When is a war crime not a war crime
when it's inconvienient for it to be a war crime, or when it undermines your arguement or when someone else accuses you of it, that's when. The Daily Yomiuri still doesn't archive its materials anywhere anyone can see them so I'm reproducing the whole thing here. Ten million people subscribe to the parent paper in Japanese.....

Govt must expedite new war memorial
The Yomiuri Shimbun
With what view of history has Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited Yasukuni Shrine in the past?
Koizumi said Thursday at the House of Representatives that he understood the Class-A war criminals--those found guilty at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, also known as the Tokyo Tribunal--were war criminals.
The prime minister was speaking in response to a question asked by Katsuya Okada, leader of the Democratic Party of Japan, at a session of the lower house's Budget Committee.
If this is the case, then Koizumi should not visit Yasukuni Shrine, which enshrines Class-A war criminals along with other war dead.
===
Criminality disputed
Critics both at home and abroad have cast doubts as to whether the Tokyo Tribunal, held on the basis of a court regulation stipulated by the Occupation authorities' GHQ, was justifiable in light of international law.
The case in point is the "Pal ruling," whereby Judge Radhabinod Pal, who represented India at the tribunal, acquitted all the defendants, saying that given the history of their own imperialistic adventures, the United States and European countries were not entitled to try Japan.
Moreover, following the 1952 San Francisco Peace Treaty, the death of Class-A war criminals by public execution has been treated as "death in the course of public duty."
Mamoru Shigemitsu, who was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment as a Class-A war criminal, became a deputy prime minister and foreign minister under the administration of then Prime Minister Ichiro Hatoyama in 1954.
Okinori Kaya, who was given a life term as a Class-A war criminal, served as justice minister under the administration of Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda.
As a result, a "criminal" became a guardian of the law.
Yet there were no particular objections made by other countries when these former "Class-A war criminals" had their lost honor restored by becoming cabinet members.
From such a historical context, many have argued strongly that the so-called Class-A war criminals are not "criminals," although they have to shoulder the guilt of recklessly dragging their country into a war.
It was in 1978 when these Class-A war criminals were enshrined, together with the war dead, at Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine.
Although the enshrinement became public knowledge in 1979, then Prime Minister Masayoshi Ohira and Zenko Suzuki, Ohira's successor, visited the shrine as their predecessors did.
Ohira said, "I think that the judgment on Class-A war criminals or on the Greater East Asia War will be made by history," thus declining to express his own opinion on whether they were criminals.
In response to Okada's question Thursday, Koizumi also said, "I'm not visiting the shrine as a duty of prime minister. I'm visiting due to my own beliefs," making clear that he is visiting the shrine as a private individual.
If his visits to the shrine are made as a private citizen, he should think of a better way to worship there. It is questionable for him to step into the holiest Shinto shrine and enter his name with his title of "prime minister" when making a private visit.
The issue of distinguishing between a visit to the shrine in a private or official capacity gained public attention after then Prime Minister Takeo Miki, on his visit to the shrine in 1975, said he went there as a "private individual."
Yet succeeding prime ministers visited the shrine without specifying whether their visits were in an official or private capacity.
Suzuki followed a policy of not answering questions as to whether his visit was in a private or official capacity.
Yet it is a different story when a prime minister clearly distinguishes his visit to the shrine, as when Koizumi says he is not visiting the shrine as part of his duties as prime minister.
===
Constitutional hurdles
One solution proposed to the problem of the prime minister's visits is to have the Class-A war criminals disenshrined and enshrined elsewhere.
But Yasukuni Shrine is a religious organization. If political leaders pressure the shrine to enshrine Class-A war criminals separately, they would be violating the principle of the separation of state and religion under the Constitution.
It is up to the shrine as a religious entity to interpret the contents of its rites, including whether it should enshrine the war criminals separately.
As there are various religions and sects in Japan, there are also many who oppose the prime minister's visits to the shrine due to religious reasons.
If it is difficult for Yasukuni Shrine to enshrine Class-A war criminals separately in light of Shinto doctrine, the only way to solve the problem lies in building a national memorial that is nonreligious.
In 2001, when the Koizumi Cabinet was inaugurated, a private panel to then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda discussed ways to mourn the war dead. It came up with a proposal the following year that a nonreligious national facility be built to commemorate the war dead and pray for peace.
The report lacked concrete ideas as to what sort of facility should be built or how to mourn the war dead. The government should put the finishing touches to the proposal as soon as possible and start building a new memorial facility.
At Arlington National Cemetery in the United States, there are tombstones for unknown soldiers as a central memorial, at which visiting heads of foreign states often lay a wreath of flowers.
A new national memorial can be built as an outdoor facility. One idea raised is for a monument to be established at Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden in central Tokyo. This is worth discussing.
The government-sponsored memorial service for the war dead, held every Aug. 15, could still be held at Nippon Budokan hall in Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo.
===
China ties unlikely to improve
Yet even if Koizumi stops his visits to Yasukuni Shrine, it will not necessarily improve Japan's bilateral relations with China anytime soon.
Even after the fact that Class-A war criminals were enshrined at the shrine was made known, China did not protest publicly when prime ministers Ohira and Suzuki made successive visits to the shrine.
It was after then Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone made an official visit to the shrine in 1985 that China began lodging protests to such visits.
In yielding to Beijing's protest, Nakasone discontinued his visits to the shrine in the following year. The action handed China a diplomatic bargaining chip that it has continued to exploit.
In later years, China, alarmed by the declining power of the Chinese Communist Party regime after the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident, intensified its policy of "educating people with patriotism and anti-Japanese sentiment," fostering a vast population with anti-Japanese sentiment year after year.
The slogans seen during the wave of anti-Japanese protests in April focused on the issue of Japan's campaign for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council and on Taiwan.
When pondering future bilateral relations with China, the government must keep a close eye on the domestic situation there.
(From The Yomiuri Shimbun, June 4)

