Archives for 2010

President Barack Obama was so effective in his 90-minute ‘questions session’ with the congressional Republican conference that some Republican leaders are said to be regretting that they allowed the session to be recorded. Fox Cable News rectified the error by pulling away its own cameras. Luckily, C-Span was there. Obama complained about hyperbole on the […]

America's Competitors Will Use Supreme Court Ruling To Block Our Green Jobs Effort And Close Our Factories | OurFuture.org ‘Saudi Arabia’s economy depends on oil exports so stands to be one of the biggest losers in any pact that curbs oil demand by penalizing carbon emissions. “It’s one of the biggest threats that we are […]

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown may have called the London Conference on Afghanistan for domestic political purposes, as a sort of publicity stunt. But the nearly 70 nations that gathered there unexpectedly took advantage of the meet to plot out a NATO exit strategy. Of course, how realistic it is remains to be seen. The […]

Tomgram: Anand Gopal, Afraid of the Dark in Afghanistan | TomDispatch “The foreign soldiers, most of them tattooed and bearded, then went on to the main compound. They threw clothes on the floor, smashed dinner plates, and forced open closets. Finally, they found the man they were looking for: Habib-ur-Rahman, a computer programmer and government […]

Flesh and Stone – War is hell on the brain: Doctors map psychological disorders in Gaza and the West Bank “23.2 percent had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 17.3 percent had an anxiety disorder (other than PTSD or acute stress disorder), and 15.3 percent had depression. PTSD was more frequently identified in children under age 15, […]

Understandably, President Obama concentrated on domestic issues, especially job creation, in his State of the Union address. But there were a few paragraphs toward the end about foreign affairs that I want to talk about. While I thought the speech generally strong, and the flash polls suggest that the public did, as well, I felt […]

AP reports that guerrillas drove a car bomb into an Interior Ministry crime lab in the Karrada district of Baghdad on Tuesday, only a day after a coordinated bombing attack on the city’s hotel district, killing 22. Al-Zaman says that a number of high-ranking officers are among the dead, and that some 80 are wounded. […]

Four charged in phone scheme at Sen. Landrieu's office – USATODAY.com James O’Keefe, the rightwing activist who tried to punk ACORN by dressing as a pimp, was endorsed in a resolution by 31 Republican congressmen as a role model. Yes, the very model of an upright gentleman. So the political right wing ruled the United […]

Headline news of the sort on which I concentrate on at Informed Comment is driven by dramatic events, with violence being the most dramatic. But it is also important to fight back against the reduction of Arab culture to stereotypes that have become all too common in the West. So I want to offset some […]