Standing on the corner
Suitcase in my hand
Jack is in his corset and jane is in her vest
And me I’m in a rock and roll band
Riding in a stutz bearcat jim
Those were different times
And the poets studied rules of verse
And all the ladies rolled there eyes
Sweet jane
Sweet jane
Sweet jane
– Mott The Hoople, ‘Sweet Jane‘ (Words and music by Lou Reed)

Creativity is just one delicious side effect of doing a bowl.
Somehow smoke opens new imaginative horizons where the creative factor weighs heavy in the air, alighting like a room full of bong smoke — oh the flow without interruption.
Marijuana lets loose those dogs of words: Last speculative point: marijuana also enhances brain activity (at least as measured indirectly by cerebral blood flow) in the right hemisphere. The drug, in other words, doesn’t just suppress our focus or obliterate our ability to pay attention. Instead, it seems to change the very nature of what we pay attention to, flattening out our hierarchy of associations.

(Illustration found here).

It’s in that high state where the flattening out come in real handy and the creative juices kick in.
Ironic, or maybe it’s just a jagged little pill for innovative thought, but Alanis Morissette agrees:

“As an artist, there’s a sweet jump-starting quality to [marijuana] for me.
I’ve often felt telepathic and receptive to inexplicable messages my whole life.
I can stave those off when I’m not high.
When I’m high — well, they come in and there’s less of a veil, so to speak.
So if ever I need some clarity … or a quantum leap in terms of writing something, it’s a quick way for me to get to it.”

Cop a buzz and you’re head over feet.

And now it appears one of the best-known and most-creative peoples in all of history, Bill Shakespeare, might have been a stoner, and a clue is Sonnet 76:

Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth and where they did proceed?
O, know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.

Shakespeare might have been more inventive than first realized, and research peoples want to find out for good.
In 2001, scientists at the The South African Police Services Forensic Science Laboratory in Pretoria analyzed the stems and bowls of 24 clay pipes — including a number found in the garden of Shakespeare’s home in England — and found traces of tobacco, suggestive evidence of cannabis, and mysteriously, two of the pipes showed signs of what looks like cocaine.
National Geographic explained: The analysis was made after a South African scientist had a hunch that reference to the “noted weed” in one of Shakespeares sonnets may have been the bard’s way of extolling the effects of cannabis. “There were very low concentrations of cannabis, but the signature was there,” said Inspector Tommy van der Merwe, of the Forensic Science Laboratory.

And with the Bard: Of the pipes that were found in the garden of Shakespeare’s home at New Place, several tested positive for cannabis. “We can’t prove that Shakespeare smoked these pipes, but we do now at least know what his contemporaries were smoking,” Thackeray says.

Now they want to dig up Bill’s bones.
From Fox News (h/t Raw Story):

Paleontologists are looking to examine the remains of William Shakespeare, hoping to unlock the mysteries of the life and death of the world’s most famous playwright — and to prove that the poet once puffed.
The bard is buried under a local church in Stratford-upon-Avon. And a team of scientists, led by Francis Thackeray — an anthropologist and director of the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa — have submitted a formal application to the Church of England for permission to probe the site where he sleeps, perchance where he dreams.
…
“We have incredible techniques,” Thackeray told FoxNews.com, referring to the “nondestructive analysis” the team has planned. “We don’t intend to move the remains at all.” Instead the team will perform the forensic analysis using state-of-the-art technology to scan the bones and create a groundbreaking reconstruction.
…
Thackeray claimed the devices were used to smoke cannabis, a plant actively cultivated in Britain at the time. The allegation has provoked disbelief and anger among some fans of the bard.
Prof. Stanley Wells, honorary president of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, told the Daily Mail, “I would be happy if they did open it up because it could put an end to a lot of fruitless speculation.”
“If we find grooves between the canine and the incisor, that will tell us if he was chewing on a pipe as well as smoking,” Thackeray told FoxNews.com, citing similar evidence found in Virginia.

