February 2011 Archives

How about Christopher Hitchens?

OK, how about Willy Wyler?

The Guardian reports:

The WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is to be extradited to Sweden [from the U.K.] to face allegations of rape and sexual assault. Assange will appeal, his legal team has confirmed. If they lose he will be sent to Sweden in 10 days.

He will "be held in custody," the report also said, "because there is no system of bail in Sweden until a possible trial or release."

Update: The good news, if you can call it that: Assange will be bailed, after all, on the same terms as before ... at a high price.

March 3 -- And MUCH WORSE NEWS for Bradley Manning.

(Latest Wikileaks news in real-time updates.)

Here we go again, this time vs. the NYT Book Review. You decide.

© 1969 by Norman O. Mustill

These images are from Norman O. Mustill's Twinpak, one of a series of Nova Broadcast pamphlets published in San Francisco in 1969.























This image is Barbara deWilde's illustration for the cover of The New York Times Book Review of Feb. 20, 2011.






It's not just images with legs we're talking about. I guess you can make the case that any artist may use silhouettes, even one in a curiously similar pose. But combining it with a background of dictionary definitions? So we're talking about an idea with legs. Rights? What rights? Not included ... let alone the courtesy of an acknowledgment.

Postscript: An ol' amigo writes: "i wish folks like babs would, when they lift sumpin', ADD at least some iota of originality to the finished werk. ja?"

It's hard to believe, but some people want to know how to become a copy editor.

Here's the headline on the exclusive report in today's Guardian: Defector admits to WMD lies that triggered Iraq war. Which reminds me of this blogpost -- HIT BY A CURVEBALL -- published way back on July 11, 2004:

David Johnston's report on how the "Powers That Be" conned Americans into believing Iraq had weapons of mass destruction is buried so deep within the The New York Times Website today that it's virtually invisible.

You can always second-guess the way an article is played, of course, and the Times editors decided Johnston's rated only page 12 treatment in the print edition. It's not breaking news, after all, and it's just one of many stories fleshing out details of the scathing Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the CIA's prewar intelligence failures.

But the story's importance is clear, given the fact that we must wait until after the presidential election in November for the official verdict from the Senate committee on whether our bonehead Maximum Leader and his minions pressured the intelligence community into supporting a preconceived policy to invade Iraq.

Johnston describes how a CIA analyst doubted the information obtained from a crucial Iraqi source -- a defector code-named "Curveball" -- claiming that Iraq had mobile bioweapons laboratories. When the analyst saw that Secretary of State Colin Powell was going to cite Curveball's information in his speech to the U.N. to justify going to war with Iraq, he expressed his concern.

"But the deputy chief of the agency's Iraqi Task Force," Johnston writes, "rejected the worries as irrelevant" and sent the analyst this e-mail:

Let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn't say, and that the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he's talking about.

It didn't matter that the analyst, an expert in biological warfare, was "the only American intelligence official" to meet Curveball before the war, that Curveball showed up at their meeting with "a terrible hangover," and that "intelligence officials were not even sure of Curveball's true identity." It didn't matter because "this war's going to happen regardless."

Take a guess.

... for Valentine's Day. There's the Victorian way. And then there's the Mustillian way.

When Noam Chomsky or Ralph Nader or Glenn Greenwald or Paul Krugman or Chris Hedges or any number of Obama's leftwing critics call him a disgrace and worse -- ok, let's say it, a finkified hypocrite -- their opinions are dismissed on the right as the mutterings of ideologues who in some cases feel that they were jilted at the alter.

So let's quote a rightwinger, the columnist Ross Douthat, who writes in today's NYT:

[A]fter two years in office we can say with some certainty where Barack Obama's instincts really lie. From the war on terror to the current unrest in Egypt, his foreign policy has owed far more to conservative realpolitik than to any left-wing vision of international affairs.

And that's not all.

On nearly every anti-terror front, from detainee policy to drone strikes, the Obama administration has been what The Washington Times's Eli Lake calls a "9/14 presidency," maintaining or even expanding the powers that George W. Bush claimed in the aftermath of 9/11.

This is not news to anyone who keeps up with the news.

(Click for complete blogpost and scroll down for updates.)