Candide's Notebooks

Florida Loves Polluters, Girl Crushes of 2010, and Madonna vs. Lady Gaga: The Live Wire, Dec. 13, 2010

2010-12-14T02:33:00.000Z

And Keep in Mind:

The Full Wire | The Previous Wire

Where You Ought To Be

2008-07-11T20:02:00.002+01:00

If you've landed here, you're two years to late. This is where you want to be:

http://pierretristam.com

Lost Causes

2007-02-13T13:26:00.000Z

Good Morning. A couple of new items today.

There is, after all, another war going on, the original war, the one “on terror,” the one that was supposed to end terrorism and states that support it. That Afghanistan is getting little attention anymore is the fruit of two poisoned trees: the situation there is intractable. And it is not about to be resolved, neither by a splurge of surges nor by imports of cash, no matter the tonnage. Canadians are catching on. NATO isn't. See "Remember Afghanistan?"

And it's not as if Iraq has it better. It wasn’t 48 hours ago that the Bush junta was chatting up its lockdown of Baghdad as a result of the ongoing “surge” of Iraqi and American forces through the capital. It was the latest of dozens of so-called lockdowns over the years. None of which have done more than fuel the insurgency. See "Now what?"

"From the Diary of an Iraqi Librarian."

Much more in the Daily Journal. Thanks for reading Candide's Notebooks. Spread the word.pt

Severed Heads and Sensibility

2007-02-12T03:56:00.000Z

Good morning. Too many new items to count...

In Book Eight of Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations,” we come across this line: “Have you ever seen a hand or a foot cut off, or a head sliced off, lying anywhere apart from the rest of the body?” The question has more relevance today than we're willing to admit. So does Aurelius's answer. Pierre's essay explores both. See "Severed Heads and Sensibility."

Target Iran: The Bush junta is going after Iran with the same guile and mix of propaganda and fabulism as it did going after Iraq. Yet again, the media are swallowing the farce whole. See "Iranian Gulf of Tonkin"

On the US-Mexico border, there are vigilantes, and there are murderers. And there are both. See "Vigilantes and Murderers."

Fox News decides to do business porn.

Fear of lesbians begins early, often and cruelly. A tale from the trenches. See "Fifth-Grade Homophobia."

As always, more in the Daily Journal. Thanks for reading.pt

Anna Nicole Smith or Jimi Hendrix?

2007-02-09T03:26:00.000Z

Try both.

You can see Anna Nicole Smith in her more pious poses (and some of those fabulous Playboy covers): "Vickie A.N. Smith, Alas"

What was the meaning of Jimi Hendrix's star-spangled ordnance at Woodstock? See Candide's Notebooks contributor Rick de Yampert's "Anthem to Jimi Hendrix"

Good weekend everyone...pt

Of Vaccine Trials and Deaths Foretold

2007-02-08T12:33:00.000Z

Good Morning. A few new items today...

Sexually-Transmitted Profits: See "Merck, God, and the War Over the HPV Vaccine."

Remember Bush declaring victory in the Iraq war on the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003? Even then, the writing of the mayhem to come was on the wall--or in the papers. See "Chronicle of Deaths Foretold."

If it's a romp through Tim Russert's Rolodex you're interested in, fine. But "Spare Me the Libby Trial."

Surge here, disperse there: "The Iraq Insurgency Goes Suburban."

More in the Daily Journal. Thanks for reading Candide's Notebooks. Spread the word.pt

Taser Brutality in Our Schools

2007-02-07T12:34:00.000Z

Good Morning. A couple of items today...

Last Thursday morning a 16-year-old special education student at a Florida high school was shot with a Taser by a school cop. It all began when the student refused to do his school work. He ended up with a felony charge and in juvenile detention. Welcome to our brave new America. See "Taser Brutality In Our Schools."

"Ehren Watada's War Theater: A Soldier Disputes an Illegal War"

Happy Birthday, Eubie Blake: a Ragtime Rover.

The WPA Guides: Arizona, "Ancient and Venerable Land"

As always, thanks for reading... and welcome new subscribers. Spread the word...pt

Cowards and Militarists

2007-02-06T12:52:00.000Z

Good Morning. A few new items today. Cue up the Sousa.

When a society is no longer exclusively and vigilantly civil, its claim to be a civilized society, let alone a civilizing one, is in peril. Other countries have been discovering that about the United States . We’re discovering it at home, too, every time a police shield is flashed with the presumptive power of an M-16 burst. See "America's March Toward a Military State."

The Senate folds on an anti-war resolution. See "Cowards."

He's a Sixth Amendment thug. See "Henry Stimson, a Lousy Pentagon Lawyer, Thankfully Resigns."

Had a Snickers bar lately? Feeling woozily homophobic? See "Those Superbowl Ads Again."

The best of the blogosphere and more crumbs and quickies in The Daily Journal. Thanks for reading.pt

Superduds

2007-02-05T13:10:00.000Z

Good morning. A few new items as the sogginess outside our Floridian windows continues. In FEMA's absence, as always.

I didn't know who the Colts were and wasn't sure why the Bears were there, but commented the Superbowl anyway. See "The Superbowl, Semi-Live."

Robert Fisk and the fallacies of the word terrorist, see "Spare Me the Word Terrorist"

It's getting old: The Bush administration has been inventing a case for war against Iran out of thin air. See "Iran, the Muddle."

More in the Daily Journal. Thanks for reading.pt

Loquacious Ineloquence from Bush to Biden

2007-02-02T12:38:00.000Z

Good Morning. A few items for the weekend...

President Bush was scampering discrepant all over Wall Street This week, including a lay-over with the Wall Street Journal Editorial board. The result? See "Bush's Wall Street Bull."

Joe Biden's Loquacious Ineloquence.

Remembering Molly Ivins, and her Queens Days.

Why is the Federal Emergency Management Agency the stand-out champion among federal agencies of the Bush administration's incompetence? See "FEMA's Shams."

The Pentagon thinks there are almost 30,000 fewer casualties than does the Veterans Administration, which recently put the number of wounded out of Iraq at 50,000. The discrepancy is indicative of the government's total war on truth. See "When Casualties Aren't."

Tales of neo-martial law: "What Military States Are Made Of."

Plenty more in the various editions of the Daily Journal. Good weekend everyone (and welcome, new subscribers: the past ten days have brought a surge of their own, and I'm all for this one).pt

War Trash

2007-01-31T12:29:00.000Z

Good Morning. A few new items...

A two-part column on war's most common by-product: art and memorials. See part I, "Ash to Art, Art to Dust," and part II, "The Human Tolerance Walls Can Speak Of."

West Virginia is a rolling heartbreak. The explosion at a convenience store on Monday is one more example. See "An Explosion in Ghent."

Hezbollah Wears Prada: See "Lebanon's Nasrallah, Coy Warrior"

America's police agencies are going military. See "Cops' Military Fetish."

Plenty more in the Daily Journal. Thanks for reading.pt

Genocide as Wallpaper

2007-01-29T02:30:00.000Z

Good morning. A few new items:

What happens if a genocide takes place and the press does report it as it's happening? Usually, indifference. See "Genocide as Wallpaper"

"Banning Unpleasant Muslims"

Holocaust Memorial Day and its (attempted) hijackers

Roger Federer wins the Australian Open. Big yawn.

More in the Daily Journal. Thanks for reading, and welcome new subscribers: Last week The Notebooks got linked by Crooks & Liars, Slate, Romenesko's Media News and Meta Filter, among others.pt

Kafka in Canada

2007-01-26T12:24:00.000Z

Good Morning. A few items for the weekend...

Maher Arar is the Syrian-born wireless technology consultant American authorities detained on false information from Canada, then "rendered" to Syria, where Arar was imprisoned and tortured for almost a year before his release. Canada cleared him of all suspicions. The Americans refuse to remove him from a terrorist watch list. See "The Hounding of Maher Arar"

"The Bush presidency Is Over." Need we say more?

"The Multinational Failures of Condi Rice"

"Hugo Chavez, Press Thug"

"Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Islam's Prickly Enlightenment"

Plenty more in the Daily Journal. Thanks for reading.pt
Plenty

Herbert Tippen Davidson Jr., 1925-2007

2007-01-24T02:54:00.000Z

Good morning,

On Tuesday morning, Herbert Davidson, third-generation owner of the last major family-owned newspapers in Florida, died. A personal tribute, "Colossus of Heart and Verve."

Hezbollah is at it again in Lebanon, edging the country toward civil war: See "Lebanon's Slide."

A tribute to Jacques Brel and "Le plat pays," see "Brel, Ever Alive and Well."

Much more in the Daily Journal. Thanks for reading.pt

Education's Heists

2007-01-23T12:27:00.000Z

Good Morning. A couple of new items today...

What's the purpose of education--to manufacture workers or mold individuals? The "free" market drives the answer. See Pierre's Tuesday Column, "Cogs and Ends: Education's Heist?"

Anthony Swofford scored big with Jarhead, his memoir of the first Gulf War. His first novel, Exit A, draws less than pink mist. See "Jarhead Shoots Blanks."

From the archives: 15 years old and shot down for wielding a fake gun. Remember "Chris Penley's Fatal Bullies."

Plenty more in the Daily Journal. Thanks for reading.pt

Bush the Empire Slayer

2007-01-22T12:23:00.000Z

Good morning. A few items from the weekend...

Bernard Chazelle, a computer science professor at Princeton, contributes a terrifically written piece that sums up the Bush years in red white and blight: See "Bush the Empire Slayer."

The war on terror's great delusion? That Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are American allies, when they are, in fact, al-Qaeda's enabling axis. See "Pakistan, Bush and the Taliban"

On Lebanon's Michel Aoun, "The General in His Laban Cloth"

Can Bach--or any classical music--be translated into words? Not likely. But don;t let that stop you from trying. See "For the Love of Bach."

Plenty more in the Daily Journal. Thanks for reading.pt

Deceptive Reversal on Spying

2007-01-18T02:56:00.000Z

Good Morning. Several new items today...

What was that about Bush's reversal on domestic spying? Don't believe it. See "Bush Isn't Ending Domestic Spying. Only Due Process."

Condi Rice--and most Americans--aren't paying a personal price for the Iraq war. See Pierre's Tuesday Column, "Barbara Boxer was right."

So it turns out the US government has been torturing prisoners without a clue about the effectiveness of the technique. See "Torture for Dummies."

"How to Eradicate Poverty By Ignoring It."

A Lebanese Immortal Dies: See "Pepe, 1910-2007."

Plenty more in the Daily Journal. Thanks for reading. pt

Reviled Prophets

2007-01-16T02:51:00.000Z

Good Morning. Several new items on the theme of reviled prophets today.

Today marks the fifteenth anniversary of the break-out of the first Gulf War, brought to you by CNN's Peter Arnett, Jim Holliman and Bernard Shaw live in Baghdad. But let's not forget what Peter Arnett prophesied about the second war, just eight days into the invasion, on April 1, 2003, only to be summarily fired for it. See "Peter Arnett's Prophesies"

Whatever happened to the $1 billion American embassy in Baghdad? See "Fortress of Folly"

Mark McGwire's steroid problem was his own. And ours. See "Of Beefcakes and Role Models"

Notebooks contributor Ohdave reviews Jimmy Carter's Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. See "Jimmy Carter's Holy Land"

Diarist: $5,000 braces. For what? See "For the Love of Torture"

Plenty more, including Glenn Gould and Burqah-bikinis, in the Daily Journal...

