Straight Up | Jan Herman

Overnight notices are now showing up regularly in the print edition of The New York Times on the inside pages of the Metro section, per the paper’s effort to perk up its arts coverage, as reported earlier. John Rockwell’s dance review this morning on page B2, “Through a Dada Forest …,” is only the latest. […]

Here’s why we need an alternative press: Compare Doug Ireland’s piece today in the L.A. Weekly, “Mike Chertoff’s Dirty Little Secrets,” about the nominee for Secretary of Homeland Security — as well as Ireland and Elaine Cassel’s comments about Chertoff in interviews this morning on Democracy Now! — with Eric Lichtblau’s piece on Chertoff in […]

More pious words about accountability from the Bush regime, this time from Colin Powell on Kofi Annan and the oil-for-food scandal: “The [U.N.] secretary general will have to be accountable for those management problems,” Powell said yesterday, according to Reuters. Powell did not say whether he himself should be held accountable for telling the U.N. […]

Now that the inquiry into CBS’s faulty reporting on Georgie Boy’s National Guard service has resulted in the dismissal of four top news executives, the Bush regime suddenly values the principle of accountability. White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said, without the slightest irony, “CBS has taken steps to hold people accountable, and we appreciate […]

Busy day ahead of me, so I’m signing off for the nonce with a link to “The Salvador Option,” which ought to start your week off with plenty to think about. For more on the subject, go to Democracy Now!, which did a segment about it and will be posting it later this morning. Postscript: […]

In the rush to leave 2004 behind, I never got around to posting the conclusion of a small debate that erupted about Bill Moyers. It began with a farewell to Moyers that praised him — he was retiring from broadcast journalism — and continued with reader Larry Lippman’s negative response, which attacked Moyers for being […]

The front-page headline says: “Gonzales Speaks Against Torture During Hearing.” Well, as Rummy Boy might say, golly gee willikers. How noble of Mr. Gonzales. Give that man a medal. Better yet, make that man attorney general. After all, he says he understands the difference between being White House counsel, his current job, and being the […]

Alberto Gonzales has added softspeak, a modification of newspeak, to the Orwellian lexicon, although Sen. Joe Biden had another term for it: “Pure malarkey!” That’s how Biden, fed up with Gonzales’s lack of candor, characterized the Attorney General nominee’s testimony in this morning’s Senate hearing. (A big tip of the hat, too, to Sen. Ted […]

The U.S. Senate confirmation hearing on the nomination of Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General begins this morning. Watch the Webcast on C-Span. It begins at 9:30 a.m. ET.

Two essays — one by Kurt Vonnegut, the other by Studs Terkel — appeared on New Year’s day in The Guardian in London. They’re both about Nelson Algren, who was, it is no exaggeration to say, one of the great American authors of the 20th century, and among the most neglected. “Like James Joyce,” Vonnegut […]

Secretary of State Colin Powell is everywhere these days. He ushered in the New Year from Times Square with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Today he’s off to survey the tsunami damage with Florida Governor Jeb Bush. On top of that, he’s leaving politics, but he’s not retiring. Powell says he expects to serve the […]

Rummy Boy in Iraq, speaking to the troops: “We’re on the side of freedom. You’re on the side of freedom. And that’s the side to be on.” Golly gee willikers.

I should have said, “Back in ’05, if not sooner.” Sooner because I wanted to link to the video of all 50-plus minutes of Bill Moyers’s keynote speech to the National Conference on Media Reform. It was posted on the Web this morning by Democracy Now!, the best daily TV-radio-Internet news broadcast we’ve got. A […]

Gone ice-fishing. Best wishes for the New Year. Back in ’05.

Reflecting on last week’s farewell to Bill Moyers, a reader let me know what he thought. Larry Lippman writes: Hey Jan, I can understand (sometimes) that in the battle of ideas, well-meaning and even bright people can have a different idea of what ought to be. But adulation for the sanctimonious, sans clerical collar Bill […]

Guess who’s joined the conservationists fighting to preserve the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where Robert Kennedy was gunned down. According to Preservation Online, it’s none other than Sirhan Shirhan. In a lawsuit to keep the structure from being demolished to make way for a school, he claims that evidence lodged in the hotel walls shows […]

Talking the other day about Orwell’s portrait of the future, I should have mentioned that it’s not only hatred and fear which serve as the twin engines of misrule. It’s also love and worship. As Orwell’s doomed hero Winston Smith learns to his everlasting degradation, it is so important in the scheme of things to […]