However, there’s the curse Bill put on his grave:

Others may have issues with digging up the body, which goes directly against the late playwright’s dying wishes.
Shakespeare, famously fearful of the happenings of his own remains after his death, had a curse engraved on his tomb: “Good frend for Jesus sake forebeare,/ To digg the dust encloased heare;/ Bleste be the man that spares thes stones,/ And curst be he that moves my bones.”
Philip Schwyzer, a senior lecturer at Exeter University, told Reuters that “Shakespeare had an unusual obsession with burial and a fear of exhumation.
The stern inscription on the slab has been at least partially responsible for the fact that there have been no successful projects to open the grave.”

Dude, it’s just bones — chill a second, then re-fill the pipe.

(Illustration: ‘Burning of Colours‘ by Wojciech Kossak found here via Google Images).

After more than three months, Leo Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace‘  is finally finished — and to reveal how good a read it’s been, I hated for the book to end, even as the once-big-lump of pages fluttered down to a few thin sheets, there was a sad longing to have it somehow start all over again.
You can read my original post in January on just getting started here if you’d like — at that point I was probably less than a quarter-ways through the book.

Although War and Peace is about Tsarist Russia, its primary characters Russian, the novel’s soul and insight are Russian, the bread-and-butter, meaty-core linchpin of the book is Napoleon’s invasion in 1812, the sacking of Moscow, and of course, the French army’s horrifying, disastrous retreat.
Also inner-woven within that meaty-core is the Russian version of religion — just about every damn conversation is inter-sprinkled with Christian scripture submerged in hypocrisy via the Russian Orthodox Church — and how people and events are tainted with this dogma.
Despite this, and ironically, Tolstoy himself in his later years developed his own schism from Russia’s version of Christianity, even up to comparing Russian Orthodoxy to witchcraft.
Hence, in huff-and-a-puff, the Russian Church excommunicated Tolstoy in 1901.
Last year, the 100th anniversary of his death (which no one in official government circles celebrated), there was an attempt made to lift the excommunication decree:

Ahead of the November 20 centenary, Sergei Stepashin, the head of Russia’s Book Union and a former prime minister, wrote an open letter to Church Patriarch Kirill to forgive the author. “I ask you, Your Holiness, to show today the compassion that only the Church can afford,” he wrote in Rossiiskaya Gazeta.
The Church was quick to respond, to the same paper, saying Tolstoy was Russian literature’s “most tragic personality.”
…
“Several generations of Orthodox readers both at home and abroad appreciate Tolstoy’s literary work… However, his excommunication will not be lifted,” wrote Tikhon Shevkunov, executive secretary of the Patriarch’s Arts Council.

Still assholes a century later.

If you want, read another view of a religious aspect of War and Peace here.

Seemingly, the first big chunk of War and Peace is an unfolding of the highest society of Tsarist Russia prior to Bonaparte’s invasion, and as I remarked in the earlier post, the novel really is a huge, multi-chararcter soap opera with a lot of romance and romantic intrigue fleshed through and through — people fall in love quick as one set of eyes can meet another.
Although there’s a shitload of characters, the narrative concentrates primarily on viewpoints from three main sources — one from Pyotr ‘Pierre’ Kirilovich Bezukhov, most-likely the male lead; along with people and events from two families, the Bolkonsky clan (Prince Andrei Nikolayevich, his sister, Maria Nikolayevna, and their asshole daddy, ‘the old count,’ who has great trouble saying, “I love you,” to his children), and the Rostov bunch (Natalia ‘Natasha’ Ilyinichna, most-likely the female lead, her brothers, Nikolai and Pyotr ‘Petya,’ their cousin, Sofia ‘Sonya’ Alexandrovna), and through them flows not only the plot of War and Peace, but also a certain segment in the history of Russia.
Until Napoleon pulls a fast one and invades, life is party, or a soireé, with huge swatches of metaphysical-philosophical musings piled freely into the chronicles, from Pierre’s infatuation with freemasonry, to Prince Andrei’s intellectual upheaval after he’s nearly killed at battle of Austerlitz.

