Category: In the news

Our casualties matter; yours don’t

Why the Fallujah atrocities of last week are considered no big deal in the Mideast. “Who cares?” said Fida Alsha’er, a columnist for a Jordanian women’s magazine. “It’s another example of how American life is considered something very expensive, very…

Pentagon to Iraq: No press freedoms for you!

Iraq’s shaping up as a brutal testing ground for our revered notions of a marketplace of ideas. From my vantage point in suburban California, it’s outrageous that U.S. troops shut down an anti-U.S. newspaper in Baghdad. But there’s no denying…

Shafer on Howell Raines

The Slate media pundit on the upcoming Atlantic Monthly piece by Howell Raines: There’s enough self-love in Raines’ autobiography to earn it a place in the autoerotica section. By the time Raines stops romancing himself in the public mirror, conjures…

Virus warning

I just got this e-mail that is obviously a virus stored in an attachment … I’m passing it along because I almost fell for it and clicked on the attachment (wouldn’t have mattered in my case .. these things never…

The wrongness of the Martha conviction

Doug Clifton talks about the Plain Dealer pulling Martha Stewart’s column. The explanation is that they don’t run the work of convicted felons (which makes me wonder, when have they had the opportunity before?). Doug talks about his uneasiness with…

Question of the day

Who on earth is interested enough in Jayson Blair’s excuses to actually buy his silly book?

Not making excuses, but …

From the NY Times preview the book by Jayson Blair, who … admits many of his deceptions in a forthcoming memoir but writes that they were fueled by ambition, cocaine and alcohol abuse and an undiagnosed condition of manic depression.…

Lots o’ Haiti links

Liz Donovan has amassed a passel of them. I noticed a bunch of looters pictured on the New York Times homepage this morning, which had me picturing the exultant beneficiaries of the revolution: HER: “Soon we will be free of…

Trudeau’s contest

E&P talks to “Doonesbury” creator G.B. Trudeau about his offer of 10 grand to anybody who can prove Bush served in the Guard while working on a political campaign in Alabama. Trudeau had one more comment about the contest: “We’re…