Word: hot-button
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...very serious about keeping his promises on the military. Thursday he promised a billion-dollar pay raise for service members, talked at length about remaking the military with modern technology, and promised Rumsfeld would "challenge the status quo at the Pentagon." And he's not interested in grandstanders or hot-button types, just old hands who can get the job done. Even if he risks looking like the only kid at the grown-up table...
Israeli officials acknowledge that they don't yet know exactly how to separate. Barak has distributed The Disengagement Imperative, a recent book by Israeli political scientist Dan Schueftan, to each of his Cabinet ministers. Schueftan calls for absolute separation, even in hot-button spots like Jerusalem. "We need to partition Jerusalem, not because the Palestinians deserve to rule over any of it," he asserts, "but because we don't deserve to be stuck with the Palestinians." Technocrats are still figuring out how to handle a physical separation. Military sources say it will mean building Israeli-only roads around Palestinian towns...
Never trust anyone under 18, says this drama, which gives high school the full David E. Kelley (The Practice) treatment: big histrionics, big issues and more hot-button pushing than an attack ad. The overwrought pilot alone hits social promotion, desegregation, guns and student-teacher sex. For an encore, Kelley may have to blow up the school. The staff is well cast, especially Chi McBride, above, left, as a besieged principal and Fyvush Finkel as a charming crank. But in portraying its one-dimensional teens, a surly lot of vipers and nitwits, Boston needs remedial...
...When mainstream Hollywood films explore hot topics they tend to do so in capital letters: INTERRACIAL SEX, THE DEATH PENALTY, LESBIANS. The characters become symbols, the plot grinds along, and, at some point, Joan Allen gets to deliver a speech - with swelling strings in the background - that can be neatly clipped and shown again on Oscar night. "Chutney Popcorn," an independent, low-budget affair, presents real people experiencing hot-button issues and not speechifying about them...
Dotcom-driven rents have become a hot-button election issue. Two propositions headed for the November ballot in San Francisco attack the way tech firms have wiggled around strict zoning restrictions on office space by defining their space as anything but an office. The radical Prop L would force live-work lofts to be used as affordable housing and ban dotcom development in areas like the Mission. The much milder Prop K, backed by Mayor Willie Brown and an assortment of business interests, would limit dotcoms in only a couple of neighborhoods--and compensate with a hefty raise...