After the invasion, though, the high-society, high-flying life goes to shit in a wire basket.
Tolstoy knows politics and history — despite bullshit from Napoleon about Tsar Alexander I forcing the French army to invade Russia, and once Bonaparte made that fatal decision to move east, Tolstoy says events moved of themselves without any real plan or aforethought, a huge, massive example of the old axiom falling forward, the feet catching.

(Illustration of Russian Foot Artillery on the eve of Borodino found here via Google Images).

Napoleon’s invasion, of course, is the paper cut of War and Peace — the event bleeds through a big middle chunk of the book and is first-most one of the major turning points in world history — and although the French supposedly won the day, Bonaparte’s days of glory were finished.
He never recovered from the horror of his Grande Armée‘s slow, ugly death as it retreated the shit out of Russia.

On the start, though, the French rolled fast, so fast the Russians weren’t able to put together any kind of defense and kept retreating further and further.
After some switching commanding generals because mainly the clash of personalities, Tsar Alexander finally appointed Mikhail Kutuzov top guy, an old, way-fat and dying prince, who truly understood the fatal mistake Napoleon had made invading the Motherland.
Kutuzov continued the retreating process, harassing the French as they went until he found a suitable place to finally make some kind of stand — a well situated spot near the town of Borodino in central Russia, about 70 miles west of Moscow.

The battle of Borodino was Bonaparte’s true Waterloo, some three years before the real battle of Waterloo was fought, which ended Napoleon for good — he lost a shitload of men at Borodino, but in reality, that particular battle really cost him that over-powering and winning thread he’d been weaving since he took power — he was loser from then on.
The battle involved about a quarter-million men (130,000 French; 120,000 Russian) and killed an estimate 70,000 of those — a horror pit and in comparison, the US Civil War’s most deadly fight at Gettysburg (72,000 Union; 94,000 Confederate troops) only left about 46,000 dead.

Borodino plays a pivotal role for our War and Peace characters, too — which Napoleon is also a member — and is a physical and emotional perception of reality game-changer.
Tolstoy paints war, especially large-canvas battle scenes, as little segments of a hell-scape, like jigsaw-puzzle pieces, each portraying a some small, nasty detail of the big, ugly whole, and though the pieces are so scattered, a sense of the horror makes itself well known.
And Tolstoy can turn a descriptive phrase.
One the eve of Borodino, Napoleon couldn’t sleep or be still, he paced about his tent, pondering all kinds of war shit, then decided to go outside (Tolstoy says it’s historical bullshit Napoleon had a head cold during Borodino and wasn’t functioning up-to-his-usual-high-caliber-snuff): “The night was dark and damp; a slight drizzle was falling almost inaudibly.”
A couple of words, ‘almost inaudibly,’ yet describes the entire feel of the environment.

And Tolstoy isn’t graphic like our modern writers.
Even a description of a field hospital where Prince Andrei is taken after being wounded, the bodies, the wounds and screaming, the over-wrought and over-worked doctors running about, it’s all there in detail, and you know this must be the real hell’s kitchen, but there’s no cruel portrayal of it all, just several of those puzzle pieces snapping hard together.
Even describing the sacking and burning of Moscow, the word ‘rape,’ is never used, or at least I couldn’t find it, and I began looking  after awhile when it became obvious by its absence — the word, ‘pillage,’ is used most often, but not in the usual conjunction as in ‘rape and pillage.’

War and Peace is also a love story (really it’s many, many love stories) in which characters do not understand who they are until the moment is right.
When Pierre sees old friend and semi-flame, Natasha, toward the end of the book, he knows he’s in love and has been so for such a long time.
Pierre’s awakening to that fact is a literary gem:

And the face with the intent eyes — painfully, with effort, like a rusty door opening — smiled, and through that door there floated to Pierre a sudden, overwhelming rush of long-forgotten bliss, of which, especially now, he had no thought.
It breathed upon him, overwhelmed him, and swallowed him up entirely.
When she smiled, there could be no doubt.
It was Natasha, and he loved her.