Thanks for reading...pt

Bush's Cambodia

2007-01-13T15:54:00.000Z

The latest from the Daily Journal: see Bush's Low Grade War on Iran

Bush's Lethal Way Forward

2007-01-11T03:38:00.000Z

Good Morning. A couple of new items today...

The Bush speech is on a few people's minds. Overly so? It was anticlimactic, poorly written and not quite the change in direction advertised. See "A Calamity Foretold"

Why Ali Allawi, an Iraqi ex-minister, isn't proposing a more realistic alternative: "A Real Blueprint for Peace?"

Thomas Friedman Smugwatch

More in the Daily Journal. Thanks for reading.pt

Bush Speech Therapy

2007-01-10T02:50:00.000Z

Good Morning. A few new items:

The best therapy for -- and most forceful civic response to -- Bush's speech on Iraq? "Don't Watch."

It's not all gloomy in America. See Pierre's Tuesday Column, "American Scriptures: Speeches that Made a Nation"

Another grim marker: On Thursday, the Guantanamo's Gitmo turns five years old.

Plenty more in the Daily Journal. Thanks for reading.pt

Escalation to Nowhere

2007-01-08T03:57:00.000Z

Good Morning. Today's new items at the Notebooks:

Even when the victors write the rules of war, the results are absurd. What happens when the losers keep writing the rules? See "We Are the Savages."

Bob Nardelli took a $215 million severance package after reaping more than $200 million in salaries and stock options as head of Home Depot, even though the company's performance was middling to anemic. Yet Nardelli was hailed as a new kind of leader for his military style. See "Military Freaks at Home Depot"

Afghanistan bans "Kabul Express," a movie critical to the Taliban

Israel readies to Nuke Iran?

A review of the blogosphere and plenty more in the Daily Journal... Thanks for reading.pt

Hangings

2007-01-04T12:33:00.000Z

Good Morning. A few new items to start the year...

The way Saddam Hussein was hanged isn't the emebarrassment. The skittish reaction by those who choreographed his assassination was the embarrassment. See:

Reflections on the New Year: "Elegy for Two Cardinals"
From L.D. Amabed Jr: "New Year"

Plenty more in the Daily Journal. Thanks for reading.pt

Wounded Knee, With Arabic Subtitles

2006-12-29T12:32:00.000Z

Good Morning. A few new items to wrap up the year.

Today, December 29, marks the anniversary of the Wounded Knee Massacre in South Dakota in 1890. Looking back at the way The New York Times interpreted the event, the similarities between the justifications of massacres now and then is a shock of recognition. See "Wounded Knee, With Arabic Subtitles."

More American soldiers have died in Iraq than on 9/11. But what does it mean when 9/11's death are set at "2,973," intentionally not to include the nineteen hijakers who also died that day? There's a direct link between that erasure and the de-humanizing way the "war on terror" has been carried out since. See "Demonism's DNA: "2,973""

Massacres are committed in every war. But the casualties aren't only the victims. See "Murderers, and Casualties, of War."

Gerald Ford, "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting"

An All Bach Christmas

Plenty more in Candide's Daily Journal. Thanks for reading, and of course Happy New Year.pt

Daily Journal Latest: Mercenaries, Atheism and Johnny Carson

2006-12-27T19:42:00.000Z

Here are the latest items in today's Daily Journal at Candide's Notebooks (click on the link for the post)...

Pentagon Flirting With Mercenaries
West Bank Mephisto
Democracy in Asia?
In the Blogosphere
Atheism’s Enemies
Alimony’s Next Frontier in India
Letterman’s Tribute to Johnny Carson
Artist of the Day: Beppe Giacobbe

Teen Sex in Stalinist Georgia

2006-12-21T12:32:00.000Z

Good Morning. A few new items today.

What happens when a 17-year-old boy receives a consensual blow job from a 15-year-old girl at a party in Georgia (the American one of Cobb County, Newt Gingrich and CNN, not its former Soviet namesake and Stalin’s homeland), and when the boy happens to be black? He gets sentenced to 10 years in prison without parole. See "Teen Sex as Gallows in Georgia"

"We're not winning," the president finally conceded to the Washington Post about Iraq. No schnitzel, Sherlock. But Bush's labyrinth is worse than he lets on. See "We're Not Winning..."

Where has Osama been? And why is his No. 2 man , the bloodlusting Ayman al-Zawahiri, grabbing the spotlight? There may be some good news and some bad news. See "Is al-Qaeda Finished?"

Plenty more in Candide's Daily Journal. Thanks for reading.pt

Goodbye, Emmanuelle

2006-12-19T12:22:00.000Z

Good Morning. Several new items today.

If Tocqueville was riding around America today, would he call it a democracy? See Pierre's Tuesday Column, "American Apartheid."

Who are the real predators? The Christmas season brings them out, and it's all about marketing to children, the new frontier of marketers' predatory skills. See "Emmanuelle's Children..."

Candide's Notebooks contributor Ohdave reviews Enemy Combatant, the memoir of a Pakistani-Briton held at Guantanamo for three years. See "Inside Guantanamo"

It's not just Arabs who lie about maps and boundaries in textbooks. Israel has been in on the act, too. See "Israel's Textbook Duplicity"

December 19 is Carted G. Woodson's 131st anniversary. Does anybody care? Celebrate in quotes here.

Plenty more in Candide's Daily Journal. Thanks for reading.pt

As Bush Loiters

2006-12-15T12:23:00.000Z

Good Morning. A couple of items for the weekend...

It’s turning into an interesting Christmas season for those mothers, fathers, wives, sons and daughters who’ll get to lose a husband, a father, a son in the next few weeks (and of course years) as the American death tally in Iraq ho ho hoses it to 3,000 while our Lord and Savior president and decider decides not to decide what to decide next for Iraq until — maybe to please Jenna and the other one — “after the holidays,” as the phraseology of the corporate cruiser goes. See Pierre's "Christmas Toll"

From the Daily Journal: Lebanon's worst enemies, South Africa's child murders, Italy's "war on Christmas," and Christmas again for the Muhammad Cartoons.

Good weekend everyone.pt

On Life Support

2006-12-14T12:01:00.000Z

Good Morning. A few new items as the Democrats' Senate majority hangs by a thread...

Godspeed, Peter Boyle. But the death of one of the stars of "Everybody Loves Raymond" only highlights a death of much longer date. See "A Graveyard of Comedy..."

Jimmy Carter is catching all sorts of flack for his new book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid." Naturally, friends of Israel are hyperventilating. See Pierre's "You Mean It's Not Apartheid?"

Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" is having a hard time getting a hearing in some public schools, where the oil lobby is putting up a fuss. Candide's Notebooks contributor Linda Sexauer writes "Goring Gore from Schools..."

Plenty more in the Daily Journal, including barbarism with an American face, the flabby state of education, why the French riots were a good thing, and more... Thanks for reading.pt

Heartbreaks

2006-12-12T01:45:00.000Z

Good Morning. A few new items since the weekend.

It isn't quantifiable. But it's tangible all the same. The America of 1979, for all its flaws, was more hopeful, more defensible, more admirable, than the America of 2006. To an immigrant, today's America is a heartbreak. See Pierre's Tuesday column, on the 20th anniversary of his naturalization as a U.S. citizen, "Losing America."

It's media's sickness, and some columnists have to play along; when Denver's Al Lewis compared car salesmen to Chihuahuas, he ended up in a self-described, and apparently self-assigned, "doghouse." His apology was worse than the offense. See "Groveling for Advertisers."

From the American Impression archives: A jaunt through the Idaho Engineering Laboratory, since 1947 the Department of Energy's lead nukes lab. See "Idaho, Nuclear Frontier."

Plenty more in Candide's Daily Journal. Thanks for reading.pt

Iraq Sullen Group

2006-12-08T11:49:00.000Z

Good Morning.

Predictably, it's been all Iraq Study Group, all the time--a remarkable accomplishment for a report that's mostly synthesis and history, and a reflection of why American presumption wasn't going anywhere when the invasion began in 2003, and can't go anywhere now that Iraq has the U.S. by the horns. See Pierre's "Lessons Missed..."

The Michael Richards fallout from his taunting audience members "niggers" at a comedy club in November goes on. Candide's Notebooks contributor Rick deYampert has ""Nigger," Indefensible, Unactionable..."

As always, plenty more in Candide's Daily Journal. To quote Katie Couric, Good Weekend Everyone.pt

Get Busy Living

2006-12-06T12:14:00.000Z

Good Morning. A few new posts today ...

The cult of living long for long life's sake is reducing our quality of life to a matter of slavery to the medical-longevity complex. A little suicide now and then is a good thing, should meaningful life have run its course. See Pierre's Tuesday column, "Get Busy Living, or Get Busy Dying..."

The question isn't "why is the sky blue?" but "where do lists come from?" And why on earth would The Atlantic stoop to the Cosmo way and give us the so-called 100 most influential Americans of all time? See "The Most Important Lists. Ever."

It might as well be a daily chronicle: the death watch of American journalism. Next in line, "A Dumber Wall Street Journal?"

Images from Beirut: The faces of Hezbollah, front and back, like you've never seen them before...

Plenty more in the Daily Journal...Thanks for reading.pt

God's Right-Wingers

2006-12-04T11:57:00.000Z

Good Morning. Several new items today...

This is the week of the Iraq Study Group's coming out party. The talk shows are lined up, smoke and mirrors at the ready. And Orientalist studies are about to get a new boost. Oh Edward Said, where art thou? See "Iraq Sullen Group..."

Is it a civil war yet? The question now applies to Lebanon. A Letter from Lebanon evokes one mother's desperation with two years of dashed hopes. See "A Mother's Rejection..."

It's down, it's not dead: America's religious right can always find creative ways to remind us why regression is always around the corner. Pierre's two-part series explores how: First, through the Christian Coalition's firing of Florida Rev. Joel C. Hunter in "The Christian Coalition's Error." Second, through the continuing slander of Enlightenment ideals, this time, ironically, by way of genital-mutilation apologist and Allan Bloom wannabe Richard Shweder. See "Mutilating God, Genitals and the Enlightenment."

Time to play: Is George W. Bush the worst president ever?

The best books of the year, the Supreme Court hits the bong, Germany's Patriot Act, a blogosphere round-up and plenty more in Candide's Daily Journal, slightly improved for ease of browsing. Thanks for reading. Spread the word.pt

This Is Neither Pipe Nor Plagiarism

2006-11-29T11:48:00.000Z

Good Morning. A few new items...

Did Ian McEwan plagiarize Lucilla Andrews in his best-selling and wonderful “Atonement”? See "Plagiarism With a Human Face..."

The circle is complete. The authoritarians, the tyrants, the regressives are back in control from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush. By foolishly rushing it, President Bush set back democracy in the Middle East for who knows how many generations, ensuring a longer dark age instead. And still, and as always, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict bubbles and seethes, the Middle East’s eternal, sleepless volcano. See Pierre's Tuesday Column, "Renaissance for Autocracy..."

The continuing story of rising income inequalities, see "Bush's Tax Scam..."

Plenty more in Candide's Daily Journal. Thanks for reading.pt

Apres Thanksgiving

2006-11-27T12:36:00.000Z

Good morning and happy post-Thanksgiving. A few new items...

It's not quite as popular as baseball, but home-schooling is becoming an American pastime. The reason, beside the religious-nut element? public schools are too much like camp. See "Revenge of the Home-Schoolers..."

