Roundup: Media's Take

Bret Stephens: What Obama Could Learn From Tony Blair

[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.] Every political party has its kamikaze squadrons. This year, Republicans have Colorado's Tom Tancredo and Delaware's Christine O'Donnell, the inexhaustible fountain of liberal mirth. Too bad for Democrats that their kamikazes are the Senate majority leader, the Speaker of the House, and the Obamakaze himself. I've been thinking about this theme for several months, as Democrats launche

Malcolm Gladwell: Small Change

[Malcolm Gladwell joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1996. He has written on a wide range of topics, including the science of cool hunting, race and sports, physical genius, the concept of moral hazard and health care, and the difference between puzzles and mysteries.] At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina

Melissa Harris-Lacewell: Fighting for Change, Longing for the Sea

[Melissa Harris-Lacewell, an associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University] I was recently reminded of a famous quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of the classic text The Little Prince. Saint-Exupéry offered a particularly relevant lesson for our current politics: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity

Michael Lind: Is America a Plutonomy?

[Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation.] Has the American economy turned into a "plutonomy"? In 2005, three Citigroup analysts -- Ajay Kapur, Niall MacLeod and Narendra Singh -- answered yes. They explained: "Plutonomies have occurred before in sixteenth century Spain, in seventeenth century Holland, the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties in the U.S ... Often these wealth waves involve great complexi

Michael Auslin: Turkey and Japan at the Crossroads

[Michael Auslin is director of Japan studies at the American Enterprise Institute.] In the 1960s, American political scientists became fascinated with political modernization in Turkey and Japan. They wanted in particular to discover the precedents that allowed two very different societies — one a centuries-old multiethnic empire, the other a feudal, isolated group of islands — to shake off the fetters of tradition and radically remake their political, economic, and social systems

Mark Tooley: Mennonite Takeover?

[Mark Tooley is president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C. and author of Taking Back the United Methodist Church.] This Summer, the Lutherans, or at least the Swiss-based Lutheran World Federation, apologized for persecuting pacifist Anabaptists 400 years ago. But given the ascendancy of Anabaptists among many U.S. evangelicals, their days as a small, persecuted minority are clearly long over. "We remember how Anabaptist Christians kn

Richard Cohen: On the Right, Hateful Words are Fired like Bullets

[Richard Cohen is a columnist for the WaPo.] I still ride a bike. I do 12 miles, several days a week, and as I do so I listen to music -- the Pandora service on my iPhone. I have created a station that plays folk rock. Lately, it has repeatedly played the Neil Young song "Ohio": "What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?" On the bike, I have to repress a tear. "Ohio" has been around for 40 years, and I have heard it over and ov

Mario Loyola: Twilight in the Evil Kingdom of the Hermit Midgets

[Mario Loyola, a former foreign-policy counsel to the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee, is director for Tenth Amendment studies at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.] With Kim Jong Il’s promotion of two family members to senior military posts in time for the historic Workers’-party conference in Pyongyang last week, the Communist world’s latest succession crisis officially got under way. Actually, “promotion” may not be the right word, given that neither the Dear Leader’s 2

Steve Kornacki: Why Tom Friedman's Third-Party Dreams Will Fizzle

[Steve Kornacki is the news editor for Salon. He’s previously written about politics for the New York Observer and Roll Call, and his work has also appeared in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and on the Daily Beast.] In his Sunday column, Thomas Friedman offered an argument that has been made many times before. It goes something like this: Our country faces serious problems, Democratic and Republican politicians in Washington aren’t fixing them, and Americans are running

Jennifer Rubin: California, There It Went

[Jennifer Rubin is Commentary's contributing editor.] More than 40 years later, I still remember the bright sun and the palm trees when we got off the plane. California in 1968 was a magical place, a magnet for those seeking new opportunities or to lose an old identity. The Golden State was allowing the rich to get richer and the middle class to live out the American dream in its pristine state. The public schools and expanding state-university system (two separate systems, in fact)

