Free Speech and Genocide

Good Morning. A couple of items for the weekend.

• France's pending legislation that would make it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide-holocaust by Turkey has renewed debate over the limits of speech, responsibility and historical memory. Bernard-Henri Levy comes to the defense of the prospective French law and others like it. Is he right? See Pierre's "Holocaust Protocol: Denying Genocide Deniers..."
  

• The vultures are gathering for the United States' Midterms next Tuesday. Two articles from The Economist summing up the ground war: "Goodbye to the Permanent Majority?" and "The Vultures Gather..."
  

• The weekend edition of Candide's Latest has several links to the best of the periodicals, including Gary Wills on the Bush Administration's faith-based surrender, Der Spiegel on Turkey's slouch toward Islamism, and Anthony Shadid on the children of Egypt's Aswan Dam. All in The Latest.

Good weekend everyone.pt

The Real Insult to the Military

Good morning. A few new items today...

• You mean the U.S. military isn’t a dumping ground? You mean it isn’t a cross-section of working-class and minority America? You mean, given the choice between a terrific education in a good university and an eventual job and the security of suburban dullness versus a couple of tour of duties in Sadr City or Anbar Province—our contemporary Sodom and Gomorrah—an American will choose Iraq over Cedar Lane? John Kerry was foolish. He wasn't quite wrong. See "The Real Insult to the Military..."
  

• The latest New York Times-CBS poll appears to have the GOP down in the dumps. But behind the numbers, we still have an American public learning few lessons from Iraq. See "A Poll's Black and Blue Marks"
  

• What would a museum to the Iraq war look like--in Crawford, Texas, and run by Ripley's Believe It or Not? See "The Next War Museum and Theme Park..."
  

• The cultural historian Michael Kammen has a new book, Visual Shock, and Candide's Notebooks has a delicious excerpt: See "Oscar Wilde's Testicles..."

Plenty more in Candide's Latest, including, today, how the Pentagon is (again) playing journalism school to the American media. See Candide's Latest...

Thanks for reading.pt

Press Free-Fall

Good Morning. A couple of new items today.

• The United States in 53rd place? That's its new ranking in Reporters Without Borders' annual survey of press freedoms in the world. But government controls are the least of America's problems. See "Press Freedom Free-Fall"
  

• Early Voting: A quick Halloween graveyard for the GOP, with a soundtrack by B.B. King.
  

• Albert Camus, George Bush and Combat: An essay by Michael McDonald on Camus as editorialist.

And plenty more in Candide's Latest. Thanks for reading.pt