Free Republic

The historian Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote a brutally clear-eyed piece in The National Review, looking back at America’s different approaches to Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and Afghanistan and how, sadly, none of them could be said to have worked yet. “Let us review the various American policy options for the Middle East over the last few decades,” Hanson wrote. “Military assistance or punitive intervention without follow-up mostly failed. The verdict on far more costly nation-building is still out. Trying to help popular insurgents topple unpopular dictators does not guarantee anything better. Propping up dictators with military aid...

Hu Xiao says his job as one of China's executioners is usually not very complicated, except for the time when a prisoner he was about to kill stood up and ran toward his loaded rifle. The rare glimpse into the ranks of China's executioners appeared in the Beijing Evening News newspaper Monday. Hu, a veteran judicial police officer, described the routine of shooting prisoners convicted of murder and other capital crimes in China, which rights groups say carries out more judicial killings each year than anywhere else in the world. "In fact, it's not as complicated as outsiders think. We...

Joe Scarborough and Mike Bloomberg for president and veep? Yeah, that's the ticket—according to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who floated the idea during his Morning Joe appearance today. Friedman foresaw Scarborough-Bloomberg running on a platform of Simpson-Bowles on the economy, an "investment agenda" [infrastructure spending], and getting out of Afghanistan ASAP. "I would bet any amount of money," forecast Friedman, that such a ticket would immediately have a "significant, significant" position. View the video here.

Thomas Friedman $300,000 Columnist, the New York Times plus $40,000 per speaking engagement) Oh yeah ... Also add (Pinch the Bitch) Arthur Sulzberger Jr. $1.92 million Chairman and publisher, the New York Times Co.

This must be part of that new tone of discourse we were promised... Liberal fascist and far left columnist Thomas Friedman says the tea party is the Hezbollah faction of the Republican Party ready to take the GOP on a suicide mission. The New York Times reported, via AP: Alas, that is the Tea Party. It is so lacking in any aspiration for American greatness, so dominated by the narrowest visions for our country and so ignorant of the fact that it was not tax cuts that made America great but our unique public-private partnerships across the generations. If sane...

NewsBusters previously reported that CNN's Fareed Zakaria had met with President Obama face-to-face to discuss foreign policy. Obama's other reported "source" of information on foreign policy, New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman, mocked Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu Sunday on CNN, and added that he should have dutifully obeyed the demands Obama outlined in his recent Mideast speech. According to a May 11 New York Times article, Friedman was one of two foreign policy journalists "sounded out" by President Obama for information on foreign affairs. The other, CNN's Fareed Zakaria, has previously criticized Israel's prime minister for not...

The IDF is purchasing non-lethal riot control gear to deal with large-scale Palestinian Authority violence expected in September, when PA Arabs are expected to attempt various violent provocations. Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz toured Israel’s Biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria Sunday and visited the Judea and Samaria Brigade, as part of the IDF’s preparation for the events predicted to begin three months from now. The PA has threatened to unilaterally declare a state, and there are various anti-Israel initiatives under way. Israel's enemies are planning flotillas to Gaza and mass marches. New York Times Journalist Thomas Friedman...

Kishore Mahbubani, the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, is over for tea and I am telling him about what I consider to be the most exciting, moon-shot-quality, high-aspiration initiative proposed by President Obama that no one has heard of. It’s a plan to set up eight innovation hubs to solve the eight biggest energy problems in the world. But I explain that the program has not been fully funded yet because Congress, concerned about every dime we spend these days, is reluctant to appropriate the full $25 million for...

Since Tim Geithner did not predict the economic crisis, Nassim Taleb has no interest in listening to him talk about it now. The author of The Black Swan, a book about risk and probability theory, told National Journal's Matthew Cooper that he did not listen to Geithner, who preceded him at the Washington Ideas Forum.