Come home Winston Smith, all is forgiven

"I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace."
George W. Bush
Doubleplus good leader of Oceania

And in other news, U.S. government scientists have announced that their research has revealed black to actually be white and up to be down.

And speaking of smoking guns...
The secret Downing Street memo - Sunday Times - Times Online

Meals with militants reveal human face

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

Dining With Terrorists
By Phil Rees
MacMillan, 395 pp, 18.99 pounds


While he has yet to lunch with Osama bin Laden, British journalist Phil Rees has sipped and supped with a lot of people whose names figure on the watch or wanted lists of security services around the world.

Dining With Terrorists is a record of Rees' work covering insurgents, jihadists, guerrillas, militants and mujahideen from Ireland to Afghanistan, but it is much more than a simple chronicle of a reporter's brushes with bad guys. Rees uses his extensive firsthand experience of dealing with armed militants to examine the use, misuse and various interpretations of the term "terrorist."

BBC correspondent Rees has covered conflicts hot and cold all over the globe for the past 20 years. While Dining With Terrorists has its share of war stories and detailed frontline observations, Rees' real focus is examining the root causes of militant movements and trying to accurately portray the opposing sides in the world's many asymmetric conflicts.

The notion that one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter comes through clearly as Rees records the motivations and justifications given by Egyptian and Algerian Islamists fighting repressive regimes, Basque nationalists seeking their own state and Afghan mujahideen battling first the Soviet Union and later the Taliban and the United States.

Along the way, Rees shares rum with Colombian Marxist guerrillas, tea and cakes with Hamas jihadists and fruit brandy with Kosovar and Serb nationalists in Kosovo.

Rees illustrates how the heavy-handed "war on terror" and the Manichean pronouncements of the White House have been used by oppressive regimes to crush legitimate dissent, driving the marginalized and repressed to take up arms. Most importantly, Rees reminds us that those who take up the gun are not the faceless, raving maniacs that mainstream media and government propagandists often portray them as, but human beings with thoughts, feelings, memories and desires. To paraphrase cartoonist Walt Kelly, Rees has met the enemy, and he is us.





Copyright 2005 The Yomiuri Shimbun

"Do you like Kipling?" the bishop asked.
"I don't know, I've never kipled." answered the actress
Dang, them moonbats over at Eschaton is a literate bunch! Have a look at the Memorial Day poem posting and then check out the primo selection of war poetry in the comments - Sigfried Frickin' Sassoon and Rudyard Frickin' Kipling may be old, old school, but great googlymoogly could they frickin' write. And so can this guy:

There is no poem that will stop this war
This is not the one.
There is none.
There is nothing to be done.
We are not anything but the Hun
the fierce images in old textbooks
the Mongol horsemen rape and pillage
villages burning and the laughter of old men.

