Your one stop pundit shop.
Roger Cohen says that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s apology is not enough:
The announcement that another 1,600 apartments for Jews will be built in east Jerusalem, a pure provocation when restarting peace talks is the core U.S. aim. [...]
This is a watershed moment. Palestinian violence, Palestinian anti-Semitic incitement and jihadist infiltration of the Palestinian national movement all undermine peace efforts. They are unacceptable; Biden was right to “ironclad” the U.S. commitment to Israeli security. But it’s past time that Palestinian failings cease to serve as an excuse for Israel’s remorseless, cynical scattering of the Palestinian people into enclaves that make a farce of statehood. That is “an affront” to America.
In this sense, Biden’s foray has been salutary. It brought U.S. “vital interests” to the surface. It challenged Israel’s ostrich-like burrowing into polices that, over time, will make one divided, undemocratic state more likely than “two states for two peoples.” It asked again the question posed recently by David Shulman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: Are Israelis, cocooned, still able “to see, to imagine, and to acknowledge the suffering of other human beings, including those aspects of their suffering for which we are directly responsible?”
Bob Herbert believes that Toyota is treating California with "the foulest form of ingratitude."
David Brooks is an idiot:
Reconciliation has been used with increasing frequency. That was bad enough. But at least for the Bush tax cuts or the prescription drug bill, there was significant bipartisan support. Now we have pure reconciliation mixed with pure partisanship.
Once partisan reconciliation is used for this bill, it will be used for everything, now and forever. The Senate will be the House. The remnants of person-to-person relationships, with their sympathy and sentiment, will be snuffed out. We will live amid the relationships of group versus group, party versus party, inhumanity versus inhumanity.
First, there was not always "significant bipartisan support" when reconciliation was used in the past ... but why let 30 seconds on Google get in the way of an agenda? Second, what planet has Brooks been living on for the past 14 months? And finally, we don't send senators to Washington to make friends, we send them to do their job. Senate Republicans do not want to do their job. Or make friends, for that matter.
Marc Thiessen, fresh off of his disgraceful defense of Liz Cheney's attacks against Justice Department lawyers, today plays concern troll on health care reform. A troll who doesn't bother to follow the news on health care reform.
Eugene Robinson is appalled that the Obama administration will allow the resale of 100,000 contaminated, Katrina-era, FEMA trailers.
Lawrence Harmon points out that:
The traditional 18- to 22-year-old residing on campus is no longer the norm. Almost three-quarters of undergraduates fall into the “nontraditional’’ category, according to a 2002 National Center for Education Statistics report, meaning they work full time, are financially independent, attend college part time, or didn’t go directly from high school to higher education. For these nontraditional college students, a foreign adventure abroad is more likely to mean deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan than exploring the medieval Gothic quarter in Barcelona. College isn’t just for children anymore.
Derrick Z. Jackson wants to talk about more than brackets:
EARLY THIS basketball season, when the National Collegiate Athletic Association released its 2009 Division 1 Graduation Success Rate report, interim president Jim Isch boasted how the overall graduation rate for basketball was up nearly 10 percentage points over the last eight years. “Be assured, the NCAA’s commitment to academics is as strong as it has ever been,’’ Isch said.
Walter Harrison, president of the University of Hartford and chairman of the NCAA’s academic performance committee, added, “At the ground level of academic reform on our campuses, there has been monumental change.’’
There is no assurance of monumental change until the NCAA finally grounds its worst programs. However, there is no sign of that as top-power Kentucky made the Division 1 tournament with a Graduation Success Rate of only 18 percent for its black athletes and 31 percent overall. [...]
The NCAA says 56 percent of black basketball players now graduate from Division 1 teams, continuing a slow increase. White players have an 81 percent graduation rate. There is plenty of praise to go around among the 65 teams that made this year’s tournament. Top-tier seeds Kansas, Duke, Villanova, Pittsburgh, and Georgetown have black player graduation rates between 67 and 100 percent. Marquette, Wofford, Brigham Young, Wake Forest, Utah State, and Notre Dame had a 100 percent graduation rate across the board.
But until the NCAA bans the likes of Maryland, Texas, Nevada Las Vegas, and Kentucky, the concept of “student-athlete’’ is corrupted beyond repair. At these schools, the athletes are semipros who should be paid.