Thomas Friedman Bashes Tea Party, Calls for New 'Centrist' Movement By Noel Sheppard Created 09/29/2010 - 10:56 New York Times correspondent Thomas Friedman is clearly unhappy about the Tea Party, so much so that he considers the movement "not that important." Instead, he envisions another group, "which stretches from centrist Republicans to independents right through to centrist Democrats," sitting silently out there in America waiting for the right leader to emerge. So wrote Friedman Wednesday in his "The Tea Kettle Movement [1]": The Tea Party that has gotten all the attention, the amorphous, self-generated protest against the growth in government...

MR. FRIEDMAN: Well, David, it's been decimated. It's been decimated by everything from the gerrymandering of political districts to cable television to an Internet where I can create a digital lynch mob against you from the left or right if I don't like where you're going, to the fact that money and politics is so out of control--really our Congress is a forum for legalized bribery. You know, that's really what, what it's come down to. So I don't--I, I--I'm worried about this, it's why I have fantasized--don't get me wrong--but that what if we could just be China for...

President Barack Obama's winning passage of national health care is both exhilarating and sobering. Covering so many uninsured Americans is a historic achievement. But the president had to postpone trips, buy off companies and cut every conceivable side deal to just barely make it happen, without a single Republican vote. If the Democrats now lose seats in the midterm elections, we're headed for even worse gridlock, even though we still have so much more nation-building for America to do — from education to energy to environment to innovation to tax policy. That is why I want my own Tea Party....

Beijing is ready to say good-bye to Google. Wang Chen, China’s State Council Information Office minister, has responded to Google’s principled threat to pull out of China: "Our country is at a crucial stage of reform and development, and this is a period of marked social conflicts … Properly guiding Internet opinion is a major measure for protecting Internet information security. Internet media must always make nurturing positive, progressive mainstream opinion an important duty. Currently, the Internet gives space for spreading rumours and issuing false information and other actions that diminish confidence, and this is causing serious damage to society...

Yeah, Afghanistan is kinda like an unemployed couple going out and adopting a Special Needs baby, that makes sense....3 time Pulizer Prize winner right here...(Video)

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman again showed a disturbing affection for China's dictatorship in his Wednesday column attacking Republican stubbornness on health care and climate change legislation ("Our One-Party Democracy"). Friedman pleaded for "enlightened" autocrats, able to get things accomplished against the will of the people, for their own good. Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today. One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when...

One normally expects to see paeans to one-party rule and dictatorships in fringe publications sponsored by International ANSWER or World Can’t Wait. Usually, the New York Times offers those sentiments in more subtle terms than it does in today’s Thomas Friedman column. Friedman extols the Chinese form of government while deriding the fact that political opposition keeps Obama from imposing the policies Friedman likes:

Well, some in the media weren't ignoring avowed Communist and Barack Obama Administration "Green Jobs Czar" Van Jones after all. The New York Times' Thomas Friedman was lauding him.

Thomas Friedman, bad writer, world traveler, and all around bon vivant, wants YOU to pay to save the planet. Just Do It Yes, this bill’s goal of reducing U.S. carbon emissions to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 is nowhere near what science tells us we need to mitigate climate change. But it also contains significant provisions to prevent new buildings from becoming energy hogs, to make our appliances the most energy efficient in the world and to help preserve forests in places like the Amazon.

There is much in the House cap-and-trade energy bill that just passed that I absolutely hate. It is too weak in key areas and way too complicated in others. A simple, straightforward carbon tax would have made much more sense than this Rube Goldberg contraption. It is pathetic that we couldn’t do better. It is appalling that so much had to be given away to polluters. It stinks. It’s a mess. I detest it. Now let’s get it passed in the Senate and make it law. Why? Because, for all its flaws, this bill is the first comprehensive attempt by...

IT has been a busy week or two for the ethics police — those within The Times trying to protect the paper’s integrity, and those outside, ready to pounce on transgressions by Times journalists. Thomas Friedman, the star columnist, returned a $75,000 speaking fee after accepting it from a California government agency in violation of a Times guideline. Maureen Dowd, another star columnist, was roughed up on the Internet for using a paragraph from a blogger without attribution. And Edmund Andrews, an economics writer, began promoting a memoir describing how he took out subprime mortgages he couldn’t possibly repay even...