Roundup: Media's Take

Source: Foreign Policy Journal
February 22, 2010

M. Shahid Alam: Disturbing Parallels Between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A.

[M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern University, Boston. He is author of Poverty from the Wealth of Nations (Macmillan, 2000), Challenging the New Orientalism (IPI, 2006), and Israeli Exceptionalism (Palgrave, 2009).] During the Cold War, the USA and USSR were arch-rivals, each the antipodes of the other. For some four decades, they battled each other for ‘survival’ and global hegemony, staring down at each other with nuclear tipped missiles, ready at the push o

Source: National Review
February 22, 2010

George Weigel: Why the Russians Whined about the Olympic Medal in Figureskating

[George Weigel is a distinguished senior fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center.] ...An exception to [the] Olympic Rule of Vanilla was on full display, however, after American Evan Lysacek narrowly beat the 2006 gold-medal winner, Russia’s Evgeni Plushenko, to take the gold in men’s figure skating at the current Vancouver Games. Plushenko, who has made a career out of being boisterous (some would say, out of being a jackass), was not pleased. He, after all, had execu

Source: Foreign Policy
March 1, 2010

John Arquilla: The U.S. Military Needs to Adopt a Network-Centric Vision of Warfare

[John Arquilla is professor of defense analysis at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and author of Worst Enemy: The Reluctant Transformation of the American Military.] Every day, the U.S. military spends $1.75 billion, much of it on big ships, big guns, and big battalions that are not only not needed to win the wars of the present, but are sure to be the wrong approach to waging the wars of the future. In this, the ninth year of the first great conflict between nations

Source: The Weekly Standard
February 22, 2010

Reuel Marc Gerecht: The Islamic Republic of Iran is Alive but Not Well

[Reuel Marc Gerecht is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.] Supreme leader Ali Khamenei had a good day on February 11. If the pro-democracy Green movement had managed to send hundreds of thousands of demonstrators once again onto Tehran’s streets, his heybat—the indispensable awe behind dictatorship—would have been finished. Backed by an enormous security force drawn from all over the country, the regime let

Source: Slate
February 22, 2010

Chris Wilson: How the U.S. Military is Changing Its Hierarchical Model of Its Enemies

[Chris Wilson is an associate editor of Slate.] Traffic had slowed to a crawl in Baghdad's Azamiyah district as drivers stopped to ogle the president. It was April 2003, and Saddam Hussein cheerily greeted his subjects as a few bodyguards tried to keep the crowd at bay. Someone handed Saddam a bewildered baby, which he hoisted up in the air a few times and handed back. When he reached a white sedan, Saddam climbed onto the hood to survey the sea of loyalists. Not long a

Source: The Atlantic
March 1, 2010

Don Peck: How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America

[Don Peck is a deputy managing editor of The Atlantic.] How should we characterize the economic period we have now entered? After nearly two brutal years, the Great Recession appears to be over, at least technically. Yet a return to normalcy seems far off. By some measures, each recession since the 1980s has retreated more slowly than the one before it. In one sense, we never fully recovered from the last one, in 2001: the share of the civilian population with a job never returned t

Source: The Atlantic
February 21, 2010

James Fallows: The OPR Report is this Era's 'Hiroshima'

[James Fallows is National Correspondent for The Atlantic.] ...Through American history, there have been episodes of brutality and abuse that, in hindsight, span a very wide range of moral acceptability. There is no way to "understand" lynchings that makes them other than abominations. But -- to use the extreme case -- America's use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki will always be the subject of first-order moral debate, about whether any "larger good"

Source: In These Times
February 22, 2010

Susan J. Douglas: The Backlash to 1970s Feminism

[Susan J. Douglas is a professor of communications at the University of Michigan and an In These Times columnist. Her latest book is Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message That Feminism's Work is Done (2010).] Spring 1997. This was the Spice Girls moment, and debate: Were these frosted cupcakes really a vehicle for feminism? And how much reversion back to the glory days of prefeminism should girls and women accept—even celebrate—given that we now allegedly had it all

Source: Guardian (UK)
February 22, 2010

Seumas Milne: Irish Unity is Inevitable

[Seumas Milne is a Guardian columnist and associate editor.] It's not hard to see why Sinn Féin wants to turn up the volume on Irish unity – or why the party threw its weight behind a packed London conference at the weekend aimed at driving the issue up the political agenda. This month's police and justice devolution deal set the seal on a 15-year process that has brought the republican leadership into the heart of the power structure in Northern Ireland. It's already d

Source: International Herald Tribune
February 21, 2010

Saswato R. Das: Farewell to NASA's Glory Days

[Saswato R. Das is a science and technology writer in New York.] Outsourcing will soon hit the National Aeronautics and Space Administration hard, if President Obama has his way. The new NASA budget unveiled this month calls for the U.S. space agency to outsource rocket development for manned space flights — historically a NASA strength — to commercial companies. If Congress approves it, NASA astronauts will be stuck riding in commercial space taxis — a sorry state of affairs for th