The radio and television prepare us
for the Super Bowl. But already in Ohio
we are number one. All of us better
than all of the rest of the world. Admit it
it was the perfect game. Allah praise Ohio State.
And admit this all who listen to NPR
the president is smarter than you.
He is riding the armored car of history
while you look for a refuge
some safe place for your children.

But there is no place to hide. We are the virus.
Everything that cannot be bought and sold
for a profit falls before us.
He knows this even if you believe he is a fool.
He lives and breathes Karl Marx
while you hold up a sign that says
Peace is Patriotic. The laughter of old men.

There is no image to stop the war.
No child with burned blacked skin like barbecued chicken.
The children waste away from bad plumbing and no medicine.
We pass along to each other the chips and organic carrots.
Bottled water.
There is no poem as good as government ensured bonds.
We are wounded with so little interest.
There is no poem that will pay us ten percent
and stop this war.
The Germans marched prematurely through history
never understanding the power of the dollar
never having heard of Lexus and SUV
never knowing anything about baseball
never knowing that the Yankees only lose enough
to make the game seem fair.
Vietnam is empty in the memory.
Cambodia fills with Wal-Mart and Burger King.
Bombs from 20,000 feet.


The first dictate of battle is to make sure
the enemy has no weapons to harm you.
Disable their best batter. Tonya Harding their best runner.
Then attack and wait for the parade.
But dont wait for the poem that will stop this war.
There is none.
The history of the empire has just begun.

Joe Napora

Happy Memorial Day America!


My son is about this age.
If I were to die he would have his family around him and live in a country with schools and governments, technology, money and enough to eat.
I feel very bad for this poor kid whose daddy isn't coming home. His dad was brave enough to join the U.S. military for whatever reason -maybe he wanted to save the world, maybe he wanted to shoot some of "them Eyeracki rhagheids whut flew them planes inta 9/11"- It doesn't much matter why now. What matters is that this poor kid is growing up without daddy, because daddy isn't coming home. I feel sick and very, very sad about this.




As bad as I feel for the poor kid in the USA who lost his dad, I feel a whole lot worse for this little girl who is wearing a significant amount of her parents' bodies, because of a "smart" bomb.

Smart bombs are only as good as the guy that aims them where he is told to, and he is only as good as the information given to him by the "security contractor" who interrogated that 17 year old after the kid had been awake and without water or clothing for 75 hours. As the staff of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade know, the guy deciding where to drop the bombs may not have the best information.

"What's that you say? The house the insurgents spent the night in was on the other side of the street? Whoops! Better luck next time!"

She's growing up in a hellhole where bullets are flying and bombs are going off every day. Even if she lives long enough and the orphanage can afford it, she probably won't ever go to school, because even if western democracy takes hold in Iraq tomorrow, it's still gonna be a few years before there's money enough for schools to be built, staffed and ready to teach little girls without burkhas in a democracy dominated by strict Shiite Islamicists. She probably doesn't have clean water or enough food or adequate shelter, nevermind a school or parents. Oh, but at least she's "free" now.

It's unlikely she will ever forgive America, nor will her fifty'leven brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins and neighbours. Nor will the families and friends of the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have been wounded or imprisoned without cause.


Yes, it is tragic that 1844 coalition soldiers have died and more than 12,000 (mostly) young Americans have been wounded, but almost 25,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed during the invasion and occupation of their country and the ensuing civil war going on now. But I bet that little girl isn't eating hot dogs at a barbecue after watching the veterans' parade. She's probably going to be watching a different kind of fireworks this Memorial Day.

Print these two pictures.

Carry them around in your pocket and look at them from time to time.

And the next time some right-wing cement-head who thinks the sun shines out of George Walker Bush's ass and posted pictures of smiling young marines blowing shit up on his blog for Memorial Day tells you freedom is on the march , show him these pictures and see what he has to say.

And if he doesn't look at least a little sorry and won't admit that the whole thing has been a horrible, horrible mistake or says something smug about breaking a few eggs to make an omlette, punch the douchebag right in the mouth.

Twice.

Torture? What Torture?

Meet Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers, the Woodshed's "wanker of the week."

