Roundup: Media's Take

Konrad Yakabuski: Obama’s 'We' Philosophy Collides with Capitalism’s 'Me'

[Konrad Yakabuski is The Globe and Mail's chief U.S. political writer, based in Washington. He covers all aspects of the American political scene, including relevant social and cultural issues.] ...This is state capitalism, Obama-style. His is a vision of a virtuous clean-energy economy nurtured by government. It is benevolent, ordered and seemingly devoid of egos, obvious wealth or crude self-interest. It is also largely at odds with the prevailing concept of America

John Paul Rollert: The Surprising Star at Elena Kagan's Hearing: Thurgood Marshall

[John Paul Rollert teaches business ethics and leadership at Harvard Summer School. He is pursuing a JD at Yale Law School and a PhD at The Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.] The Kagan hearings were a sleepy affair. With no 12th-hour revelations and a candidate who acquitted herself as cagey and well qualified, the solicitor general proved adept at the kabuki dance of the Supreme Court confirmation process. Yet there was one exception to the othe

Doug Bandow: So Much for the European Project

[Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is the author of Beyond Good Intentions: A Biblical View of Politics (Crossway).] Europe was supposed to have arrived. With the final approval of the Lisbon Treaty last year, the European Union sported a new, consolidated government. Europe's political elite believed it had answered Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's derisive question: what is the phone number for Euro

Amitai Etzioni: Return of the Hooverites

[Amitai Etzioni served as a Senior Advisor to the Carter White House; taught at Columbia University, Harvard, University of California at Berkeley, and is a University Professor at The George Washington University. He served as the President of the American Sociological Association, and he founded the Communitarian Network.] The Republicans are willing to put the brakes on now despite the fact that the economy has not gained enough lift to take off. Indeed, their deficit-mongering i

George F. Will: Another Round of Prohibition, Anyone?

[George F. Will is a columnist for the Washington Post.] The evening of Jan. 16, 1920, hours before Prohibition descended on America, while the young assistant secretary of the Navy, Franklin Roosevelt, drank champagne in Washington with other members of Harvard's Class of 1904, evangelist Billy Sunday preached to 10,000 celebrants in Norfolk, Va., : "The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory. . . ." Not exactly. Daniel Okrent's darkly h

David Ignatius: Obama Needs a Foreign Policy Machiavelli

[David Ignatius writes about international affairs and US foreign policy for The Washington Post op-ed page.] The two modern American masters of Machiavellian diplomacy, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, both practiced their art at times comparable to this one -- with the country suffering from reversals in war and loss of confidence in its political leadership. So it's an interesting thought exercise to imagine how a national security adviser with the secretive,

Timothy Egan: Obama's Lincoln Moment?

[Timothy Egan worked for The Times for 18 years – as Pacific Northwest correspondent and a national enterprise reporter.] There must be, in the glaring light of an anxious, heat-stinging summer, an image or two from the past appearing in President Obama’s White House. As Abraham Lincoln had an Army of the Potomac that looked inert under Gen. George McClellan, Obama has an economy stalled and troubled, and two wars, one now branded as the nation’s longest, its outcome ne

John Pilger: The charge of the media brigade

[John Pilger is a renowned investigative journalist and documentary film-maker.] The TV anchorwoman was conducting a split-screen interview with a journalist who had volunteered to be a witness at the execution of a man on death row in Utah for 25 years. "He had a choice," said the journalist, "lethal injection or firing squad." "Wow!" said the anchorwoman. Cue a blizzard of commercials for fast food, tooth whitener, stomach stapling, the new Cadillac.

Chase Madar: Obama’s Gitmo

[Chase Madar is a lawyer in New York.] President Obama may lack the nerve to stare down Liz Cheney or Bibi Netanyahu, but no one can deny that our commander in chief has the guts to take on a child soldier. Come August, a military commission in Guantánamo will try Omar Khadr, a Canadian national captured outside Kabul in 2002, when he was just 15 years old. This will be only the third Gitmo trial and the Obama administration’s first, and there won’t be anything kinder and gentler ab

Melvin A. Goodman: What Eisenhower Could Teach Obama

[Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.] Fifty years ago, President Dwight D. Eisenhower told his senior advisers in the Oval Office of the White House, “God help this country when someone sits in this chair who doesn’t know the militar

Michael Levy: 7/7: The London Bombings of 2005 Remembered and Muslim Perspectives

