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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)

As Tuesday’s vote revealed, Americans are strongly devoted to individualism, one happy aspect of which is that they are possessed of an abhorrence to being told what to think, a truth that explains why people are drawing their own conclusions regarding this question: Which Americans are behaving with anti-intellectual, hateful ignorance in the debate regarding the Obama/Pelosi/Reid healthcare bills making their way through Congress? To answer that question, common sense folks begin by stipulating some of what is currently known about the bills, for example — The final version will be advertised as costing $1 trillion over the next decade....

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...

Thomas Friedman is being forced to turn in a $75,000 speaking fee he received for talking to the San Francisco Bay Area's Air Quality Management District, last weekend, the LA Times is reporting. The hefty fee given to Friedman raised quite a stink, particularly amongst jealous journalists, and anyone looking to poke at the New York Times. Apparently, the fee is out of bounds within the Times ethical guidebook. Reporters can only get paid from "educational and other nonprofit groups for which lobbying and political activity are not a major focus," which the Bay Area group is not.

Hey Kristof... You're Late! Posted in: Gerald A. Honigman By Gerald A. Honigman Monday, March 23, 2009 While The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof is no stranger to these positions throughout the year, he frequently comes out with his gems of Middle East wisdom right around Bike Week here in Daytona Beach, Florida, when tens of thousands of Harley enthusiasts arrive to also spread their hot air exhaust around town. This year Nick was a few weeks late. Like others of his ilk--Thomas Friedman (better of late), David Ignatius, Richard Cohen, just to name a few, who are also obsessed...

Propaganda according to Friedman: General Dayton was addressing the Second Special Battalion of the Palestinian National Security Force, or N.S.F. He was originally assigned to help reform Palestinian security by the Bush team in 2005, but only got the funds to do so after Hamas took over Gaza in 2007.

If New York Times columnist Friedman has his way, gas taxes will go up. Way up. He wants to slap an additional $2.40 per gallon in taxes on top of the 18.4¢ you already pay. “Today’s financial crisis is Obama’s 9/11,” Friedman wrote. “The public is ready to be mobilized. Obama is coming in with enormous popularity. This is his window of opportunity to impose a gas tax. And he could make it painless: offset the gas tax by lowering payroll taxes, or phase it in over two years at 10 cents a month.” Do the math. 10 cents a...

Link to Article Basically...China is way ahead of America in infrastructure construction, science...everything. Going from China to America is like going from the "Jetsons" to the "Flintstones".

HONG KONG (AFP) – Best-selling author Thomas Friedman on Tuesday praised Barack Obama's new energy team and said the next US president had to insist on a radical environmental agenda to tackle global warming. Friedman, whose new book "Hot, Flat and Crowded" is a call-to-arms to reduce US dependency on oil and coal, said Obama's nomination of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu as his new energy secretary was a "terrific" move. He insisted that the challenge facing Obama required a revolutionary attitude to environmental policy, if the new administration wanted to avoid the devastating effects of global warming. "We can...

It's not like Barack Obama is a socialist or anything. It's just that Thomas Friedman wants him to put a "government master" in charge of the country's biggest manufacturing sector. Friedman made his modest proposal in his New York Times column of today, and expanded on it during a Morning Joe appearance. [H/t reader Tom.] View video here. I've got three easy reasons why Friedman's idea won't work.

It wasn't the world that got flat, contrary to New York Times pundit Thomas Friedman, but the emerging markets that got flattened. Faddish conventional wisdom over the past few years held that American influence was fading as technology radiated to the far reaches of the world. When America's economy went into a ditch, though, the supposed economic superpowers of the future went flying, like children on skates holding onto the back of truck. The financial crash exposes the fragility of large swaths of the world. The political consequences will be terrible. The worst of it is that America will not...

Nationalization has its consequences. Just note the rhetoric coming from some prominent voices on the left. The government's foray into offering services normally provided by the private sector by bailing out aging mortgage giants gives it the power to implement "green" building requirements, according to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. He suggested Sept. 23 that any construction financed by government-funded mortgages should be certified "green" according to the standards of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System. "If we're going to be in the mortgage business as a government, then every government-funded mortgage -...

