Roundup: Media's Take

Michael Koplow: Hiding in Plain Sight

[Michael Koplow is a doctoral candidate in the government department at Georgetown University.] As the explosive, ongoing release of hundreds of thousands of State Department diplomatic cables shows, official Washington is anxious about the direction that Turkey's government is taking the country -- and particularly the influence of Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, long credited as the architect of its foreign policy. And judging by the academic-turned-international-strategist's do

Andy Kroll: The New American Oligarchy

[Andy Kroll is a reporter in the D.C. Bureau of Mother Jones and an associate editor at TomDispatch.com. You can email him at akroll (at) motherjones (dot) com.]There is a war underway. I'm not talking about Washington’s bloody misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, but a war within our own borders. It’s a war fought on the airwaves, on television and radio and over the Internet, a war of words and images, of half-truth, innuendo, and raging lies. I'm talking about a political war

Soner Cagaptay: Sultan of the Muslim World

[Soner Cagaptay is a Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and is the co-author, with Scott Carpenter, of Regenerating the U.S.-Turkey Partnership.] Turkey may be the most Muslim nation in the world. It was forged through blood and war as a state exclusively by and for Muslims -- a claim it shares only with Pakistan. Fleeing persecution in Europe, Russia, and the Caucasus, millions of Turkish and non-Turkish Muslims settled there, and today almost half of Tu

Matthew Shaffer: The Espionage Act and Bradley Manning

[Matthew Shaffer writes for the National Review.] ...[T]here is a legal question of whether Manning is guilty of espionage. He handed documents over to, charitably construed, a journalist — not an enemy power. And it’s not clear that he had a specific intent to undermine the U.S., her interests, or her allies. So does this still constitute espionage? Yes. There’s a closely analogous precedent for this case. In 1985, Samuel Morison, the namesake and grandson of the famo

Dana Milbank: A Strange Way to Honor the Founding Fathers

[Dana Milbank is a columnist for the WaPo.] Republicans gained control of the House last month on a promise to "restore the Constitution." So it is no small irony that one of their first orders of business is an attempt to rewrite the Constitution. On Tuesday, Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah), a member of the House GOP's majority transition committee, introduced a constitutional amendment that would allow a group of states to nullify federal laws with which they disag

Lincoln Caplan: Exploring the Meaning of ‘Constitutional Conservatism’

[Lincoln Caplan is the editor and president of Legal Affairs.] John Boehner, the next House speaker, expresses the message of constitutional conservatism in calling for every bill to identify the part of the Constitution it rests on. Sarah Palin used the phrase to campaign for limited government. Tea Party members call themselves constitutional conservatives. It is the new mantle in which Republican politicians are wrapping themselves.... A polemic called the Mount Vern

Ed Meese and Richard Perle: New Start ... What Would Reagan Do?

[Mr. Meese was attorney general and a member of the National Security Council, and Mr. Perle was assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration.] President Obama has taken to the airwaves to pump up support for the New Start Treaty with Russia by arguing that Ronald Reagan would have endorsed it. Both of us had the high honor of knowing our 40th president. We worked for Ronald Reagan, and we're sure that's not the case. There are many reasons why this treat

Seumas Milne: WikiLeaks is holding US global power to account

[Seumas Milne is a Guardian columnist and associate editor.] Official America's reaction to the largest leak of confidential government files in history is tipping over towards derangement. What the White House initially denounced as a life-threatening "criminal" act and Hillary Clinton branded an "attack on the international community" has been taken a menacing stage further by the newly emboldened Republican right. WikiLeaks' release of 250,000 Uni

Jacob Sullum: The Appearance of Corruption

[Reason Senior Editor Jacob Sullum is a nationally syndicated columnist.] When Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901, he quickly established a reputation as a trust buster, railing against the power of giant corporations. In 1902 he ordered a Sherman Act lawsuit aimed at dissolving the Northern Securities Company, the first of 45 antitrust cases pursued during his administration. For the 1904 election, Roosevelt amassed a $2.2 million war chest ($52 million in today’s dollars)

Peter Smith: What Does the Food Safety Bill Really Mean?

[Peter Smith has covered food, agriculture and science for Gastronomica, Saveur, Wired, and The Atlantic.] This morning, the lame-duck Senate did something remarkable. It passed S. 510, the Food Safety Modernization Act, with a whopping 73-25 bipartisan majority.... The legislation still has to be reconciled with H.R. 2749, the House bill of food safety.... In short, there’s still a chance it could fail because of concerns about where the estimate $1.6 billion to fund t

Peter Osnos: How China Elevates the Nobel Peace Prize

[Peter Osnos is a journalist turned book editor/publisher. He spent 18 years working at various bureaus for The Washington Post before founding Public Affairs Books.] The Nobel Peace Prize, unlike those, say, for medicine or chemistry, sometimes lands with a splat. There was Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, who were awarded the medal in 1973 for bringing peace to Vietnam, which they did not. In 1994, the prize went to Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres for the Oslo Accord

John Yemma: Don't Look Too Closely at Museum Antiquities

[John Yemma is editor of The Christian Science Monitor.] ...How did Egyptian objects come to the MFA or other Western museums? A note at the MFA explains that the “Egyptian Antiquities Service generously awarded a portion of all archaeological discoveries to the institutions that conducted the digs.” Fair enough. But there’s no such note in the Mesoamerican collection. And there’s no escaping the troubling past of some of the pieces. You see, most Mayan antiquities in American and E

Patrick B. Pexton: The Fear of Gays in the Military Just Like Earlier Fear of Women

[Patrick B. Pexton is a contributing editor at National Journal. He previously reported on the military for Army Times.] ...[F]or straight servicemen, the fear of gays is much like that expressed when females began entering most U.S. military units in the 1990s. Men suddenly saw that women could fly fighter jets, sail ships, fire cannons and face death, and some felt it diminished the band of brothers they joined to prove that they were, well, men. Similarly, if gay men can also mak

Vladimir Ryzhkov: Medvedev's Address Must Break From the Past

[Vladimir Ryzhkov, a State Duma deputy from 1993 to 2007, hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.] Today, President Dmitry Medvedev will give his third annual state-of-the-nation address to the Federal Assembly. And yet, it is difficult to recall exactly what he spoke about in the first two addresses, which, according to the Constitution, should be the main speech by the head of state and should define the political course of the country’s leadership for each subsequent ye

Matthew Duss: WikiLeaks and the Failed Bush Doctrine

[Matthew Duss is a research associate with the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and a blogger at CAPAF’s Wonk Room.] Some time between Saturday evening and Monday morning, it suddenly became important to U.S. hawks that we take seriously what Arab leaders have been saying about instability in the Middle East. I refer, of course, to the comments from Arab leaders, released as part of the WikiLeaks cable dump, urging the United States to more aggressively curb I

John B. Judis: A Defense of Wikileaks ... How it could actually improve U.S. foreign policy

[John B. Judis is a senior editor of The New Republic.] The Obama administration has condemned Wikileaks for its second release within a year of classified foreign policy documents. And some liberal commentators have backed up the administration’s complaints. And I am not going to argue that the administration doesn’t have a case. Governments rely on candid assessments from their diplomats; and if Americans in overseas embassies have to assume that they are writing for the general p

Elliot Abrams: Dictators, Democracies and WikiLeaks

[Mr. Abrams served as an assistant secretary of state from 1981 to 1989 and as a deputy national security adviser from 2005 to 2009.] Why are diplomatic cables secret at all? It's a fair question to ask as we assess the WikiLeaks disclosures and the damage they may do. Overall, there are very few surprises in these cables. Anyone who regularly reads this newspaper, follows congressional debates, or watches cable news will know that there is tension between the United States and Afgh

David R. Francis: Not Even Economists Understand the Economy

[David R. Francis writes a weekly column for the CS Monitor.] Why is it that economists don't understand – at a deep and scientific level – how the economy works? Two centuries after Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations," and more than seven decades after the Great Depression, they're still fighting over what works and what doesn't. The debate is far from theoretical. The fate of nations, politicians, and millions of working people depends on policymakers getting i

Sheldon Richman: Bradley Manning is a Hero

[Sheldon Richman is the editor of The Freeman magazine and blogs at Free Association.] ...Mannings is a hero. When a government secretly engages in such consequential activities as aggressive wars justified by at best questionable and at worst fabricated intelligence, covert bombings and assassinations, and diplomatic maneuvering designed to support such global meddling, the people in whose name that government acts – and who could suffer retaliation – have a right to know.

Anthony Barnett: Student Power: 1968... 2010

[Anthony Barnett is the founder of openDemocracy and the Co-Editor of its UK section, Our Kingdom.] I've just been in to University College London to show solidarity with the students, including Guy Aitchison, now occupying the Jeremy Bentham Room #UCLoccupation. It freshened up my memories of the first wave of student occupations in the late sixties. Much feels the same, except for the laptops and phones and the hired in security. Others might want to add their reflections.