Roundup: Media's Take

Alexander Cockburn: Fifty Years After Greensboro, Whatever Happened to the American Left?

[Alexander Cockburn is co-editor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. He is also co-author of the new book "Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils," available through www.counterpunch.com.] Fifty years ago this month, history took a great leap forward. On Feb. 1, 1960, four black students from Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina sat down at a segregated lunch counter

Peter Roff: ‘President’s Day’ is a Ridiculous Insult to George Washington

[Peter Roff is a columnist for U.S. News & World Report.] On Monday America will again observe Presidents' Day, the holiday established to honor all the former chief executives of the United States. It wasn't always so. In 1968, under the provisions of the so-called "Long Weekend Act," the United States Congress changed the calendar in order to move George Washington's birthday to the most convenient Monday. The three-day weekend the act created, while hel

Joseph Chingyong Liow: Malaysia's "Allah" Controversy

[Joseph Chingyong Liow is Associate Dean and Associate Professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is author of Piety and Politics: Islamism in Contemporary Malaysia.] ...For many Muslims in the region [of Malaysia], Christian use of the word "Allah" is relatively unproblematic. Jesus, who lived six centuries before Islam was founded, would most likely have used a similar Aramaic word, "Alah," in

Yang Yao: The End of the Beijing Consensus

[Yang Yao is Deputy Dean of the National School of Development and the Director of the China Center for Economic Research at Peking University.] For the last 30 years, the CCP has intentionally adopted policies favoring specific groups or regions to promote reform and economic growth. It has helped that the disinterested CCP government was not permanently beholden to certain groups or regions. China's integration into the world economy is a case in point. At the end of the 1970s, th

Fred Kaplan: Should We Stop Worrying and Love the Iranian Bomb?

[Fred Kaplan is a journalist and contributor to Slate magazine.] Iran's announcement of an advance in its uranium-enrichment program—and thus a potential step closer to an A-bomb—has sparked four responses in various opinion pages: 1. It's time to attack Iran now, before it's too late. 2. It's time to rally the world to impose sanctions on Iran now, before it's too late. 3. It's time to engage Iran in diplomacy now, before it's too late. 4. Relax: A

Michael Gerson: Guantanamo prison ... Ugly but necessary

[Michael Gerson's column appears on Wednesdays and Fridays.] It is the oddest of unintended airport stopovers -- a short stay at Guantanamo Bay. Helicopter flights for the ship I was trying to reach off the coast of Haiti had been canceled. So I slept in an Air Force tent at Camp Freedom, an arrow's shot from where Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed is imprisoned -- his stay now extended longer than the Obama administration would wish. "Guantanamo" has

George H. Wittman: The Old Afghan Waltz

[George H. Wittman is a member of the Committee on the Present Danger and was the founding chairman of the National Institute for Public Policy.] "Getting in line" and "getting with the program" are old expressions in the Pentagon. The Navy version is to be "on board." You've got to get in line or be on board if you expect to "get ahead" at the good old DoD. In regard to war fighting in Afghanistan, the current program with which everyone is s

Noam Scheiber: What Obama could learn from Bush about bipartisanship

[Noam Scheiber is a senior editor of The New Republic.] Everyone remembers that George W. Bush’s first tax cut was contentious when Congress considered it back in 2001. So contentious, in fact, that the Bushies didn’t even try passing it under normal Senate procedures. The GOP leadership, worried that it couldn’t collect 60 votes to overcome a Democratic filibuster, relied on reconciliation, the Senate rule that allows budget-related measures to pass with a simple majority.

Marcia Alesan Dawkins: Tom Tancredo's Fear of a "Multicultural" Nation

[Marcia Alesan Dawkins is Assistant Professor of Human Communication at California State University, Fullerton.] Last Thursday night former Congressman and 2008 Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo made opening-night remarks at the inaugural National Tea Party Convention in Nashville. Tancredo fired verbal shots at Barack Obama, Sen. John McCain and “the cult of multiculturalism,” stating that people who “could not spell the word vote or say it in English” had elected the

Johann Hari: Obama's secret camps are worthy of Bush's

[Johann Hari is a British journalist and writer.] Osama bin Laden's favourite son, Omar, recently abandoned his father's cave in favour of spending his time dancing and drooling in the nightclubs of Damascus. The tang of freedom almost always trumps Islamist fanaticism in the end: three million people abandoned the Puritan hell of Taliban Afghanistan for freer countries, while only a few thousand faith-addled fanatics ever travelled the other way. Osama's vision can't even inspire h

