The US lost a security council vote on Syria. Russia has a Syrian naval base, among its many other ties to the Assad regime, so it was going to veto the measure all along. China opposed the resolution against Iran’s ally for reasons of its own. And the US response to all this was to complain about being held hostage. We fail to understand what purpose is served by the US losing a diplomatic battle so publicly and then whining about it. Please explain.
CNN reports on the Vetters getting on a train in Charlotte, NC:
they noticed what appeared to be a uniformed Transportation Security Administration officer holding a leashed police dog. “He just loosened the leash on the dog, and the dog came over to check me out,” Vetter said. Standing on the platform above Vetter were three other officers who appeared to be wearing bullet-proof vests…The Vetters had encountered VIPR — special TSA Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response teams…
The program has 15 teams and is expanding to get access to 12 new teams…officers include plainclothes and uniformed team members — some of them armed — who arrive without telling passengers in advance. Officers in the joint operations then randomly ask travelers for permission to search their bags for explosives.
To prevent accusations of profiling, searchers choose a random number — eight for example — and then search the bags of every eighth passenger…local and federal authorities insist the searches are not mandatory. But passengers who refuse are not allowed on the train…
Police Chief Christopher Trucillo, who works regularly with VIPR teams, acknowledged that the search system isn’t perfect. Potential attackers carrying explosives who refuse searches are free to simply drive to the next station on the line and board there…
A high-profile example of VIPR’s growing pains, transit officials say, is a VIPR-assisted passenger screening a year ago at Amtrak’s station in Savannah, Georgia. Instead of screening passengers as they boarded trains — which is standard security procedure — officers were screening passengers as they were getting off trains. Security experts know that makes no sense
Let’s count the ways that this totally unnecessary government intrusion into citizens’ lives is offensive and ridiculous. It’s expensive, ineffective because of its randomness, clueless in that it searches people getting off trains, and inane because all a hypothetical bad guy would have to do is drive to the next station. But be warned: better not tweet anything about Marilyn Monroe — or else!
The rush out of the Egyptian pound is so rapid that Egyptian investors refuse to hold debt in their own national currency, even at a 16% yield. After Islamist parties won more three-quarters of the seats in recent parliamentary elections – 47% for the Muslim Brotherhood and 25% for the even more extreme al-Nour Party – the business elite that prospered under military rule is counting the days before exile. The first reports of actual hunger in provincial Egyptian towns, meanwhile, are starting to trickle in…
It seems unlikely that Egypt’s central bank will be able to prevent a banana-republic devaluation of the Egyptian pound, and a sharp rise in prices for a population of whom half barely consumes enough to prevent starvation. The difference between Egypt and a banana republic, though, is the bananas: unlike the bankrupt Latin Americans, who exported food, Egypt imports half its caloric consumption. Meat imports have already fallen by 60% over the past year…
Nearly half of Egyptians are functionally illiterate. Nine-tenths of adult women have suffered genital mutilation. Almost a third of Egyptians marry first or second cousins, the fail-safe indicator of a clan-based society. Half of Egyptians live on less than $2 a day, and must spend half of that on food…It should have been no surprise that the Islamists swept the parliamentary elections, given the desperation of the people and the cupidity of the political system. The Wafd Party, Egypt’s oldest secular political entity, polled just 9% of the vote.
Delusional as it was to expect Egyptians to support secular liberal parties that never existed and offered no solution to their desperation, it is all the more delusional to expect the Islamists to stabilize Egypt. The Islamist victory in the first round of voting last year almost certainly prompted the jump in capital flight in December, and the consolidation of Islamist power. Egypt’s middle class will leave and tourism, down by a third over the past year, will virtually disappear
We saw this sort of thing coming a year ago. But the wise ones said, “to be in Tahrir Square tonight, to feel the energy and pride of a people taking back the keys to their country and their future from a tired old dictator, was a privilege.”
The deputy editorial page editor of the Washington Post:
the president’s biggest failures have been his own ideas….Obama arrived in office afire with the ambition to create a Palestinian state within two years. But his diplomacy was based on a twofold misunderstanding: that the key to successful negotiations was forcing Israel to stop all settlement construction — and that the United States had the leverage to make that happen.
