Not a value judgement.
In a famous scene from Buñuel’s Phantom of Liberty, the roles of eating and excreting are inverted: people sit at toilets around a table, chatting pleasantly, and when they want to eat, sneak away to a small room. So, as a supplement to Lévi-Strauss, one is tempted to propose that shit can [...]

Shafer picked up on Hastert’s insinuation that liberal angel George Soros made some of his money peddling drugs (the illegal kind, not the kind whose makers write big checks to Hastert every year).
We live in dangerous times—more dangerous than you might imagine. Terrorists have marked the president of the United States for death. Heart disease [...]

From Government Executive magazine:
Officers who safeguard the skies from terrorists have lied on job applications, slept on duty, worked under the influence of alcohol and drugs, and lost their weapons, according to the DHS Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin.
In a report made public Aug. 27, Ervin accuses the Federal Air Marshal Service of being too [...]

The number of US troops wounded in Iraq is closing in on 7,000. Add the 1,000 dead and ignore the thousands more whose wounds aren’t visible. I had no idea the toll was so high. I suspect most other people aren’t any more aware of it than I was. Maybe one of the national papers [...]

I have a piece posted there. The consensus so far among the people who have emailed me in response is that I’m a hopeless optimist.

A little less than three years, ago, John Ashcroft announced during a news conference that a Michigan terrorist cell consisting of three men who were “suspected of having knowledge of the September 11th attacks” had been busted.
A little more than a year ago, Ashcroft celebrated the convictions of the three men involved as bringing [...]

I watched a bit of Zell’s keynote address (the link is to the transcript; you have to scroll down a bit to get the video links) and read the transcript of his Hardball appearance, during which he challenged Chris Matthews to a duel. All in all, a remarkable performance.

I hope this’ll be available forever. It’s an index linking to all of the articles mentioned in the Times’ somewhat less than exhaustive look at its flawed coverage of the whole Iraq adventure, and it includes Judith Miller’s famous “Bigfoot of Babylon” story, in which she wrote about some guy in a ball cap, whom [...]

A senior White House official, speaking to reporters before Bush’s address Thursday night, said, “Senator Miller was speaking on behalf of himself and obviously on behalf of himself.”
Well, yeah, obviously. Why else would he be giving the keynote address at the Republican Freakin’ National Convention?
The article also notes that Miller and his wife were uninvited [...]

Sue me. I thought it was significant that the GOP repudiated its convention keynote speaker — you know, the person specifically chosen to transmit the underlying theme of the convention — almost immediately after he gave his speech, but no. So far as I can tell, no one has followed up on yesterday’s MSNBC piece [...]

Josh Marshall noted today that press critic and all-around nice guy with a huge mean streak, James Wolcott, now has his own blog. Yippie-ki-yay, motherfuckers.

Noted Cold War historian Melvyn Leffler has an article in the current issue of Foreign Policy magazne arguing that the Bush* administration’s foreign policy is less a departure from previous administrations than a series of errors in judgement on how to apply a traditional foreign policy. He makes some well-taken points about the inclusion of [...]

American Journalism Review has a now slightly dated piece on press coverage of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, looking particularly at how slow the press as a whole were in picking up and pushing the story forward. Comments from various press luminaries include the following:

Len Downie, Jr., the Washington Post’s executive editor speaking about a [...]

[W]hite House aides like to say that George W. Bush is a transformational president. That’s an exaggeration, but if he’s elected to a second term and acts on the words he uttered on Thursday night, he just might be.
The White House aides are right; Bush* has been transformational. Brooks thinks Bush* will roll back all [...]

More than 10% of the 17% increase in Medicare premiums announced Friday is due to the cost of subsidizing private insurers to encourage their development of private insurance plans that could reduce the percentage of senior citizens reliant upon the federal program. This year’s increase comes on top of a 14% increase last year.
According to [...]

Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and, for three months earlier this year, a senior advisor to Iraq proconsul Paul Bremer, has an essay in Foreign Affairs magazine, the house organ of the Council on Foreign Relations, regarding the failures of Bremer and his cohort in post-invasion Iraq. It’s a long essay, [...]

