New Internationalism

"I think [Mitt Romney] is looking for a way to distinguish himself from President Obama's foreign policy, and since he doesn't have a significant difference in the actual policy prescriptions that he's calling for, what he's resorting to is simply saying, 'President Obama isn't tough enough. His rhetoric isn't firm enough. He's leading from behind instead of in front.' But when pressed, what would you actually do? He's given out policies that are really not that different."

Most importantly, nobody dared to breathe the truth, lest it actually get out -- America Is Not Broke.

That's right, the debate was an exercise in ridiculousness that produced no insight, no plan, no inspiration, no leadership, no truth. We are rich. We have enough money to put nutritious food on the tables of the one in five U.S. kids who are hungry and undernourished. We have enough money to help the laid-off moms and dads make ends meet until they get another job.

 As Phyllis Bennis from the Institute for Policy Studies writes, the Israeli position is much more dangerous. “There is no accepted international definition of 'nuclear capability.' Usually it refers to some combination of access to enriched uranium or the ability to enrich uranium, and the scientific know-how to follow the how-to-build-a-nuke instructions that are pretty much all over the internet. Like every country that produces nuclear power Iran has all that.”

I think his message was aimed much more at President Obama and the American people, as well as his own constituency back home, more than it was at Iran directly or the General Assembly as a whole. His prop, as you have defined it, is a rather cartoonish sort of grade-school level poster of a bomb. And he sort of used this funny language where he said – this is a bomb, this is a fuse.

“Elections are sometimes signs of hope. By themselves, elections don’t mean very much and I don’t think this one will mean very much,” opined Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.

The council was created "precisely to prevent the biggest powers, the strongest powers, from going to war, partly against each other but in general to restrain them," said Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington.

"From that vantage point, the so-called deadlock of the council, the refusal to endorse war, is exactly what the UN role should be," she said.