[Michael Levy is Britannica's Executive Editor. He received a bachelor’s degree (1991) in political science from the University of North Carolina and a doctorate (1996) in international relations and comparative politics from the University of Kentucky.] Map of London bombings of 2005; Encyclopaedia BritannicaAmerica has September 11 of 2001. Spain has March 11 of 2004. And, the United Kingdom has July 7 of 2005. All three involved terrorist attacks on transportation networks. All t

Rageh Omaar: Somaliland -- Small Country, Big Election Result

[Rageh Omaar is a Mogadishu-born broadcaster whose family is from Somaliland] In Africa this past week a completely peaceful presidential election was held. International observers said it met all the western standards for a free election. What's more, the incumbent president fully accepted the result the minute it was announced and handed over power to his successor and bitter political rival – and on accepting his victory, the president-elect thanked and congratulated the outgoing

Jason Epstein: The Netanyahus and the Epsteins

[Jason Epstein is the former editorial director of Random House.] There can be few friendships stranger than Benzion Netanyahu’s and mine, for on the urgent question of Israel’s security we could not be more opposed. Benzion, a disciple and former secretary of Ze’ev Jabotinsky and to this day an uncompromising Zionist Revisionist, believes that the State of Israel should occupy both banks of the Jordan, presumably by force. At the time of the Oslo Accords, when my wife and I visited

Stephan Salisbury: Stage-Managing the War on Terror

[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 (Nation Books).]Informers have by now become our first line of defense in our battles with the evildoers, the go-to guys in the never-ending domestic war on terror. They regularly do the dirty work -- suggesting and encouraging the plots, laboring as bag men to move the money, fashioning the bombs, and eliciting the flambo

Douglas Murray: Britain has not learnt the lesson of the July 7 suicide bombing

[Douglas Murray is director of the Centre for Social Cohesion.] Tomorrow marks the fifth anniversary of the day suicide bombing came to Britain. On July 7, 2005 three young British-born men exploded their devices simultaneously on the London Underground. A fourth man detonated his an hour later on a bus in Tavistock Square. Together they left 52 people dead, many more injured, and a country only starting to realise that a problem it had long exported had found its way home.

Mark Curtis: Bin Laden, the Taliban, Zawahiri ... Britain's done business with them all

[Mark Curtis is the author of Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam.] When the London bombers struck five years ago, many people blamed the invasion of Iraq for inspiring them. But the connection between 7/7 and British foreign policy goes much deeper. The terrorist threat to Britain is partly "blowback", resulting from a web of British covert operations with militant Islamist groups stretching back decades. And while terrorism is held up as the country's

Mitt Romney: Obama's worst foreign-policy mistake

[The writer was governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007.] Given President Obama's glaring domestic policy missteps, it is understandable that the public has largely been blinded to his foreign policy failings. In fact, these may have been even more damaging to America's future. He fought to reinstate Honduras's pro-Chávez president while stalling Colombia's favored-trade status. He castigated Israel at the United Nations but was silent about Hamas having launched 7,000 rockets f

Anne Applebaum: Democracy in trouble

[Anne Applebaum is a weekly columnist for The Post, writing on foreign affairs.] A riot of golden curlicues embellished the theater boxes; in the plush velvet seats below, ambassadors in saris crowded against activists in crumpled suits. It was standing-room only on Saturday for Hillary Clinton's speech at the 10th anniversary meeting of the Community of Democracies, and the American secretary of state had the crowd behind her. First she paid compliments to her predecessor Madeleine

Bret Stephens: A (Better) Reason to Hate BP

[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.] What Barack Obama taketh away, Moammar Gadhafi giveth. That must be the fond hope these days at BP, as it seeks to recoup in Libya's Gulf of Sidra what it is losing in the Gulf of Mexico. And if it takes a wretched lobbying effort to make that happen, so be it. Yesterday, the chairman of Libya's National Oil Co. told Zawya Dow Jones that he would urge Libya's sovereign wealth fund to

Nicholas von Hoffman: 7 Lessons Saul Alinsky Would Give Progressives Today

[Nicholas von Hoffman, author of 13 books, recently republished 'Radical,' a biography of Saul Alinsky.] Floating around in the Internet cosmos is a Web site with a headline asking, “Is Miley Cyrus an Alinskyite Mole Sent to Brainwash Country Music Fans?” It is not known if Ms. Cyrus has the faintest idea who Saul Alinsky was -- he died in 1972 -- but people in politics now know the name well. Alinsky, a genius at political tactics, invented community organizing. He is