Thomas Friedman

First it was New York Times reporters who were quoting unelected Cuban dictator Fidel Castro insulting the “idiocy and ignorance” of the two lead candidates for the GOP nomination, in a January 26 story. Now columnist Thomas Friedman gets in on the act, quoting Castro approvingly in Sunday’s “Made in the World.”

The media is going to work overtime to ignore Mark Levin’s brand-new book “Ameritopia.” He asks: Do we choose between America as it was founded on liberty or a radically socialist Ameritopia? Levin says we’ve already chosen (b). No one in the liberal media wants that announced so explicitly from their mountain tops.

The arrogance of socialists is apparent on the back cover of Levin’s book. It carries a passage from Adam Smith that aptly defines the modern leftist: “He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.” That perfectly defines utopians like Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, who has explicitly declared his affinity for tyranny. “I think we’re entering an era...where being in politics is going to be more than anything else about taking things away from people.”

“Many [OWS] protesters say the lawless visitors constitute a tiny fringe and are not representative of the movement, which, they say, has espoused nonviolence and mutual aid. Some have suggested moving the kitchen area and the comfort station out of the park to discourage freeloaders from congregating there. But there are concerns that even if the criminal and antisocial elements are a small minority, they are becoming visible enough to tarnish the image of the entire group.” – From a November 6 story by Cara Buckley and Colin Moynihan.

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“It was difficult, if not disingenuous, for the Tea Party groups to try to disown the behavior. They had organized the rally, and under their model of self-policing, they were responsible for the behavior of people who were there. And after saying for months that anybody could be a Tea Party leader, they could not suddenly dismiss as faux Tea Partiers those protesters who made them look bad.” – Reporter Kate Zernike on page 139 of her 2010 book “Boiling Mad – Inside Tea Party America.”

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman this weekend said he'd give President Obama high marks for fulfilling Bush's foreign policy.

This surprising observation on PBS's McLaughlin Group came somewhat coincident with Chris Matthews saying George W. Bush was actually better at conveying his message than the current White House resident (video follows with transcript and commentary):

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman declared the G.O.P. “a danger to itself and to the country” in his Wednesday column, “No Christie, No Bargain.”

Move over, Tom Friedman--there's another MSMer looking longingly at Communist China.  In an infamous column, Friedman wrote of his envy of the power of the Chinese despots to impose "critically important decisions."  He's been at it again lately

Now comes Sino-Commie-phile Katty Kay.  On Morning Joe today, the BBCer criticized the USA for not having a "40-year plan for medical innovation" like the Chinese do.  Joe Scarborough was on-point with his comeback. Video after the jump.

Joe Scarborough and Mike Bloomberg for president and veep? Yeah, that's the ticket—according to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who floated the idea during his Morning Joe appearance today.  

Friedman foresaw Scarborough-Bloomberg running on a platform of Simpson-Bowles on the economy, an "investment agenda" [infrastructure spending], and getting out of Afghanistan ASAP.  "I would bet any amount of money," forecast Friedman, that such a ticket would immediately have a "significant, significant" position.  Video after the jump.

“Deep Cuts in Social Services” By Conservatives Led to London Riots

“Frustration in this impoverished neighborhood, as in many others in Britain, has mounted as the government’s austerity budget has forced deep cuts in social services. At the same time, a widely held disdain for law enforcement here, where a large Afro-Caribbean population has felt singled out by the police for abuse, has only intensified through the drumbeat of scandal that has racked Scotland Yard in recent weeks and led to the resignation of the force’s two top commanders....Economic malaise and cuts in spending and services instituted by the Conservative-led government have been recurring flashpoints for months...As the budget cuts take hold, risk of unemployment increases and social measures like youth projects are sacrificed, Mr. Beech said, and ‘all logic says there will be an increase in antisocial behavior.’” – London-based reporter Ravi Somaiya on the riots there, August 8.

 

Norway Terrorist’s “Fellow Travelers,” Gingrich and Rep. Peter King

“Breivik has many ideological fellow travelers on both sides of the Atlantic. Theirs is the poison in which he refined his murderous resentment....Republicans like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Representative Peter King, who have found it politically opportune to target ‘creeping Shariah in the United States’ at a time when the middle name of the president is Hussein. – International columnist Roger Cohen, posted to nytimes.com July 25.

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) caused quite a stir last week when she said if elected president she would bring back $2/gallon gasoline prices.

On CNN's "Reliable Sources" Sunday, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman - without supplying any economic data to support his claim - called Bachmann's pledge "flat out nuts" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Speaking on the floor of the Senate Saturday, Marco Rubio (R-Fl.) said, "If we had a billion dollars for every time I heard the words 'Tea Party extremist,' we could solve this debt problem."