Veterans of the Middle East “peace process” shook their heads in wonderment as what at first appeared to be a rookie error evolved into a two-year standoff between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. There was only one possible explanation for this persistence in futility: The president himself was fixed on it.
Obama’s next big project was global nuclear arms control — an initiative so impressive to Norwegians that it won him the Nobel Peace Prize before he could act on it. Yet the results to date hardly seem prizeworthy. The New Start nuclear arms agreement with Russia merely ratifies warhead reductions already underway in Russia, while imposing a modest cut on the U.S. arsenal. More ambitious multilateral initiatives by Obama — to control nuclear materials, for example — have made little progress, despite an elaborate summit the president hosted in 2010.
Here again there appears to be a disconnect between Obama’s 1970s-vintage ideas and the real world of the early 21st century. There’s nothing wrong, and modest good, in extending Cold War nuclear conventions with Russia, or extracting highly enriched uranium from Ukraine and Chile. But the most dangerous proliferation threats emanate from countries that don’t attend summits or sign international treaties, such as North Korea and Iran. In terms of nuclear capability, both are ahead of where they were in 2009.
This brings us to Obama’s most distinctive — and most ill-fated — idea, and the one most identified with his 2008 campaign: the determination to “engage” with U.S. adversaries such as Iran, North Korea, Syria and Venezuela. Obama promised “direct diplomacy” — even one-to-one meetings — with the likes of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Kim Jong Il. More broadly he made the case that the United States could benefit by reaching out to autocratic regimes…
In his first year Obama dispatched two letters to Khamenei while keeping his distance from the revolutionary Green movement. He shook hands with Hugo Chavez. He launched a “reset” of relations with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and dispatched envoys to reason with Bashar al-Assad in Damascus. He delivered a sweeping address to the Muslim world from Cairo.
The results have been meager. Khamenei spurned the U.S. outreach. Relations with Putin warmed for a time but now have grown cold again. In Egypt and across the Middle East, the president’s popularity is lower today than when he gave the Cairo address.
The Post offers no explanation for the litany of failures it cites. Remarkable enough that a Democrat wrote the piece. We’ll leave it to VDH to provide a rationale: “American foreign policy is now becoming an extension not of classically liberal values, but of progressive suspicions of constitutional government, capitalism, and the historical role of the United States in particular and the West in general. The bowing to foreign potentates, the sad historical fabrications in the Cairo speech, the self-serving nonsense that arose in the first Al-Arabiya interview, and the so-called ‘apology tour’ were simply superficial manifestations of a deeper ambiguity about America.” He’s being charitable.
Not Tom Friedman:
it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man. For war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting…as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto…
In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Egypt is a country with no democratic tradition, over 40% illiteracy and grinding poverty. Terrible unemployment and underemployment. And a 65% vote in favor of more of the same. So who is closer to understanding Egypt, the Tom above or the NYT’s Tom?
Tom Friedman in the NYT:
the Islamist parties — the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafist Al Nour Party — just crushed the secular liberals, who actually sparked the rebellion here, in the free Egyptian parliamentary elections, winning some 65 percent of the seats. To not be worried about the theocratic, antipluralistic, anti-women’s-rights, xenophobic strands in these Islamist parties is to be recklessly naïve. But to assume that the Islamists will not be impacted, or moderated, by the responsibilities of power, by the contending new power centers here and by the priority of the public for jobs and clean government is to miss the dynamism of Egyptian politics today.
Flashback: “to be in Tahrir Square tonight, to feel the energy and pride of a people taking back the keys to their country and their future from a tired old dictator, was a privilege.”
