I have no interest in paying $27 for John Bolton’s Surrender is Not an Option, even if he were willing to sign it from me. But I have been enjoying recent reviews of the book. Mark Goldberg’s take, written for the American Prospect, is especially sharp.
This is the second “Weekly Gaff,” a feature inspired by Frank Gaffney, who has engineered a campaign of misinformation in the pages of the Washington Times. In last week’s edition, we touched on treaty arch-enemy Senator Jim Inhofe’s attempt to “retrofit unilateralism” and his concession that the arguments against the treaty aren’t actually true.
It’s amazing that what passes for political courage in national politics seems commonsense at the municipal level. New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg told the U.S. Conference of Mayors: Last spring, as part of our PlaNYC initiative, we proposed a system of congestion pricing based on successful programs in London, Stockholm and Singapore.
My colleague Howard Salter and I had a funny conversation a couple of weeks ago that evolved into this blog post of his, a lost scene of the Godfather acted out by various personalities in Vice President Cheney’s office.
I just got back from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee business meeting on the Law of the Sea. The final vote was 17-4 in favor of consideration by the full Senate.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee votes tomorrow on the Law of the Sea. The Committee is likely to approve the treaty, as it should. Frank Gaffney publishes a weekly column in the Washington Times. For the last three months or so, his column has targeted the Law of the Sea week in, week out.
(Huene Island, pictured above, part of the Carteret Island chain, has literally been cut in two by rising sea levels) Papua New Guinea’s Mission to the United Nations recently announced that it would evacuate the Carteret Islands, a horseshoe-shaped group of islands in the South Pacific.
Sens. John Sununu, Norm Coleman, and George Voinovich all voted for the Law of the Sea in 2004. According to sources in the Senate, all are now reconsidering their votes under heavy pressure from the likes of John Bolton, Frank Gaffney, and their most vocal black helicopter-fearing constituents.
I feel bad. I’ve now bumped Jennifer Buntman’s first post on this blog down two notches. Not bad enough to hold back my post, but bad enough to urge you to read it here. Please, help assuage my guilt.
The National Democratic Institute hosted a terrific (and huge and really long) lunch yesterday honoring the Fifty Fifty Group in Sierra Leone and Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. The work that Fifty Fifty has done to bring women into politics in Sierra Leone is very impressive.