Roundup: Media's Take

James Taranto: Why ObamaCare Makes Us Nostalgic for the Cold War

[James Taranto is editor of OpinionJournal.com and author of its popular Best of the Web Today column. In August 2007 he was named a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.] Well, they did it to us. By a vote of 219-212, the House late last night passed the Senate's ObamaCare bill, sending it to the president for his signature. Wisely, the Democrats who run the House dispensed with the bizarre "deem and pass" tactic and voted on the bill directly, depriving Ob

John Nichols: A Historic Vote for Health-Care Reform

[John Nichols writes about politics for The Nation magazine as its Washington correspondent.] It fell to the senior member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Michigan Democrat John Dingell, to put Sunday night's vote in favor of landmark health care legislation in perspective. "Today we are doing something that ranks with Social Security and Medicare," declared the man whose father served during the New Deal era that gave America Social Security and who him

Dana Milbank: Health Reform and the Specter of Alf Landon

[Dana Milbank writes for the Washington Post.] "This is the largest tax bill in history," the Republican leader fumed. The reform "is unjust, unworkable, stupidly drafted and wastefully financed." And that wasn't all. This "cruel hoax," he said, this "folly" of "bungling and waste," compared poorly to the "much less expensive" and "practical measures" favored by the Republicans. "We

Vladimir Kozin: The New Cuban Missile Crisis

[Vladimir Kozin is head of the analytical section of the Asia-Pacific department at the Foreign Ministry.] While history will remember the 20th century for the nuclear arms race, the 21st century might be remembered for the missile defense arms race. About 20 countries now possess missile defense systems, but more than 40 states are expected to have them by midcentury. In fact, by 2050 an entire coordinated system will appear of ground-based, sea-based, air-based and possibly even space-based missile defense elements. At the same time, the United States and its NATO partners are trying to downplay the negative consequences that missile defense will have on international security, saying it is purely defensive in nature. The standard explanation is that the missile shield will consist of 40 ground-based interceptors positioned on the territory of the continental United States and several dozen more interceptor missiles deployed on the territory of NATO member states and on war-ready battleships.

Pratap Chatterjee: How Afghan Police Training Became a Train Wreck

[Pratap Chatterjee is a freelance journalist and senior editor at CorpWatch. He has traveled extensively in the Middle East and Central Asia and is the author of two books about the war on terror, Iraq, Inc. and Halliburton's Army (Nation Books, 2009), which has just been published in paperback.]The Pentagon faces a tough choice: Should it award a new contract to Xe (formerly Blackwater), a company 

E.J. Dionne: Yes, they made history

[E.J. Dionne is a twice-weekly columnist for The Post, writing on national policy and politics.] Yes, we did. Finally, President Obama can use those words. The passage of health-care reform provided the first piece of incontestable evidence that Washington has changed. Congress is, indeed, capable of carrying through fundamental social reform. No longer will the United States be the outlier among wealthy nations in leaving so many of its citizens without

Jonathan Chait: Obama's Place In History

[Jonathan Chait is a senior editor at The New Republic.] Let me offer a ludicrously premature opinion: Barack Obama has sealed his reputation as a president of great historical import. We don't know what will follow in his presidency, and it's quite possible that some future event--a war, a scandal--will define his presidency. But we do know that he has put his imprint on the structure of American government in a way that no Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson has.

Kevin Kosar: Susan Jacoby Bungles Education Reform

On March 14, 2010, the New York Times ran an op-ed by Susan Jacoby on education and federalism. Jacoby has written widely and smartly on many subjects, but why the Times felt she should handle this subject is a mystery to me. Plenty of other thinkers could have done a bang-up job, like Patrick McGuinn, Paul Manna, Rick Hess, or… But, the editors chose to go with Jacoby, and to disastrous effect. Her op-ed is a classic example of someone clever writing about a topic that they know

Phyllis Schlafly: Texas Kicks Out Liberal Bias From Textbooks

[Ms. Schlafy is a noted conservative activist.] "Don't Mess with Texas" is a popular slogan in our most prosperous state. By a 10-to-5 margin, the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) just told liberals to stop "messing" with social studies textbooks. For years, liberals have imposed their revisionist history on our nation's public school students, expunging important facts and historic figures while loading the textbooks with liberal propaganda, di

