A perfect passage in a sweet Sunday profile of Budd Schulberg

Robert Chalmers in the independent goes a round with Budd Schulberg. This is by far not the best paragraph but it is great: "A well-preserved and alert 94, Schulberg sits by a log fire while his fourth wife Betsy Langman, a former actor and magazine journalist who protects his interests with formidable devotion, is discussing percentages on the phone. Budd seems more interested in looking out for the swans that visit Aspatuck Creek, the stretch of water just beyond his window. Some of them will take corn from his hand. If you didn't know, you would never guess that this gentlest of ornithologists, who speaks with a slight stammer, would be a legend even if all he'd ever produced was his boxing journalism.

'Did you ever fight, yourself?'

'I tried to box,' he says. 'But I had two major flaws: I never liked being hit on the nose. And I never developed a strategy to avoid being hit on the nose.'"

Photographers to become terrorists in UK

Reports the Guardian, UK photographers fear they are target of new terror law. "Taking photographs of police officers could be deemed a criminal offence under anti-terrorism legislation that comes into force next week. Campaigners against section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008, which becomes law on Monday, said it would leave professional photographers open to fines and arrest... The National Union of Journalists and the British Press Photographers' Association said the law would extend powers that are already being used to harass photographers and would threaten press freedom... Under section 76, eliciting, publishing or communicating information on members of the armed forces, intelligence services and police officers which is "likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism" will be an offence carrying a maximum jail term of 10 years... The new powers would be too vague to prevent abuse... "They will now be able to arrest you if a photograph could potentially incite or provoke disorder. But isn't that any protest?" ... Val Swain, a member of Fitwatch, a collective which photographs police intelligence teams taking pictures of protesters, said: "I took a picture of an officer on my camera phone and he walked over and said, 'you are going to delete that'. We're in a public place, he's in a public role and he knew that. They've been gearing up for it but so far they've stopped short of arresting people. Now they will have the power to do it." Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the NUJ, said: "Police officers ... believe they have the power to delete images or to take editorial decisions about what can and can't be photographed. The right to take photos in a public place is a precious freedom. It is what enables the press to show the wider world what is going on."

CNBC anchor does not speak same English as Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Talleb

"Dr. Doom," aka economist Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Taleb, author of "The Black Swan" seem to have been invited onto CNBC for comic relief as the anchor doesn't seem to understand, or care to understand, a single thing the lucid pair have to say. It's a fairly stunning ten minutes that suggest mass media may have been dead for far longer than we care to realize.

The writer is president of the United States.

A nice bit of journalistic notation at the end of an op-ed in today's Washington Post.

AP dashes HOPE

AP's Hillel Italie reports on AP alleging copyright infringement in Shepard Fairey's iconic HOPE image. Observers of journalism have noted the newsgathering service's often alarming slant on news toward Republicans and against Democrats. (Washington editor Ron Fournier almost became part of the failed John McCain presidential campaign.) AP also disapproves of quotation and linkage from their articles: this much falls under 250-word fair use. "The image, Fairey... acknowledged, is based on an [AP] photograph, taken in April 2006 by Manny Garcia on assignment for the AP...The AP says it owns the copyright, and wants credit and compensation. Fairey disagrees." [More bunkum at the link.]

Joe Klein on former VP Cheney's outburst

At Swampland, Joe Klein makes a few notes on the unspecified location of Mr. Cheney's mind in "Please Go Away": "Let's leave aside the fact that if Dick Cheney and his alleged boss had been more vigilant—if they had listened to the Clinton appointees like Sandy Berger who warned about Al Qaeda, if they had paid attention to their own intelligence reports (notably the one on August 6, 2001)—the September 11 attacks might never have happened. Actually, I can't leave that aside... but in any case, it is sleazy in the extreme for Cheney to predict another terrorist attack. For several reasons:
1. Some sort of terrorist attack is likely, eventually, no matter who is President.
2. Cheney has done here what the Bush Administration did throughout: he has politicized terror. If another attack happens, it's Obama's fault. Disgraceful... and ungrateful, since it's only Obama's mercy that stands between Cheney and a really serious war crimes investigation. Which leads to...
3. The means that Cheney has supported to combat terror in the past, especially "enhanced" interogation techniques, are quite probably illegal. He is criticizing the Obama administration for not being willing to defy international law.
4. Cheney's track record of mismanagement in Iraq and Afghanistan--his sponsorship of Donald Rumsfeld, the worst Secretary of Defense in US history-- disqualifies him from having any credible say on the security policies of his successor.
This is a man who should either be (a) scorned or (b) ignored.