Proving his point about the vitriolic name-calling of conservatives so prevalent now, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman began his most recent piece, "Watching today's Republicans being led around by an extremist Tea Party":

What is it with New York Times columnists likening Republicans to terrorist groups? On Sunday Nicholas Kristof  compared Tea Party sympathizers in Congress to Al Qaeda. Now Thomas Friedman in his Wednesday column “Can’t We Do This Right?”, not content to argue that Tea Party Republicans are misguided, calls them the “Hezbollah faction” of the G.O.P.

Good news, we’re doomed, says New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in Wednesday’s "The Earth Is Full." (Has the globe-trotting Friedman never been to Texas?) But we can still save ourselves eventually, as long as we realize that "the consumer-driven growth model is broken and we have to move to a more happiness-driven growth model, based on people working less and owning less." But does that "own less" solution include the privileged columnist as well?

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century -- when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all -- and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?

NewsBusters previously reported that CNN's Fareed Zakaria had met with President Obama face-to-face to discuss foreign policy. Obama's other reported "source" of information on foreign policy, New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman, mocked Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu Sunday on CNN, and added that he should have dutifully obeyed the demands Obama outlined in his recent Mideast speech.

According to a May 11 New York Times article, Friedman was one of two foreign policy journalists "sounded out" by President Obama for information on foreign affairs. The other, CNN's Fareed Zakaria, has previously criticized Israel's prime minister for not agreeing to the Israeli-Palestinian borders laid out by Obama in his Mideast speech.

[Click here for audio. Video below the break.]

On Sunday's Face the Nation, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman denounced the proposed White House plan to use the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to curb rising gas prices: "That would rank in my top five worst ideas of 2011 so far....one thing we should finally be doing is using this opportunity to have a credible energy policy that begins to reduce our addiction to oil."

Friedman's idea of "credible energy policy" was to force Americans to continue to pay higher gas prices: "Gasoline is almost $4 a gallon. We know that's a red line where people really start to change their behavior. At a minimum, I'd be talking about a tax that basically says we're going to keep it at $4. If it goes below we'll true it up, if it goes above that we're not going to touch it."

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Over the last decade, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has written on the costs of the Iraq war, the federal deficit, the threat of global warming, and the uprisings in the Arab world. In Friedman’s view, all these problems have one simple solution: A $1-a-gallon hike in the gas tax.

 

In his Wednesday column, “If Not Now, When?” Friedman pushed the tax as having some tenuous connection to pushing democratic values in the Middle East:

Ronald Reagan may have won the Cold War by forcing the Soviet Union to realize that it could not compete financially or technologically with a revitalized United States. But to the American media, the Reagan defense buildup seemed like a plot designed to deny government aid to poor and hungry people. It was seemingly the only spending that caused the budget deficit, even bankrupted the country. Cranking up spending on supposedly unworkable new ideas like a national missile defense system was “absolute nonsense,” as ABC’s Ted Koppel told Phil Donahue in 1987.

A 1985 Los Angeles Times survey of reporters found out how McGovernite liberalism dominated the press: 84 percent of reporters and editors supported a so-called “nuclear freeze” to ban all future nuclear missile deployment; 80 percent were opposed to increased defense spending; and 76 percent objected to aid to the Contra rebels fighting for democracy in Nicaragua. One side of this debate had an eye on permanent “peaceful coexistence.” The other side had an eye on victory.

New York Times correspondent Thomas Friedman is clearly unhappy about the Tea Party, so much so that he considers the movement "not that important."

Instead, he envisions another group, "which stretches from centrist Republicans to independents right through to centrist Democrats," sitting silently out there in America waiting for the right leader to emerge.

So wrote Friedman Wednesday in his "The Tea Kettle Movement":

On his PBS show, Charlie Rose usually begins with a snappy soundbite of the long interview to come. With New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman on Thursday night, there was this stunning clip at the show's top:

You know, Charlie, for 60 years you could say being a political leader was on balance about giving things away to people. That's what you did most of your time.  I think we're entering an era -- how long it will last I dare not predict -- where being in politics is going to be more than anything else about taking things away from people. And that shift from leaders giving things away to leaders taking things away, I don't think we know what that looks like over time.

Put aside for a moment that governments (half-solvent ones, at least) take away as much as they give. Friedman and Rose were discussing the recent British election, where the candidates all talked about the "pain" of government living within its means. 

Remember that $787-billion stimulus passed last year, the one that was supposed to keep unemployment from hitting double digits by invigorating a new green economy?  Well it hasn't exactly worked.

Conventional wisdom would suggest not trying it again. Based on the nearly 10 percent unemployment, it's obvious Keynesian economic policies, where the government is a major force in an economy, don't work. However, MSNBC's "Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough made the case for an even bigger trip down that route.

