Remember those prepackaged news stories — a k a Video News Releases (VNRs) –which Bush regime is so fond of distributing? Well, the Government Accountability Office today issued this decision by the Comptroller General. Here’s the bad news: Prepackaged news stories are complete, audio-video presentations that may be included in video news releases, or VNRs. […]

Like a lot of Democrats, I get messages from Mark Green, the former public advocate for New York City and the president of the New Democracy Project. As much as I agree with his low opinion of our Dear Leader, I can’t help noticing: Green’s latest message delivered the same old, same old, and did […]

As Gawker says about David Brooks’s blooper correction: “We’d roll the laugh track if anyone actually knew what the hell he was talking about. Or cared.” Also, check Paul Krugman’s funny-if-it-wasn’t-so-true refer (this morning, too): In its April Fools’ Day issue, Scientific American published a spoof editorial in which it apologized for endorsing the theory […]

Robert Creeley, who died yesterday at 78, wrote poetry with a spare minimalism that clarified, condensed and dissolved the distance between thought and feeling, between the real world and the imagined, between language and meaning. He was often more explicit than Samuel Beckett and much more approachable, but no less dense or elusive. Listen to him reading two poems: […]

Go to BestCommercialEver.mpg and click on it for something different. Thanks, Martin. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Famed defense attorney Johnnie Cochran is dead. R.I.P: If the heart won’t stirYou must inter. — Leon Freilich EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Today’s column by Paul Krugman — “What’s Going On?” — is too good to go unmentioned. It’s a perfect example of what makes him indispensible. He says in the mainstream media what many think in private, and he says it with coherence, persuasive logic and a level-headed marshalling of facts that most of us cannot […]

I’m being suckered here: Dear Jan Herman, Thanks very much for your attention to my work! And if you have any doubts that “America” is a pro American text, you can check it out: http://www.america-is.com/press. (It is for your reading only.) Best,Paulo José Miranda Miranda is charging five bucks on the America-is site to read […]

While I was fussing with MIRANDA WARNING, I completely missed something much more important. It took my friend Jennie D. to remind me of it: Eyes Wide Open, a traveling exhibition organized by the American Friends Service Committee about the human cost of the Iraq war. Watch the movie. If it moves you, sign the […]

The item ALL RED ALL THE TIME, about a peculiar essay by Portugese writer Paulo José Miranda, drew this response from John Keene: I read your blog regularly and have faith in your critical powers, so I’m a bit dismayed that you didn’t see the sharp and obvious irony in José Miranda’s “America” project. It’s […]

This came unsolicited. Click the link and watch very weird, well-designed, right-wing propaganda about America from a European’s point of view. It’s by Portugese writer Paulo José Miranda, who claims: “America built the Moon. America widens space. America keepings welcoming the world. America doesn’t have a religion, it has God. … Iraq is not occupied, […]

Theater writer Jesse McKinley learned two object lessons this week: Never trust a Broadway producer, especially for a puff piece, and never report that something in the future is “certain” to happen, especially in the theater. “On Thursday,” he wrote, the producer of a new “Sweet Charity” revival told him plans to bring the show […]

Jean Shepherd was always my idea of a media rebel. Phil Donahue never was. But he became one for me this morning on Democracy Now! Donahue, right, smiles easily and calls himself lucky. He says his success spoiled him, which I’m sure is true. But behind the smile and the luck there’s a gritty malcontent […]

The shooting rampage at the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota puts American neo-Nazism back on the front page and adds an awful top spin to yesterday’s e-mail debate about David Irving and C-SPAN. As you’ve doubtless read by now, Jeff Weise — a self-described Ojibwe Native American teenager who killed 10 people, wounded seven […]

It’s amusing to look back every once at some of the things posted here over the past 20 months. So says my staff of thousands, which has decided to start a Straight Up tradition. It begins today with possibly the most entertaining yet pointed commentary about the 2004 election: the Sloganator. Go there. I did […]

Taking a cue from ArtsJournal publisher Doug McLellan, who has created a public forum for debating significant arts issues, herewith a baker’s dozen e-mail comments on free speech, the Holocaust and ethical journalism. They were spurred by Friday’s item, C-SPAN ON TRIAL, about the idea of broadcasting a speech by Holocaust denier David Irving to […]

Paul Wolfowitz’s nomination to head the World Bank and John Bolton’s to represent the United States at the U.N., far from being promotions, signal a purge of neocons from policy-making positions in the Bush regime. So says investigative reporter Greg Palast, left, who was interviewed on Democracy Now! about his recent BBC Newsnight report detailing […]