Quote/Unquote 2006 Jan.

Christiane Amanpour thinks things are getting"worse and worse" in Iraq. Given that daily attacks are up from 55 per day to 77 per day over a year ago, and given that Baghdad (1/4 of the population) is being starved of fuel and electricity, and given that the Sunni Arabs rejected the constitution and are threatening to launc h a civil disobedience campaign on top of the guerrilla war, I don't see in what way her statement is controversial.

It is a measure of the fantasy world in which about 40 percent of Americans live that her statement is even a matter for comment. As for the charge that her views might affect her reporting, no one on the right is complaining about all those gung ho reporters who went to Iraq in 2003 believing it was a noble endeavor. Wouldn't that philosophy have affected their reporting of the war? In fact, don't Fox Cable News reporters get pressure from their editors and from Rupert to constantly downplay the guerrilla war in Iraq and to find silver linings in this mess? And Christiane, who has reported on wars all over the world and knows the Middle East like the back of her hand is the one who is out of line?

The outlook of Richard Nixon was that he was above the law. Watergate disabused him of the notion. The position of George W. Bush is that he is a law unto himself."

There is no instance in American history where we've been exposed as being so deeply involved in actually conducting torture on a routine and regular basis.

They're Convicts, Terrorists and Worse...They're College Professors

It is time to end the meaningless annual ritual of the State of the Union address. What began as a yearly survey of the nation's condition has deteriorated into a frivolous moment of political theater and continuous campaigning.

WEEK of January 23, 2006

On the key question of their attitude toward Israel, Fatah is willing to negotiate with Israel to gain territory and other benefits, while Hamas on principle refuses to deal with the"Zionist entity." But the difference is between them is mostly illusory, as Fatah in fact engages in terrorism and Hamas does talk to the Israelis.

“The Red Army fights not merely for the sake of fighting,” Mao wrote in 1929, “but in order to conduct propaganda among the masses, organize them, arm them, and help them to establish revolutionary political power. Without these objectives, fighting loses its meaning and the Red Army loses the reason for its existence.” “The people are like water,” he wrote two decades later, following the defeat of Japan and as the Communists triumphed over the Guomindang, “and the army is like fish.” Today’s Maoist revolutionaries take such words seriously as they strive to replicate the People’s War that produced the revolution of 1949. So too do their enemies. The U.S. ambassador to Nepal declared last August, “With a violent, ideological Maoist insurgency desiring to take over the state and then to export its revolution to peaceful neighbors, there is much to worry about.” But those who have nothing to lose but their chains respond, today as always, with enthusiasm to calls for radical change. Their hope is the flipside of the official dread greeting the resurgence of Maoism in the new millennium.

Historians will look back in puzzlement at the way our 21st century world tolerates the slavery of more than a million children in brothels around the world.

WEEK of January 16, 2006

"The New World" is something I don't think I've ever seen before on a movie screen: an epic lyrical dialectic. Self-indulgent, gorgeous, maddening, grueling, ultimately transcendent, it's a Terrence Malick movie all the way, and possibly the director's most sustained work since 1972's"Badlands." A revisionist telling of the Pocahontas story, it also gets its knuckles dirty in the myths that have sustained America since the very first landfall, draining them of romance while measuring a new and clear-eyed sense of national identity. It is a thing of wild beauty. And many people will hate it. Historians, for one, since"The New World" paints an impassioned love story that never actually occurred between the 27-year-old Captain John Smith and the 11-year-old Algonquin girl.

How many adult-oriented sites are on the World Wide Web depends a lot on whom you ask. Local porn historian Ralph Whittington, a former curator at the Library of Congress who built a museum-quality personal collection of X-rated magazines and videos, said he believes there are about 200,000 pornographic sites on the Web. On the other hand, the Web site Internet Filter Review said it calculates that there are 4.2 million pornographic sites online, based on its own research.

I say that war will go either in our favor or yours. If it is the former, it means your loss and your shame forever, and it is headed in this course. If it is the latter, read history! We are people who do not stand for injustice and we will seek revenge all our lives. The nights and days will not pass without us taking vengeance like on Sept. 11, God permitting. Your minds will be troubled and your lives embittered. As for us, we have nothing to lose. A swimmer in the ocean does not fear the rain. You have occupied our lands, offended our honor and dignity and let out our blood and stolen our money and destroyed our houses and played with our security and we will give you the same treatment.

