Special Plans:
The blogs Douglas Feith
and the faulty intelligence
that led to war
The Bloggers
(in order of appearance)
David Neiwert (Orcinus)
David Neiwert is a freelance journalist based in Seattle. His
reportage for MSNBC.com on domestic terrorism won the National
Press Club Award for Distinguished Online Journalism in 2000.
He is the author of Death on the Fourth of July: The Story
of a Killing, a Trial, and Hate Crime in America, (Palgrave/St.
Martin’s, 2004), In God’s Country: The Patriot Movement
and the Pacific Northwest (1999, WSU Press), as well as Strawberry
Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community
(Palgrave/St. Martin’s Press, due for release June 2005).
His freelance work can be found at Salon.com, the Washington
Post, MSNBC and various other publications.
Bernard Weiner (The
Crisis Papers)
Weiner has taught American politics and international relations
at Western Washington University and San Diego State University.
He was an anti-war activist and activist journalist in the ’60s
and ’70s, and served as an editor of Northwest Passage in
the Pacific Northwest. He was with the San Francisco Chronicle
for nearly twenty years as a writer/editor/critic, and has published
in The Nation, Village Voice, The Progressive, CounterPunch,
The Progressive Populist, and widely on the internet. He is the
author of Boy Into Man: A Fathers’ Guide to Initiation of
Teenage Sons (Transformation Press), four volumes of poetry,
and numerous plays. He lives in San Francisco.
ABW (Daily
Kos diarist)
33-yr-old Kos diarist ABW (a.k.a. &y) lives with his
fiancee and his dog in Philadelphia. His life right now is mostly
about finishing up graduate school in metallurgy (studying how
damage accumulates in metals—aircraft metals, primarily—and
how to improve service-life predictions). He’s a complete
square (but used to be cool). After graduation, he plans (among
other things) to find some sort of job and to start a blog (probably
called, “Speaking as a scientist, etc.”) He is overfond
of parentheses, wordiness, and speaking of himself in the third
person (in that order).
Jerome Doolittle (Bad
Attitudes)
Jerome Doolittle is a former reporter, columnist, and editor
for the Washington Daily News and the Washington Post. He left
journalism to join the United States Information Agency in Casablanca
and in Laos, where he was the embassy spokesman during the secret
war waged in that country by the CIA and the U.S. Air Force.
Upon resigning, Doolittle covered the war in Vietnam and Cambodia for various magazines and newspapers. He returned to the United States before the communist takeover of Indochina, going to work in Jimmy Carter’s press office during the 1976 Presidential campaign. For the first two years of the Carter administration he was a White House speech writer; for the last two he was chief of public affairs for the Federal Aviation Administration.
He has taught at Harvard, and has published two books in Time-Life’s American Wilderness series, as well as The Bombing Officer, a novel about the secret air war in Laos. Body Scissors was his first Tom Bethany mystery. The others are Strangle Hold, Bear Hug, Head Lock, Half Nelson, and Kill Story. Bethany is a onetime political operative, Air America pilot, and college wrestler who lives in Cambridge.
Joshua Micah Marshall (Talking Points Memo)
Joshua Micah Marshall is a Contributing Writer for the Washington
Monthly and a columnist for The Hill. His articles on politics,
culture and foreign affairs have appeared in numerous magazines
and newspapers such as The American Prospect, The Atlantic Monthly,
The Boston Globe, The Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, The Los
Angeles Times, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York
Post, The New York Times, Salon and Slate. He has appeared on
CNN, CNBC, C-SPAN, FOX and MSNBC and is a frequent guest on radio
stations across the country.
Marshall graduated from Princeton in 1991 and holds a doctorate in American history from Brown. He lives in New York City with his wife Millet and their dog Simon.
J. Evans (Stand
Naked)
J. Evans is a lawyer in private practice doing primarily plaintiff’s
class action litigation. He was a conscientious objector during
the Vietnam War and has remained active in peace efforts since
then.
