Archive: 2008

Andrew Sullivan writes: “Sarah Palin was more qualified to be vice-president than Caroline Kennedy is to be a Senator. Both are celebrities, but Palin made her own way herself, winning…

Read more

From the Sunlight Foundation: After months of paging through invitations we had a pretty good idea where the hottest party spots were for members of Congress and lobbyist donors. But…

Read more

From the Seattle Times: Scientists have discovered a lotion that can save the lives of U.S. soldiers exposed to chemical weapons — a product vastly superior to the standard-issue decontamination…

Read more

Read more

Richard Nixon’s White House counsel, John Dean, makes the case for prosecuting Dick Cheney for his role in torturing prisoners in the war on terror in an appearance on MSNBC’s…

Read more

The Bush Administration’s swan song consists of a series of increasingly absurd claims designed to cover its crimes and failings. The most persistent of these is the claim that torture…

Read more

I posted an item a few weeks ago about Obama’s top White House economics adviser, Lawrence Summers, and the Managed Funds Association (MFA), the leading lobbying organization for the hedge…

Read more

At 5:15 p.m. on June 7, 2006, two American F-16 fighters dropped 500-pound bombs on a farmhouse about five miles north of the Iraqi town of Baqubah. Within an hour,…

Read more

From Politico: President-elect Obama has pledged to cut farm subsidies and embrace renewable fuels – two initiatives that hit close to the wallet of his newly unveiled pick for agriculture…

Read more

From the Associated Press: Former President Bill Clinton’s foundation has raised at least $46 million from Saudi Arabia and other foreign governments that his wife Hillary Rodham Clinton may end…

Read more

Today the newspaper of record provides us with 1237 words of reporting and analysis focusing on the Levin-McCain report. It notes the painfully obvious: this report is tantamount to a…

Read more

I don’t know a lot about Mary Schapiro, Obama’s pick to head the Securities and Exchange Commission, but her bio doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. Originally appointed to the…

Read more

From the Project on Government Oversight’s letter to congressional oversight committees: As you know, the TARP was created for the express purpose of buttressing the financial system by assisting institutions…

Read more

Senator Carl Levin, chair of the Armed Services Committee, oversaw an 18-month long investigation into the Bush Administration’s torture policy that conclusively established that the abuse of prisoners at Abu…

Read more

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

Read more

“It had been a wonderful evening and what I needed now, to give it the perfect ending, was a little of the Ludwig Van.” –Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962)…

Read more

There are many ways of explaining the sudden, stratospheric popularity of Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. At his essence he was a writer who was always thinking of new ways to…

Read more

From the Washington Post: Famously private, [Caroline] Kennedy nonetheless emerged during the Obama campaign as a political force of her own. Along the way, friends and colleagues say, she discovered…

Read more

Did Cheney Confess to a Felony? It looks that way to me. In an interview conducted with ABC News’s Jonathan Karl yesterday, Vice President Cheney was probed on his role…

Read more

From Politico: Time Managing Editor Richard Stengel, reacting on Monday to Jay Carney’s decision to leave the magazine for a job with the Obama administration, said that his outgoing Washington…

Read more

Curly throws a pie at George Bush. Or was that a shoe?…

Read more

Is the famous shoe-throwing journalist of Baghdad now a torture victim? George W. Bush’s triumphal visit to Baghdad turned out to be something closer to theater of the absurd. The…

Read more

How often in our nation’s history has a Congressional Committee published a report which concludes that the President is essentially guilty of war crimes? Only once. It happened last week…

Read more

Speaking of crime and violence in Mexico, consider this number: 6,836. That’s the number of people killed in drug-related violence since 2007, more than the number of American fatalities in…

Read more

From the Washington Post: Time magazine’s Jay Carney, who said over the summer that Joseph R. Biden Jr. is “incredibly prone to say the wrong thing,” will soon be in…

Read more

Caught in the Web, 1860. Federal agents arrested hedge-fund manager Bernard Madoff and charged him with running a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, possibly the largest in Wall Street history. Madoff…

Read more

As a child, senior career Justice Department lawyer Thomas M. Tamm, who hails from a family of career federal law enforcement professionals, played under the desk of J. Edgar Hoover.…

Read more

From the New York Times: An American security consultant who has helped negotiate the release of scores of kidnapping victims in Latin America was himself kidnapped last week in northern…

Read more