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TOM FRIEDMAN VIA NEW YORK TIMES : "I’ve been trying to understand the Tea Party Movement. Sounds like a lot of angry people who want to get the government out of their lives and cut both taxes and the deficit. Nothing wrong with that — although one does wonder where they were in the Bush years. Never mind. I’m sure like all such protest movements the Tea Partiers will get their 10 to 20 percent of the vote. But should the Tea Partiers actually aspire to break out of that range, attract lots of young people and become something more...

Back in September, Tom Friedman, speaking of China, proclaimed that "there is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today." That prompted Jonah Goldberg to call Friedman a "liberal fascist," drawing an example from his seminal book, Liberal Fascism, to demonstrate how Friedman's fawning over the Chi-Coms "is exactly the argument that was made by American fans of Mussolini in the 1920s." But far from being abashed, Friedman is apparently so enamored of his formulation that he has repeated it virtually verbatim. The Times columnist suffered another bad...

Dostoevsky’s 1872 novel, The Possessed, is a tale about a small town overcome by revolutionary ideas. After an intense meeting of a literary salon, a fire breaks out and one of the villagers comments, “The fire is in the minds of men, not in the roofs of buildings.” The historian James Billington used that phrase — “the fire in the minds of men” — to describe the incendiary ardor of Russian revolutionaries of all stripes, making it the title of his epic history of the subject. Now, in the hands of New York Times columnist Tom Fried­man, this scene could...

Perhaps President Barack Obama might have preferred New York Times columnist Tom Friedman to reserve these comments for their golf outings together, but has Friedman recognized this path toward a larger government is unsustainable? On MSNBC's March 5 "Morning Joe," host Joe Scarborough recounted his childhood in the early 1970s and the poor economy. He explained there was a different focus - that his family was hoping for the economy to turn around and could have cared less about the other issues of the day - Vietnam, Watergate, etc. It was all about the economy. ...more (w/video)...

Tom Friedman is convinced that China has gotten the idea of proper governance right and that the U.S. has gotten it horribly wrong. Everywhere Friedman goes, it seems, he is rudely reminded of the inferiority of our way of life. The latest reminder of our impending demise as a great power is the run-down condition of the Los Angeles International Airport. Friedman writes: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Walking through its faded, cramped domestic terminal, I got the feeling of a place that once thought of itself as modern but has had one too many face-lifts and simply can't hide the wrinkles anymore. In...

<p>This Tom Friedman column surprised me, but it was a pleasant surprise. Several bloggers have highlighted it, and I want to do so too, because it says some things that really need to be said—not that Obama will say them.</p>

I hate to write about this, but I have actually been to this play before and it is really disturbing. I was in Israel interviewing Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin just before he was assassinated in 1995. We had a beer in his office. He needed one. I remember the ugly mood in Israel then — a mood in which extreme right-wing settlers and politicians were doing all they could to delegitimize Rabin, who was committed to trading land for peace as part of the Oslo accords. They questioned his authority. They accused him of treason. They created pictures depicting him...

[ed note: Found! Beneath a pile of New York Times junk bonds in a 43rd Street dumpster: first draft of Tom Friedman's latest OpEd tour de force]by Thomas L. FriedmanContinued

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman let his power lust just flow throughout the studio of The Colbert Report on Comedy Central on Thursday night. Promoting his book Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Friedman discussed his concept of America becoming "China for a day," so that his dream of a green revolution -- all those allegedly planet-saving taxes and regulations and product bans -- can be permanently enacted. When Colbert lived up to his conservative character enough to insert that China has a totalitarian regime, Friedman simply replied "It is a measure of the frustration a lot of people in the...

Watching the Bush team wrestle with Iran, North Korea and Iraq reminds me of something that used to be said of the Reagan administration: The right hand never knew what the far right hand was doing. In fact, my bet is that when the inside history of the Bush team is written, we will discover that, contrary to its carefully managed image of a disciplined core operating from consistent, conservative principles, it has actually been one of the most internally divided administrations — ever. The only thing the Bush folks all agreed on was that they would never do anything...

Here’s a little foreign policy test. I am going to describe two countries — “Country A” and “Country B” — and you tell me which one is America’s ally and which one is not. Let’s start: Country A actively helped the U.S. defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan and replace it with a pro-U.S. elected alliance of moderate Muslims. Country A regularly holds sort-of-free elections. Country A’s women vote, hold office, are the majority of its university students and are fully integrated into the work force. On 9/11, residents of Country A were among the very few in the Muslim world...