If John McCain can win this election race with a 50-pound ball called "George W. Bush" wrapped around one ankle and a 50-pound ball called "The U.S. Economy" wrapped around the other, then he deserves to represent America in the next Olympics in any race he wants -- swimming, cycling or track -- I don't care how old he is. He would be the Michael Phelps of politics. I confess, I watch politics from afar, but here's what I've been feeling for a while: Whoever slipped that Valium into Barack Obama's coffee needs to be found and arrested by the...

In his latest [book], "Hot, Flat, and Crowded," Thomas L. Friedman makes it clear that he wants to improve conditions for mankind. "I start from the bedrock principle," he writes, "that we as a global society need more and more growth." But because of climate change (hot), ever-more people (crowded) and higher material aspirations of all in a competitive global economy (flat), he believes that the world's growth is leading us toward catastrophe. Mr. Friedman, a columnist for the New York Times, describes this threat in the grimmest of terms. We should expect disasters "of a biblical scale," humans are...

In a recent article in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman wrote that NATO is essentially irrelevant. It had been replaced by what he tongue-in-cheek calls NASTY: Nations Allied to Stop TYrants. NASTY is made up of what he calls three "like-minded English-speaking allies", America, Australia and Britain, with occasional French involvement. He claims "what these four countries have in common is that they are sea powers, with a tradition of fighting abroad, with ability to transport troops around the world and with mobile special forces that have an 'attitude'." All four nations, he notes enjoy playing either rugby or...

Agreeing with THOMAS FRIEDMAN: ...<excerpt> ... ... But when it comes to pure, rancid moral corruption, no one can top South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, and his stooge at the U.N., Dumisani Kumalo. They have done everything they can to prevent any meaningful U.N. pressure on the Mugabe dictatorship.As The Times reported, America’s U.N. ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, “accused South Africa of protecting the ‘horrible regime in Zimbabwe,’ ” calling this particularly disturbing given that it was precisely international economic sanctions that brought down South Africa’s apartheid government, which had long oppressed that country’s blacks.So let us now coin the Mbeki...

Obama and the Jews Pssst. Have you heard? I have. I heard that Barack Obama once said there has to be “an end” to the Israeli “occupation” of the West Bank “that began in 1967.” Yikes! Pssst. Have you heard? I have. I heard that Barack Obama said that not only must Israel be secure, but that any peace agreement “must establish Palestine as a homeland for the Palestinian people.” Yikes! Pssst. Have you heard? I have. I heard that Barack Obama once said “the establishment of the state of Palestine is long overdue. The Palestinian people deserve it.” Yikes!...

...They are not only tired of nation-building in Iraq and in Afghanistan, with so little to show for it. They sense something deeper — that we’re just not that strong anymore. We’re borrowing money to shore up our banks from city-states called Dubai and Singapore. Our generals regularly tell us that Iran is subverting our efforts in Iraq, but they do nothing about it because we have no leverage — as long as our forces are pinned down in Baghdad and our economy is pinned to Middle East oil. Our president’s latest energy initiative was to go to Saudi Arabia...

ABC’s April 11 “World News with Charles Gibson” is showing they finally get it – ethanol production and high energy costs are causing food shortages worldwide. “[P]rices are rising across Africa, pushed up by the cost of oil and demand for biofuels,” ABC correspondent Jim Sciutto said. “Those biofuels are in fact a large part of the equation,” ABC correspondent David Muir added. “Many farmers around the world, who once grew wheat and rice, now grow corn and sugar cane instead, to produce ethanol a more lucrative market.”

Thomas Friedman thinks you are "stupid" if you still care about the atrocity committed against this country by Islamofascists in New York on 9/11/2001. He thinks "9/11 is over" and we all should just move on. Even worse, he has decided that we are no longer a great country, but are filled with seemingly meaningless "fear," that we have a dilapidated infrastructure, and that while America used to be "the gold standard," he believes "We aren’t anymore." Friedman is falling for the typical, leftist doom-and-gloom scenario and imagines that China is better than we are, Europe is more inviting, and...

