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Friday, 8 October 2004
Hostage Bigley murdered in Iraq < 1:09:24 PM>. .
Hostage Kenneth Bigley's brother confirms he is killed in Iraq a video claiming to show his death is released. [BBC News | World | UK Edition]
'Fahrenheit 9/11' sets record for docs on... < 2:36:18 AM>. .
On Tuesday, its first day of release, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 sold roughly two million units on DVD and VHS.
FULL STORY [CBC Arts News]
Why Did James Baker Turn Bush Into Nixon? < 2:33:05 AM>. .
The first Bush-Kerry debate marked the moment that the savvy Bush-Cheney machine lost its once-invincible grip on the all-important TV game. [New York Times: Arts] [T]he thoroughness with which Mr. Baker's offstage maneuvers set his guy up for disaster on Sept. 30 may tell us more about the state of play in the campaign than the much-dissected style and substance of the debaters' onstage performance.
It was Mr. Baker's job to negotiate the 32-page debate agreement with Vernon Jordan, representing the Kerry camp, and by all accounts, the Bush campaign got almost everything it wanted. Yet as we now know, every Bush stipulation backfired, from the identically sized podiums that made the 5-foot-11 president look as if he needed a booster stool, to the flashing "Time's up!" lights that emphasized Mr. Kerry's uncharacteristic brevity and Mr. Bush's need to run out the clock by repeating stock phrases ad infinitum and ad absurdum.
The most revealing Baker error, though, was to insist that the first debate be about the president's purported strong suit, foreign affairs, instead of domestic policy. Did no one anticipate the likelihood that Iraq might once again explode that day, as it has on so many recent others? Insurgent attacks have gone from a daily average of 6 in May 2003 to as high as 87 in August. And so, as Adam Nagourney of The Times reported, "In the hours leading up to the debate, television images of aides to Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry were mixed with images of corpses and bloody children from Baghdad," on a day when some 35 Iraqi children were slaughtered by car bombs.'
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