If you haven't heard, Karl Rove -- once best known as Bush's Brain -- is a pundit for Fox News while also acting as an informal adviser to presumptive Republican nominee John McCain. But he's hardly the only ex-politico backroomer showing up on American airwaves.

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark thinks there's many reasons besides his creation why U.S. newspapers are facing troubles these days -- even though it pulls in US$80 million to $100 million annually with just 25 employees.

Vancouver writer Stan Persky on the 75th anniversary of a notorious event in anti-intellectualism. He wrote about it at the Tyee:

May 12, 2008 -- Some things I take personally. This is one of them. That's because I write books. So, whenever people burn books -- whether it's the ancient library of Alexandria, Egypt going up in flames nearly two millennia in the past, or the 2003 torching of the National Library in Baghdad just five years ago, at the beginning of the U.S. invasion of Iraq -- I take offence. And it's personal. When the temperature reaches Fahrenheit 451, the degree at which paper burns, books like mine were and are reduced to ashes.

Opernplatz Square, 1933.

That flame-scorched history is why I was in Berlin's August Bebel Platz on Sat., May 10. It's the site where, 75 years ago on that date in 1933, the most notorious book burning of the 20th century was ignited by the then recently-installed Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler. Less than four months after Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Nazi students throughout the country were egged on by Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels to purge the nation's libraries of all thought of which the government didn't approve. ...

As the tongues of hungry flame lit up the night sky, Goebbels himself was on hand to put the government's official stamp on the event. "My fellow students, German men and women, the era of exaggerated Jewish intellectualism is now at an end," the propaganda chief declared. He promised the mob that "the future German man will not just be a man of books." The young would be educated "to repudiate the fear of death in order to gain again the respect for death. That is the mission of the young and therefore you do well at this late hour to entrust to the flames the intellectual garbage of the past." ...

If one wants a more shudder-inducing, immediate sense of the event being remembered, it's as close as your computer. The Nazis, obsessed with recording the triumphs of what they expected to be a Thousand Year Reich, scrupulously filmed the May 1933 book burning. There are the crackling flames, and there's Goebbels, thundering away, in a film clip available at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum website.