The Guardian’s front-page headline this morning was ‘NHS cuts have affected patient care say four out of five doctors’. So just how severe are these ‘cuts’? Ten per cent of the budget? Five? Here are the official figures from the Department of Health. At a time when other ministries are indeed under pressure, spending on the NHS will continue to grow year on year throughout the parliament – as it has almost uninterruptedly since 1948. Expenditure will rise from £103.8 billion to £114.4 billion in 2015. It’s true that, once inflation is factored in, the increase is slight – around 0.4 per cent. It’s true, too, that there is a reallocation of funds within that budget from administration to the actual provision of healthcare. Still, in no system of mathematics does this represent a ‘cut’. What, then, is the Guardian talking about? Read far enough and you’ll see that the whole story is based an online survey of, er, 664 self-selected respondents
Consider the New York Times’ coverage, as reported by Adam Nossiter, in an article titled “Nigerian Group Escalates Violence With Church Attacks”: The sect, known as Boko Haram, until now mostly targeted the police, government and military in its insurgency effort, but the bombings on Sunday represented a new, religion-tinged front, a tactic that threatens to exploit the already frayed relations between Nigeria’s nearly evenly split populations of Christians and Muslims…
This sentence is fraught with problems. For starters, Boko Haram has been terrorizing Nigerian Christians for years, killing thousands of them, and destroying hundreds of their churches. Considering that just last Christmas Eve, 2010, Boko Haram bombed several churches, killing nearly 40 Christian worshippers, the New York Times’ characterization of these latest attacks as “represent[ing] a new, religion-tinged front” is not only unconscionable, but unprofessional.
Boko Haram — whose full name in Arabic is “People of Sunna for Da’wa [Islamization] and Jihad [Holy War]” — has, for a decade, been representing a very “religion-tinged front,” that is, an Islamic front, one that is hostile to all things non-Muslim, with Christians at the very top. In just the last couple of months, Boko Haram has carried out attacks on dozens of other churches, bombing some, torching others. In one instance, they opened fire on a congregation of mostly women and children, killing dozens; they executed two children of an ex-terrorist because he converted to Christianity
A cut is properly defined as an inadequate increase. A clear religious-political strategy of violence is properly defined an unfortunate religion-tinged tactic that might result in some random man-caused disasters. What about clear writing don’t these whiners understand?
1968 was a tumultuous year, really awful in some ways, hardly what you’d call the good old days. Yet it had its moments, including the first human spaceflight to leave the earth’s orbit. Merry Christmas from the three astronauts of the Apollo 8 mission.
Ynet:
Last Saturday, violent groups of Islamic-Salafi radicals burned the famous scientific institute established by Napoleon in Egypt after its first encounter with the West. Some historians consider it the start of modern times in the Middle East. The site, L’Institut d’Egypte, held some 200,000 original and rare books, exhibits, maps, archeological findings and studies from Egypt and the entire Middle East, based on the work of generations of western researchers. Most of the artifacts were lost forever, burned or looted…
In 1258, the Mongols burned the immense library in Baghdad known as the “House of Wisdom.” It held rare writings that have disappeared forever, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, and the other cornerstones of Western civilization. All we know today is that these books existed, yet following the terrible fire in Baghdad they were burned forever. The Mongols sought to secure the same objective as Egypt’s Salafis: Erasing the past and keeping only their present.
Earlier this year: “to be in Tahrir Square tonight, to feel the energy and pride of a people taking back the keys to their country and their future from a tired old dictator, was a privilege.” Yeah, right.
A message from a while back:
The one above is from 1789. Here’s one from 1863. Can you imagine anything of the sort being written today?
On Oct. 22, 1844, thousand of Millerites, having sold all their possessions, climbed to the top of hills in Upstate New York to await the return of Jesus and the end of the world. They suffered “the great disappointment” when it didn’t happen. In 1212, or so the legends go, thousands of Children’s Crusaders set off from France and Germany expecting the sea to part so they could march peaceably and convert Muslims in the Holy Land. It didn’t, and many were shipwrecked or sold into slavery. In 1898 the cavalrymen of the Madhi, ruler of Sudan for 13 years, went into the Battle of Omdurman armed with swords believing that they were impervious to bullets. They weren’t, and they were mowed down by British Maxim guns.
A similar but more peaceable fate is befalling believers in what I think can be called the religion of the global warming alarmists. They have an unshakable faith that man-made carbon emissions will produce a hotter climate causing multiple natural disasters. Their insistence that we can be absolutely certain this will come to pass is based not on science — which is never fully settled, witness the recent experiments that may undermine Einstein’s theory of relativity — but on something very much like religious faith. All the trappings of religion are there.
