KPFK Wed. 3/18: Victor Navasky: The Iraq Experts

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It’s the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war. For comment and analysis we’ll feature VICTOR NAVASKY – his new book is MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, Or How We Won the War in Iraq: The Experts Speak. Samples: “Military Action will not last more than a week” – Bill O’Reilly, Jan. 23, 2003. “I couldn’t imagine somebody like Osama bin Laden understanding the joy of Hanukah” – George W. Bush, at a White House menorah lighting ceremony, Dec 10, 2001. Victor of course is publisher emeritus of The Nation.
READ Victor Navasky in today’s LA Times op-ed page

Also: TOM ENGELHARDT talks about what we’ll be saying a year from now, when the war will still be going strong – even if Obama is elected, Tom points out, he will have been in office only two months in March 2009, and is unlikely to have removed significant numbers of troops by that point. Tom edits the indispensable TomDispatch.com.

Plus: LOUISE STEINMAN’s memoir begins with the fundamental rule of her childhood in the 1950s: “never mention the war to your father.” Then, after his death, she discovered nearly 500 letters he wrote during the Pacific War – and a mysterious Japanese flag. She set out to uncover his story and the story of the flag. Her book is THE SOUVENIR: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War. Louise is curator of the ALOUD series at the LA Public Library and co-director of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities at USC, and she writes for the LA Times, the LA Weekly, and other publications.

Hillary’s Iraq Vote, Five Years Later: HuffPost

The fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war provides an appropriate moment to revisit Hillary Clinton’s argument in favor of authorizing Bush’s use of force, and to contrast it with the case made at the time by Bush’s opponents.

In the last few years, Clinton has defended her vote by arguing that “if I knew then what I know now, I would never have given President Bush the authority” to attack Iraq.But a majority of Democrats in the House knew enough “then” to vote against the resolution – as did 21 out of 50 Democratic senators.

In Clinton’s Senate speech, still posted on her senate website, she began by accepting Bush’s premise that “if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons.”The question, she said, was whether war was the appropriate means of stopping those developments.

In supporting Bush, Clinton claimed to be taking a middle path between two extremes – on the one hand, those who believed we should go to war only if the UN Security Council approved it, which she considered absurd, and on the other, those who favored “attacking Saddam Hussein now.”But not even Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld favored an immediate attack at the point the Senate debate occurred — October 2002 – so she was rejecting an argument no one was making.

. . . continued at the Huffington Post 

KPFK Wed. 3/12: Who Would Jesus Vote For?

 

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Evangelical politics is taking a sharp, surprising turn – away from a war on liberalism and toward doing something about poverty and the environment. BOB MOSER explains – his story “Who Would Jesus Vote For?” is on the cover of the new issue of The Nation. Bob has been covering Democrats in the South for book to be published this summer.

Plus: novelist PETER CAREY has won two Booker prizes: the first for Oscar and Lucinda, which was made into a movie starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett; the second for The True History of the Kelly Gang, which sold two million copies worldwide. Now he has published his tenth novel, His Illegal Self, which tells the story of Che, a seven-year-old whose parents are part of the Weather Underground.
More Stuff to read: my Q&A with Peter Carey

Also: The Comintern had front organizations – and so did the CIA. The story of the CIA’s funding of supposedly independent cultural groups and magazines—and how Ramparts magazine exposed the secret funding in 1967– is told by HUGH WILFORD; his new book is The Mighty Wurlizer: How the CIA Played America. “By turns hilarious and horrifying” — Kirkus reviews. Hugh Wilford teaches at Cal State U. Long Beach.

More stuff to read: my new piece at the Huffington Post, “How the Spitzer Sex Scandal Could Help Hillary”

Peter Carey: Growing Up Radical: Dissent

Peter Carey has won two Booker prizes: the first for Oscar and Lucinda, which was made into a movie starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett; the second for The True History of the Kelly Gang, which sold two-million copies worldwide. Now he has published his tenth novel, His Illegal Self, which tells the story of a seven-year-old whose parents are in the Weather Underground. I spoke with him in Los Angeles.

Jon Wiener: In His Illegal Self, the year is 1972 and the characters are set in motion by the Weather Underground. I’’m reluctant to talk about the plot because one of the pleasures of the book, especially at the beginning, is figuring out the plot—, told mostly from the perspective of an seven-year-old boy. Could you explain what you want people to know about it?

Peter Carey: This is the number one issue for me at the moment. I spent two years building this book, which really depends on withholding information. It delivers a whole series of surprises and thrills for the reader, I hope, which was not easy to achieve. But we live in a culture where people confuse “story” and “art,” and where reviewers are called upon by their editors to report the story. So while they are praising this book, they are sort of destroying it by giving away all these things.
. . . continued at Dissent magazine HERE

KFPK Wed. 3/5: The Beat Goes On

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Hillary won the popular vote in Texas and Ohio — but she can’t win a majority of elected delegates, no matter what happens in the remaining primaries (as Jonathan Alter has pointed out).
Can we understand what happens next? Yes we can! — with help from HAROLD MEYERSON and JOHN NICHOLS: Harold writes for the Washington Post op-ed page and is executive editor of The American Prospect; John is Washington editor of The Nation and writes “The Online Beat” blog at TheNation.com.

