If Juan Manuel Reyes-Alonso is indeed a spy, as Department of Homeland Security officers recently implied, then he’s been operating under the deepest of covers. The 36-year-old Havana native made his way to the United States in 2000 and married Chatham County resident Amber Harmon. Since then, he’s worked as a landscaper, fish salesman and, […]
Jon Elliston
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Dick: The Man Who is President
What a Dick. Sure, it’s both easy and crude to call him that, but Vice President Cheney probably won’t mind a little scatological jab; after all, he’s the guy who recently brought the words “go fuck yourself” to the Senate floor. While playing the bad cop to President Bush’s good cop, Cheney has garnered comparisons […]
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Politics, glorious and otherwise
Where We Stand: Voices of Southern Dissent Edited by Anthony Dunbar NewSouth Books, 234 pp., $24.95 Can you imagine a president of the United States asserting that “the greatest challenge facing the world” is “the growing chasm between rich and poor people,” and that “extreme inequality is a moral issue” that the nation must address? […]
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A Disaster Waiting to Happen
Fridays don’t get much busier than this. It’s the morning of Sept. 3, and Federal Emergency Management Agency headquarters in Washington, D.C., is running at a full clip, having mobilized a cadre of disaster-response specialists in its National Emergency Operations Center the day before. “This is our ‘war room,’” a FEMA employee explains. “Right now […]
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Sam Currin caught in the crossfire
It’s been 139 years since the Civil War ended. But judging by the latest infighting within the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which came to a head at the group’s recent national convention in Dalton, Ga., a truce in the long-running cultural war about the meaning of Southern pride may still be generations away. The nation’s […]
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High times
Let’s Stop Beating Around the Bush: More Political Subversion from Jim Hightower By Jim Hightower Viking, 234 pp., $21.95 Michael Moore is making millions mocking the Bush administration, and Jon Stewart’s wry take on the same topic is bringing gusts of hilarity into homes across the nation every weeknight on The Daily Show. But Jim […]
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Trashheaps of New York
Mongo: Adventures in Trash By Ted Botha Bloomsbury, 243 pp., $23.95 Last month, two French photographers unveiled a collection of their trashiest work at a much ballyhooed show in SoHo. Their exhibit, Star Trash, features 15 years worth of–you guessed it–the contents of celebrities’ garbage, which ranges from the mundane to the mysterious. (I suppose […]
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Cutting through the guff
Wake Up… You’re Liberal! How we can take America back from the Right By Ted Rall Soft Skull Press, 315 pp., $15.95 Despite the passing of our 40th president, the Reagan Revolution rolls on. In many ways, the United States seems to be GOP country. Where, observers of the political map may wonder, are the […]
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Finding some truth in Colombia
More terrible than death By Robin Kirk PublicAffairs, 336 pp., $16.95 For most of the past half century, Colombia has been at war within itself, in a vicious conflict that is fueled from the outside by the money and prerogatives of the most powerful country in the world. The U.S. role in Colombia’s turmoil is […]
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Cop accused of faking FBI ties sues town
John W. Moore, a former Chapel Hill police officer who resigned last summer after his superiors concluded he had posed as an FBI agent to intimidate a high school student, now says that his civil rights were violated. Call it the Case of the Faux Fed: In May 2003, two police officers, Moore and Bryan […]
