Sarah Palin quit the governor’s office so that she could fight for Alaska.
What?
OK, no one really believes that. But no one really expected Palin to announce, on July 3rd, that she was stepping down from the governorship of America’s northernmost state. It’s been widely believed that Palin would run for president in 2012, as she hasn’t exactly been circumspect about her ultimate goals.
The biggest criticism of Palin on the campaign trail—and after it—was that she was unqualified, that her single unfinished term as governor of a sparsely populated, oil-rich state didn’t prepare her to deal with the complexities of running an entire country. John McCain’s aides have continued to drop comments into the press about Palin’s incompetence months after his opponent took office, but as other GOP hopefuls drop off the stage (paging Mark Sanford), Palin seems to have decided that now was her chance to seize the spotlight… by telling America that she was going to forego the chance to gain more experience.
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Unlike other western politicians, American legislators are expected to lead lives of sexual purity. When they step outside of their marital vows, it triggers a feeding frenzy in which members of the press and public line up to consume their pound of flesh. Mark Sanford is the latest politician to allow his genitalia heart make his decisions for him. He was in a prime position to be the front man to the now-rudderless Republican Party, until recent events changed everything.
There really is nothing new or shocking about Sanford’s story. Each day, countless people are unfaithful; according to The Monogamy Myth by Peggy Vaughan, statistics show that approximately 60% of husbands and 40% of wives will have an affair at some time in their marriage. Today, it is often more shocking to find that a husband is not a lecher. The only real twist to this drama is the reaction of Jenny Sanford, Mark’s wife.
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$700 million dollars was the amount of money that South Carolina governor Mark Sanford wanted to refuse from the stimulus package. $700 million for failing South Carolina schools, for underpaid teachers, for jobs. His rationale was that he didn’t want the federal government interfering in South Carolina’s affairs. He now has the national media’s attention not on South Carolina’s affairs, but on his own.
I never had much sympathy for Mark Sanford. Yet watching him ramble and apologize, over and over again, for the extramarital affair that led him to disappear for six days, for the first time he appeared human. The man willing to deny money to the schoolchildren of his state, more concerned with paying down its debt, has a heart after all.
The only lasting impression from the man at the podium that day was that he was deeply, obsessively in love—so much so that he was willing to drop everything and fly to Argentina, bailing on his job and his family, on such short notice that his wife and his staffers even told press they had no idea where he was. And when he got back, got busted at the airport by reporters doing a little bit of shoe-leather journalism (wish they’d do more when sex isn’t the scandal du jour, but then again isn’t it always), he dropped all pretense and simply, for once, told it like it was to Americans.
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Already, much of the outside coverage of the upcoming Ukrainian presidential election, scheduled for January 17 2010, has boiled down to the absurd notion that “pro-Western” and “pro-Russia” forces are going head-to-head next year. To understand that the issue is a little bit more complicated than that, one can look no further than the candidacy of current Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.
Yulia Tymoshenko’s glamorous image, coupled with the prism of sexism that can often distort a female politician’s nature in the public eye, hides an iron-clad will to succeed. Famous for her bold and even inflammatory rhetoric during the Orange Revolution (at one point, she was quoted as saying that Donbas region of Ukraine might as well be cut off from the rest of Ukraine with barbed wire, due to the region’s lack of support for Victor Yuschenko), Tymoshenko neverthless knows when to play ball with the Russian Federation. Even her desire for Ukraine to eventually join the EU is tempered by placating rhetoric toward Russia. Unlike Western commentators, who don’t have to live next to Russia, Tymoshenko is well aware of the possible ramification of long-standing political conflict in her neck of the woods.
The real challenge for the Ukrainian electorate right now is trying to decide which candidate is better suited to fight corruption. When I spoke to Nicholas of Kiev Ukraine News Blog to get his opinion on the situation, he replied that
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Only can time tell how Netanyahu’s decision of committing to the Two-State Solution in regard to the Israel/Palestine conflict will work out. Yes, Bibi imposes very strict conditions of setting up an independent Palestinian state, which is going to be economically and militarily weak. Palestinian refugees from 1948 will never be allowed to return today’s Tel Aviv-Jaffa and Haifa. The future Palestinian state can never claim East Jerusalem as the capital. Settlements will, in the words of Bibi, “grow naturally” while outposts would be evacuated.
Bibi’s ideas are not new. Israel as the Jewish state, Jerusalem as the eternal capital of Israel and the Palestinian abandonment of the right of return have been the top priorities of successive Israeli governments. The only difference between the mainstream left and right in Israel lies in the growth of settlements. The One-State Solution supported by Benny Elon of National Union Party has never been popular. Benny Elon calls for formal annexation of Judea and Samaria. Palestinian residents in West Bank then become citizens of Jordan.
But why have the Two-State Solution and One-State Solution negotiations failed? In his book, One State, Two States, Benny Morris chronicles peace negotiations between Jerusalem and Ramallah and predicts the future of the relationship between Israel and Palestine.
