Roundup: Media's Take

Jon Cowan and Evan Wolfson: A Quiet Shift in GOP Stance on Gay Marriage

[Jon Cowan is president and co-founder of Third Way, a moderate think tank, and Evan Wolfson is founder and executive director of Freedom to Marry.] As the "tea party's" outsider challenge to Republican Party orthodoxy grabs headlines, another, quieter revolution is unfolding inside the GOP. This rebellion has at its heart a truly surprising issue, one that could have long-term consequences for the party: gay and lesbian couples' freedom to marry. The latest e

John Pilger: Chile's Ghosts Are Not Being Rescued

[John Pilger, Australian-born, London-based journalist, film-maker and author. For his foreign and war reporting, ranging from Vietnam and Cambodia to the Middle East, he has twice won Britain's highest award for journalism. For his documentary films, he won a British Academy Award and an American Emmy. In 2009, he was awarded Australia's human rights prize, the Sydney Peace Prize. His latest film is "The War on Democracy."] The rescue of 33 miners in Chile is an extraordi

George F. Will: A Historic Shift in the Making This Election?

[George F. Will is a columnist for the WaPo.] Voters seem to think Congress is like a weedy lot -- that anything done to it will improve it -- so they seem poised to produce something not seen since 1981-82. Then, for the first time since 1952, a majority of senators were in their first terms. This was the result of three consecutive churning elections -- 1976, 1978 and 1980.... After November, Republican eyes will turn to the prize of the presidency in 2012. Concerning

Tim Rutten: In This Election, Follow the Money

[Tim Rutten is a columnist for LA Times.] The emergence of the neo-populist "tea party" has been the big story of this election cycle. After the votes are cast in November, we may realize that the political resurgence of big business and great wealth was far more significant in determining election outcomes. To an extent not seen in generations, companies and wealthy investors with a naked economic interest in influencing election results are pouring money int

Kathleen Parker: The Economic Crisis Was an 'Inside Job'

[Kathleen Parker writes a column for the WaPo.] If you haven't been humming tunes from "Les Misérables," you haven't seen "Inside Job," the new documentary about how our economic crisis evolved. The most forgiving American will want to seize a pitchfork and march on Wall Street. Or Harvard Square. Or in front of the White House. There are so many despicable parties, it's hard to pick a favorite. Is it time to reconsider the Axis of Evil?...

Fang Li-Zhi: Liu Xiaobo and the West's naive beliefs about freedom in China

[Fang Li-Zhi, a dissident physicist widely regarded as “China’s Sakharov” and the mentor to the student protestors at Tiananmen Square in 1989, now lives in exile in the United States, where he teaches at the University of Arizona.] I heartily applaud the Nobel Committee for awarding its Peace Prize to the imprisoned Liu Xiaobo for his long and nonviolent struggle for fundamental human rights in China. In doing so, the committee has challenged the West to re-examine a dangerous noti

Peter Ferrara: Obama ... so much worse than Carter

[Peter Ferrara is director of entitlement and budget policy at the Institute for Policy Innovation and general counsel of the American Civil Rights Union.] The most important fact to take from the September unemployment report released last week is that almost three years after the recession began the economy was still losing jobs! Almost 100,000 (95,000) additional jobs were lost last month from the economy overall. That makes 400,000 jobs lost since May. Moreover, in a regular ann

Con Coughlin: The Afghanistan War's Dividends in Europe

[Mr. Coughlin is executive foreign editor of London's Daily Telegraph.] If ever there was a compelling argument for not withdrawing American forces from Afghanistan, it is the State Department's latest terror-threat warning to American citizens that al Qaeda is planning a fresh wave of attacks in Europe. One of the main reasons that the State Department was able to issue the warning is the considerable military and intelligence investment the U.S. and its NATO allies ha

Jim Arkedis: Remember the Cole

[Jim Arkedis is the director of the National Security Project at the Progressive Policy Institute. He was a counter-terrorism analyst with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service which investigated the Cole attack, from 2002-07. jarkedis@ppionline.org.] America forgets Oct. 12 as seamlessly as it remembers Sept. 11. Ten years ago today, 17 U.S. Navy sailors were killed and 39 injured in an Al Qaeda attack against the U.S. destroyer Cole

