sfarber

Fresh after his stunning Supreme Court victory last summer, former alleged OBL motor pool member Salim Hamdan (for some background, try our interview with his Supreme Court counsel Neal Katyal), apparently, learned that his victory was just a tad Pyrrhic, as (via TalkLeft) federal judge James Robertson of Washington, D.C., who halted Hamdan’s military commissions trial in the first place in 2004 which ultimately led to the Supreme Court’s decision… ruled that the new Military Commissions Act ostensibly screws Mr. Hamdan out of any legal process whatsoever, save the kangaroo kourt he can expect from the military kommissions themselves… i.e.,...

Such is the punchline of an old joke featuring two codgers on a park bench in Miami Beach describing their respective paths to yon park bench, one of whom had a store in the North, destroyed by a fire after which he collected the insurance and retired, the other had a store in Florida, destroyed by a hurricane and then he collected the insurance money and retired… so the man from the North asks the man from Florida… Well, never mind. WTF does that have to do with… Democratic Senator Tim Johnson of South Dakota entering the hospital with a...

The old joke about New Orleans in particular and Louisiana in general (very much like my home County of Kings) is: “We don’t tolerate corruption. We DEMAND it.” And so it seems, they do, as the Second Congressional District of Louisiana, which includes most of New Orleans, merrily returned scandal-ridden Congressman William Jefferson to office with 57% of the vote in a runoff election. Jefferson, you will recall, was found with over $90,000 in his freezer by the FBI (and two associates have pleaded guilty to bribing him); only legal wrangling about documents arising from an ill-advised raid on his...

In an angle on the Bush Administration’s insanely botched (and immoral… and illegal… and evil…) handling of yet another aspect of the war on terror, our once-weekly-but-now-irregular-visit-to-Pravda gives us this discussion of the criminal probe in Milan over the kidnap of then-asylum-seeker Abu Omar (a/k/a Hasan Mustafa Osama Nasr) [for those unfamiliar, “Abu Omar” means, more or less, the honorific “Omar’s Dad”]. Abu Omar was pulled off the streets of Milan by a CIA rendition team with the connivance of the Italian intelligence service, driven to the Aviano air-base and hailed off to Egypt in one of the CIA’s rendition/torture...

The Ethics Committee of the House of Representatives decided that no one involved in the Foley scandal did anything worthy of taking any action, although “mistakes were made”. I suppose the conclusion was something like “Wasn’t costing these bastards their majority punishment enough?”

A group of survivors of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hickam Air Base, etc. gathered in Honolulu… in what they anticipate wiill likely be their final reunion, given their aging demographic. It has, of course, been noted that we have now been engaged in Iraq longer than the time between Pearl Harbor, and the Japanese surrender. The Iraq Study Group TM has concluded that current policy has led to a grave and deteriorating situation, i.e. a failure (i.e., the GOP lost both Houses of Congress…) The report, in true bipartisan fashion, accomplishes… well… nothing. Or, in other words, Iraq kind...

This Wednesday (6 December) the media of book publishing and the media of blog publishing collide at an event in lower Manhattan. Bill Scher, e-mails to tell us: Hi everyone. Just wanted to let you know that my last NYC book tour appearance is this Wednesday 12/6, 8 to 9 PM, for a panel discussion, “Blogs ‘n Books: A Conversation with Three Authors,” including Eric Boelhert (“Lapdogs“), Michael Berube (“What’s Liberal About The Liberal Arts?”) and myself [Bill wrote “Wait! Don’t Move to Canada!”], moderated by Elana Levin of the Drum Major Institute. It will be taking place at The...

Notwithstanding the incoming Democratic control of the Senate and the House of Representatives, which, if the Democrats in leadership are smart, will include very early (if not the very first act) election machine reform as part of the agenda (along with tying the minimum wage to Social Security COLAs, thereby automatically preserving both a minimum wage to keep up with inflation and ensuring that Social Security revenues always keep up with rising costs, to some degree, and enabling any future attacks on the minimum wage to be rightly perceived as attacks on Social Security itself… and of course, undoing the...

In this case, we give you this WaPo discussion of cheating in school… not just any school, but at (my alma mater) Columbia University’s School of Journalism. And not just any course, but the course on journalistic ethics! (Irony alert, as there is a reference to a similar event, and to Columbia’s J-School, though not to cheating at Columbia or to this event, in my recent interview with Michael Berube.) Some students have very wisely pointed out that they have learned more about journalistic ethics from this event, its aftermath, and its publicity, than from the course itself. That seems...

That would be for one of the giants of 20th century intelligentsia, Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman who died in mid-November at age 94, whose lengthy Grey Lady obituary is here. His is the (5’3″ tall) “yan” to the (6’8″ tall) “yin” of his friend and frequent debating partner, the late John Kenneth Galbraith, whose death I commented on here. Friedman acknowledged his own extremism, pointing out that someone in each generation must go “all the way”, and that was him. Some of his suggestions, the negative income tax (now incorporated in our tax code as the earned income...