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Archive: Oct 2007

Sappho’s ‘Supreme Sight on the Black Earth’

Some say cavalry and others claim infantry or a fleet of long oars is the supreme sight on the black earth. I say it is the one you love. Some…

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Kames on Law and Human Sentiment

Man is evidently intended to live in society; and because there can be no society among creatures who prey upon one another, it was necessary, in the first place, to…

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When Critics Are Really Pumpkins

Manus manum lavat. It means, roughly, “one hand washes the other.” The phrase appeared for the first time in a play by Seneca in which he ridiculed the culture of…

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Dereliction of Duty

As I noted a couple of weeks ago, General Petraeus’s predecessor, General Ricardo Sanchez, has now emerged as one of the harshest critics of the Bush Administration’s management of the…

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Beating a Dead Kurtz

I was out Thursday night and missed Howard Kurtz’s appearance on the Daily Show to promote his new cure for insomnia, Reality Show: Inside the Last Great Television News War.…

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Chicago Court Orders Discovery of DOJ Political Prosecutions

In civil litigation connected to one of a substantial number of federal prosecutions of campaign funding of contributors to Democratic candidate John Edwards, a federal court has directed the Department…

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Lagerlöf’s Legend of the Soul and the Flame

For what is man’s soul but a flame. It flickers in and around the body of a man as does the flame around the rough log. Now, one winter’s night,…

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Media Alert

The survivors of three Iraqi civilians killed in the September 16 incident in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square involving Blackwater USA have brought suit in a U.S. federal court seeking damages from…

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Sources: CIA legal official quit in protest over “enhanced interrogations”

Well over a year ago I reported on a brewing revolt within the CIA over the Bush Administration’s use of renditions, “enhanced interrogation” techniques (otherwise known as torture) and other…

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WaPo’s Continuing Editorial Slide

The New Yorker‘s Hendrik Hertzberg, in a recent Radar interview, reveals that when it comes to national politics, he turns not to the Washington Post or New York Times, but…

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Speaking Truth to Torturers

”I don’t think it, I know it” Each time he is confronted with evidence of his own policies condoning torture, President Bush responds with the same phrase: “We do not…

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More Siegelman Updates

Anniston Star The Anniston Star also calls Javert on his latest sleazy press release: Louis Franklin has the worst legal job this side of defending Britney Spears. He is the…

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Herzen on the Persistence of Torture

Peter the Third abolished the torture-chamber, and the Russian star chamber. Catherine the Second abolished torture. Alexander the First abolished it over again. Evidence given under torture is legally inadmissible.…

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Karl Rove Linked to Siegelman Prosecution

Significant new information is appearing on the Siegelman case, in the form of the 143-page deposition of Jill Simpson, a Republican lawyer who previously issued an affidavit that described a…

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Warren’s ‘In the Turpitude of Time’

In the Turpitude of Time, Hope dances on the razor edge. I see those ever healing feet Tread the honed edge above despair. I see the song-wet lip and tossing…

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Camus on the Values Worth Fighting For

S’il est vrai qu’en histoire, du moins, les valeurs, qu’elles soient celles de la nation ou de l’humanité, ne survivent pas sans qu’on ait combattu pour elles, le combat (ni…

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A Lobbyist Downsizes: Jeffrey Shockey goes from insider to soccer dad

Remember Jeffrey Shockey? He’s the former top aide to Republican Congressman Jerry Lewis, a powerhouse on the House Appropriations Committee. Shockey left the Hill in 1999 to become a lobbyist…

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More from the ‘Bama Press

The Pravda of the South Speaks Again Early yesterday, a contact on the G.O.P. staff of the House Judiciary Committee told me that her colleagues had taken a step to…

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The Dilemma of the Moor’s Return

Thomas Mann, Meerfahrt mit ‘Don Quijote’ in Gesammelte Werke: Frankfurter Ausgabe, Leiden und Größe der Meister, p. 1018 (1934) Yesterday, I posted some thoughts about Cervantes’s Don Quixote and what…

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Schweitzer on Cruelity and Humanity

Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. The roots of cruelty, therefore,…

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Bipartisan Stenography: David Broder Strikes Again

The National Republican Congressional Committee is technically insolvent, with millions more in debt than it has in the bank. The GOP can’t raise money–Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama each brought…

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Facts and Darfur

When I lived in Brazil in the early 1990s and worked for Associated Press, I filed a short item on a study by a pro-choice group that revealed the staggering…

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Cervantes’s Golden Age

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha (pt. I 1605, pt. II 1615) The world of Phillip II sits at the heart of the Golden…

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Cervantes on Why History is Like Buñuelos

La historia es como cosa sagrada; porque ha de ser verdadera, y donde está la verdad está Dios, en cuanto a verdad; pero, no obstante esto, hay algunos que así…

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Weekly Review

Burma’s junta claimed that peace and stability had been restored following its crackdown on mass pro-democracy protests in which at least 30 people, but likely far more, were killed. Up…

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‘We Do Not Torture’

This last week, the nation’s leading newspaper established that the Bush administration continues to use torture techniques as a matter of formal policy, crafted at its highest levels. This comes…

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Abd al-Rahman’s Palm Tree

A palm tree stands in the middle of Rusafa Born in the West, far from the land of palms I said to it, “How like me you are, far away…

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