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.

Pundits are used to analyzing the gap between what our ideals suggest and what our security interests require.

The intersection of religion and world politics has often been a bloody crossroads.

For the entire first term, Obama and his people blamed Bush for everything - which is another way of saying they felt Bush and the Bush years were the inescapable reference point for everything they were themselves doing.

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

As the Palestinian leadership never seems to pay any penalty for its words, America's seriousness about the peace process is in doubt.

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.