"We talked about Sputnik at the event we did last year," Scarborough said on his April 21 program. "I wrote in my book last year that Sputnik was the moment that Eisenhower, a Republican, leaned forward and created a new generation of engineers, a new generation of scientists. That led to the Mercury program, the Apollo program, a man walking on the moon and the Internet. Can we make that type of, again, long-term investment?"

Back in September, Tom Friedman, speaking of China, proclaimed that "there is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today."  That prompted Jonah Goldberg to call Friedman a "liberal fascist," drawing an example from his seminal book, Liberal Fascism, to demonstrate how Friedman's fawning over the Chi-Coms "is exactly the argument that was made by American fans of Mussolini in the 1920s."

But far from being abashed, Friedman is apparently so enamored of his formulation that he has repeated it virtually verbatim.  The Times columnist suffered another bad bout of Chi-Com envy on today's Meet The Press, guest-hosted by Tom Brokaw.

Perhaps President Barack Obama might have preferred New York Times columnist Tom Friedman to reserve these comments for their golf outings together, but has Friedman recognized this path toward a larger government is unsustainable?

On MSNBC's March 5 "Morning Joe," host Joe Scarborough recounted his childhood in the early 1970s and the poor economy. He explained there was a different focus - that his family was hoping for the economy to turn around and could have cared less about the other issues of the day - Vietnam, Watergate, etc. It was all about the economy.

"You know Tom Friedman, I remember in the early '70s, my dad worked for Lockheed, got laid off and he was without a job for 18 months," Scarborough said. "This is in the middle of Watergate was blowing up on TV and in the middle of Vietnam, as it was grinding to a very bloody, messy ending. And my family, we just cared about one thing. When we watched Walter Cronkite at night, we wanted to know if the economy was turning around. And we didn't understand what was going on in the college campuses."

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was chewing the scenery in a Wednesday discussion of global warming on CNN’s Amanpour show. He trashed Sen. James Inhofe for demanding an investigation into U.N. climate science, suggesting Inhofe needs to be investigated: "I'd love to see all the e-mails between his office and various coal and oil companies over the last 20 years....we'll let citizens and voters decide where the real science is."

Friedman also invoked Dick Cheney, oddly comparing Iraqi WMD to climate change: "I mean, I'm a Dick Cheney guy on this. I'm with Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney said, if there's a 1 percent chance that Iraq has a nuclear weapon, we need to take that on. Well, if there's a 1 percent chance on climate change, just like Cheney said -- I'm with Cheney -- we need to prepare for it."

Friedman appeared on CNN alongside leftist NASA scientist James Hansen -- who insisted that cap-and-trade was for wimps, when we needed a massive carbon tax -- and in a surprising nod to balance, Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. Amanpour began by asking about Inhofe’s call for an investigation:

New York Times bias often came with a smile in the early part of 2009, with the paper falling hard for Obama's "historic" presidency and limitless intellect. But by late summer that smile had curdled into a snarl, as Times reporters seethed at“angry,” “bitter,” and, above all, “white” tea party protesters who challenged the president on his attempted takeover of health care and his massive spending proposals.

Times Watch welcomes first-time judge Scott Johnson to join Thomas Lifson and Don Luskin in choosing the most biased quotes as their "favorite" from the Times in 2009.

Scott Johnson of the Powerline blog went beyond the call of duty and may qualify for hazard pay, picking favorites in each category. But he found this quote from Thomas Friedman's September 9 column in praise of Communist China the worst of all:

It's a good thing New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wasn't a used car salesman because CNBC "Squawk on the Street" co-host Mark Haines would have driven off the lot in a lemon.

Friedman appeared on the Dec. 14 broadcast of "Squawk on the Street" to promote the paperback release of his book, "Hot, Flat, and Crowded." And once again, he made the case the United States is lagging behind in green technology and the only way to overcome this innovation gap is to set some sort of premium on the price of using carbon-based energy sources, as he meticulously argued in his book.

Friedman insisted it will take action by the government to impose these premiums and to grant some sort of long-term subsidy to stimulate this innovation. Haines, showing he was sold on Friedman's premise, expressed his doubt this could ever be set in motion.

Thomas Friedman of the New York Times dismissed the ClimateGate scandal during an interview on Thursday’s Situation Room on CNN, labeling it “nonsense” and an “idiot debate.” Anchor Wolf Blitzer only pressed Friedman slightly when he repeated his call for a “price on carbon that would trigger mass innovation in green technology,” meaning a large surtax on fossil fuels.