Robert Novak is king of that paradox of the Washington punditocracy: terrifically informed yet analytically dim and intellectually corrupt, because drunk on that Molotov cocktail of America-First presumption: ideology and nationalistic chauvinism. See "Robert Novak, Caudillo's Knave..."

From Candide's Notebooks contributor Ohdave, an essay on Ian McEwan's "Saturday," one of the better novels of the post 9/11 era. See "When Violence Crashes the Party..."

As always, plenty more in Candide's Daily Journal... Thanks for visiting.pt

Pierre Gemayel Assassination in lebanon

2006-11-22T15:31:00.000Z

For the latest perspective on the assassination and Lebanon's flirtations with civil war, see Pierre's "This Way to Lebanon's Gas Chambers..."

More later...

Al-Jazeera's No-Fluff Zone

2006-11-21T12:19:00.000Z

Good Morning, A few new items...

Curious about al-Jazeera's English service but unable, in the United States, to watch it on your local cable or satellite provider? Pull up a chair. Here's what it's like, and why it's the most relevant all-news channel on the air (when you can get it). See Pierre's Tuesday column, "Watching al-Jazeera..."

Lebanon is unraveling, thanks to Hezbollah and the Lebanese gift for disunity. But this latest collapse had plenty of help. See "Israel and America's Blooming Blunders..."

Maureen Dowd interviews Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert in Rolling Stone. Worth the cover price? Not quite. Stick to the summary: "Maureen's Colbert & Stewart Routine..."

As always, plenty more in the Daily Journal. Thanks for reading (and welcome, new subscribers).pt

Censors and Euphemists

2006-11-17T12:01:00.000Z

Good morning. Several new items today.

The U.S. government's Department of Agriculture has erradicated hunger. No joke. It's no longer calling America's 35 million poor hungry, but merely lacking in "food security." One more step in America's surrender to the fake. See "Security's Hungers..."

Al-Jazeera has gone global with an English service. Too bad you can't see it in the United States. See "Censoring al-Jazeera..."

Weekend Reading: On Monday Pierre presented a talk at Stetson University as part of the university's Values Council lecture series. The full transcript: See "Whose Freedom? Whose Responsibility?"

John Dowland, anyone? For a little Elizabethan Lute music, try the "Dowland-de Maistre Smackdown..."

Plenty more, as always, in Candide's Daily Journal...

Good weekend everyone.pt

Moday Morning Beatings

2006-11-13T12:02:00.000Z

Good morning. A few new post-election items ...

What is it with the Los Angeles Police Department and its barbarism? See "L.A. Beating," with video.

How the University of Alabama and other corporations are dumbing down intellect and creatyivity in the name of copyright: see Pierre's "Art, Expression and the Parody of Property..."

When it comes to the confirmation of the new defense secretary, it won't be a repeat of the Iran-Contra hearings--unfortunately. See "The Skeletons in Robert Gates's Closet..."

More, including Bach on the Lute, in the redesigned Candide's Latest...

Thanks for keeping up with The Notebooks.pt

Live 2006 Midterm Elections Commentary

2006-11-08T00:14:00.000Z

Going on right now at Candide's Notebooks...

Election Fizz

2006-11-07T11:56:00.000Z

It's Election Day. Don't let your vote turn up missing on a milk carton. A couple of new items.

The Tuesday Column: It's the rope and a tree for Saddam. It's also still the wrong man. See "So We Have a Hanging..."

An all-Democratic Congress? A split? Another Republican sweep? See "Your Predictions," and join the fun.

More howls and frippery in Candide's Latest...

Thanks for reading. And please: remember to drink before you vote.pt

Saddam's Hanging Chad

2006-11-06T12:38:00.000Z

Good morning. A few hanging items to start the week.

So Bush and his GOP got their November surprise, and it's a thick one. Saddam is to hang. See the bacchanal's complete roundup in Candide's Latest.

Robert Fisk: "A Guilty Verdict on America, Too." From the UK Independent.

Don’t tell me that we’re not becoming, as an American society, meaner, stupider, more authoritarian, all in the name of security—“responsibility”—as we go about supposedly preserving these freedoms of ours. It doesn’t have to be Guantanamo to make the point. It’s in the little things, the everyday incidents of ordinary life around us, that hiss with the sound of freedom’s rug being pulled from under us. See "Outlawing Creative Subversions."

Thanks for reading. Remember to vote. Or not: Not voting is a right, too.pt

Free Speech and Genocide

2006-11-03T12:56:00.000Z

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

2006-11-02T12:26:00.000Z

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

2006-10-30T12:16:00.000Z

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

Australia Rapegate

2006-10-27T17:33:00.000+01:00

Extra!

Everything you always wanted to know, and didn't, about Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali, the Australian-based Muslim cleric who thinks rapes are women's (and America's) fault. With a full audio of his speech (in Arabic). But the Sydney sheikh is far from the only rape-addled zealot in the mix. He has equal company in American evangelists and law. See "When Religion Is the Rapist..."

And in Candide's Latest, Dick Cheney admits to waterboarding--and calls it a "no-brainer."

Good weekend everyone.pt

Rush v. Fox

2006-10-26T12:06:00.000+01:00

Good Morning... a couple of new items today.

Was Rush Limbaugh out of his mind, badgering Michael J. Fox over the way he looked in a campaign commercial? To ask the question is to imply that the right-wing ideology compelling Limbaugh to make those comments ever had sense on its side. See "Stem Cell Lies and the Liars Who Peddle Them"

Just added to the library: Thomas Frank's latest, on lobbying in Washington: See "Descending into the Ninth Circle of Washington Hell" (from TNR)

More in Candide's Latest. Welcome, new subscribers.pt

Get-R-Done

2006-10-25T11:20:00.000+01:00

Good morning. A few new items today.

President Bush's new Iraq War adviser is Larry the Cable Guy? It's not quite a joke. See "Stay the Course" Yields to Get-R-Done..."

Forget Bob Woodward's State of Denial. The book of the season is Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower. It documents to what extent the "intelligence agencies" enabled 9/11. And it points to an inevitable conclusion. See "Bush and bin Laden's Marriage of Convenience."

Horn-tooting time: Pierre's Tuesday column for the Daytona Beach News-Journal again won First Place from the Florida Press Club.

More in Candide's Latest. Thanks for reading and commenting.pt

Speaking of Inquisitions

2006-10-23T02:30:00.000+01:00

A busy last few days, including a couple of longish postings over the weekend.

The dead and wounded of the Iraq war are being largely ignored. Chalked up to an abstraction indistinguishable from the kind of dead Americans see on their nightly television shows and in Shwartzenegger movies. The indifference is intentional--and a favor to the government. See "Casualties of War: Dead, Buried and Discarded"

"Flags of Outr Fathers," the Clint Eastwood movie based on the book of the same name, about the men of that famous Iwo Jima flag-raising, is the talk of the nation. It's also worth revisiting the facts and myths of that Iwo Jima moment, and how they inform war myths to this day. See "From Iwo Jima to Baghdad"

On Sunday, Pierre delivered a lecture at the Unitarian Universalist Society of the Daytona Beach Area: "Speaking of Inquisitions: From Dostoevsky to GWB." The full text is available here...

Who is Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury? A Bangladeshi journalist who happens to think that Islamic militants are out of control, and talking with Israel shouldn't be a heresy. For that, he's on trial, facing the death penalty in Bangladesh. See "The Case of Salah Choudhury, “Seditious” Journalist"

As always, thanks for reading--and keep spreading the word.pt

What We Live For

2006-10-18T03:39:00.000+01:00

Good Morning. A couple of items for the senses today.

Last week Orhan won the Nobel Prize for Literature. His writings draw their force from his experience as a man torn between the traditional pull of his ancestral East and the rational push of the West — and his ability, through his novels, to turn that experience into an inquiry that illuminates a central problem of our time: How can East and West converse without going at each others’ throats? Or, as one of Pamuk’s characters put it in “Snow,” one of his greater novels: “Can the West endure any democracy achieved by enemies who in no way resemble them?” See "Pamuk's Nobel..."

Whatever happened to arts and music education in schools? What traditional inattention hadn't reduced to a pitiful few exceptions, No Child Left behind massacred. But it isn't all bleak. Here's a personal elegy to "What We Live For..."

As always, keep your eyes on Candide's Latest, updated daily and throughout the day. Thanks for reading.pt

Voodoo Economics Redux

2006-10-12T11:13:00.000+01:00

Good morning. A couple of new items...

President Bush delivered one of his trademark newseless news conferences from the Rose Garden on Wednesday. Most of it focused on Korea and Iraq. But he did make one astounding claim that most papers are ignoring, but campaign ads won't: That he has cut the budget deficit in half "three years aherad of schedule," and with $12 billion to spare. This, of course, from the man who claimed the Iraq war would cost less than $60 billion. The deficit claim is its own howler. See "W,'s Voodoo Economics."

We've democratized everything from elections to education to travel to luxury to the stock market to entertainment to publishing. One exception: When it comes to war, we’d rather know as little as possible. Leave it to the few to tell us what it’s about, to lie or tell us nothing at all. See "Democracy's Ultimate Cover-Up"

Plenty more in Candide's Latest. Thanks for reading.pt

A Bacchanal of Rushdie Affairs

2006-10-09T02:38:00.000+01:00

Good Morning... A couple of related items today.

It hasn't been a good few weeks for free expression, and neither liberals nor conservatives have much to be proud of--from France to Columbia University to YouTube. See "A Bacchanal of Rushdie Affairs."

It's official: Hell has frozen over, because I'm writing in support of one of the blog world's most reprehensible voices. But fair is fair. See "In Defense of Michelle Malkin."

Let's hope it doesn't become a habit. And do forgive. Thanks for reading.pt

Torchsong Trilogy

2006-10-05T02:56:00.000+01:00

Good morning. Several new items today.

The CBS Evening News lent 90 seconds of air time to Brian Rohrbough, father of one of the murdered students at Columbine High School. Rohrbough went on to lecture the audience about God's absence from schools, the evils of abortion and suicide, and a lost generation of kids. Free speech at its best--as long as CBS informed the viewer about Rohrbough's background. CBS didn't. See "Evangelical Taliban Does CBS Evening News."

The Tuesday Column: Ex-presidents’ lives offer a retrospective lesson in contrasts. Since World War II, Democrats have usually distinguished themselves as public servants. Republicans have distinguished themselves — when they have distinguished themselves at all — as servants of their shareholders or of themselves, or as amiable irrelevancies. The contrast goes to the heart of the philosophy of the two parties. So why is it, like ex-presidents, equally ignored? See "The Difference Between Democrats and Republicans"

Taliban Redux: What were US Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and Florida Senator Mel Martinez doing, cozying up to America's alleged arch-enemies in Afghanistan? See "Bill and Mel's Excellent Adventure"

As always, thanks for reading and for your comments.pt

States of Denial

2006-10-02T01:48:00.000+01:00

Good Monday Morning. A few new items today.

How else not to begin with Bob Woodward? But the news isn't Bush's state of denial. That's been obvious even since before Woodward wrote "Bush At War" five years ago. The more catastrophic state of denial that Woodward unwittingly reveals is his own, and the press corps' in general. See "Woodward At War."

Osama bin Laden's best ambassadors were in Washington last week for a dinner date with President Bush. See "Enemies, a Love Story."