Thomas Friedman shouldn't be so modest. His opening line in his column today proclaims his inability, based on his current trip to Iraq, to see the big picture there. But buried in his description of three experiences from his journey is a conclusion as unequivocal as it is harrowing. In the first anecdote in [subscription-required] Letter from Baghdad Friedman describes his experience visiting a U.S. Army platoon based in Baghdad's Ameriya neighborhood. As the author explains, this had been an affluent Sunni area that had first been ravaged by Shia militias and then by pro-Al Qaedi Sunnis who had 'imposed...

<p>CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Al-Qaida's No. 2 has issued a new video tape calling on Muslims to unite in jihad, or holy war, and support the Islamist movement in Iraq, a U.S.-based intelligence monitoring group said Wednesday.</p> <p>Ayman al-Zawahri is seen in the one-hour and 35 minutes tape dressed in white and addressing topics from Iraq to Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian territories and Egypt, said the U.S.-based SITE intelligence group, which monitors al-Qaida messages.</p>

I'm actually beginning to think something could be afoot at the New York Times. On Monday, one columnist extolled the virtues of that fount of Western civilization, Hellenism. Tuesday, another columnist claimed freedom and liberty are distinct creations of Western civilization. Today, the celebrated Thomas Friedman offers up a laundry list of generalizations about Arabs that - from the keyboard of a conservative - would normally merit a Times editorial rebuke for ethnic stereotyping. Among Friedman's observations in his subscription-required column Mideast Rules to Live By: "What people tell you in private in the Middle East is irrelevant. All...

In a column written by Thomas Friedman for the New York Times, he asks "How dumb are we? It's your typical Bush hit piece, but one of his assertions caused me to up chuck my oatmeal. George Bush, Dick Chenet and Don Rumsfeld think you're stupid.They think they can take a mangled quip about President Bush and Iraq by John Kerry - a man who is not even running for office but who, unlike Bush and Cheney never ran away from combat service- and get you to vote against all Democrats in this election.(bolf type is mine) The person that...

by Mark Finkelstein October 11, 2006 - 06:42 Not the smallest bird doesn't fall but liberal pundits blame it on George W. Bush. A refreshing change of pace this morning, then, in the person of Thomas Friedman, who writes that the major responsibility for avoiding future international catastrophe lays not at the feet of the current occupant of the White House, but in Moscow and Beijing. In the subscription-required The Bus Is Waiting, Friedman propounds the theory that the nuclearized N. North Korea and Iran will inevitably lead to a string of countries across Asia and the Middle East developing...

Some time back, The New York Times Foreign Affairs writer, Thomas Friedman (liberals genuflect here), wrote a fascinating tome entitled The Lexus and the Olive Tree. I was living and working in Minneapolis when I had the chance to see him speak about the book. By the way, if I heard him correctly, he said he had grown up in St. Louis Park, which is where pesky Air America liberal Al Franken now lives. Coincidence? The point of the book was based on some thoughts he had, in having seen the advanced robotics being used by Toyota to create their...

by Mark Finkelstein September 5, 2006 - 20:32 In the coming hours and days, my colleagues at MRC and NewsBusters are sure to provide comprehensive, in-depth analysis of Katie Couric's debut this evening as the anchor of the CBS Evening News. From the opening segment, whose message was that things are worse in Afghanistan than you realize, to an interview with MSM foreign policy fave Thomas Friedman decrying tax cuts, to anti-McDonald's crusader Morgan Spurlock, ahem, spuriously trying to pass himself off as an opponent of hype, it was all pretty predictable liberal stuff. But Katie did - unintentionally no...

