Roundup: Media's Take

Daniel Foster: Should We Nuke the BP Oil Well?

[Daniel Foster is news editor of National Review Online.] It was September of 1966, and gas was gushing uncontrollably from the wells in the Bukhara province of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. But the Reds, at the height of their industrial might, had a novel solution. They drilled nearly four miles into the sand and rock of the Kyzyl Kum Desert, and lowered a 30-kiloton nuclear warhead — more than half-again as large as “Little Boy,” the crude uranium bomb dropped over Hiroshi

William A. Galston: The Case Against Keynes (With Some Questions for Krugman, Too)

[William A. Galston holds the Ezra Zilkha Chair in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program, where he serves as a Senior Fellow.] As President Obama’s bipartisan fiscal commission gets set to convene, the Greek budget disaster has triggered the predictable flood of cautionary notes about how we’re spending too much and heading toward a debt crisis. Should these concerns illuminate the commission’s work—or are they merely alarmist? Paul Krugman harbors no

William Choong: Is North Korea's Kim Jong-il a madman or a genius?

[William Choong joined the Strategic Defence Studies Centre in March 2005.] Some years ago, I visited an observatory near the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea. From there, one could see a massive statue of Kim Il-sung, the late North Korean leader. His right hand was stretched southward, as if seeking to entice southerners to go over to his communist utopia. Nearby stood low concrete buildings of simple construction. According to a tour guide, they

Simon Jenkins: Let Cameron hasten the end of our absurd Afghan war

[Simon Jenkins is a journalist and author. He writes for the Guardian and the Sunday Times, as well as broadcasting for the BBC.] Senior ministers are meeting at Chequers today for an urgent review of policy on Afghanistan. This is good news. President Obama staged a similar review on taking office and came within an inch of withdrawing. Perhaps David Cameron could go that extra inch. It is idle to pretend that Britain's 2006 expedition to bring Helmand under the contro

Matthew Dickinson: Obama Wonders: Will You Still Love Me at 64?

[Matthew Dickinson is a professor of political science at Middlebury College.] It’s been a rough presidency for Obama so far. His promise to change the tone of Washington politics proved woefully naïve in the face of a deeply polarized Congress and the echo-chamber effect of an increasingly ideologically fragmented news media. He inherited a financial bailout program and an economic recession that has stubbornly lingered despite (or because of, according to critics) Obama’s backing

James Ridgeway: Obama's "Revelations" and the Oil Industry's Slimy History

[James Ridgeway is a senior correspondent at Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here.] "What's been made clear from this disaster is that for years the oil and gas industry has leveraged such power that they have effectively been allowed to regulate themselves," President Obama said last week in his press conference on the BP oil spill. "I was wrong," he declared, "in my belief that the oil companies had their act together when it came to worst-cas

Philip Weiss: The U.S.S. Liberty and the Culture of Impunity

[Philip Weiss runs the website Mondoweiss.] The attack on the USS Liberty is one of the great enigmas of US-Israel relations. On June 8, 1967, in the middle of the Six-Day War, Israeli planes attacked an American spy ship, the Liberty, that was in international waters off the coast of Egypt, listening in on secret communications. The attacks appeared to be deliberate, involving numerous passes on a clearly-marked American boat, strafing and napalming. The attack killed 34 Am

Gershom Gorenberg: A Brief History of the Gaza Folly

[Gershom Gorenberg is a senior correspondent for The Prospect. He is the author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 and The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount. He blogs at South Jerusalem.] At first, reports of the number of dead fluctuated by the hour. After Israeli naval commandos landed on a Turkish ferry heading for Gaza, rumors said that Sheikh Raed Salah, leader of the radical Islamic movement among Israel

Dino Mahtani: Battling Corruption (and the Past) in Liberia

[Dino Mahtani is an independent journalist.] ...[T]hese days, Africa's oldest republic is a darling of the donor community. And many believe the country's president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, deserves most of the credit for the dramatic change. Sirleaf, the first female head of state ever elected in Africa, has won international adulation for stabilizing Liberia's political economy and admiration from, among others, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. A former senior World Bank of

William Voegeli: The Meaning of the Tea Party

[William Voegeli is a visiting scholar at Claremont McKenna College's Henry Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World, and a contributing editor for the Claremont Review of Books. He is the author of Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State (Encounter Books). His reviews and essays have appeared in City Journal, First Things, In Character, the Los Angeles Times, National Review, and The New Criterion.] One point about the tea party movement is n

