Charles Kaiser : Author Archive : CJR

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Full Court Press

Tortured Logic, “Dueling Speeches” Edition
May 22, 2009 05:44 PM
“Democrats and Republicans, politicians, journalists, and citizens fell silent. In other words we went off course.”–President Barack Obama “I want to say I was always on Darth Vader’s side.”--Bill Kristol “That’s kind of a weird thing to admit.”--Jon... Continue reading
Full Court Press

“Good Deeds, and Good Works”
May 13, 2009 03:11 PM
Eden Ross Lipson, an author-editor-activist-journalist who had a huge, mostly-unseen impact on American literature and American life, died early yesterday morning at a hospice in Manhattan. Her death at 66 came thirty months after she was first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer--and... Continue reading
Full Court Press

Winners and Sinners
May 8, 2009 05:23 PM
Winners: New York Times economics columnist David Leonhardt and President Barack Obama for a splendidly substantive interview in The New York Times Magazine about the democratization of finance, the future of education and health care, and what the... Continue reading
Full Court Press

Above the Fold: The Pentagon Capers
May 7, 2009 06:05 PM
This week the Pentagon took the highly unusual step of withdrawing a report issued by its inspector general one week before President George W. Bush left office last January. The report was an attack on the superb New York Times... Continue reading
Campaign Desk

Above the Fold: Ross Report Revisited
April 28, 2009 01:22 PM
Brian Stelter reports on page one of The New York Times today that newly disclosed torture memoranda show how an interview conducted at the end of 2007 by ABC News had unfairly tilted the debate about waterboarding. Stelter’s... Continue reading
Full Court Press

Winners & Sinners
April 23, 2009 06:25 PM
Winner: The New York Times's Scott Shane. Just four months after remarks of F.B.I. director Robert Mueller were published on vanityfair.com, two days after FCP asked Shane’s editor why they had never been reported in the Times, and... Continue reading
Campaign Desk

Above the Fold: Know-Nothings at the NYT
April 22, 2009 05:34 PM
“There is no history of ethnic conflict in Iraq.” – former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, explaining to Congress in February, 2003, why Gen. Eric K. Shinseki’s prediction that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in... Continue reading
Full Court Press

Above the Fold: Waiting in the Lobby
April 21, 2009 05:40 PM
Although FCP doesn’t agree with everything the Obama administration has done, especially in its defense of state secrets, never has a senior member of that administration said something that strikes us as outright ridiculous. That record of reasonableness... Continue reading
Full Court Press

Above the Fold: Memos of (Mis)understanding
April 17, 2009 06:58 PM
Barack Obama acted intelligently and courageously yesterday by making the Bush administration’s torture memos public, despite the strong objections of past and present CIA officials. None of the protests were very credible, partly because almost everything in these memos detailing American... Continue reading
Full Court Press

Above the Fold: Beltway Journalism, “Swallowed by an Hourglass”
April 15, 2009 03:42 PM
The more things change, the more Beltway punditry stays the same. If only the voters could change the composition of the talking heads on television the same way they replace presidents and members of Congress, we might all get... Continue reading
Full Court Press

Winners & Sinners
April 10, 2009 05:21 PM
Winner: Mark Danner, for another brilliant piece about torture in the New York Review of Books: “Torture is at the heart of the deadly politics of national security." he writes. The former vice-president, as able and ruthless... Continue reading
Full Court Press

Above the Fold: Our Financial Follies
April 10, 2009 04:33 PM
Last week, William Black, a former investigator of the Savings and Loan scandal, went on Bill Moyers Journal and repeated a charge which a growing number of experts agree with: the chief executives of many of America’s... Continue reading
Full Court Press

Winners & Sinners
April 3, 2009 05:30 PM
Sinner: Vanity Fair, for running an article by Mark Bowden about Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. that was so filled with elementary factual errors that it managed to destroy the credibility of the magazine and of its newest contributing editor... Continue reading
Full Court Press

Above the Fold: Colin Powell, American Coward
April 3, 2009 05:21 PM
At just about every crucial juncture in his career, Colin Powell has failed his country, and himself. This sorry record goes all the way back to his time as a young U.S. Army Major posted in Saigon, when, after... Continue reading
Full Court Press

Winners & Sinners
March 24, 2009 09:23 AM
Winner: Paul Goldberger, for a beautiful meditation in The New Yorker on the baseball stadiums just completed for the New York Yankees and the New York Mets--“the first time that two major-league stadiums have opened in the same... Continue reading
Full Court Press

Above the Fold: The Torture Report
March 23, 2009 06:32 PM
When the history of this era is written more honor will be attached to Mark Danner than to most other journalists. One week ago the author and UC Berkeley journalism professor printed the details of a hitherto secret... Continue reading
Full Court Press

Winners & Sinners
March 13, 2009 03:06 PM
The Biggest Winner: Let’s be clear: Jon Stewart is the best interviewer on television, because he is the toughest, the smartest, and the best informed in the business. That is the real lesson of his week-long assault on CNBC, Rick... Continue reading
Campaign Desk

Above the Fold: The Whole Truth About Torture
March 10, 2009 06:35 PM
The story by Charlie Savage and Scott Shane on the front page of yesterday’s New York Times, about the “fallout of the war on terrorism” lingering over former Bush Administration lawyers, was not terrible. The article quoted experts on... Continue reading
Full Court Press

Above the Fold: Remembering John Leonard
March 3, 2009 06:37 PM
Family members, former colleagues, important writers, and intimate friends gathered yesterday to praise the critic John Leonard for his “love of the life of the mind,” his “incomparably informed generosity,” his reluctance to “pan books or movies or TV shows... Continue reading
Full Court Press

Above the Fold: The Best and Worst of Television
March 2, 2009 10:11 AM
It took me five minutes to know that it was a fraud. It took me another almost four hours of mathematical modeling to prove that it was a fraud.–Harry Markopolos on Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme If you only see one... Continue reading

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