Great book, good read: War and Peace.

Note: So overwhelmed myself with War and Peace, I’m now reading Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina,’ a whole different animal, yet in the same vein as War and Peace, but not so heavy and dense.
Just from what I’ve gathered so far, the whole thing’s about infidelity.

And from what I’ve read of Tolstoy himself, he had a long, successful and happy marriage, not a life situation for a shitload of other writers, so he had a different take on love, romance and marriage than a lot of people.

(Illustration of ‘Portrait of a Woman 1883‘ by Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoy (Kramskoi) found here via Google Images).

Federal safety officials are investigating a report that two planes landed at Reagan National Airport without control tower clearance because the air traffic controller was asleep.
An aviation official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the incident, said the single controller — a supervisor — was scheduled for duty in the tower at that time but had fallen asleep.

What’s a body to do?

(Illustration found here via Google Images).

Apparently, it’s not to sleep.
US peoples have a tendency to place awake over sleep, we be tough.
And we’ve a debt beyond the house, the car and kids off to college…
From the New York Times:

Sleep Machismo means valuing sleep loss over sleep, placing all activities above the basic human need of sleep and celebrating the machismo of the sleep-deprived.
Americans perceive sleep as an expendable luxury, rather than a biological necessity.
Day after day, week after week, we choose to defer bedtime in the interests of a favorite TV show, reading one more article, answering one more e-mail, or catching up on the phone.
All the while, we are accumulating sleep debt — a debt which, like financial debt, incurs steep penalties.

But we can brush it all off with a nice afternoon nap.
The big problem, I believe, is what happens when we actually get to sleep.
This from a horrific new study:

A study conducted at the University of San Diego found that during an average night’s sleep, at least 14 different animals, ranging from ants to Gila monsters to wounded possums, are likely to scurry, slither, or crawl across a slumbering individual’s body.
“You become a virtual playground for these creatures mere minutes after you fall asleep, inhaling dozens of insects and swallowing up to 17 spiders during an eight-hour period,” lead researcher Jack Paulette told reporters Thursday, adding that earwig colonies spend each night hatching thousands of their young in and around human genitalia.
“If you’re lying in bed and feel as if something has just brushed across your leg, that’s because something actually has. In most cases, snakes.”
Paulette added that it’s not uncommon for a baby mountain goat to clamber upon one’s shoulder at night in an attempt to find purchase, and that people who awaken with mountain-goat afterbirth in their bedsheets should know they aren’t alone.

(The Onion).

Good morning, hope you slept well.
There’s still a nuclear holocaust brewing in Japan, a crazy no-fly flying war in Libya, and if you can’t sleep, try acupressure, yoga and tai chi.
If nothing else, sleeping beauty, lose them dumb-ass PJs.

“Dawn“  by Miss Emily Dickinson

When night is almost done,
And sunrise grows so near
That we can touch the spaces,
It ‘s time to smooth the hair

And get the dimples ready,
And wonder we could care
For that old faded midnight
That frightened but an hour.

Another day, another time to be boxer-shorts-shitting frightened, and way-more than just 60 minutes:

Eliza Bennet is the hottest, ass-knocking chick this side of Trinity — and is beyond proficient in the deadly arts.
She kicked the shit out of love-sick, befuddled Mr. Darcy, and can handle a mob of the undead with a flick of her dreaded Katana sword, chopping up Satan’s Spawns with all the grace of Aphrodite and the ruthlessness of Herod.
Beware of pissing off Miss Bennet, however, as she’d quickly open your throat, or slice up your gizzard, snatch out the intestines, and choke your ass on your own entrails.
And the writer, Jane Austen, who’d have thought — in the ghastly plague that swept the UK in the last years of the 18th century and into the 19th, Austin was a samurai/ninja, highly-excellent in the slaying of the unmentionables.
Who’d figured?
And what about Miss Dickinson — my most favorite of all the poets, quiet, unassuming, gifted — and her abilities in the deadly arts?
A student of Master Pei Liu of the Shaolin Temple in Henan Province, Miss Dickinson was a champion with her Zatoichi Cane sword and then took the skills back to America for a time.
Reportedly, however, under Austen’s advice and consent, and while on safari in the UK, alone once slaughtered three-score and six zombies in an ambush of the diseased ones just south of Kent.
Who’d have figured?

