Global
Nixon: "I don't mind the homosexuality, I understand it. ... Nevertheless, god---mn, I don't think you glorify it on public television, homosexuality, even more than you glorify whores. We all know we have weaknesses. But god--mn it, what do you think that does to kids? You know what happened to the Greeks! Homosexuality destroyed them! Sure, Aristotle was a homo. We all know that. So was Socrates."
Ehrlichman: "But he never had the influence television had."
A reminder of the rules: First, listen carefully to the answer. Then, try to come up with the correct question.
Today's main category is: "Overseas and Under-reported."
- When President Clinton visited this far-off nation of 64 million people
in mid-November, a New York Times article reported that he "gently nudged
the country to strengthen its adherence to human rights." That was a
newspeak reference to ongoing patterns of torture and murder by police and
security forces.
What is Turkey?
"Your agreement to life without parole has taken yourself out of the spotlight and out of the public eye. It means no drawn-out appeals process, chance of walking away free due to a technicality, no chance of a lighter sentence due to a 'merciful' jury. Best of all, you won't be a symbol. No years of publicity, no chance of a commutation, no nothing -- just a miserable future, and a more miserable end. It works for me ...
Consider how one of the nation's most influential newspapers framed the upcoming confrontation as November began. The Washington Post reported on its front page that the WTO has faced "virulent opposition" -- an assessment not quoted or attributed to anyone -- presumably just a matter of fact.
"Virulent"? According to my dictionary, the mildest definition of the word is "intensely irritating, obnoxious or harsh." The other definitions: "extremely poisonous or pathogenic; bitterly hostile or antagonistic; hateful."
Don't you just love objective reporting?
Corcoran vividly incarnates the peculiar horrors of our national gulag. It was conceived in the eighties' prison boom as a new model of "absolute control," whose heart was the Secure Housing Unit, holding 1,500 of those deemed to be the most dangerous inmates in California's metastasizing prison population. In Corcoran's SHU, the guards -- many of them fresh out of the academy -- determinedly pursued a policy of forced integration of deadly rivals -- Aryan Nation with Mexican Mafia, gang with gang.
Under California law, you can thus shield your rashness from the public record, provided there's an 18-month interval from your last citation. The class in Eureka was run by a former cop from San Diego, who divides his time between running a driving school and representing tax deadbeats before the IRS. He offered a torrent of statistics. The most dangerous time to drive: Friday evening, closely followed by Saturday night, closely followed by Sunday night. The safest day is Tuesday. The last 24-hour period in California in which no one was killed on the roads was on May 1, 1991 (which turns out to have been a Wednesday).
We revere Mark Twain as a superb storyteller who generates waves of laughter with powerful undertows of biting satire. One generation after another has grown up with the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Some of Twain's essays were less palatable; his most scathing words about organized religion seemed so blasphemous that they remained unpublished for half a century after he died in 1910.
The renowned author's fiery political statements are a very different matter. They reached many people in his lifetime -- but not in ours.
Today, few Americans are aware of Twain's outspoken views on social justice and foreign policy. As his fame grew, so did his willingness to challenge the high and mighty.
A specter is haunting America -- the specter of populism.
Now that Patrick Buchanan has left the Republican fold to seek the Reform Party's presidential nomination, a lot of journalists will be analyzing his denunciations of the bipartisan establishment. In the months ahead, many pundits are going to throw brickbats in his direction.
But Buchanan is largely a media creation. During the last two decades, he gained wide visibility and national clout through the good graces of CNN and other television networks. Despite his vehement biases against gays, blacks and non-European immigrants, Buchanan's colleagues on the chat shows did little to challenge his assorted bigotries.
It's an important issue, since the NATO powers, fortified by a chorus from the liberal intelligentsia, flourished the charge of genocide as justification for bombing that destroyed much of Serbia's economy and killed around 2,000 civilians, with elevated death levels predicted for years to come.
Whatever horrors they may have been planning, the Serbs were not engaged in genocidal activities in Kosovo before the bombing began. They were fighting a separatist movement, led by the KLA, and behaving with the brutality typical of security forces, though to a degree infinitely more restrained than those backed by the United States in Central America. One common estimate of the number of Kosovar Albanians killed in the year before the bombing is 2,500.
With NATO's bombing came the flights and expulsions and charges that the Serbs were accelerating a genocidal plan; on some accounts, as many as 100,000 were already dead. An alternative assessment was that NATO's bombing was largely to blame for the expulsions and killings.
Helping to fuel the online trading mania is a new blitz from Ameritrade, a company that has launched a $200 million national marketing drive. "The campaign's target audience is more psychographic than demographic," says an Ameritrade news release, "cutting across all ages, races, professions and income levels."