President Obama has given Americans much to think about over the past couple weeks. At the UN, Mr. Obama was the largest and most important element in a diplomatic menagerie which focused public attention on the international body in a way that has not occurred for years, and possibly decades....

Calm has prevailed for more than 24 hours in Tegucigalpa since Tuesday morning when the last major riots and clashes took place. The government announced via TV today, breaking all television broadcasts to display the blue-and-white Honduran flag, that the curfew will be lifted from 10 am to 5 pm....

Gunfire, the smell of burning tires, and tear gas woke me up this morning. Tegucigalpa's Palmira neighborhood erupted into violence at around 5 in the morning. Demonstrators were gathered throughout the night on the street below my hotel balcony, where I stood watching tires burn in the middle of the...

TEGUCIGALPA , September 21 -- An emergency curfew was put into order by the Honduran government today as tensions escalate upon the return of the country's ousted president, Manuel Zelaya. The center of the city, and particularly the area around Colonia Palmira, where Zelaya was reported to be, burst into...

There's only one place in the world where representatives from the US, Austria, Britain, Korea, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, to name a few, are gathering to meet face-to-face to settle their differences in a civilized manner. That place is (of all places) Flushing Meadows, Queens, New York. Those representatives are the elites...

Clash For Clunkers is being scrapped. The National Automobile Dealers Association found in a study of dealers participating in the program that the $3 billion allotted to C4C has been exhausted. Yesterday, the Transportation Secretary announced that the program would be wound down under the guidance of his department. Lahood...

Two recent pieces of domestic legislation have done more to convince the American public that big government is big trouble and that the private sector, occasionally as greedy and stupid as the federal behemoth, serves Americans in a way that Washington never has, does, or will. The first, of course,...

I posted last week on the turbulence that the now-passed Cash For Clunkers bill was going through as it made its way through a cantankerous Congress. Miraculously, the bill passed. Now, for some reason, the media is having a go at the bill, calling it everything from confusing, to...

Imagine a bill making its way through Congress that would boost the economy while protecting the environment -- or, I should say, boost the economy by protecting the environment. This dream bill, furthermore, would be a bi-partisan affair. Who could say no to that? Well, apparently Congress could.

This dream...

A little while ago the attorney general of the United States accused the nation he serves of being a nation of cowards on questions of race. Mr. Holder was nearly right: America has not yet become, but is becoming, a nation of Donkins -- the "deserving creature that knows all...

One day, in journalism schools of the future, students will be presented with a graph showing the rise of internet-based news -- including blogs -- and the coinciding fall of print-based, establishment news -- including The New York Times. This graph will feature many labeled points, such as the birth...

You have to be wary when someone declares the death of something big. It's an easy thing to say, with ample bravado of course, that history is dead, that metaphysics is dead, or that the book, the magazine, the newspaper, or whatever else are all dead. But it's rarely true.

Wei Jingsheng, the leading anti-PRC dissident who spent two decades as a political prisoner in China, recently came out to voice disapproval of the selection of Chas Freeman for the position of National Intelligence Council chair. Mr. Freeman withdrew from the appointment last week, in part because of criticism he...

Never in the history of the English language has the word "smear" been as widely used as it is today. There is good reason for this. Politicians "smear" each other freely, even if they belong to the same party; and then the same politicians who were on the verbal attack...

Charles "Chas" Freeman, President George H.W. Bush's ambassador to Saudi Arabia and now President Obama's pick for the crucial intelligence post of National Intelligence Council chairman, has come under fire in the past weeks for his financial ties to China and Saudi Arabia. Opposition to his appointment to...

Nuance is finally dead. The murder weapon: politically-motivated political correctness. The killer: still at large, but witnesses describe a big, bungling information industry, unsure of foot, appearing dazed by its own business model as it fled the scene. Authorities have named the media as a suspect.

The chimp cartoon thing...

Some people think bankrupt. The paper has been bankrupt before -- by 1896 it was losing $1,000 a day (about $25,000 in today's money) -- which was when Adolph Ochs, the founder of The Times' current owning dynasty, swooped in and made a respectable business out of a respectable newspaper....

"To my readers," an early publisher of the great French newspaper Le Figaro once remarked, "an attic fire in the Latin Quarter is more important than a revolution in Madrid." There could hardly be a better characterization of the problem of Darfur. It's incredible that most of the Western world...

President-elect Obama is prepared to offer Israel a "nuclear umbrella" to protect against the possibility of -- to stay consistent with the metaphor -- an Iranian nuclear downpour, according to the Israeli daily Haaretz. The so-called umbrella would guarantee an American nuclear strike against Iran if the Islamic Republic were...

There is no crisis in Darfur. This is something the American public, along with the citizens and leaders of every democratic, human rights-interested, and justice-serving nation, must understand. To date, the number of people murdered in Khartoum's campaign of death numbers well into the six figures and, all else equal,...