Why, you very well may ask? Because Human Events has declared them the Ten Most Harmful Books Of The 19th And 20th Centuries. Here’s how it worked:

Human Events asked a panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders to help us compile a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Each panelist nominated a number of titles and then voted on a ballot including all books nominated.

A title received a score of 10 points for being listed No. 1 by one of our panelists, 9 points for being listed No. 2, etc. Appropriately, The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, earned the highest aggregate score and the No. 1 listing.

The names and professional affiliation of the judges is listed at the bottom of the article.

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish who wrote in The Closing Of The Conservative Mind that:

…this list by Human Events contributors is a disturbing one, and a sign of increasing morbidity in conservative intellectual circles.

I sure hope that Human Events hates my books.

My Soundtrack: Dawnsong on Medwyn Godall Radio.

In My Backpack… Women’s Reality by Anne Wilson Schaef; In My Car… The Hanged Man’s Song by John Sanford; On My Nightstand… Life Of Pi by Yann Martel; On My Computer… One Time My Dad by Richard E. McMullen; On My Screen… Queer As Folk, No. 414 (*) directed by Kelly Makin, written by Ron Cowen & Daniel Lipman.

My Soundtrack: Reality, What A Concept by Robin Williams.

First there was one, then two, now we have eight memos for 2002 that continue to pull back the curtains on the decision process that led us to war in Iraq. The Los Angeles Times reported on yesterday but did not post the six new memos in the growing Downing Stree Memo story. This morning in New Memos Detail Early Plans For Invading Iraq the paper got it right and posted the PDF’s (which were already all over the Internet) of the six memos.

The memos are precursors to the 23 June 02 Downing Street memo and provide additional insight into the process that led Great Britain and the United States into a war that adds the lives of American service personnel to the tally of death and destruction with a relentless drumbeat.

The memos were first put up as PDF’s for about 45 minutes before an editor had them yanked. Fortunately, 45 minutes is a long weekend on the Internet and plenty of copies were made and distributed.

Reporting from London, L.A. Times staff writer John Daniszewski, says:

Foreshadowing developments in the year before the war started, British officials emphasized the importance of U.N. diplomacy, which they said might force Saddam Hussein into a misstep. They also suggested that confronting the Iraqi leader be cast as an effort to prevent him from using weapons of mass destruction or giving them to terrorists.

The documents help flesh out the background to the formerly top-secret Downing Street memo published in the Sunday Times of London last month, which said that top British officials were told eight months before the war began that military action was seen as inevitable.

In addition, writes Daniszewski:

Although British officials said in the documents that they did not think Iraq’s weapons programs posed an immediate threat and that they were dubious of any claimed links between the Iraqi government and Al Qaeda, they indicated that they were willing to join in a campaign to topple Hussein as long as the plan would succeed and was handled with political and legal care.

8 March 02 memo on legal issues.

8 March 02 memo on options.

14 March 02 memo .

18 March 02 memo.

22 March 02 memo.

25 March 02 memo.

…with political and legal care. Looks like they might have gotten it half right. Until now.

My Soundtrack: They Only Come Out At Night by Edgar Winter.

When I was a baby Bob Woodward and new to Cleveland, my mantra was Finely Peter Dunne’s dictum: The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Then I sold out and became a business-press editor. The pay was good: a full 50 percent more than I had expected to start at. For the next 11 years I wrote thousands, and edited tens of thousands, of articles and news stories.

Not one of them was worthy of the flimsy gray paper that Roldo Bartimole used to print his Point Of View.

I don’t remember where I first picked up a copy of POV, but I was a subscriber for years. Like everyone else in Cleveland, I knew that if I wanted to know what what was really going on in the halls of power, I had to read Roldo. When he retired a few years ago, the powerful celebrated. But fortunately, the retirement didn’t last long, and the Internet provided Roldo with a new life.

