Washington Post Does Deck Chairs

I am always on the lookout for reliable news sources. Desperate, even. My standards are pretty high, given my increasing knowledge/cynicism about the general behavior of the folks who play at journalism these days. I want critical thinking, little or no unattributed rumor-spreading, and honesty. That seems a pretty good place to start, ehh?


More or less on that basis, I have a half-dozen or so web-sites that I consult routinely - multiple times per day, when circumstances permit. I have frequently linked and promoted these sites here - and I hope that may have led some of you to check out or even bookmark those sites. The pantheon includes Glenn Greenwald at Salon, Josh Marshall's TPM mega-site, the Firedoglake complex, Hullabaloo, and Dan Froomkin's White House Watch.


So it has been seriously gut-wrenching that the Washington Post, a major newspaper that has barely otherwise managed to stay above National Enquirer/Fox News/WSJ editorial page caliber for me has jettisoned Dan Froomkin. There are a lot of folks besides me who will no longer bother to consult the doomed Washington Post from here on, from what I understand. There are a few resources of interest there still, Dionne, for example. My only direct links to the paper in the last year+ involved Froomkin.


The last actual White House Watch post is here. It includes a wonderful wealth of links, e.g. to archive of posts, sympatico bloggers, and such. You would be well-advised to copy in full with links maintained if you are still an actual standing human with an interest in how the American form of democracy as conceived in the 18th century might survive. I have no idea how long the dastardly paper will maintain links to such an incriminating bunch of stuff. Dan has astutely archived a good deal on his own, and identified means of catching up with him in his next incarnation.


I have greatly appreciated that Dan has been willing to forego the Obama kool-ade, subjecting our vibrant new President, obviously leaps and bounds beyond his predecessor in ever-so-many ways, to serious criticism when it is called for. And it has indeed been called for on several fronts. It is appalling that Dan is in a very tiny minority in so acting. See short list above for others.

In short, to quote the Boss, sorry BHO, "No Retreat, No Surrender!"


Here are the first few paragraphs of Dan's last WHW post, hopefully with links intact:


Today's column is my last for The Washington Post. And the first thing I want to say is thank you. Thank you to all you readers, e-mailers, commenters, questioners, Facebook friends and Twitterers for spending your time with me and engaging with me over the years. And thank you for the recent outpouring of support. It was extraordinarily uplifting, and I'm deeply grateful. If I ever had any doubt, your words have further inspired me to continue doing accountability journalism. My plan is to take a few weeks off before embarking upon my next endeavor -- but when I do, I hope you'll join me.

It's hard to summarize the past five and a half years. But I'll try.

I started my column in January 2004, and one dominant theme quickly emerged: That George W. Bush was truly the proverbial emperor with no clothes. In the days and weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks, the nation, including the media, vested him with abilities he didn't have and credibility he didn't deserve. As it happens, it was on the day of my very first column that we also got the first insider look at the Bush White House, via Ron Suskind's book, The Price of Loyalty. In it, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill described a disengaged president "like a blind man in a room full of deaf people", encircled by "a Praetorian guard,” intently looking for a way to overthrow Saddam Hussein long before 9/11. The ensuing five years and 1,088 columns really just fleshed out that portrait, describing a president who was oblivious, embubbled and untrustworthy.

When I look back on the Bush years, I think of the lies. There were so many. Lies about the war and lies to cover up the lies about the war. Lies about torture and surveillance. Lies about Valerie Plame. Vice President Dick Cheney's lies, criminally prosecutable but for his chief of staff Scooter Libby's lies. I also think about the extraordinary and fundamentally cancerous expansion of executive power that led to violations of our laws and our principles.

And while this wasn't as readily apparent until President Obama took office, it's now very clear that the Bush years were all about kicking the can down the road – either ignoring problems or, even worse, creating them and not solving them. This was true of a huge range of issues including the economy, energy, health care, global warming – and of course Iraq and Afghanistan.


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Outside In

I have seriously impacted my box of canning salt in the last couple weeks.

