Straight Up | Jan Herman

Do you have a subscription to Sirius Satellite Radio? I don’t. Never listened to it either. Until yesterday, when I was invited to be a guest on “The Blog Bunker.” It airs on Sirius Indie Talk Channel 110, which is described as “political talk for people who hate political talk.”

Isn’t this cute. Aw gee. Update: April 21 — Now have a look at “Murdoch, Ink,” Newsweek’s huge takeout about the actual WSJ that hit the street today. In the orotund prose of magspeak: With its increased focus on politics, international news, culture and sports, Murdoch’s reconceived Journal represents nothing short of a formal declaration […]

Robert Parry explains how the United States became a Banana Republic. A reader writes: “Thank you.  Parry’s article is incisive in overview and on the mark in particulars. Excellent.” He continues: One example of Parry’s thesis — that “sophisticated manipulation of information is what would do the Republic in” — is waterboarding being dismissively defined by journalistic leaders as “simulated drowning” […]

The aaaeulc keeps it going … six months at a time. Click the link. It’s a smart video from moveon.org. Postscript: I see I completely overlooked the ABC News report on the top war criminals in the White House. It’s not as if we didn’t already know who they are. But the report — in […]

The other day we said that if David Petraeus can spin the Iraq menu this time around, he ought to be promoted from four-star general to five-star headwaiter. Well, no promotion for heem. He couldn’t spin it. Petraeus himself conceded in his parting remark to the Senate Armed Services Committee, “The Champagne bottle has been pushed […]

The best analysis I’ve read about the failed Iraqi army assault on the Shiite militias in Basra far surpasses anything I’ve seen in The New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Los Angeles Times. Written by M.K. Bhadrakumar, a former career diplomat in India’s Foreign Service, it ran a couple of days ago in […]

As we were saying, it’s the American way: Let me emphasize that our new Sunni friends insist on being paid for their loyalty. I have heard, for example, a rough estimate that the cost in one area of about 100 square kilometers is $250,000 per day. And periodically they threaten to defect unless their fees […]

The LA Times says it’s silly of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to declare a 40-hour moratorium on violence to mark the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Maybe so. But will somebody please give the editorial board a brain enema? Its own pieties need to be flushed out, not to […]

It takes 1,750 words on Maliki’s Basra screwup to get to the money (and the money graf).  But there it is, finally — the bribes to the tribes, a key tactic used by the U.S. military to suppress the Iraqi insurgency — in the next-to-last paragraph of today’s NYT frontpager: Maliki was pressed by U.S. officials “to seek an […]

Now that this blog has been redesigned to take advantage of the latest in Web technology — thanks to ArtsJournal’s publisher and editor Doug McLennan, also known as “resident genius” — it occurred to me to check the first blogpost put up here. This is what struck me: Have an online look at two things […]

The title — “Motherfuckers: The Auschwitz of Oz” — tells you it’s an unusual novel. But it still doesn’t prepare you for the story (or the swastika on the cover). Which is why “Horror Panegyric,” published today by Savoy Books, works so handily. As Keith Seward explains in his introductory essay: Motherfuckers’ principals are Meng […]

Things are going so well in Iraq that, as the headline says, “Pentagon Urges Delay in U.S. Troop Reductions in Iraq.” Or as retired four-star Gen. Barry McCaffrey said the other day at the Council on Foreign Relations, “If you look at the totality of our experience in Iraq, it’s been a major disaster. There’s […]