I hope President Obama read about Maddie Parlier as he was working on his State of the Union address. Parlier is the subject of Adam Davidson’s illuminating article in the current issue of The Atlantic.
Parlier’s father abandoned her when she was young and crashed his car while driving drunk, killing himself and a family of four. Maddie is smart and hard-working. She did reasonably well in high school but got pregnant her senior year.
She and the father of her child split up, which put the kibosh on her college dreams because she couldn’t afford day care. She temped for a while. Her work ethic got her noticed, and she got a job as an unskilled laborer at Standard Motor Products, which makes fuel injectors.
BRUSSELS.- Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has a lot on his mind these days, from cutting the defense budget to managing the drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. But his biggest worry is the growing possibility that Israel will attack Iran over the next few months.
Panetta believes there is a strong likelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May or June — before Iran enters what Israelis described as a "zone of immunity" to commence building a nuclear bomb. Very soon, the Israelis fear, the Iranians will have stored enough enriched uranium in deep underground facilities to make a weapon — and only the United States could then stop them militarily.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t want to leave the fate of Israel dependent on American action, which would be triggered by intelligence that Iran is building a bomb, which it hasn’t done yet.
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak may have signaled the prospect of an Israeli attack soon when he asked last month to postpone a planned U.S.-Israel military exercise that would culminate in a live-fire phase in May. Barak apologized that Israel couldn’t devote the resources to the annual exercise this spring.
No aprenden. Ese feminismo barato –aunque caro para los contribuyentes– que se gastan en las presumibles izquierdas es una necedad. De la fotografía para "Vogue" en los principios del desastre al escalofriante documento gráfico de Carmen Chacón con las maduras nenas en el Círculo de Bellas Artes. ¿Qué gana con estos guateques tan absurdos? "Mujeres de la política y la cultura". Qué tostón de convocatoria. El feminismo profesional sólo convence a las profesionales, que en buena medida viven de eso. Se ha quedado rancio y antiguo. Recuperar a María Teresa Fernández de la Vega en plan apoyo constante es de una antigüedad pavorosa. Pasan los días y los candidatos socialistas insisten en sus naufragios. Para compensar el peso de Fernández de la Vega, Zabaleta, Pajín y Matilde Fernández, Rubalcaba ha presentado también su apoyo constante. Felipe González. Original y futurista. Y me pregunto: ¿No existe nadie en el PSOE que se atreva a alzar la voz? ¿Tan atada y bien atada – me suena la frase– está en el socialismo la dependencia de la mamandurria?
“Quién sólo conoce España, no conoce España”, nos dice el gran hispanista británico Hugh Thomas. Y esa oración es válida, en estos tiempos de la mundialización, para todo el quehacer humano. Ni lo bueno ni lo malo conocen fronteras. La misma tecnología que nos contacta a todos para el discurrir diario, puede ser usada por quienes ven la política, la cultura o la economía como una oportunidad más para su provecho propio, o para atacar la democracia, la libertad y la paz, valores primordiales para el Partido Demócrata Cristiano de Cuba.
Foro Internacional
