Joseph Califano Jr. has written a new memoir, “Inside: A Public and Private Life,” which makes some startling claims about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. A longtime political insider who started out as one of Robert McNamara’s Pentagon “whiz kids,” Califano was privvy to much that is still not completely understood about the […]

Brian Whitaker describes the problem of catching terrorists in Saudi Arabia — or rather not catching them — in a London Guardian report headlined “Paying the price for incompetence.” Think of it as the Keystone Kops, Saudi-style. What “often happens in the kingdom,” he writes, “[is] a case of the police stumbling on a plot by […]

The Memorial Day weekend is upon us. It’s time to take a break. We leave for ours with a couple of reminders. One is entertaining: Jon Stewart’s commencement address a couple of weeks ago at his alma mater, The College of William & Mary, where “roughly 13,000 people packed into William and Mary Hall” to […]

A lot of people are wagging their fingers at the mea culpa admitted yesterday by The New York Times. Frankly, some of the finger-waggers seem to be piling on, not that the errors don’t deserve a more thorough airing. But it seems, too, that the Times has trouble learning from its own mistakes. The errors […]

Before taking a few days off for the long Memorial Day weekend, we feel an obligation to address some unfinished business: a recent email exchange with blogger Steve Sailer involving the item “Scraping Bottom” (May 10), which followed up on an earlier item, “The Spectrum from Blue to Red” (May 5). If posting the exchange […]

Jack Shafer was correct yesterday when he reported in Slate that The New York Times was preparing an “Editors’ Note” reassessing “its pre-Iraq War coverage, particularly its coverage of weapons of mass destruction.” Finding < EM>the note online took a bit of searching on the Times Web site. But it appears in plain view on the […]

More headlines from the torture front: “General Is Said To Have Urged Use of Dogs” and “Abuse of Captives More Widespread, Says Army Survey.” It wouldn’t surprise us, given those headlines, that the administration arranged to take our minds off them with today’s alert: “U.S. Warns of Al Qaeda Threat During Summer,” but there’s “Nothing […]

Remember what Kevin Phillips said about the Bush family? “Over four generations they have honed a pattern of loyalty to [America’s] wealthiest 0.01 percent … How you do that over four generations and not take that loyalty to the White House is not credible.” If anyone doubts his words, they should have a look at […]

The Divine Miss S — a friend’s not altogether admiring nom de plume for Susan Sontag — told us: “It is probable that the ‘torture’ word will continue to be banned” by the W. gang. Tim Rutten, the Los Angeles Times media columnist, writing a week before her piece appeared in The New York Times Magazine on Sunday, […]

Now hear this: The entire “state of Vermont — and its charm — is threatened by a corporate behemoth, a nonprofit preservation group warned on Monday,” The Associated Press reports. “The alleged culprit: Wal-Mart.” Because of plans for several new Wal-Mart Supercenters across the state, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has placed the entire […]

What’s your opinion about Rummy boy, aka Bush’s lip? The other day the liberal columnist Nicholas Kristof surprised himself by “Sticking Up for Rumsfeld.” He wrote that demands for Rummy boy’s resignation struck him as “unfair and premature,” even though he has “presided over the most foolish conflict since the War of Jenkins’ Ear in the 18th […]

We probably won’t hear about this new tactic in tonight’s presidential speech on strategy in Iraq. Rummy boy is working to eliminate those pesky gosh darn photos: “Mobil phones fitted with digital cameras have been banned in U.S. army installations in Iraq on orders from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,” The Business newspaper reports. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

More on “torture,” the word and the practice: “Don’t torture English to soft-pedal abuse” by Geoffrey Nunberg, in Newsday, adapted from his piece on NPR’s “Fresh Air.” It quotes Secretary of State Colin Powell saying on Fox News, “Torture is torture is torture.” Also “What’s in a Word? Torture” by Adam Hochschild, in The New York Times. […]

More essential reading: Susan Sontag has Sunday’s cover story of The New York Times Magazine. It’s a thoughtful, elegant essay called “The Photographs Are Us.”  Here’s a reminder that at Straight Up, blogged on the fly (on the gadfly?) — we sometimes log on while still rubbing sleep from our eyes — our timing seems right even if […]

Today’s torture headlines are self-explanatory. Anyone who cannot see the signs of systematic mismanagement in all that’s being reported must be blind. Even if the nitwit in the White House and the top Pentagon brass from Rummy boy on down had no knowledge of what was going on — which strains credulity — such purported ignorance […]

In “A Call to Conscience,” Roger Morris, “the diplomat who quit over Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, asks Americans on the front lines of foreign service to resign from the ‘worst regime by far in the history of the republic.’” This is powerful stuff. Reasoned. Urgent. Necessary. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Whenever he opens his mouth, the world-renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs speaks truth to power. Or so it seems to me, having heard him twice in the past few days. The first time was over the weekend at the “What We Stand For” conference, where he brought more than 800 liberal Democrats to their feet with an extemporaneous speech that […]