In his recent bestseller, "The World Is Flat," Thomas Friedman warned Americans about the challenges of an era of increased globalization and international competition. In an ever "flattening" world, many jobs can easily be outsourced to skilled, lower-cost workers in other countries. Today, American workers have to compete against workers from around the world. Friedman explained what this should mean to American students by recounting a warning he offered his daughters: "Girls, when I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, 'Tom, finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving.' My advice to you is:...

by Mark Finkelstein April 19, 2006 On this morning's Today show, NY Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman expressed the astonishing wish that the price of crude oil . . . go to $100/barrel ASAP. Friedman's theory is that extremely high oil prices are desirable because they would induce behavioral changes that would ultimately decrease demand and force oil prices way down. Here's how the exchange with host Matt Lauer unfolded: Friedman: "I hope the Iranians get as crazy as they want. My attitude toward the president of Iran is 'you go, girl', because the faster we get to $100...

by Mark Finkelstein March 2, 2006 Is it just coincidence? Barely a week after new media from Rush Limbaugh [subscripton required] to this column found the Today show appearance of NY Times foreign-affairs maven Thomas Friedman noteworthy, Today had him back again this morning. Could the new media be driving news choices at the antique? In any case, while the ostensible purpose of Friedman's appearance was to discuss President Bush's current trip to India, his most interesting comments came in relation to Iraq and by extension to the entire Middle East. His notion: the path from dictatorship to democracy in...

by Mark Finkelstein February 24, 2006 If NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman is for many the voice of the center-left foreign policy establishment in the U.S., then his nuanced and not-altogether-bleak assessment of the situation in Iraq on this morning's GMA merits consideration. It was tempting to headline this entry with the provocative notion Friedman floated that perhaps only a Saddam was capable of holding Iraq's fractious components together. But Friedman was by no means endorsing Saddam's despotic rule, musing rather whether Saddam was a cause or an effect. As Friedman put it: "Is Iraq the way Iraq is because...

Thomas Friedman's article, "A shah with a turban" (Views, Dec. 24), poignantly illustrated the rift between Iran's clerical dictatorship and the country's population, especially the youth. However, an inappropriate headline and cartoon by Kal undermined what was informative and valuable in his article. The implication that the shah's reign bears any resemblance to the present regime is inaccurate. Under the late Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iranians enjoyed incomparably better lives than what they have to endure today; moreover, the prospect for a stable Middle East appeared promising. Jews and other religious minorities thrived and prospered under the shah, who promoted religious...

The Times columnist does foreign policy punditry by clichéOn May 11, Thomas Friedman, America’s most influential foreign affairs columnist, began his twice-weekly New York Times op-ed this way: “In his book ‘The Ideas That Conquered the World,’ Michael Mandelbaum tells a story about a young girl who is eating dinner at a friend’s house and her friend’s mother asks her if she likes brussels sprouts. ‘Yes, of course,’ the girl says. ‘I like brussels sprouts.’ After dinner, though, the mother notices that the girl hasn’t eaten a single sprout. ‘I thought you liked brussels sprouts,’ the mother said. ‘I do,’...

<p>Thursday's bombings in downtown London are profoundly disturbing. In part, that is because a bombing in our mother country and closest ally, England, is almost like a bombing in our own country. In part, it's because one assault may have involved a suicide bomber, bringing this terrible jihadist weapon into the heart of a major Western capital.</p>

George Bush has a Dick Cheney problem. It's not the one you think: an overbearing, archconservative vice president imposing his will and ideas on a less-seasoned president. No, George Bush has a different V.P. problem. It is the fact that his vice president has made clear that he is not running for president after Mr. Bush's term expires in 2008. So Mr. Bush has no heir apparent. And that explains, in part, why his second term is drifting aimlessly, disconnected from the problems facing the country. "If President Bush had a vice president, or someone who was clearly designated as...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Rich Galen in his Mullings web log today said, "We have to be the dumbest superpower in the history of the planet. The latest example of Liberal intellectual rigor mortis is this business about closing down the prison at Guantanamo Bay because of 'allegations of abuse.'" [Snipped comments about Dittocam problem] Mullings continues, "Senator Biden who wants to ride the Gitmo Train all the way to the White House in 2008, is the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He said on ABC's Sunday show, 'I think we should end up shutting it down, moving...