Misunderestimating intelligence is a specialty of the White House. The latest National Intelligence Estimates retreated an old question in Washington, Bush's insistence on having read "three Shakespeares" notwithstanding: Can the president read? See "It Is Iraq, Stupid" (with apologies to James Carville).

Candide's Latest should be updated by early morning Monday. Thanks for reading.pt

36 Hours of Murder

2006-09-26T03:24:00.000+01:00

Good Morning. A few items since the weekend...

Last Wednesday evening through Thursday proved to be 36 hours of premeditated madness--a banner day and a half for the death penalty, from Florida to Delaware to North Dakota to Jordan, Iraq and Indonesia. To what end? In the Tuesday column, Pierre argues that executions in whatever form--on Iraqi streets or by lethal injection in death chambers-- are indistinguishable. See "36 Hours of Murder."

Candide's Notebooks contributor Ohdave sees the architecture of Kafka's Castle in the White House's latest torture-justifying house of cards. See "Tortured Semantics."

Kazakhstan, Borat and the Bushes: No one pays much attention to the Central Asian republic (a country four times the size of Texas). We should, now that it's gthe latest tinpot regime to cozy up to the White House. Think oil... in Candide's Latest.

McCain Mutinies Not

2006-09-22T11:42:00.000+01:00

Good Morning. A couple of new items today.

For a brief moment it looked as if John McCain and two other Republican senators might stand up to the administration's follies regarding terror suspects--illegal imprisonments, torture, kangaroo trials, and so on. Thursday evening, McCain & Co. surrendered. See "Monkey Trials After All."

"David Brooks, Grand Mufti."

A veteran assassin's warning to Pope Benedict, bombing Pakistan to the stone age, the Wall Street Journal editorial page miraculously sounding reasonable--and more: all in Candide's Latest.

Good weekend everyone.pt

Bush Does the U.N.

2006-09-20T03:03:00.000+01:00

Good morning. A couple of new items today.

His Tour for Terror over, President Bush was at the United Nations in a seemingkly altered state on Tuesday: more conciliation than bluster, more deference than belligerence. But that's only because his speech was as cleverly written as it was revealing of its disjointed, hollow core. See "Bush at the U.N., in Camouflage."

Year after year we hear that federal programs like Social Security and Medicare are heading for bankruptcy. We never hear about the Pentagon heading for bankruptcy. The presumption is that social programs can and must be cut back if the nation is to survive, but military spending cannot be: Defense is indispensable if we’re to have something left to live for. We have it backward. Military spending as a share of gross national purpose is driving us to bankruptcy in every way — economic, social, moral — faster than Social Security or Medicare could, regardless of how “burdensome” the Baby Boom generation will be on those programs. See "Engines of Defeat: Destroying the Gross National Purpose."

The Pope and his commenters have kept Candide's Latest busy. Be sure to check out the last couple of days' editions.pt

The End of the World News

2006-09-15T02:59:00.000+01:00

Good Morning. A few new items.

Pierre reveals his long-ago short-lived affair with Meredith Vieira, victim since to the degradation of television news into America's sensory aristocracy in the service of popular doping. See "The End of the World News."

Islamic Law in the Netherlands? Oliver Wendell Holmes would have approved. See "Democracy's Full Circle of Hell."

In Case you missed it: Pakistan's Infatuation with rape.

Tony Judt on the Strange Death of American Liberalism.

And in Candide's latest: The Montreal college killer's death diaries, Colin Powell's letter bashing George Bush, and wordplay over the "Clash of Civilizations."

Have a good weekend everyone, and thanks for reading.pt

Assassinating George Bush: The Flick

2006-09-13T04:00:00.000+01:00

Good Morning. A few new items.

If you haven't heard of it yet, you inevitably will very soon: a British filmmaker has just released "Death of a President," or "D.O.A.P.," a fictional documentary about the assassination of George W. Bush in 2007. The reaction has been, from the reactionary right, predictably apoplectic. Pierre writes "In Defense of "D.O.A.P."

How could we avoid it? The Tuesday column had to deal with 9/11 Five Years On. But with a bonus to make it go down easier: It includes a list of airport regulations five years from now, along with an assessment of what's been lost in the past five years: "From Solemn to Embarrassing."

George W. Soprano? Candide's Latest features The Bush Lie, Part 2,042: Those secret prisons haven't been emptied after all, as Bush claimed last week. Remember how three years ago Bush revealed to the world that he was just another Soprano? Plus, Niall Ferguson on empires crumbling, and an ongoing discussion, with contributing comments from Candide's Notebooks readers and contributors, about Peter Singer, the philosopher and animal rights activist. Join the debate. All in Candide's Latest.

Thanks for reading.pt

9/11 Remembered

2006-09-11T02:34:00.000+01:00

Good Morning. Several pieces to mark the fifth anniversary of 9/11.

On Sept. 16 and Sept. 30, 2001, I wrote two essays for the News-Journal on the attacks. They're published at Candide's Notebooks for the first time: "When Barbarism Follows Barbarism," and "Manhattan the Days After." The second piece was written following a one-week assignment in Manhattan, days after the attacks.

Candide's Notebooks Contributor OhDave writes an affecting essay, mixing the personal with the political, on what's been lost since 2001 in "Paranoid Nation."

Osama has done it again: He's released a video, right on cue, ahead of the mid-term elections, as per Bush's implicit desires. Read all about the "Al-Qaeda Video Awards."

A 9/11 anniversary would not be complete without an update: "Bush Lies, Part 2,038."

As always, keep up with the more immediate developments with Candide's Latest...

[Note: Feedburner, the service I use for these email alerts, has been erratic and unhelpful when alerted to its slumbers. Your patience is appreciated.pt]

Bush's Tour for Terror

2006-09-07T03:30:00.000+01:00

Good Morning. A couple of new items, both related to Bush's ongoing Tour for Terror speeches.

The season of raspberries has replaced the season of hurricanes: George Bush is making his terror war a fetish for fear and panic as lurid as the media’s debauch over Katie Couric’s debut on the CBS Evening News. See "Bush Co-Hosts D.C. With Osama..."

What do you do when your favorite concentration camp and its tribunals get secon-guessed by the Supreme Court? Why, you transfer the 9/11 mastermind there, in time for the 9/11 anniversary, and dare anyone to question whether he should be tried in secret, without due process. See "Tribunals Get Their Star Kangaroo..."

Plenty more in Candide's Latest... Thanks for reading.pt

Labor Daze

2006-09-05T02:38:00.000+01:00

Good Morning and (for readers in the U.S.), happy post-Labor Day. A couple of new items.

For American workers, it's felt like post-Labor Day blues for years: there's little to celebrate when ordinary workers' incomes aren't keeping up with inflation, when job security is just another gamble, and when health and retirement benefits are becoming daily punchlines to unfunny jokes on workers. How do employers get away with it? By being deceptively "inspirational" and "motivational," all the while keeping employees under a jackboot. See Pierre's Tuesday column, "Art of the Workplace Vise..."

Why do Men Love War? William Broyles answered the question in a famous essay for Esquire 22 years ago that said more about Americans' love affair with the testosterone-laden idea of war than with its repulsive reality. Here's an update on the question, and Broyles' lingering influence: "Jarheads: Romancing the Brutes..."

Gun-running by El Al, the Israeli airline? Guns are the least of it. Think bombs. Missiles. Cluster bombs. Not just under the Department of Homeland Security's eyes, but with its encouragement. Through America's civilian airports. See the item in the Monday edition of Candide's Latest, and more...

Tuesday is primary election day in Florida: Katherine Harris and Randall Terry are just a couple of the lightning-rod luminaries on the ballot. Stay tuned.pt

How Stupor Killed the Fourth Estate

2006-09-01T02:52:00.000+01:00

Good Morning. A couple of new items today.

"Who Killed the Newspaper," the most recent cover story by The Economist, got what's left of us in the newspaper industry all riled up for a few moments, while the mass of the unreading public didn't even shrug: it was too busy watching "reality" TV. But the problem isn't with newspapers' content, or even with the medium. The problem is quality journalism--not its absence, but public indifference, if not disdain, for it. The medium isn’t the problem. It’s the message. And the message is: Most people disdain any medium that presumes to make them think. Mass-market anti-intellectualism has always been a norm in American society. Mass-market anti-reflection is now the new normal. News as critical reflection, news as change agent, as the fourth-estate, is not just irrelevant. It's dead. See Pierre's "How Stupor Killed the Fourth Estate..."

Not to get you down so much before the weekend, but there's also more evidence that the United States is slouching toward second-rate economy status, if it isn't entirely there so far as its social structure is concerned. See "Dawn of a Second-Rate Economy..."

Candide's Latest, as always, remains a busy place, including choice bits on Salman Rushdie, Wole Soyinka and Naguib Mahfouz, as well as a few clouds of demagoguery from Lebanon and a couple of blog round-ups. Keep your ears open: Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson will make an appearance or two soon.

Thanks for subscribing (the ranks keep growing). Spread the word about The Notebooks. And for all the gray graphs about median incomes and middling economies, have a good weekend.pt

Porn, Proctology and Hijackers

2006-08-29T03:06:00.000+01:00

Good Morning. Several new items since the weekend.

Pierre's Tuesday column looks back at the five years since 9/11, notes that sometime over the next few weeks the death toll of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan will equal that of 9/11, and asks who, since then, has been American values' real hijackers. See "America's Hijackers Five Years On..."

Porn for Troops: It's a truism that in war violence and porn join with seamless abandon. On Sunday, the New York Times ran what looked like an innocuous front-page story about risque dancers putting on shows for troops in Iraq. But the story was anything but innocuous, when you consider where the soft-porn shows were held: Haditha, the city where Marines conducted a massacre on 24 Iraqi civilians last year. See "From Massacre to Lap-Dance..."

Once in a while it's necessary to stop and bend over, not quite to smell the rose. Pierre describes his latest visit to the doctor's and reaches a few religious conclusions in "The Prods that Try Men's Souls..."

Candide's Latest has been extra busy with commentary on Katrina, our abusive military, and American fashion's sexualization of young girls, among many other items, all in Candide's Latest and its previous editions.

Thanks for reading, and remember: help spread the word about Candide's Notebooks.pt

Few politicians die, and none resign.
—Thomas Jefferson

Polls and Bellwethers

2006-08-24T03:19:00.000+01:00

Good Morning. A couple of new items today.

The Pity of Polls: It could briefly be played up as a significant number, and the New York Times is certainly trying to headline it as such: 51 percent of Americans see no link between the terror war and the Iraq war. But it isn’t significant. It’s closer to pathetic, like taking heart from the fact that 51 percent of Americans don’t think the Apollo 11 Moon landing was staged, or that 30 percent don’t think angels exist. That 51 percent who see no link between Iraq and terror still means a proportion approaching half, half, still think there is a link. Why? Because the Bush administration's true war has been a triumph. See "How Bush Won His War and Defeated the Constitution."

Bellwether Broil: As goes Ohio, so goes the nation. The 2004 election was pretty much stolen in Ohio. The 2006 mid-term election there has a Senate and governor's race portending plenty for the political futyre of the nation. Candide's Notebooks contributor Ohdave (that's Ohio Dave, by the way), previews what's at stake in "Ohio's 2006 Verdict on America."

As always, Candide's Latest is a busy place--Iran's bait game, the continuing badgering of Judge Taylor's decision declaring Bush's domestic wiretapping illegal, and more.

