THIS MODERN WORLD

Billmon is going to be on the radio tonight:

I’m supposed to be on a program called Open Source Radio this evening talking about one of my personal heroes — the late, great independent journalist I.F. (“Izzy”) Stone…

Open Source’s host, Chris Lyndon, tells me tonight’s guests will include former Washington Post reporter Myra MacPherson, who just published a biography of Izzy, and former Washington Post national editor (and Stone intern) Peter Osnos, who’s edited a new compilation of Izzy’s articles, The Best of I.F. Stone…

MacPherson and Osnos are supposed to discuss Izzy’s life and times, then I’ll come on for a few minutes and bloviate about Izzy and the blogisphere — i.e. are bloggers the true and legitimate heirs to Stone’s stubborn independence, or just a feral pack of blogfascists in search of a few cheap thrills?…

Anyway, if you want to listen in, here’s a list of public radio stations that carry the program. The podcast link is on the same page (itunes required).

I’m genuinely curious to hear what Billmon sounds like. What I think would be great is if everyone listens and it’s clear he’s actually Joe Lieberman, filling an anonymous blog with all the razor-sharp progressive political analysis his handlers won’t let him say out loud.

Dear White House reporters,

Here’s a question you might ask Tony Snow at one of those little get-togethers you have:

Tony, as you know, Dan Bartlett said back in July, 2003 that President Bush didn’t read all of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq before he took the country to war.

In the five months since it’s been completed, has the president read all of the most recent National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism?

Let me know if you find out the answer.

your friend,
Jon

This sounds like a poorly thought out plot element from a bad movie:

Nearly three-quarters of the judges are not lawyers, and many — truck drivers, sewer workers or laborers — have scant grasp of the most basic legal principles. Some never got through high school, and at least one went no further than grade school.

But serious things happen in these little rooms all over New York State. People have been sent to jail without a guilty plea or a trial, or tossed from their homes without a proper proceeding. In violation of the law, defendants have been refused lawyers, or sentenced to weeks in jail because they cannot pay a fine. Frightened women have been denied protection from abuse.

These are New York’s town and village courts, or justice courts, as the 1,250 of them are widely known. In the public imagination, they are quaint holdovers from a bygone era, handling nothing weightier than traffic tickets and small claims. They get a roll of the eyes from lawyers who amuse one another with tales of incompetent small-town justices.

A woman in Malone, N.Y., was not amused. A mother of four, she went to court in that North Country village seeking an order of protection against her husband, who the police said had choked her, kicked her in the stomach and threatened to kill her. The justice, Donald R. Roberts, a former state trooper with a high school diploma, not only refused, according to state officials, but later told the court clerk, “Every woman needs a good pounding every now and then.”

A black soldier charged in a bar fight near Fort Drum became alarmed when his accuser described him in court as “that colored man.” But the village justice, Charles A. Pennington, a boat hauler and a high school graduate, denied his objections and later convicted him. “You know,” the justice said, “I could understand if he would have called you a Negro, or he had called you a nigger.”

And several people in the small town of Dannemora were intimidated by their longtime justice, Thomas R. Buckley, a phone-company repairman who cursed at defendants and jailed them without bail or a trial, state disciplinary officials found. Feuding with a neighbor over her dog’s running loose, he threatened to jail her and ordered the dog killed.

“I just follow my own common sense,” Mr. Buckley, in an interview, said of his 13 years on the bench. “And the hell with the law.”

See, it’s cool — because there’s only one rail!

Kidding aside, I haven’t spent anywhere near enough time in the city of Seattle. The first time I was there, I was in my early twenties, at the tail end of a cross country Greyhound bus trip. And if you’ve never experienced the particular intersection of poverty and wanderlust that leads one to voluntarily travel cross country via Greyhound you should consider yourself lucky, but that’s another story. All I really remember about Seattle from that trip is that I stayed in a fleabag hotel above a strip club, and that it rained the entire time, and that I didn’t actually have enough money to do crazy tourist things like, you know, eat very much.

I hadn’t been there since, until this last year, when I made it out twice — once to give a talk for an ACLU event, and once for a booksigning at Elliott Bay. This time around, each time, I felt like an honored guest. KUOW in Seattle was one of only two NPR stations that gave me airtime on the last book tour (the other was WNYC in New York) — for whatever reason, NPR stations tend to give me the cold shoulder, but at KUOW I was greeted with open arms. They went so far as to record audio versions of several cartoons, which were mixed in during the live interview (there’s a podcast here, but you have to listen to the whole interview to hear them). The crowd at Elliot Bay was one of the most enthusiastic I’ve ever spoken to, and later that night I shared a hotel elevator with Stephen Hawking. All in all, much more fun than the whole Greyhound bus/fleabag hotel experience.

And of course, you can’t discuss Seattle (if by “you” I mean “I”) without giving a shout out to one of its greatest cultural treasures.

There’s really a sense of helpless fury, for the millions of us who saw this disaster coming and tried to raise our voices in warning, only to be shouted down by dimwits and thugs chanting poorly-reasoned slogans and waving flags.

Case in point:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 — A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.