With the oil crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, is it time for Americans to well and truly change their lifestyles? According to Martin Laubli of Switzerland’s Tages Anzeiger, President Obama needs to lead the world by pointedly rejecting George H.W. Bush’s 1992 statement that ‘The American way of life is non-negotiable.’ For Tages Anzeiger, Martin Laubli writes in part: Obama has the opportunity...

I have been browsing the Peruvian newspaper “El Comercio,” for news about Joran van der Sloot. Of course, the breaking news that van der Sloot has confessed to murdering the young university student Stephany Flores is all over the news here in the U.S. And so is the news that allegedly van der Sloot became enraged when he returned to his hotel room after getting a cup of coffee and found Ms. Flores browsing...

There have been many takes on the resignation today of Helen Thomas (some of them here on TMV). And here’s yet another take: was a double standard applied to her or not? (Your views are welcome in District TMV)

The controversy has reached its ultimate end, with Thomas announcing today she will retire. I have to feel a little sad at this news. While I have not been a fan of Thomas for some time, she has been an institution at the White House for half a century and that is a pretty big deal. My bigger regret is that in recent years she allowed her partisanship to mar a long period of service. NOTE: Due to a system glitch...

I’ve written before about what appeared to be a lack of conservative women running for office. So it’s with great satisfaction that I read and listened to not one but two stories from NPR on the statistically significant increase in the number of conservative female candidates in this year’s election cycle. First, from For Republican women, 2010 is already a huge year: Fourteen Republican women...

When it comes to the BP oil crisis, is Obama the victim of circumstances beyond his control – or is he partly to blame? Whatever the answer, according to Der Tagesspiegel columnist Malte Lehming, it would be tragic if the ‘drill-happy’ Republicans benefited from the biggest oil disaster in U.S. history. From Der Tagesspiegel, Malte Lehming writes in part: The oil disaster is threatening the...

Took a week or so off from blogging. This morning, however, I have a few rants on the topics of the day. Helen Thomas: what is the big deal? Just because she said that Jewish people should move back to Europe. White folks in the south, as well as black separatists, have been saying that black people should go back to Africa for almost two hundred years (see Liberia). Helen Thomas does not make policy for...

George W. Bush was lucky. Over eight years, the so-called liberal media decided he was an incurable clod, mocked him as the self-described Decider and left his inner life alone. Not so with Barack Obama, for whom the Oil Spill has unleashed a new rush of psychobabble from the Left, with globs of comment about his detachment, over-rationality and rage deficit. As everyone from Maureen Dowd to Spike Lee urges...

The BBC reports that the Israeli government has apologized for a “spoof video” making fun of the Israeli assault on the Mavi Marmara:

The Time Has Come By Alex Hammer Why is that you have hundreds of choices of TV channels, almost unlimited selections of music, countless book choices (e.g. Amazon), many choices of coffee flavors, but only two significant political choices – Democrat and Republican? Isn’t that strange? In my state of Maine, we have 39% Independents but not a current single Independent anywhere in the legislature. As...

I referred to Helen Thomas’s recent comments a couple of times here in posts about the larger subject of Israel’s May 31 attack on the Gaza aid flotilla. I think I made it clear just in those tangential remarks that I agreed her remarks were offensive but that the reaction to them was overblown (in the blogosphere in general; not necessarily here, and certainly not here alone).

Judging from this article from Afghanistan’s Outlook Afghanistan newspaper, the Peace Jirga held last Wednesday, Thursday and Friday by President Hamid Karzai did little it improve his government’s credibility among average Afghans, or persuade the militants to reenter what in Afghanistan qualifies as the ‘mainstream.’ Reporting in part on the wave of bombings surrounding the event...

Veteran journalist Helen Thomas has been dumped by her speaking agency after her controversial comments about the Middle East in which she basically said that Israel’s Jews should go back where they came from (to Germany, Poland, etc.), the Huffington Post reports: “It is with a heavy heart that Nine Speakers, Inc. announces its resignation as the agent for Helen Thomas, Dean of the White House...

Yesterday, I blogged about the Israeli response to the reports that the original tape it released of communications between the Israelis and the aid ships just before the Israelis boarded the Mavi Marmara in an assault that killed nine activists had been doctored to give the impression that one of the activists had told the Israelis to “go back to Auschwitz.” In fact, no such statement was ever made...

Gaza Flotilla’s Leader Explains: It was a Jihadist Attack not a “Humanitarian Operation” by Barry Rubin Bülent Yildirim, the main organizer of the Gaza Flotilla, explained at a Hamas rally in Gaza that the operation was no humanitarian effort but part of a global Jihad to overthrow governments and install Islamist dictatorships. He made no secret of that fact, as shown in the MEMRI translation...

You’d get THIS.

Continuing with our global reaction to last week’s attempt to break Israel’s blockade of Hamas-ruled Gaza, and reflecting the never-ending and understandable Palestinian frustration, this article by columnist Fouad Abu Hajla of Alhayat Aljadeeda of the Palestinian Territories expresses embarrassment that rather than Arabs, it took Turks, Greeks and other Europeans to stand up for the besieged...

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. For me, Michele Bachmann is neither. As I wrote in a column posted last week, she is who she is and is the sole responsibility of voters in her Sixth Congressional District in Minnesota. Bachmann is one of those political gadflies who is constantly in the news as a mouthpiece of ratings for Fox News and darling of ridicule, primarily by Keith Olbermann and Chris...

While the likes of Ari Fleischer and Michele Bachmann are screaming for Helen Thomas to be fired because she answered a reporter who asked for her opinion on the Israeli-aid flotilla horror show by saying that Israel “should get the hell out of Palestine” and then added, when the reporter asked her where Jews should go, that they should go back to Germany and Poland (by which she obviously meant...

As previously reported here, a Prescott City Councilman and talk show host has been making an issue about an elementary school mural that used actual school kids of various ethnicities as models — helping stir up hatred so the mural painters were cussed out and the school principal later claimed that for artistic reasons he did what educators who have murals are not known to do: insisted that the skin...

I completely agree with Joe in his feeling that Helen Thomas — apology notwithstanding — lost all credibility when she told a reporter that Jews in Israel should go back to Germany and Poland “and America, and everywhere else.” It’s not just the way her assertion echoed the ignorant demand that black and brown people, and Latinos, and Koreans, etc., etc., “go back where they...

When the great nation of Israel takes some action—generally of a military nature—with which many people disagree, those who criticize such actions or the Israeli government are oftentimes accused of being anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, or worse. In the wake of recent Israeli military actions against the “Gaza flotilla,” those accusations have once again been rampant. It reminds me of the “not supporting...

Wherever there is moral ugliness, Liz Cheney will show up sooner or later. I’m just surprised, in the matter of Israel’s assault on the flotilla bringing humanitarian aid to blockaded Gazans, it took her until now to voice her outrage — at Barack Obama’s use of the word “tragic” to describe the human lives that were ended on the flotilla ship:

Veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas is coming under enormous fire now for her comments saying that Israel’s Jews should “go home” to Poland, the U.S. and to Germany. Some seem to imply she was saying go home to the old Germany of the Nazis and some feel she has revealed herself to be an anti semite. But if you GO HERE and can watch the video of her you can see she was answering...

Is Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva making a mistake cozying up to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the expense of Brazil’s relations with the United States? In this latest of a series of articles we’ve translated about the wisdom of Lula’s ambitious profile on the global stage, Sergio Malbergier of Brazil’s Folha newspaper warns President Lula that he could be taking his...