Madeleine Albright and Igor Ivanov: We must restart our stalled nuclear talks

[Madeleine Albright was US secretary of state 1997-2001. Igor Ivanov was Russian foreign minister 1998-2004. A paper with ideas they submitted to the US and Russian governments is at www.brookings.edu and www.imemo.ru.] In September the US Senate foreign relations committee voted to support New Start, an important treaty limiting nuclear arms in America and Russia. It was a hopeful step, but sadly politics inte

William Easterly: Why No-Tech Ancient Civilizations Still Can't Catch Up

[William Easterly is professor of economics at New York University and author of The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.] ...Strangely, history has never figured into the equation when it comes to exploring why some countries prosper and others don't. To understand how it might relate, Diego Comin at Harvard Business School, Erick Gong at the University of California, Berkeley, and I started by compiling a list of 11 a

Mark Musser: The Original Enviro-Nazis

[Mark Musser is the author of "Nazi Oaks: The Green Sacrificial Offering of the Judeo-Christian Worldview in the Holocaust" and a commentary on the warning passages in the book of Hebrews called "Wrath or Rest: Saints in the Hands of an Angry God."] In light of the recent environmental controversy over splattergate, where the green propaganda ad in the United Kingdom explosively became gory red in the classroom, it is time to be reminded that the Nazis started ou

Patrick J. Buchanan: Food Stamp Nation

[Patrick J. Buchanan is co-founder of the American Conservative magazine.] “The lessons of history … show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.” These searing words about Depression-era welfare are from Franklin Roosevelt’s 1935 State of the Union Address. FDR feared

Leon Hadar: No World Order

[Leon Hadar is a Cato Institute research fellow in foreign-policy studies and author, most recently, of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East.] Since the end of geostrategic competition between the U.S. and the (former) USSR, pundits have been proposing new conceptual frameworks for understanding the evolving global political and economic balance — or imbalance — of power. Indeed, for close to two decades, scholars have been debating the direction that the “parad

Davey D: Oakland's Hip-Hop Activism

[Davey D is a journalist and community activist from the Bay Area. He hosts the daily syndicated radio show Hard Knock Radio.] One of the hallmarks of Oakland, Calif, is its activism and politics and its longtime alignment with hip-hop culture. When I say "aligned," I'm not talking about a rapper doing a song where he spits a couple of cool verses with a socially relevant message. Don't get me wrong; that's important, too, but that's just surface stuff. Political involveme

Robert Dreyfuss: In China-Bashing in the 2010 Election, Echoes of the Cold War

[Robert Dreyfuss, a Nation contributing editor, is an investigative journalist in Alexandria, Virginia, specializing in politics and national security. He is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam and is a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone, The American Prospect, and Mother Jones.] ...Now, according to the New York Times, China is becoming an issue in the 2010 election, with both Republicans and Democrats bashing Beijing in campaign

Ivan Briscoe: A Soundbite for the Poor

[Ivan Briscoe is a fellow of the Conflict Research Unit at the Clingendael Institute in The Hague.] The resurrection of John Maynard Keynes did not save him from being entombed once again. Dedicating his first term to the cause of social welfare has not prevented the Spanish prime minister from kindling a bonfire of his reforms. Sooner than anyone could have predicted, more rudely than in Hamelin, the state that rode back in 2008 has been shown the road out of town. How

David Marquand: Neither Hayek or Lenin: The Suitability of Cameron's Conservatism

[David Marquand is former principal of Mansfield College, Oxford. Among his many books are The Unprincipled Society (1988)and Ramsay MacDonald (2nd edition, 1997).] The term 'Old Whig' was coined by Edmund Burke during the bitter disputes over the French Revolution that tore apart what was left of the Rockingham Whigs in the 1790s. Charles James Fox, the party leader, was enthusiastically for the French Revolution; Burke was passionately against. Burke called himself an 'old Whig' s

Stanley Kurtz: Obama’s Radical Past

[Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism.] On the afternoon of April 1, 1983, Barack Obama, then a senior at Columbia University, made his way into the Great Hall of Manhattan’s Cooper Union to attend a “Socialist Scholars Conference.” There Obama discovered his vocation as a community organizer, as well as a political program to guide him throughout his life.

Jonah Goldberg: Hating Woody

[Jonah Goldberg is editor at large for the National Review.] The NYT has a Room for Debate discussion on conservatives hating Woodrow Wilson. It’s a bit undisciplined. A few of the folks use it as an excuse to beat up on Glenn Beck, even trying to make him into a mouthpiece for Leo Strauss (no, really). Others get bogged down in the question of motives, as if motives were relevant to the substance of the debate, particularly when all of the “defenders” are unwilling or unable to o