The way for the Palestinians to get a state is to go ahead and build it.

It’s unlikely to change – there’s nothing in King Salman’s past as governor of Riyadh for about forty years that suggests that he was particularly a reformer, not on the role of women, not on democratic development. There’s been a rumor in the last couple of days that he said to someone in an e-mail that he’s in favor of a constitutional monarchy, but I would be surprised if the level of repression started to go down … I think the kind of thing that we would view as significant reforms is unlikely.

Moammar Gaddafi, who has called himself the 'Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya,' should go down in history with the Emperor Bokassa and Idi Amin as a grotesque reminder of why people have the right to change their government.

Pessimism is rife in Israel.

The Obama administration has vastly expanded the use of armed drones and concentrated a great deal of diplomatic effort on building and maintaining alliances that share information about terrorists, provide access to get near them, and then strike against them.

During most of the Bush administration, human rights and democracy in Egypt were on the front burner.

Mass killing has very clearly not been eliminated, nor has the 'international community' developed a response that will avert it or bring it to a quick end.