One might expect, given last year’s headlines across the Middle East as well as promising political developments in authoritarian countries from Myanmar to Cuba, that 2011 was a banner year for freedom. The reality is more complicated. The year was indeed noteworthy for some significant and potentially even historic achievements, but many societies endured intensified repression.
When I was a teenager in the 1970s, the hottest thing on girl radar was Judy Blume’s young-adult novel Forever. My family was living in Ireland on a sabbatical year when it came out, and so a friend packaged it up (in actual brown paper) and sent me a copy from Berkeley. In Ireland at that time, not even adults could have bought a book like Forever, let alone girls in their summer dresses. Every time I re-encounter the book, I expect to find an amusing curio, a reminder of a more innocent age. And each time I am surprised again — shocked — at how explicit and intentionally erotic a book it is.
There are two main schools of thought on what may happen next with Europe’s debt crisis. Some well-informed people strongly believe that everything will work out just fine, and without much of an economic slowdown. Other, equally well-informed people believe just as strongly that the euro area will break apart in a traumatic manner. When it comes to predicting Europe’s future, not many people occupy the middle ground.
When Congress voted on Dec. 23 to fund a temporary extension of the payroll-tax holiday in part by requiring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to increase their fees, it effectively ended the fiction that the two mortgage-financing giants are part of the private sector.
I’m not convinced that U.S. Marines actually urinated on Taliban corpses. I sure hope they didn’t. Having watched the video many times, I’m still not sure what I’m seeing. At first blush, it looks like servicemen desecrating the dead bodies of battlefield opponents. But I can’t be positive. Pardon my coarseness, but I don’t see a stream, I don’t see a splash, and I don’t see any stains.
In South Carolina, Newt Gingrich won a standing ovation at the Fox News-Wall Street Journal debate by calling President Obama “the best food-stamp president in American history” and claiming that the program breeds dependency on the federal government among indolent minorities. He flatly rejected a moderator’s suggestion that he was propagating a vile racial stereotype. “We ((Republicans)) believe in work,” he said afterward. “We believe people should learn to work and that we’re opposed to dependency.”
MCT FORUM
All children’s deaths are tragic, but some are absurdly so. First-grader Ammaria Johnson had just returned to her Virginia grade school after the Christmas holiday and inadvertently ate a peanut at recess. Feeling sick, Ammaria went to a teacher who rushed her to the school clinic, where someone called 911.
The furor over the pardons I recently granted as governor of Mississippi initially focused on numbers. I would like to set the record straight.
Among the many tantalizing questions surrounding Myanmar’s flirtation with democracy is this: Might Kim Jong Un be enticed to try something similar in North Korea?
At debates his opponents sported ties with colors from the flag: blue or, better yet, blistering Republican red.
When Vice President Dick Cheney held secret meetings for his energy task force in the early days of President George W. Bush’s first term, he was excoriated by the left and even some on the right. Both Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club sued, but the Supreme Court found the proceedings were protected by executive privilege.
The second anniversary last week of the devastating Haiti earthquake, which killed around 150,000 people and destroyed much of Port-au-Prince, brought reports of mixed progress. About half of the rubble has been cleared (if that sounds slow, consider it took five years to remove far less rubble in Aceh after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami). About half a million people are still living in camps in Haiti — but that is down from closer to 1.5 million two years ago. Meanwhile cholera, introduced by U.N. peacekeeping troops, killed over 7,000 people in the aftermath of the crisis — the infection rate has abated but the disease remains endemic.
“Good. Because a man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.”
The late, profane iconoclast George Carlin must have been rolling in his grave Tuesday — with laughter at the irony and potential.
The beginning of a new year is a time for resolutions, and Hillary Clinton’s admirers are already busily, lovingly resolving on her behalf. On one sideline, her friends tell me that after a few years of hyperactive globetrotting what she really needs is to put her feet up and dictate another volume of her memoirs while nagging Chelsea to deliver grandchildren. (“She’s tired; she needs some time off,” her husband told ABC.) At the other extreme, a couple of Democratic consultants, Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen, propose to draft her right now as the 2012 Democratic presidential candidate, whether she likes it or not. (“Not only is Mrs. Clinton better positioned to win in 2012 than Mr. Obama, but she is better positioned to govern if she does,” they wrote in The Wall Street Journal.) Other helpful devotees have noticed that Brown University is looking for a new president, or have imagined her creating a clone of the Clinton Global Initiative focused on empowering women. Or maybe Ruth Bader Ginsburg will decide to put her feet up, opening a seat on the Supreme Court.
Almost 65 years ago, in 1947, the U.S. government sued 17 leading Wall Street investment banks, charging them with effectively colluding in violation of antitrust laws.
In the current debate over naming our art museum after a local donor, another museum gift should be recalled. Seventy-five years ago, on Dec. 22, 1936, Andrew W. Mellon, the Pittsburgh banker, statesman and art collector, wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In his letter, which FDR received on Christmas Day, Mellon offered to build and endow a National Gallery of Art on the Mall in Washington, D.C., to which he would donate his entire art collection, consisting of many masterpieces from the Italian renaissance, plus iconic Flemish, Dutch, British and American paintings from the 15th century to the 19th century and 31 pieces of classical sculpture. The value of the whole gift is estimated at $80 million, or least $10 billion in today’s dollars. It may well be the largest gift ever made to a government from any single individual.
They all heard some version of the same thing.
As I read articles about Jorge Perez’s donation to the Miami Art Museum, the controversy that surrounds his gift and the emotions it has sparked, one word comes to mind: hypocrisy.
The general explanation of the Obama administration’s controversial, precedent-setting recess appointments is that they were just another salvo in the ongoing war being waged between the White House and congressional Republicans over nominations. The less obvious, but perhaps more true, interpretation is that last week’s appointments are a salvo in an ongoing war over a controversial tactic that congressional scholar Thomas Mann has dubbed “a modern-day form of nullification.”
In an effort to drum up interest in his presidential bid for the 1968 elections, Michigan’s governor, George Romney — Mitt Romney’s father — went into the belly of the beast. During the summer of 1967, the elder Romney gave a stump speech in San Francisco’s Golden Gate panhandle, a couple of blocks from Haight and Ashbury, the epicenter of hippiedom.
Who could fault a worker who did not pay dues to the Teamsters? In the past two years the Department of Labor has charged or convicted of corruption 11 Teamsters officers. A government monitor recently accused the union’s president, Jimmy Hoffa, of trying to bribe election opponents with Teamster funds. Hoffa himself makes more than $300,000 a year.
Only 51 percent of American adults are married — a record low — down from 72 percent in 1960, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census data.
Rick Santorum is a Republican who knows how to connect to the 99 percent, and that’s a problem for Mitt Romney.
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