Reading through the Screens of Bias The New York Times has a poignant story, in significant miniature, of how last week’s coup in Honduras has split Honduran society. Jorge Arturo Reina, Honduran ambassador to the United Nations has sided with ousted President Manuel Zelaya. Honduran ambassador to the United States Roberto Flores Bermúdez, Reina’s former […]
Lessons in Democracy
The New York Times reports that a majority of New Yorkers do not favor Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s serving another term, despite Blumenthal’s success last October in getting the New York City Council to “extend” term limits so that he and council members could all serve third terms. Term limits were imposed in New York City […]
Bad Argument
It’s everywhere among the political class. On ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Liz Cheney, Dick’s daughter, and Steve Schmidt, late of John McCain’s campaign, joined Clinton stalwart James Carville and The Nation‘s Katrina Vanden Heuvel for a round table with venerable conservative George Will. On the matter of potential removal of some foreign prisoners […]
Zhao Ziyang and Charles Freeman
The New York Times reports today of a rare and remarable occurrence, the publicly released memoir of communist Chinese leader – secretly recorded, in this case, during his 16-year house-arrest prior to his death, by former party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, deposed in 1989 for being soft on the Tiananmen demonstrators before the ultimate crackdown […]
Tortured Argument
The next several years of the torture debate will be variously instructive, not least in what we already see in the low form and manner of important public political argument among figures who should have been schooled to a higher level. The debate will last at least a few years, and it will distress in […]