Source: Newsweek
February 19, 2010

Jon Meacham: The System’s Not to Blame - We Are

[Jon Meacham is the Editor of Newsweek.] History can be a problem. if you spend a lot of time thinking about the political past, you tend to see the events of the present time differently than you do if you are consumed by the passions of the hour. A habit of mind that puts most things in context with what has happened before—weighing them, if you will, to gauge their gravity in comparison to ages past—has its virtues and its vices. The chief virtue is that you probably know how we

Source: Newsweek
February 19, 2010

Eleanor Clift: The 2010 Midterms are Looking a Lot Like the 1994 Election

[Eleanor Clift is contributing editor to Newsweek.] Florida Senate candidate and tea-party darling Marco Rubio is riding the wave of what he calls "the single greatest pushback in American history." While his view of history and the impact of other populist movements can be debated, there's no doubt that Scott Brown's win in Massachusetts has thrust Senate Democrats into a deep panic. They complain they have no message and no leadership, and they're angry at their leader,

Source: American Prospect review of Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party by Max Blumenthal, Nation Books, $25.00, 394 pages
February 17, 2010

Robert Kuttner: How the Religious Right Has Taken Over the Republican Party

[Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect magazine, as well as a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the think tank Demos. He was a longtime columnist for Business Week, and continues to write columns in the Boston Globe. He is the author of Obama's Challenge and other books.] Anyone who has followed Max Blumenthal's investigative writings on the far right's takeover of the Republican Party should not have been surprised when John McCain added Sarah Palin to th

Source: Foreign Policy
February 19, 2010

Andrew Swift: A Guide to the International Conflicts Playing out at the Winter Olympics

[Andrew Swift is a researcher at Foreign Policy.] THE SIX-PARTY TALKS ON ICE The politics: North Korea's nuclear program has destabilized the Asian political scene for years. The six-party talks aimed at resolving the crisis -- between North Korea, South Korea, the United States, China, Japan, and Russia -- have continued intermittently, with no final, satisfactory result. The Hermit Kingdom regularly fires off ballistic missiles, enraging and scaring the interested par

Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 18, 2010

Jeff Randall: David Cameron and the Tories Should Learn Lessons from History

[Jeff Randall is the Daily Telegraph's editor at large.] ...“Our finances have been brought into grave disorder. No British Government in peace time has ever had the power or spent the money in the vast extent and reckless manner of our current rulers... no community living in a world of competing nations can possibly afford such frantic extravagances... the evils which we suffer today are the inevitable progeny of that wanton way of living.” This analysis, crisp and in

Source: The American Conservative
February 18, 2010

David Franke: The Mount Vernon Declaration in Historical Perspective

[David Franke was one of the founders of the conservative movement in the 1950s and 1960s, when Democrats and liberals were the ones who believed in big government, fiscal recklessness, and an imperial presidency. This article originally appeared on LewRockwell.com.] ...[D]ozens of top conservative muckamucks met on February 17 at an estate that was an original part of George Washington’s Mount Vernon. There they signed “The Mount Vernon Statement” with the subtitle: “Constitutional

Source: NYT
February 18, 2010

David Brooks: The Decline of Trust in the Power Elite

[David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times.] One of the great achievements of modern times is that we have made society more fair. Sixty years ago, the upper echelons were dominated by what E. Digby Baltzell called The Protestant Establishment and C. Wright Mills called The Power Elite. If your father went to Harvard, you had a 90 percent chance of getting in yourself, and the path upward from there was grooved in your favor. Since then, we have opened up oppor

Source: WaPo
February 15, 2010

Robert Samuelson: The Danger Behind China's 'Me First' Worldview

[Robert Samuelson is a columnist for the Washington Post.] It's become apparent from recent events that America's political, business and scholarly elites have fundamentally misjudged China. Conflicts with China have multiplied. Consider: the undervalued renminbi and its effect on trade; the breakdown of global warming negotiations in Copenhagen; China's weak support of efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons; its similarly poor record in pushing North Korea to reli

Source: The Nation
February 18, 2010

Barbara Crossette: Sri Lanka Wins a War and Diminishes Democracy

[Barbara Crossette, United Nations correspondent for The Nation, is a former New York Times correspondent and bureau chief in Asia and at the UN. She is the author of So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1995.] In its 62 years of independence, Sri Lanka has never had a better chance than it has now to stamp out the last fires of ethnic hatred, violence and mindless chauvinisms that have left over 80,000 people dead in

Source: LA Times
February 18, 2010

Erwin Chemerinsky: UC Irvine's Free Speech Debate

[Erwin Chemerinsky is dean of the UC Irvine School of Law.] College campuses, especially at public universities, are places where all ideas should be expressed and debated. No speech ever should be stopped or punished because of the viewpoint expressed. Of course, there must be rules to regulate the time, place and manner of such expression to preserve order and even to make sure that speech can occur. These general principles are unassailable, but their application to