Researchers at Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) have come up with a novel way of dealing with noxious fumes produced by diesel engines.
They have developed a new catalytic converter based on urea, a compound found naturally in urine, which eliminates the pollution blamed for much of the summer ozone.

Patrick McLeod provides an explanation of how 1100 US soldiers were wounded in Iraq during August. Responding to claims by the military that they can’t explain the surge in the number of wounded, McLeod says, “Oh bullshit. They do know why but they are sure as hell not going to say it: A change in [...]

Ahmed Chalabi says friends (say, who could that be?) in the US government have told him of a National Security Council memo telling unspecified people to “go after me.”
I suppose it’s possible this whole deal is nothing more than a street fight between the NSC and the Pentagon, but I’m not convinced that Condi Rice, [...]

I quite literally cannot imagine what it’s like to live in these circumstances.
Members of the Iraqi national guard pulled back from an al-Sadr office in Najaf after appearing to be readying for an assault on Monday.
The move came after an apparent intervention from senior Shia Muslim cleric Ayat Allah Ali al-Sistani.
I also can’t imagine [...]

There’s this guy named Lee Smith who has written some columns for Slate’s “Foreigners” department. I’ve mentioned him before (like, two or three days ago). I don’t think highly of his work. The column that really overloaded my tolerance fuse is here. Around the same time I read that hardened piece of lumpy porridge masquerading [...]

This piece ranks in the top two or three most dishonest post-conversion columns he’s written for Slate, and trust me, there’s not a lot of room at the top. He manages to conflate “understandable” and “justifiable” without blinking an eye, and he manages to forget that he’s been a cheerleader for colonialism by proxy in [...]

I haven’t read the entire 911 commission report, just a few short excerpts. I had no idea how bleak a picture it paints of the reaction, or lack of reaction, on the administration’s part. And not just the generic “administration,” but particular actors within it. And not just any actors, but the ones whose roles [...]

The official Bush* campaign theme regarding Vietnam-era service may be about to change from “Both men served honorably” to “Who cares what happened thirty years ago?” Oh, how I hope Josh Marshall is right:
CBS has now gone live with its online promo for the Ben Barnes interview that is running tomorrow evening. But, as I [...]

The wackos are apparently unwilling to let loose of smearing Kerry on Vietnam, so rather than dropping the issue in the face of the new reports confirming the president’s dereliction of duty in the National Guard, they’re gearing up to make the argument that the Bush* failings are insignificant compared to Kerry’s because Kerry was [...]

Q: Mr. Secretary, you mentioned the thousand death mark approaching. The number of U.S. troops killed per day is about two per day; it’s been about the same for roughly the last year. What does that say about the resilience of the insurgency there? And was it underestimated?
SEC. RUMSFELD: There’s no question [...]

London’s Financial Times, long known as a bastion of anti-capitalist, far-left tendencies, is reporting that, astonishingly, the White House and attorney general John Ashcroft are leaning on the FBI to taaaaaake theirrrrrrrrr tiiiiiiiiiiiiime about pursuing the various counterintelligence investigations oozing around the office of Doug Feith, the defense department’s number three man and an all-round [...]

White House communications director Dan Bartlett told CBS’ “60 Minutes II,” which first obtained the memos, that Bush’s superiors granted permission to train in Alabama in a non-flying status and that “many of the documents you have here affirm just that.”
“On this date I ordered that 1st Lt. Bush be suspended from flight status [...]

The Bushies are flexible. While they don’t think Kerry’s records prove he served honorably, whatever that entails, and they don’t think Bush*’s service records prove he didn’t, they do think the lack of witnesses to the effect that Bush* served as he claims, and the presence of witnesses who say he didn’t, is irrelevant while [...]

Some folks are saying that the documents CBS pulled out of its journalists’ fedora last night may be faked because they appear to be typed using proportional spacing, a relatively recent development. IBM reports that it introduced proportional spacing in 1941, and that the feature “became a staple of the IBM Executive series typewriters.”
Fortunately, we [...]