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Thursday, Apr 25, 2002

phuket, yo

some abc gum for ya.

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lapdawg

"Lapham once considered himself a centrist, but said the center has moved so far to the right that he's now seen as liberal. Still, he believes the notion of a liberal media is "a canard . . . utterly a straw man as far as I'm concerned."

The right wing wants to "blame the wreckage of the culture on a few university professors," Lapham said. "The people that have (wrecked the culture) -- it's the (Rupert) Murdochs of the world. Those are the people who say, 'Whatever the market will bear.' The market doesn't think. The market isn't a cultivated person. It's a ball bearing. It will go immediately to what sells. That's what wrecks the culture."

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midas well

ny observer columnist michael thomas "retires" to life of golfing gardening and blogging.

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Wednesday, Apr 24, 2002

yellow ruse

nobodys got any dirt on the karen hughes announcement that she would be leaving the administration because her family was homesick. seems highly implausible but stranger things have happened. meanwhile, talking points starts the ari fleischer deathwatch. may it be more successful than those of rumsfeld, o'neill and white.

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bad oman

"MUSCAT, April 22 (PNS): The US has decided to spend £90m to build a new airbase in Oman with runways long enough to handle B52 strategic bombers and heavy-lift transport aircraft."

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taking a break

"WASHINGTON, April 23 — The Supreme Court ruled today that a government-imposed moratorium on property development, even one that lasts for years, does not automatically amount to a "taking" of private property for which taxpayers must compensate the landowners."

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fashion plates

"Since he posted the first installment on Oct. 9 at www.mnftiu.cc, the strip has been a textbook illustration of the viral reach of the Web, spreading by word of e-mail alone, so that in its first two weeks it received five million hits from Web crawlers around the world. "A friend sent it to me," said the gadfly commentator Arianna Huffington, whose taste in language usually runs to more polite combat. She added: "Profanity is often a part of biting political commentary, including what `The Osbournes' is doing right now."

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gated community

"In this fairy tale, Gates and his colleagues are knights in shining armor. They rescue technology from hard-hearted titans like IBM, and their own subsequent toughness is necessary to curb the chaos that would result if actual competition existed in the regime that replaced the big-iron brutes. Hence it is Microsoft's due, and right, to rule as sovereign. Without Microsoft's iron-fisted but simultaneously benevolent rule, the entire technology industry would unravel, and along with it just about everything else."

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Tuesday, Apr 23, 2002

news reels

"But it's the History Channel that must really bother PBS, and not just because the upstart flaunts its illiberal jingoism and paranoia. As its obsession with shocking secrets suggests, the History Channel has much in common with the New York Post—and Oliver Stone. PBS treats making TV shows as if it were noble but tedious missionary work; the History Channel manages to create some comical, intriguing visual rants about "history"—and at the same time attract viewers. If the channel broadcasts downright bunk from time to time, it also curates vast quantities of old—and fascinating—newsreel footage. Sometimes all it takes to make an evocative show is jumpy period film of Antarctic explorers or the angelic-looking Alexei Romanov. With this material available, broadcasting vastly overhyped School of Burns documentaries—wide-angle beauty shots and buttery close-ups of Ivy League professors—begins to seem like a sucker's game."

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rush job

douglas rushkoff joins the weblog universe.

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