Vaclav Havel: The Outsider in Power
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on December 21st, 2011 5:31 am by HL
Vaclav Havel: The Outsider in Power
Madeleine Albright, Washington Post
Madeleine Albright was secretary of state from 1997 to 2001.Nov. 24, 1989: Prague’s storied Wenceslas Square swarmed with demonstrators chanting slogans and waving signs that read “Posledni Zvoneni,” the last bell. Activists rattled the keys in their pockets, emulating the sound of a bell tolling to mark the end of four decades of communist rule. On a balcony overlooking the crowd stood a 53-year-old man who had been arrested that year and would, within a month, be president. Almost alone among his countrymen, he had predicted that this moment of triumph would…
Why Has the Economic Recovery Been So Slow?
Gene Epstein, Barron’s
Begin with a detailed score card. The recovery from the 2008-09 recession has been the slowest since any recession in the post-World War II era. It has taken nine calendar quarters since the recession ended in the second quarter of 2009 for real gross domestic product to climb back to its fourth-quarter '07 peak. Assume the same rates of growth during the recoveries from the two previous recessions that rank second and third in severity since World War II — '81-'82 and '74-'75 — and the recovery from the recent recession should have taken half as long.
Kim Jong Il’s Road to Ruin
Nicholas Eberstadt, Los Angeles Times
The career of Kim Jong Il, North Korea's “Dear Leader,” was marked by a series of historical firsts — most of them dubious at best. He was, to begin, the first ruler of a Marxist-Leninist state to inherit absolute power through hereditary succession from his father, “Great Leader” Kim Il Sung, founder of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, or DPRK.He was also the first ruler of an urbanized, literate society to preside over a mass famine in peacetime: The Great North Korean Famine of the 1990s, which erupted shortly after his father's death,…
The Call That Demands Leadership
Eugene Robinson, Washington Post
WASHINGTON — It's late at night when the phone rings at the White House: Kim Jong Il, the ruthless oddball dictator of nuclear-armed North Korea, is dead. His apparent successor is his 20-something son, about whom practically nothing is known. South Korean officials have rushed to put the nation's military forces on high alert.Do we want Mitt Romney answering that phone call?Newt Gingrich?We learned Sunday night what happens when Barack Obama is on the receiving end of unsettling news from one of the world's most dangerous flashpoints. There's a round of consultation with…
Is Obama’s Political Offensive Paying Off?
Greg Sargent, Washington Post
Yesterday the Washington Post released some new poll data suggesting that Obama is on the rebound. While it found that Obama’s economic disapproval numbers are still high, it also showed he holds a 15 point advantage over Republicans on helping the middle class, and a 17 point edge among independents on the traditional GOP signature issue of taxes.It would be premature to place too much stock in one poll. But CNN has just released a new survey with equally striking findings — ones that suggest that Obama’s new populist offensive, including the pressure on…