Roundup: Media's Take

Bernard Weiner: Bibi as Bullyboy

[Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government and international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked as a writer/editor for the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org). To comment: crisispapers@hotmail.com.] Take a large dose of hubris, combine it with Lord Acton's famous dictum ("power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely"), and you emerg

Doug Bandow: Germany's Lesson for America: Wars of Necessity, not Choice

[Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. He also is the Robert A. Taft Fellow at the American Conservative Defense Alliance and served as a Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan.] For many, probably most, statesmen war is just another policy option. A government can apply diplomatic pressure. It can impose sanctions. It can launch a military attack. The U.S. is a democracy and Americans like to think of themselves as setting a moral standard for the

James P Rubin: Obama's Foreign Policy Success

[Mr. Rubin is an adjunct professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. He was an assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration.] The Obama administration is an unreliable friend and a faint-hearted adversary. U.S. allies in Europe no longer treasure their ties to the United States. Turkey defies us without paying a price. China's leaders question our fortitude. Iran's nuclear weapons program continues unchecked. So chants a

Leon de Winter: Anti-Semitism Is Salonfähig Again

[Mr. de Winter is a Dutch novelist. His latest book is "The Right of Return."] It's a fascinating phenomenon: Why do people and organizations that present themselves as progressive team up with reactionary Muslims? The Free Gaza group is just such a Leftist-Islamist alliance. Well, Gaza is already free. Israel withdrew from the narrow strip five years ago. And there is also no need for any humanitarian aid. Well over a million tons of humanitarian supplies ent

Stephen Schwartz: Let’s Hear It for Tex Avery

[Stephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.] The nationwide uproar over the Texas State Board of Education’s (SBOE) decision to reform the history curriculum began with the release, last July, of proposed new standards for the writing and production of textbooks, and for student understanding. With a school enrollment closing in on five million, Texas practices “statewide adoption” of textbooks, which makes it a leading force in educational publishing. And th

David Broder: California Switch Could Affect Elections Nationally

[David Broder is a columnist for the Washington Post.] An impromptu transcontinental race has begun, with nothing less at stake than the future of the American political and governmental system.... Early on, the Founders worried about the splintering capacity of "factions," by which they meant private interests of all kinds. In the Industrial Age, that danger focused on corporations and, later, on labor unions. The result was a series of enactments, culminatin

Sebastian Mallaby: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Ending Poverty

[Sebastian Mallaby is the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite.] Halfway through the 12th century, and a long time before economists began pondering how to turn poor places into rich ones, the Germanic prince Henry the Lion set out to create a merchant’s mecca on the lawless Baltic coast. It was an ambitious project, a bit like trying to build a n

Ramin Jahanbegloo: Iran's Failing Legitimacy

[Ramin Jahanbegloo, one of Iran’s best-known dissidents, headed the contemporary studies department of the Cultural Research Bureau in Tehran until his arrest in April 2006. He was released that August and now lives in exile in Canada, where he teaches at the University of Toronto., one of Iran’s best-known dissidents, headed the contemporary studies department of the Cultural Research Bureau in Tehran until his arrest in April 2006. He was released that August and now lives in exile in Canada,

Sandy Tolan: How Oil Spills Like BP's Can Reshape Politics

[Sandy Tolan is author of “The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East.” He is associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.] Twenty years ago, near the beginning of that transformation, I sat beside a campesino-turned-community activist, Segundo Jaramillo, as our small plane banked low over the company oil town of Lago Agrio. Below lay the grimy hub of Texaco’s former operation in Ecuador, w

Paul Starobin: Don't Expect Obama to be Superman

[Paul Starobin, a staff correspondent for National Journal and a contributing editor to the Atlantic, is the author of "Five Roads to the Future: Power in the Next Global Age."] ...Americans like to read politics and history as a tale of the Great Man -- they are eager subscribers to the Hercules myth of how the world works. Obama in particular plays to this seductive but fanciful notion. In electing him president in 2008, Americans seemed to think that "yes, we can&q

Timothy Egan: How Failure Became an Option

[Timothy Egan, a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner, takes on the politics of the American West.] Needing a break from the omnipresent BP oil cam, I went back and watched the spirit-resuscitating “Apollo 13.” Oh, to revel in the days when we could fix anything with duct tape and American self-confidence! Sad to say, it looks like a time capsule. This is the film about the crippled lunar flight of 1970 that gave us two of the most iconic lines of

