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Meanwhile, inside the beltway…
Via Michael Crowley at TNR’s “The Plank,” a story from The Hill about the 15 Democrats who broke party ranks to support the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA): Business interests are making good on their promise to reward 15 House Democrats who bucked their party’s leadership in July and backed [CAFTA].In the three months since CAFTA passed the House
“Emergency”?
The National Lawyers Guild has put forth an “Emergency Resolution Condemning Zionism as a Form of Racism.” “Smells like A.N.S.W.E.R.”, a friend says.
A correction
On my old and abandoned blog, I had quoted Arundhati Roy as follows: The Iraqi resistance is fighting on the frontlines of the battle against Empire. And therefore that battle is our battle…. Terrorism. Armed struggle. Insurgency. Call it what you want. One of my respondents notes, rightly, that the material following the ellipsis is not contiguous in Roy’s original
A word on Cuba
Pursuant to this piece of mine for The New Republic about the “Hands Off Assata” campaign, which is run by pro-Castro fanatics, here is an important Doug Ireland post. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) protested a Paris visit by Castro’s foreign minister Felipe Pérez Roque this past October. Ireland lends his support to RSF and attracts vicious replies in his comments
The French riots
[Updated] Here is a meticulous, historically informed post on the French riots by Doug Ireland, who rips up the rightist Sarkozy but also Tariq Ramadan. Money quote, about Sarkozy’s vow to “Karcherise” the Arab ghettoes: “Karcher” is the well-known brand name of a system of cleaning surfaces by super-high-pressure sand-blasting or water-blasting that very violently peels away the outer skin
Today’s torture news
From an MSNBC report:Vice President Dick Cheney made an unusual personal appeal to Republican senators this week to allow CIA exemptions to a proposed ban on the torture of terror suspects in U.S. custody, according to participants in a closed-door session. Sullivan’s on the money: “[Cheney’s] still furiously lobbying Senators to protect his right to torture. A man who avoided
Music tidbits
I’ve been lax in posting about music, so here are a few recent highlights: —Watching Christopher Taylor play Ligeti’s complete Piano Etudes at the Miller Theater. Verging on superhuman. —Hearing Peter Apfelbaum’s great Hieroglyphics band at Symphony Space tonight (or last night, I should say). —Listening to Yes’s Tales From Topographic Oceans for the first time in probably 15 years,
Intelligent Design
Laurie Goodstein had a great piece in yesterday’s Times about the “intelligent design” trial in Dover, Pennsylvania, and how the Thomas More Law Center scoured the country for years looking for a school board willing to provoke a lawsuit over this pseudo-science. So the trial itself was intelligently designed, by reactionary political operators. (The law center is chaired, bizarrely enough,