One curious headline in yesterday’s New York Times was this: “Treaty Advances Obama’s Nuclear Vision”. The article was about START II, which Obama and Russian President Medvedev agreed to sign this week. Under START II, the number of legal strategically deployed nuclear warheads will be capped at 1,550 for each signatory. The “nuclear vision” to […]
Sunday afternoon, I got a phone call from my good friend Philippe who lives in California. “Gail just saw a great movie, Green Zone! It’s right up your alley. It’s about the Iraqi WMD thing. You have to go see it. It’s great! It’s particularly timely since Karl Rove just came out with a book […]
The Democrats’ drive to pass health care reform has resurrected ancient legal demons. As The New York Times reported last week, nullification, typically considered a pretty-much dead 19th century notion of the relationship between states and the federal government, is experiencing a resurgence. The early American debates about the relationship between state and federal power […]
Joel Davis of FPA’s U.S. Role in the World blog accuses the U.S. of not being an honest and impartial broker in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. He notes that the U.S. threw a “temper tantrum” after Israel’s housing development announcement last week and asks why the U.S. did not throw a similar tantrum after a […]
This week, a series of maps caused the blog-o-sphere to erupt in lively debate over the origins and future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The maps in question… …were posted by Juan Cole last week, picked up by Andrew Sullivan the next day, and subsequently criticized by Jeffrey Goldberg. It turned into Cole and Sullivan vs. […]
Bibi was defiant in the Knesset, refusing to halt Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem. The Obama administration has turned up the heat, higher than at any time since 1991 when H.W. Bush/Baker withheld loan guarantees because of settlements. This worries Israeli diplomats. Hillary is set to give a speech at the AIPAC conference beginning in six days. High […]
The Texas Board of Education voted on Friday to make many substantial changes in the Texas school system’s social studies curriculum. I support many of these changes. Students will be taught that the U.S. is a “constitutional republic” rather than “democratic.” This is correct. Students should learn about the ways in which the Founding Fathers […]
The Rising Powers blog has devoted some time in recent days to the diplomatic flap over Israel’s embarrassment of US Veep Joe Biden with the announcement of East Jerusalem settlements. See recent posts here and here. To update you, President Lula of Brazil, the one-time labor union firebrand who has united his country of extreme riches and […]
With the voluble Veep safely stateside, Hillary took off the gloves and expressed just how pissed off she and the Commander-in-Chief are with ally Israel, the behavior of which she found an “insult” to the United States. I wrote a piece on the Veep’s visit, found at this link and below. President Obama voiced his […]
The point that Jerusalem should not be divided, should remain under Israeli sovereignty with strong guarantees for Muslim control over Islamic holy sites, should not be dismissed out of hand.
Preemption has become a dirty word. But this need not and should not be so. I bring this up because the Obama administration’s Nuclear Posture Review has drawn the Bush administration’s so-called “preemption” doctrine into the news again. The only problem is the Bush administration’s preemption doctrine was not a preemption doctrine. Just ask the […]
Popular from Press
