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Matt Cooper and Harry Shearer

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It's a Wonderful Life, Charlie Brown

By Harry Shearer
Posted Monday, Jan. 3, 2000, at 2:12 PM ET

The New York thing is easy: It wasn't to my taste, but New Yorkers tended to like it the way it was. Like Egypt holding a Christian New Year celebration at the pyramids, New York under Giuliani is playing to the tourists. That may be good strategy for an economy losing manufacturing jobs (a strategy honed for decades by New Orleans), but that's a fickle crowd to keep happy. I say just give up and put a giant casino in the middle of it. Like New Orleans.

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I'm handling the Peanuts thing so well. Mainly because, as with Capra, I never saw the dark side, only the Met Life commercials side. Frankly, I cross people off my list who say It's a Wonderful Life is their favorite movie.

The Staples Center scandal is remarkable precisely because, in defense of the Times' behavior, so many other egregious examples of editorial-advertiser coziness surface. I do think it stinks that newspapers own teams that their sports pages have to "cover," or that even the most distinguished papers hold conferences, seminars, and festivals that then tend to get "covered" more than events sponsored by others. It's a practice indistinguishable except in degree from TV newscasts' doing "stories" that just "happen" to tie in to the movies that preceded them. Don't get me started.

Does this Putin guy scare you? Personally, I loved Yeltsin's resignation speech. The slowest anybody has ever been allowed to speak on television, like the Russian branch of Bob and Ray's Slow Talkers of America. We're gonna miss that lovable old drunk. Now comes a guy who actually knows how to run a government, and thinks the coolest branch thereof is the secret police.

Harry Shearer