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A few killers more
In response to this weekend's suicide bombing in Israel -- ostensibly a retaliation for the Israeli army's missile attack that killed a Hamas leader and nine children, and the latest bloody act in a cycle of violence with no exit in sight -- President Bush had this to say: "There are a few killers who want to stop the peace process that we have started, and we must not let them."
Now, if the problem were "a few killers," the solution would be simple, and it would be Ariel Sharon's solution: Peace would be a straightforward matter of, in Bushanese, smoking 'em out and hunting 'em down. But Sharon and the Israeli army have been doing that for months now, and for all their effort, the bombings continue.
Perhaps at one time Israel was at war with a handful of militants, but it seems increasingly plain that what the Israelis now face is a mass movement, radicalized by years of privation, hopelessness, bad leadership and propaganda. Any plan to end the bombings and move towards peace that fails to take this reality into account seems doomed to me.
More valuable than most conventional journalism on this subject, I think, was this weekend's heartbreaking reporting on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict on NPR's This American Life (Available soon at the show's Web site).
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Salon Blog watch
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On Radio Free Blogistan, Christian Crumlish writes of MSNBC's new blog initiative, "I suppose Salon Blogs are to Table Talk as this new MSNBC blogspace will be to their bulletin boards." Big differences: (1) MSNBC is shutting down their bulletin boards, whereas Salon has kept Table Talk open; (2) As far as I can tell, all MSNBC plans to do is start a big index of blogs run by its own pundits (there are a half dozen of these) and other people across the Web. If they are planning a "start your own blog" hosting scheme as Salon has, that hasn't been in any of the accounts to date. We'll see soon enough.
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Chris McMahon offers a punk-rock aesthetic, and some good advice, for newbie bloggers: It is indeed all about "doing it ourselves."
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Douglas Anders (The Agora) likes Robert Reich's new book, "I'll Be Short."
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Enron to Bush: fly me
While we are still digesting the unsurprising but still flabbergasting report about the Bush campaign's use of Enron and Halliburton corporate jets during the Florida recount fracas, Al Gore comes out punching -- finally -- in a Times op-ed today. Looks like Gore is mad about comments from Joe Lieberman and others that he was wrong to play the populist card in 2000. My only question is what took the once and presumably future candidate so long to enter the fray. Meanwhile, Democratic National Committee spokesman Bill Buck wins the soundbite prize: "The Bush-Cheney administration literally flew into power in Enron's and Halliburton's corporate jets."
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A Dowd-y view of indie film
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has her fans, but I am not one of
them. Her pieces usually read to me like a series of drafts of alternate
leads: She keeps trying out one-liners and fine-tuning her jokes, but seems
uninterested in actually building an argument. Often she has her finger on
the pulse of a narrow spectrum of Beltway (and, lately, Hollwood) insiders;
she aggressively distances herself from her subjects via a barricade of
wisecracks, but they seem to be the only stratum of society she is actually
interested in.
Her piece
today on Soderbergh's new "Full Frontal" (which I have not seen, but
Stephanie Zacharek reviews here)
is actually somewhat more linear than the norm for her; this time, the
problem is that her argument -- that "indie" does not necessarily equal
"good," or, as she says, "just because something is grainy doesn't mean
it's cooler" -- is about 30 years old. There is nothing novel or innovative
in pointing out that being low-budget crude, or art-house obscure, does not
in itself render a movie worthy of one's attention or ticket dollar.
Pauline Kael established this essential critical stance early on in her
career, and several generations of critics -- myself very much included --
grew up accepting it as a given. Cheap movies succeed or fail artistically
in much the same ratio as expensive ones. There is no correlation between
budget size and quality (or virtue). About the only indictment of big
Hollywood movies that does not apply equally to small indie movies is that
they squander huge sums of money and cultural attention. When an indie
flops, the waste is less egregious.
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Lee Felsenstein is blogging at Lee Felsenstein Ad Seriatim.
Subtitle: "Thoughts of an Industry Character who's been around since Year
Minus One." Lee was a pioneer of the dawn of the personal-computer era; I
learned to program assembly language (or was it machine language? I
certainly can't remember, and it was the only time in my life I've ever
done so!) in 1978 on one of the Sol
computers he created. This weekend he offers a memoriam to
Bob Bickford.
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