~ Ford, a Texas-based writer, contributes essays on music, Texas life and cultural issues regularly to The Agonist

Sometimes you have to call bull-shit.

Leah and I went to see the movie 300, not knowing what to expect. I’d seen neat looking previews with visual effects similar to those we had watched in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

I must confess; the movie is engaging, the acting good and the visual effects stunning, although at times it seemed as though I was stuck in a giant video game.

"Nothing Left of Liberals"

Speaking as a fellow undergraduate of Danny Postel’s, I can testify that his knowledge of academic minutiae was staggering even at twenty. His boundless knowledge reminded me of the ‘buff’ of whatever fetish - like the baseball fanatic who memorizes every player’s stats. Danny developed an interest in academia in boarding school, and watching him quiz elder members of the philosophy department on obscure journals I was reminded of the Bible story where Mary takes the twelve year old Jesus to the temple where he wows the scribes. Danny combines a commanding knowledge of intellectual history and incisive intelligence with a passionate zeal to do the right thing and defend and protect his intellectual heroes.

. . . has news that the news organization AP went cold turkey on Paris Hilton for a week. The results?

Better than you think.

I guess there is hope for us all.

. . . will return to the AP after a very short stint at Hotsoup, which seems to be faring rather poorly. One can only hope the same fate befalls The Politico, right?

I'm a little behind on my reading, and didn't get well into the February 19th issue of U.S. News and World Report until this evening. Part of the procrastination was due to its lurid cover which shrieks, "Terror's Next Target?" over a photo of a domestic chemical plant.

It runs out the material for the piece is from Steven Flynn's book The Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resilient Nation. Don't know why U.S. News decided to run a book report as their cover story, but hey, it's a grabber and this rag doesn't normally fly off the newsstands at the same rate as Time, Newsweek, and People.

Al Gore just won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. Congratulations, Mr. Gore, next stop, Stockholm and then the White House.

Melissa Etheridge just won the Oscar for Best Song, as well. That makes two for 'An Inconvenient Truth.'

The Guardian

``You also have to be accountable for the results. What are the consequences of that? What happens if we withdraw from Iraq?,'' he said. ``And the point I made and I'll make it again is that al-Qaida functions on the basis that they think they can break our will. That's their fundamental underlying strategy, that if they can kill enough Americans or cause enough havoc, create enough chaos in Iraq, then we'll quit and go home. And my statement was that if we adopt the Pelosi policy, that then we will validate the strategy of al-Qaida. I said it and I meant it.''

At one time, I loved reading the New Republic, and Rick Perlstein's recent columns for the magazine have brought a much needed and fresher voice to the magazine. But I have to say I am not surprised by this development. Cutting back on a publication schedule is not good, regardless of how you spin it:

The New Republic’s circulation, which was about 101,000 in 2000, has slipped to slightly more than 60,000 now. Mr. Foer attributed the decline in part to an intentional culling of subscriptions sold at reduced rates, a move that has helped save costs. Since then, he said, with the help of “buzzy” articles, “we’ve been growing at a slow but steady clip,” and circulation last year within Washington grew by 30 percent.

Circulation growth within Washington of 30%? Well, sounds to me like the neocon market has been tapped out.

Actually, I think it is sad that the magazine that brought us Walter Lippmann has sunk so low. What would he think of "buzzy" articles?

. . . is that the mainstream media is just flat out scared of us. There is no other way to explain it.

Seriously, when was the last time you heard something like this on anything other than NPR?

I tempted to quote Atrios but I'll hold off for now.

My favorite quote comes from Richard Wolffe of Newsweek: "A lot of the blogs are unduly devoted to media criticism." Sure Richard, as if you've never made a mistake in your life, yeah?

Folks, this is exactly why they are scared. Not only do we try and hold our leaders accountable we try and hold the media accountable too. It's a great concept, Wolffe ought to give it some thought some time.

