Republicans believe there are three words so powerful that they might reshape the political order in an economically beleaguered corner of the country: War on coal. With Democrats holding total control of the federal government and a cap-and-trade bill still looming, the GOP is fanning widespread coal country fears that the national Democratic Party is [...]
Iran is now a “nuclear state,” President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced this morning. As Gordon Brown warned that the world's patience is wearing thin, Ahmadinejad told scores of cheering Iranians that the Islamic Republic is capable of producing weapons-grade uranium. He spoke as tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Tehran to mark [...]
The Saudi religious police launched Thursday a nationwide crackdown on stores selling items that are red or in any other way allude to the banned celebrations of Valentine’s Day, a Saudi official said. Members of the feared religious police were inspecting shops for red roses, heart-shaped products or gifts wrapped in red, and ordering storeowners [...]
Chomsky and the Khmer Rouge Letters The Observer February 8, 2010 In his prickly response Letters, 17 January to Andrew Anthony’s “Lost in Cambodia,” OM, 10 January 2010 Noam Chomsky does precisely what he accuses Anthony of doing: “Vilify the messenger, to ensure that unwanted history is forgotten.” That unwanted history is of Chomsky himself [...]
If 2001 was the year when international terrorism hit American soil, then 2009 was the year when Americans became the targets of domestic terrorism. In November, Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, born in Virginia to Palestinian Muslim parents, killed 13 and wounded 30 in his one-man attack on fellow soldiers at Fort Hood in Texas. [...]
DALLAS — Charlie Wilson, the former congressman from Texas whose funding of Afghanistan's resistance to the Soviet Union was chronicled in the movie “Charlie Wilson's War,” died Wednesday. He was 76.Wilson died at Memorial Medical Center-Lufkin after he started having difficulty breathing while attending a meeting in the eastern Texas town where he lived, said [...]
Binyam Mohammed is an al Qaeda terrorist who planned, with his would-be partner Jose Padilla the “Dirty Bomber” to carry out mass-murder attacks in U.S. cities as part of a 9/11 “second wave.” More here. Unlike Padilla, who was prosecuted on tangentially related terrorism charges and is now serving a lengthy albeit not lengthy enough [...]
“If you have a better idea, show it to me.” That was President Barack Obama’s challenge two weeks ago to House Republicans regarding health-care reform. He has since called for a bipartisan forum, not to start over on health reform but to “move forward” on the “best ideas that are out there.”The best ideas out [...]
Representative Paul Ryan’s 40th birthday coincided with the House GOP retreat in Baltimore on January 29. Ryan’s wife and three children joined him for the event. President Obama was also there, at the invitation of the House Republican leadership, to deliver remarks and answer questions from selected members. And he had a surprise in store [...]