This particular pontification on current events and social metaphors came about after a call last night from an old journalism friend, a long-time photographer who’d worked with me years ago on my last newspaper gig down on California’s Central Coast (the Times-Press-Recorder) and wondered if I’d be interested in contributing to an online magazine he was helping put together up in Washington state.
He explained the new publication would highlight stories with a positive news perspective, as most news media carries only bad shit, but would instead focus on good coming out of bad.
Good idea, I guess, and told him sure, I’ll see what can be done.
After reminiscing on personal and professional folklore in and out of the newsroom, we hung up.
A good conversation, as he’s a good friend and a most-excellent photographer (view his stuff  here), but there was also something curious in the sense of it — I was tired, so I didn’t ponder the mysterious import feeling within the confine of my ears.

Until this morning — the odd sense, the ring of the idea, positive news, hamstrung the brain.
Although I really couldn’t understand the concept, positive news, apparently there’s a growing market for nothing but — in an age of ugly, seek out the pretty.
Last March, a piece in Newsweek viewed this trend:

People not only wanted to watch good-news reports, they had lots of their own good news to share.
I’m even learning to spin bad news into optimistic gold all by myself.
Watch this: more people losing their jobs has actually led to a massive increase in stay-at-home parents, which is great for childhood development.
Bam.

There’s already a Good News Network, with stories on things like jeans giant Levi Strauss to include A Care Tag for Our Planet on its products, and even a Good News on This Day in History segment (an example: today in 1797, Andre-Jacques Garnerin made the first recorded parachute jump over Paris, France).
Alas, however, good news after 30 days will be hidden behind a subscription firewall.

In reality, there is/are no good news anywhere, layered down, or on top, or spun out of whole cloth — an extreme-depressing proposition, I admit.
These ‘green shoots‘ of optimism are just a cultural perception of the old “The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades” view of good vs bad.
Not many feel-good stories came out of the Great Depression era, hence, the 1930s were alive with screwball, romantic movie comedies, and a big song of the time: ‘We’re in the Money.”
In bad times, even lottery ticket sales increase — good news come from dreams.
And the factuality coming at humanity, though, is embodied within the worst form of dreaming — a nightmare.

One aspect of the Internet is speed, how quickly events can be recorded, disseminated and digested across the globe — those damn, freakin’ cellphone cams!
Iran’s presidential election last summer is a pure, prime example.
Online allows anyone, anywhere at anytime to become a reporter, or more like it, a chronicler of events, places and things.
Videos of just about every human situation has cropped up online to be viewed potentially near-instantly by billions of people, which makes the point — way, way-too-much information is thrown at the brain nowadays, and it’s not just via the Internet — witness all that horrifying shit bill-boarded off racked magazines on grocery-store check-out lines; we’re trapped there, forced to read glaring headlines on all kinds of cultural-personality-obsessed, dumb-fuck stories.
(Read a loony essay I wrote last year on media here).

Mixed in with all uploading/downloading/viewing/listening is the professional media — newspapers, TV, magazines, whatnot.
These guys have morphed into something real ugly in the last three decades — the national people, especially all the TV types, pursue nearly-wholly other interests than real journalism (Katherine Graham would indeed let her tit (be) caught in a big fat wringer if she could see her Washington Post as it is today) and the real loser is the US peoples.
Just one glaringly-sad example — the New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning story on the Pentagon’s TV propaganda military-analyst ploy in the run-up to the Iraq invasion — few Americans know anything about that story as it was blacked out by ALL the TV networks (as they were co-conspirators in the scam) except one (PBS).
The continuing loss of anything-near what’s been called accountability journalism is similar to all those failed banks from last year recently giving the same asshole employees huge bonuses — the fat get fatter.
While the national media parades around full of itself, making much of balloon boy and David Letterman’s peccadilloes, the two biggest stories facing the planet are way under-reported – peak oil and climate change, especially the latter, as its influence might be worse than the former, and its arrival quicker.
Although the subjects have been discussed/debated in public, the actual consequences of what’s really occurring and the likely worse-case scenarios approaching have been viewed as fringe or nutcase, and no full-blown balloon-boy-like examinations by the media.
Even with a major climate conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, only weeks away.
The BBC reports nothing of substance will emerge from Denmark, despite the obvious:

