America's political system has evolved over the last 50 years in ways that have enhanced the power of business lobbies.
In their war against Israel's existence, the Arab governments took advantage of the Cold War. They enlisted the military, economic, and political support of the communist world against Israel, and they turned a local, regional conflict into an international powder keg.
'Rage' is the word that most often attaches itself to the Tea Party movement, and it's true that, from the outside looking in, their public demonstrations appear to be more enraged than any political events in America since the race riots and anti-war protests of the 1960s.
We are supposed to believe that every dollar given to a Clinton is a dollar that improves the world. But is it? Clintonworld is a galaxy where personal enrichment and political advancement blend seamlessly, and where a cast of jarringly familiar characters pad their pockets every which way to Sunday.
To be sure Plato did not favor 'affirmative action' to fill political and military offices in his own society; nor did he enroll women in his school.
Corporations are economic entities or structures, and yet they're allowed to fund political candidates, and when those candidates are elected, guess who gets in the door first? It's corporations.
I'm entitled to my political opinions, and I get to vote because I'm an American.
I've long believed the environmental issue is an economic issue and a political issue. The three are entwined. You can't build prosperity on any basis other than a long-term basis, and you can't do that if you don't have a healthy environment.
The environmental movement, like all political processes, reacts best to disasters. But these are very slow, very gradual disasters in the making.
So that was Reagan's political problem. As a rancher in California, he was an environmentalist himself. But the President of the United States doesn't control everything that happens in Washington.
When facing the public, politicians constantly filter their ideas through a political sieve. 'How will this affect the environmentalists, labor, management?' Sometimes the sieve gets so clogged by political taboos that no new ideas pass through.
I think we can work through a lot of political and international problems, but what really frightens me is what's happening environmentally.
I think of my visual work as an exploration of political epistemology: the politics of how we know what we think we know.
The worst thing you want is a willy-nilly judge who is swayed by the political whims of the era or the time. What you want is a judge who is thinking about what he or she is doing and is thinking about it in a principled way.
No political event can be judged outside of the era and the circumstances in which it took place.
Previous efforts to eradicate malaria failed for several reasons, including political instability and technical challenges in delivering resources, especially in certain countries in Africa.
Actually, the notion of what is acceptable for a moral government to do seems to have eroded in some ways since 9-11. Not to get too political here, but countries, including our own, seem to have accepted what was once almost unimaginable - condoning torture, for example, and even criminalizing peaceful protest.
During two decades, on and off, reporting in Russia and the post-Soviet states - in the turbulent '90s, the wealthy but depressing aughts and, finally, during the eruption of violence in Ukraine - I occasionally heard people talk about how 'the Americans' wanted this or that political outcome.
My parents left Libya in 1979, escaping political repression, and settled in Cairo. I was nine.
A lot of times, especially when it comes to political debates, people get caught up in esoteric statistics. So the realest thing I can do that has nothing to do with numbers is tell you my personal experience.
