Word: claims
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...That should not be surprising. Justice, after all, is an older concept than democracy; societies which had no conception of democracy as we know it nonetheless had sophisticated systems of justice. But it is important to distinguish two ways in which justice is relevant to claims of American leadership. First, there is a search for equity between the competing claims of individuals - the sort that might be made by a Palestinian farmer, for example, who has seen water from the local aquifer appropriated by an Israeli settlement. We ignore such claims, and the sullen outrage that accompanies them...
...this context, it made sense to think, and speak, of "American leadership." If you were an American policymaker in 1945, you did not actually need to make a moral claim to leadership. You did not need to argue that because America was an idea, a city on a hill, the last, best hope of mankind, it had a right and responsibility to remake the world. It was much simpler than that. American leadership in the post-1945 world was not a moral aspiration, or a policy goal, at all. It was, as the Marxists would say, an objective reality...
...America that is sketched in passages such as that - one that does not claim a monopoly of wisdom; one that recognizes that the world has changed; one that does not argue that simply because America was founded on a great idea 232 years ago, it has a moral superiority over everyone else today - is an America to which others would listen. We will soon know if such an America is taking shape...
Davis does not claim to be middle of the road; he criticizes Childers for being middle of the road. Davis is a throwback to the small-government GOP revolutionaries of 1994, before they took power and discovered that Big Government had its perks. He believes the trouble with the Bush era has been overspending, and he's hammering away at Obama, Pelosi and the specter of a liberal counterrevolution that would turn health care over to the government. When I remind him that Medicare is a government program, Davis doesn't hesitate: "And look how great that turned...
Chocolate is getting a makeover. With the commodity price of cocoa nearly doubling over the past year, Hershey's and Mars--which claim two-thirds of the U.S. chocolate market--have shifted focus from mass-market bars to upscale gourmet in order to shore up profit margins. That's bitter news for some: to cut costs, Hershey's recently replaced cocoa butter with vegetable oil in several products, which is why the labels on Mr. Goodbar, Milk Duds and Krackel now have to say things like "chocolatey" instead of "milk chocolate." But even as the king of American candy cheapens...