquisitorial, tyrannical practices! What petty whims of a few higher-ups trampling the nation under…