Killing schoolchildren is wrong. Let's start with that for today's comment on this war. (This is the first of a set of four comments on the US and Israeli war with Iran this week, looking at it from four different points of view: economic, political, constitutional and, today ... human. ) As the war began, children at the Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School were already in the two story building dedicated to their education, a building in the town of Minab, one with walls painted with pink flowers. A missile slammed into that building midmorning, leaving rubble and dead bodies. Survivors of the first strike gathered in a hall, and there became victims of a second strike. In all there were apparently 175 people killed, 108 of them children. The first response of the President of the United States was, "In my opinion and based on what I've seen, that was done by Iran. They're very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions." The secon...
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These are the facts behind the lawsuit that the jury heard, and decided so quickly, last week. In 2008 Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska but largely unknown outside of that state, suddenly found herself catapulted into national prominence when the Republican nominee for President, John McCain, asked her to join his ticket. She agreed, and was on the ballot that November as a Vice Presidential nominee. The McCain-Palin ticket lost. After the election, though, Palin hoped to retain her national prominence and to that end she formed a political action committees, SarahPAC. Only one fact about that PAC is really pertinent here, Its website at some point thereafter adopted a graphic image of a ballistic crosshair superimposed on the 8th congressional district of Arizona, then represented by Gabrielle Giffords. The image of course was intended to convey the general idea that Giffords should be a metaphorical "target" for Republican energies, so that a Republican could replace...
Good news. On April 22, a jury in New York City ruled that the NYT had not defamed former Alaska Governor and one-time Vice Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin in a 2017 editorial. Today I will discuss this outcome in somewhat general terms. Tomorrow I expect to dive into the particulars of the case. This is the second time a jury has done so. Another one reached the same result on the same facts three years ago. Palin refused to accept it, and did manage to get the verdict reversed, a new trial ordered, on appeal. The safe bet is that she will appeal this one, too, on whatever grounds her attorneys can cook up. But, having already had a second bite at the apple, the odds have become rather small that the appellate courts are going to give her a third. My guess is the Times has won this one. Cases like this are fascinating because they involve two well-funded opponents. I am certain that Palin could raise as ...
The New York Times can print the Project Veritas memos. One problem with demanding censorship with regard to a particular text is that you may draw a lot of attention to something that would otherwise have passed largely unnoticed. This is called the "Carol Burnet" effect, I believe. The term goes back to a 1976 column in The National Enquirer that portrayed comedienne Burnett as drunk. It was a short dfour-sentence item that might have been very quickly forgotten had Burnett not sued over it. The litigation lasted for years and ended up being an important precedent. BUT the lesson remains: if you think you are hurt by people who spread item X, consider the degree to which your lawsuit will do exactly that, before bringing it. A simple thought for Project Veritas to contemplate this week. The underlying subject of the memos in question was perfectly obscure. Now it will be clear. It will also be or at least it will briefly seem, important.
Neil Sheehan ( October 27, 1936 – January 7, 2021) has died. A giant of old-school American print journalism, Sheehan began his career in the Tokyo bureau of the UPI in 1962. He was in Japan with the US Army, and the reporting was a moonlighting gig. When he was released from the service, the UPI took him on his payroll, and sent him to Saigon. In 1964, he returned to the US to take a job in New York, on the city desk of the Times . But that must have seemed boring to him. By 1966 (I'm skipping some career points), he was in Washington for the NYT, covering the Pentagon. It was that assignment that got him into the history books in a big way. See below: After Neil Sheehan’s death, secret interview reveals how he got Pentagon Papers (msn.com) Here is where the new revelation, a post-mortem disclosure of an old Sheehan interview, sheds some new light. Sheehan says in the interview that Ellsberg was very wary of letting Sheehan make any copies of the famous re...
