A U.S. soldier patrols a village in the volatile Diyala province of Iraq.
One year to the day after unveiling a U.S. troop "surge" to Iraq, George W. Bush was under fire Thursday for calling the war "incredibly successful beyond anybody's expectations" in 2007.
After years of mismanagement of the war, many people had grave doubts about whether success in Iraq was possible. In Congress, opposition to the surge from antiwar members was swift and severe. They insisted that Iraq was already "lost," and that there was nothing left to do but accept our defeat and retreat.
In fact, they could not have been more wrong. And had we heeded their calls for retreat, Iraq today would be a country in chaos: a failed state in the heart of the Middle East, overrun by al Qaeda and Iran. As Americans, we have repeatedly done what others said was impossible. Gen. Petraeus and his troops are doing that again in Iraq today.
The theory behind the surge was clear. Some people said more troops would bring more security to Iraq. Critics of that idea noted that sending more troops would be logistically unsustainable. Now we're near the point of de-surging -- the window is closing rapidly and nobody thinks the opportunity will be seized. And yet surge fans are declaring victory. It's doesn't make sense. The surge's architects laid out admirably clear goals for it. Laid them out and unambiguously failed to meet them.
Maybe the "opt-out revolution" fizzled out.
After years of newspaper stories suggesting that professional moms were leaving the workplace to become full-time parents, a new study says that idea just isn't true.
But that doesn't mean it's easy to be a mom and and employee.
Women who stay home are lucky enough to be able to choose personal benefits over economic ones; stay at home mothers have refused to value their time in dollar signs. It is similar to placing a dollar value on intimate marital relations because, after all, those 'services' are available elsewhere for a fee. When you define the value of family meals in terms of cold cash, then you've lost the importance of what's really going on. When you convert acts of love into acts for profit, you've lost at life itself.
Most women today have to work: it's the only way their families are going to be fed, housed and educated. A new college-educated generation takes it for granted that women will both work and care for their families -- and that men must be an integral part of their children's lives. It's a generation that understands that stay-at-home moms and working mothers aren't firmly opposing philosophical stances but the same women in different life phases, moving in and out of the part-time and full-time workforce for the few years while their children are young.
Fifty-five percent of Republicans have sex once a week. Just forty-three percent of Democrats do.
That's one of the more significant findings of a new survey by Republican pollster Frank Luntz. The results are reported in the February issue of Playboy.
“Social and cultural issues still divide us by gender, age and race, but on that most intimate of personal issues we are surprisingly united," Luntz said.
Among the factors that impact the survey results is that more men identify themselves as Republicans and men are more likely to say they are sexually satisfied and enjoy sex "a great deal." Also, Democrats are more likely to be women; and the poll results show that women are more likely to fake orgasms.
Early in the 1996 election campaign Dick Morris and Mark Penn, two of Bill Clinton's advisers, discovered a polling technique that proved to be one of the best ways of determining whether a voter was more likely to choose Clinton or Bob Dole for President. Respondents were asked five questions, four of which tested attitudes toward sex.
According to Morris and Penn, these questions were better vote predictors—and better indicators of partisan inclination—than anything else except party affiliation or the race of the voter.
GOP presidential hopeful Ron Paul talks to reporters in New Hampshire.
When Republicans take the stage for their debate in Myrtle Beach tonight, there will be six -- not five -- candidates. But Ron Paul, who was excluded from the Fox News debate in New Hampshire on Sunday, could face questions about his newsletters, which have been described by the liberal New Republic as "bigoted" and filled with "fringe" conspiracy theories. Paul has taken "moral responsibility" for the newsletters, but denies writing them.
Does Ron Paul deserve to share the limelight with the other GOP contenders? Or has his time passed?
Ron Paul could also do liberty-lovers a big favor if he would come out with a very strong statement that he's made some errors in his past associations, but wants to make it clear now that he neither solicits nor welcomes support from racists, neo-Confederates, conspiracy-mongers, anti-Semites, and so forth. But I'm not completely convinced that Paul finds support from at least some of these groups entirely unwelcome.
There is a paradox at the heart of the Paul campaign: he's the candidate least likely to hedge or obfuscate, the most apt to spell out in sharp detail his underlying principles--and yet he's also something of an ideological cipher, attracting the support of everyone from hipstertarian kids on Northeast college campuses to John Birchers in Texas.
A mess of plastic.
New York's City Council overwhelmingly passed a bill requiring large stores and retail chains to collect and recycle plastic bags they give to shoppers. New York is by far the largest U.S. city to enact so broad a measure to limit the environmental impact of the bags.
Bag banners and regulators ignore the costs. Biodegradable plastic bags cost between eight and 10 cents, compared to a penny for the standard plastic bag. Supporters of an earlier plastic-bag mandate in San Francisco said the price of biodegradable plastic bags would drop if more municipalities required them, but this may not be the case. The biodegradable bags are made from soy and especially corn. Given the increasing demands for corn from the ethanol industry, the cost of producing these biodegradable bags is likely to increase by a significant amount.
Considering the size of the New York market, where about one billion plastic bags are used every year, the mandate is enormous. The law could go into effect by early summer. What will become of these bags? They could be made into more plastic bags, and presumably re-recycled indefinitely. Better still, the new law might just encourage people to forego the plastic and carry their own reusable bag for shopping and chores.
