President Obama is about to test an important proposition – that the United States can more effectively improve even the worst global institutions by participating in them than by shunning them. In this case, the institution is the United Nations Human Rights Council, for which the Obama Administration has applied for U.S. membership, reversing a …
Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s recent demand that Washington guarantee the safety of China’s investments in U.S. Treasury securities highlights just one problem that huge federal budget deficits present for the United States. China is now America’s largest creditor, holding about $1 trillion in securities – having lent us much of the necessary funding that …
Fascinating. I run a campaign based on “change you can believe in.” I win big at home, and hundreds of millions of people around the world seemed thrilled as well. I’m still very popular with the American people, so I should have all the political capital I need to tackle the big problems that we …
In her new book, Alger Hiss and the Battle for History, the brilliant intellectual historian Susan Jacoby describes the Hiss case of the early post-World War II period as a kind of political Rorschach test. If you‟re a liberal, she writes, you believe that Hiss, a former top State Department official in the 1940s who …
Continue reading “Charles Freeman, America’s Next Political Rorschach Test”
Welcome to “Israeli Apartheid Week,” the fifth such global event, which runs this year from March 1 to 8 and is designed, its organizers say, to “educate people about the nature of Israel as an apartheid system.” With activities in over 40 cities from Berkeley to Johannesburg, this yearly event is designed to build support …
As President Obama focuses the nation’s attention on the prospect of huge, long-term federal budget deficits, some experts in Congress and elsewhere will try to build momentum to create a “budget commission” that would draft a deficit-cutting plan on which Congress would then vote. The idea is borne of frustration with soaring deficits and with …
Continue reading “Budget Commission? Bad Idea; Responsible Budgeting is Congress’s Job”
Facing growing threats to free speech across the West from what’s called “libel tourism,” lawmakers in Washington and London are beginning to awaken to propose legislative remedies. Their response is long overdue. Libel tourism is the practice by which the subjects of critical books or articles – such as Arab billionaires who allegedly finance terrorism …
Continue reading “Terrorists Fight Back With ‘Libel Tourism’”