Karl Rove, a Cancer on American Politics? "Everyone says that Karl Rove is a genius. Yeah, right. So are cigarette companies. They get you to buy cigarettes even though we know they cause cancer. That is the kind of genius Karl Rove is." Posted by: Clay Waters 11/3/2006 10:26:59 AM Columnist Tom Friedman really wants the Republicans to suffer next Tuesday, judging by his Friday column (Times Select required) "Insulting Our Troops, and Out Intelligence." "George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld think you’re stupid. Yes, they do. "They think they can take a mangled quip about President Bush and...

Weekend Preview AnalysisNo one has complained about the format, so I'm sticking with it.Of the Sunday shows I'm most interested in ... well, frankly, none of them.  I want to hear what the various Israeli diplomats have to say, but I've been hearing the genocidal rants of the Jihadi's for most of my 51 years of life, so I'm really bored with why their reasons why they are entitled to commit genocide against the Jews and to enslave everyone else, including me an my children.Bremer is trying to cover his butt for all of the screw ups he made while...

Globalization guru Tom Friedman called Lou Dobbs, "a blithering idiot" in a lecture at Yale Law School last week... Friedman, three time Pulitzer Prize winner and author of bestsellers "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" and more recently "The World is Flat" (which sold a million and a half copies, far more than Dobbs' viewership), begins his answer. "One of the problems", he begins, explaining that we need leaders who can explain the complexity, not who will just stir the pot, "is we have politicians that are making us stupid, who are throwing sand in our eyes." But then he...

Guests: Governor Rick Perry, (R-Texas); Dr. Ivor van Heerden, Director, LSU Hurricane Center; Aaron Broussard, President, Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; Tom Friedman, The New York Times; Maureen Dowd, The New York Times; David Brooks, The New York Times Moderator/Panelist: Tim Russert - NBC News

The New York Times surely once had an institutional policy against cronyism. But between then and now, something must have happened to the Times, or to ethics. Maureen Dowd, whom I actually like when she gets off politics, published a collection of her Bush-bashing columns and the Times, her paper, got it quickly reviewed and (mostly) praised. I thought that strange. Maureen is a big girl now and she ought to hunt and fight for coverage and praise like the rest of us. Stranger still is the saga of Tom Friedman. Those of us in the writing and opinion business...

Recalling how John McCain's "code of honor" is what "separated him from his captors" in communist North Vietnam, on Sunday's Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer casually referred to how he "thought about that as yet another tale of torture and abuse came out about the POW camp we are running at Guantanamo Bay." Schieffer then proceeded to endorse New York Times columnist Tom Friedman's recommendation that "the prison ought to be shut down because the stories about it are so inflaming the Arab world." Schieffer presumed the worst about the uncorroborated charges related to detainee treatment, most of which...

I think it was about five months ago that Press editor Alex Zaitchik whispered to me in the office hallway that Thomas Friedman had a new book coming out. All he knew about it was the title, but that was enough; he approached me with the chilled demeanor of a British spy who has just discovered that Hitler was secretly buying up the world’s manganese supply. Who knew what it meant—but one had to assume the worst "It's going to be called The Flattening," he whispered. Then he stood there, eyebrows raised, staring at me, waiting to see the effect...

The other night on ABC's "Nightline," the host, Ted Koppel, posed an intriguing question to Malcolm Gladwell, the social scientist who wrote the path-breaking book "The Tipping Point," which is about how changes in behavior or perception can reach a critical mass and then suddenly create a whole new reality. Mr. Koppel asked: Can you know you are in the middle of a tipping point, or is it only something you can see in retrospect? Mr. Gladwell responded that "the most important thing in trying to analyze whether something is at the verge of a tipping point, is whether it...

 The New York Times' web site says that today's most emailed article was Tom Friedman's column titled Sunday News Quiz. Friedman writes:I'll give you 10 news stories from the past few weeks and you tell me what they all have in common. Friedman than recapitulates, in a sentence or two, ten recent news stories, all of which are intended to reflect badly the Bush administration; the general theme--reminiscent of leftism of the 60s and 70s--is that there is plenty of money for defense, while social programs are being cut. Friedman concludes:So what is the common denominator of all these news...