Nevertheless, what is clear from the interview is that what is agreed at Copenhagen is likely to fall so far short of original expectations.
Let’s not forget what is at stake here.
The Copenhagen conference is reckoned by many to be pretty much the last chance the world has to begin to cut greenhouse gas emissions before catastrophic climate change becomes inevitable.

And to make a matters worse, Sen. James Inhofe, a wingnut GOPer from Oklahoma, will supposedly visit the Copenhagen meeting with a “a truth squad of three” to undermine any kind of global-warming agreement in an original-classic case of hauling-off and striking himself along with everybody on the planet directly in the nuts.
Inhofe and others of his ilk will in the near future most-likely be viewed as more than just loudmouth dumb-asses, but near criminals.
Despite the evidence, a Pew Research poll released today reports only 57 percent of US peoples in the survey think there is solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades. In April 2008, 71% said there was solid evidence of rising global temperatures.
And this: fewer also see global warming as a very serious problem — 35% say that today, down from 44% in April 2008.

The best sites for info: The Oil Drum and Climate Progress.

Coupled with the environment and fuel is capitalism/economics.
And there ain’t nothin’ purty there either.
Might be hard to cobble together a positive news perspective in today’s money woes — except for the mentioned Wall Street assholes — but there are ‘good’ stories there.
I could part of a ‘good’ economic story.
In my day-job/offline profession as a liquor-store clerk, there’s not really a recession, though, business is not booming, sales have maintained a strong course the past two years.
Whiskey is a good tax revenue and when times are bad, people will still smoke and drink, but are frugal about what they inhale — according to Gallup last June, The percentage of U.S. adults who consume alcohol is fairly steady at 64%, and there has been little change in self-reported drinking volume.
Now it’s more bang for the buck: Whiskey, of all the spirits, is making a bit of a comeback, the council said, and showed good performance in a slow market. Premium rum, super premium tequila and premium vodka also grew.
Mine is just one story in the Naked City.

The rest are experiencing a financial nightmare without an apparent end.
As the US Senate haggles over extending unemployment benefits, 7,000 US unemployed a day loose that small income — US employment at 9.8 percent and California at 12 — and one has the fixings for a shitload of bad stories with new jobless claims higher than expected.
Although there’s some indication an economic recovery is on the way, banks are still biting at the gold-plated chafe, so says Elizabeth Warren, TARP’s oversee chair: “You really begin to wonder what it’s going to take to get the attention of the people in charge of these very large corporations…”
Never-ending story with a bad ending.

Here’s a good one.
From SatireWire:

Unwilling to wait for their eventual indictments, the 10,000 remaining CEOs of public U.S. companies made a break for it yesterday, heading for the Mexican border, plundering towns and villages along the way, and writing the entire rampage off as a marketing expense.
…
Calling themselves the CEOnistas, the chief executives were first spotted last night along the Rio Grande River near Quemado, where they bought each of the town’s 320 residents by borrowing against pension fund gains.
…
Law enforcement officials and disgruntled shareholders riding posse were noticeably frustrated.
“First of all, they’re very hard to find because they always stand behind their numbers, and the numbers keep shifting,” said posse spokesman Dean Levitt. “And every time we yell ‘Stop in the name of the shareholders!’, they refer us to investor relations. I’ve been on the phone all damn morning.”

Maybe, it’s the end of the world as we know it, but I feel like smiling — for just a few minutes, at least until the next good story.

