Straight From The Hart

A document with a vague sounding name like Paris Agreement being bandied about in the cable news doesn’t garner much attention from the general public, even somebody like me who lives and breathes this stuff about 15 hours every day in one form or another. The “mentions” have become more prominent now as the Agreement has become a source of contention between our outgoing president and the incoming Trump administration. The Paris Agreement has to do with global warming, or climate change as the proponents now choose to call it.  The Agreement stems from a meeting in Paris held in December, 2015 at the 21st Conference of the Parties by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The language of the agreement was negotiated by representatives of 195 countries and adopted by consensus on December 15 of that year.  It went into effect on November 4 of this year, which explains the more than usual interest in recent weeks. The goal of...

My column from Lebanon newspaper 10/19/16: On April 10, 2015, a cocktail party for “leading news figures and top-level Clinton staff” was held at the Upper East Side home of  Joel Benenson in New York City.  Benenson is the chief strategist for the  Hillary Clinton campaign.    It was also described as a “fully off the record” gathering designed to set out Clinton’s campaign message shortly before her official announcement on April 12 to run for the presidency. Those reporters who responded to the invitation that they would attend included Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos from ABC, Mark Halperin and John Heillman from Bloomberg, Rachel Maddow from MSNBC,  Savannah Guthrie from NBC,  Maggie Haberman from the New York Times,  and others whose names may not be as familiar to you  from CBS, CNN,  Daily Beast, Huffington Post, the New Yorker, PEOPLE magazine, Politico, VICE and VOX. Food and drinks were provided by the ca...