Roundup: Media's Take

LA Times editorial: A New Spanish Civil War

For years, conservatives in Spain bristled as their most famous magistrate, Baltasar Garzon, pushed the boundaries of international law against former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet and human rights abusers in other countries, but they were powerless to stop him. When Spain's star judge turned his sights on Spanish Civil War atrocities, however, they joined forces with his many personal enemies and went after him, accusing him of opening old wounds and violating the country's 1977 amnest

Andrew Rawnsley: Queen Victoria would be amused by this Clameron coalition

[Andrew Rawnsley is the The Observer's Chief Political Commentator.] Had Nick anticipated that he would end up in bed with David, he might have thought twice before previously saying of his new partner: "He's put the con back into Conservative." Had David foreseen that they would be spliced together, he might have bitten his tongue before he named Nick as his "favourite joke". They had not seen this coming, but some clues were scattered before us in

Johann Hari: This Is Not What the British People Voted for

[Johann Hari is a columnist for the Independent (UK).] The British people are all supposed to now laze back and watch the latest Richard Curtis film: Politics, Actually, a charming tale of two 43-year-old rich men who have to run Britain together despite having different colour ties and eccentric armies of supporters tossing buns at each other in the background. Larks and hijinks no doubt ensue. But before you reach for the popcorn, can I briefly refer back to the will of the Britis

Gabriel Winant: Arizona Prohibits "Hateful" Ethnic Studies Classes

[Gabriel Winant is a freelance writer and graduate student, currently living in the United Kingdom.] When did Arizona get so mean? As if what they've done already isn't bad enough, Gov. Jan Brewer and the state legislature have just passed a law forbidding state public schools from teaching ethnic studies courses. Or, as they put it in the new legislation, students "should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or

Mike Rogers: Fighting terror like it's 1993

[Rep. Mike Rogers (Mich.) is the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee's Terrorism Subcommittee and a former FBI special agent.] NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly noted last week that the investigation of the Times Square bombing attempt was in some ways similar to the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. He was talking about the police work that nabbed Faisal Shahzad -- but the comment also highlighted the similarity of our government's response then and now.

Richard Haass: Goodbye to Europe as a high-ranking power

[The author is president of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of ‘War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars’.] It is more than a little ironic that Nato has committed itself to defining a new strategic concept at precisely the moment the transatlantic relationship counts for less than at any time since the 1930s. In part this development reflects Europe’s success. While Europe was the central arena for much of 20th- century history and a princ

David Leonhardt: Students of the Great Recession

[David Leonhardt is an economics columnist for The Times and a staff writer for the magazine.] The Great Depression did not have too many silver linings, but it did change the way Americans thought about education, clearly for the better. In 1930, only 30 percent of teenagers graduated from high school. By 1940, after a decade in which there often was nothing better to do than stay in school, the number had jumped to 50 percent. The Depression didn’t just make Americans tougher. It

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: The Mother of Hung Parliaments?

[Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the author of “The Strange Death of Tory England” and “Yo, Blair!”] A reliable rule in politics is that whenever something is decried as an unprecedented innovation, you can be sure that this is a tradition with many precedents. The British have just experienced a strange election campaign, and then a convulsive few days since Thursday when the votes were cast. But, as ever, there is little new under the sun. For the first time since

Gabriel Winant: What's with Conservatives' Fetish for the Founding Fathers?

[Gabriel Winant is a freelance writer and graduate student, currently living in the United Kingdom.] It's pretty revealing that, when casting about for a plan to oppose Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, the Republican National Committee decided to accuse her of not loving the Constitution enough. The item that the RNC thought was so dynamite? Kagan had quoted her mentor, Justice Thurgood Marshall, on the subject of the "defective" Constitution -- that is, the document tha

Michael Lind: Will the Great Recession Lead to World War IV?

