From Portfolio: Trevor Foltz was six months old last fall, fresh off a visit to Disney World in Orlando, when the spasms first began. Healthy until that point in his…
His meteoric career is not simply the stuff of movies–after all, some of David Iglesias’s experiences as a Navy JAG at Guantánamo Bay furnished the material for Aaron Sorkin’s play…
The Wall Street Journal has been running a terrific series of articles about corruption and human rights abuses in Kazakhstan, which the newspaper describes as “a strategic U.S. friend and…
Barack Obama began his week-long foreign tour in Afghanistan, where he met with President Hamid Karzai, and continued on to Iraq. There, he flew in a helicopter to the Green…
“Let’s not kid ourselves,” I wrote a few years ago, “everyone hates translations. The evidence is everywhere in the history of literature:” Cervantes wrote that reading a translation was “like…
Last week the House Judiciary Committee conducted two further hearings into the formulation of Bush Administration torture policy. In the second, John Ashcroft was questioned and some significant progress was…
From the Project on Government Oversight (POGO): While elements of the Air Force brass were bickering about color coordination for their new comfort capsules, troops have sat for hours on…
From a reader: “This might be the sickest, slickest thing to come out of Congress since the Dems took over, and, I think, something that Henry Waxman is losing a…
The Washington Post is running a 12-part series on the unsolved 2001 murder of Chandra Levy. Then-Congressman Gary Condit became a suspect in the case, in part because after she…
Leon Wieseltier on Hitchens and waterboarding: Just some weeks ago Christopher Hitchens and his camera-ready conscience went and got themselves waterboarded for the pages of Vanity Fair, which are anyway…
Ein gegent heißt schlauraffenlant, den faulen leuten wol bekant, das ligt drei meil hinter weihnachten, und welcher darein wölle trachten, der muß sich großer ding vermeßen und durch ein berg…
In an interview here about a week ago, Arvind Ganesan of Human Rights Watch criticized the twelve corporate “super-sponsors” of the Beijing Olympics, companies that include McDonald’s, Coke, and GE.…
For months an Illinois woman, Colleen Davis Bargouthi, has been petitioning Barack Obama’s campaign and Senate offices to help her four American-born daughters, who, she says, are being held incommunicado…
Maximo autem, cui minimum coincidit, convenit ita unum amplecti, quod et aliud non dimittat, sed simul omnia. Quapropter natura media, quæ est medium connexionis inferioris et superioris, est solum illa,…
As I noted earlier today, Karl Rove can’t be bothered to honor a congressional subpoena, but he’s got time to fly off to Yalta to appear at a panel sponsored…
From Jeff Stein at CQ: Darrell Darnell, director of the District of Columbia’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency, says there would be “a lot of panic, a lot of…
It’s always exciting when a novel by a writer of whom one hasn’t heard appears and is said to be terrific. Receiving the news, we readers are granted a few…
Karl Rove does not have the time or inclination to testify before Congress but he did manage to fly off to the Ukraine last week to appear as a panelist…
From James Wolcott at Vanity Fair: The raven caw of Laura Ingraham’s voice on the radio has never been one of nature’s nobler mating calls, and her on-air personality has…
Back in January of 2007, the House Ethics Committee (“Press 1 if you are a member of Congress covering up a criminal offense. Press 2 if…”) released a statement saying…
More than a year ago I reported on an ongoing investigation into two top employees at the U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), Stuart Bowen Jr. and Ginger…
Today on Warren Olney’s “To the Point,” Jane Mayer appears to discuss her new book, The Dark Side, and Harper’s legal affairs writer Scott Horton offers comments, together with Cliff…
Brilliant dissection of the media reaction to the New Yorker cover: Via Charles Kaiser at Radar. Yes, out of context, Wolf Blitzer just might be a Hitler-lover.
If pressed to offer an account of oneself in prose, how might one best go about presenting not merely a coherent personal narrative but an insightful one? And going further…
From The Guardian: The first footage showing an interrogation at Guantánamo Bay was released today by the lawyers of Omar Khadr, a Canadian teenager detained by US forces. The video…
Plea deal with lobbyist friend likely imminent… The federal investigation into former Congressman Curt Weldon has been going on for nearly two years now. The original investigation stemmed from an…
Many readers disliked yesterday’s item “WhineOn.org,” about the hysteria over The New Yorker‘s cover illustration on Barack and Michelle Obama. Indeed, the item generated more negative mail than an earlier…
Following up on that Sunday Times of London story about its sting on lobbyist Stephen Payne, regarding the former administration official caught seeking to sell access to the White House,…
The U.S. Office of Thrift Supervision seized the IndyMac Bank of California, worth an estimated 32 billion dollars, after the bank’s closure in the wake of mortgage industry collapse,AFPand the…