Marg and I made a foray to the Dry Side of the Cascade Mountains recently with bird-viewing, asparagus-buying, and relaxation on our minds. Per usual, backroads were factored into our route, in this instance for the sake of the birds (well, actually, for the sake of me). Bluebirds, western and mountain, Cedar Waxwings, Bullock's Oriole. That sort. Ahhh.

We enjoyed our riverside room in Yakima, featuring a cameo of float-fishers working their way into the swift-flowing river. I got my grass (8#) at the farmer's market, along with much else, e.g., $1 cabbage that could still find its' way to the smoker.

That aspara-grass yielded 4 marginal quarts pickled, with a cup or so of said salt in the mix. Not to mention pickling spice, onions, carrots, garlic, and an erotic variety of other herbs and flavorings, with results to be assessed later.

And then "we" concluded that my new smoker ought to be invoked for some salmon for Father's Day gifting. Not a bad idea! I used a box of dark brown sugar and a cup of that same iodine-free salt, together with a handful of garlic, minced, for overnight brine. Soupy liquid a clear indication that brine had some effect. Four hours on the smoker, more or less, in this case using apricot wood for smoke. Two nice filets for the Grand-dads and a leftover fillet from our freezer along for the ride. I am quite happy with the results, tender, juicy, smoky delight.

In the meantime I had to get right on the asparagus. Four quarts would never make it, considering that we missed a year or two along the way. We picked up another armful locally over the weekend and I managed another four quarts last night. More salt!

You Had to Be There

As has happened too often in the past couple months, I recently found myself having to return a library book unread. Some of the key factors in arriving at this unfortunate state include the uncertainty as to when any particular reserved book will show up, whether said book is in such demand that it cannot be renewed, and what else I have in the way of distractions.

Speaking to the one factor there that is less than random, this is certainly one of those seasons of distraction. June is a busy month on our social calendar, perhaps second only to December. Lots of birthdays and anniversaries, just for starters. And there is also a distinct intensity when it comes to getting the vegetables going.

But let's get back to that book: "Is God a Mathematician?" My impression was that the book was an ode to the elegance of mathematical principles and a presentation in lay terms of the intrinsic fascination of various mathematical aspects of our universe.

I confess I am a fan of mathematics, with a love hangover from some success and delight in the topic in school and a good deal of frustration at how rare that experience seems to be these days. Exhibit A for my fandom is that I recently worked at tracking down a copy of a book that I found inspiring in one of my HS courses (Courant and Robbins: "What is Mathematics"). I now find the book has subtitles like "Incommensurable Segments, Irrational Numbers, and the Concept of Limit" and "Hyperbolic Non-Euclidean Geometry." It is not a number I have any intention of reading cover-to-cover. Anyway, whether it is the teaching of the subject, degraded quality of the textbooks, or something else, it is disturbing to me that enthusiasm for such a critical subject seems to be in such decline.

When I realized I was going to have to forego actually reading "Is God," I made a point of sampling the book. That just made relinquishing it worse of course. But in the process I encountered the word "antinomy," denoting something like conflict or paradox, i.e., two seemingly valid yet opposed principles. I'm not sure I had encountered that word before. It was distinctive for me as an anagram for the element antimony (#51?). In the meantime, I was reading a book entitled "A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines," an entertaining semi-fictional improvisation on the lives of Kurt Godel and Alan Turing. Almost disturbingly, that same "new" word came up, less than 24 hours after first encounter. An intriguing word, if not necessarily useful in everyday exchanges (!).

I had just acquired a resource book on the subject of anagrams, 800 pages or so in length, and decided, bemused by this new word and anagram to give the resource a road-test. The way it works is that you alphabetize the letters and then consult the correct word-length chapter. Eight letters. AIMNNOTY, right?

Mind you, this was my first actual usage of the $2 anagram book I had dumped on book pile the previous day. I opened to the 8-letter section and proceeded to the "AIMNN" section only to find that my helpful bookseller had inserted a bookmark at that exact page.

If only it meant something! Like, say, I just won a single-payer health-care plan for the country.