Archive: Aug 2009

From the Washington Post: [T]he criticism of Barack Obama has turned strikingly personal as some of his liberal media allies have gone wobbly on him. After playing a cheerleading role…

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From the Washington Post: President Obama ordered federal officials to disclose their contacts with lobbyists trying to influence how the government doles out money to jump-start the economy. Yet few…

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Some people want community foundations to support newspapers, sort of like NPR. I’m afraid that’d pull coverage away from poor people’s issues like crime and social services and toward rich…

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Georgetown law professor David Cole, a leading civil liberties advocate in relation to the “War on Terror,” has a new book out next week. The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable…

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One of the gems among the stack of CIA documents released late on Monday is a memorandum sent to the man who then ran the Justice Department’s Office of Legal…

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From David Rothkopf: [CNN] has in fact recently transformed itself into the Cadaver News Network. Between its non-stop coverage of Michael Jackson’s demise (that was a guy who really knew…

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From the Port Clinton News Herald: Authorities fielded a flurry of calls Saturday from concerned residents who saw men in ski masks, Ghostbusters, ballerinas, ninjas and Little Red Riding Hood.…

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Just in time for Labor Day, the Center for Constitutional Rights has introduced a novel way to keep track of the criminal investigation into Bush Administration torturers: Torture Team trading…

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From the St. Petersburg Times: Ousted House Speaker Ray Sansom racked up about $173,000 on his Republican Party-issued credit card, taking his family on a trip to Europe, making visits…

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If a shoe-throwing journalist has come to represent the summa of Iraqi opinion concerning George W. Bush, the view from the north is different. In Kurdish eyes, the toppling of…

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Between 1503 and 1505, Niccolò Machiavelli was responsible for organizing the defense of the city of Florence. He turned to mercenary units to bolster the defense efforts, with disastrous results.…

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“People only care about being rich now – this is the only way to achieve social prestige. Before, careers weren’t so important; people had more time for their friends. In…

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The centerpiece of Dick Cheney’s six-week-long torture tour, in which he made the case that torture works, was a claim that there were two CIA studies that proved him right.…

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D. Kyle Sampson, sometimes referred to as Karl Rove’s “Mini-Me,” was Alberto Gonzales’s chief of staff when the U.S. attorneys scandal broke. He found himself at its epicenter and resigned…

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From Public Citizen: Lobbyists and lobbying firms representing seven of the top 10 TARP recipients in the financial services industry as well as four of their major trade association allies…

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From the Atlanta Journal Constitution: U.S. Rep. Nathan Deal, a Republican candidate for governor in 2010, personally intervened with Georgia leaders to preserve an obscure state program that earns his…

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“South Auckland man Paea Taufa was found roasting his pitbull terrier-cross in an umu pit at his home in Mangere,” reads a story in the New Zealand Herald. “The dog…

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From Harper’s: Jeremy Miller on teaching the test From “Tyranny of the Test: One year as a Kaplan coach in the public schools” by Jeremy Miller A bell sounds, and…

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The United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York issued a press release today announcing the arrest of Hassan Nemazee, the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Nemazee…

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You can catch my review of the CIA Inspector General John Helgerson’s report on BBC’s “The World” or on MSNBC’s Live with Carlos Watson today at 11 ET. Here, in…

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Barack Obama claimed that the same groups that attacked the U.S. on September 11, 2001, were “plotting to do so again,” that the eight-year conquest and occupation of Afghanistan were…

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Almost two years ago I lost my cat Gattino. He was very young, still a kitten, at seven months barely an adolescent. He is probably dead but I don’t know…

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Attorney General Eric Holder today announced that he has charged John Durham, a career prosecutor from Connecticut, to examine a series of cases in which CIA interrogators appear to have…

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The Justice Department is sending UBS bankers to prison: Former UBS banker, Bradley Birkenfeld of Weymouth, Mass., has been sentenced to 40 months incarceration by Judge William J. Zloch in…

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“Grass-Roots Battle Tests The Obama Movement,” ran a headline in the Washington Post yesterday atop an article that looked at why health care reform has bogged down. The story examined…

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Back when I was studying the relationship between private-security contractors and the Bush Administration for a book, it became clear very quickly that Blackwater (now called Xe) had a highly…

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