– Original sin: Mankind is responsible for these prophesied disasters, especially those slobs who live on suburban cul-de-sacs and drive their SUVs to strip malls and tacky chain restaurants.
– The need for atonement and repentance: We must impose a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system that will increase the cost of everything and stunt economic growth.
– Ritual, from the annual Earth Day to weekly recycling.
– Indulgences, like those Martin Luther railed against: private jet fliers like Al Gore and sitcom heiress Laurie David can buy carbon offsets to compensate for their carbon-emitting sins.
– Corporate elitists, like General Electric’s Jeff Immelt, profess to share this faith, just as cynical Venetian merchants and prim Victorian bankers gave lip service to the religious enthusiasms of their days. Bad for business not too. And if you’re clever, you can figure out how to make money off it.
– Believers in this religion have flocked to conferences in Rio de Janeiro, Kyoto and Copenhagen, just as Catholic bishops flocked to councils in Constance, Ferrara and Trent, to codify dogma and set new rules.
But like the Millerites, the global warming clergy has preached apocalyptic doom — and is now facing an increasingly skeptical public. The idea that we can be so completely certain of climate change 70 to 90 years hence that we must inflict serious economic damage on ourselves in the meantime seems increasingly absurd.
Take a fishbowl and place 10,000 blue marbles in it. Take out just one little blue marble and replace it with a green marble. You have now illustrated to yourself how much additional CO2 has increased in the atmosphere in the last several hundred years. Predicating doom on such a truly trivial event is not science. Barone has explained it very well indeed.
In Benghazi, on the main square where it all started, they were slaughtering camels in celebration. There they sat, eight of them, feet tied so they could not move, quivering with fear as they were beheaded one by one. As soldiers fired rifles in the air, members of the cheering crowd held up the severed heads as trophies. They daubed their hands in the camel-blood, and gave the V-for-victory sign with dripping fingers. But away from the square, the birthplace of the revolution was not in party mood. The streets were fairly quiet. And in the cafes, people were watching TV pictures -– more graphic than any shown in Britain –- of a bloodied Gaddafi dragged along and beaten, feebly protesting, before a gun was put to his head. The picture then cut to the dead ex-leader being rolled onto the pavement, blood pooling from the back of his skull.
An “inclusive and tolerant and democratic Libya”? Time will tell.
We didn’t show the first picture from the Return to 1968 Festival in NYC. It kind of sums things up, however. Maybe this does too: “God bless them for their spontaneity,” Pelosi told reporters. “It’s young, it’s spontaneous, it’s focused and it’s going to be effective.” Yeah, good luck with that. How effective? Just watch this scene from Atlanta’s dramatization of Orwell’s Animal Farm:
How creepy is all that chanting in unison? Ginning this up was a terrible idea on the part of those who wanted to create an anti-tea-party. We’d say Go For It! — but there’s something a little scary about the behavior of these mind-numbed robots. HT: Powerline
MSNBC quotes a candidate for office in Massachusetts, the rather dogmatic Mrs. Warren:
No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward
Here is a thoughtful response from the real world to the comments. And here is what Warren has been doing since graduating from Rutgers law school in 1976:
Academic Appointments
Harvard Law School. 1995-present: Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law; 2001-02, Radcliffe
Fellow; 1992-93: Robert Braucher Visiting Professor of Commercial LawThe University of Pennsylvania Law School. 1990-1995: William A Schnader Professor
of Commercial Law; 1987-1990: Professor of LawThe University of Texas School of Law. 1986-87: Jay H. Brown Centennial Fellow in
Law; 1983-1987: Professor of Law. 1985-86: Conoco Faculty Fellow in Law; 1981-82:
Visiting Associate Professor of LawThe University of Texas at Austin. 1983-87: Research Associate, Population Research
CenterThe University of Houston Law Center. 1981-83: Associate Professor of Law; 1978-80:
Assistant Professor of Law; 1980-81: Associate Dean for Academic AffairsThe University of Michigan. 1985: Visiting Professor of Law
