April 27, 2010
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 w...
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April 6, 2010
Here's my fun fact for the day, provided courtesy of Robert Litan, who directs research at the Kauffman Foundation, which specializes in promoting innovation in America: "Between 1980 and 2005, virtually all net new jobs created in the U.S. were crea...
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March 30, 2010
If you think this latest Israeli-American flap was just the same-old-same-old tiff over settlements, then you're clearly not paying attention -- which is how I'd describe a lot of Israelis, Arabs and American Jews today.
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February 9, 2010
SAN'A, Yemen -- Yemen's former prime minister, Abdul Karim al-Iryani, got right to the point when I arrived at his San'a home for dinner: "So, Thomas, did it take Abdulmutallab to finally get you here?" Yes, it is true, I admitted, because that...
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January 12, 2010
HONG KONG -- C.H. Tung, the first Chinese-appointed chief executive of Hong Kong after the handover in 1997, offered me a three-sentence summary the other day of China's modern economic history: "China was asleep during the Industrial Revolution. She...
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December 22, 2009
I've long believed there are two basic strategies for dealing with climate change -- the "Earth Day" strategy and the "Earth Race" strategy. This Copenhagen climate summit was based on the Earth Day strategy. It was not very impressive...
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December 8, 2009
President Obama certainly showed leadership mettle in going against his own party's base and ordering a troop surge into Afghanistan. He is going to have to be even more tough-minded, though, to make sure his policy is properly executed.
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July 7, 2009
Over the past decade, whenever I went to China and engaged Chinese on their pollution and energy problems, inevitably some young Chinese would say: "Hey, you Americans got to grow dirty for 150 years, using cheap coal and oil. Now it is our turn.&quo...
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June 18, 2009
Watching events unfolding in Tehran raises three intriguing questions for me: Is Facebook to Iran's Moderate Revolution what the mosque was to Iran's Islamic Revolution? Is Twitter to Iranian moderates what muezzins were to Iranian mullahs? And, finally......
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June 11, 2009
I confess. I'm a sucker for free and fair elections. It warms my heart to watch people drop ballots in a box to express their will, especially in a region where that so rarely happens. So I came to Lebanon on Sunday to watch the Lebanese hold their nation...
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June 4, 2009
During a telephone interview Tuesday with President Barack Obama about his speech to Arabs and Muslims in Cairo on Thursday, I got to tell the president my favorite Middle East joke. It gave him a good laugh. It goes like this:
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April 30, 2009
Weighing everything, President Barack Obama got it about as right as one could when he decided to ban the use of torture, to release the Bush torture memos for public scrutiny, and to not prosecute the lawyers and interrogators who implemented the policy.
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April 23, 2009
Speaking of financial crises and how they can expose weak companies and weak countries, Warren Buffett once famously quipped that "only when the tide goes out do you find out who is not wearing a bathing suit." So true. But what's really unnervi...
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April 16, 2009
I’ve been thinking lately of starting a new school of foreign service to train U.S. diplomats. My school, though, would be very simple. It would consist of a single classroom with a desk and a chair. At the desk would be a teacher, pretending to be...
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March 12, 2009
It’s always great to see the stock market come back from the dead. But I am deeply worried that our political system doesn’t grasp how much our financial crisis can still undermine everything we want to be as a country. Friends, this is not a test. Ec...
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March 10, 2009
Sometimes the satirical newspaper The Onion is so right on, I can’t resist quoting from it. Consider this faux article from June 2005 about America’s addiction to Chinese exports:
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March 5, 2009
Two signs of the times: First, a banker friend remarked to me that you know your bank is in trouble when its share price is less than the cost of taking money out of one of its ATMs.
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