Walter Russell Mead says it was Palestine and that all the bruhah about his Israel/Middle East speech is overblown or downright wrong. I agree. He writes:
On substantive grounds, it is hard to see what Obama’s critics have in mind. The US position is and has always been that the 1967 borders are the starting point for negotiations. UN Security Council Resolution 242, the basis for all negotiations on this question since it was passed in 1967, makes that very plain — although that resolution does not demand an Israeli withdrawal from all of the territory it conquered in the war. President Bush never deviated from this position; neither has President Obama. Israeli prime ministers including Likud prime ministers like Ehud Olmert have accepted this for years. This is standard diplospeak boilerplate. It is a non-statement, a platitude, even a bromide.
His post comes with a nifty little map of the controversy, courtesy of the CIA:
Go here to read the actual press release. Simply amazing that a politician would let something like that see the light of day.
Campaign Rhetoric, Dumb Statements, Economics, Government, Health Care, Presidential Politics, Taxes, The Media, Videos
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Colbert Report, Meet the Press, Newt Gingrich
The talking heads have had nothing good to say about Mitt Romney lately, and especially since his healthcare speech in Michigan last week. Are his backers not paying attention? What do they see that the talking heads don’t?
Only 374 people were murdered in Rio in March 2011, down from 492 during the same month the year before. Compare that with New York City, where in November 2010, the murder count for the entire year to that point was 464.
Interestingly, if we go back to 1990, New York saw 2,245 of its citizens murdered, a rate of 187 a month. Thus, things are much better in NYC. Maybe there’s hope for Rio.
So what does a 51 foot-high floodgate in Japan have to do with our $14.377 trillion dollar debt? Do I really have to explain?
The more important question is who is going to step up and be our Mayor Kotaku Wamura? There’s a surfeit of poseurs. Who’s the real thing?
According to Henrique Meirelles, president of Brazil’s Olympic committee, preparation of the Rio Games will result in a new model of public administration by promoting more coordination between all levels of government, municipal, state, and federal.
I’ve interviewed more than a couple of people involved in those preparations, two of them government officials, and Meirelles has his work cut out for him. It’s not an impossible job, and he’s right, the Games will focus attention on the need to work together. Whether he’s up to the task remains to be seen.
I’m against torture.
I’m undecided about waterboarding. Is it torture? It certainly must be uncomfortable, and I’ve read all the arguments that it is–Japan did it in WWII, and we went after them, etc. But then there’s the odd fact that guys like Christopher Hitchens willingly underwent waterboarding to see what it was like. (It was like torture, he said.) I have a hard time imagining Hitchens allowing someone to attache electrodes to his genitals or pull off his finger nails.
Anyway, we can debate my moral dilemma another day. My point today is to raise an interesting question raised by an interchange in the comments on Barry Ritholtz’s website The Big Picture. Ritholtz, by the way, is adamant that water boarding is torture. Virtually all of his readers appear to agree with him, judging by the comments.
But then there’s this interchange:
Andy T Says:
May 6th, 2011 at 2:45 am
“Thinking that torture is wrong is not a liberal or conservative value — it is an American value.”
If your wife or child was captured by somebody…and the only way to get really good information out of a suspect/accomplice was to torture them, what would you do?
Tough question…..I know.
Mike Dukakis lost an election with that type of question in 1988.
Keep holding on to your ‘truths’ ….
~~~
BR: Its not a tough question — its a silly piece of rhetoric, revealing the questioner to be a fool. Of course, my personal code of ethics is different than what a great nations’ laws are.
What I would do personally in that situation — ripping someone’s eyes out with my bare hands so I could piss on their brains — is not the same sort of response that is appropriate by a nation.
Why is what might be appropriate for me to do, inappropriate for a nation to do? Discuss.
Obama finally releases his long-form birth certificate (here’s the short form).
We do not have time for this kind of silliness,” Obama said. “We’ve got better stuff to do.”
Like releasing your college transcripts?
Save your breath. I’m not a birther. I am someone who wants to know why the man who leads this country is so unwilling to let his followers know who he is. I also want to know why the press has let him get away with it for so long. His stonewalling and their enabling–now that’s silliness.
UPDATE: The “silliness” continues as The Smoking Gun kicks the ball back into play. What Obama could have learned from the Nixon White House.
Paul Clement 1, King & Spaulding 0.
Defending unpopular clients is what lawyers do.
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