Now Steve FitzGerald – may the gods shine on him – and Lakewood Buzz has given Roldo a new home at: Read Roldo.

For the introduction to the new website Roldo writes:

I simply knew what all reporters in conventional newspapers come to know, that there were boundaries beyond which one could not go. Really, it comes down to one thing: Never be afraid, never flinch; always ask the tough questions.

It takes a long time to not be afraid, to not be concerned about approval. My aim has been to look at how power works in a local community. How well I did is recorded in the writing and commenting over these years. I tried to follow the maxim of George Seldes: Tell the truth and shame the devils.

Last evening I got to see Roldo in action. John Ettorre of Working With Words invited me to hear Woody Sanders speak at Artefino.

(More on this elsewhere and after a news embargo ends at noon today. But Roldo wrote an excellent preview in Is Anyone Else Getting Bored With Roldo’s Endless Attacks On Gateway and George Nemeth has a great summary in Heywood Sanders @ Artefino 6/14 on Cool Cleveland.)

I think I spent most of the evening listening to Sanders and watching Roldo. Like most giants, he doesn’t loom over a room. But you could see it, how ever you want to define it, in his presence.

Someday I hope I can be half the journalist that Roldo Bartimole became.

My Soundtrack: Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get by Joe Walsh.

Craig Heckert, president and CEO of the Americas for Wal Mart International and Ken Eaton, senior vice president and managing director for Wal Mart Global Procurement both think the Central America Free Trade Agreement is a really good idea.

According to a letter sent over their signatures to Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), Heckert and Eaton:

…see great potential for a Central Amerian retail industry, specially in a post-FTA scenerio where both job creation and economic development encourage Central American consumers to demand greater access to a wider variety of affordable products at a lower cost.

Beyond this, Central America is a thriving source of products including apparel for women and children, as well as foot wear from the Dominican Republic. In FY 2004, for example, Wal Mart sourced over $339 million in textile and apparel from the countries of El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua…

(As an aside, Sen. Grassley recieved the Porker Of The Month award last month from Citzens Against Government Waste.)

Wal Mart Watch, in Wal Mart Aggressively Lobbies Congress For Help To Export U.S. Jobs Overseas, adds this little tidbit:

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the American economy has lost 138,000 or 38% of textile industry jobs since President Bush took office in 2001. The number of textile manufacturing jobs has decreased from 364,700 in January 2001 to 226,400 in May 2005, the most recent month available.

Well, now we know where they went.

My Soundtrack: The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein, read by Nicol Willamson.

In My Backpack… Women’s Reality by Anne Wilson Schaef; In My Car… The Hanged Man’s Song by John Sanford; On My Nightstand… Life Of Pi by Yann Martel; On My Computer… The Drink by Ron Padgett; On My Screen… Queer As Folk, No. 414 (*) directed by Kelly Makin, written by Ron Cowen & Daniel Lipman.

My Soundtrack: Mama Africa by Peter Tosh.

Jeff Jarvis links to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Legal Guide For Bloggers. Jarvis calls the guide long needed. I don’t know. I’m feeling a little squicky about it about it because I don’t like the idea that I might have any different legal responsibilities and protections than every other journalist out there. The bottom line for me is that bloggers expressing their own views are the soul of the freedom of speech.

Here’s part of the introduction to the guide:

Like all journalists and publishers, bloggers sometimes publish information that other people don’t want published. You might, for example, publish something that someone considers defamatory, republish an AP news story that’s under copyright, or write a lengthy piece detailing the alleged crimes of a candidate for public office.

That’s why EFF created this guide, compiling a number of FAQs designed to help you understand your rights and, if necessary, defend your freedom.

I’m going to be giving it a thorough read this evening.

My Soundtrack: Joy To The World by Three Dog Night.

The three-way discussion concerning the Downing Street Memo continues this morning with more comments from Dan Wismar and Whymrhymer. Dan points me to Michael Kinsley’s Op-Ed piece The Left Gets A Memo in the Los Angeles Times yesterday. Others, like Editor & Publisher are sitting up to take notice as well.