It's been four years since publication,so I'm late to the fair. I'm only now looking at Judith Miller's book, THE STORY (Simon & Schuster)-- chiefly a memoir of her years with The New York Times. That covers a lot of years. The Times hired her in 1977, and she was forced out in 2005. In all the controversy about the supposedly hidden "weapons of mass destruction" in Saddam Hussein's hands in the run up to the Iraq War, Miller is for me the most fascinating single character. I am happy to report that the book doesn't make her seem less so. A terminological point: she doesn't use the phrases "first Gulf War" and "second Gulf War." She refers to the war of 1990-91 as the Gulf War -- there is only one -- and the war of 2003 as the Iraq War. Today, I'll quote a bit of what she wrote about the Gulf War, the war associated with George H.W. Bush, portrayed above. The Times' coverage was coordinated by Johnny Appl...
Although I think the general argument Jill Abramson sets forth in her book, as compressed in yesterday's entry, is valuable and perhaps in the end sound, I have to include here the unhappy truth that Abramson is an unfortunate bearer of that message. Her book, Merchants of Truth, contains some glaring instances of plagiarism. This comes especially in the section of the book devoted to the news website Vice News , seen by some (by not by JA) as a wave-of-the-future institution. Back in the late spring of 2005, the Ryerson Review of Journalism carried a piece by Nicolle Weeks, headlined "Bigot or Champion of Truth?" Weeks argued that Vice is much more the former than the latter. She says this, about the website's co-founder Gavin McInnes: In August 2003, McInnes wrote a column in The American Conservative , a magazine run by Pat Buchanan. In the magazine, he called young people a bunch of knee-jerk liberals (a phrase McInnes and his cronies use often) who...
Jill Abramson -- who worked for three years (2011-14) as executive editor of The New York Times, has now written a book, Merchants of Truth, about the changes in the news business in the last decade, one that offers important context to some of the headline political events of our day. I'll discuss the major contentions of the book in this post, then the controversy around it (especially over plagiarism) in the next. To be blunt, the major contentions are two. The first is that some of the website-only news sources, like Vice News , may seem like the way of the future, but have inherent crippling weaknesses. The second is that some of the traditional print-media news sources, like her old employer or its rival, the Washington Post , may seem antiquated but in fact they are renewing themselves in valuable ways. Abramson’s book has much to say about Jeff Bezos, though it was published in advance of the two most recent Bezos-related news stories: his blowing th...
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/05/trumps-saturday-of-lies-president-says-official-who-briefed-reporters-doesnt-exist.html What does this mysterious hypothetical existent look like? If he existed, he would look a lot like the smiling fellow above. The Orange One's lies get more bizarre as his office and its trappings go to his discolored head. On May 26 The New York Times reported (accurately, the videotape backs them up on this) that senior White House official had said that there wasn't enough time to hold the North Korean summit on the originally scheduled date of June 12. Almost immediately, POTUS -- who seems to have convinced himself that his cancellation of that meeting is a matter of no consequence, that he is still making up his regal mind whether to attend the already-cancelled meeting -- tweeted that the Times was lying, that nobody said that, and in fact that the senior administration official in question "doesn't exist." This ...
On August 17th, The New York Times' blog, Dealbook., ran a piece by Andrew Ross Sorkin about Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina. Fiorina is getting some traction, despite the fact that she has never held public office. She has been a chief executive of a major institution, though. That institution was the computer giant Hewlett-Packard, and that qualification is CF's chief credential (aside from appealing initials) for the post of chief executive of the United States. Sorkin does not have a high opinion of her performance at HP. He says that he vividly remembers September 2001, when she announced her plans for a merger with Compaq. So here is her, and his, money quote from the column: “Hang with us,” she said on that same day in a conference call with reporters. “It’s going to be a great party.” The party never happened, but the hangover was brutal. Hewlett-Packard is still recovering from the ill-conceived merger nearly 14 years later, and recent...
In June of this year, Paul Krugman wrote a sort of humblebrag column admitting to certain errors that have accumulated in his columns. The tone was, "yes I've gotten things wrong, but none of these examples reflects any very deep mistakes in my assumptions, and since I'm owning up to my errors, all is good." The most intriguing of the admissions, to me, involved the economy of the United Kingdom. Krugman has been using "austerity" as a whipping boy for years now. Every impulse toward hardening the money supply or cutting public expenditures, in any country toward which he turns his gaze, is "austerity" or the cult of the "austerians" and a bad thing. One sometimes gets the impression that Krugman coined "austerians" to pun on "Austrians," and to try to use the failures (as he sees them) of austerity policies as arguments against Austrian economics. A silly pun, if that is what is intended. Anyway: the U....