First it was Merrill Lynch.
Now it's Goldman Sachs.
More and more signs are pointing to the word "recession" -- housing woes, credit woes and more.
Are we really in a recession? And if so, what can be done about it?
The key thing to remember is that businesses drive the economy. Businesses create jobs and incomes for consumers to spend. Today’s John Edwards/Mike Huckabee anti-business populism sounds more like William Jennings Bryan than Adam Smith. It’s absolutely crazy. They attack Wall Street and investors, which is another way of attacking capital. Without capital investment, there will be no new business, no new jobs, and no middle class
According to a CNN poll, 57 percent of Americans thought we were already in a recession a month ago. Economists may complain that this is only because the public is ignorant of the technical--or at least the newspapers' standard--definition of a recession, which specifies that there must be at least two consecutive quarters of negative growth in the GDP. But most of the public employs the more colloquial definition of a recession, which is hard times. If hard times have already fallen on a majority of Americans, then "recession" doesn't seem to be a very useful term any more.
Are the high-def DVD wars over?
The stalemate over the future -- whether HD DVD of Blu-ray would be the dominant standard for high-definition viewing -- appeared to break last week when Warner Brothers said it would adopt the latter format. Now there are rumors that Paramount will follow.
And all across America, owners of HD DVD systems are howling in an anguish not felt since the demise of Betamax videotapes nearly three decades ago.
So Blu-ray appears to be the winner. How about consumers? Will anybody be watching?
HD DVD fans declared the "war" lost, but some of the most rabid red members said they were taking their ball and going home. In essence, they were saying if BluRay wins, they don't want anyone to win. Of course, there was the inevitable childish gloating by some on the blue side. Both sides then began touting how much better their toy was, and how much better the future would be or could've been. It was like the "my dad can beat up your dad" argument except doing it as an adult. It's nice, and quite scary, to see that the inner child in many of us never goes away.
The real question that needs to be answered is not which format will win the battle of the standards, but rather if consumers really need a follow-up standard for DVDs. Our take on this is that, although HD Ready and Full HD screens are now abundant in homes across the Western world, there seems to be little appetite for these high definition discs. The studios are concerned that DVD sales will dwindle the next few years and consumers will want a new physical medium to keep their movies and TV series. A problem for the studios might not be a problem for viewers, who during the next few years will get used to downloading movies and TV programmes from the web rather than buy them in a store.
The mea culpas are copious today.
Hillary Clinton's political obituary had been written before the New Hampshire primary -- with polls, pundits and conventional wisdom all doing their bit to shovel the final mounds of dirt on the grave. Months before, John McCain had endured the same process.
I have referred several times before in this space to Tony Blair's observation, after resigning last year, that the pressure of 24/7 electronic media has drastically cut the time available to make judgments, and so the quality of decisions has declined. The missed call in New Hampshire is the first sharp demonstration of this truth for journalism itself. Odds are that nothing will be learned from this because no one has time to think about it.
But as to the media's coronation of Barack Obama after Iowa, what's to explain? They jumped over the moon for Barack. End of story.
I don’t think it was the pure emotion. I think it has more to do with how the media covered that emotion. They just wouldn’t give her a break. Hillary’s burst of anger at John Edwards during the debate was described as shrill and unhinged; the tears, as I said earlier, were immediately interpreted as some kind of ploy, or a sign of weakness and even emotional instability. It was the voters who saw beneath the interpretation and actually perceived these moments as a glimpse at the real Hillary. The pundits and analysts missed this. To them she was just as inauthentic as ever, the narrative had not, could not, change. What I think the public in New Hampshire responded to—the backlash, if you will—was how these moments were spun. People saw the media’s inability to fit Clinton into any narrative other than the one the press had constructed for her, and they decided to give her a break, believing what they saw versus how they heard it characterized.
Megan Meier, 13, committed suicide in October 2006 after receiving cruel messages on MySpace.
A federal grand jury in Los Angeles has begun issuing subpoenas in the case of a Missouri teenager who hanged herself after being rejected by the person she thought was a 16-year-old boy she met on MySpace. The case set off a national furor when it was revealed that the "boyfriend" was really a neighbor who was the mother of one of the girl's former friends. But should Internet harassment be a federal crime?
Local teenagers and residents protest just steps from the Drews' tiny porch. People drive through the neighborhood in the middle of the night, screaming, "Murderer!" Dozens of people allegedly have called local businesses that work with the family's advertising booklet firm, and flooded the phone lines this week at the local Burlington Coat Factory, where Curt Drew reportedly works.
"I posted that, where Curt works. I'm not ashamed to admit that," said Trever Buckles, a neighbor whose two teenage boys grew up with Megan. "Why? Because there's never been any sense of remorse or public apology from the Drews, no 'maybe we made a mistake.' "
Although there is a new law passed by the last Congress criminalizing the use of the Internet to "annoy," it is a poorly written statute that is extremely likely to be challenged on constitutional grounds. Other well-established charges, such as child endangerment and other predatory crimes, would be hard to prove in this case. It seems clear that the Drews did not want to kill Megan or even hurt her physically. They are not the first to be grotesquely transformed by a new technology that offers easy availability and anonymity to its users. Yet, if cyber-traps are to be deterred, there must be avenues to guarantee both forms of private relief and public record.
