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Chomsky hearts Hugo
If any one American has truly benefited from the First Amendment guarantee of free speech and the right to criticize the government openly and without retribution, it is Noam Chomsky, who continues to draw admiring crowds of listeners despite being a vastly overrated crank and shameless liar. But during his latest trip south to kiss the ring and the behind
Health care in a nutshell, again
David Goldhill takes American hospitals to task, wondering: How can a facility featuring state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment use less-sophisticated information technology than my local sushi bar? And I’d add: How can the man working to change that situation be compared to Hitler?
Afghanistan: the ongoing tally
It’s literally the last sentence of this AP dispatch on a bomb explosion in Kabul, but as the Afghan war debate heats up, I find it absolutely essential to repeat this fact again and again: [A United Nations report said] 1,013 civilians were killed in the first half of 2009, 59 percent in insurgent attacks and 30.5 percent by foreign
Against torture
To the best of my knowledge, Dick Cheney has never personally interrogated a terror suspect. Nor have former California congressman Duncan Hunter or most other right-wing pro-torture pundits. But Ali Soufan has. He makes the case against torture based on direct experience that very few people will ever know.
Israel-Palestine via Toronto
Sanctimonious lefties, including such performers as David Byrne, have lent their signatures to an odious campaign to protest a series of Israeli films being shown at the Toronto International Film Festival. (Hat tip Ben Cohen.) One of the committee members is Naomi Klein, who debased herself as an apologist for the Mahdi Army in 2004. One of the signatories is
Exonerating Todd Willingham
David Grann’s New Yorker piece on Todd Willingham, who was all but certainly innocent of the crime for which he was executed in 2004, is essential reading, and the full text is online. Willingham couldn’t afford decent legal representation and so was done in by two crackpot arson investigators; a quack psychologist who testified that Willingham’s Iron Maiden and Led
#jazzlives update
The campaign continues. Howard Mandel speaks about it here.
Robeson’s legacy
From Peter Applebome’s NYT account of politics and historical memory in Peekskill, New York, specifically as relates to Paul Robeson: [Robeson] became a pioneering and uncompromising human rights advocate. He spoke out against segregation decades before the civil rights movement began, and was a fierce opponent of colonialism when that was barely an issue. He also became an enthusiastic, unflagging