Liberal Talk Radio

A few billion in arms to Saudi Arabia, a few billion more to Israel, and whaddaya know? The two countries are suddenly willing to sit down:
If Saudi officials do sit down with the Israelis, it will be the first time they have both attended public talks about Israeli-Palestinian peace since the Madrid conference in October [...]

Check out these pictures (via Sullivan).

The details about the latest free speech in schools battle going on at the Supreme Court are supremely depressing:
The Supreme Court heard arguments yesterday in a case that has attracted attention mainly because of its eccentric story line: An Alaska student was suspended from high school in 2002 after he unfurled a banner reading “Bong [...]

I suppose we have Nouri Maliki to thank for making even the American “Arab Street” sympathetic to Saddam:
The execution of Saddam Hussein was big news from the Euphrates to YouTube. But along Bay Ridge’s heavily Arab-American Fifth Avenue, the death of the tyrant was greeted with silence.
“I won’t watch it and I have no other [...]

Gay marriage for Dutch voters:
Five days before a national election here, the center-right government announced today that it planned to introduce legislation to ban burkas and similar garments in public places, saying the full-body garb worn by a small number of Muslim women in the Netherlands posed a grave security threat, both to the country’s [...]

If you have any trouble at all understanding that a man executing Amish girls in a one-room schoolhouse is one of the most depraved things to ever happen this side of Baghdad, you should see Nightline’s John Donvan report from the scene last night (I think this might be the link**). Donvan breaks down and [...]

It’s true that history will judge what’s happening now (and also true that the Future will be left to pick up the pieces). And I’ll give you that it’s a sour, sour pickle that we’re in.
The biggest issue, IMO, remains: there’s very little agreement on first principals. In some sense, by quibbling over the definition of [...]

Dunno, Contrario.  Maybe I’m just Euro like that.  Still, I hear my alarmist position echoing across the mare more and more.  Check out this ditty on a historical cognate to the Senate’s abandonment of liberty from Roman days:
Those of us who are not Americans can only look on in wonder at the similar ease with which [...]

After international officials outlawed the export of wild caviar from the Caspian and Black Seas, the market has turned to farmed fish, and I have to say, the whole business comes off as slightly perverse*:
In the mid-1990’s the farmed caviar industry was nothing more than a few marine biologists with a dream. Today it is [...]

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent trip to New York, as seen through his in-country translator:
On Tuesday, Sept. 19, the day of his now-famous speech, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad entered the General Assembly at the United Nations and sat down with his foreign minister and the Iranian U.N. ambassador. He waved in my direction, and I waved back. [...]