http://blog.psaonline.org Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:32:31 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The new FISA Amendments Act of 2008 is not only an affront to privacy, it is a symptom of the leadership deficit currently afflicting the U.S. Congress. The bill, which passed the House last week by a landslide, makes two drastic changes to our current surveillance laws: 1. First, the ... http://blog.psaonline.org/2008/07/01/decoding-the-new-fisa-bill/ At the Brookings Institution this morning, Shibley Telhami and Steven Kull each presented their findings on public opinion regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Shibley Telhami focused on Arab public perceptions. The main part of his study, was centered on the question “How important is the issue of Palestine in your priorities?” ... http://blog.psaonline.org/2008/07/01/news-flash-the-palestinian-israeli-conflict-is-still-important/ In a speech at the Brookings Institution yesterday, Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel spoke eloquently about the challenges that will be faced by the victor of this year’s presidential election. The speech, entitled “Memo to the Candidates”, was essentially Senator Hagel’s laundry list of problems the new president must deal ... http://blog.psaonline.org/2008/06/27/chucking-out-partisan-polarization/ Bipartisanship has its advantages. A bipartisan process is more likely to get policy based on values that Americans broadly agree on, and a bipartisan process is less likely to accept mistaken evidence because many eyes will have examined the evidence from different perspectives. But we need to remember, especially at Across ... http://blog.psaonline.org/2008/06/27/another-example-of-bad-bipartisanship-oil-speculation/ It was just over twenty years ago, on June 23 1988, that Dr. James Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told a U.S. Senate committee that the year's record temperatures were not the result of natural variation. As a result global warming irrevocably became part of ... http://blog.psaonline.org/2008/06/27/twenty-years-later-so-little-change/ Senator McCain, the presumptive Republican candidate for President, has, over the years, made a virtue out of inconsistency when the logic of consistency has not always been a virtue. This has been part of his appeal to independents and to others who gaze at the political world not from ... http://blog.psaonline.org/2008/06/25/when-is-a-contradiction-not-a-flip-flop/ The Bush administration's unilateralism and incompetence, typified by its reckless invasion of Iraq, have damaged perceptions of the United States in much of the world. By many accounts, China has taken advantage of this lapse in U.S. leadership by bolstering its own influence across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But ... http://blog.psaonline.org/2008/06/24/declarations-of-american-decline-are-premature/ This morning, we got Ambassador Tom Pickering, Bud Mcfarlan, and Rick Barton in a room together to see what they had to say about the kinds of foreign policy our next president could enact with support from both sides of the aisle. Part 1: Pickering kicked off the discussion with a ... http://blog.psaonline.org/2008/06/24/video-of-a-bipartisan-foreign-policy-for-january-2009/ Actually, it’s tahadiya, as opposed to hudna, which means calm or cease fire (sometimes spoken of as a truce). It’s interesting that in the Middle East, even a temporary, grudging condition-laden cessation in the fighting has to be negotiated. For the amount of time Israelis and Arabs (not to ... http://blog.psaonline.org/2008/06/19/what%e2%80%99s-the-arabic-word-for-%e2%80%9clull%e2%80%9d/ In a recent article published by the New York Times, David Kirkpatrick traces John McCain's views about foreign conflicts all the way back to 1974.  During that year, McCain submitted an essay to the National War College in which he argued that the American soldiers held captive in prison camps ... http://blog.psaonline.org/2008/06/19/of-captivity-and-loyalty/