Wednesday, March 2, 2011

A Former Car Thief and Arsonist, Who is He Now?

A six-term California Republi-con, recently been elected chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Read The New Yorker, Don’t Look Back, Darrell Issa, the congressman about to make life more difficult for President Obama, has had some troubles of his own.


A Facebook Revolution?

UPDATE II: "Future historians will long puzzle over how the self-immolation of a Tunisian street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, in protest over the confiscation of his fruit stand, managed to trigger popular uprisings across the Arab/Muslim world. We know the big causes — tyranny, rising food prices, youth unemployment and social media. But since being in Egypt, I’ve been putting together my own back-of-the-envelope guess list of what I’d call the 'not-so-obvious forces' that fed this mass revolt." Read about those 'not-so-obvious forces' at The New York Times, This Is Just the Start.


UPDATE: So far, the Middle East revolution "movements that have appeared so suddenly and proved so powerful have shunned the two central tenets of the Qaeda credo: murderous violence and religious fanaticism. The demonstrators have used force defensively, treated Islam as an afterthought and embraced democracy, which is anathema to Osama bin Laden and his followers." Read The New York Times, As Regimes Fall in Arab World, Al Qaeda Sees History Fly By.

Reaffirming what I said for many years, violence favors the terrorists.

In the meantime, follow the Middle East protests, country-by-country.

To understand "[h]ow a spat over pears in the middle of nowhere morphed into a Tunisian revolution," read The New York Times, Facebook and Arab Dignity.