Top general defends guards at Guantanamo
By LOS ANGELES TIMES
.
WASHINGTON — The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Sunday strongly defended the military’s treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, calling the prison, which has been harshly criticized by human-rights organizations and others, a “model facility.”


Yeah, a model facility the Red Cross has expressed a few concerns about:

"International Committee of Red Cross charges in confidential reports to United States government that American military has intentionally used psychological and sometimes physical coercion 'tantamount to torture' on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba...Red Cross has been conducting visits to Guantanamo since Jan 2002; this is first time it has asserted in such strong terms that treatment of detainees, both physical and psychological, amounts to torture; report says methods used on prisoners in latest visit are 'more refined and repressive' than those seen on previous visits; cites as examples 'humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions';'"
New York Times abstract of its November 30th, 2004 article on detainee abuse at Guantanmo

and this from Reuters quoting the NYT story

"The construction of such a system, whose stated purpose is the production of intelligence, cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture," the Times quoted the report as saying."

Amnesty International had a few minor quibbles with the Gitmo resort as well:

Amnesty Takes Aim at 'Gulag' in Guantanamo
By PAISLEY DODDS, Associated Press Writer
Wed May 25, 7:15 PM ET
LONDON - Amnesty International castigated the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay as a failure Wednesday, calling it "the gulag of our time" in the human rights group's harshest rebuke yet of American detention policies.


So in short, Gen. Myers is either a lying bastard who is intentionally trying to cover up torture or an incompetant fool who has no idea what is going on at Gitmo. Either way, while he may be an air force general, he's a major wanker

Why I love Eschaton--reason #364
Because you get great ideas from the posters there, like this one from Falstaff on

writing a neo-con to english dictionary

Massacre? What Massacre?

Japanese politicians continue to revise history to smooth over what the media here often refer to as "that spot of unpleasantness back in 40s." One alleged human being from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party - Masahiro Morioka, the parliamentary secretary for the Health Ministry - criticized the Chinese government for demanding the Japanese Prime Minister stop visiting the Yasukuni Shrine where the souls of Class A war criminals are specifically enshrined along with the rest of Japan's war dead.

"Class A war criminals are treated as bad people because of fear of China,"
Morioka said. "War criminals were categorized as Class A, Class B and Class C at
the Tokyo Tribunal of War Criminals. They were categorized by a one sided
tribunal led by the Occupation forces at which crimes against peace and humanity
were created"

"A war is a part of politics, and it is in line with an
international law. The Diet unanimously agreed to pay pensions to the families
of Class A war criminals who have died. They are not seen as criminals in this
country." "
(Saturday, May 28 Daily Yomiuri)

I recommend the excellent Wikipedia entry on the Nanjing Massacre as a starting point in explaining why Morioka is an idiot. The Tokyo Tribunal did not behead prisoners or bayonet infants or particpate in gang rapes. It didn't invent comfort women, Unit 100, Unit 731 or the Bataan Death March. Morioka is a facist apologist who deserves to be pilloried in the press and beaten like a rented mule at the ballot box. Unfortunately neither will happen.

Too Sweet
I love plagarists, I especially love how incredibly dumb they are. So does World O'Crap

Just for Pete
"Centuwion, Why do they titter so?"

Our hero and new spiritual leader of the moment -

Wammo

He's finally done it! Wammo has gotten his online act together. He's blogging and posting films and all manner of good stuff - check him out!

follow this link to Wammolovesme.com

Have a listen courtesy of Amazon.com

With all apologies to his His Regal Wammoness for not paying him to post this, here are the lyrics (from his site) to one of my favorite songs by the "Fat-Headed Stranger"

WINGLESS ANGELS (from My Favorite Record)