Rutgers School of Law (Newark). 1977-78: Lecturer in Law…
Research Grants
2007 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Research Grant for Empirical Study,
“Homeownership in a Time of Financial Peril”2006 American Association of Retired Persons, Research Grant for Empirical Study, “The
Changing Demographics of Debt”2004 Kauffman Foundation, Research Grant for Empirical Study, “Entrepreneurial Financing
and the Bankruptcy System”2004 Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr, “Chapter 11 Outcomes – A Critical Update”
2004 American College of Bankruptcy, Research Grant for Empirical Study, “Expanding the
View of Business Bankruptcy”2004 Annie E. Casey Foundation Research Grant for Empirical Study, “Growing Financial
Risks Facing Families With Children”2001 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Research Grant for Empirical Study, “Medical
Bankruptcy: A Study of Financially Catastrophic Illness”2001 Ford Foundation, Research Grant for Empirical Study, “Home Ownership and Financial
Distress: The Interplay of Tax, Real Estate and Bankruptcy Law”1994-1998 National Bankruptcy Conference, Research Grant for Empirical Study of Business
Bankruptcy1993-1998 National Conference of Bankruptcy Judges, Empirical Study of Business Bankruptcy
1995 Scholar in Residence, Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio Italy
1995-1998 Small Business Administration, Research Grant for Empirical Study on Small Business Failures
1993 Moller Research Chair in Bankruptcy Law and Policy
1992 Research Foundation, University of Pennsylvania
1991 National Conference of Bankruptcy Judges, Empirical Study of Consumer Debtors
1988 Public Policy Research Initiative, University of Pennsylvania
1997 John M. Olin Foundation, Institute for Law and Economics, University of Pennsylvania
1986 American Bar Foundation, Meyer Research Grant
1986 National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, HD #06160-15 16
1984-1986 National Science Foundation, Grant # SES 8310173 – Consumer Choices in
Bankruptcy: Statutory Intentions and Statutory Consequences1985-1986 Texas Bar Foundation, Grant for Research on Bankruptcy Demographics
1985 Policy Research Institute, Grant # 30-3239-4850
1979 Research Initiation Grant, University of Houston
(That 1995 stint in Italy courtesy of the Rockefeller Foundation is a nice touch.) Like so many of her colleagues over the past few years, Mrs. Warren is innocent of any personal experience in the private sector. Easy to be so dogmatic when you don’t know what you’re talking about.
UPDATE: there’s an effective response to Mrs. Warren.
Tom Friedman in the NYT some months back: “to feel the energy and pride of a people taking back the keys to their country and their future from a tired old dictator, was a privilege.” Note: the author of that comment called Rick Santelli an idiot on CNBC. (For those of you who don’t understand the photo, read this)
The executive editor of the NYT:
This year’s Republican primary season offers us an important opportunity to confront our scruples about the privacy of faith in public life — and to get over them. We have an unusually large number of candidates, including putative front-runners, who belong to churches that are mysterious or suspect to many Americans.
Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are Mormons, a faith that many conservative Christians have been taught is a “cult” and that many others think is just weird…
Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum are all affiliated with fervid subsets of evangelical Christianity, which has raised concerns about their respect for the separation of church and state, not to mention the separation of fact and fiction.
I honestly don’t care if Mitt Romney wears Mormon undergarments beneath his Gap skinny jeans, or if he believes that the stories of ancient American prophets were engraved on gold tablets and buried in upstate New York, or that Mormonism’s founding prophet practiced polygamy (which was disavowed by the church in 1890).
Every faith has its baggage, and every faith holds beliefs that will seem bizarre to outsiders. I grew up believing that a priest could turn a bread wafer into the actual flesh of Christ.
Comments: (1) we don’t recall the NYT’s interest in exploring odd churches in 2008; (2) the author of this piece was a member of the same church as Mr. Santorum, whom he criticized above; and (3) we might just vote for a Zoroastrian if he could deliver the top line of this chart broadly throughout the country.
