…the new Salon cover story, which provides a fascinatingly detailed account of exactly how Thomas White — Bush’s secretary of the Army — inflated the dubious profit claims of his division at Enron in spring 2001, immediately before leaving for government service. White has said he was operating his division of Enron as a separate fiefdom, and that he shouldn’t be tarred with the same brush as Enron’s rogue’s gallery of corporate scoundrels. But if you read Jason Leopold’s story you will have a hard time believing that. Is anyone in Congress listening? Why is this man still serving in what is presumably a highly important position during wartime?
Weinberger, Motavalli, state of the Net
It’s up, for your reading pleasure: My double review of Motavalli’s “Bamboozled at the Revolution” and Weinberger’s “Small Pieces Loosely Joined.” The piece also offers my snapshot of the state of the Net, 2002, which, in short, is as follows: Reports of its death are not only highly exaggerated but quite ridiculous.
August
This week Salon takes its annual summer break, known to the editorial staff as “dark week” — a week in which we update the site with fewer articles. It’s a chance during the dog days of August for those of us who basically work around-the-clock most of the year to catch our breaths and take a real vacation. I’m doing the same — though I’ll keep updating this blog, perhaps a little less regularly. Don’t worry, though; Salon will have a new cover story every day, the wires will continue to be updated, and of course the blogs will keep rolling.
If you stay tuned you can catch my cover story tomorrow — a double book review, of John Motavalli’s “Bamboozled at the Revolution” and David Weinberger’s “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” — that uses those books as a chance to look at the state of the Net in general. I’ve tried to write (at least) one such piece a year.
TIPS: Truth stranger than fiction
Dave Lindorff signed up as a volunteer for the new spy-on-your-neighbor anti-terrorist brigade — but when he tried to call in a tip, he found that the government is routing such calls through Fox’s “America’s Most Wanted” TV program. No joke. Read all about it in Salon Premium. Is the War on Terrorism really just a proxy for the War for Ratings?
Reorganizing the back catalog
If you haven’t checked out Salon’s spiffy new upgraded article directory, you’re missing out. In its seven-year history Salon has published tens of thousands of articles on every subject under the sun. The directory helps you find your way through this. You’ll also find a nifty “most popular topics” feature at the bottom of the directory’s main page.
When you access most older Salon stories you will now find them reformatted at a dir.salon.com URL. If you want to see the page in its original format, there’s a link at the bottom — or just change the URL to archive.salon.com.
On the other hand, apologies are in order for the state of our search engine, which actually indexes Salon well but does not handle multi-word searches well — and that’s the most common kind of search. We’re still working on it; in the meantime, Google does a fantastic job of searching Salon, as it always has.
Superfund follies
Damien Cave’s Salon cover story today is a must-read. “Companies like Atlas Tack, and its parent company, Great Northern Industries, are the happy beneficiaries of the Bush administration’s new Superfund policy. By refusing to clean up the sites and then collect costs from the responsible parties, Bush and the EPA have essentially given the nation’s biggest corporate polluters a multimillion-dollar reprieve — at a huge personal cost to less influential citizens.”
Enter Olbermann
Tonight in Salon: our newest columnist debuts: Keith Olbermann.