From IPS: A veteran Army officer who has served in both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars warns in an analysis now circulating in Washington that the counterinsurgency strategy urged by…
From Calvin Trillin: Celebrities would just be fools, To play by little people’s rules. So Roman’s banner we unfurl. He only raped one little girl.
As head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Jay Bybee issued a series of memoranda—rescinded by the Justice Department before Bush left office—purporting to legalize the torture and…
From TPM: [Congresswoman] Myrick and three other members of the Congressional Anti-Terrorism Caucus came to a news conference today armed with Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to…
From The Onion: According to a report published this week in American Journalism Review, 93 percent of all newspaper sales can now be attributed to kidnappers seeking to prove the…
For the last decade, Tom Donohue’s U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a nominally nonpartisan organization, has been the secret weapon of the Republican Party. U.S. Chamber of Commerce support for the…
On October 1, federal judge Emmet Sullivan ruled that the Justice Department had to release records of Patrick Fitzgerald’s interview of Vice President Dick Cheney, conducted in the context of…
From Bloomberg: Some of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s closest aides, none of whom faced Senate confirmation, earned millions of dollars a year working for Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Citigroup Inc.…
If you enjoy fear-mongering, here’s a not-for-profit organization for you: Keep America Safe. William Kristol and Liz Cheney are the dynamic duo behind it. Cheney is just off a Sunday…
Fom Steven Pearlstein in the Washington Post : Analysts at Goldman Sachs suggested Tuesday that, despite a 50 percent run-up in stock prices that has left the Dow Jones industrial…
Rufus Phillips, Vietnam expert, as quoted by the New Yorker: I’m afraid the President, who seems like a supremely rational being, is trying to find the most rational policy option…
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…
The course to audit this semester at Berkeley would be Brad DeLong’s Econ 115. He’s been drilling down on the Great Depression and doing his best to extract lessons that…
Matt Latimer’s Speechless: Tales of a White House Survivor has been mined heavily for its disclosure of Bushisms about Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, but David Corn surveys its revelations…
The wire master and his puppets, 1875. As the United States marked the eighth anniversary of its war in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal asked President Barack Obama to send 40,000…
In a review-essay in the New York Review of Books, James Bamford discusses the latest monster-projects of the highly secretive National Security Agency: On a remote edge of Utah’s dry…
From Associated Press: The Israeli military takes months to investigate whether its soldiers committed crimes against Palestinians in the West Bank, deliberately trying to dim chances of any prosecution, an…
From The Awl: Harvard University and the New York Times are the high church bishoprics of the money culture’s permanent counter-reformation: elite northeastern institutions that compulsively monitor each other for…
From Wired: It sounds like the opening scene of a B movie: A giant bug lands on a truck driver transporting intercontinental ballistic missiles. The trucker swerves off the road,…
The decision to award President Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize produced a torrent of heckling from left and right. A consistent criticism is that Obama hasn’t yet acted as…
la folie. Formons les plus brillants concerts ; Quand Jupiter porte les fers De l’incomparable Platée, Je veux que les transports de son âme enchantée, S’expriment par mes chants divers.…
Il est triste que souvent, pour être bon patriote, on soit l’ennemi du reste des hommes. L’ancien Caton, ce bon citoyen, disait toujours en opinant au sénat: «Tel est mon…
You might assume that in the American market economy, telecommunications service providers are private companies. But the Obama Justice Department, in a strange filing with a federal court in San…
From Glenn Greenwald: While Obama’s popularity has surged in Western Europe, the changes in the Muslim world in terms of how the U.S. is perceived have been small to nonexistent.…