Roundup: Media's Take

Henry A. Giroux: Democracy and the Threat of Authoritarianism: Politics Beyond Barack Obama

[Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department. He has taught at Boston University, Miami University of Ohio, and Penn State University. His most recent books include: The University in Chains: Confronting the military-Industrial-Academic Complex (Paradigm, 2007); Against the Terror of Neoliberalism (Paradigm, 2008); Youth in a Suspect Society (Palgrave 2009). Giroux is also a member of Truthout

Bill Fletcher, Jr.: Lessons From Black History: Understanding How Change Happens

[Bill Fletcher, Jr., is the Chairman of the Board of Directors for the International Labor Rights Forum, Executive Editor of The Black Commentator and founder of the Center for Labor Renewal.] ...If there is one critical lesson from the last year, it is that in the absence of social movements -- and particularly social movements with dynamic and audacious leadership -- political change does not happen in a progressive direction irrespective of the intent of elected leaders. This is

Carl Gershman: The Dalai Lama's Principled Pursuit of Democracy

[The writer is president of the National Endowment for Democracy, which will present its Democracy Service Medal to the Dalai Lama on Friday.] Now that the White House has announced that President Obama will receive the Dalai Lama, it is important that he be welcomed not only as a moral and religious leader respected throughout the world but also as a fellow democrat who shares America's deepest values. This is not an aspect of the Dalai Lama that is well understood, es

Michael Barone: Under Obama, Crony Capitalism Again Rules the Day

[Michael-Barone is senior Political Analyst for the Washington Examiner. A resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, he is also a Fox News Channel contributor and co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. His column is published Wednesdays and Sundays.] In his best-seller "Inside U.S.A.", the hugely readable journalist John Gunther described America as it was in the last year of World War II. He interviewed hundreds of politicians, businessmen and journali

Michael Lind: Mythological Politics are the Key to Understanding the Populist Right

[Michael Lind is policy director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation.] ...American political culture was British before it was American. During the English civil war of the 17th century, two themes crystallized — and have influenced American public discourse to this day. One was the idea of the Ancient Constitution. The other was the idea of the True Religion. Many British opponents of the Stuart monarchs claimed that they were defending an anci

Peter Beinart: Cheney's Real Enemy Is Bush

[Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is associate professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. His new book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, will be published by HarperCollins in June.] Soon after 9/11, Foreign Affairs published an article arguing that the struggle between al Qaeda and the United States was just a byproduct of the struggle among Muslims thems

Samuel M. Edelman: A Week of Uncivil Discourse on Campus

[Cutting Edge contributor Samuel M. Edelman is executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.] Anti-Israel individuals and groups on college campuses are beginning to show a pattern underlying a shift in the form of their anti-Israel activities which attack the very core of what many consider the most important aspect of the university experience, the free flow of information and opinion. Just in the last week we have seen the following events take place at UC Irvine,

Paul Mozur: China's Self-Defeating Censorship

[aul Mozur is a freelance writer based in Taipei.] ...During the debate over Internet censorship that has raged since Google stopped filtering search results in China, the unsettling example of Xinjiang — which with a population of 20 million represents one of the largest examples of Internet suppression the world has ever seen — has rarely been mentioned. It must be considered. Indeed, though it is not so difficult to imagine going without Youtube or Twitter, which are regula

Wolfgang Ischinger and Ulrich Weisser: Why NATO Should Withdraw Nukes from Germany

[Wolfgang Ischinger is a former deputy foreign minister of Germany and chairman of the Munich Security Conference. Ulrich Weisser was director of the policy planning staff of the German defense minister.] A recent report by George Robertson, a former secretary general of NATO, and two co-authors, Franklin Miller and Kori Schake, criticizes the German proposal to withdraw the remaining American nuclear weapons from German territory as damaging not only to Germany, but to the alliance

Philip Bowring: Are Political Dynasties Good or Bad?

