The Israeli government, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and the American Jewish Committee (AJC) are urging the United Nations General Assembly not to go through with plans to screen the anti-Israel film Miral Monday night in the main hall of the United Nations General Assembly. (more)
While not so much a vote of confidence for the GOP as it was an overwhelming public rebuke of Democrats’ misguided economic policies, it is clear that a Republican tide swept the nation in this year’s midterm elections. And perhaps nowhere was the result more consequential than in the Tar Heel State, where Republicans took control of the North Carolina legislature for the first time in over 100 years. (more)
Gov. Bob McDonnell has dropped two proposed taxes on liquor sales from his plan for getting Virginia out of the distilled spirits business, opening a $47 million-a-year hole in the state budget. (more)
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made his annual address to the United Nations General Assembly late last week. He reminded America and the free world just what a crazed worldview he holds when he called for an investigation into whether the United States government was behind the attack on the World Trade Centers on 9/11. It was brilliant theater and a classic distraction technique to be sure. What he didn’t want you and I to focus on was what his brutal, menacing regime is doing to its own people, to its neighbors, and to the world. (more)
My 13-year-old son, who is far more interested in sports than politics, walked into the family room yesterday and said: “Dad, I saw on the news that the thing is starting when all the dictators come to America and give speeches about how bad we are.” His statement is one of the better descriptions of the United Nations General Assembly (the UNGA) that I have ever heard. (more)
Many of our fellow citizens are up in arms about the prospect of the United States becoming a European-style social democracy. Their stubborn and unreasonable resistance to the obvious advantages of the modern European state, though frustrating, is really not surprising. They’re the same right-wing dullards that always raise a stink when someone tries to improve America. Luckily for the rest of us, we live in a time when our government is chock full of really, really smart people. (Nearly every one an Ivy League grad.) And I hear that they’ve come up with a truly brilliant plan to circumvent this obstinate, brain-dead conservative mob and finally enable the rest us to enjoy the benefits of a more compassionate and humane form of government. (more)
If the President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is seriously thinking about running for the post of UN Secretary General, he probably can count on the support of the International Olympic Committee. (more)
What is the definition of accountability? United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon may be about to find out. (more)
Abstract: In the real world, as opposed to what French President Nicolas Sarkozy calls President Barack Obama’s "virtual world," America faces the reality of Iran’s intransigence and aggressiveness; China’s headlong pursuit of its own national, regional, and global interests; Russia’s determination to regain its Near Abroad; the Arab states’ refusal to accept any kind of a reasonable settlement of the kind that Israel has already offered under several governments; Syria’s designs on Lebanon; and Hugo Chávez’s designs on the weaker countries in Latin America. President Obama’s foreign policy agenda of gradual American retreat will have inexorable consequences: When erstwhile allies see the American umbrella being withdrawn, they will have to accommodate themselves to those from whom we were protecting them. If Obama proves impervious to empirical evidence and experience, all these accommodations, the weakening of alliances, the strengthening of centers of adversarial power in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Caracas, and elsewhere will continue until we are awakened by some cataclysm. (more)
The debate over whether the United Nations will continue to overcharge American taxpayers is over–and the U.S. wound up on the losing end. In a dramatic turnaround from steady declines since 2001, the percentage that the U.S. will be charged for U.N. peacekeeping has been sharply increased for the next three years, and U.S. taxpayers will end up paying roughly $100 million more each year than they would have if the 2009 assessment rate had been maintained. (more)