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During the election of 2008, the McCain campaign portrayed Barack Obama as a celebrity with very little substance. The liberal left fought against this stereotype. Now that he has been elected, the various groups that threw their support directly behind him have arrived at the White House door, hat in hand, demanding that the debt be repaid.
When Obama was sworn in he was charged to rectify the worst Depression since the Great Depression. Banks and entire industries were and are failing. The infrastructure is in need of a complete overhaul and American children are increasingly falling behind in education. No national health care plan exists, causing many Americans to die an early death. Proving that no lessons were learned from Katrina, racism and violence continues to escalate. Obama inherited a country that’s a shadow of its former self, due to the efforts of the Bush administration.
In the words of Tavis Smiley, members of the Black Intelligentsia have become quick to hold Barack Obama “accountable.” Dr. Michael Eric Dyson has already been vocal about not being invited to the White House despite being one of the first to publicly support Barack in the election. Dr. Cornel West has stated emphatically that he would rather “visit a crack house than the White House.” According to the self-appointed leaders of the Black community, Barack is failing in his efforts to advance the issues of African Americans.
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I’m not going to make any cute jokes about how “the revolution will be tweeted,” mostly because they have already been made. Also, because the most inspiring thing about the protests in Iran isn’t the Twitter part, but the sight of thousands of people crowding the streets, demanding basic democracy in their country.
The story is about Twitter only to the extent that it’s about us, the rest of the world outside of Iran and especially here in the U.S. Yes, it’s inspiring to see a field of green avatars on Twitter, or to see people normally uninvolved in politics even in their own country passing on information about a protest thousands of miles away, but when the comments are mostly about what Obama is doing about Iran, I have to remind myself that this isn’t our protest.
We had a pretty questionable election ourselves not all that long ago, and we didn’t take to the streets in any large numbers. Americans seem to have forgotten what large public protests are like. Sure, 2 million people showed up to Obama’s inauguration—and that was a thrilling sight—but several people have pointed out the irony of Americans supporting Iranian protesters while ignoring our own.
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The 12th of June 2009 saw Iran’s tenth presidential election get underway with Iranians turning out in record numbers. As someone who decided to vote in one of the many polling stations made available for expats across the world, I can say that in the scenes I witnessed, the excitement was palpable; we all felt we were on the cusp of a potential leap forward in the ongoing and painstaking struggle for reform in Iran. While we remained cognizant of the constitutional and political constraints upon the Iranian presidential office, we felt there was great potential for a transformation of Iran’s image and place in the international order, prospects for economic growth and prosperity and of course, the future of women’s rights campaigners and human rights activists at home.
Estimates claim that 80-85% of the eligible electorate participated in what Tehran University Professor, Sadeq Zibakalam called “a big “no” to Ahmadinejad!” and thus by implication a break with the policies pursued by the hard-line president over the course of the last four years which have seen Iran’s international isolation increase and inflation and unemployment soar. Two, in many respects, irreconcilable visions for Iran’s future (at least at the domestic level) were presented by the two frontrunners, though it should not be forgotten that only the incumbent president out of the four presidential hopefuls, continues to maintain that the country’s present course is on the right track. The other conservative candidate, Mohsen Rezaei, had been unrelenting in his criticism of Ahmadinejad’s economic record and even went so far as to claim Ahmadinejad’s government had brought Iran to the “edge of the precipice”. The anti-Ahmadinejad coalition had and continues to have a broad base, with reform-minded politicians, pragmatic conservatives, university students, women, and ethnic minorities, at least for the time being, united in their opposition to a common foe.
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“I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” Revelations 3:15-16
The quote may be from the Christian New Testament, but no words better describe Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech last night than those above. A self-fashioned response to President Barack Obama’s Cairo speech of a week before, Netanyahu’s speech thrust himself firmly into lukewarm status, neither cold nor hot, neither wholly denying of peace nor ready to bring it about in full force.
Obama’s speech had a limited amount of clear policy – restrict settlements, recognize each other’s rights, two states – but an immense amount of goodwill and force to it. While he spoke for a middle ground – between Arabs and Jews, between Americans and the Middle East – he forged a clear and strong position. The exact means to his ends may be as of yet unclear, but we know where he’s going.
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The United States has some of the world’s best hospitals, yet millions of U.S. citizens are unable to access their services, making their existence meaningless to large sections of the population. Many die each year due to a lack of insurance and the greatest cause of bankruptcy is unpaid medical bills. Looking from the outside, it is clear that the American Health care system is about profit, whereas the value of a single human life is priceless.
As a Canadian, I often find myself laughing at the mendacious tales of woe that the AMA and insurance companies put in their advertisements about our system. There is a reason Tommy Douglas, the creator of our healthcare system, was voted Greatest Canadian in 2004. We may be dissatisfied with long wait times in emergency rooms and doctors’ shortages in small towns, but no Canadian has died due to a lack of funds in the case of a medical illness since our system was created. Medical treatment is decided between a patient and a doctor and not some government bureaucracy, as is often stated in these misleading advertisements.
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