Tumbling on the heels on that last story is this item from the No Good Deed Goes Unpunished Department: it turns out that Andy Martin, the original promoter of the Obama Muslim smear, has now decided to smear… that’s right, the person who called him out in the Washington Post: Danielle Allen.
Here’s some highlights from the ridiculous press release that Martin put out today. If you have any questions about the talents, intelligence, or reliability of Prof. Allen, I happily direct you here and here and even here.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled buffoonery:
“In so far as my contact with the Post,” Martin will state, “Mr. Mosk accurately reports my role and, as far as I can remember, correctly reports our interview.
“But Mosk produced an incomplete form of journalism. He writes a long article about Danielle Allen, but she is a very suspicious character to say the least. (more…)
The Washington Post has a nice story up about Danielle Allen’s efforts to trace the origins of the Obama-is-a-Muslim smear.
I should start by saying that Allen is something of a hero to many us who know her even slightly, and not just because she earned two doctorates by the time she was 29. I don’t know her at all well, but as Dean of the Humanities Division at the U. of C. she was the university officer most directly responsible for Chicago Review.
Ben Smith at Politico takes a swipe at Allen–or at least the Post’s validation of her research–for coming too late to a story that’s already been covered by him and others:
There’s some interesting stuff in the story about how a smear spreads, but I’m not sure where the two doctorates come in. Indeed, Allen could have made it to her key discovery—that the author of the smear was a marginal Illinois character named Andy Martin—without even resorting to The Google. Chris Hayes (who, with Jonathan Martin and me, has been obsessing about this since last fall) tracked it back to Martin in his Nation piece last October.
This kind of turf-guarding is fairly predictable, especially when it’s journalists and academics who are standing on opposite sides of the picket fence. (Smith, joking about Hayes: “Give that man a Ph.D. Or two.”)
But Smith’s self-confessed superciliousness seems misplaced. (more…)
“Postcards from Nowhere,” which appears in this week’s New Republic, is Jed Perl’s latest poison-tipped volley against the ruling elite of contemporary art. Some sample copy:
For Matthew Barney, Richard Prince, and now Cai Guo-Qiang, having a retrospective at the Guggenheim is like being a Visigoth who has been given the keys to Rome. At the Guggenheim, the staff no longer curates exhibitions. They simply invite an artist to come in and rape the place.
And, discussing the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and the New Museum:
Discussing such museums in architectural terms is like discussing a sculpture by Jeff Koons in compositional terms. You would be kidding yourself. These museums are only brands designed to contain brands.
I’ve been struck favorably by some of the art that Perl hates. Whichever of Damien Hirst’s mirrored medicine cabinets was hanging in the Palazzo Grassi in Venice back in 2006 was impressive enough to steal my breath for more than a few seconds.
But far and away the best things at the Grassi were the very uncontemporary Rothkos hanging in a second-story alcove. And so, having found myself almost completely bored by the Whitney Biennial a few weeks back–only Leslie Hewitt’s leaning paintings held my attention for more than a few minutes there–I have to count myself generally sympathetic to Perl’s spite.
That said, I thought it interesting to see how difficult Perl found it to explain what exactly it was that gets under his skin about the Matthew Barneys and Richard Princes of the world. (more…)
Enchanted by this little mystery over at John Latta’s Isola di Rifiuti, I set myself to poking around Google Books, which coughed up this page and its delightful list of the “key words and phrases” in Kenneth Koch’s Selected Poems 1950-1982:
sleeping with women, circus girls, Thesmophoriazusae, Poros, asleep and sleeping, Frank O’Hara, O’Ryan, Saint Ursula, Fernand Leger, Jane Freilicher, Art of Love, John Ashbery, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, limburger cheese, Amba, poetry, brassiere, Larry Rivers, Strangler
No, kids, it’s not flarf; it’s just a little fun.
The Chico Enterprise-Record has a pretty amazing slideshow of the Humboldt Fire, which lasted from June 11 to June 16. According to the paper,
Flames from the Humboldt Fire chewed through 23,344 acres, destroyed 74 homes, and damaged 20 others before it was brought under full containment Monday [June 16] just after 6 p.m. Progress against the fire allowed the release of several crews Sunday and Monday, reducing the number of personnel on the fire lines from a high of 2,500 Friday to around 1,000 today [June 17].
And on a more depressing note, the Times also has an article today on a new report (PDF) that describes how the U.S. government blocked the disbursement of loans intended to fund clean-water and sanitation projects in Haiti for political reasons.
The revelation of the role the American government played in keeping the loan money from reaching Haiti is the most disturbing part of the report–though given our history in that country it would be difficult to describe the news as shocking–and I’ll get to it in a moment.
But the report’s real effort–and arguably its most important–is to construe this meddling as a human rights violation. Specifically, the report concludes that “it is clear that actions taken by the United States in blocking IDB development loans earmarked for water projects in Haiti were a direct violation of the U.S. government’s human rights obligations.”
The key conceptual hinge for this argument, which seems fairly novel to me as a legal argument (but what do I know?) is that
the human rights of individuals in many parts of the world—including the right to water—are directly affected by the actions that some States take at the international level through international organizations, development programs and, most importantly for this report, IFIs [international financial institutions]” (p. 50).
This opens the path to the report’s conclusion that
the United States actively impeded the Haitian State’s ability to fulfill the Haitian people’s human right to water through its actions, thus breaching its duty to respect human rights. Such blatant frustration of the object and purpose of the human rights treaties to which the United States is a signatory or a State party is a clear violation of international law.
In any case, here are the paragraphs that describe the U.S. government’s interference with the Haitian loans, from pages 11 and 12 of the report, which was jointly authored by the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ), Partners In Health (PIH), the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center (RFK Center), and Zanmi Lasante:
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