Benedict Brogan: This Relationship is Special, Despite the BP Oil Spill

[Benedict Brogan is the Daily Telegraph's Deputy Editor.] My first lesson in American history was delivered by the fist of an older boy in the playground of Lafayette Elementary School in Washington, nearly 40 years ago. He wanted to put me right about my namesake Benedict Arnold, an enterprising colonial who offered to betray the fort at West Point to the British in 1780. As the new kid, I was to understand that the locals had long memories about the perfidious English, especially

Elizabeth Wydra: A Sober Look at Proposals to Repeal Portions of the Constitution

[Elizabeth Wydra is Chief Counsel, Constitutional Accountability Center] It seems that Tea Partiers’ recent political victories may have gone to their heads faster than bubbles in a glass of champagne. Flush from this electoral success, the Tea Party movement is turning its attention to the Constitution with renewed fervor. The result has been some proposals that are at turns wacky, unwise, and even dangerous to our constitutional values. The Tea Party’s sights appear

Mark Hertsgaard: BP Gets a Bitter Lesson From Bhopal

[Mark Hertsgaard (markhertsgaard.com), a fellow of The Open Society Institute, is The Nation's environment correspondent. He has covered climate change for twenty years and is the author of six books, including the forthcoming Generation Hot: Living Through the Storm of Climate Change.] ...The parallels between the Bhopal chemical explosion of 1984 and the BP underwater oil gusher of today are downright eerie. In the lead-up to each catastrophe, warnings of impending disaster were r

Jason Zengerle: The Roots of Rand Paul’s Radicalism

[Jason Zengerle is a senior editor of The New Republic.] In 1984, Ron Paul ran for the United States Senate. It was an audacious gamble. Paul, who represented Texas’s twenty-second congressional district, had to give up his safe House seat to compete in the state’s Republican Senate primary. What’s more, his chief opponent was Phil Gramm who, despite having recently switched from being a Democrat, had the support of Texas’s GOP establishment. And, while Paul’s unusual brand of far–r

Matthew Dickinson: Why the Oil Spill Tells Us Nothing About the Effectiveness of Obama’s Management Style

[Matthew Dickinson is a professor of political science at Middlebury College.] The punditocracy’s willingness to derive lessons for Obama’s presidency based on his (mis)handling of the Gulf spill seems to grow daily in proportion to the spread of that spill. Much of the recent criticism centers on what the spill reveals about deficiencies in Obama’s “management style.” Unfortunately, pundits do not always agree regarding to what “management style” refers. Some, like Jonathan Alter,

Vladimir Milov: Pining for a Soviet Paradise

[Vladimir Milov is a columnist for Vedomosti.] On Saturday, Russia will celebrate Russia Day. The roots of this holiday go back to June 12, 1990, the day the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Russian Republic adopted the Declaration on State Sovereignty for Russia. It proclaimed the “sovereignty” of the Russian Republic within a liberalized Soviet Union during Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika program. Among other things, the declaration, which was signed by the chair

Henry Blodget: In 1930, They Didn't Know It Was "the Great Depression" Yet

[Henry Blodget is the CEO and Editor-in-Chief of The Business Insider, a leading online business publication.]In the past year, we've written a lot about the similarity between the rally of early 1930 and the one we had through April of this year.The early 1930 rally came after the market had fallen nearly 50% in the fall of 1929. The spring 1930 rally took the market up nearly 50% again, to a level that was only about 20% below the previous peak. That rally, of course

Daniel Franklin: The U.S. Senate: Undemocratic and Anachronistic (Convert It into a U.S. House of Lords)

[Daniel Franklin is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. He received his BA in political science from UCLA and his MA and PhD from the Department of Government at the University of Texas, Austin.] In my last post I wrote about the problems of the U.S. Senate, especially associated with its’ principle of representation which is anachronistic and undemocratic. To be frank I’m a little torn about what to do about it.

Niall Reynolds: An Ancient Continental Conflict that Never Ends

[Niall Reynolds writes for the Globe and Mail.] It was almost precisely 70 years ago (June 16, 1940) that British prime minister Winston Churchill made France an historic offer – the “indissoluble union” of Great Britain and France. Although advanced to assist British and French national survival in the short term, Churchill made it clear that the integration of the two countries was intended to endure for all time. The postwar consequences of such a union for Canada would have been