Cafepolitico.us Blog

The Dalai Lama will be coming to Boston April 30th-May 3, 2009 and will be giving a series of lectures as well as being the guest of honor at the new Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT. I am going to one of his workshops this upcoming Saturday.
The Tibetan-American community [...]

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Some mid-east observers are saying that there are increased tensions between Israel and the US, due in part to uncertainty about a new US administration, appointment of George Mitchell as Mid-East envoy, plan to engage Iran in dialogue and the recent Israeli elections which placed the much more conservative “Bibi” Netanyahu (as compared to Tipi [...]

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Obama’s foreign policy team has been working overtime in an attempt to help stabilize the various crisis currently on their plate.
Secretary Clinton was in the Hague where she signaled a willingness to work with Iran on shared interests in the Afghanistan region and while there was no formal meeting with the representative of Iran, special [...]

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Sarah Palin disses former staffers and they are none too pleased.

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Over at the Washington Note, Steve Clemons has an interesting post (and video) about an interview he did yesterday with a member of Palestinian Fatah who supports a pro-unity government. It is a very interesting dialogue and worth checking out. The post is here and there is a video link once you get [...]

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Yesterday I blogged about South Africa’s refusal to issue a visa to the Dalai Lama to attend an international peace conference in Johannesburg- the reasoning given by the SA government was that it was not in their best interest to allow His Holiness into the country lest it upset China, with whom SA has increasing [...]

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Watching the media and the politicians lament the sorry state of the economy as though they themselves played no role in it, is laughable. That the hypocrisy is lost on all of them, just shows how powerful the corporate media has become when it comes to shaping the story and it demonstrates the price [...]

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I don’t really understand President Obama’s over-all policy with respect to Gitmo detainess, people already labeled as enemy combatants:

Court documents filed Friday reveal that Obama’s lawyers are arguing that Ex-Guantanamo detainees have no constitutional rights.
The Center for Constitutional Rights(CCR), a non-profit legal advocacy group, is supporting four British citizens – Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal, [...]

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Chas Freeman has bowed out as Obama’s Director of the National Intelligence Council after strong criticism from pro-Israel hawks and others. Now a controversy is again erupting over, you guessed it, the influence that the pro-Israel lobby (”The Lobby”) has over US politics. It used to be that social security was seen [...]

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This is just wrong on so many levels.
Why can’t the government just stay out of the promoting religion business and just for once, try not to cynically use religion as a political prop?
UPDATE: Today’s NYT (sub. req) has an interesting article/commentary about government funding of religious groups, charities etc. and is worth a [...]

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