Wolcott comments on this post of Steve Gilliard's where he calls just about everyone out on everything. Both are must read material.

Steve will be on the radio show next Wednesday.

. . . Shaula emailed me this link and this link. Both are from Scobeleizer. Both are comments about teevee, one a question on why our teevee is so 'watered-down' and the other an interesting rumination on the values of HD-TV and analog.

Just something random and interesting to ponder on a Saturday afternoon.

There seems to be a market for the faud pseudo-snob, the person who can proclaim what has "value". Generally it is someone whose tastes are knowledgeable about that which people wish they were knowledgeable about, and their purpose is to tell people not to bother with being knowledgeable about that which is a single step farther into depth and desire of art and thought. Clive James is the latest old foggey to be set up as an authority. Often wrong, but never in doubt, he is now going to subject us to his encyclopediac narrow mindness. That he takes joy in the Duke is a joy - Ellington is the Haydn of Jazz, the man who it keeps coming back to. But Clive James' inability to appreciate bop shows that what he is is a verbose philistine. A generation ago, Ellington would have been sniffed at by such an individual, and a generation from now, the needle of acceptability will have inched a bit forward, and the next old bore will be telling us that the line is now someplace like 1960 or 1970.

Some people lived in 1941, Clive James died there.

. . . but a necessary one.

The Bagnews ad on The Agonist front page took me to the site where a lot of comments of varying stripe and quality weighed in on the posted photograph, and others in the collection. Halfway down the comment list is one from a writer calling himself Scarabus who linked to this article in the Washington Post about a soldier assigned to an interrogation team in Iraq.

If this doesn't make your gorge rise, check your pulse.

(Let me echo Doug's comments and simply add: there's a lot of honesty in the comment thread over there. Check it out. ~spk)

. . . that Glenn Greenwald has a new home.

It seems to me there is a bit of a double standard here. On the one hand the author in question writes a book, called Stealing Jesus, which the Times article in question called, "a harsh critique of Christian fundamentalism." The book is lauded by liberal critics.

Then the same author writes a hard-hitting book about the risks of Islamic fundamentalism in Europe, called While Europe Slept. One liberal critic called it, "racism as criticism."

Now, I've not read either book, but the author's approach seems fair to me. If you're going to tackle one religious 'ism' troubling the world, might as well tackle the other. As to the author's method, well, has anyone read either book? Care to comment?

She wrote as 'Emptywheel' on Daily Kos and covered, extensively, the Plame Affair and all of its various twists and turns. Now she has a book:

What happens when Washington, D.C. pundits and journalists run in the same social circles as the powerful people they cover? When the President and his administration trade press access for loyalty? You get a complicit, uncritical press greasing the skids to a brutal war, conspiring to out a CIA agent, and muddying the waters of a grand jury investigation. In the fearful aftermath of 9/11, much of America’s pride — its free press — became an unquestioning propaganda arm.

This is good opportunity to both buy a good book and support Progressive writers.

The whole review is worth a read, McCauliffe remade the party for the Clintons, and how he remade it had important effects.

McAuliffe taught Democrats that to win they had to learn to play with the billionaires. But there were, as the economists say, “opportunity costs.” In 400 pages of blow-by-blow, one momentous event passes with barely a whisper: the 2002 elections. Some hoped that President Bush’s ties to Enron would make 2002 a Democratic year. Instead, Democrats lost the Senate. As the televised face of the party, McAuliffe got in some hard punches on Enron, but Republicans replied that he himself had made an $18 million profit from a mere $100,000 investment in the controversial communications company Global Crossing.

I'd forgotten about this, but a friend reminded me today. A few years back I interviewed Molly Ivins, the fiery Texas writer who died Wednesday. If you are so inclined you can read the interview here. She really will be missed.

