Roundup: Media's Take

Anne Applebaum: Up to their old spy tricks again

[Anne Applebaum is a columnist at The Washington Post.] Along with many other things, the spy novel did not survive the end of the Cold War. There are still thrillers, of course, but it isn't the same: James Bond has become just another action hero, and John Le Carre had turned into yet another British writer who doesn't like George Bush. When communism collapsed, the dead-letter drops, the invisible ink and the microfilm concealed in hollowed-out pumpkins mostly disappeared from fi

Brian Palmer: What Does an Exalted Cyclops Do?

[Brian Palmer is a freelance writer living in New York City. He can be reached at explainerbrian@gmail.com.] Robert Byrd...wore many hats during his lifetime, including that of Exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan. What are the job responsibilities of an Exalted Cyclops? He presides over the Council of the Centaurs and writes quarterly reports to the Grand Giant. In the Klan hierarchy, each local chapter, or Klavern, is led

Michael Honda: Honduran Coup: One Year Anniversary Beckons Better U.S. Policy Towards Latin America

[Rep Michael Honda represents California's 15th district. Follow Honda's work on Twitter and Facebook.] Swirling south of here, in a gulf between the Americas, a crisis is brewing and already affecting the livelihoods of millions of people, threatening food and energy security, and undermining our nation's reputation regionally. Yet it has nothing to do with an oil spill. There is an ever-growing gulf of political proportions gumming up U.S.-Latin-American relations, an

Robert Wright: The Myth of Modern Jihad

[Robert Wright on culture, politics and world affairs.] It would be an understatement to say that Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square bomber, pleaded guilty last week. “I’m going to plead guilty a hundred times over,” Shahzad told the judge. Why so emphatic? Because Shahzad is proud of himself. “I consider myself a Mujahid, a Muslim soldier,” he said. This got some fist pumps in right-wing circles, because it seemed to confirm that America faces all-out jihad, and

John Rapley: Jamaica is a Neo-Medieval State

[John Rapley is President of the Caribbean Policy Research Institute, an independent think tank affiliated with the University of the West Indies.] On June 22, Jamaican police stopped a car they had been tracking down a rain-sodden highway. Inside was a man rather poorly disguised to look rather like a woman on her way to a church convention. In fact, the man was Christopher "Dudus" Coke, the notorious gang leader whom police had been chasing for over a month. Two days lat

John Nichols: Elena Kagan Embraces Jefferson's Original Intent

[John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written the Beat since 1999. His posts have been circulated internationally, quoted in numerous books and mentioned in debates on the floor of Congress.] Thomas Jefferson was not a strict constructionist when it came to the Constitution. The essential founder could not have been clearer on that point: "We have not yet so far perfected our constitutions as to venture to make them unchangeable," Jefferson wrote

Ben Gidley: Are Jews the Model Immigrants in England?

[Ben Gidley is Senior Researcher at the COMPAS Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, Oxford University. He is the co-author of Turbulent Times: The British Jewish Community Today.] Brick Lane is the heart of London’s East End, the immigrant quarter celebrated in the Victorian novels of Israel Zangwill (the man who first popularized the term “melting pot“), the 1950s film A Kid for Two Farthings, and Monica Ali’s 2003 bestseller. Whether it was the best use of the cash or not, it

Allan Meltzer: Why Obamanomics Has Failed

[Mr. Meltzer is a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of "A History of the Federal Reserve" (University of Chicago Press, 2003 and 2010).] The administration's stimulus program has failed. Growth is slow and unemployment remains high. The president, his friends and advisers talk endlessly about the circumstances they inherited as a way of avoiding responsibility for the 18 months for

David Leonhardt: Governments Move to Cut Spending, in 1930s Echo

[David Leonhardt is a economics journalist with the New York Times.] The world’s rich countries are now conducting a dangerous experiment. They are repeating an economic policy out of the 1930s — starting to cut spending and raise taxes before a recovery is assured — and hoping today’s situation is different enough to assure a different outcome.... The policy mistakes of the 1930s stemmed mostly from ignorance. John Maynard Keynes was still a practicing economist in tho

Shireen K. Burki: Bring Back the Afghan Monarchy

[Shireen K. Burki is currently completing a book on state-society relations in Pakistan and Afghanistan. An ethnic Pashtun, she served at the United States Marine Corps’ Center For Advanced Operational Culture Learning from 2006 to 2008 as an expert on South Asia and Southwest Asia.] US forces in Afghanistan just got another competent military commander in Gen. David Petraeus. However, the current US strategy that General Petraeus must enforce only guarantees mission failure in the

