Roundup: Media's Take

Charles M. Blow: Let’s Rescue the Race Debate

[Charles Blow is a columnist for the NYT.] “There is another class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. ... Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs ... There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get well.” This 100-year-old, cobbled-together quote from the “the Great Accomm

Fred Block: How Obama Should Deal with a Republican House

[Fred Block’s new book, edited with Matthew Keller, is called State of Innovation: The U.S. Government’s Role in Technology Development, by Paradigm Publishers. It documents the economic importance of federal innovation spending.] ...The pundits have offered Obama two strategies to deal with the situation. The first is to follow Bill Clinton’s post-1994 trajectory—move sharply to the center and differentiate yourself from the liberal wing of the party. But this strategy does nothing

Boris Fishman: Understanding Why Soviet Jews Fleeced the Restitution Fund

[Boris Fishman is a 2010-2011 fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.] Last week, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York charged 17 Russian-speaking employees and associates of two Holocaust-restitution funds with defrauding the claims programs of $42 million. The suspects allegedly recruited Russian-speaking applicants and either doctored or invented claim-worthy stories on their behalf. For me, the news served as a doleful

Bjorn Lomborg: Cost-Effective Ways to Address Climate Change

One of the scarier predictions about global warming is the suggestion that melting glaciers and ice caps could cause sea levels to rise as much as 15 to 20 feet over the next century. Set aside the fact that the best research we have - from the United Nations climate panel - says that global sea levels are not likely to rise more than about 20 inches by 2100. Rather, let's imagine that over the next 80 or 90 years, a giant port city - say, Tokyo - found itself engulfed by a sea-level rise of abo

Daniel Stone: Hail to the Chiefs

[Daniel Stone is a senior reporter in Newsweek's Washington bureau covering national politics and environmental policy.] In 1936 Franklin Roosevelt felt overwhelmed. The New Deal had begun to spawn dozens of new agencies, and Roosevelt, fearful of the fragmentation of the executive branch, asked for help. The Brownlow Committee, an independent panel tasked with finding a new model of White House management, proposed offering the president some personal staff. “They would remain in t

John B. Judis: You've Got Them All Wrong, Mr. President

[John B. Judis is a senior editor of The New Republic and a Visiting Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.] The White House thinks that Democrats got drubbed in the election because they lost the support of “independent” voters. Obama’s advisers, the Washington Post reported, “are deeply concerned about winning back political independents, who supported Obama two years ago by an eight-point margin but backed Republicans for the House this year by 19 points. To d

Karen Greenberg: Guilty Until Proven Guilty

[Karen Greenberg is the Executive Director at the Center on Law and Security at New York University Law School. She is author of The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days (Oxford University Press, 2009).]Liberty versus security, that initial heated debate over the war on terror, is again rearing its head with much bravado, nowhere more so than in our nation’s courtrooms where American justice continues to pay the price.Over the course of the past nine years, in the n

Simon Tisdall: U.S. & Europe Still Need Each Other

[Simon Tisdall is an assistant editor of the Guardian and a foreign affairs columnist.] Rebuffed in Asia and repudiated at home, Barack Obama's bent and battered bandwagon heads for Europe this week, looking for a change of political fortune, or at least a welcoming smile. But sulky, insecure Eurocrats, awaiting his arrival in Lisbon for Saturday's one-day EU-US summit, have not forgotten last May's Madrid debacle, when he failed to show up at all. Obama's "snub", they say

Dmitri Trenin: Will Killing START Kill Obama's Reset?

[Dmitri Trenin is director of the Carnegie Moscow Center.] Jon Kyl has spoken. The Senate minority whip, emboldened by his party's midterm election gains, said Tuesday that the Senate shouldn't vote on the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty this year, likely sealing the fate of what would have been the signature foreign-policy accomplishment of U.S. President Barack Obama's first two years in the White House. If the Senate doesn't attempt a vote before the end of the year, the

Betsy McCaughey: This Lame Duck Session Should Be the Last

[Ms. McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York state, is the author of "Obama Health Law: What It Says and How to Overturn It".] Americans ought to make this lame duck session of Congress the last in history. Members who lose re-election have no moral authority to continue governing: They were fired by the voters, who should demand that they clean out their desks and go home. On Nov. 2, the voters replaced the Democratic majority in the House of Repr

Nick Turse: Twenty-First Century Blowback?

[Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com. An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. His latest book, The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Verso Books), which brings together leading analysts from across the political spectrum, has just gone into its second printing. Turse is currently a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute. You can follow him on Twitter @NickTurse, on Tumblr, and o

Steve Kornacki: Dittoheads, Race and Denial

[Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor.]On Tuesday, I learned that there is a circumstance under which right-wingers are happy to align themselves with RINOs: in hindsight over the issue of civil rights.I discovered this almost by accident, after including in a post about Rush Limbaugh's confused racial paranoia -- he can't seem to decide

John Shattuck: By Admitting Its Human Rights Problems, the U.S. Helps Other Nations Admit Theirs

[John Shattuck is a former Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, a former US Ambassador to the Czech Republic, and the current president of Central European University in Budapest. A version of this essay previously appeared on The Hill’s Congress Blog.] ...Isn’t UN-sponsored human rights reporting just a platform for human rights abusers? On the contrary, these international obligations strengthen the case against abusive governments, especially if the

Bob Greene: Smoke Got In Their Eyes

[Bob Greene is the author of “Late Edition: A Love Story.”] FRANK SINATRA, exuding crisp sophistication, a squared pocket handkerchief peeking out of his suit jacket, a fedora tilted back from his forehead, eased into the opening words of “I Get a Kick Out of You.” Behind him, in this 1950s black-and-white television appearance, was a giant blowup of what looks like an album cover, with the title “Music for Smokers Only.”... This presentation, included in a new boxed DV

Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann: The Fog of Containment

[Flynt Leverett directs the New America Foundation's Iran Initiative. Hillary Mann Leverett heads a political risk consulting firm. Both lecture at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and publish www.RaceForIran.com.] In the coming weeks, the United States may well be joining a new round of nuclear negotiations with Iran. But, rather than working to promote their success, most commentators seem to be consumed with explainin

Jonah Goldberg: The Clinton Road Map Won't Work for Obama

[Jonah Goldberg is editor at large for the National Review and writes a column for the LA Times.] Should Obama pull a Clinton? This has been a burning question inside the Beltway ever since the polls showed the Great Shellacking bearing down on the White House. As most know by now, pulling a Clinton isn't anything kinky; it simply means moving to the center, or "triangulating" between the unpopular left and the unpopular right. That's what President Clinton did a

Michael Gerson: Oklahoma's Faith-Baiting Initiative

[Michael Gerson is a former speechwriter for President Bush and a columnist for the WaPo.] Just to be on the safe side, voters in Oklahoma this month overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment that prevents the Talibanization of the Sooner State. Henceforth, there will be no public stonings in Ponca City, no forced burqa wearing in Bartlesville, no sharia law in Lawton.... But the problem with the anti-sharia movement runs deeper. In its purest form, it is stran

Craig Fehrman: Reagan is Sarah Palin's Crutch

[Craig Fehrman is at work on a book about presidents and their books.] "Sarah Palin's Alaska" didn't debut until Sunday night, but the former governor has been defending it for weeks. After Karl Rove wondered how a reality show fit "the American calculus of 'that helps me see you in the Oval Office,'" Fox News gave Palin a chance to respond. "You know, I agree with that," she said. "Those standards have to be high for someone who would ever want to

Ramesh Ponnuru: 1995 and 2011 ... Congresses Compared

[Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor at National Review.] Next year in Washington is not going to be a replay of 1995. The analogy is on everyone’s mind in the capital. Many Republicans worry that President Obama will win the public-relations war against Speaker-to-be John Boehner as handily as Bill Clinton bested Newt Gingrich. They should relax. The parallels are obvious. Both times, a young Democrat had succeeded George Bush in the presidency and then worked with a Dem

Stephen Blank: The Real Reset ... Moscow Refights the Cold War

[Stephen Blank is a professor at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College. The opinions expressed are his own.] Presidents Obama and Medvedev have publicly insisted that “hitting the reset button” has improved more than just the atmospherics of U.S.-Russian relations. Russian officials in particular claim that this policy shows that Washington has begun to take Moscow’s interests seriously. But enthusiasts on both sides are hard-pressed to come up with evidence t