[Michael Lind is policy director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and author of "The American Way of Strategy."] ...To those accustomed to thinking of the left-right spectrum in economic terms, the success of the recession-era right might seem peculiar. After all, you would think that the collapse of the deregulated financial system that helped cause the great recession would have discredited the market-worshiping right. And you would think that

Alexander Golts: Preparing for World War III

[Alexander Golts is deputy editor of the online newspaper Yezhednevny Zhurnal.] President Dmitry Medvedev made a number of very important statements in an interview with Izvestia published on Friday — the most notable of which was his statement that another war on the scale of World War II is possible in the future. The president thus proved that he continues to be influenced by Russia’s most conservative generals, who insist that the country should be prepared for a Soviet-style ma

David Swanson: Afghan Escalation Funding -- More War, Fewer Jobs, Poor Excuses

[David Swanson is the author of Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union and blogs at his website, War Is a Crime. To catch Timothy MacBain's TomCast audio interview with Swanson on the media, Congress, and the administration's latest request for escalation funding, click

Bernard Weiner: Get Out of Afghanistan Now

[Bernard Weiner, Ph.D., has taught government & international relations 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.] Many of us progressives now in our 60s and 70s spent years of our young

Linda Greenhouse: Just Answer the Question, Ms. Kagan

[Linda Greenhouse, the winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The New York Times from 1978 to 2008. She teaches at Yale Law School and is the author of a biography of Justice Harry A. Blackmun, “Becoming Justice Blackmun.”] AMONG its other virtues, the nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court is an opportunity to rescue the confirmation process from the “vapid and hollow charade” that it has become. The words in quot

David Brooks: The Proliferation of "Organization Kids"

[David Brooks is a columnist for the NYT.] About a decade ago, one began to notice a profusion of Organization Kids at elite college campuses. These were bright students who had been formed by the meritocratic system placed in front of them. They had great grades, perfect teacher recommendations, broad extracurricular interests, admirable self-confidence and winning personalities. If they had any flaw, it was that they often had a professional and strategic attitude to

Bret Stephens: What Is Happening to Turkey?

[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.] Last week I asked Bernard Lewis where he thought Turkey might be going. The dean of Middle East historians speculated that in a decade the secular republic founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk might more closely resemble the Islamic Republic of Iran—even as Iran transformed itself into a secular republic. Reading the news about Turkey from afar, it's easy to see what Prof. Lewis means. S

Richard Lourie: The Next Round of the Great Game

[Richard Lourie is author of “The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin” and “Sakharov: A Biography.”] The April uprising in Kyrgyzstan illuminates the latest phase of the Great Game. The game’s initial phase ran from 1807, when Napoleon proposed to Tsar Alexander to invade British India, until 1907, when tsarist Russia and imperial Britain sat down and — like civilized Europeans — divided spheres of interest, some of which ran right through countries like Iran.

Erwin Chemerinsky: Even Terrorism Suspects Have Rights

[Erwin Chemerinsky is dean of the UC Irvine School of Law.] Last week, following the attempted bombing in Times Square, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) proposed that those aiding foreign terrorist activity should be stripped of their citizenship. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton quickly agreed, with a few reservations, that the idea had merits. On Sunday, Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. said on morning news shows that

Anne Applebaum: Greece and the New Colonialism

[Anne Applebaum is a columnist for the Washington Post and Slate.] For the time being, the markets have been pacified. For the moment, the riots in Athens have subsided. Only "hundreds" of demonstrators came out over the weekend, fewer than the 50,000 who killed three people during a violent petrol-bomb attack on a bank last week. But this temporary truce in Greece has been bought at a high price—by which I don't just mean that it was expensive. Here in front

Dahlia Lithwick: The Limits of Influence

[Dahlia Lithwick is a senior editor for Slate.] The hunt for Justice John Paul Stevens' replacement has become singularly focused on personality type. In­­stead of searching for the most brilliant jurist in the country, we have all become obsessively focused on which candidate is most likely to influence the rest of the court. We talk about each prospective nominee as though we were adding a new castaway to Gilligan's Island. And, so goes the narrative, President Obama