Month: September 2004

<![CDATA[President Bush told Fox News he had no regrets about putting on the flight suit and giving the "mission accomplished" speech last summer. In fact, he would do it again.
I'd guess we'll see that speech sometime in October. Maybe with the election pressing in on him, he'll have actually deployed troops to capture bin Laden or one of his top people.
The problem with this president is that he believes the people need to be lied to in order to keep them on the path he deems fit for them.
And, as a tribute, here's one of The Bushies strips, back from the archives….
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<![CDATA[I've posted a long piece at Red Herring about the deportation of Cat Stevens from the United States and what it says about the closing of the American mind:
Can an economy of fear survive?

Now I’ve been crying lately, thinking about the world as it is
Why must we go on hating, why can’t we live in bliss
Cause out on the edge of darkness, there rides a peace train
Oh peace train take this country, come take me home again

The United States has stopped an aircraft bound for the Washington, D.C., rerouting it to Bangor, Maine, in order to de-plane the author of the lyrics to Peace Train, Yusef Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens. Just how afraid have we become and what is it doing to the U.S. economy and business opportunity?
Look, forget the fact Mr. Islam is a Muslim for just a moment. Distance yourself from the knee-jerk reaction some people have to Muslims, especially when they are cast in news stories presented by U.S. government officials. If you believe, as we do, that the economic freedom enjoyed in the United States is a key to the nation’s greatness, then all the other freedoms – to speak, to travel, to disagree – have to precede the success of the economy, or prosperity will be choked off.
Read the whole essay.]]>

<![CDATA[Were I to write a television show, it would be about the same characters each week, but they would all have different histories in each episode. Sometimes the hero would be the villain or the daughter the father, and characters would develop over time based on the decisions they made in these different roles. Like Julio Cortåzar‘s Hopscotch, a book whose chapters can be read in any order. It took a long time after the “invention” of the novel by Cervantes for writers to really experiment with the form. Reality TV may be all the rage, but it’s not really any kind of art; someday, TV could be more frequently artful, but by then I’d imagine it will be written and produced like small theatre today.]]>