You can get your fill of sarcastic book review right here, if you enjoy that kind of thing.

You've lived all your life in America, never attended a megachurch or a brothel, don't own guns, are non-Amish, and it dawns on you that this is a book about the French. There's no reason for it to exist in English, except as evidence that travel need not be broadening and one should be wary of books with Tocqueville in the title.

America is changing, he concludes, but America will endure. Thanks, pal. I don't imagine France collapsing anytime soon either. Thanks for coming. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. For your next book, tell us about those riots in France, the cars burning in the suburbs of Paris. What was that all about? Were fat people involved?

Garrison Keillor Skewers Bernard-Henri Lévy

All Music Guide begins her bio with:

Vocalist Madeleine Peyroux can best be thought of as a Billie Holiday for the 1990s.

From the promo on her web site:

The album "Careless Love" seamlessly weaves strands of acoustic blues, country ballads, torch songs and pop into a vibrant fabric that is both classically vintage and thoroughly up to date.

AMG wraps up its bio of Peyroux with this:

However she is marketed, blues, jazz or "roots music," look for more great things to come to this young and promising 20-something vocalist, guitarist and songwriter.

Madeleine Peyroux

If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good mother. I am in fact a bad mother. I love my husband more than I love my children.

The author of this essay has a new book out. Review is available in today's NYT. From the First Chapter:

Don't they see that I am busy? Don't they realize that obsessive self-pity is an all-consuming activity that leaves no room for conversation? Don't they know that the entrance to the park lies right next to the Eighty-first Street playground and that if I am not completely prepared, if I do not clear my mind, stop my ears to all sounds other than my own breathing, it is entirely possible -- likely even -- that instead of striding boldly past the playground with my eyes on the bare gray branches of the trees, I will collapse outside the playground gate, the shrill voices of the children keening in my skull? Don't they understand, these ladies with their petitions and their dead banker husbands and bulky Tod's purses, that if I let them distract me with talk of Republicans stealing elections or whether Mrs. Katz from 2B saw Anthony the new doorman asleep behind the desk last Tuesday night, I will not make it past the playground to the refuge of the park beyond? Don't they get that the barbaric assault of their voices, the impatient thumping of their Lucite canes as they wait insistently for my mumbled replies, will prevent me from getting to the only place in the entire city where I am able to approximate serenity? They will force me instead to trudge along the Seventy-ninth Street Transverse, pressed against the grimy stone walls, inhaling exhaust fumes from crosstown buses all the way to the East Side. Or worse, they will force me to take a cab.

Today, thank God, the elevator is empty all the way to the lobby.

You may also wish to check out the review by former Poet-Laureate Robert Pinsky of Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking":

The geological imagery conveys the disparity of scale between any mortal intelligence and those immense, lethal gulfs and mountains. It is a terrain often lied about, and routinely blurred by euphemism. Didion's book is thrilling and engaging -- sometimes quite funny -- because it ventures to tell the truth: a traveler's faithful account of those harsh but fascinating cliffs.

Modern Love: Truly, Madly, Guiltily

This film is definitely worth your time. Frankly I'm surprised none of the MemeStreams regulars have mentioned it before now, aside from my recent posting of the Oscar nominations. (This film received six.) Be sure to visit the official site.

The trailer at the official site seems designed to evoke the greatest possible resonance between the McCarthy era and today's circumstances with the 'war on terror'. But the story in the film is substantive in its own right, and the treatment is thoughtful without being preachy or overwrought with metaphor/allegory.

A.O. Scott at NYT said, "the film is a passionate, thoughtful essay on power, truth-telling and responsibility."

Roger Ebert closed his review thusly:

Clooney's message is clear: Character assassination is wrong, McCarthy was a bully and a liar, and we must be vigilant when the emperor has no clothes and wraps himself in the flag. How many Americans know what habeas corpus means, or why people are still talking about it on TV?

Good Night, and Good Luck.

What follows are excerpts from Paul Pillar's essay, "Intelligence, Policy,and the War in Iraq", which appears in the March/April 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs. I originally posted about this article on Friday.

What is most remarkable about prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq is not that it got things wrong and thereby misled policymakers; it is that it played so small a role in one of the most important U.S. policy decisions in recent decades.

Congress, not the administration, asked for the now-infamous October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's unconventional weapons programs, although few members of Congress actually read it. (According to several congressional aides responsible for safeguarding the classified material, no more than six senators and only a handful of House members got beyond the five-page executive summary.)

In the shadowy world of international terrorism, almost anyone can be "linked" to almost anyone else if enough effort is made to find evidence of casual contacts, the mentioning of names in the same breath, or indications of common travels or experiences. Even the most minimal and circumstantial data can be adduced as evidence of a "relationship," ignoring the important question of whether a given regime actually supports a given terrorist group and the fact that relationships can be competitive or distrustful rather than cooperative.

I made a similar comment in 2004.

Although distance from policymakers may be needed for objectivity, closeness is needed for influence.

The intelligence community should be repositioned to reflect the fact that influence and relevance flow not just from face time in the Oval Office, but also from credibility with Congress and, most of all, with the American public.

Senator Rick Durbin: "If you measure [the compromise] against the original Patriot Act ... we've made progress [toward] protecting basic civil liberties at a time when we are dealing with the war on terrorism."

Democrat Harry Reid called the compromise "a step in the right direction."

The proposal would restrict federal agents' access to library records, one of the Patriot Act's most contentious provisions. A form of secret subpoena known as a National Security Letter could no longer be used to obtain records from libraries that function "in their traditional capacity, including providing basic Internet access." But libraries that are "Internet service providers" would remain subject to the letters.

The Senate proposal would no longer require National Security Letter recipients to tell the FBI the identity of their lawyers.

The compromise bill also addresses "Section 215 subpoenas," which are granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court. Recipients of such subpoenas originally were forbidden to tell anyone about the action. The proposed Senate measure would allow them to challenge the "gag order" after one year, rather than the 90-day wait in earlier legislation.

Patriot Act Compromise Clears Way for Senate Vote

The former National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia explains how the pre-war situation with Iraq went so wrong.

During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, writes the intelligence community's former senior analyst for the Middle East, the Bush administration disregarded the community's expertise, politicized the intelligence process, and selected unrepresentative raw intelligence to make its public case.

Intelligence, Policy,and the War in Iraq - Paul R. Pillar

According to a new FCC report, consumers could be better off under "a la carte" options for delivery of video services.

A report by Booz Allen Hamilton, published in 2004, contained numerous errors in reaching the (incorrect) conclusion that the a la carte model was not economical.

FCC: Flawed BAH Study on Cable TV

In affluent McLean, elementary school girls judge one another on whether they have a new Louis Vuitton bag.

At Park Lawn Elementary School in Alexandria, the cool girls wear Converse Chuck Taylor high-tops.

Online bullying is big in McLean. At Park Lawn, most students have never heard of Instant Messenger.

The Many Social Complexities of 21st Century Elementary School

The CIA Director explains the impact of leaks.

The term "whistleblower" has been misappropriated. The sharp distinction between a whistleblower and someone who breaks the law by willfully compromising classified information has been muddied.

Too many of my counterparts from other countries have told me, "You Americans can't keep a secret."

The terrorists gain an edge when they keep their secrets and we don't keep ours.

Loose Lips Sink Spies