And to get away from Clinton, Obama, and McCain for a moment:
THE WORLD WITHOUT US: ALAN WEISMAN asks what would happen to the earth if humans vanished: how would nature respond if it were suddenly relieved of the relentless pressures of human activity? Weissman’s book is a major international bestseller, translated into 27 languages, with 2 million copies sold worldwide; It’s the #1 Nonfiction book of the year for many critics.
Watch the great YouTube video: “Your House Without You”

Obama and the Jews: HuffPost

March 2: Now it’s official: page one of the New York Times reported on Saturday that the Jews have a problem with Obama.

The story, by Neela Banerjee (is that a Jewish name?), did not exactly say there was a “problem.” It said there was a “challenge” for Obama: “navigating” the “treacherous paths” that lead to “winning the trust” of Jewish voters. That task, the Times reported, is “all the more difficult” because of the “tenuous relations” between blacks and Jews.

Not until paragraph nineteen, deep inside the paper on page A12, did readers learn that the Jewish vote is “hardly monolithic.”

READ THE REST OF THIS HUFFINGTON POST STORY HERE.

KPFK Wed. 2/27: Samantha Power on Obama & Iraq

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Samantha Power is a foreign policy advisor to Barack Obama and Pulitzer-Prize winning author of A Problem from Hell, the ground-breaking work on genocide and humanitarian intervention. She was also an early opponent of Bush’s plans to invade Iraq. We’ll talk with her about Obama, Iraq, and her new book Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World – Vieira de Mello was killed in Baghdad, by a suicide bomber in 2003.
READ my new piece at the Huffington Post, “Samantha Power: Obama and Me”

We’ll also be featuring THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES , the BBC documentary that has never been released in the US. It argues that much of the threat of terror is a fantasy. J. Hoberman in the Village Voice called it “the most widely discussed docu agitprop since Fahrenheit 9/11,” and said “The Power of Nightmares takes a similarly confrontational stance toward Bush-world disorder. But . . . it’s more complex and seductive.”

More stuff to read: my new piece at the Huffington Post, “Republicans for Obama: How Significant?”

Feminists Against Hillary–HuffPost

Wed. Feb. 20: no show on KPFK today — pre-empted for the fund drive.
But there is more stuff to read:

Obama girls“Anti-Hillary Sentiment on the Rise Among Feminists”

More than 1,000 feminists have signed a statement criticizing Hillary Clinton and supporting Obama for president – evidence that Clinton’s support among women activists continues to decline. The group, “Feminists for Peace“, started out with 100 signers before the super-Tuesday primaries, and has 1,200 signers two weeks later.

Clinton’s support for the war in Iraq was the leading reason she lost the support of the feminists, along with the fact that “until quite recently [she] opposed all legislative efforts to bring the war and occupation to an end.”

Those endorsing Obama include writer Barbara Ehrenreich; longtime peace activist Cora Weiss; Katha Pollitt, columnist for The Nation; Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times writer Margo Jefferson; women’s rights historians Alice Kessler Harris and Linda Gordon, and actor/activist Susan Sarandon.

READ THE REST OF THIS HUFFINGTON POST STORY HERE .
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also at the HuffPost: “Nutrition vs. Food: Michael Pollan and his Eater’s Manifesto”

KPFK Wed. 2/13: The Power of Nightmares

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THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES is the BBC documentary that has never been released in the US. It argues that much of the threat of terror is a fantasy. J. Hoberman in the Village Voice called it “the most widely discussed docu agitprop since Fahrenheit 9/11,” and said “The Power of Nightmares takes a similarly confrontational stance toward Bush-world disorder. But the counter-narrative offered by this three-part, three-hour BBC account of the so-called war on terror is more complex and seductive.”
We will be featuring the DVD of “The Power of Nightmares” as a premium in the KPFK fund drive.

Also: AN EATER’S MANIFESTO: MICHAEL POLLAN’s is deceptively simple: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly vegetables.” His new number one-bestseller is IN DEFENSE OF FOOD. His previous books include The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, named one of the ten best books of 2006 by the New York Times. Pollan teaches journalism at UC Berkeley. We will be featuring In Defense of Food as a premium in the KPFK fund drive.
MICHAEL POLLAN’S RECOMMENDED WEBSITES:
Center for Informed Food Choices – Eat Local Challenge – Food Routes

KPFK Wed. 2/6: Can Obama beat Clinton?

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Our day-after analysis of Clinton v. Obama on Super Tuesday: Clinton 52% Obama 42% in California; total delegates: Clinton 803, Obama 742.

HAROLD MEYERSON on the Republicans: he says in today’s Washington Post, “McCain’s victories have chiefly been a triumph of biography over ideology.” Last night demonstrated “the bankruptcy of the conservative agenday and political strategy that have steered the Republicans for many years.”

HillaryJOHN NICHOLS on the Democrats: he says at TheNation.com that white men split their votes evenly between the woman and the black man; women were for Hillary, blacks for Obama; that means the deciding votes were Latino – they went for Clinton 2-1 nationally and 73% in California.

And we’ll put it in historical context with MICHAEL KAZIN of Georgetown U. -his most recent book is A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan.

More stuff to read: my new piece “Feminist Leaders Oppose Hillary” at the Huffington Post — 39,679 hits!