Richard N. Haass: Only one force can stop Iran now ... its people

[Richard N. Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of War of Necessity, War of Choice: a Memoir of Two Iraq Wars.] In Iran the clock is ticking. In fact, three clocks are ticking simultaneously — in the country’s nuclear laboratories, at the negotiating table and on the streets. Its future depends on which clock ticks fastest. Demonstrations filled the streets yesterday, accompanied by the clear sound of a political crackdown as the regime

Con Coughlin: A bloody history may be about to repeat itself in Iran

[Con Coughlin is the author of 'Khomeini's Ghost'.] Despite facing the worst political crisis since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini established his uncompromising Islamic theocracy in February 1979, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his supporters were still able to summon hundreds of thousands of pro-government supporters onto the streets. In many respects the atmosphere in Tehran on Thursday was not dissimilar to that in 1979, when government forces battled to prevent an

Amir Taheri: Will Tehran Choose the Tiananmen Solution?

[Amir Taheri is author of The Persian Night: Iran under the Khomeinist Revolution.] An east-west street of more than 30 miles divides Tehran, Iran’s megapolis of a capital, into two halves: a modern north and a traditional south. Thirty years ago the thoroughfare was named after Reza Shah, the founder of the Pahlavis, the last dynasty of monarchs in Iran. Today it is called Enghelab (Revolution) Street after the turmoil that led to the creation of the first theocracy in the country’

Fred Barnes: The Ideologue ... Obama’s No Clinton

[Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.] President Obama’s greatest need is to escape the ideological grip of congressional Democrats and the liberal base of the Democratic party (they’re one and the same). But he either doesn’t recognize this or, as a conventional liberal himself, isn’t so inclined. This self-inflicted difficulty has put Obama in worse political straits than President Clinton faced after the Republican landslide of 1994. Certainly ther

Lisa Daftari: Exalting Khomeini’s Legacy

[Lisa Daftari is an award-winning journalist with expertise in the Middle East and counter-terrorism. Her stories have appeared on CBS, NBC, PBS, the Washington Post and Voice of America. She was invited to show her documentary film on an Iranian political youth movement to a subcommittee of Congress.] ...Khomeini, best known to the rest of the world as the founder of modern Islam, the supporter of the Hostage Crisis and the man who issued a fatwa (death decree) on the head of autho

Steve Fraser: How the Obama Administration Ended Up Where Franklin Roosevelt Began

[Steve Fraser is the co-editor of The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order and author, most recently, of Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace. He is Research Associate at the Joseph Murphy Center for Labor and Community Studies at the Graduate Center of the City of New York.] On March 4, 1933, the day he took office, Franklin Roosevelt excoriated the “money changers” who “have fled from their high seats in the temples of our civilization [because...] they know only the rules of a

Aaron Zelinsky: WWJD: What Would Johnson Do?

[Aaron Zelinsky is Articles Editor, 'Yale Law Journal'] The Senate is strangling the Obama administration. Everything from high profile legislation to mid-level appointees is held up, often because of little more than pet peeves. Many members of the GOP now practice obstructionism for the sake of obstructionism: They are, therefore they filibuster. In Washington, the Senate hold has become as commonplace as lobbyists and monuments. It's time President Obama looked hard

Francis Fukuyama: What Became of the 'Freedom Agenda'?

[Mr. Fukuyama, professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is author of "America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy" (Yale, 2006).] President Obama's recent drop in the polls has not been accompanied by a corresponding rebound in public opinion concerning the foreign policy of his predecessor George W. Bush. This is particularly true with regard to the promotion of democracy in

Aaron Zelinsky: WWJD: What Would Johnson Do?

[Aaron Zelinsky is the Articles Editor at the 'Yale Law Journal'] The Senate is strangling the Obama administration. Everything from high profile legislation to mid-level appointees is held up, often because of little more than pet peeves. Many members of the GOP now practice obstructionism for the sake of obstructionism: They are, therefore they filibuster. In Washington, the Senate hold has become as commonplace as lobbyists and monuments. It's time President Obama lo

Matthew Kroenig: China and Russia Aren't Interested in Non-Proliferation in Iran

[Matthew Kroenig is an assistant professor of government at Georgetown University and the author of Exporting the Bomb: Technology Transfer and the Spread of Nuclear Weapons.] As President Obama begins a push to impose harsher economic sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program, his success will be determined largely by the answer to a single question: Will China and Russia get on board? In order to bite, sanctions must be enforced by the rest of the international community, but, so