Roundup: Media's Take

Julia Baird: We Don't Hear About Africa's Oil Spills

[Julia Baird joined Newsweek in February 2007 as Senior Editor for Science, Society and Ideas. In that role, she oversaw NEWSWEEK's coverage of social trends and scientific breakthroughs as well as fresh, important ideas. In 2009 she was made Deputy Editor.] It was hard to believe BP when it announced oil had stopped gushing into the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday, July 15. It had taken 87 days. There was relief but little jubilation: it will take many years to clean the shores and the

David Brooks: The Technocracy Boom

[David Brooks is a columnist for the NYT.] When historians look back on the period between 2001 and 2011, they will be amazed that a nation that professed to hate bureaucracy produced so much of it.... When historians look back on this period, they will see it as another progressive era. It is not a liberal era — when government intervenes to seize wealth and power and distribute it to the have-nots. It’s not a conservative era, when the governing class concedes that th

David Rieff: Justice Begins at Home

[David Rieff is the author of eight books including A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis.] In 1914...France and the United States had roughly the same income gap, with the top decile of income share in both countries somewhat over 40 percent and climbing to close to 50 percent at the depth of the Great Depression. After World War II, and basically until the early 1980s (when, er, who was president, by the way?), U.S. and French income disparities were roughly equal. No, it

Deborah Blum: The Raw-Milk Deal

[Deborah Blum is a professor of science journalism at the University of Wisconsin and author of The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.] ...Pasteurization, named for the great 19th-century French scientist Louis Pasteur, is essentially the process of heating a liquid to a temperature that will kill most microorganisms living within it. Hoping to aid winemakers who were concerned about the rapid spoiling of their product, Pasteur disco

Abe Greenwald: The Soft-Power Fallacy

[Abe Greenwald is associate editor of COMMENTARY.] The concept of soft power was first described at length by the Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye in his 1990 book, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. According to Nye, soft power is exercised “when one country gets other countries to want what it wants.” This is to be achieved through “intangible forms of power,” such as the setting of a good example, the export of positive popular culture, and a redoubled wi

Eugene Robinson: The Tea Party Must Purge Racism from its Ranks

[Eugene Robinson is a columnist for the WaPo.] That was quick. We now have proof the NAACP was right.... On Saturday, the National Tea Party Federation announced it had expelled one of the movement's most prominent figures -- a California blowhard named Mark Williams -- because of the outrageously racist things he had said about the NAACP. Ejected along with Williams was his whole organization, Tea Party Express, which had been a particularly active, high-profile group.

Matt Bai: Beneath Divides Seemingly About Race Are Generational Fault Lines

[Matt Bai writes for the New York Times.] ...According to Pew, there is nearly a 20-point spread between Mr. Obama’s approval ratings among voters younger than 30 and those older than 65. Among independent voters older than 50, Mr. Obama gets passing marks from only 35 percent, while about half of those voters 49 and younger say they approve of his performance in office. These numbers probably do reflect some profound racial differences among the generations, but they a

Walter Rodgers: The Right Wing's Perversion of Patriotism

[Walter Rodgers, a former senior international correspondent for CNN, writes a biweekly column. correspondent.] It once was a given that you did not discuss religion or politics in polite company. To this list, I would add “patriotism.” It has become the new secular American religion, so mercurial that we cannot even agree about what it is.... It was not always thus. As a boy in New England, just after World War II, I was schooled in patriotism quite unlike what’

Stuart Whatley: The Dangers of Seeing America as a 'Christian Nation'

[Stuart Whatley is a writer and journalist in Washington.] ...A hefty segment of American Christians believes that its specific version of God is the inspiration for all men’s conception of freedom. If the United States is a wholly Christian nation then the syllogism follows that the liberty it affords to all is specifically Christian-furnished.... When the Roman Emperor Constantine first brought Christianity into the political fold, his motivation was purely autocratic

Sally Satel: The Battle Over Battle Fatigue

[Sally Satel is a psychiatrist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.] Military history is rich with tales of warriors who return from battle with the horrors of war still raging in their heads. One of the earliest known observations was made by the Greek historian Herodotus, who described an Athenian warrior struck blind "without blow of sword or dart" when a soldier standing next to him was killed. The classic term—"shell shock"—dates to Wor

Lloyd Grove: Great Britain ... America's New Frenemy?

[Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast.] Can this marriage be saved? When British Prime Minister David Cameron and President Barack Obama meet Tuesday at the White House, they might want to bring along a family therapist, if sovereign nations can make use of such services. The long-vaunted “special relationship” between the United Kingdom and the United States has seldom been more tetchy and irritable. They have, as the shrinks say, issues. Not

David E. Hoffman: Why Republicans Should Support Obama's Nuke Treaty

[David E. Hoffman is a contributing editor to Foreign Policy and is the author of The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.] The new strategic arms treaty with Russia is a gift for Republicans, not as a political weapon against President Barack Obama, but as the fruit of their own labors. The treaty is a logical, modest step down the long road of strategic nuclear arms control, led by

David Cameron: A Staunch and Self-Confident Ally

[Mr. Cameron is the British prime minister.] No other international alliance seems to come under the intense scrutiny reserved for the one between Britain and the United States. There is a seemingly endless British preoccupation with the health of the special relationship. Its temperature is continually taken to see if it's in good shape, its pulse checked to see if it will survive. I have never understood this anxiety. The U.S.-U.K. relationship is simple: It's strong

Angelo M. Codevilla: America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution

[Angelo M. Codevilla is professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University.] ...Its attitude is key to understanding our bipartisan ruling class. Its first tenet is that "we" are the best and brightest while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless properly constrained. How did this replace the Founding generation's paradigm that "all men are created equal"? The notion of human equality was always a hard

Simon Tisdall: Explaining Anti-Europeanism

[Simon Tisdall is an assistant editor and foreign affairs columnist at the Guardian.] ...Seen from Europe, of which Britain is (arguably) a part, the roots of American anti-Europeanism appear many and varied. At one end of the spectrum, there is the widely shared view that Europe does not pull its weight in a world that Washington would like to order according to its lights. At the other end of the spectrum, there is the unpalatable fact of widespread American ignorance, exacerbated

Jacob Heilbrunn: End of the Republican Foreign-Policy Establishment

[Jacob Heilbrunn is a senior editor at the National Interest.] The battles between establishment Republicans and the right are not new. Even a cursory glance at the establishment's past reveals that from the outset of America's rise to global power at the turn of the last century, East Coast Republicans have always enjoyed an uneasy relationship with the GOP itself. Consider the political odyssey of one of the foreign-policy establishment's founding fathers, Henry Stimson. Stimson,

Ellen Cantarow: Big Oil Makes War on the Earth

[Ellen Cantarow is a journalist whose work on Israel/Palestine has been published widely for 30 years including at TomDispatch. She is now working on climate change and big oil, which have much to do with the Middle East, Israel, and Palestine, as well as the rest of the planet. Recent phone conversations with her stepdaughter Kim -- she and her husband have a

J.E. Dyer: Rules of Engagement ... From Bosnia to Afghanistan

[J.E. Dyer is a retired Naval intelligence officer living in Southern California. She is a regular contirbutor to CONTENTIONS and also writes at The Optimistic Conservative blog.] A career military officer is typically less inclined than civilians to offer sweeping criticism of the rules of engagement (ROE) adopted for an operation. This is due to an ingrained understanding of the basic purpose of ROE, which is to enable our side to retain initiative and operational discretion. ROE

Rebecca Kaplan: The Lessons of 1982

[Rebecca Kaplan is a Slate intern.] ...[S]peculation is running rampant, particularly in the media and especially among Republicans (and White House spokesman Robert Gibbs), that 2010 could be a replay of the Democrats' lowest political moment in the last half-century: the 1994 midterms, when Republicans seized 52 seats in the House and eight in the Senate, taking control of Congress for the first time in 40 years. But the similarities between 2010 and 1994 are superficial. The more

Denis MacShane: The message Mr Cameron must deliver

[Denis MacShane is Labour MP for Rotherham and former Deputy Foreign Secretary.] In 1951, a British Prime Minister flew to Washington and gently but firmly turned the US President away from his generals' desire to use nuclear weapons against China. In 1999, a British Prime Minister persuaded a US President to reject the caution of his generals and commit the US military might to bring an end to the genocidal decade of Serb militarism and wars in the western Balkans. Tom