Thanks for reading. Your participation in the comment section at the site is always appreciated. pt

America On Drugs

2006-08-22T03:04:00.000+01:00

Good Morning. Several new items today, and the caffeine hasn't yet kicked in.

David Murray, a drug policy analyst for the Bush administration, was asked recently about cocaine cultivation in Colombia, where the United States is fighting an expensive, low-grade war against coca growers since 2000. “This is a trade whose days are numbered,” Murray told The New York Times. The phrase rang of Vice President Dick Cheney’s evaluation of the Iraqi civil war in May 2005: “I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.” Someone should find out what these Bush types are, if you will, smoking: Pierre's Tuesday column is an analysis of the American way of losing wars--the war in Iraq, in Afghanistan, on terror, on drugs--all of which ensure that, when admitting defeat is not an option, defeat becomes the only certainty. See America On Drugs...

President Bush's news conference on Monday was a classic case of gunboat diplomacy gone stale on the shoals of electoral desperation. See the recap here...

From Candide's Notebooks contributor William C. Hall, here's "A Short History of American Warfare."

As always, thanks for reading, and check the Notebooks' Front Page for the latest...pt

Lieberman, L'Immoraliste

2006-08-21T02:32:00.000+01:00

Good Morning. A few new items to start the week.

So his eminence Joe Lieberman declared on a Sunday morning chat show, without hint of having been drugged beforehand, that Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld should resign. Of course it's Lieberman playing craven catch-up with the anti-war vote. But there's more to Lieberman as the country's chief immoralist. See Pierre's "Born-Again Prig: Lieberman, L'Immoraliste..."

The Gunter Grass controversy produces two good fresh defenses of the magic mountaineer. Here's a piece by Daniel Kehlmann, "A Prisoner of the Nobel," and one by the great Peter Gay, "The Fictions of Gunter Grass..."

Candide's Latest would have made Proust proud of late: Don't miss the weekend's version, which included a romp through South Korea's Love Land park (a pictorial experience you won't soon regret; the permalink is here, in case you read this beyond Monday). Also: Is the US military now an army of rapists? And a review of the latest blog recommendations in Monday Morning Bloggerback. All in Candide's Latest...

Thanks for reading.pt

Waffen SS and Wiretaps

2006-08-18T02:40:00.000+01:00

Good Morning. A few new items got past NSA censors today.

The Constitution has been in assisted living for the better part of the last five years. Thursday it had a nice little outing in the sun, compliments of a 73-year-old federal judge, a Carter appointee, who declared the Bush junta's NSA-wiretapping scheme unconstitutional. The reactionaries were quick to pounce. Liberals are dancing. Libertarians may be breathing a bit easier, though with them you never know anymore. Pierre has "A Brief Hang-up On Wiretaps."

It's not as big a story here as it is on the other side of the Atlantic because literature barely has a cult following in the United States anymore, foreign literature even less, and history no memory at all. But Gunter Grass's revelation that he was a Waffen SS in the waning days of World War II has Germany breaking up all over again--either in stitches or in vengeful self-righteousness. Helped by lustful memories of his own, Pierre defends the author of "The Tin Drum" in "The Stoning of Gunter Grass..."

How do reactionaries politely, intellectually call Islam a terrorist religion and get away with it? Roger Scruton shows how in his smelly-styled "Islamofascists," compliments of the Wall Street Journal's aromatically challenged OpEd page.

Candide's Latest has been a beehive lately: too much to recap here, but it's always there.

A special thanks to the many new subscribers of the last couple of weeks: the numbers are up, the response gratifying. Remember to check the front page of The Notebooks for roving updates. Have a good weekend.pt

Terror Doctrines

2006-08-16T01:17:00.000+01:00

Good Morning. A couple of new items today.

Any lingering doubts about the British terror plot's extent and veracity? The Britain plot sounds too much like a variant on the WMD story — more fear than fact, more tell than show. I don’t buy it, even though it’s not a question of whether terrorists will strike — at some point they probably will — but whether they need to strike at all to have the desired effect, and whether we’re interested in stopping them. In both cases, the answer is no. See "Fear, Deception, Terror: The Bush legacy"...

Candide's Notebooks Contributor Ohdave gives us a review of Ron Suskind's "The One Percent Doctrine." See "Dick Cheney's Junta..."

If you haven't yet read Thomas Franks's "What's the Matter With Kansas," his brilliant book about the working class and heartland Republican fixation on sticking with GOP politics that are squarely against their self-interest, perhaps it's time you do. Failing that, the New York Times has had Thomas Frank provide a few guest columns on its OpEd pages while its regular riters appear to have adopted the French vacation schedule for the month of August. Here are two tasty treats from Frank: "The Spoils of Victimhood," where demolishes the myth of Bush or the Republicans as enacting any sort of "insurgency" against the Washington establishment, since they are the establishment; and "A Distant Mirror," which opens thus: "By now, even the most dedicated “values voter” is aware that an orgy of plunder and predation grinds merrily on in the capital, yet if polls are to be believed, the Democrats can persuade almost nobody to switch their vote on that basis. That’s because, while they have many nice slogans on the subject, Democrats offer no larger theory of corruption, no way to help voters understand what is essentially Republican about the pillage currently being visited on our national government.

Remember to check Candide's Latest for... well, the latest.pt

A Cease-Fire on paper Only

2006-08-14T03:13:00.000+01:00

Good Morning.

By the time you read this a cease-fire was to have gone into effect in lebanon (at 1 a.m. Monday, EST). Here are Pierre's Cease-Fire Fantasies...

In today's Recommendations, Even Sunday evening it was evident that the Lebanese government, with hezbollah providing the weaponry, would shoot itself in the foot: it's a no-go on sending lebanese troops to the south. Great Israeli novelist David Grossman three days ago publicly called on the Israeli government to end its war in lebanon. On Sunday, Grossman learned that his 20-year-old son was killed in operations with the Israeli military inside Lebanon. And the New York Times tries to be fair and balanced in an analysis of what it takes to fairly report a war in the Middle East. All and more here...

The day promises many developments. Stay tuned with the latest in the Recommendations segment.pt

Terror's Foils

2006-08-11T03:05:00.000+01:00

Good Morning. A busy few items.

Fear and terror, anyone? The homeland authorities in London and Washington are falling over themselves with a mixture of self-congratulation and heightened fear-peddling in the aftermath of the foiled plot, or alleged plot, to blast several airliners out of the Transatlantic sky. Pierre has his doubts about the victory: foiled or not, as long as fear predominates, terrorism is still the victor--without lighting one fuse. See When Terror Is the Foil...

Remember the Marines' landing in Beirut in 1958, to save the government from a supposed overthrow? Candide's Notebooks contributor Sam Conant was an 18-year-old Marine then, and he was there. He remembers it in Eyewitness to Bikinis...

Our Matanzas Heritage: In Spanish, "Matanzas" means "massacre." It's a common place-name in Florida (a high school by that name just opened locally), for good reason: the place was founded in the blood of religious wars' massacres imported from Old Europe. Candide's Notebooks contributor Bill Hall argues that "Any ethical distinctions separating today’s Mullahs, Rabbis and Christian clergy from the outrages of our own history is illusory as we remain the world’s leading maker of war and the weapons of war." See Their Mullahs, Our Matanzas Heritage...

Candide's Recommendations have been particularly busy, all here and here...

Thank you for the readership. Remember to spread the word when you can: Candide's Notebooks depends on it. Have a good weekend.pt

Fakery and Butchery

2006-08-09T03:39:00.000+01:00


Fake this

Good Morning. A few new items today.

Some of you may have heard about Adnan Hajj, or at least seen his photographs. He's the Reuters photographer who's been caught faking some of his pictures from Lebanon. The right-wing blogosphere has jumped all over the case as proof of a vast Hezbollah conspiracy to massage and manage the news out of Lebanon--as if the war's real butchery was just a sideshow. Pierre counters the Adnan Hajj bandwagon's attempt to deflect attention from the real horrors in Lebanon: The Pictures Are Fake. The Butchery Isn't.

At this writing it looked like Ned Lamont was pulling it off: he was beating Joe Lieberman in Connecticut's Democratic primary. We got a little bit ahead of ourselves and called the race in his favor at 10:30 p.m. Tuesday night, because it was time for bed and, well, Candide's Notebooks contributor Ohdave sent in this dispatch arguing why a Lamont win is good for the Democratic Party: Anchors Away...

Wafa Sultan: She's the firy Syrian psychiatrist whose February appearance on al-Jazeera, denouncing Islam's barbarism and violence, has made her the darling of e-mail forwarders and conservatives looking for an Arab-looking stick to bash Islam with. But is she for real? Well, yes, and she's no crackpot, but she's not the crock-pot of pluralism and enlightenment she's been made out to be, either. Pierre's Tuesday Column: The False Seduction of Wafa Sultan...

Pierre quoted by Foxnews.com? Actually, yes, as a result of that column I wrote on back in June on those idiotic NBC shows that go after sexual predators. The original column is here, and the foxnews.com piece here.

Finally, the usual run-down of the latest of Candide's Recommendations...

Welcome to quite a few new subscribers in the last few days. Thanks for reading. pt

Elegy At Graveside: From Philip Roth to Lebanon

2006-08-07T02:46:00.000+01:00

Good Morning. A few new items today.

Another day, another massacre. This time at Israel's expense. Hezbollah's missile attacks on Israel are becoming more frequent, more lethal, less discriminating, although the massacre at Kfar Giladis was mostly of Israeli reserve soldiers. "Retaliation's Mutual Injustice" looks at the consequences...

The world goes on. The Notebooks have focused almost exclusively on the Lebanon war for the last three and a half weeks. But the Notebooks are not primarily a Lebanon or Mideastern site. So we return, slowly, to our regularly scheduled programming with a critical essay by Pierre on Philip Roth's his latest, and very good, novel: "Everyman."

Candide's Recommendations: Because of the variety and extent of the recommendations lately, at least two days' editions will be kept on the front page. You can access the current, latest recommendations here, and the previous day's recommendations here.

Problems with the alerts? Suggestions? Let me know at ptristam@att.net and, as always, thanks for reading.pt

Dude, Here Is Your Civil War

2006-08-04T03:42:00.000+01:00

Good Morning. A few new items today.

Dude, Here's Your Civil War: Remember Ralph Peters, the occasional New York Post columnist and permanent Pentagon flacker who tripped around Baghdad last March and derisively asked, "Dude, Where's My Civil War?" He might have found his answer fuming in a Senate committee hearing on Thursday, as we revisit the wildfires of the Iraqi ranch...

Room for Disagreement: The focus on Lebanon in the last three weeks has generated what no discussion about the Levant has managed to avoid since the third day of creation (did God create oranges first that day, or lemons? Citrus groves have been waging their own intifadas over that one ever since). Namely: disagreement. I post two of the more compelling recent comments, one by an American married to a Lebanese Christian, disagreeing with my characterization of Hezbollah as, among other things, a Shiite Taliban. The other, by one of our friends at Jewlicious, disagreeing with my take on Israeli designs as described in yesterday’s piece. See the letters...
Candide's Recommendations for Friday will be posted today in the early morning hours, Eastern Standard.

Good weekend all.pt

A Preemeditated War--Going Back to 2005

2006-08-03T03:06:00.000+01:00

Good Morning. Two new items today.

