Archive: Sep 2009

From Laura Rozen: UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has announced that he is ending the appointment of American diplomat Peter Galbraith as his deputy special representative to the UN mission…

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From the Project on Government Oversight: Last week, the House inadvertently took a large step forward in protecting taxpayers from misbehaving contractors. The House passed the “Student Aid” bill that…

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In dealing with foreign journalists who cover American politics, I’ve noticed a consistent view about the White House press corps. I strain to recall a positive word ever being uttered…

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Following President Obama’s assumption of office, a single member of the core Rumsfeld team at Defense has managed to hold on to his position: the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, Bryan Whitman.…

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In recent years, a new genre of fiction known as the Officialdom novel has become increasingly popular in China. Fans claim that the novels offer rich entertainment while providing valuable…

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Many critics–some writing in Harper’s—have seen Leo Strauss as the thinker behind the modern neoconservative movement and have blamed him for the neocons’ sins. Now Peter Minowitz, a self-described Straussian…

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Are major media making a mistake by failing to join in the current frenzy over the ACORN video? Ken Silverstein thinks so. The public editors of the Washington Post and…

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As yesterday’s Links points out, Garry Wills has a fine essay in the New York Review of Books that puts the fundamental dilemma of the Obama presidency in historical context:…

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Remember when a federal judge in Virginia was pressing for information about tapes made of CIA interrogations, and—after the Inspector General and Agency lawyers had determined that the tapes had…

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An American cattleman. President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy revealed that Iran had a secret uranium-enrichment facility. The announcement, based on previously classified…

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Even in areas outside national security, the Obama administration quickly came to resemble Bush’s. Gay military personnel, including those with valuable Arabic-language skills, were being dismissed at the same rate…

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Listen to Denzel Washington recite Langston Hughes’s poem I, too, sing America (from the movie The Great Debaters (2007)):…

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Since what is intended by man’s existence is that he attain supreme happiness, he—in order to achieve it—needs to know what happiness is, make it his end, and hold it…

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Until now, passenger convenience has largely been ignored. After 9/11, a litany of sharp objects was banned from carry-ons. After Richard Reid tried to ignite explosives hidden in his sneaker…

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From Eric Spiegelman, via Politico: Ladies and gentlemen, your President is a robot. Or a wax sculpture. Maybe a cardboard cutout. All I know is no human being has a…

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Nabucco is an opera by Giuseppe Verdi that contains the famous chorus “Va, pensiero.” Nabucco is also the name of a massive new pipeline project that promises to bring gas…

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Must read piece at Reason on the media’s response to the ACORN scandal. Highlight: One of the more convincing non-coverage defenses came from Austin American-Statesman Editor Fred Zipp (“First, it’s…

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From the Washington Post: Democratic political committees have seen a decline in their fundraising fortunes this year, a result of complacency among their rank-and-file donors and a de facto boycott…

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From the Guardian: The number of former servicemen in prison or on probation or parole is now more than double the total British deployment in Afghanistan, according to a new…

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I remember some night when I am eating a Mexican dinner in the company of a Famous Eastern European Poet. As we celebrate his reading, a member of our party…

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The German historian Heinrich August Winkler, best known for his historical survey The Long Journey West (Der lange Weg nach Westen), has just published the first volume of a planned…

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The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he said, should be solved by the creation of a single state, which Mr. Qaddafi called Isratine, but Mr. Qaddafi stressed it was wrong to infer that…

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Remember those awful pictures of George W. Bush’s secretary of state Condoleezza Rice embracing an assortment of corrupt, brutal energy-rich dictators? Now Hillary Clinton is offering precisely the same service.…

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One of the basic assumptions of liberal democratic thought in the postwar era has been that free trade and economic development would tend to retard war and create a world…

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Advocates often portray torture, like waterboarding, as black magic that quickly enables the interrogator to break through his subject’s defenses and force him to divulge the location of the bomb…

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From Harper’s: Rachel Aviv on Child Evangelism From “Like I Was Jesus: How to bring a nine-year-old to Christ” in the August 2009 Harper’s. Rachel Aviv is a writer living…

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“Obama’s decision is complicated by a deepening domestic political divide and no guarantee of success whichever option he chooses,” the Washington Post wrote today in a story about Afghanistan. “One…

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