Earlier this month, I wrote about a dispute over the history of HAMP, the Home Affordable Modification Program. This was the program supposedly designed to help homeowners who were in over the heads. A couple of those who participated in the early Obama administration, notably including Neil Barofsky, portrayed here in full smile, have since said that Geithner administered the plan in an openly cynical bankers'-ass-protecting spirit. At the time I last wrote about this, Geithner's own view of the incident was known only through bits and pieces, such as his quote to an interviewed from The New York Times that I cited in that blog post. Since then, Geithner has come out with his own book on his tenure as Secretary of the Treasury. Does this shed any light? Fortunately, amazon allows me to read inside Geithner;'s book at will, so I don't actually have to buy the thing to see what he said about HAMP. He portrays himself as a faithful public servant who wo...
On December 27th The New York Times ran a long piece by David Kocieniewski under the headline, "Academics Who Defend Wall St. Reap Rewards." The article constitutes an elaborate and somewhat indirect charge to the effect that two particular academics, Craig Pirrong and Scott Irwin, are sell-outs. Pirrong is a professor of finance at the University of Houston (that is his photo above) and Irwin is at the University of Illinois. Both gentlemen (I know Pirrong slightly, he's been a source of expert commentary for me on a couple of stories I worked on, and I like him -- take that as disclosure of bias if you like) -- both gentlemen are of generally free market orientation. This does not necessarily make them defenders of wall street, since much of wall street thrives as a consequence of very non-free-market activities. You can't really blame Kocieniewski for the headline., I guarantee he didn't write it. But he is responsible for the general slant of the ...
James Dodson, who once taught writing at Hollins University , in Virginia, has more recently written and Vintage has now published, a book with the grand title AMERICAN TRIUMVIRATE. Those of us with an interest in US antebellum political history will naturally read that title and expect a discussion of Calhoun, Clay, and Webster. But the subtitle is more informative: SAM SNEAD, BYRON NELSON, BEN HOGAN, AND THE MODERN AGE OF GOLF. Also an interesting subject. The New York Times tells me this "is a fascinating biography of three gifted, unusual men...." It also brings to my own mind some family history. My mother and her brother, when they were kids, used to make up stories to amuse each other about a fictional character called Sam Snead, a Paul Bunyan type figure. They simply adopted the name "Sam Snead" because the sound of it amused them and fit this purpose. Some time later, as I understand the tale, Mom was with my still-much-in-the-future Dad, and the...
I don't have anything much to say about the impending sequestration, but if that's what you're into, I'll offer some links. We can always start with what a reference work says: Auburn University . But it might be more amusing to listen to what Maria Bartiromo, the Money Honey, thinks about it all: Click here . As a reminder, the subjects of discussion are across-the-board budget cuts designed to serve as a Monster (as a recent piece in Slate explained it) to scare both parties into coming to an agreement to do something important but less monstrous. The New York Times has focused on delays in air travel . That reminds me of the good old days. The early 1980s, when a new and jelly bean consuming president faced a job action from traffiuc controllers. PATCO is long gone , but air traffic controllers may be happy to see themselves in the news in a sympathetic light. Historic resonances aside, some observers just don't see the sequestration 'monster...
I'm working on something for Just sheet music about the large portion of the operatic canon that has Shakespearean inspiration. Consider this a preview. One of the operas I plan to highlight is Le Marchand de Venise (1935), by French composer Reynaldo Hahn and librettist Miguel Zamacois. I've just described Hahn as a "French" composer advisedly. Though he was born in Venezuela in 1874, he arrived in Paris at the age of three, and stayed there through two world wars, dying there in 1947. Indeed, one reference book calls Hahn "one of the most fragrantly Parisian of composers." I'm not sure that isn't a misprint. Wouldn't "flagrantly" have been a more natural turn of phrase? Nothing in the context supports the notion that it's an intentional pun. But, hey, follow the above link and decide that for yourself. The opera involves the usual compressions: the five acts of the Shakespeare original are turned into three, and some...