On July 10, 2006, two days before the Hezbollah caputure of Israeli soldiers and the Israeli assault on lebanon, the Wall Street Journal coincidentally ran a front-page analysis of Hezbollah's evolution into a polkitical force in lebanon. A third of the way into the article, in a paragraph describing the attacks on Hamas in Gaza, the reader comes across this curious line: “[W]orried that Hezbollah’s armed wing might attack too, the Israeli military has issued a high-level alert along its northern border with Lebanon.” From there, Pierre connects dots all the way back to May 2005 to conclude that the ongoing war was premeditated (and put on hold by the Hariri assassination), and that the end game this time is no different than in 1982: installing a pro-Israel president in Lebanon, whose name happens to be Michel Aoun, his current alliance with Hezbollah notwithstanding. See the full article here...

Today's edition of Candide's Recommendations is a bit long, but worth the browse: The war's latest "occupation" euphemisms; how America's neo-cons, out of targets to radicalize, are going after Cuba now that Castro is on his seventeenth death bed; how Marines are deflecting attention from the Haditha massacre in Iraq by suing... John Murtha (!); how Tony Blair has become Britain's Bush, bumblings and idiocy included; and what bloggers are reporting on a Qana conspiracy theory, Dick Cheney's war on civil liberties and cats that look like Hitler. All in Candide's Recommendations...

As always, Ecrasez l'infame! and thanks for reading.pt

From Baalbek to America's Taliban

2006-08-02T04:27:00.000+01:00

Good morning. Several new items today.

If you missed the Tuesday column, say your prayers: Pierre looks at America's Evangelical Taliban and finds few differences with its Islamic variants--incitements to violence included: "At this late stage of the Bush rapture, American evangelism is a lot like the Exxon Valdez: Massive, sloshing with oily energy and not a little drunk on its power as it steers through hazards of its own designs. The moment evangelicals began tearing down the church-state wall, the rubble became their shoals. The wreck will be ugly." See "America's Evangelical Taliban..."

News was trickling out late Tuesday evening of an Israeli airborne assault on Baalbek, the town in eastern Lebanon's Bekaa Valley that's home to some of the greatest Roman ruins. Here's a more personal and at times sappy essay that has nothing to do with politics and the war, and everything to do with a boyhood's memories of one's father in the ruins of Baalbek several decades ago: "In My Father's Court: Baalbek..."

Horn-tooting time: I was interviewed and The Notebooks featured in a religion column by Cary McMullen of The Ledger in Lakeland (the New York Times-owned daily where I used to work), in the context of--what else, Lebanon's tap-dance between Israel and Hezbollah. See the column in full...

A busy day for Candide's Recommendations: The latest Orwellian chicaneries from Ehud Olmert, Stiletto diplomacy from Condi Rice, unsurprising bigotry from Mel Gibson, whose latest act is a Richard Nixon impersonation, a round-up of bloggers' views, and quite a bit more. All in Candide's Garden...

As always, remember that the Notebooks update throughout the day. Join the conversation, drop in a comment or two, and thanks for reading.pt

Massacre Redux

2006-07-31T02:02:00.000+01:00

Good Morning, at least here. The latest massacre at Qana in Lebanon dominates.

In "When 'Never Again' Needn't Apply to Lebanon," I looks back at the massacre at Qana in 1996, during Israel's "Operation Grapes of Wrath"--the assault that Shimon Peres halted as a result of the shelling attack on the refugees at Qana, which killed 102 civilians who'd escaped to a UN camp there. The 1996 massacre is compared with Sundays: nothing has changed, except for the bombing halt: Peres' bombing was over for good. Olmert's is to last only two days. See the full post...

Candide's Recommendations on Sunday were focused entirely on the attacks, with links to bloggers' pictures that aren't likely to make it to the front pages and the evening newscasts, as well as Michael Totten's prediction of an impending civil war in Lebanon. The permanent lionk to Sunday's recommendations is here. I hope to have the recommendations updated for Monday by early morning on the front page, here.

As always, check for roving updates on the front page. Thank you for your interest in the Notebooks.pt

Hubris in Retreat?

2006-07-28T03:48:00.000+01:00

Good Morning. Some of you may not be getting these emails in as timely a way as Feedburner promises us (they're scheduled to ship out to your mailbox around 5:30 a.m. Eastern time). It's a problem with the so-called "Atom" feed. I have no idea what the technicalities mean, but we're working on it and hope to have it resolved soon. Meanwhile, a couple of new items:

Morality Is Not On Israel's Side: Leave it to the Israeli press to have the more honest dialogue on the Lebanon war: This piece, almost unthinkable on the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times or the Washington Post, and a likely invitation to asinine boycots and accusations of anti-Semitism were it to be written by an Arab and run in any one of a thousand dailies across the United States, appeared on July 25 in Haaretz, one of Israel's two principal dailies. See the full column by Ze'ev Maoz.

Candide's Recommendations today are long-winded but varied: While Israel is deciding against a "wider offensive," Arab opinion is slouching toward Hezbollah. Alabama police wants to learn SWAT techniques from Israel. Several links about the Lebanon war in photographs. And a blog round-up. All here...

Check in with the Notebooks for roving updates. Have a good weekend.pt

Neither Israel Nor Hezbollah

2006-07-27T03:38:00.000+01:00

Good Morning. Several new items today.

The American mentality of you're-either-with-us-or-you're-with-the-terrorists rears again, and wants you to choose sides in the Lebanon war. But it's a false choice. The only just one, as Pierre argues, is Neither Israel Nor Hezbollah.

24 hours before their worst day yet, Israeli soldiers were pictured brandishing captured Lebanese and Hezbollah flags on their return from Lebanon. The picture speaks of the gang-rape of Lebanon by an essentially Israeli-Hezbollah alliance of destruction.

The Accidental War: "This is madness, and it should end. It is madness because the likelihood of Israel achieving the war aims it has set for itself is negligible. However much punishment Mr Olmert inflicts on Hizbullah, he cannot force it to submit in a way that its leaders and followers will perceive as a humiliation. Israel’s first invasion of Lebanon turned into its Vietnam. It is plainly unwilling to occupy the place again. But airpower alone will never destroy every last rocket and prevent Hizbullah’s fighters from continuing to send them off. No other outside force looks capable of doing the job on Israel’s behalf. At present, the only way to disarm Hizbullah is therefore in the context of an agreement Hizbullah itself can be made to accept." See The Economist's lead editorial in full...

Rim Jobs: Candide's Recommendations include commentary and links on the latest in Lebanon, where Israel suffered its heaviest losses yet; on war bloggers; and on Washington State joining the regressive movement against gay marriage.

Candide's Notebooks updates throughout the day. Thanks for visiting.pt

Blankets in July

2006-07-26T03:21:00.000+01:00

Good morning. Three new items today.

A little worn out by the barrage of material on the bombings? Here's a dig from the heart's archives: The New York Times published this piece as an OpEd in 1982. I’d been out of Lebanon for three years and failing miserably at forgetting. I remember reading this back then, clipping it, savoring it, typing it over and sending it to my grandmother in Lebanon. There’s never been a better time to revive it, now that so many Lebanese have been made to feel like such strangers in their own land: "Turning lebanese: A Family Story," by Barbara Beway (with a poicture of Lebanon's mighty Sannin mountain]

Candide's Notebooks contributor OhDave argues against the now-commonly peddled notion that siding against Israel means "siding with the terrorists" in "Wrong Question, Right Response."

Candide's Recommendations: Links to the latest follies in Beirut, including Condi Rice's blanket idiocy, Hezbollah's Nasralla's television promise of launching missiles "beyond Haifa," and a terrific column in Beirut's Daily Star about Israel appearing to be, to some Muslims anyway, like the lesser enemy in this go-around. All here...

Remember: Candide's Recommendations are updated throughout the day. Thanks for visiting. pt

Terror's Weaponry

2006-07-25T05:28:00.000+01:00

Good Morning. A few new items today, unfortunately still focused on Lebanon (we'll get awayt from that soon, I hope).

The Tuesday Column looks at the myth of eternal enmity between Arabs and Jews: Compared with two millennia of enmity between Europeans, or two centuries of exported warfare by the United States, Arabs and Jews look like the new kids on the bloc of mutual disdain. They haven't at all been at it forever, nor are they doomed to be at it regardless of their recent history--much of it a history of hatreds seeded by European anti-Semitism and Euro-American realpolitik. See the full column...

Terror's weaponry: The more the Israeli assault lasts, the more distant it gets from its presumed aim of destroying Hezbollah—the more impossible it becomes to destroy what the bombing campaign of the last twelve days can only recharge and redirect in proportion to the tonnage of savagery it is dropping on Lebanon. Who, the Lebanese are rightfully asking themselves, are the terrorists now? See "Pity the Nation..."

Candide's recommendations: No Rice-Throwing, Please--and other fall-out from Condi Rice's pointless, two-weeks-too-late drop-kick into Lebanon. Also: Alan Dershowitz thinks civilians who don't leave their homes when asked to leave areas being bombed are complicit with terrorists. The links and more here.

Amos Oz Shoots Down the Doves

2006-07-22T22:31:00.000+01:00

Good Sunday morning.

Last Sunday Candide’s Notebooks published a piece on Amos Oz, one of Israel’s leading intellectuals and leaders of the peace movement, recalling an essay he wrote twenty-four years ago about the divide between Arabs and Israelis, and how to bridge it. On Wednesday, Oz wrote a brief essay for the Los Angeles Times in which he broke from his past criticism of Israeli military action in Lebanon, this time wholeheartedly supporting it because “a defeat of a militant Islamist terror organization may dramatically enhance the chances for peace in the region.” Cecilia Lucas, a graduate student in education at the University of California at Berkley and a new contributor to the Notebooks, responds to Amos Oz.

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon is proceeding apace, with few clear-sighted views to recommend. Here's one of them, by Gideon Levy in Haaretz, who writes: "The war that the IDF has now declared on Lebanon and before it on Gaza, will never be considered another "war of no choice." Let's save that debate from the historians. This is unequivocally a war of choice. The IDF absorbed two painful blows, which were particularly humiliating, and in their wake went into a war that is all about restoring its lost dignity, which on our side is called "restoring deterrent capabilities." Neither in Lebanon nor certainly in Gaza, can anyone formulate the real goals of the war, so nobody knows for sure what will be considered victory or an achievement." See the full column, "Operation Peace for the IDF"...

Also:

We have John Tierney's latest column on the Republican Party as Stem-Cell Poopers, or what Tierney calls "The Church Lady Party"
Frank Rich Does "The Passion of the Embryo"

As always, check the Notebooks' Front Page for rolling updates.

Lebanon Plunders, 1982-2006

2006-07-21T03:06:00.000+01:00

Good morning. One (long) new item today to accompany the picture of the young Lebanese girl, above, walking through the ruins of the village of Ferzoul in Lebanon's bekaa Valley.

Reagan’s “Outrage,” Bush’s Silence: Here's the somewhat forgotten story of August 12, 1982, the day that saw the worst bombing of Beirut at the tail end of Irsael's 1982 invasion, promting Ronald Reagan's public "outrage" and direct involvement to demand a ceasefire. The article, with numerous links to original reporting from 1982, compares Reagan's reaction then to George Bush's reaction this go around, without quite mythologizing Reagan's role: for all the Gipper's outrage, it was 18,000 deaths too late, and it couldn;t prevent Sabra and Shatila, barely a month hence. What out-of-control surprisers are in store with this invasion as Israelis prepare to enter Lebanon with ground troops? See the full article here...

Candide's Recommendations for Friday will be updated by 8 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.

