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Archive: Aug 2008

NBC’s Olympics, Brought to You By Henry Kissinger

“Through NBC, GE has paid hundreds of million of dollars to broadcast the Olympics,” Arvind Ganesan of Human Rights Watch said in an interview here recently. “Will we see tough…

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The Justice Department’s Truthiness Problem

“Truthiness,” a phrase coined by the comic Stephen Colbert, has emerged as one of the hallmarks of the Bush Administration. Truthiness, Colbert tells us, is something a government spokesperson knows…

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How Low Can Jacques Rogge Sink? Beijing and the spirit of ’36

In an editorial last week the New York Times suggested that the International Olympic Committee, in its ceaseless shilling for China in the run-up to the games, had proven itself…

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Weekend Read: An unwritten, half written, rewritten difficult book

Two months ago, I wrote about the news of Dmitri Nabokov having announced, after protracted hemming and internationally reported hawing, that he intended to publish his father Vladimir’s final, unfinished…

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Verdict on Hamdan

Yesterday a military panel rendered a split decision in the prosecution before a Guantánamo military commission of Salim Hamdan, the chauffeur of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. In the…

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National Enquirer Publishes John Edwards Pix

This has not yet been authenticated but the National Enquirer must be pretty confident about this story on John Edwards and his alleged “lovechild.” After all, Edwards is a trial…

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All That, For This?

A book I read this past weekend, not John Haskell’s American Purgatorio about which I wrote in my previous post, but one that comes out in the fall, was a…

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Obama’s Money: Will his big donors top Bush’s Pioneers and Rangers?

I posted an item last week noting that Barack Obama’s presidential campaign liked to talk about all the money it has raised from small donors, but that it was raking…

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Silent Armey: Former House majority leader lobbies for defense contractor

Whenever the cry goes up in Washington for lobbying reform, lobbyists insist that there’s really no need for any serious change. After all, they’ll say, we are already required to…

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Hard Times for the G.O.P.: Leaked letter reveals pathetic financial conditions at party’s private club

Earlier this year I described my night at the Capitol Hill Club, the exclusive private watering hole for Republican elected officials and their supporters, primarily lobbyists. The club boasts a…

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Money Over Morals: Obama’s the candidate of the hedge-fund partners

John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of the forthcoming book You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America. A version of this column…

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Weekly Review

Caught in the Web, 1860. Senator “Uncle” Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican in the Senate and “Alaskan of the Century,” was indicted for seven felonies related to unreported gifts worth…

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Die A Painful Death

Enthusiasm is suspicious. Or so a critic sometimes feels. Ruth Franklin, writing in the New Republic a few years ago about David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green, expressed some discomfort over…

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Will Bush Administration Let Oil Companies Skate on Money Paid to African Dictator?

Exxon Mobil is quietly commemorating the biggest operating profit in U.S. corporate history, announcing last week that it had earned $11.7 billion during the second quarter. Here’s something else that…

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Mörike’s To a Lamp

Noch unverrückt, o schöne Lampe, schmückest du, An leichten Ketten zierlich aufgehangen hier, Die Decke des nun fast vergeßnen Lustgemachs. Auf deiner weißen Marmorschale, deren Rand Der Efeukranz von goldengrünem…

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David Broder Tears Up Over Senator Stevens

In his Washington Post column today–one of thousands he has written over his career that end with a cry to end “partisan gridlock”–David Broder gets misty-eyed over the indictment of…

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Burckhardt on the Duty of Citizens

Es gibt aber neben den blinden Lobpreisen der Heimat eine ganz andere und schwere Pflicht, nämlich sich auszubilden zum erkennenden Menschen, dem die Wahrheit und die Verwandtschaft mit allem Geistigen…

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Weekend Read: “So the trail leads you here”

In my previous post, I touched upon the habit of rereading, suggesting that it’s a central feature of all reading experience. To mint a crude means of measuring literary quality,…

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