Stephanie J. Jones: Thurgood Marshall's Legacy Deserves Cheers, Not Sneers

[The writer, a public affairs and government relations strategist, was executive director of the National Urban League Policy Institute from 2005 to 2010 and was chief Senate Judiciary Committee counsel to John Edwards from 2002 to 2005.] As Sens. Jeff Sessions, Jon Kyl and John Cornyn disparaged the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall on the opening day of Elena Kagan's confirmation hearings, dismissing him as an "activist judge" in what appeared to be a raw atte

Marvin Hier: Holocaust: a Huge Word Made Small

[Rabbi Marvin Hier is the Founder and Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.] ...The Holocaust was a watershed event in the history of mankind, in which 6 million Jews — one-third of the world's Jewish population — were exterminated. But today the word is used in ways that cheapen it.... The Holocaust was a total eclipse of humanity. It was not about going to the back of the line or eating in a different part of the restaurant or being escorted to the border without recou

Dayo Olopade: Why Are 53 Countries Rooting for Ghana?

[Dayo Olopade is a reporter for The Daily Beast in Washington, and a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation.] "When you're playing an African team, you're playing the whole continent." So reads one of several different World Cup ads sponsored by South African telecommunications giant MTN. The participatory slogans ("I Believe in Africa"; "United We Score") riff on a theme of continental solidarity--and their ubiquitous placement seems to

Jonah Goldberg: The Un-Borkable Elena Kagan

[Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.] ...Elena Kagan thinks that the “Borking” of Robert Bork during his 1987 confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court would deserve a commemorative plate if the Franklin Mint launched a “Great Moments in Legal History” line of dishware. This is not the time to rehearse all the reasons why Kagan is wrong on that score. Still, there is one adverse result

Ruth Marcus: Unhinged on the Right

[Ruth Marcus is a columnist for the Washington Post.] The campaign video is such a transparent ploy, the temptation is to ignore it. After all, Tea Party candidate Rick Barber is a long shot in his July runoff race for the Republican nomination for an Alabama congressional seat. But then you hit replay, and see again the iconic images, you think you must have imagined. They last a fraction of a second, but they are so imprinted on the modern brain that is all it takes t

Dahlia Lithwick: Elena Kagan is "Green Tea" at Her Confirmation Hearings

[Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.] There is something achingly familiar about Monday afternoon's opening day of Solicitor General Elena Kagan's Supreme Court Senate confirmation hearings. The talking points on both sides—"liberal judicial activist" and "justices who understand real people"—are so overused that at first you think you just might be listening to the mix tape Chief Justice John Roberts prepared for Justice Samuel Alito's hearings. It's not j

Erik Voeten: David Brooks, Epiphanies, and Social Science

[Erik Voeten is the Peter K Krogh Associate Professor of Geopolitics and Global Justice at Georgetown University] David Brooks has a rather curious op-ed in today’s New York Times that draws public policy lessons from the success of Alcoholics Anonymous. The op-ed starts off with a description of the AA’s founder who managed to shrug off his alcohol addiction after an epiphany in which a

Con Coughlin: Don't they know the Cold War is over?

[Con Coughlin, the Telegraph's executive foreign editor, is a world-renowned expert on the Middle East and Islamic terrorism.] For the Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, the exposure of a Moscow-run spy ring in the heart of the American suburbs could not have come at a more embarrassing moment. Only a few days before the FBI made its dramatic arrests in New York, Mr Medvedev was being fêted in Washington, where President Barack Obama entertained him to lunch at his favourite ha

E.J. Dionne Jr.: Whose Supreme Court Is It?

[E.J. Dionne’s e-mail address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.] This week’s hearings over Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court will mark a sea change in the way liberals argue about the judiciary. Democratic senators are planning to put the right of citizens to challenge corporate power at the center of their critique of activist conservative judging, offering a case that has not been fully aired since the days of the great Progressive Era Justice Louis Brandeis.

David Cole: The Roberts Court's Free Speech Problem

[David Cole is a Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center.] On January 21, in its first decision of this term, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court’s five-member conservative majority announced that the First Amendment bars Congress from imposing even mild constraints on the ways corporations can employ their vast financial resources to drown out the voices of ordinary people in federal election campaigns. On June 21, in one of its last deci