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Thomas Friedman is being forced to turn in a $75,000 speaking fee he received for talking to the San Francisco Bay Area's Air Quality Management District, last weekend, the LA Times is reporting. The hefty fee given to Friedman raised quite a stink, particularly amongst jealous journalists, and anyone looking to poke at the New York Times. Apparently, the fee is out of bounds within the Times ethical guidebook. Reporters can only get paid from "educational and other nonprofit groups for which lobbying and political activity are not a major focus," which the Bay Area group is not.

Hey Kristof... You're Late! Posted in: Gerald A. Honigman By Gerald A. Honigman Monday, March 23, 2009 While The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof is no stranger to these positions throughout the year, he frequently comes out with his gems of Middle East wisdom right around Bike Week here in Daytona Beach, Florida, when tens of thousands of Harley enthusiasts arrive to also spread their hot air exhaust around town. This year Nick was a few weeks late. Like others of his ilk--Thomas Friedman (better of late), David Ignatius, Richard Cohen, just to name a few, who are also obsessed...

Propaganda according to Friedman: General Dayton was addressing the Second Special Battalion of the Palestinian National Security Force, or N.S.F. He was originally assigned to help reform Palestinian security by the Bush team in 2005, but only got the funds to do so after Hamas took over Gaza in 2007.

If New York Times columnist Friedman has his way, gas taxes will go up. Way up. He wants to slap an additional $2.40 per gallon in taxes on top of the 18.4¢ you already pay. “Today’s financial crisis is Obama’s 9/11,” Friedman wrote. “The public is ready to be mobilized. Obama is coming in with enormous popularity. This is his window of opportunity to impose a gas tax. And he could make it painless: offset the gas tax by lowering payroll taxes, or phase it in over two years at 10 cents a month.” Do the math. 10 cents a...

Link to Article Basically...China is way ahead of America in infrastructure construction, science...everything. Going from China to America is like going from the "Jetsons" to the "Flintstones".

HONG KONG (AFP) – Best-selling author Thomas Friedman on Tuesday praised Barack Obama's new energy team and said the next US president had to insist on a radical environmental agenda to tackle global warming. Friedman, whose new book "Hot, Flat and Crowded" is a call-to-arms to reduce US dependency on oil and coal, said Obama's nomination of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu as his new energy secretary was a "terrific" move. He insisted that the challenge facing Obama required a revolutionary attitude to environmental policy, if the new administration wanted to avoid the devastating effects of global warming. "We can...

It's not like Barack Obama is a socialist or anything. It's just that Thomas Friedman wants him to put a "government master" in charge of the country's biggest manufacturing sector. Friedman made his modest proposal in his New York Times column of today, and expanded on it during a Morning Joe appearance. [H/t reader Tom.] View video here. I've got three easy reasons why Friedman's idea won't work.

It wasn't the world that got flat, contrary to New York Times pundit Thomas Friedman, but the emerging markets that got flattened. Faddish conventional wisdom over the past few years held that American influence was fading as technology radiated to the far reaches of the world. When America's economy went into a ditch, though, the supposed economic superpowers of the future went flying, like children on skates holding onto the back of truck. The financial crash exposes the fragility of large swaths of the world. The political consequences will be terrible. The worst of it is that America will not...

Nationalization has its consequences. Just note the rhetoric coming from some prominent voices on the left. The government's foray into offering services normally provided by the private sector by bailing out aging mortgage giants gives it the power to implement "green" building requirements, according to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. He suggested Sept. 23 that any construction financed by government-funded mortgages should be certified "green" according to the standards of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System. "If we're going to be in the mortgage business as a government, then every government-funded mortgage -...

If John McCain can win this election race with a 50-pound ball called "George W. Bush" wrapped around one ankle and a 50-pound ball called "The U.S. Economy" wrapped around the other, then he deserves to represent America in the next Olympics in any race he wants -- swimming, cycling or track -- I don't care how old he is. He would be the Michael Phelps of politics. I confess, I watch politics from afar, but here's what I've been feeling for a while: Whoever slipped that Valium into Barack Obama's coffee needs to be found and arrested by the...

In his latest [book], "Hot, Flat, and Crowded," Thomas L. Friedman makes it clear that he wants to improve conditions for mankind. "I start from the bedrock principle," he writes, "that we as a global society need more and more growth." But because of climate change (hot), ever-more people (crowded) and higher material aspirations of all in a competitive global economy (flat), he believes that the world's growth is leading us toward catastrophe. Mr. Friedman, a columnist for the New York Times, describes this threat in the grimmest of terms. We should expect disasters "of a biblical scale," humans are...

