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Tuesday, Mar 26, 2002

eggs over medium

"Fear & Favor is FAIR�s annual review of incidents that reflect the range of pressures on reporters to use something other than journalistic judgment in deciding what goes in the news and what gets left out. The year 2001 presented special challenges in this regard. The horrific September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the ensuing declaration by the Bush administration of an open-ended "war on terrorism," meant incredible pressure on the press corps to present U.S. actions and policy in the best light; incidents of outright censorship occurred, and even more self-censorship, as many outlets confused independent inquiry with a lack of patriotism."

skin flint

"The new delivery systems have also allowed major corporations to get a piece of the pie without getting too close to the product itself. While the dirty work of actually making the films is still largely done in the San Fernando Valley, major corporations like AT&T, General Motors and Marriott are sharing the profits by helping get the product to consumers. At the same time, a new generation of entrepreneurs � including dot-com techies and Ivy League business school grads � are bringing ambitious business strategies to the mix."

Monday, Mar 25, 2002

access and allies

"I asked Haass whether there is a doctrine emerging that is as broad as Kennan's containment. "I think there is," he said. "What you're seeing from this Administration is the emergence of a new principle or body of ideas�I'm not sure it constitutes a doctrine�about what you might call the limits of sovereignty. Sovereignty entails obligations. One is not to massacre your own people. Another is not to support terrorism in any way. If a government fails to meet these obligations, then it forfeits some of the normal advantages of sovereignty, including the right to be left alone inside your own territory. Other governments, including the United States, gain the right to intervene. In the case of terrorism, this can even lead to a right of preventive, or peremptory, self-defense. You essentially can act in anticipation if you have grounds to think it's a question of when, and not if, you're going to be attacked."

booknoted

"The most successful saga in postwar popular culture got off to a conscientious start after breakfast on a tropical morning in Jamaica early in 1952. Ian Fleming, forty-three years old and ten weeks away from his first and last marriage, knocked out about 2,000 words on his Imperial portable claiming (falsely) that he was just passing time while his bride elect, Anne Rothermere, painted landscapes in the garden. In fact Fleming had been planning to write a spy thriller for years and he kept up the regimen of2,000 daily words until, two months later, he was done, with Commander James Bond recovering from a near lethal attack on his testicles from Le Chiffre's carpet beater, Le Chiffre finished off by a Russian, Vesper Lynd dead by her own hand, and a major addition to the world's cultural and political furniture under way."

Sunday, Mar 24, 2002

read ochre

"This small band of early Africans were, a group of scientists excavating the Blombos Cave site believes, thoroughly modern people, capable of abstract thought and probably language. Evidence from their settlement could have important implications for theories about the emergence of modern people."

stinging nettles

"In the gray, matter-of-fact bureaucratese so typical of a government document, the leaked "Israeli Art Student Papers" confirm what we have been saying in this space all along: that an underground apparatus of Israeli covert agents, centered in the southwestern US but extending nationwide, carried out extensive operations in the months prior to 9/11. Their targets were US government offices, including not only the Drug Enforcement Administration (as previously reported), but the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Federal Protective Service, the Bureau of Alchohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF), the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and a host of other state and federal courthouses and other buildings, as well as military bases. There is no long any doubt about whether the spy ring existed. Now we are left with the nagging question: what was its purpose?"

pieces of hate

"Not Peace, But Piece. At issue is not peace, but piece, as in land and water. The Palestinian people are living on land taken by Israel in the 1967 war. Israel's claim to the land is promoted by a radical group of settlers and ultra-nationalists who insist on keeping the ever-expanding settlements. Since the Oslo Accords, Israel, under both Likud and Labor Prime Ministers, has cut and sliced the Territories into tiny pieces by building roads, fences, settlements, irrigation and water systems, and restricted areas in ways that undermine the political and economic viability of a future Palestinian state. The resulting bits and pieces of land amount to less than the state of Rhode Island. Broken up as it is, and with its water resources diverted for use by the Israeli settlements, it is not realistic to expect this territory to support over 3 million Palestinian people. The duplicity of negotiating "peace" while taking away more land has infuriated Palestinians for many years, and fomented radicalism."

empire state

"MOSCOW � As the Roman Empire spread two millenniums ago, maps had to be redrawn to reflect new realities. In similar fashion, the expansion of the British Empire kept cartographers at their drawing boards, reshaping territories from Southern Africa to India to Hong Kong.

Now, as the United States wages its war on terrorism in Afghan-istan � and deploys troops for the first time in the energy-rich regions of Central Asia and the Caucasus � the borders of a new American empire appear to be forming."

bench warrant

"March 22 � Having defeated President Bush�s appeals court nominee Charles Pickering, Senate Democrats are moving to block Bush from appointing other conservatives to the federal bench. But some are going further, saying that because Bush lacks a popular mandate, the Senate should take no action on any Bush nominee to a Supreme Court vacancy until after the 2004 presidential election."

winging it

"What would make an avid Clinton-hating attack journalist have a "road to Damascus" experience and cause him to completely change his point of view? Why would he denounce the A-list conservatives who made him, and instead ally himself to people close to Bill Clinton? All these questions and more are answered in David Brock's memoir Blinded By the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative."

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