Susan Jacoby: One Classroom, From Sea to Shining Sea

[Susan Jacoby is the author of “The Age of American Unreason.”] AMERICAN public education, a perennial whipping boy for both the political right and left, is once again making news in ways that show how difficult it will be to cure what ails the nation’s schools. Only last week, President Obama declared that every high school graduate must be fully prepared for college or a job (who knew?) and called for significant changes in the No Child Left Behind law. In Kansas Cit

Jonah Goldberg: Our Political Leaders Believe in Two Different Americas

[Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.] John Edwards, when he wasn’t fixing his hair or cheating on his wife, liked to talk about “two Americas.” In one America, things were pretty bad, somewhere between The Grapes of Wrath and Thunderdome. In the other America, where Edwards himself lived in a McMansion, things were going swimmingly. Edwards was hardly the only one to use this two-America

Conrad Black: Don’t Give Up on Europe

[Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full. He can be reached at cbletters@gmail.com.] As with so many other foreign-policy matters, there is room and reason for the United States to reassess its policy toward Europe. That policy was stable throughout the Cold War: support of anything that assisted the Western Europeans in being better Cold Warriors. The destruction of W

Max Boot: Obama's Actions No Way to Treat Israel

[Max Boot is a contributing editor to Opinion, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of "War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today."] It is nice to see a real display of emotion from the normally dispassionate Obama administration. Unfortunately, if predictably, its ire is directed not against America's enemies but against one of our closest friends. Vice President Joe Biden, in Israel on March 9,

David Brooks: Our Broken Society Needs to Be Transformed

[David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times.] The United States is becoming a broken society. The public has contempt for the political class. Public debt is piling up at an astonishing and unrelenting pace. Middle-class wages have lagged. Unemployment will remain high. It will take years to fully recover from the financial crisis. ...[T]here is [a] way to respond to these problems that is... communitarian... This alternative has been explored most fully by the

Christine M. Flowers: A Textbook Case of Hysteria

[Christine M. Flowers is a lawyer. Listen to her Thursdays on WPHT/1210 AM, 10-midnight.] FOR YEARS, liberal activists and historians have engaged in an all-out effort to redefine our country's narrative by attacking the so-called "white and patriarchal" interpretation of history found in most pre-1960s textbooks.... Nothing wrong with that, in theory. The more information a student is exposed to, the better. Assuming, that is, that there's balanc

Thomas Frank: Don't Mess With the Texas Board of Ed

[Thomas Frank is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal.] At some point during the deliberations of the Texas State Board of Education last week, that august body decided that when public school students came to study the era of the Great Society and affirmative action they should henceforth be required to "analyze any unintended consequences" of those 1960s reforms. I do not know what "consequences" board members had in mind when they approved that

Joe Conason: Right Wing Gone Wild, Just Like the 1950s

[Joe Conason writes for The New York Observer.] Demagogues often prosper under the rules of democracy, intimidating the moderate and preying on the weak-minded. But in a healthy society, such figures cannot cross a final threshold of decency without jeopardizing their own status—and today’s right-wing nihilists seem to be on the verge of doing just that. When Elizabeth Cheney, a daughter of the former vice president, questions the loyalty of anyone who stands up for the

Ray McGovern: Yoo Besmirches Legacy of Jefferson

[Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He was an analyst at the CIA for 27 years, and is on the Steering Group of VIPS.] Initially I was shocked at the thought of the University of Virginia (UVA) welcoming former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo to the "Academical Village" founded by Thomas Jefferson. There was something very wrong about that picture. Was it not Jefferson who conde

Fred Barnes: The Health-Care Wars Are Only Beginning

[Mr. Barnes is executive editor of the Weekly Standard and a commentator on Fox News Channel.] On Dec. 7, 1941, an announcement was made during the football game between the hometown Washington Redskins and the Philadelphia Eagles. All the generals and admirals at Griffith Stadium were instructed to report to their duty stations. Little did they know their lives would be changed forever and America would be at war, or on war footing, for the next half-century. Pearl Harbor had been

Andrew Cohen: The Revival of the Extreme Anti-Government Right

[Andrew Cohen - Andrew Cohen has served as chief legal analyst and legal editor for CBS News and won a Murrow Award as one of the nation's leading legal analysts and commentators.]Among other items of evidence seized from Timothy McVeigh's car when he was arrested 15 years ago next month outside of Oklahoma City was a papered quote from Samuel Adams. "When