Black Wednesday

2006-07-20T04:21:00.000+01:00

Good Morning. Several new items, and the grimmest day yet in lebanon.

Bush to Lebanon: Drop Dead. The Bush administration has decided to sit back and let the bombings carry on for at least a week, maybe many more, as Israel "vows to finish the job." Diplomacy is as dead as possibilities of peace, even when the bombing stops. Pierre writes about the degradation of American foreign policy's morality.

The Perpetual Refugee is a terrific new blogger, a Lebanese businessman exiled in Canada who happens to be stuck in Beirut at the moment. Candide's Notebooks features two of his very best posts--one an obscene encounter with Irsaeli customs officials, the other, a moving tribute to his grandfather, Jido, shocked ouit of his house by the bombing campaign. See The Perpetual Refugee...

Candide's Recommendations include the latest from Lebanon, including links to a Finacial Times interview with Lebanese PM Fouad Siniora, how the US government is charging Americans $300 to evacuate them, The Guardian's report on the destruction of an entire village in South Lebanon, Robert Fisk on seeing terror outside his Beirut window, The Toronto Globe and Mail Beirut correspondent blogging on an eerie walk through Solidere, the renovated Beirut neighbhood now gone dead again, and a London times report on the dead and rotting in Beirut's ruins. Also: The US deploying an anti-missile system in Okinawa, George Bush's stem-cell veto destroying hopes of curing Republicanism and its many derivative diseases any time soon, and the New York Times thinning out for shareholders' sake. All in Candide's Recommendations...

The Notebooks' Front Page updates throughout the day, in the recommendations box especially. Your suggestions and partricipation through comments are welcome.

Israel Is as Hezbollah Does

2006-07-18T04:16:00.000+01:00

Good morning. Three new items at the Notebooks today.

Pierre's Tuesday Column for the Daytona Beach News-Journal: "Israel Is as Hezbollah Does," or how Israel and Hezbollah are mutually assuring Lebanon's destruction while sparing each other the brunt of the barbarism they're inflicting.

Candide's Notebooks contributor Ohdave could not resist giving Bush's expletive-buttered pre-lunch chat with Tony Blair his own just dessert: "An American president without an idea, and a British PM afraid to assert his."

Candide's recommendations today include James Wolcott refusing to join "the Israeli division of the 101st Fighting Wankers," Michael Kinsley's last words before brain surgery, and The New Yorker's Adam Gopnick going Camus on Zidane's head-butt. All here. The recommendations are updated throughout the day.

How To Cure a Fanatic: The Amos Oz Solution

2006-07-17T03:14:00.000+01:00

Good morning. Two new items today.

The column was entitled “Arabs and Israelis—All Victims of Europe.” It was published in The New York Times on May 19, 1982. It was written by Amos Oz, the great Israeli writer. Pierre looks back at that column, how little has changed since, how much could change if Oz's ideas took hold. See "How to Cure a Fanatic"...

Candide Recommends: The rain of terror continues in lebanon: Links to a Los Angeles Times report on Beirut's reconstructed dream, lost again; a profile of Hezbollah's Hasan Nasrallah; and how the New York Times discovers five years too late that the Bush administration was never about 9/11, but about profit and opportunism for the Executive's sake. The links here...

A Savage and Unwinnable Gambit

2006-07-15T03:50:00.000+01:00

Pierre's Latest: As Lebanon burns, Israel and Hesballah tango in A Savage and Unwinnable Gambit :

The irony is that Israel’s conditions for a cease-fire are nothing if not reasonable: Return the two Israeli soldiers. Quit the rocket attacks on Northern Israel. Disarm Hezballah. Any Lebanese worth his cedars would gladly set out those conditions himself. But in the meantime, this? A nation taken hostage? Thirty civilians a day slaughtered in the bombing? An economy finally on its feet, ruined all over again? A blockade? This isn’t just a matter of disproportion. It’s sheer madness, the result of an Israeli prime minister with something of a Kennedyesque inferiority complex (Lebanon as a Bay of Pigs, but without the benefit of invasion interruptus) enabled and just about applauded by an American president who wouldn’t know the difference between a self-defensive war and crimes against humanity if Saint Augustin shouted it in his ears, deafened as they’ve been by his predilection for shock and awe. Read the full essay...

And Candide Recommends:

BEIRUT BLASTS: It may be Bastille Day, but it’s bombing time all over again for Lebanon, where it’s as if the rewind button’s been pressed back twenty years. David Ignatius in the Washington Post (Ignatius covered parts of the Lebanon war for the Wall Street Journal in the early 1980s): “Watching the events of the past few days, you can't help but feel that this is the rerun of an old movie -- one in which the guerrillas and kidnappers end up as the winners.” Not to be outdone by the movie analogy, here’s Thomas Friedman in the Times: “When you watch the violence unfolding in the Middle East today it is easy to feel that you’ve been to this movie before and that you know how it ends — badly.”

DEFICIT-MAD: Paul Krugman reminds us that there's more to Bush failures than the Middle East in "Left Behind Economics."

See what bloggers are saying in Lebanon, a round-up here...

Check in with the Notebooks' front page for updates from Lebanon and beyond throughout the day.

Minds Without Borders

Israel's Malice

2006-07-13T02:23:00.000+01:00

Pierre's Latest:

There is fair retaliation, then there’s malice: the destruction of the Qasmiyeh bridge on Lebanon’s coastal north-south highway by the Israeli army on Wednesday dispels any notion that the July 12 attack was motivated purely by Hezbollah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers. Malice, the kind of malice that’s been uprooting Palestinians’ olive trees purely as expressions of vindictive power for years (“terrorists” don’t grow on trees, nor have olives been known to be used as particularly effective projectiles by Palestinian insurgents) was at play in this latest “incursion,” the first serious one in six years. Not that the attack itself was justified retaliation: countries don’t generally invade other countries with tanks and bombing runs when a few of their men are captured. But we’re in the Middle East, where nut-mongering is the rule and the laws of war a punch line to something Cheneyesque. Invasions are Mideast history’s commutes. Israel's Malice in full...

And Candide Recommends:

ZIDANE SPEAKS! All excuses, zero regrets. See the Reuters report as well as, in French, how L'Equipe treats Zidane's interview on Canal Plus this evening. So boorish Materazzi insulted his mother and his sister. And this is how a grown man responds?

The war on immigrants continues to evolve brash and bigoted weaponry: The Wall Street Journal today reports on how “politicians from Massachusetts to California are drawing up laws and ordinances to limit illegal immigrants' access to jobs, housing and government services. The officials argue that illegal residents are overburdening local schools and hospitals and straining public finances.” The piece follows up on a similar take by The New York Times on Sunday, which focused on the racist mayor of Avon Park, Fla., who, like a brother-bigot mayor in Hazelton, Pa., pushing a similarly racist ordinance in his town, longs for the days when “nuclear families were the only occupants of single-family homes in their towns, every resident paid taxes and English was the only language heard on the streets.”

Debt and Kryptonite

2006-07-11T16:28:00.000+01:00

When the only way to go is up, it’s easy to make things look rosier than they are. But two things about pink: It’s still a derivative of red, whether we’re talking blood or red ink. On Tuesday, and in a ceremony fit for the USS Abraham Lincoln, President Bush declared victory against the deficit. My Tuesday column shows why that "victory" has so much in common with Bush's rolling "victory" in Iraq: Bush's Deficit Fog in full...

Frequent CN contributor and pop culture columnist Rick de Yampert takes on Superman's erectile shyness in Krypton and Nothingness...

And in other reads, Candide Recommends:

The Wall Street Journal's Peter Waldman reports on the FBI's favored tactic of corralling Muslim informants: use their Green Card to blackmail them and threaten deportation if they don't join up. As one FBI agent told Yassine Ouassif, the Moroccan subject of the story, "America is just like a bus, and you have a choice to make: Either you board the bus, or you leave." Emma Lazarus, R.I.P. The whole story here…
Zidane's self-implosion is still the story of the planet, the circling hurricane that won't abate. Leave it to Bernard-Henri Lévy, also in today's Journal, to tell us what led this man, "a man more admired than the Pope, the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela put together," to implode: It isn't the insults. "No. The truth is that it is perhaps not so easy to stay in the skin of an icon, demigod, hero, legend." The essay here...

CSI: Germany

2006-07-11T03:26:00.000+01:00

Well, here it is: your complete World Cup postmortem in three easy pieces, including everything you need to know (and some of what you didn't) about that Zidane head-butt to Italy's sternum. Two pieces are from Notebooks contributors; you can see the front-page lay-out of the entire package by clicking here, or go to each individual piece:

And for those of you who are sick and tired of the World Cup, here are a few good reads recommended by Candide:

Missile Envy: North Korea, Bush Ally

2006-07-08T16:08:00.000+01:00

There is of course no danger of a Kim Jong Il-starred missile ever grazing so much as a Pentagon radar’s anxieties: North Korea is a nation where even ants starve and technology runs on the digestive clockwork of oxen. Its ability to fire off an ICBM that could do more than kill a few hapless fish in the Sea of Japan is somewhere between one-in-a-million and the Hubble Deep Field (though its ability to turn patches of South Korea into a deep field of its own is less in doubt). But if Bush could turn al-Qaeda’s posse of spectacular fanatics and conventional imbeciles into a threat on par with Nazi Germany, and if his administration could turn Saddam into the greatest evil since Stalin, then surely his Cheney-trained handmaids can spin a tale of North Korean missiles threatening everything from the Golden Gate to Aunt Bethel’s collection of souvenir spoons in Miami Beach. And if they can do that, as they have, then North Korea can be a running advocacy campaign for Bush’s version of Star Wars—his “missile defense” initiative currently devouring $10 billion a year to go with the $150 billion spent on the blanched elephant since Ronald Reagan concocted it in March 1983. Sure enough, on Friday Bush was all engorged for his missiles: “It’s been three days since North Korea fired those missiles,” a reporter asked him in Chicago. “Yesterday you said you did not know the trajectory of the long-range missile. Can you now tell us where was it was headed? And if it were headed? And if it were headed—if it had been headed at the United States, how would our national ballistic missile system have taken it down?”

Bush’s response was at first jocular, because he’s a great kidder, because ICBMs are a hoot, and because, gosh darn it, people like him that way. Read the rest...

Kipling on the Loose: Thomas Friedman's Toxic Tourism

2006-07-06T01:23:00.000+01:00

LIMA, Peru—The best part of this job is being able to step outside of your routine and occasionally look at the world through a completely different lens. The Peruvian Amazon rain forest is such a lens, and looking at the world through this dense jungle has given me new perspectives on two issues — Middle East violence and the spread of the Internet.
—The first lines of Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column, July 5, 2006

From the doorway of La Crónica Santiago looks at the Avenida Tacna without love: cars, uneven and faded buildings, the gaudy skeletons of posters floating in the mist, the gray midday. At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?
—The first lines of Mario Vargas Llosa’s Conversation in the Cathedral (1974).

One quote appears to have nothing to do with the other. But neither do Friedman’s juxtapositions, or his quests for the soppy metaphor. You’d think the New York subway would be as good a place as any, jungle-wise, to “look at the world through a completely different lens.” There’s a subway stop half a block away from Friedman’s office. Timesmen who work on the building’s eleventh floor must think the underground peruvia non grata. So the juxtaposition begs the question: at what precise moment did Thomas Friedman go Peruvian on his own Amazon rear? Answer: January 1, 1995, the day he published his first “Foreign Affairs” column for the Times and heralded the age of imperialism with a liberal face. Or Rudyard Kipling minus the poetry, the style, the occasional substance, the ear for irony.

