Straight Up | Jan Herman

We interrupt our search for a hideout to bring you this: Belated advice from Christopher Hitchens, who has finally got around to acknowledging the obvious about Abu Ghraib: We may have to start using blunt words like murder and rape to describe what we see. And one linguistic reform is in any case already much […]

A couple of people I know are heading to a rainforest in Central America, which  reminds me it’s time to head somewhere. I haven’t figured where just yet. But my staff of thousands is working on it. In the meantime, there’s plenty in the archives to keep you amused or befuddled, impressed or depressed, until our […]

By Jan Herman Ray Charles, who died yesterday, was never president of the U.S. of A. No state funeral for him. He was a different kind of president — “The Genius,” as many called him. For me, he was the unforgettable President of Soul. I still remember a show he did one snowy winter night in 1963 in a dingy […]

Isn’t it romantic? “Let’s take a look back at the lifelong love affair of Nancy and Ron,” is how one MSNBC anchor put it yesterday morning, giving their relationship a first-name status usually reserved for the likes of Antony and Cleopatra or Scarlett and Rhett.” How touching. And then a further reach too far: “When […]

Unlike the thousands of Americans who will line Constitution Avenue to see the horse-drawn caisson delivering Saint Ronald‘s coffin to the Capitol Rotunda, where his body will lie in state — and unlike the media maestros who will sanctify the rites as whispering hosts of a civic religion — Greg Palast has lost no love, admiration or respect […]

See it to believe it: “Attorney General John Ashcroft is refusing to release or discuss memos detailing U.S. torture policy. Lawmakers accused him of trying to hide how the Bush administration has justified the abuse of prisoners.” (Click on the link above and then click on “Watch 256k stream” to play the video.) Here’s how silly […]

So you doubted the White House bonehead, Rummy boy, chief crony Cheney and the rest of the gang had dirty hands? You believed the use of torture on Iraqi prisoners was the low-level notion of “a few bad apples” and not the systematic plan of higher-ups? You didn’t (or couldn’t) believe the rule of law as […]

What’s next? Saint Ronald? Everybody, including Mikhail Gorbachev this morning, is recalling just how wonderful the 40th U.S. president was. “I think he understood that it is the peacemakers, above all, who earn a place in history,” Gorbachev writes, in a bow not to the Great Communicator so much as the Friendly Persuader. In the […]

The trouble with the death of Ronald Reagan is that, whatever else it means, it will give our White House bonehead a ceremonial stage to play statesman in mourning for the rest of the week until Reagan’s burial. Will that get the bonehead a bump in the polls? We think so. When he pays blustering lip service to the noble ideals that Reagan […]

We all need something to get us out of bed. Here’s what gets me up in the morning: Bill Moyers on truth and journalism. If you’ve got a few minutes — OK, 30 minutes — have a look at him speaking recently at the National Conference on Media Reform in Madison, Wisc. Moyer’s keynote address […]

We’re familiar with all the objections to Ralph Nader’s presidential candidacy. But we still believe he has every right to run. We also believe he’s the most  passionate, intelligent, accomplished and honest of all the current candidates. If the American people want to elect the presumptive Democratic candidate John Kerry, they should vote for him —  as we will, […]

A report this morning from the Associated Press: Enron traders gleeful at ripping off grandmas. “Enron traders openly discussed manipulating California’s power market during profanity-laced telephone conversations in which they gloated about ripping off ‘those poor grandmothers’ during the state’s energy crunch in 2000-01, according to transcripts of the calls.” An editorial this morning from […]

The full-page newspaper ad for THE CONCERT FOR JOHN KERRY at Radio City Music Hall had a star-spangled banner wrapped around an electric guitar. Black background. White type. It said: “A Change Is Going to Come.” It said there will be performances by Jon Bon Jovi, Whoopi Goldberg, Wyclef Jean, John Mellencamp, Bette Midler, James Taylor and […]

Now that Daniel Okrent, the public editor of The New York Times, has given us his opinion about the Times’ mea culpa, what’s the verdict? Okrent writes, “I think they got it right. Mostly.” He blames the paper in general for hyping its dead-wrong reports that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction during the […]

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 […]