democracy

During the decades of international sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, successive U.S. administrations yearned for regime change.

Today, the first Tuesday in March, is town meeting day in Vermont, as it has been for more than a century. Town meeting was a tradition in Vermont before there was any officially designated town meeting day. Town meeting was part of Vermont before Vermont was part of the Union.

Two years ago in Cairo, Nobel laureate and former International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamed ElBaradei was the talk of the town. Newly retired from the IAEA, ElBaradei returned to Egypt in February 2010 after living abroad for decades. He began criticizing the Mubarak regime, hinting that he might run for president, and almost overnight he became Egypt’s great liberal hope. And yet when ElBaradei announced last week that he was ending his presidential bid, the news was met with a collective yawn.

In a recent presidential debate, Congressman Ron Paul made a bizarre equivalence between a Chinese dissident taking refuge in America and Osama bin Laden hiding in Pakistan, as he was attempting to criticize American foreign and defense policies generally.

On behalf of the Working Group on Egypt, Michele Dunne of the Atlantic Council and Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution have sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton concerning disturbing activity in Egypt.

Another country has calculated that Christmas time is a good time to launch a crackdown on human rights. Following China’s harsh sentencing of two writers on subversion charges, Egyptian security forces today rolled up to several prominent democracy and human rights NGOs in Cairo and shut them down, confiscated materials, and detained employees onsite for questioning.

Two very important changes have occurred in America, and indeed in other Western economies. My guess is that they will prove to be permanent phenomena, just as permanent as the changes introduced by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Now is the time to undermine Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. With major protests going on in response to the recent fraudulent parliamentary elections, with Mikhail Prokhorov announcing that he is likely to challenge Putin for the presidency in the next election, and with major ferment in Russia, it is the best time to further undermine Putin’s control structure by holding human rights violators accountable. And there are several efforts underway to do just that in Congress.

Vladimir Putin’s official launch of his presidential campaign late last month coincided with the publication of a damning new dossier of evidence relating to the death of Sergei Magnitsky, the whistleblower attorney who has become a martyr to anti-corruption efforts in Russia.

Earlier in the week Israel Hayom reported that the new Tunisian constitution may include “a section condemning Zionism and ruling out any friendly ties with Israel.” Yesterday Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of al-Nahda (Revival), the main Islamist party that won more than 40 percent of the seats in Tunisia’s parliamentary elections two weeks ago, disputed the report. “I don’t think this clause will be included in the constitution,” said Ghannouchi.

The Daily Show explores whether there is class division at the Occupy Wall Street encampment: