The New York Sun, ‘Bound Together’

Worth reading on line at ‘Bound Together’ or in full below. President Obama's Tucscon speech:

President Obama and Sarah Palin Embrace a Nation
Editorial of The New York Sun January 12, 2011

President Obama spoke beautifully at Tucson this evening in a much-needed speech. It is hard to imagine how his remarks could have been improved. No doubt there will be some less generous in their appraisal, but that is our reaction. We haven’t heard such a performance from the president since his “one America” speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. At Tucson the president capped a week of shock, grief, and anger by reaching for the best in all of us and bidding America to recapture the wonder and the dream of a nine-year-old girl who had gone to hear her congresswoman.

One of the remarkable things that came through in the broadcasts we watched of the event was the way a whole nation turned to embrace what is, in Tucson, a relatively small, university town. The congresswoman, the judge, the student hero, the university president, and Republican governor, the former Democratic governor, the Mexican-American physician with Indian ancestry, they all, among others, know each other in the intimacy of a small town. Yet they represent themes that reach out to our whole vast country in an inspiring way.

The most surprising, and admirable, element of the Mr. Obama’s speech, was the pointedness with which he rejected the accusations against Sarah Palin and her colleagues in the Tea Party movement to whom the left wing of the president’s own party has been trying so shamelessly these past few days to attach the blame. Mr. Obama welcomed a wide debate on all the issues, but he made no plea for gun control, no call for regulations on political speech, nor bid for censorship of the images our politicians use in targeting their opponents. He may join in that; we shall see. This evening, he had a different message.

“At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized — at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do — it's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds,” he said in a none-too-subtle rejection of the Paul Krugman, New York Times line that has emerged in the wake of the shootings. “[W]hat we can't do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another.”

The president’s remarks were consonant with the statement earlier in the day by Sarah Palin, who has borne the brunt of the left-wing attacks with such admirable restraint since the New York Times and others began tuning up against her without so much as a quark of evidence that any of her rousing political rhetoric these past two years had anything to do with the killer’s motivations. The president’s point was Mrs. Palin’s point when she warned that journalists and pundits “should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn.”

Mrs. Palin, by speaking up for herself when so many turned on her, was speaking up for the rights of all Americans to participate vigorously in our national debate — and she was marking the same point the president made, when he called on each of us to enter the fray with “a good dose of humility.” We liked the way he put it when he said: “Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.”

Israelis rush to Tel Aviv

We in the States think we know traffic. Let me tell you, the people in Israel know traffic, too. Traffic jams getting to and out of Israel's major cities have increased greatly in the past 10 years. A country whose citizens could not embrace the automobile for 50 years because of the price of cars and fuel, now finds itself jammed with them.

So, no surprise that Israel, a technologically advanced country, is thinking outside the box when it comes to its highways and alleviating traffic flow problems. Privately owned toll roads are now being planned for a Tel Aviv highway that will charge drivers for when they drive.

Here's the report: Tel Aviv fast lane is a world first - Globes.

Be sure, if it works, look for similar thinking to occur in the United States.