| December 1 |
- NBC and McCaffrey's coordinated responses to the NYT story
- Emails obtained between NBC executives and the retired General further underscore NBC's gross indifference to journalistic ethics.
|
| December 2 |
- Eric Holder, Jack Quinn and the Rich pardon
- It's premature to criticize Obama for his establishment-soothing appointments. But it's just as premature to heap praise on him for those appointments.
- Salon Radio: Cato's Gene Healy on domestic troop deployments
- What is behind the Pentagon's new plan to deploy 20,000 U.S. Army troops inside the U.S., and what are the risks and dangers?
|
| December 3 |
- Nepotistic succession in the political class
- A large, and rapidly growing, percentage of high elected officials are part of politically powerful families. What accounts for this anti-democratic dynamic?
|
| December 4 |
- Why do Feinstein and Wyden sound much different on the torture issue now?
- The two Senators spent the year emphatically insisting that the CIA's interrogators comply with the Army Field Manual. With Democrats in control, they're not so emphatic any longer
|
| December 5 |
- Vague pledges to "end torture" and "comply with treaties and laws"
- When politicians pay lip service to vague generalities, it reveals nothing about what they actually intend to do about the worst of the abuses.
- Salon Radio: NPR's Tom Gjelten and ACLU's Harvey Grossman
- What accounted for NPR's inaccurate reporting on the John Brennan controversy? And: will a federal court invalidate telecom immunity as unconstitutional?
|
| December 7 |
- A Democratic insider's call for a new presidential secrecy power
- Matt Miller of the Center for American Progress wants to crush one of the few remaining means by which Americans learn about their government: disclosure by presidential aides
|
| December 8 |
- The CIA and its reporter friends: Anatomy of a backlash
- The coordinated, successful effort to implant false story lines about John Brennan illustrates the power the intelligence community wields over political debates.
- Gen. Hayden and the claimed irrelevance of presidential appointments
- Since when did people start believing that high-level appointments and Cabinet secretaries were irrelevant?
|
| December 9 |
- Salon Radio: Retired Rear Adm. John Hutson on torture
- Twelve retired military officers meet with key Obama appointees to discuss ways to end Bush's torture and detention policies.
|
| December 10 |
- Top Democrat urges "continuity" for CIA, DNI and interrogation policies
- House Intelligence Committee chairman Silvestre Reyes channels Dick Cheney in urging Obama to retain Bush's key intelligence aides and policies.
|
| December 13 |
- Some observations on this week's television appearances
- The limitations from the "concision" demands of mainstream television become even more apparent when one is subjected to them
|
| December 15 |
- Senate report links Bush to detainee homicides; media yawns
- While the media fixates on the low-level, ultimately irrelevant crimes of Rod Blagojevich, a Senate report all but declares Bush and Rumsfeld to be war criminals
|
| December 17 |
- Prostitution vs. war crimes: The real moral offense
- As Dick Cheney heads off into a luxury-filled and respectable retirement, outrage continues to be directed at the petty transgressions of Eliot Spitzer
- Committing war crimes for the "right reasons"
- Those defending Bush officials by claiming they acted with good motives are invoking the same rationale used by every war criminal and aggressor.
|
| December 18 |
- Demands for war crimes prosecutions are now growing in the mainstream
- The emerging evidence of culpability among top leaders, combined with their increasingly brazen admissions, is rendering real investigations an unavoidable option
- Salon Radio: Pam Spaulding on Rick Warren
- What's behind Obama's choice of one of America's most extremist pastors to deliver the invocation at his Inauguration?
|
| December 19 |
- How new is Obama's New Politics?
- Many Obama supporters claim that including, accommodating and compromising with the right will create post-partisan harmony. When have Democrats not done that?
|
| December 20 |
- If criminal penalties are removed, what will deter lawbreaking by political officials?
- The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus advocates the ultimate self-contradictory claim: we need to forget about prosecutions in order to "ensure it never happens again"
|
| December 22 |
- Cheney says top congressional Democrats complicit in spying
- The vice president claims key Democrats were briefed in detail about the NSA program, actively approved of it and urged that it be kept secret.
|
| December 23 |
- Some observations after being involved in a Fox News report
- The Fox tactics of distorting news are extreme, but they are far from uncommon
|
| December 24 |
- Torture ambivalence masquerading as moral and intellectual superiority
- The consensus defense of the Bush torture regime -- "it was done with good motives" -- is almost as destructive as the torture itself
|
| December 27 |
- Politico reviews the year in American "political journalism"
- Its list of the top 10 "political scoops" of 2008 says far more about the state of our political press than they could have possibly imagined
|
| December 28 |
- Marty Peretz and the American political consensus on Israel
- The New Republic Editor-in-Chief expresses anti-Arab hatred in the starkest terms possible, but are his policy views towards Israel any different from the standard American position?
|
| December 29 |
- David Gregory shows why he's the perfect replacement for Tim Russert
- The new Meet the Press star conducts an "interview" with the Israeli Foreign Minister that makes the media's pre-Iraq-war behavior look adversarial by comparison
|
| December 30 |
- George Washington's warnings and U.S. policy towards Israel
- Americans overwhelmingly want the U.S. to take no sides in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Why is that view not just disregarded, but made into a taboo?
|
| December 31 |
- Torture prosecutions finally begin in the U.S.
- The Bush DOJ is actually demanding a 147 year sentence for a Liberian political official who ordered torture inside Liberia.
|
