-Children reared in a foreign country tend to be high achievers.
According to a piece in The Australian: In the 1990s, [Michigan St. Professor Ruth Hill] Useem conducted a survey of adult TCKs [kids who've lived in countries other than their own] that revealed that children reared abroad were different from their peers. Even those who had spent just a year overseas as a child were four times more likely to have earned a bachelor's degree than those who spent all their time at home. They were more likely to study foreign languages or international affairs and to seek jobs in fields that involve travelling, such as diplomacy, banking, trade and teaching. More than one-quarter had studied aboard and one-third established their own businesses.
-Canadians can distinguish between disliking President Bush and disliking America. Let's hope that intellectual honesty filters south of the border.
According to a piece in The National Post: Bush disliked by 73% in Canada. But 68% like Americans.
-The former head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was accused by the organization's inspector general of meddling in PBS programming and of othersie violating CPB's own internal rules on overt politicking.
Shock of the year!
He resigned under pressure. What lessons were learned from the Tomlinson disgrace? None, apparently. He was succeeded by a former head of the Republican National Committee, an organization whose sole job is overt politicking.
-Think you can have guns AND butter?
Think again.
Demonstrating again that the costs of the Iraq war is not measured solely in thousands of American and tens (hundreds?) of thousands of Iraqi lives, the House passed a bill cutting funding for Medicaid, student loans and food stamps. They tried to sneak in a provision to open up drilling in ANWAR in Alaska, but had to retreat when all the other provisions stirred up controversy.
-American foreign policy talk of freedom is only half right....
Americans must deal with justice as well, if they want to have any hope of convincing moderate Muslims to reject extremist interpretations of their religion. So argues George Perkovich in an excellent piece in Foreign Affairs..
President Bush is only half right to trumpet the spread of freedom as the main objective of U.S. foreign policy; the pursuit of justice is just as important. Broadening the focus would not only befit the United States' political tradition, but also help neutralize opposition from radical Islamists and critics of globalization. With its ringing invocation of "the force of freedom," President George W. Bush's second inaugural address exemplified and updated the long-standing American belief that liberty is an intrinsic human good and that its promotion will enhance the nation's security and prosperity. Critics who scoffed at Bush's attempt to put ethics at the heart of U.S. foreign policy were misguided, because such considerations have been a crucial part of policy debates since the country's founding. What they should have criticized instead was Bush's narrow focus on one particular principle, political freedom, in isolation from other components of the American creed. After all, the Pledge of Allegiance promises not only liberty, but justice as well. Unfortunately, the elision of the notion of justice from the president's speech matches its elision from his foreign policy, with the result that in recent years, U.S. diplomacy -- public and private -- has been limping along on one leg and stumbling.
It's a foregone conclusion that the president will ignore Perkovich's excellent advice but hopefully Bush's successor won't.
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