Posted on January 31st, 2009 by Daniel Larison
An education ministry circular particularly annoyed Israel by telling Turkish schoolchildren to observe a minute’s silence in solidarity with Palestinian children. In the event, the Israelis persuaded the Turks to cancel a proposed essay and drawing contest for schoolchildren to air their feelings of hatred towards Israel. Israeli officials were apparently poised to respond [...]
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Filed under: Armenia, foreign policy, history, politics
Posted on January 31st, 2009 by Daniel Larison
As tedious as it seems, I have to say a few words on the exchange between John Schwenkler and R.S. McCain. McCain seems to be laboring under the false impression that C11 was a) building a political movement and b) uniformly hostile to Sarah Palin. Neither is correct. The name of the [...]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on January 31st, 2009 by Daniel Larison
Mark Thompson responds with an interesting post, arguing that overturning Roe would deprive absolutists on both sides of the debate of the power that they currently possess:
In most places, the pro-choice and pro-life absolutists will no longer find themselves with quite as much power, as the majority in the mushy middle will wind up crafting [...]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on January 31st, 2009 by Daniel Larison
As long as you’re not too picky about some details (it was South Dakota, not North Dakota, where the abortion restriction initiative failed), Damon Linker is making a certain amount of sense here (via Chris Dierkes):
How could Obama — how could liberals, how could supporters of abortion rights — both win and end the culture [...]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on January 30th, 2009 by Daniel Larison
Alex Massie slaps Jonah Goldberg around for this item extolling the “Churchillian” courage of the House GOP. Massie refrains from mocking the “apparently compulsory Churchill reference,” but I cannot. There really ought to be a rule for Americans, especially when they’re writing from Britain, that they cannot compare their own politicians to [...]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on January 30th, 2009 by Daniel Larison
Michael Crowley correctly observes that India’s diplomatic victory in limiting Holbrooke’s official mission, about which India is “exulting” according to the Post, is an illusory one. Crowley thinks that Kashmir will be an inevitable part of Holbrooke’s work. I agree that it probably will be, but not because it has to be. [...]
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Filed under: foreign policy, politics
Posted on January 29th, 2009 by Daniel Larison
This Time article makes for depressing reading. It confirms my suspicions that meddling in Kashmir might very well figure into Holbrooke’s mission in South Asia, and it also makes me think that New Delhi is extremely insecure in its relationship with the U.S. after the change in administration. Three months ago when Obama [...]
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Filed under: India, foreign policy, politics
Posted on January 29th, 2009 by Daniel Larison
This Philip Weiss post on the role of Near Eastern affairs in Passaic County politics brought a question to mind: what has George Ajjan, our man in Passaic County, been doing lately? His latest post shows a promotional poster for the Inaugural in Senegal, where he travels from time to time, but we haven’t [...]
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Filed under: miscellaneous
Posted on January 29th, 2009 by Daniel Larison
It continues to mystify me how John Boehner remains the leader of the House Republicans. The Republican stimulus vote was remarkable in how politically tone-deaf it was. The bill as presented to the House shouldn’t have passed, but it is striking how unwilling the Republican leadership was to back a popular piece of [...]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on January 29th, 2009 by Daniel Larison
Remember GSAVE? That was the clunky abbreviation for Donald Rumsfeld’s brief, ill-fated replacement name for the Global War on Terror (GWOT) as the “global struggle against violent extremism,” which was slightly less ridiculous than warring against an abstraction and yet even more amorphous and aimless. Little wonder it didn’t catch on. In [...]
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Filed under: foreign policy, politics
