Columns

"Our hope, then, is that with the lessons learned from the mini-drama of the last week, we can move forward as a community to confront the challenges we face in defending civil rights and liberties, advancing immigration reform, and advocating for a more balanced American Middle East policy that is more responsive to the needs of the Arab World and its people."

"What comes through so clearly in media commentary and conversations is that confidence in the U.S. may have reached a tipping point in this region. In this emerging new reality, the cautionary observation President Obama offered in his AIPAC remarks on the importance of a newly freed and now consequential Arab public opinion may now be said to apply as much to the U.S. as it does to Israel. But in this region, that fact is already understood."

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard." -- U.S. journalist H.L. Mencken

"Overall, while a significant majority of all executives say they are worried about the "youth bulge", only those who are citizens indicate the need to give preference to hiring skilled young nationals. Despite their concern with youth unemployment, expat executives continue to prefer hiring other expats, especially if they can hire them for less pay. And while executives who are nationals support government imposed quotas for hiring young nationals, expat executives object to such quotas. In addition to the pay differential, other reasons given for their preference in hiring non-nationals range from the difficulties in firing nationals for under-performance, to the perception that expatriot hires are more motivated."

"...at the top of Washington’s hierarchy, the yearning is very different. The nation’s decade-long war effort in Afghanistan, where it costs $1 million to deploy one U.S. soldier for one year, is a grisly symptom of chronic war fever. More enemies are easy to find, and even easier to make....A country that’s committed to being at war will treat the real potential for peace as an abstraction."

"All eyes will now be on Obama as he speaks before the AIPAC (the major pro-Israel lobby) meeting on Sunday to see whether he backs away from or fine tunes the positions he outlined in his State Department address. While AIPAC's leaders have cautioned their members not to boo the President, it will not be a receptive audience—unless he walks back from his earlier positions, in which case the AIPAC crowd might cheer while an already disenchanted Arab audience will become enraged."

Canadians, in droves, turned up their noses at democracy, choosing a party that has attacked it at every turn. These voters made their electoral decision with one hand holding their wallets and the other flailing around from their eyes to their ears, willfully shutting out the endless evidence that it is the people, and not just Parliament, that Harper holds in contempt. -- Ethan Baron,  columnist and new Canadian citizen

"The President can make clear in a speech the parameters of what would constitute a just solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Building on the Taba framework, which was nearly completed by Israeli and Palestinian negotiators in 2000, and the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, the President can put forward an Obama Plan. But he must go further by laying down firm markers for behavior and binding timetables for implementation, backed up by U.S. commitments as incentives and the threat to withhold political support as a sanction. He then must sell this framework to the American public, the world community and especially to Arabs and Israelis."