In a recent article in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman wrote that NATO is essentially irrelevant. It had been replaced by what he tongue-in-cheek calls NASTY: Nations Allied to Stop TYrants. NASTY is made up of what he calls three "like-minded English-speaking allies", America, Australia and Britain, with occasional French involvement. He claims "what these four countries have in common is that they are sea powers, with a tradition of fighting abroad, with ability to transport troops around the world and with mobile special forces that have an 'attitude'." All four nations, he notes enjoy playing either rugby or...

Agreeing with THOMAS FRIEDMAN: ...<excerpt> ... ... But when it comes to pure, rancid moral corruption, no one can top South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, and his stooge at the U.N., Dumisani Kumalo. They have done everything they can to prevent any meaningful U.N. pressure on the Mugabe dictatorship.As The Times reported, America’s U.N. ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, “accused South Africa of protecting the ‘horrible regime in Zimbabwe,’ ” calling this particularly disturbing given that it was precisely international economic sanctions that brought down South Africa’s apartheid government, which had long oppressed that country’s blacks.So let us now coin the Mbeki...

Obama and the Jews Pssst. Have you heard? I have. I heard that Barack Obama once said there has to be “an end” to the Israeli “occupation” of the West Bank “that began in 1967.” Yikes! Pssst. Have you heard? I have. I heard that Barack Obama said that not only must Israel be secure, but that any peace agreement “must establish Palestine as a homeland for the Palestinian people.” Yikes! Pssst. Have you heard? I have. I heard that Barack Obama once said “the establishment of the state of Palestine is long overdue. The Palestinian people deserve it.” Yikes!...

...They are not only tired of nation-building in Iraq and in Afghanistan, with so little to show for it. They sense something deeper — that we’re just not that strong anymore. We’re borrowing money to shore up our banks from city-states called Dubai and Singapore. Our generals regularly tell us that Iran is subverting our efforts in Iraq, but they do nothing about it because we have no leverage — as long as our forces are pinned down in Baghdad and our economy is pinned to Middle East oil. Our president’s latest energy initiative was to go to Saudi Arabia...

ABC’s April 11 “World News with Charles Gibson” is showing they finally get it – ethanol production and high energy costs are causing food shortages worldwide. “[P]rices are rising across Africa, pushed up by the cost of oil and demand for biofuels,” ABC correspondent Jim Sciutto said. “Those biofuels are in fact a large part of the equation,” ABC correspondent David Muir added. “Many farmers around the world, who once grew wheat and rice, now grow corn and sugar cane instead, to produce ethanol a more lucrative market.”

Thomas Friedman thinks you are "stupid" if you still care about the atrocity committed against this country by Islamofascists in New York on 9/11/2001. He thinks "9/11 is over" and we all should just move on. Even worse, he has decided that we are no longer a great country, but are filled with seemingly meaningless "fear," that we have a dilapidated infrastructure, and that while America used to be "the gold standard," he believes "We aren’t anymore." Friedman is falling for the typical, leftist doom-and-gloom scenario and imagines that China is better than we are, Europe is more inviting, and...

Thomas Friedman shouldn't be so modest. His opening line in his column today proclaims his inability, based on his current trip to Iraq, to see the big picture there. But buried in his description of three experiences from his journey is a conclusion as unequivocal as it is harrowing. In the first anecdote in [subscription-required] Letter from Baghdad Friedman describes his experience visiting a U.S. Army platoon based in Baghdad's Ameriya neighborhood. As the author explains, this had been an affluent Sunni area that had first been ravaged by Shia militias and then by pro-Al Qaedi Sunnis who had 'imposed...

<p>CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Al-Qaida's No. 2 has issued a new video tape calling on Muslims to unite in jihad, or holy war, and support the Islamist movement in Iraq, a U.S.-based intelligence monitoring group said Wednesday.</p> <p>Ayman al-Zawahri is seen in the one-hour and 35 minutes tape dressed in white and addressing topics from Iraq to Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian territories and Egypt, said the U.S.-based SITE intelligence group, which monitors al-Qaida messages.</p>

I'm actually beginning to think something could be afoot at the New York Times. On Monday, one columnist extolled the virtues of that fount of Western civilization, Hellenism. Tuesday, another columnist claimed freedom and liberty are distinct creations of Western civilization. Today, the celebrated Thomas Friedman offers up a laundry list of generalizations about Arabs that - from the keyboard of a conservative - would normally merit a Times editorial rebuke for ethnic stereotyping. Among Friedman's observations in his subscription-required column Mideast Rules to Live By: "What people tell you in private in the Middle East is irrelevant. All...