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Archive: Jun 2009

Rebel Yell II: Will Georgia’s Charles Walker Get a New Trial?

Dramatic developments in Georgia, as federal judge Dudley Bowen, who presided over the trial and sentencing of former Georgia senate leader Charles Walker, acknowledged that he never should have been…

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Wells Fargo’s Stagecoach to Hell

From the Baltimore Sun: Wells Fargo loan officers guided minorities toward high-rate mortgages and joked that they were “riding the stagecoach to hell” for routinely steering prime-loan-qualified customers toward subprime…

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Six Questions for Cynthia Smith on the Legality of Force-feeding at Guantánamo

Correction, June 11, 2009: Scott Horton writes in to point out that Ward Casscells’s term as assistant secretary of defense ended April 28. I had written that my interview took…

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Links

From Harper’s:Stuart Chase on the auto industry in the last Depression. From “The Enemy of Prosperity: Overproduction,” in the November 1930 Harper’s Magazine. Overproduction, particularly in this year of world-wide…

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Bush Recount Helper Gets Prison Term For Public Corruption

From the Department of Justice: Defendant Mary McCarty was sentenced today to 42 months of imprisonment, to be followed by 3 years of supervised release. Defendant McCarty was immediately remanded…

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Cheery Photo-ops and Mud

From The Hill: In public, Senate Republicans have kept their distance from conservative attacks on Sonia Sotomayor— but behind the scenes, they have encouraged activists to keep their crosshairs trained…

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The Cairo Speech

I watched Barack Obama’s much heralded speech in Cairo this morning asking myself, How much of this speech could I imagine being delivered by George W. Bush? There are a…

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“Renegade”: From RW to BO, with love

From Politico: It was Barack Obama himself who first proposed that Newsweek reporter Richard Wolffe make a play to be this generation’s Theodore White—the legendary journalist whose insider account of…

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Twenty Years Later

In the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof remembers what transpired twenty years ago today on and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing. “So, 20 years later, what happened to that bold…

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Obama’s Speech, Pro and Con

The pro comes from M. J. Rosenberg: Mission accomplished. For the first time in memory, an American President spoke to Muslims and Arabs not as antagonists who need to take…

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Links

The federal government mistakenly made public a 266-page report, its pages marked “highly confidential,” that gives detailed information about hundreds of the nation’s civilian nuclear sites and programs, including maps…

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Kim Jong-il’s Son: Cheese scholar, peacemaker (on the playground)

From the BBC: So little is known about Kim Jong-un – the youngest son and reportedly the named successor of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il – that even his date…

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Brian Williams, Head of the Presidential Puppy Corps

The media treated George W. Bush very well during the early days of his administration (as it does every incoming president) but the slavish devotion to Barack Obama is an…

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Who Will Tell The People?

From Politico: The congressional cussing caucus is in need of new members. The Capitol lost its prince of profanity when Rahm Emanuel left for the White House five months ago.…

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Leo Strauss and the Iraq War

It’s a commonplace among political philosophy students to note that the Neocons may be Straussians, but that hardly makes Leo Strauss a Neocon. After all, he died in 1973, and…

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Cheney Ran the CIA’s Torture Briefings

We’re now a month past the CIA’s release of a summary to the Senate Intelligence Committee concerning its briefings of Congressional leaders about the introduction of the Bush program of…

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Unsatisfactory Answers from General McChrystal

Those who expected to hear Stanley McChrystal come clean on what he knows about mistreatment of prisoners in the custody of JSOC units that reported to him in the Iraq…

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Links

From Harper’s:Cynthia Gorney on Partial-Birth Abortion From “Gambling With Abortion: Why both sides think they have everything to lose,” by Cynthia Gorney, in the November 2004 Harper’s Magazine. The Partial-Birth…

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Buchanan Surrenders in Her War With Wecht

Mary Beth Buchanan, among the most political of the Bush-era U.S. attorneys, hoisted the white flag of surrender today, announcing she would no longer pursue corruption charges against former county…

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The Familiar Face of the New RNC

Four months after he left office, the media image of Dick Cheney has been amazingly transformed. He’s gone from being a reclusive man of few words to a poster figure…

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How Many Bottles Make a Waterboarding?

In one of her best essays, “History by the Ounce,” published in Harper’s back in July 1965, Barbara Tuchman talks about the role of characteristic detail in providing an historical…

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Questions for General McChrystal

Today General Stanley McChrystal appears before the Senate Armed Services Committee to discuss his appointment as the senior U.S. commander in Afghanistan. The New York Times has published an editorial…

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Weekly Review

President Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor, a Bronx-born, divorced, childless, diabetic, Hispanic federal judge on the U.S Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, to replace Justice David Souter on…

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General Sanchez Calls for Accountability Commission

At a packed function last night at the Times Center in New York, former commanding general of multinational forces in Iraq Ricardo Sanchez issued a call for the creation of…

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Links

The most obvious example of the trouble caused [by the 1872-73 horse flu outbreak] was in Boston. A major fire broke out on November 9th at the height of that…

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Petraeus: Bush Administration Violated Geneva Conventions

General David Petraeus gives a fascinating interview to Fox News. Martha MacCallum presents him with the predictable set of Fox-Cheney talking points, and he bats them down with ease one…

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Congressman Cantor and Cockfighting

The former sheriff of Page County, Virginia, Daniel Presgraves, has been indicted on 22 counts of public corruption, including accepting bribes to protect cockfighting. Based on the indictment, Presgraves appears…

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Congressman Visclosky Hit With Subpoena

From Politico last Friday: Rep. Pete Visclosky (D-Ind.) has been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury looking into the PMA Group, a once-high flying lobbying firm that collapsed after a…

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