After a U.S. senator was shot on Fox's drama 24 this year, another character blurted out the make and model of the assassin's submachine gun. The German brand had been prominent in so many episodes of 24 that gun-enthusiast bloggers, among others, speculated whether the company was paying to advertise on the show.
Watching the Obama administration launch its ``new era of engagement'' over the past 10 months, most seasoned observers have pondered two questions: First, if engagement fails, will the Obama team ever acknowledge that it has failed? And what then?
In the military, I learned to expect screw-ups, especially when it came to money. So maybe the Department of Veterans Affairs is just trying to ease my transition to civilian life by doing things the military way in its handling of Post 9/11 GI Bill education benefits.
Rather than serving in the U.S. Senate for almost 20 years, or having so many other wonderful life experiences, I could have served a longer sentence in prison for some of the stupid, reckless things I did as a teenager. I am grateful to have gotten a second chance -- and I believe our society should make a sustained investment in offering second chances to our youth.
For 40 years, the community organizing group ACORN has been a strong and effective voice for low-income Americans. It has registered more than 1 million citizens to vote. It has provided counseling and other assistance to help Americans buy and keep homes. It has fought on behalf of working people for fair treatment by employers, banks, mortgage companies and payday lenders. It played a leading role in organizing the victims of Hurricane Katrina to gain a voice in the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast.
Politicians love photo ops. So when Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., appeared alongside Hamid Karzai as the beleaguered Afghan president announced that he would agree to a runoff election, it was hardly surprising. Kerry was doing what politicians do.
Forty-seven years ago, on Oct. 22, President John F. Kennedy revealed that the Soviet Union was secretly installing strategic nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba. More than 40 were to be emplaced, capable of obliterating nearly every major American city. The two superpowers confronted each other at the brink of nuclear holocaust.
As everybody knows, the two biggest battles on Capitol Hill -- reforming healthcare and regulating Wall Street -- have unleashed massive campaigns from the enemies of free markets.
Of all the regions in a dangerous and intractable world, forgotten Latin America might paradoxically offer President Barack Obama the best opportunity to influence events so that the ``hope for the future'' embodied in his Nobel Peace Prize becomes a reality.
As an Afghan woman who for many years lived a life deprived of the most basic human rights, I find unbearable the thought of what will happen to the women of my country if it once again falls under the control of the insurgents and militants who now threaten it.
I was lucky, if you can call it that, to have been stalked before the digital age. Nearly 30 years ago, a stalker had to rely largely on land lines and the U.S. mail to instill fear, and a stalking victim had to rely largely on herself and her friends for protection.
Feminism made women miserable.
This, anyway, seems to be the most popular take-away from ``The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,'' a recent study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers that purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972. Maureen Dowd and Ariana Huffington greeted the news with somber perplexity, but the more common response has been a triumphant ``I told you so!''``Our concern is that the Obama administration is perceived to be softening on human rights.''
If that comment came from a human rights lobbyist, you might not pay too much mind. But I heard it from Anwar Ibrahim, a Malaysian leader who is one of the world's foremost spokesmen for Islamic democracy -- and who is himself under threat from authorities at home. If Anwarsays that people throughout Asia and the Middle East are wondering about President Obama's commitment to human rights, the administration ought to pay attention.The civil rights struggle for legal equality in America today is no less necessary, nor worthy, than a similar struggle fought by blacks several decades ago. Now, as then, Americans are denied rights simply because of who they are. When lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans gather in Washington Sunday for the National Equality March, they will invoke the unfulfilled promise in our Constitution that they, too, are due equal protection under the law.
I went to a flattened college Saturday. The names of the dead were scrawled on a sliver of salvaged dry-erase board. A crowd of gawking teenagers hovered near an excavator working the rubble, along with the dowdy, fidgeting headmistress. Periodically sobbing parents were hanging about in the background. When the searchers reached five students crushed below a staircase, and soldiers emerged from the rubble bearing black body bags, a grim practice followed: A rescue worker would bring a student's putrid backpack or purse to a shocked mother or father to confirm whom they'd found. And the waiting youngsters with camcorders and cell phone cameras flocked around the scene like moths to a light.
She makes herself do it.
Judy Shepard doesn't enjoy talking in front of people, living a public life, giving speeches. ``Speech class was my worst nightmare,'' she said.The American health-care system suffers from three serious problems: Health-care costs are rising much faster than our incomes. More than 15 percent of the population has neither private nor public insurance. And the high cost of health care can lead to personal bankruptcy, even for families that do have health insurance.
A disquieting phrase has entered our economic lexicon: ``new normal.'' The ``new normal'' economy that emerges from our recovery, many economists fear, won't look like the old normal, the American economy of the past couple of decades. It will look worse.
What would Thomas Edison say?
Last month, stores in Europe stopped acquiring new stocks of Edison's brilliant invention. In truth, the traditional incandescent light bulb is terribly inefficient: Only about 10 percent of its energy output is in the form of visible light; the rest is emitted as heat. Switching everyone to alternatives such as compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) will result in fairly significant reductions in energy consumption, which will help Europe meet its targets for reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.The economy will not begin to recover until home prices stop falling. That's what smart people counseled a year ago as things collapsed from Wall Street to Los Angeles, and they were right.
To boss: ``u will hv story in 5 mins''
To husband: ``u pickd up m yet? u r l8 4 class!'' Phone rings: ``Hello? Hi, Mom. Yes, yes, we're fine. The boys are fine. No, the weather is good. If you saw it on the Weather Channel, why are you calling me to ask? Yes, I'll make sure the boys wear jackets. Gotta go, Mom, I'll call you back.''A group of interplanetary aliens studying Americans might easily decide that we are the cleanest bunch of folks in the galaxy.
``They've got all these hand sanitizers,'' they would say to the Mother Ship. ``Stuff called Purell.''The international order that emerged after World War II has rightly been termed the Pax Americana; it's a Washington-led arrangement that has maintained political stability and promoted an open global economic system. Today, however, the Pax Americana is withering, thanks to what the National Intelligence Council in a recent report described as a ``global shift in relative wealth and economic power without precedent in modern history'' -- a shift that has accelerated enormously as a result of the economic crisis of 2007-09.
November 8, 2009, will mark the one-year anniversary of Ecuadorian immigrant Marcello Lucero's brutal murder at the hand of seven high school teens in the infamously anti-immigrant Suffolk County, New York. Unfortunately, it took the death of one human being to raise awareness of the injustices occurring in Suffolk County and across the United States, which, ironically, has always been a nation of immigrants.
After nearly a week of euphoria, I think it's time the overly optimistic Cuban-American community put their feet back on the ground. For the past week, I've heard all sorts of claims about the value of the Juanes concert, how it will build hope among Cuban youth, how it's a sign the regime is changing, how it's a sign the exile community is changing. I must respectfully disagree.
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