So we get sentences like today’s: “What is so striking about the rain forest, when viewed up close, is what an incredibly violent place it is—with trees, plants and vines all struggling with each other for sunlight, and animals, insects and birds doing the same for food.” Funny. I could say the same about the copse of woods in back of my Floridian house, or stage where two or more lobbyists compete for a legislator’s price. Seen up close of course the last thing any of this is is violent. It’s placid, well-mannered, immobile. It takes perspective, a bit of analysis, seeing the forest for the trees sort of thing—doing what Friedman seems incapable of—to reflect the ecosystem’s violence. It takes abandoning the very preconceptions and presumptions going to a place like the Peruvian jungle was meant to do. So he goes from vines and jungle animals competing “with an identifiable purpose” to describing the violence between Israelis and Palestinians as “utterly without purpose.” Read the rest...

Burning Emotions: The Real Threats to the Flag

2006-07-04T14:14:00.000+01:00

As the U.S. Senate contributed mightily to global warming while debating a constitutional amendment to ban flag-desecration last week, the Citizens Flag Alliance (“representing 147 organizations and over 20 million members”) made this startling announcement: Flag-desecration incidents are up 33 percent this year. That is, there’s been four incidents reported so far this year, compared with three by June last year.

And those four incidents? Early the morning of June 22 on a residential Brooklyn street, louts thought to be teens just out of school set on fire a few flags in people’s yards. Two weeks earlier, a drunken man in West Haven, Conn., desecrated a flag while chugging beer and taunting passers-by on a bike path. On May 30, vandals stole a flag from a VFW Post in Mineville, N.Y., and burned it. And on May 13 in a small New Hampshire town, 13 flags hanging from a VFW building were sliced into ribbons. Each of these, except the drunker man’s desecration (he could be prosecuted for drinking beer in public, but not messing with a flag) are misdemeanors punishable by perfectly acceptable laws: You can’t go around destroying other people’s yard property, whether it’s a flag or a pink flamingo. But are three instances of stupid vandalism and one drunken hic-up a crisis warranting the mobilization of the U.S. Senate and the push for the first constitutional amendment in 14 years? Read the rest...

High on Crack: Put the Space Shuttle Out of Its Misery

2006-07-03T19:12:00.000+01:00

We forget how safety concerns plagued the space shuttle even before it took its first flight in 1981. From a New York Times story on January 24, 1981: “The astronauts who are to fly the first orbital test mission of the space shuttle Columbia said here today that they had confidence that the new space plane was flightworthy, despite its years of development problems, and that they would be ‘140 percent trained’ by the launching day.” They were preparing to launch aboard Columbia. Of course they could be trained 10,000 percent: It wouldn’t make a difference to a one-pound piece of foam that could come undone and knock a hole in the shuttle’s fuselage, as one did, pulverizing Columbia on re-entry on its twenty-eighth flight and killing its 140-percent-trained crew. Just its twenty-eighth flight. Challenger exploded on its tenth. They’re prepping Discovery, the workhorse of the bunch, for its thirty-second flight, another one of those “return to space” crapshoots, this one on July 4. (Atlantis has had twenty-six flights, Endeavor is still a teen with nineteen).

NASA puts odds of a big accident at 1-in-100, which is, of course, sheer bull: there’s been one hundred and fourteen flights, two of which have ended in disaster. That puts the odds of a disaster at 1-in-50, but they’re actually much lower than that when you look at the flimsy things shuttle by shuttle. NASA is all but begging for a disaster with Discovery, a rickety mass of fixer-uppers that should have gone up last week but has been delayed, day after day, allegedly by weather and now more honestly, maybe, by new discoveries of cracks in the ship’s insulation foam. Read the rest...

Patriotic Gore: Can't Win the War? Bomb the Press!

2006-07-02T16:26:00.000+01:00

Frank Rich, The New York Times / July 2, 2006

"OLD GLORY lost today," Bill Frist declaimed last week when his second attempt to rewrite the Constitution in a single month went the way of his happy prognosis for Terri Schiavo. Of course it isn't Old Glory that lost when the flag-burning amendment flamed out. The flag always survives the politicians who wrap themselves in it. What really provoked Mr. Frist's crocodile tears was the foiling of yet another ruse to distract Americans from the wreckage in Iraq. He and his party, eager to change the subject in an election year, just can't let go of their scapegoat strategy. It's illegal Hispanic immigrants, gay couples seeking marital rights, cut-and-run Democrats and rampaging flag burners who have betrayed America's values, not those who bungled a war.
No sooner were the flag burners hustled offstage than a new traitor was unveiled for the Fourth: the press. Public enemy No. 1 is The New York Times, which was accused of a "disgraceful" compromise of national security (by President Bush) and treason (by Representative Peter King of New York and the Coulter amen chorus). The Times's offense was to publish a front-page article about a comprehensive American effort to track terrorists with the aid of a Belgian consortium, Swift, which serves as a clearinghouse for some 7,800 financial institutions in 200 countries.
It was a solid piece of journalism. But if you want to learn the truly dirty secrets of how our government prosecutes this war, the story of how it vilified The Times is more damning than anything in the article that caused the uproar. Read the rest...

Florida Swamped: Warming Maw

2006-06-30T01:23:00.000+01:00

This picture represents what Florida would look like if ocean levels were to rise eighteen to twenty feet, what with global warming cooking up the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. That’s Lake Okeechobee there in the current Florida, the big eye to the south-central part of the state, opening up into the Atlantic with the sea rise to create a new version of Italy’s boot, without much of a Sicily for consolation. I live further up the east coast on a chunk of beachside exurb between Daytona Beach and Jacksonville. That whole slice of luxury, diminished though it already is by the crowding of pac-man developments, would also disappear. Not a bad fate for this town of mine, one of those non-descript coalition of subdivisions with neither center nor soul. But it’s home.

The eighteen-to-twenty-feet rise is actually a conservative estimate, given the latest global warming calculations. “The business-as-usual scenario yields an increase of about five degrees Fahrenheit of global warming during this century, while the alternative scenario yields an increase of less than two degrees Fahrenheit during the same period,” writes Jim Hansen in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books, where this watery Floridian postcard appears. (Hansen is the Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the space agency’s lead climatologist who won some notoriety in January when he told the New York Times that the Bush administration “tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture [in December 2005] calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.” The New York Review article, which you can link to below, includes this delicious header: “His opinions are expressed here, he writes, ‘as personal views under the protection of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.’”) Read the rest...

From the Files of TNR Squad

2006-06-29T14:07:00.000+01:00

Technobabble: Glenn Reynolds's Utopia
Christine Rosen, The New Republic

Liberals on the Strip: Wag the Blog
Ryan Lizza, The New Republic

Trash Talk: The Hatred of Ann Coulter
Michelle Cottle, The New Republic

World Cup Diary: Breakdown and Resurrection

2006-06-29T02:03:00.000+01:00

Just when you thought this World Cup was on the verge of disaster both as spectacle and sport — low scoring, badly refereed, uninspiring, unsurprising, lacking drama and excitement — here come France and Brazil, the last two teams to win the championship, to save the day. Brazil’s 3-0 win over Ghana on Tuesday wasn’t spectacular. The famed Brazilian style is still stuck somewhere between Tierra del Fuego and Gibraltar, and Ghana’s Black Stars managed to shine despite the losing score almost throughout the match, as every African team shone this year. But we needed this Brazil-France rematch, this lunge at revenge by the Brazilians, who were smashed up on the shoals of a 3-0 humiliation by this very French team eight years ago (“we’ll always have Paris”), when Zidane had his two goals in the final to go with his previous two and Emmanuel Petit had his 90 th minute sweetener in front of 75,000 people at the Stade de France. (Lost in the crowd of those French goals that year were three by Thierry Henry, then a mere scallion of a striker, and a couple by Lilian Thuram, who’s still around.)

The French are old. They’re a bit full of themselves, these continental Americans (how could they be French if they weren’t). This year they looked the opposite of Spain. They looked slow, morbid, slightly idiotic with their inability to score, held over from their blanketing in 2002. Spain looked invulnerable, a bull out of the gate, a goal-scoring machine with the efficiency of German engineering, the youthful exuberance of Brazilian footwork, and of course that Iberian passion that’s no stranger to football, but that never quite made its mark in World Cup, play. Read the rest...

Voyeurism as Entertainment: “To Catch a Predator,” To Lose a War

2006-06-27T23:39:00.000+01:00

Network news was once about authority: Walter Cronkite, Roger Mudd, Ted Koppel, even Dan Rather in his reporter days. But when is the last time a network, as opposed to a newspaper or a magazine, broke major investigative news vital to the public interest like the Abu Ghraib scandal (The New Yorker), the Bush administration’s secret prisons (Washington Post), the NSA wiretaps and international finance snooping (New York Times), the Marines’ massacre of Iraqi civilians at Haditha (Time magazine)? So much fine print journalism is being produced week in and week out, it’s difficult to keep up. But most Americans still get their perceptions of the world around them from the networks. And for network news these days, it’s about deference to authority: When anchor chairs are filled by the likes of Katie Couric and Charles Gibson, it’s more about putting a good face on the news than breaking it. No wonder the networks’ news divisions are indistinguishable from their entertainment function. One running example stands out as an illustration of the networks’ degradation — and irresponsibility.

On Nov. 11, 2004, NBC’s Dateline aired a segment called “To Catch a Predator.” Reporter Chris Hanson went on the prowl in a New York City suburb with tabloid journalism’s standards — the hidden camera, the ambush, the crucifixion on camera — and with a little help lured 18 men in three days to a house where the men thought they might have sex with a teen they’d chatted with online. Read the rest...

Speaking of Disgrace: Bush Against the Press

2006-06-26T23:43:00.000+01:00

Why aren’t we winning the “war on terror”? Because the New York Times won’t let us. That, anyway, is how President Bush sees it. He was asked this morning about the disclosure by the Times and several other newspapers of his administration’s latest end-run around the law—the administration’s wiretapping of financial wire transfers “involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States.” It’s the equivalent of the NSA’s snooping on Americans’ Internet habits and emails, listening in on international phone calls and the calls of Americans speaking to anyone abroad. (Most Americans speak to other Americans, of course, so the president’s explanation that his administration is only keeping track of foreigners, let alone of suspected al-Qaeda members, is as has become habit, bogus). The press obviously if belatedly quit taking him at his word sometime in 2003, when the number of dead American soldiers and dead Iraqis became the only evidence of mass destruction on Bush’s watch in Iraq, and the administration’s strategy of preemptive war the most active weapon of mass destruction at the moment. A few people inside Bush’s government became more willing to speak to the press and stop this run-away heist of constitutional values in the name of a war judged, juried and executed by Bush without check and plenty of imbalance. The New York Times’ James Risen has been among the few but committed reporters who’ve done what much of the press, and all of the television media, refuse to do: hold Bush’s junta-like tactics and gut-skunked strategies to account. Risen’s piece on the Bush administration’s snooping around financial records reveals more of the Bush penchant for evasion and lies, for accruing power by all means necessary. But so does Bush himself. Hear him roar this morning in the Roosevelt Room, when he took the last question during a brief exchange with reporters: Virtually every word was equally veil and lie, evasion and PR, pandering and, to the truth anyway, scalding. Read the rest...