No Comment

United States District Court Judge Mark Fuller has sentenced former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman to a term of over seven years in prison and a fine of $50,000. The sentence…

Read more

Anthropologists studying Mesoamerican cultures from the late Middle Ages through the arrival of Columbus have noted the remarkable prevalence of human sacrifice as a religious and social rite. Mel Gibson’s…

Read more

In my speech in Florence, “The Danger of Being Hated,” I focused on how changing attitudes towards the United States around the world – but particularly among former key allies,…

Read more

Flames erupted across Tehran today as angry drivers set filling stations on fire. Could this be the start of one of the most important and most unanticipated news stories of…

Read more

In another strange twist, U.S. Attorney General Alberto “Fredo” Gonzales was forced to seek shelter Wednesday in a much-beleaguered institution these days – a U.S. Attorney’s office. Gonzales was in…

Read more

Ken Silverstein’s article in the current Harper’s, “Their Men in Washington” reminds us that the obstacles put in the path of influence peddlers representing corrupt and repressive regimes are impressive…

Read more

Note: Updated August 2, 2007. Earlier this year, a senior career Justice Department official, Daniel J. Metcalfe, resigned well short of normal retirementretired upon first reaching retirement and went public…

Read more

Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It holds tight an author’s phrase, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, and replaces it with just the right idea. — Comte de…

Read more

In a bizarre twist in an increasingly inexplicable case, prosecutors in proceedings in Montgomery today argued to federal district court judge Mark Fuller that former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman should…

Read more

I get a chuckle reading in what passes for newspapers down in Alabama that the “flap” over the conviction of former Governor Don Siegelman is all just so much protesting…

Read more

Aristotle, writing in his Politics, spends a good bit of papyrus on the question of tyranny. What exactly makes a leader a tyrant, he asks. And right at the core…

Read more

The Presidential Scholars – the 140 smartest high school kids in the country – had a joint message for President Bush and they delivered it in a meeting with him…

Read more

He sputters obscenities on the floor of the Senate, peddles torture to members of Congress behind closed doors like crack, and has an unnerving habit of mixing alcohol and firearms…

Read more

In the early days in Afghanistan, two Westerners were picked up with what were believed to be Al Qaeda or Taliban units. They were a kid from California named John…

Read more

Newsweek reports that 41 per cent of Americans are convinced that “Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was directly involved in planning, financing, or carrying out the terrorist attacks of September…

Read more

During the history of Japan, for various periods the power of the emperor was checked as military dictators called “shoguns” ruled the country. The term “shogun” in fact meant “supreme…

Read more

Our friends at Talking Points Memo have been keeping a watch on the Siegelman affair. Since a Republican lawyer went forward with a sworn affidavit concerning the GOP plot to…

Read more

Of course politics is an interesting and engrossing thing. It offers no immutable laws, nearly always prevaricates, but as far as blather and sharpening the mind go, it provides inexhaustible…

Read more

Deep in southwestern Alabama sits the town of Monroeville. It’s a sleepy place, not of much consequence since the cotton industry gave out. People in America may think they don’t…

Read more

I’m no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system—that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality. Gentlemen, a…

Read more

If you’re not concerned about the prospects for another war in the Middle East in the near future, consider that you may be a sleepwalker. There is every reason to…

Read more

The July issue of Harper’s features a brilliant exposé piece by DC Editor Ken Silverstein (the author of the Washington Babylon blog at this site) entitled “Their Men in Washington.”…

Read more

I’ll be discussing my article from the July issue of Harper’s, “State of Exception: Bush’s War on the Rule of Law” on the weekend edition of NPR’s All Things Considered.…

Read more

Let’s see. It’s Friday afternoon, after the close for the evening news feed. Time for the latest bad-news-please-bury from the Department of Justice. Today’s headline: Acting Associate Attorney General William…

Read more

A key aspect of the legal architecture of the “war on terror” crafted by the Bush Administration involves labeling all persons seized and held as “terrorist detainees” (look at the…

Read more

In 1798, the brightest and yet most fleeting star among the German Romanticists, Novalis, wrote that “the highest duty of education is to overcome the transcendental Self, to be at…

Read more

Writing in his masterwork Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in 1922, Max Weber showed that the “bureaucratic class” (Beamtentum) manipulated state secrets in order to undermine democratic institutions. By wielding security classifications,…

Read more

Newsweek’s new poll has Bush at 26%, but now we’ve reached something new: the average of all major polls (including the perennial Republican outliers that give Bush a 10-point bump)…

Read more