Word: speeches
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This is a lesson that all U.S. leaders learn. A President cannot dictate the terms of political debate in the U.S., but he can at least set them. Yet as Obama prepares for a foreign trip in which he will give a much heralded speech to the Islamic world, he has to come to terms with the fact that, beyond the water's edge, he depends on the cooperation of others to get things done - European armed forces, Chinese bond holders, an Arab public suspicious of any American initiative, and an obdurate Stalinist Korean dynasty...
...dramatic introduction in the East Room, the President is dazzled by his nominee's Puerto Rican background. Obama has an unfortunate tendency to conflate personality and principle. "I stand here today as someone whose own life was made possible by these documents," he said during his national-security speech at the National Archives in May. As if there were any American for whom that is not true. Or as if ethnic minorities can make that claim more plausibly than other Americans. (See pictures of Judge Sonia Sotomayor...
...would need a heart of stone not to be inspired by Sotomayor's story. But does her superior knowledge of "ordinary" people arise from being Hispanic? Sotomayor thinks so, if we believe the snippet from a 2001 speech at the University of California, Berkeley, law school that rippled across the Internet this week. She believes judges cannot help being affected by gender and ethnic identity. "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences," she said, "would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life...
...possibility of a "dirty" nuclear bomb - the Bush Administration had no choice but to authorize the use of whatever means necessary to extract information from suspected terrorists. "We had a lot of blind spots after the attacks on our country," former Vice President Cheney explained in a May 21 speech in Washington. "We didn't know about al-Qaeda's plans, but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and a few others did know. And with many thousands of innocent lives potentially in the balance, we didn't think it made sense to let the terrorists answer questions in their own good time...
...When I think 'Steven Chu,' I think of someone who has worked hard to solve this particular problem," Dechter said. "I think it would have been almost inappropriate for him to try to give a too general speech...It would have been weird...