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Friday, Jan 02, 2004
affairgate
"I actually think it's likely that the original source didn't know that Plame was a "NOC," because I actually don't believe that the people around Bush would have been sufficiently unpatriotic to burn a NOC, and all of her assets, in such a petty act of revenge and damage control. That was my first take on this story, and I haven't yet seen adequate reason to change it. I think that some of my Democratic friends are so taken with the general horribleness of the Bush Administration as to have lost sight of that fact that these people aren't Snidely Whipsnade melodrama villains, self-consciously revelling in the evil they do. In their own minds, they're good people, and above all, patriots. So it's much more likely that whoever called Novak would have had only a hazy impression of Plame's actual status than that he would have been deliberately revealing a still highly secret identity."
the unhappy recap
arod untrade wrapup.
bubble rap
george soros: the bubble of american supremacy
Thursday, Jan 01, 2004
graph paper
"If the threat of taking boring pix hangs over every photographer of ambition, Diane Arbus was perhaps more conscious of it than any other photographer. Her photographs relentlessly tell us how interesting they are; they dare us to look away from them. If our favorite thing in the world is not to look at pictures of freaks and transvestites and nudists and mentally retarded people, this cuts no ice with Arbus. She forces us to acknowledge that these are no ordinary unpleasant pictures of society's discards. They are photographs only Diane Arbus could have taken. The question of whether they are also great works of photography remains undetermined thirty years after her death. Arbus is not universally beloved the way, say, Walker Evans is. Interestingly (and fittingly), she herself did not love Evans. Of the 1971 Evans retrospective at MOMA she wrote: "First I was totally whammied by it. Like THERE is a photographer, it was so endless and pristine. Then by the third time I saw it I realized how it really bores me. Can't bear most of what he photographs.""
narcosphere
narco news relaunches.