In the great national debate, Richard Cohen lays out the government-centric argument in a critique of a GOP presidential hopeful in the Washington Post:
He occupies the cultural and intellectually empty heartland of the Republican Party. He vows to diminish Washington’s influence — a conservative applause line but a moronic policy. What America desperately needs is more, not less, Washington — more economic stimulus and more national education standards…What does create jobs — well-paying jobs, in fact — is education…He says the federal government needs to stop “dictating” school policy when this is precisely what needs to be done. He says “government doesn’t create jobs,” when in fact it can and does. He blasted the stimulus programs, yet without them the American economy and its financial institutions would be much worse off. He repeats bromides about small business
Mr. Cohen is undoubtedly a fine fellow, but his bio does not indicate that he has ever worked in the private sector — unless you think that writing stories about politicians and government for the establishment newspaper in Washington DC since 1968 is your idea of a private sector job. He ably lays out the government-centric case. He feels it in his bones. He believes in it sincerely and deeply, as do many of his like-minded associates.
But his beliefs have failed him, catastrophically. The optimist in us says, good!, now we can have a bracing debate about the right way to fix things. It shouldn’t be all that hard if everyone keeps an open mind, because the solutions are obvious and not all that difficult. But that’s not how deeply held beliefs usually change, is it? We quote Charles Darwin and Max Planck:
Darwin, in a particularly perceptive passage at the end of his Origin of Species, wrote: “Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume,…I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine…but I look with confidence to the future — to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to look at both sides of the question with impartiality.” And Max Planck, surveying his own career in his Scientific Autobiography, sadly remarked that “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” (p. 151)
Those who counsel caution and delicacy in the debate on America’s future path are wrong, and it is particularly offensive when it comes from the Republican side. It’s not for the likes of Mr. Cohen, his confrères in the media, or senior congressmen and administration officials, that this debate is being held. There’s no changing their minds; they’ve lived in the government / media complex too long. As Holman Jenkins noted in the WSJ, this is “the same old crisis of forgetting what works” that we had in the late 1970′s, except that Washington is twice as big, twice as old, and twice as ossified now. If they take offense, who cares? How else, except by clarity, do you engage and educate the Americans of the future?
We probably disagree with Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter on a variety of policy matters, but the 3000 word address he delivered from the pulpit of the Mount Carmel Baptist Church is remarkable. Rich Lowry has a précis.
A former senior politician:
what do they do? They pay pseudo-scientists to pretend to be scientists to put out the message: ‘This climate thing, it’s nonsense. Man-made CO2 doesn’t trap heat. It may be volcanoes.’ Bullshit! ‘It may be sun spots.’ Bullshit! ‘It’s not getting warmer.’ Bullshit!…When you go and talk to any audience about climate, you hear them washing back at you the same crap over and over and over again…There’s no longer a shared reality on an issue like climate even though the very existence of our civilization is threatened. People have no idea!…It’s no longer acceptable in mixed company, meaning bipartisan company, to use the goddamn word climate. It is not acceptable. They have polluted it
The lad is upset that no one seems to be paying attention to the planetary emergency. We have an idea about where this fellow might better use his righteous anger: make him ambassador to Syria.
“Froma Harrop, a member of The Journal’s editorial board and a syndicated columnist, has been named president of the National Conference of Editorial Writers. The NCEW is a 64-year-old professional organization. Its members include editorial writers, editors, broadcasters and online opinion writers. One of its new missions, the Civility Project, endeavors to improve the quality of political discourse.” — Providence Journal, April 15
“Make no mistake: The tea party Republicans have engaged in economic terrorism against the United States — threatening to blow up the economy if they don’t get what they want. And like the al-Qaida bombers, what they want is delusional…Americans are not supposed to negotiate with terrorists, but that’s what Obama has been doing…That the Republican leadership couldn’t control a small group of ignoramuses in its ranks has brought disgrace on their party…The GOP extremists would ask Obama for his firstborn, and he’d say, ‘OK.’ So they think, why not ask for his second-born, to which he responds, ‘Let’s talk.’ ” — Froma Harrop syndicated column, Aug. 2
More of the same. What can they possibly think that this offensive talk will accomplish?