Thomas Sowell: The Real Public Service

[Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.] Every year about this time, big-government liberals stand up in front of college-commencement crowds across the country and urge the graduates to do the noblest thing possible — become big-government liberals.... That’s what a man named Sam Walton did when he created Wal-Mart, a boon to people with modest incomes and a bane to the elite intelligentsia. In the process, Sam Walton became rich. Was that the “gre

John Derbyshire: Genomics, Humanity's Past, and Humanity's Future

[John Derbyshire is an NRO columnist and author, most recently, of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism.] The science news this month was dominated by two genome stories. An organism’s genome is the sum total of all its genetic information — its DNA. In sexually reproducing species, a child gets half its genome from one parent, half from the other. Asexual organisms like bacteria just copy DNA from one generation to the next. In both cases, there are occasional copying

James Lewis: Obama Seems a Lot Like Woodrow Wilson

[James Lewis is a scientist by trade, and carps as a hobby about the passing parade of human fraud and folly.] He was a progressive, Ivy League president, with that calm and lofty style of lecturing to his audiences. He had a fixed and unshakable conviction of his own rightness about the blessings of bigger and bigger government. The media fawned on him in the most nauseating fashion, and professors everywhere shouted Hosannas. He was dedicated to global peace under the benign gover

Dan Miller: What Would Winston Do?

[Dan Miller graduated from Yale University in 1963 and from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1966. He lives in a rural area in Panama.] Having read Churchill’s The Gathering Storm for the third or fourth time, it strikes me as frighteningly inauspicious, and not only for the United States today. Churchill was a leading proponent of stopping Hitler before stopping him would involve the massive devastation inflicted on much of the world when World War II eventua

J. Robert Smith: How the GOP Can Learn from General Giap to Rout the Democrats

[J. Robert Smith is a contributor to American Thinker. He is a public affairs consultant with a practice in Alexandria, Virginia.]Here’s an unconventional tip for the GOP. Learn some valuable lessons from Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap about how to win political campaigns via the lessons of war.But from a communist and an old enemy, you say? Well, yes, as a matter of fact. To put a stop to the madness of Obama

David Firestone: So You Still Want to Choose Your Senator?

[David Firestone writes for the NYT.] Few members of the Tea Party have endorsed Rand Paul’s misgivings about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but a surprising number are calling for the repeal of an older piece of transformative legislation: the 17th Amendment. If you don’t have the Constitution on your smartphone, that’s the one adopted in 1913 that provides for direct popular election of United States senators. Allowing Americans to choose their own senators seems so ob

Robert Mackey: Echoes of Raid on ‘Exodus’ Ship in 1947

[Robert Mackey is a report for the New York Times and a frequent blogger on both national and international news. During the conflicts in Bosnia and Croatia, he worked as a field producer for a United Nations sponsored program that broadcast news reports and documentaries in local languages throughout the former states of Yugoslavia.] To some Israeli observers, it was impossible to miss the parallels between Monday’s killing of pro-Palestinian activists by Israel’s military in int

Michael Lind: Texas Textbooks and the Truth About the Confederacy

[Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation.] The Texas State Board of Education, the most astringently reactionary body since the Spartan Ephorate, has decreed that textbooks for the schoolchildren of Texas are to include Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address along with the first inaugural of Abraham Lincoln. This controversy holds particular interest for me. I am a fifth-generation native of Texas.

Ian Black: Gaddafi the Younger Looks to Scrap Libya's Pariah Statu

[Ian Black is the Guardian's Middle East editor] It looked, for a while, just like the bad old days: a handful of angry demonstrators on one side of a London street, shouting "Gaddafi is a murderer" and waving placards as a larger group of men on the other pavement lobbed back Arabic insults over the heads of the watching policemen. But the past was swiftly banished when Muammar Gaddafi's son, Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi, began to speak from the podium in a university lectu

David Fontana: The Postradical Legal Generation

[David Fontana is an associate professor at George Washington University Law School. professor.] When President Barack Obama nominated Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court last week, he described her appeal in much the same way he has described his own: as a postpartisan figure. Just as Obama and Kagan represent a generation of national political figures trying to be postideological, so too they represent a distinctive generation of figures in elite law schools—as does Obama