“Conscience laundering” is what Peter Buffett (son of Warren) calls “feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity.” He provides perspective from inside the world of...
Read Part 1. While media in the United States has focused on the Egyptian uprising that triggered a military-led coup in which the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) led government was dissolved, hardly any media reports here have considered the regional implications of the...
Secretary of State John Kerry has thrown himself back into the Middle East “peace process,” shuttling between various Middle Eastern capitals and trying to coax the Israeli government into reaching some kind of understanding with the Palestinian Authority. So far it’s...
Lindsey Graham is no longer just rattling his saber at Iran -- it now looks like he’s en garde and ready to face off against the Islamic Republic. At ThinkProgress, Ben Armbruster reports that, on Tuesday (July 23), the Republican senator from South Carolina said “If...
Cross-posted from Counterpunch. “Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called...
“Abbas Calls For Terrorists’ Release Before Peace Talks,” reads a recent headline in an Israeli political blog. “Abbas … sees great opportunity in using the precondition of releasing terrorists as leverage for just beginning peace talks,” says the text. The idea that...
“Do you hear the people sing, singing a song of angry men, it is the music of a people who will not be slaves again.”-- Les Miserables 32 million Egyptians in the streets can’t all be wrong This time the Egyptian people did not wait 41 years to bring down what could...
For U.S. policy-makers, the annual allocation of 1.3 billion dollars provided to Egypt has been a vital tool for maintaining its sphere of influence with the Egyptian government. When I read that the Egyptian military had issued an ultimatum to the Morsi government to...
New York Times columnist David Brooks was rightly taken to task for his July 4th column about the current upheavals in Egypt. Writing about what happens when groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood assume the leadership of a nation, he makes sense at first. Democracy,...
Following the Egyptian military’s ousting of the democratically elected President Mohamed Morsi, public officials and media personalities have debated whether or not to call the recent upheaval a coup. Supporters of the action see the military’s removal of the...