I lost my virginity

While the preacher was downstairs

Chattin' with my mom

And I wasted my youth

On a girl named Ruth

And it don't make no difference to me

Now all you wingless angels

Get in line to take a stab at me

'cause I'm rollin' down the last six pack

And two A.M. brings finality

I was born in New York City

And beat up down in San Antone

And I wasted my time

Smokin' agriculture

In the back of my buddy's old Firebird

Now all you wingless angels

Start clocking yourselves

With the junebug of the times

'cause I'm staggerin' in to your pit stop

And I'm lined up

Down at your favorite bar

Crippled at the South Ban

I fulfilled the prophesy

But baptized in the waters of the Broken Spoke

When a yodeller named Walser

Pierced my soul

lNow all you wingless angels

Stop trampin' 'round my back door

'cause I'm drownin' in a Bushmills dream

And I got a hot date

With the Holy Ghost

Now Jesus, he knew his price tag

Thirty pieces of silver hung on his hide

But that devil in your smile

Is so divine

I'll be Judassing your ass out for twenty-nine

Now all you wingless angels

Sanctify my ability to recognize

'cause I'm drunk off my ass

In Omaha

And I'm sleepin' on the bus

With a busted wing

Yeah, I'm passed out on the bus

With a busted wing

(c)B.Y.G.U.M. 2000

Department of Blatant Plugs
My neighbour and new pal Professor Jesse Glass is an author, poet and fan of outsider music and art. He is also one of the proprietors of Ahadada Books a very cool small publisher based in Toronto.

Also, check out Jesse's partner in Ahadada Books, Daniel Sendeki, and his useful advice for the useless Conservative/Alliance/Reform/Republican/Fourth Reich Party leader Stephen Harper.

War is not good for children or other living things, but we shouldn't let it spoil David Brooks' morning coffee

Sid Schanberg takes our second least favorite NYT columnist and many, many more of us not on the firing line to task for being afraid to look at images of a war so many flag-waving jackasses think is a cross between a video game and Sands of Iwo Jima.

And if you don't like to see pictures of four-year-olds who have been caught in an airstrike, think about why that airstrike is supposed to have taken place.

Yeah, freedom is on the march all right, you can tell by the sound of the jackboots.

Flushing credibility

My take on the whole "Newsweak" fiasco is that it is a tempest in a teacup brewed up by Rove and his minions to further discredit an already battered national media. In their attempt to shoot the messanger, a story that has been corroborated by several former Gitmo detainees, is now being branded a fabrication because one anonymous govt source backed down at the last minute. See the Rude Pundit for further details. The Rude One is entirely correct. Every time the press screws up, the right and left both hammer them for it, eroding trust in the media. Which is just what the White House wants.

We are now seeing more and more accusations of torture in Afghanistan and the latest are hardly the first. As the Rude One points out, the short term result of the Newsweak cave-in is going to be that every right-wing bloviator will be painting every report out of Afghanistan with the same brush as they have the "Newsweek lied, people died" claim.

Pimping the media whores redux

Tim Noah at Slate's Chatterbox reports the results of the "columnist for sale" poll. The responses he counted - and I'm guessing mine was not among them due to the math involved since I advocated David Brooks being forced to pay me to read he crapulous nonsense about "heartland values" - apparently averaged out to this:

Paul Krugman: $6.90

Thomas L. Friedman: $4.10

Frank Rich: $3.92

Maureen Dowd: $3.42

Nicholas Kristof: $2.35

Bob Herbert: $1.42

David Brooks: $1.39

John Tierney: $0.31

IN YOUR EAR

Bruce Springsteen - Devils and Dust

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

Imagine you've spent the night at a big house party smoking, drinking and carrying on into the wee hours. Almost everyone else has crashed out or staggered home and you find yourself in the kitchen with the last survivors, puffing a final cigarette and draining the dregs of someone's bottle of Jose Cuervo as the sun comes up.

Some middle-aged guy from New Jersey is noodling away on an acoustic guitar and somebody tells him to either play a song or put it down. He strums a few chords and in a raw-throated rusty voice, sings a handful of stories about love, loss, redemption and desperation with a world-weariness and sincerity that makes the roomful of sleepy drunks sit up and take notice.

Bruce Springsteen's Devils and Dust is not the kind of album you put on to liven up a party, but rather the sort of thing you listen to when the frivolity has passed.

This is not a typical collection of muscular anthemic rock 'n' roll about cars, girls and the good old days. Devils and Dust is a stark, stripped-down series of sketches of life on the margins of society. Foregoing the big rowdy sound of the E Street Band, this album harkens back to earlier efforts like Ghost of Tom Joad and Nebraska.

The instrumentation is generally understated and sparse, centering on Springsteen's acoustic guitar with minimal drums and percussion and a subtle keyboard wash in the background. Devils and Dust's quiet intensity is a long way from the bombast of "Born to Run" or "Born in the USA."