Donald Luskin: The Trade and Tax Doomsday Clocks

[Mr. Luskin is chief investment officer at Trend Macrolytics LLC.] Thankfully, we're not repeating all the mistakes of 1937. But Congress and the Obama administration are flirting dangerously with one of them by failing to extend the expiring low tax rates for all Americans. What's worse, we're close to repeating the mother of all policy errors, the one made not in 1937 but in 1930—the one that started the Great Depression. We're on track to resurrect the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Ac

Hannah Beech: Asia's New Cold War Has Begun

[Hannah Beech is a journalist for TIME Magazine.] After surviving a harrowing maritime adventure, the fishermen of Gangfu village on China's eastern coast are sometimes presented with a rejuvenating bowl of noodles topped with duck eggs. But on Sept. 25, Gangfu's Zhan Qixiong was lavished with a more extravagant welcome: bouquets of flowers from cheering local leaders, a chartered flight home courtesy of the Chinese government and, of course, the requisite bowl of noodles.

Peter Popham: Outsiders ... The trouble with the Roma

[Peter Popham was the Rome correspondent for the Independent, 2002-09.] This Thursday, in a hall in the Council of Europe's headquarters in Strasbourg, a group of academics, government advisers and gypsy representatives will get together to discuss the next steps in a pan-European project entitled "The Decade of Roma Inclusion, 2005 to 2015". The idea of the "decade", according to its authors, is to "improve the socio-economic status and social

Slavoj Zizek: Liberal multiculturalism masks an old barbarism with a human face

[Slavoj Zizek is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.] The recent expulsion of Roma, or Gypsies, from France drew protests from all around Europe – from the liberal media but also from top politicians, and not only from those on the left. But the expulsions went ahead, and they are just the tip of a much larger iceberg of European politics. A month ago, a book by Thilo Sarrazin, a bank executive who was considered politically close to the

Fred Hiatt: Will Obama's foreign policy follow his new democracy rhetoric?

[Fred Hiatt is the editorial page editor of The Post.] After enjoying a good run in the 1980s and 1990s, democracy has been playing defense lately. Dictators have grown wise to people power. China, Russia, Iran and Cuba have been more successful exporting and extolling their systems than democracies have been in promoting theirs. In his first two years, President Obama seemed only sporadically attuned to this negative shift. In Cairo, Oslo and elsewhere, he spoke power

Stephan Salisbury: Surveillance, America’s Pastime

[Stephan Salisbury is cultural writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer. His most recent book is Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland.]The dried blood on the concrete floor is there for all to see, a stain forever marking the spot on a Memphis motel balcony where Martin Luther King, Jr. lay mortally wounded by a sniper’s bullet.It is a stark and ghostly i

Kevin Drum: Tea Party: Old Whine in New Bottles

[Kevin Drum is a political blogger for Mother Jones]essay about the tea party movement published earlier this year in the New York Review of Books, historian Mark Lilla provided a now-familiar explanation about what motivates the tea partiers. T

Phil Gramm: Echoes of the Great Depression

[Mr. Gramm is a former U.S. senator from Texas and former professor of economics at Texas A&M University.] This may not be your grandfather's Great Depression, but many aspects of today's situation would remind him of the 1930s. If the recession that officially ended a year ago feels uncomfortably surreal to you yet familiar to him, it's probably because the recovery went missing. During the average recovery since World War II, gross domestic product (GDP) surpasse

Ethan Devine: The Japan Syndrome

[Ethan Devine is a partner and portfolio manager at Indus Capital Partners, an investment firm specializing in Asian markets] This year, China overtook Japan as the world's second-largest economy, a shift in the global pecking order that surprised nobody who has been paying attention for the past 20 years. What was truly surprising is that Japan was still No. 2. Like a distant uncle whose death notice reminds you he was alive, Japan is noteworthy for its furtive slinkin

Dana Milbank: Glenn Beck is Obsessed with Hitler and Woodrow Wilson

[Dana Milbank is an op-ed columnist for The Washington Post. This is an excerpt from an essay adapted from his book"Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America," forthcoming Tuesday. The full essay can be found here.] Glenn Beck, the conservative television and radio host, is an amateur historian. Very amateur. One day, he rhetorically a