As Nadia Bilbassy, White House correspondent for the Dubai-based satellite TV network MBC, told Think Progress last month: I found that I think they really think that if you make it to cover the White House then you must be bigger than God, therefore, you know, you have to be treated as such.

Except for one gal, the dean (or headmistress) of the WH press corp: Helen Thomas.

(Illustration found here).

Thomas has been covering WH antics for nearly 50 years, starting with JFK (in the photo above) and still running strong into a new millennium with President Barack Obama (photo below).
She still maintains that pure journalism appeal: Those in power hate her.

During his WH press conferences, George Jr. didn’t call on Thomas for three years!
In May 2006, he wished he’d made it four years.
An exchange on the Iraqi War:

Thomas: They didn’t do anything to you or to our country.
Bush: Look — excuse me for a second, please. Excuse me for a second. They did. The Taliban provided safe haven for al-Qaeda. That’s where al-Qaeda trained –
Thomas: I’m talking about Iraq –
Bush: Helen, excuse me. That’s where — Afghanistan provided safe haven for al-Qaeda. That’s where they trained. That’s where they plotted. That’s where they planned the attacks that killed thousands of innocent Americans.

(Illustration found here).

Yesterday, Time magazine held a Q&A with Thomas on the publication of her newest book, Listen Up Mr. President: Everything You Always Wanted Your President to Know and Do, and she was still up-front and right-on:
How is Obama’s approach to the press?

Everybody in the White House tries to manage us. There’s always the spin. When Kennedy came in, which was the first year I started covering the White House, there was something called “managed news.” And through the years it has been perfected to an art.
…
Not more than any other President. Nobody likes criticism, and nobody likes to feel attacked, of course. But I think it behooves all Administrations to tell the truth as much as they can, to bring the people with them. You cannot have a democracy without informed people. It shouldn’t be a shock when the public finally learns things.

How’s the WH on secrecy?

All of them are secretive. All of them. But I think we got a lot more out of President Kennedy and especially President [Lyndon] Johnson. He would summon us — the entire press corps — to the South Lawn and we’d stroll around the grounds with him. We’d call them the Bataan Death Marches because the women wore really high heels with pointed toes, and we would be falling all over each other. But we’d take these walks, and he would really let his hair down. We’d get real insight into how much he was suffering with Vietnam. He’d tell us a lot of things, then he would say it was all off the record. But we knew that he wanted us to write it without attribution.

And bloggers?

Everyone with a laptop thinks they’re a journalist. Everyone with a cell phone thinks they’re a photographer. So our profession is sidelined in a way. There’s no turning back. It’s frightening because you can ruin lives and reputations willy-nilly without realizing it. No editors. No standards. No ethics. We’re at the crossroads. So many newspapers that are so valuable are going down the drain. It’s a crisis.
…
I’m praying. I’m praying that we’ll still have newspapers. That’s where you get in-depth information. You can’t get it from headline news or these very brief things on TV or on blogs. They don’t explain anything.

And advice for future presidents?

It would be, Do the right thing. There’s no other place to go.

Continue hanging, Helen, we’d all better off if you did.

(Illustration found here).

This will indeed piss-way-off the GOP and all wingnuts as the award comes much, much early in Obama’s tenure in power — an unprecedented event.
As one reader at Talking Points Memo pointed out this morning: Isn’t it a little soon for this? Maybe after he brokers an Israeli-Palestinian agreement or something like that.
It sounds like the, ‘boy is the world relieved you guys didn’t choose McCain’ award.

GOP chairman Michael Steele responded: “The real question Americans are asking is, What has President Obama actually accomplished?”… and it’s “unfortunate that the president’s star power has outshined tireless advocates who have made real achievements working towards peace and human rights.” And the president won’t be…“receiving any awards from Americans for job creation, fiscal responsibility, or backing up rhetoric with concrete action.”

Whether Obama deserves the award is not the real excitement — the horror stories now will pour forth from the conservative aisle and it will be much fun.