From Huff Post’s Dan Froomkin:

“These days, when we think of George W. Bush, we think mostly of what a horrible mess he made of the economy. But his even more tragic legacy is the loss of our moral authority, and the transformation of the United States of America from global champion of human rights into an outlaw nation.

History is likely to judge Bush most harshly for two things in particular: Launching a war against a country that had not attacked us, and approving the use of cruel and inhumane interrogation techniques.” nd that’s why the two most essential lies — among the many — in his new memoir are that he had a legitimate reason to invade Iraq, and that he had a legitimate reason to torture detainees. Read more here

Roxana Saberi was a freelance reporter living and working in Tehran when she was arrested by Iranian authorities in January 2009. She had been in the country for six years, and was about to return to the US, where she planned to work on a book about Iran. Instead, she was sentenced to eight years on charges of espionage.

Saberi was forced to spend 100 days in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, eighteen of those in solitary confinement, before her sentence, which had attracted worldwide media attention, was overturned.
In Between Two Worlds: My Life and Captivity in Iran, she documents her arrest, imprisonment, and the goes into details about her Iranian interrogation. She recently discussed these matters with Nazanin Rafsanjani, a producer at National Public Radio’s On the Media, who began the conversation by asking Saberi about the day she was arrested. Check it out here

The award-winning journalist Neil Henry confronts the crisis facing professional journalism in this era of rapid technological transformation. American Carnival combines elements of memoir with extensive media research to explore critical contemporary issues ranging from reporting on the Iraq War, to American race relations, to the exploitation of the image of journalism by advertisers and politicians.

Drawing on significant current events in U.S. media and social history, Henry argues that, given the amount of fraud in many institutions in American life today, the decline of journalistic professionalism sparked by the economic challenge of New Media poses especially serious implications for democracy. As increasingly alarming stories surface about unethical practices, American Carnival makes a stirring case for journalism as a calling that is vital to a free society, a profession that is more necessary than ever in a digital age marked by startling assaults on the cultural primacy of truth. Check it out here

Ah, “Gotcha!” According to Yahoo News, the journalist Joe McGinniss, who is now working on a biography of Sarah Palin, which is set to come out in 2011, has moved right next store to Sarah Palin in Alaska. Yahoo News decided to reference Palin’s Facebook page(?!) on which she’s commenting that McGinniss is her new neighbor.
Nothing like a brilliant free-publicity stunt, un-knowingly delivered from the most clueless former VP candidate on earth. Read more of Palin’s facebook rants on the subject here…

In a September 2006 talk before the International Monetary Fund, Nouriel Roubini presciently warned that a “U.S. housing bust” would spark a recession in America and a “global hard landing”: homeowners would default on mortgages, trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities would unravel, financial institutions would totter, and a fiscal tsunami would threaten the world
Read the NY Times Review