As might have been deduced from his many appearances on behalf of John Kerry during the 2004 U.S. presidential election, Springsteen is not a big fan of the Iraq war, and the title track is an intense and haunting statement conceived as part of a conversation between soldiers in Iraq:

"Well I've got God on my side
And I'm just trying to survive
What if what you do to survive
Kills the things you love
Fear's a dangerous thing
It can turn your heart black you can trust
It'll take your God filled soul
Fill it with devils and dust"

There's a sort of Southwestern thread running through many of the songs, with Spanish words sprinkled through the lyrics and cowboy imagery used repeatedly.

The political title track aside, the focus is mainly on Springsteen the storyteller telling tales of redemption. "Reno" tells the story of a depressing liaison with a prostitute that has aroused controversy for its explicit lyrics and imagery. "Hitter" chronicles the experience of a journeyman bareknuckle boxer who has come home for a rest. The moving "Matamoros Banks" is about an illegal immigrant who drowns trying to cross the border from Mexico to the United States. The stories are mostly about people at, or at least near the bottom--ragged cowboys, runaways, losers seeking a fresh start.

But it's not all darkness and gloom, a pair of love songs, "Maria's Bed" and "All I'm Thinkin' About," lighten things up, with Springsteen showing off his falsetto on the latter tune.

The accompanying DVD directed by Danny Clinch is in some ways superior to the album itself. Featuring intense and intimate performances of five of the best songs on the album, it comes about as close to duplicating the aforementioned fantasy concert as anything short of the real thing is likely to. It doesn't feature any fancy special effects or an all-star band, it's just the Boss and his guitar on a straightback chair in what looks like an abandoned hotel room. He doesn't even look into the camera. He just strums a few chords, throws back his head and sings in a rough and ready rasp.

Suddenly it feels like dawn around the kitchen table.





Copyright 2005 The Yomiuri Shimbun


In a non-published list let me just add that among the other discs in heavy rotation at the Woodshed are the new Loudon Wainwright III "Here Come the Choppers," lots of new John Prine and Sam Bush's "Ice Caps - peaks of Telluride" --go and buy them all now!

Pimping the media whores
The New York Times has announced that its columnists work will no longer be available for free on the internet, but instead will be available only to those paying a $50 subscription. Fair enough, as the subscription also gives one access to the NYT archives.
Just for fun though....Slate's Tim Noah is running a one day contest to see which of the columnists you would pay to read and how much you'd be willing to cough up. He reckons the archive is worth $25 and thus the other $25 should be divided amongst the eight main op-ed writers. Here's my payment plan:

*$10 goes to Paul Krugman - the K-man is one of the best and brightest in the biz, and his well-reasoned, well-researched and artfully written dope slaps to the Bush Junta are one of the best things in the Grey Lady.

*$5 each to the generally excellent Nicholas Kristof and Thomas L. Friedman.

*$4 to the only-slightly less excellent Frank Rich.

*$3 to Bob Herbert, whom I rarely read, but who seems to have his act together at least

*2 cents for Maureen Dowd, just because she makes me laugh occasionally, though not on purpose.

The reality-based amoung you will have noticed that we have exceed the $25 cap, but bear with me for a moment

*David Brooks should pay Krugman $2 out of his own pocket for the honor of appearing in the same publication. Furthermore, he should have to pay me $1 every time I read his inane and wrongheaded blatherings, thus paying for my Times online subscription. I know he writes more than one column a week, but one a week is about all I can stomach.

*John Tierney, whom I think of as Brooks-lite can cough up one-tenth of the fine levied against Brooks, thus supplying the two cents Dowd is paid.

Bill Moyers doth stomp upon the terra!

Who are they? I mean the people obsessed with control using the government to threaten and intimidate; I mean the people who are hollowing out middle class security even as they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class to make sure Ahmad Chalabi winds up controlling Iraq’s oil; I mean the people who turn faith-based initiatives into Karl Rove’s slush fund; who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets; I mean the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy. That’s who I mean. And if that’s editorializing, so be it. A free press is one where it’s okay to state the conclusion you’re led to by the evidence.

see it all here

The wrong end of the Mojo wire

some ruminations on what it was like to edit Hunter S. Thompson may be found in
CJR May/June 2005: Ideas & Reviews - Essay by Robert Love