Dan wrote:

Even a reliable liberal like Michael Kinsley said yesterday that, as much as he has enjoyed the flap over it, the Downing Street Memo has nothing in it that remotely proves that Bush knew that the actual weapons of mass destruction programs were not in as active a stage as we all thought they were, and lied about it as a pretext for an invasion.

The passage in Kinsley’s Op-Ed that I believe Dan is referencing is this:

…the memo is not proof that Bush had decided on war. It states that war is “now seen as inevitable” by “Washington.” That is, people other than Bush had concluded, based on observation, that he was determined to go to war. There is no claim of even fourth-hand knowledge that he had actually declared this intention. Even if “Washington” meant administration decision-makers, rather than the usual freelance chatterboxes, C was only saying that these people believed that war was how events would play out.

Kinsley may be, I, again, believe, reacting to what I have come to call the Grandmother Effect. Back in the early ’70s we had something called the Watergate hearings. My maternal grandmother was riveted to her television as she watched the parade of witnesses discuss what President Nixon knew and when he knew it.

She couldn’t understand why I wasn’t equally riveted to the hearings. I wasn’t for the same reason that I didn’t go see Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911: there wasn’t any new information there for me.

I associate this with Kinsley’s writing because in the paragraph following the one I quote above he writes:

Of course, you don’t need a secret memo to know this. Just look at what was in the newspapers on July 23, 2002, and the day before. Left-wing Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer casually referred to the coming war as “much planned for.”

The New York Times reported Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s response to a story that “reported preliminary planning on ways the United States might attack Iraq to topple President Saddam Hussein.” Rumsfeld effectively confirmed the report by announcing an investigation of the leak.

Kinsley goes on to cite several other publications that on or around the 23 July meeting pointed the finger at the coming war. And Kinsley is, of course, right. There isn’t anything new in the Downing Street Memo; to those of us who have been paying close attention to the events that have resulted in the destruction and loss of the lives of our military personnel in Iraq.

But sometimes a broader portion of America that hasn’t, perhaps, paid quite as close attention, needs reminding.

Drum beats can be such useful things.

My Soundtrack: Kilroy Was Here by Styx.

New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg gets props from The Neighborhood Retail Alliance this morning in: Bloomberg Reaches Out to Local Supermarkets. According to the Alliance:

The mayor”s outreach is definitely a step in the right direction. He is setting up a task force to examine the needs of the industry. What the NSA leaders need to do, however, is to come up with a couple of concrete policy ideas in order to avoid the whole exercise deteriorating into a meaningless symbolic gesture.

Makes more sense than reaching out to Wal Mart, eh Mayor Campbell?

My Soundtrack: Greatest Hits by James Taylor.

In My Backpack… Women’s Reality by Anne Wilson Schaef; In My Car… The Hanged Man’s Song by John Sanford; On My Nightstand… Life Of Pi by Yann Martel; On My Computer… Turtle by Kay Ryan; On My Screen… Queer As Folk, No. 414 (*) directed by Kelly Makin, written by Ron Cowen & Daniel Lipman.

My Soundtrack: Stop Making Sense by Talking Heads.

If you check out my WorldBlogs list on the left, you’ll see an addition today – Editor: Myself. The blogger is Hossein Derakhshan and he’s back in Iran to cover the election on Friday. After finishing Reading Lolita In Tehran, I know that what he’s doing puts this pitiful little blog to shame.

To get an idea of what he’s facing, be sure to read the How To Support list (he’s not talking cash) at the bottom of his Going Home, Finally post.

My Soundtrack: Styx II by Styx.

Another memo has emerged in Great Britan related to what is now known as the Downing Street Memo. This eight-page memo, written on 21 July 02 in preparation for the 23 July meeting from which the Downing Street Memo emerged, sheds light on the internal processes of the those preparing to take the United States and Great Britian to war.

