Assembly Leader Sheldon Silver certainly knows how to obstruct progress; congestion pricing was an example.
It is refreshing and challenging to see an article pointing out how environmentalists actually obstruct progress toward sustainability.
After that Britain continued to obstruct progress, giving other member governments the opportunity to hide their negotiating difficulties behind British intransigence.
But as Susanna Agostini, head of the health and social-services commission in Florence, put it, "the law and the campaign against its abolition attack science and obstruct progress".
At the start of the CSW57, Michelle Bachelet made very clear that despite sensitivities, culture and tradition should not be used to obstruct progress in this field.
Yet when Group of 8 leaders met in Genoa, Italy, two weeks ago, they chastised protesters with warnings that they would only obstruct progress for the poor.
But on that issue, as Copenhagen revealed, China is not the self-touted rising superpower but a scheming power that uses poor states as a front to obstruct progress through procedural wrangling.
On a host of issues from Iran to Sudan, it has used its main geopolitical asset, its permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, to obstruct progress, hiding behind the excuse that it does not want to intervene in other countries' affairs.
Facebook showed it would rather obstruct progress, even progress it had lobbied for, than provide real constructive criticism.
The ability of the Senate minority party – and even individual Senators – to delay and obstruct progress can be extraordinarily frustrating.
"Senate Republicans have already voted twice to obstruct progress on this legislation," said Pelosi in a speech National Conference of States Legislatures in Louisville.