Blitzer raised ClimateGate during the second half of his interview with Friedman: “Let’s talk about ‘Hot, Flat and Crowded’ and global warming; this conference that’s under way in Copenhagen right now. The release of these e-mails, what’s called ‘ClimateGate,’ how much damage does that do to those who say man does have this significant role in global warming and this whole debate takes a new twist as a result of that?”

The New York Times columnist immediately played the “denier” card, and pointed to his favorite country, China, as an example of a society that wasn’t paying any attention to the scandal:

What's $200 billion annually, or roughly $1,761 per family per year, if it means lowering by 10 percent the chance that the world is going to end? It's a pittance to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

Friedman made an appearance on CNN's Dec. 3 "Campbell Brown" to promote the paperback release of his book, "Hot, Flat, and Crowded." Brown asked Friedman for his take on the ClimateGate scandal, and he insisted there should be transparency as far as the data is concerned.

"Well, these were hacked e-mails from one of the important climate research centers over in the U.K.," Friedman said. "And, frankly, Campbell, as someone who follows this issue, cares about it, I found some of those e-mails disappointing, frankly in the kind of way in which it seemed that they were trying to keep certain research out, you know, of the discussion, because I think transparency here is really ... is everything. OK. You say this. I say that. Here is my data. Here is your data."

Thomas Friedman of the New York Times repeated his endorsement of the “smaller footprint” approach in Afghanistan on CNN’s Campbell Brown program on Wednesday, but couldn’t bring himself to explicitly oppose President Obama’s move to send 30,000 additional U.S. troops to the country: “I have great sympathy for the President....my gut instinct was...I wish there was a smaller way to try to do this.”

Anchor Campbell Brown devoted the entire interview of the New York Times columnist, which began 13 minutes into the 8 pm Eastern hour, to Afghanistan. Brown first tried to get Friedman to expand on his doubting position on the troop increase: “General McChrystal basically getting what he wants with these additional troops- you think it’s a bad idea, I know. Explain your thinking.” The left-of-center columnist tried to spin his argument to be more about the state of the economy, and made his first hint of his sympathy with the President over the decision:

A lefty magazine editor has come up with a list of brilliant solutions to the planet's purported climate change problem: make the recession worse, make goods more expensive, and restrict all intercontinental travel to blimps.

So said Emily Douglas, web editor for The Nation, who, when asked Wednesday how we could "reverse our culture of consumerism," replied immediately "make the recession worse."

She later claimed that her response was a bit "tongue-in-cheek," according to CNS News, but admitted that her magazine "never shies away from doomsday scenarios."

What's gotten into New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman lately? In the last month the mustachioed globe-hopper has praised Communist China for getting things done and seen a looming assassination threat to Barack Obama based on tea party rallies and some stray "Birthers."

His Wednesday column was on the three bombs allegedly hanging over all of our heads, two of them of the metaphorical variety: Debt and climate change. To make his case that climate change is some kind of imminent and deadly threat, Friedman conjured up a wildly implausible scenario out of a dystopian science fiction movie.

Today's youth are growing up in the shadow of three bombs -- any one of which could go off at any time and set in motion a truly nonlinear, radical change in the trajectory of their lives.

The first, of course, is still the nuclear threat, which, for my generation, basically came from just one seemingly rational enemy, the Soviet Union, with which we shared a doctrine of mutual assured destruction. Today, the nuclear threat can be delivered by all kinds of states or terrorists, including suicidal jihadists for whom mutual assured destruction is a delight, not a deterrent.

But there are now two other bombs our children have hanging over them: the debt bomb and the climate bomb.

As we continue to build up carbon in the atmosphere to unprecedented levels, we never know when the next emitted carbon molecule will tip over some ecosystem and trigger a nonlinear climate event -- like melting the Siberian tundra and releasing all of its methane, or drying up the Amazon or melting all the sea ice in the North Pole in summer. And when one ecosystem collapses, it can trigger unpredictable changes in others that could alter our whole world.

CNN’s Jack Cafferty and Wolf Blitzer endorsed Thomas Friedman’s “scary and sobering column” in the New York Times on Wednesday’s Situation Room, where the liberal writer compared the current American political climate to that of Israel in 1995 prior to Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination. After Cafferty remarked that “Friedman’s right,” Blitzer labeled the column “powerful.”

The CNN commentator began his 5 pm Eastern “Cafferty File” segment with his “scary and sobering” label of the New York Times column. After summarizing it and reading a quote where Friedman warned that “something very dangerous is happening” in the American political dialogue, Cafferty remarked that “Friedman’s right. You don’t have to look any further than protesters comparing President Obama to a Nazi, or a Facebook poll asking if he should be killed. Tom Friedman says even if you’re not worried about violence against Mr. Obama, you should be worried about what’s happening to American politics.”