The London Times provides only a transcript of the memo, citing a need to protect the source which would be presumably outed if the copy of the original were published. The Times also reports that the final page of the copy it recieved was missing. Just as I distrust redacted government documents, anytime a publication must alter a document to protect sources, my Lemmings Meter begins to twitch.

In Sunday’s Washington Post, Walter Pincus wrote in Memo: U.S. Lacked Full Postwar Iraq Plan:

In its introduction, the memo “Iraq: Conditions for Military Action” notes that U.S. “military planning for action against Iraq is proceeding apace,” but adds that “little thought” has been given to, among other things, “the aftermath and how to shape it.”

Today’s New York Times picks up the story in Prewar British Memo Says War Decision Wasn’t Made bylined by David Sanger. Sanger focuses on indications that going into the meeting:

that the Bush administration had made “no political decisions” to invade Iraq, but that American military planning for the possibility was advanced.

I find paragraphs 1 and 11 of the main body of the memo to be particularly instructive.

What follows is the transcript as provided by the London Times in Cabinet Office Paper: Conditions For Military Action:

PERSONAL SECRET UK EYES ONLY

(a) We need to influence US consideration of the military plans before President Bush is briefed on 4 August, through contacts betweens the Prime Minister and the President and at other levels;

The Times transcript ends at this point, most likely because of the missing final page.

My Soundtrack: Teaser And The Firecat by Cat Stevens.

You step into the stream…

Those who have been regular readers of Have Coffee Will Write know that I give no credibility to such things as fortune telling, Tarot cards or horoscopes. But like John Sanford’s Kidd, I find it instructive to focus my brain at times with such random inputs.

So for anyone with an interest, prurient or otherwise, I present, without comment, my astrological chart and accompanying description prepared by a friend and local blogger.

My Soundtrack: Greatest Hits by Cat Stevens.

[Update No. 3: And of course there is a Downing Street Memo blog.]

[Update No. 2: Andrew Sullivan is underwhelmed by the Downing Street Memo but credits his employer, the London Times with scoring another huge scoop for the 21 July memo.]

[Update No. 1: Whymrhymer has rejoined the debate and I’ve made a suggestion for an indepth discussion of specific statements made by President Bush and those around him. Check it out.]

One of the problems with blogs is that occasionally the best material shows up in the comments days after the original post. If you’re not watching them, you miss the fun. This the case with my own The Memo… from Wednesday, 8 June. In the last 18 hours, I have written more in the comments on this post than I normally write in a week. But it’s worth it.

My worthy foil in this case is Dan Wismar of the Wizblog.

Dan is a passionate and honorable commentator as evidence by his words and his signature. Don’t let this slip away. I hope you have as much fun reading our comment Point-Counterpoint (we stay above the ignorant slut level, I promise) as Dan and I are having writing them

These women rock. The Raging Grannies of Seattle are part of a larger organization created a few miles to the north in Victoria, British Columbia nearly 20 years ago. These empowered and powerful women are on a mission:

In the tradition of wise women elders, to promote global peace, justice, and social and economic equality by raising public awareness through the medium of song and humor.

In the mid-’80s my ex was involved with the group Women Speak Out For Peace And Justice, the Cleveland chapter of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. That group had it’s own core of raging grannies. I wonder what they think of Wal Mart and Steelyard Commons?

My Soundtrack: Back To The Earth by Cat Stevens.

In My Backpack… Women’s Reality by Anne Wilson Schaef; In My Car… The Hanged Man’s Song by John Sanford; On My Nightstand… Life Of Pi by Yann Martel; On My Computer… A Drinking Song by W. B. Yeats; On My Screen… Troy (*) directed by Wolfgang Petersen, screenplay by David Benioff.

My Soundtrack: Footsteps In The Dark by Cat Stevens.