Welcome to the first “International Free Press Day,” commemorating the start of a cartoon controversy in Denmark that showcased the conflict between freedom of the press and efforts to protect religion from insult. It was September 30, 2005 when a gutsy Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, published 12 cartoons of Islam’s prophet, Mohammed. It sought to demonstrate …
“Mr. Obama appears to have crossed a psychological threshold on Iran, and in recent days he appears to have made a leap toward viewing tough new sanctions against Iran as an inevitability, after months of talking about the need for engagement.” – New York Times, September 25, 2009 President Obama’s tough remarks about the discovery …
Some 40 of us had gathered around a long rectangular dinner table in Britain’s House of Commons, exchanging ideas from a day-long conference on Iran that had just ended down the street, when columnist Melanie Phillips bemoaned the West’s failure to forcefully confront Tehran over its nuclear program. The West will keep dithering, she predicted, …
With Washington focused on health care, and political activists of the right and left doing their best to tear the nation apart, the chickens of what was once called the “War on Terror” are coming home to roost. The administration and Congress face important decisions about Afghanistan, not the least of which is whether to …
The recent flap over President Obama’s speech to schoolchildren this week is a disheartening reflection of political discourse in today’s America, replete with the artificiality, paranoia and coarseness that have become all-too-familiar staples of our national, televised, on-line, roundthe-clock “yeller-ama.” The September 8 speech, scheduled to air on the White House web site and C-SPAN …
It was 1998, and President Clinton and Vice President Gore were working with Senate and House Democratic leaders to stage party “unity” events around the country, hoping to build the grassroots enthusiasm that would help elect as many Democrats to Congress that year as possible. At an event in Boston, Clinton and Gore were joined …
Continue reading “Remembering Kennedy, and Cooling the Rhetoric”
Upon hearing George H.W. Bush utter his “read my lips, no new taxes” pledge at the 1988 Republican National Convention, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee phoned Bush’s campaign manager. “What are you doing?” an exasperated Dan Rostenkowski, the burly tax writer, asked campaign manager James A. Baker III. For years, Rostenkowski …