"Sure, a few may come back to haunt us," wrote New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in arguing to close down the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay. Who are the "few" that Mr. Friedman is thinking of, and what exactly does he mean by haunting? Perhaps the case of Mohammed al Qahtani, a Guantanamo detainee profiled in the current issue of Time magazine, offers insight. From a Guantanamo logbook, Time reports that interrogators did a number of unpleasant things to al Qahtani to get him to talk. These included shaving his beard, stripping him naked, ordering him to bark...

For those of you who may be queasy about the way the Bush administration is approaching and prosecuting the War on Terror I invite you to consider, for purposes of contrast, the mindset toward foreign policy that springs from the worldview of liberalism. Generally, I refer you to the contrasting reactions of liberals and conservatives to charges against America. Specifically, I refer you to the May 27 column of liberal media icon Thomas L. Friedman, Middle East "expert" and New York Times columnist extraordinaire. If anything, Friedman is often more reasonable than many of his counterparts on the Left. He...

Thomas Friedman wants the wired world to let in the other half of humanity In working on his third book about global trends, Thomas Friedman discovered that the world has become smaller. In fact, so small it's "flat." A columnist for The New York Times, Mr. Friedman loves to travel our round planet like a photon in a fiber optic cable, picking up this hot new trend and that advice from a notable achiever, then collating it all into a globe- spanning metaphor of mega-meaning. In "The World Is Flat," this modern Magellan even admits, "I'm exhausted just writing about...

Naomi Klein, writing in The Nation magazine asks the question, "Can Democracy Survive Bush's Embrace?" Klein writes, “It started off as a joke and has now become vaguely serious: the idea that Bono might be named president of the World Bank.” Bono talks to Republicans as they like to see themselves: not as administrators of a diminishing public sphere they despise but as CEOs of a powerful private corporation called America. "Brand USA is in trouble...it's a problem for business." The solution is "to re-describe ourselves to a world that is unsure of our values." Klein continues, “The Bush Administration...

Thomas Friedman recently wrote a column in which he outlined eight rules for Middle East reporting. They included Rule 1: "Never lead your story out of Lebanon, Gaza or Iraq with a cease-fire; it will always be over by the time the next morning's paper is out." Rule 3: "The Israelis will always win, and the Palestinians will always make sure that they never enjoy it. Everything else is commentary." Friedman's insights are good, but he's missed a number of rules that are more commonly followed by his colleagues. These include: Never file stories from an Arab capital; it's dangerous...

Thomas Friedman advises George Bush to make a silent tour of Europe when he meets with leaders on the Continent in February. Friedman believes that the only way for Bush to get people to like him is for the President of the United States to do his Marcel Marceau impression:

In the wake of U.S. aid to help Muslim and other victims of the recent tsunami, Colin Powell suggested that maybe, now that the Muslim world had seen "American generosity" and "American values in action," it wouldn't be so hostile to America.Don't hold your breath waiting for a thank-you card. If the fact that American soldiers have risked their lives to save the Muslims of Bosnia, the Muslims of Kuwait, the Muslims of Somalia, the Muslims of Afghanistan and the Muslims of Iraq has earned the U.S. only the false accusation of being "anti-Muslim," trust me, U.S. troops passing out...

For years now it's been clear that the Middle East peace process has left the realm of diplomacy and started to become an industry, with its own G.N.P. of conferences and seminars. But there is a new industry rapidly overtaking it in the Middle East, and that is the "reform industry." Every month there seems to be a new conference on reform in the Arab world. Indeed, I have been attending one here in Dubai, an amazing city-state on the Persian Gulf that is becoming the Singapore of the Arab East. What the reform process and the peace process have...

I was speaking the other day with Scott Pelley of CBS News's "60 Minutes" about the mood in Iraq. He had just returned from filming a piece there and he told me something disturbing. Scott had gone around and asked Iraqis on the streets what they called American troops - wondering if they had nicknames for us in the way we used to call the Nazis "Krauts" or the Vietcong "Charlie." And what did he find? "Many Iraqis have so much distrust for U.S. forces we found they've come up with a nickname for our troops," Scott said. "They call...