Steve Gilliard (The
News Blog)
Steve Gilliard was born and raised in New York, attended NYU,
studied history and then proceeded to suffer the slings and arrows
of misfortune as a freelance writer for 20 years. In that time,
he has worked as a journalist, editor, game writer and political
hack. Having repented his sins, he now runs The News Blog, which
went online in August 2003.
Billmon (Whiskey
Bar)
Billmon is the author of Whiskey Bar, online at www.billmon.org.
Matthew Yglesias (TAPPED)
Matthew Yglesias is Associate Editor of TPM Cafe. In addition,
he is Staff Writer at The American Prospect magazine, where he
also writes a weekly web column and contributes to the magazine's
staff blog, Tapped.
Yglesias graduated from Harvard in 2003 where he studied philosophy, was editor in chief of The Harvard Independent, a campus alternative weekly, and first began his eponymous blog which has existed in various forms since January 2002 before coming to TPM Cafe in May 2005. He has also written on American politics, culture, and media for the Center for American Progress, the Gadflyer, and The New York Times. In addition, he has appeared as a commentator on CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, RNN, and the CBC as well as many radio stations throughout North America.
A native of New York City, Yglesias currently resides in Washington, DC where he's trying to learn how to grow a vegetable garden.
John Aravosis (Americablog.com)
John Aravosis is a Washington, DC–based writer and political
consultant, specializing in using the Internet for political
advocacy. He is the creator of StopDrLaura.com, Matthew Shepard
Online Resources, and DearMary.com, among other activist Web
sites.
Paul Craig Roberts (Lew Rockwell.com)
Roberts is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political
Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He
is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal,
former contributing editor for National Review, and a
former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author
of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.
Jack K. (The
Grumpy Forester)
Jack K. is a 50-something wildlands management specialist
currently living on the eastern slopes of Oregon’s Cascade
Mountains, working for a major Federal wildland management agency
that has unresolved issues about bears in Ranger hats, who
has spent virtually his entire adult life assisting
in the commitment of the sorts of atrocities to our nation’s
priceless natural resources that would send most environmentally aware
progressives to bed with a sick headache, which is why Jack K.
doesn’t often discuss his actual line of work in lefty circles.
Although a lifelong liberal politics junkie, Jack fell into
this dark blogging affliction almost by accident in late
2003 when he began conversing with Lisa English at
her Ruminate This blog about her son’s diagnosis of diabetes,
sharing his personal experiences over his own dealings with his
son’s diabetes. One thing leading to another, he was invited
to become a guest blogger at Ruminate This, and later started
his own little-read effort, The Grumpy Forester, mostly on a
whim. Jack is the father of two teenagers and the husband of
over 20 years to a wildlife biologist who has taught him through
hard personal experience to be exceedingly careful about just
exactly what he takes out of the freezer to defrost for dinner
because sometimes there are work-related items in there.
Attaturk (Rising
Hegemon)
Dr. Atta J. Turk is an international bon vivante and local joke.
He has been ranting, raving and claiming to be mildly humorous
at www.rising-hegemon.blogspot.com since the early 21st century.
Jason Sigger (Armchair
Generalist)
Jason Sigger is a defense policy analyst and the proprietor of
the blog Armchair Generalist, online since December 2004. His
specialty area of research is chemical, biological, radiological,
and nuclear (CBRN) defense issues inside the Department of Defense
and the Department of Homeland Security. He lives in Northern
Virginia with his wife and dogs.
Allison Hantschel (Author)
Allison is a 10-year veteran of the newspaper business, having
worked at two award-winning weeklies and three metropolitan daily
newspapers. Her work has been published in The Chicago Sun-Times,
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Madison Magazine, Wisconsin Trails,
The Daily Southtown, The Elgin Courier-News, The Madison Times,
The Isthmus and On Wisconsin magazine. Since August 2004 she
has published the collaborative writing and politics blog First Draft, under the
handle Athenae, along with partners Tena Hollingsworth, Holden
Caulfield, and pie.