~ Ford, a Texas-based writer, contributes essays on music, Texas life and cultural issues regularly to The Agonist

Recently I watched The Good Shepherd, a movie that follows the life of a young man and his family as he goes to college at Yale University, joins the infamous Skull and Bones society, is drafted into OSS, and later becomes one of the original agents of the Central Intelligence Agency. As the name suggests, the character, Edward Wilson, played by Matt Damon is a believer in the cause.

I’ve just finished a fantastic novel by T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain. Boyle’s perceptions of the “us” and “them” are sharp and refreshing. This “Post-Modern” novel is at once sarcastic and ironic while capturing the deeply human spirit of Steinbeck.

“He’d read about beggars in India mutilating themselves and their children so as to present the horror of the empty sleeve, the dangling pantleg or the suppurating eye socket to the well-fed and guilt-racked tourist. Well, wasn’t this Mexican cut from the same mold, throwing himself in front of his car for the thin hope of twenty bucks? Of course, dinner had been ruined. By the time Delaney got over the shock, said his goodbyes to Jack and swept out into the rush-hour traffic and back up the hill to the new gate and the newly installed guard waiting there to grill him on the suitability of his entering his own community, the marinara sauce had been scorched to the bottom of the pan, and the mussels, though he’d turned off the flame beneath them, had taken on the consistency of Silly Putty.”

I just finished listening to a podcast of Richard Clarke's appearance on the Diane Rehm show on Tuesday, January 23. Ostensibly on the show to promote his new book Breakpoint but really just to talk about our situation in the world regarding Iran, Iraq and al Qaeda. If you have the time give this one a listen. It's worth it. And if you are interested, buy the book Breakpoint, which sounds much more interesting than his last one.

William Ratliff | Stanford University | January 26

Seoul Times - China has traveled light years during the past three decades. After Mao Zedong died in 1976 and the Chinese people step by step became freer to cultivate their entrepreneurial inclinations to improve their lives, China has seemed to be a film spinning ahead in fast-forward. Images flash before the eyes, but before you can really focus they have been replaced by others and yet others.

Guy Clark, Joe Ely, John Hiatt, Lyle Lovett
State Theatre, Cleveland, Ohio: January 20

Four great singer/songwriters. Four chairs, four acoustic guitars. The promise of a couple hours of the best American music you could hope to hear.

All this was delivered this evening at the beautiful and cozy State Theatre in Cleveland as the Songwriters Tour rolled through on a crisp midwest winter's evening.

Q: You are an author and journalist who has written quite a bit about poverty. What made you turn your attention to the white-collar worker for Bait and Switch?
A: Since writing Nickel and Dimed, I’ve gotten hundreds of letters from people in poverty. A lot of the people I’ve been hearing from don’t fit the profile of the “unskilled,” under-educated, low-wage person. They’re college-educated and, in most cases, were doing well until they lost their jobs, usually due to downsizing or outsourcing. I think I shared the common belief that if you’re college-educated, hard working and not a crack addict, you’re pretty much set for life. So hearing from former white-collar, middle class people who are facing destitution made me curious -- and concerned. I decided to investigate.

~A review by Agonist reader Scott Mullen

As a young man in a military family, I grew up listening to the war stories of my father's generation. Many of them were wounded in Vietnam, some badly. A friend of the family got a bayonet in the throat and talked forever afterwards with a strangely altered voice. My father was machine gunned, suffering injuries to hand and foot. They all told stories of absent friends, those who were not so fortunate as they. Their stories were always sobering, and starkly real compared to what I saw on TV or in the movies.

Michael Weisskopf reminds the reader through his own story that what we see in the media is too often much different from what happens in real life. When he picked up a grenade to throw it out of the bed of the truck he was riding in, Weisskopf became part of the story and suffered the same fate as many of our young soldiers whose lives have been altered by the roadside bombs and IED’s in Iraq. Weisskopf lost his hand and part of his arm. Other soldiers he was with suffered more extensive amputations – injuries that have become the hallmark of the Iraq war. This book is an attempt to tell their stories, through the eyes of a reporter that is going through everything they are forced to endure.

More after the jump