Are political dynasties good or bad? Election time in the Philippines is a regular reminder of the roles that feudal instincts and the family name play in that nation’s politics. Benigno Aquino, son of the late President Corazon Aquino, is the front runner to succeed President Gloria Arroyo, daughter of Diosdado Macapagal, a president in the 1960s.... The list of Asian countries with governments headed by the offspring or spouses of former leaders is striking: Pakistan

André Glucksmann: The Velvet Philosophical Revolution

[André Glucksmann is a French philosopher. His story was translated by Alexis Cornel.] On the evening of November 9, 1989, the wall of shame was breached. The next morning, I took off for Berlin; shortly afterward, I experienced the Velvet Revolution in Prague, and finally the fall of Ceauşescu in Bucharest. The year 1990 opened joyfully for the human race. But I was struck by the difference in the emotions felt in the East and in the West. Representative of the West was Fr

Mark Ames: The Hero of the Orange Revolution Poisons Ukraine

[Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (Soft Skull) and The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia (Grove). He is a regular contributor to eXiled Online.] If you've been wondering what ever happened to that wonderful Orange Revolution in Ukraine--because let's face it, it was probably the last feel-good moment America collectively experienced in an otherwise bummer-packed decade--Sunday's

Naomi Klein: Haiti: A Creditor, Not a Debtor

[Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and syndicated columnist and the author of the international and New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (September 2007); an earlier international best-seller, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies; and the collection Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (2002).] If we are to believe the G-7 finance ministers, Haiti is on its way to getting something it ha

Christopher M. Fairman: The Case Against Banning the Word 'Retard'

[Christopher M. Fairman is a professor at the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University. He is the author of a book subtitled "Word Taboo and Protecting Our First Amendment Liberties," whose title is unprintable here.] Does the word "retard" have less than three weeks to live? Long before Rahm Emanuel, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh made the word fodder for political controversy and late-night punch lines, a movement was underway to eliminate it

E.J. Dionne: What Bill Clinton Could Teach President Obama

When word went out that Bill Clinton had been rushed to the hospital, the prospect that he was in danger made me wish that President Obama had spent more time learning lessons that only Clinton can teach.... ...Clinton, like Obama, started out as a unifier who disdained ideological quarrels and saw himself as a problem-solver. There is not a dime's worth of difference between Clinton's war on "the brain-dead politics of both parties" and Obama's insistence that "there

Bruce Anderson: We not only have a right to use torture. We have a duty

[Bruce Anderson is a columnist at the Independent.] Torture is revolting. A man can retain his human dignity in front of a firing squad or on the scaffold: not in a torture chamber. Torturers set out to break their victim: to take a human being and reduce him to a whimpering wreck. In so doing, they defile themselves and their society. In Britain, torture has been illegal for more than 300 years. Shortly after torture was abjured, we stopped executing witches: all part of a move

Caryl Churchill and Amir Amirani: The people's brakes on war

[Caryl Churchill has been a leading British playwright for more than 30 years. Amir Amirani is an Iranian-born British film-maker who is working on a documentary about the Iraq War.] Seven years ago today, it was hard to believe how many people were on the streets trying to prevent the Iraq war. There was anger and foreboding, but also a feeling of exhilaration. Surely a march this big would have some effect. As we know, it didn't. Yet the numbers on that 15 February 20

Thomas Friedman: 1977 vs. 1979 in the Muslim World

[Thomas Friedman is an American journalist, columnist and multi Pulitzer Prize winning author. He is an op-ed contributor to The New York Times, whose column appears twice weekly. He has written extensively on foreign affairs including global trade, the Middle East and environmental issues. He has won the Pulitzer Prize three times, twice for International Reporting (1983, 1988) and once for Commentary (2002). He has been a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board from 2004 until the present.]

Sam Husseini: U.S. Afghanistan Offensive Violates Olympic Truce

[Sam Husseini is a writer and political activist. He is the communications director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, a D.C.-based nonprofit group that promotes progressive experts as alternative sources for mainstream media reporters.] Earlier today I sent a note to several friends, writing that it "would be interesting if the U.S. started the offensive in Afghanistan tonight, since the ancient Greeks stopped their wars to have Olympics; but we've followed a different path

Stephen Farrell: Marja 50 Years Ago: Model Villages and American Money

[Stephen Farrell is a columnist for the New York Times.]Marja, an area of Afghanistan’s southern Helmand Province, is the focus of an imminent NATO military operation. Tribal elders are being assured that government and NATO forces will rid the area of Taliban fighters, and that they will be consulted on the appointment of l