Nixon Taped the White House; Bush Taped the Entire Nation The Liberties of the Subject

Unfortunately, not a single senator followed such questions by articulating a coherent judicial philosophy against which Alito could be measured. Yes, Republicans offered platitudes about"judicial restraint," insisting that the job of judges is to interpret the law, not make it. And yet their model Supreme Court justices are Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, who have voted to strike down more federal laws than any other justices on the Court. Democrats, by the same token, demonize right-wing judges for their conservative activism. But, in their eagerness to overturn state laws with which they disagree--such as those establishing school voucher programs and restricting late-term abortions--they are no more consistent than Republicans in their advocacy of judicial restraint. Indeed, their idea of a compromise candidate at the moment is O'Connor, who firmly believes that the courts, rather than the legislature, should resolve the most contested questions in society--from abortion to presidential elections--and who has voted to strike down more state and federal laws combined than any other justice except for Anthony Kennedy.

The 1939 timeless classic The Fine Art of Propaganda describes several techniques used in manipulation. One of these is “card stacking.” It is the rhetorical equivalent of the bodybuilder who wears muscle shirts to show off his polished “guns” while wearing sweatpants to hide his untrained legs. Card-stackers overstate the significance of the evidence that supports their case while minimizing, or even neglecting, evidence that weakens it. In a biography (or autobiography), the glowing parts are put on a pedestal, the skeletons, closeted. I don’t know whether Woods PLAYS cards, but he definitely knows how to stack ‘em.

TUCKER CARLSON: Everybody in journalism is pro-choice, pro-gun control and for gay marriage. When you only have people [in the media] that all think the same, you do not have good coverage. You can’t cover America until you have a newsroom that looks like America … who thinks like America.

ERIC ALTERMAN: If we had a liberal media, then 44 percent of Americans would not have believed the Sept. 11 bombers were Iraqis. We get an extremely biased version of the news.

By his own admission [Ben] Franklin was a rascal, one well pleased with his cunning, the more so when the result of his machinations happened to be the founding of a hospital. He was equal parts Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and Bugs Bunny.

WEEK of January 9, 2006

Whatever the top officials of this administration are capable of doing, they and their cronies in various posts throughout the federal bureaucracy are absolutely incapable of (and perhaps largely uninterested in) running a government. Let's give this phenomenon a fitting name: FEMAtization. You could almost offer a guarantee that no major problem is likely to arise this year, domestic or foreign, that they will not be quite incapable of handling reasonably, efficiently, or thoughtfully -- to hell with compassionately (for anyone who still remembers that museum-piece label," compassionate conservative," from the Bush version of the Neolithic era).

That comprehensive and undefined presidential powers hold both practical advantages and grave dangers for the country will impress anyone who has served as legal adviser to a President in time of transition and public anxiety. While an interval of detached reflection may temper teachings of that experience, they probably are a more realistic influence on my views than the conventional materials of judicial decision which seem unduly to accentuate doctrine and legal fiction. But, as we approach the question of presidential power, we half overcome mental hazards by recognizing them. The opinions of judges, no less than executives and publicists, often suffer the infirmity of confusing the issue of a power's validity with the cause it is invoked to promote, of confounding the permanent executive office with its temporary occupant. The tendency is strong to emphasize transient results upon policies -- such as wages or stabilization -- and lose sight of enduring consequences upon the balanced power structure of our Republic.

It is harder to write short than long, but publishers are anxious to keep the book price down. Kennedy took me eight years;nixon,seven, and Reagan five. I'm getting better, or at least faster in my old age.

I HATE TO BE THE ONE TO TELL YOU THIS, but the old, relentlessly mourned Pennsylvania Station was a dismal piece of architecture. A late arrival in the City Beautiful movement, the building tried to augment meager conviction with extreme colonnades. Walking into its cold, cavernous spaces was like arriving in Philadelphia two hours before you had to.

The answer to your rhetorical question is a resounding"No." In fact, personally I refuse to learn from history, preferring the path of ignoramus and certain frustration. It keeps me on my toes.

WEEK of January 2, 2006

The fact is that my being panicked about this hole (sic) event led me to unfortunately prop up my story (i.e., fabricate it), for that I have to apologize to you and to my professors. I have spoken to my family about the whole issue and the fact is that they were understandibly (sic) angry. My name has been dishonored within my family and so I will spend the rest of the winter trying to restore even a little bit of it back, at least.

A Sunday New York Times story claims 70 million, but Jack Shafer says that's impossible."That's the equivalent of a midsize New Yorker feature on a daily basis, and would have left little time to eat, drink, bathe, shave, sleep, edit, get laid, and play music, all of which [H.L.] Mencken was known to do."