Roundup: Media's Take

Erin Aubry Kaplan: "Negro" Needs to be Retired

[Erin Aubry Kaplan is a contributing editor to the LA Times.] America's Negro problem just won't quit. The Census Bureau has been using the term "Negro" as a racial identifier on its decennial forms since 1950, later joined -- though not supplanted -- by "black" and "African Am." But when the website thegrio.com recently pointed out that "Negro" was going to appear once more on the 2010 census, many black folks reacted with shock and pointed d

Gregory Rodriguez: America's Distrust of Government Started with George III

[Gregory Rodriguez is a columnist for the LA Times] Let me get straight to the point: Americans' profound distrust of government is neurotic -- irrational, defensive and born of emotional trauma.... If Americans were to seek help for their neurosis, any good therapist would try to dig down to the root of the outsized distrust. Maybe he or she would let us beat around the bush for a few sessions. We'd recount incidents of government corruption, overreach. Then there was

Tim Rutten: The Winter of America's Discontent

[Tim Rutten is a columnist for the LA Times] It has been more than four decades since the Congress of the United States has been able to summon the will to pass a major piece of social legislation. Not since 1965, when Medicare and the Voting Rights Act both overcame decades of opposition to become law, has Congress proved itself up to the task. Significant healthcare reform is all but dead for this session, and the chances of substantively addressing the regulatory bre

Henry J. Barkey and Thomas de Waal: Armenia and Turkey: The Truce in Need of a Rescue

[Henri J. Barkey is a professor of international relations at Lehigh University and a visiting senior scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where Thomas de Waal is a senior associate on the Caucasus.] For a while, it looked like the start of a great reconciliation. Armenia and Turkey have lived beneath the vast shadow of the mass murder of Armenians in eastern Turkey during World War I, and to this day they maintain no diplomatic ties. But in October, the Armeni

Hollis Robbins: The Minstrel Origins of "Who Dat?"

Is it OK to say “Who Dat?” Now that the Saints have won the Super Bowl, the phrase (if anyone had missed it before) is ubiquitous, and the question is both moot and even more pressing. The answer is yes, it’s OK. The phrase has its roots in vernacular poetry of the 19th century and was popularized by black entertainers. The documented history of the phrase begins with the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), famous for poems such as “We Wear the Mask”

Michael O'Donnell: Scalia v. The World

[Michael O'Donnell is a lawyer in Chicago whose writing on legal matters has appeared in Bookforum, the Los Angeles Times and the Christian Science Monitor] The dean of the modern conservative legal movement, Justice Antonin Scalia, is neither an intellectual nor a primitive. He is both. Scalia has fused the cerebral and the atavistic strains of conservatism in a manner that leaves one wondering if they were ever distinct at all. For decades Scalia has beguiled conservative law stud

Nick Turse: The 700 Military Bases of Afghanistan

[Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and the winner of a 2009 Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction as well as a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, In These Times, and regularly at TomDispatch. Turse is currently a fellow at New York University's Center for the United States and the Cold War. He is the author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books). His

Bob Brecher: Iraq and the Fig-Leaf of Just War Theory

[Bob Brecher is the founder of Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics at the University of Brighton]Dissension over the legality of the Iraq war, and the history of western military interventions since 1945, reveals the paucity of international law's moral underpinnings. The article continues our series Lest we forget: remembering historic conflicts, openSecurity’s new editorial project in association with History & Policy,

Yvette D. Clarke: Black History is American History

[Yvette D. Clarke is a Democratic congresswoman representing New York's 11th Congressional District.[ It was August 28th, 1963, and the greatest civil rights coalition in modern history had descended upon Washington. Hundreds of thousands of protesters trekked through the heat, stretching from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial. For several hours, marchers heard oratory expression from civil rights, religious, labor, and student leaders from across the country....

Con Coughlin: Endgame for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran?

[Con Coughlin is the author of 'Khomeini's Ghost'.] First came the announcement that Iran had successfully launched a space probe carrying two turtles, a hamster and a worm. Then its nuclear scientists announced that they would maintain their defiance of the West by ratcheting up the country's controversial uranium enrichment programme. Finally this was followed by yesterday's announcement from the Iranian Defence Ministry that it will shortly begin production of "advanced"

Mary Dejevsky: Ukraine Says Goodbye to the Cold War

[Mary Dejevsky is the chief editorial writer and a columnist at The Independent.] The last time Viktor Yanukovych featured prominently in the Western media was more than five years ago. When the drama of Ukraine's Orange Revolution was at its height, he played the villain. With his power base in the east, his clumsy style and his compromised victory, he was the Kremlin-backed devil to the angelic duo of Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko. This weekend, Yanukovych n

Jeff Bergner: Republicans Need to Change "The Narrative"

[Jeff Bergner has served as staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, assistant secretary of state, and professor of government. His forthcoming book is on the role of German idealist philosophy in shaping the modern idea of a human being.] Recent electoral successes, including Scott Brown’s landmark victory in Massachusetts, have positioned Republicans once again for a role in governing, and far sooner than they might have supposed. But are they ready to govern? It

James Branch: Is That Black History Stuff Really Important?

[James Branch of Fort Worth is a member of the 2010 Star-Telegram Community Columnist Panel.] Recently, out of the clear blue sky, one of my daughters asked, "Do we celebrate Black History Month in college?" "Yes," I nonchalantly replied. I recognized immediately by her intonation and my paternal instinct that she was expecting a more immersive reply.... Having planned and promoted numerous black history programs in various educational

Thomas H. Benton: The Big Lie About the 'Life of the Mind'

[Thomas H. Benton is the pen name of William Pannapacker, an associate professor of English at Hope College, in Holland, Mich. He writes about academic culture and welcomes reader mail directed to his attention at careers@chronicle.com.] A year ago, I wrote a column called "Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go," advising students that grad school is a bad idea unless they have no need to earn a living for themselves o

Gerard Alexander: Why Are Liberals So Condescending?

[Gerard Alexander is an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia.] ...It's an odd time for liberals to feel smug. But even with Democratic fortunes on the wane, leading liberals insist that they have almost nothing to learn from conservatives. Many Democrats describe their troubles simply as a PR challenge, a combination of conservative misinformation -- as when Obama charges that critics of health-care reform are peddling fake fears of a "Bolshevik plot&qu

Fareed Zakaria: U.S.-China Growing Pains

Despite the recent squall in U.S.-Chinese relations, both countries have powerful reasons to cooperate with one another. These have grown over the past two decades, a progression that both countries seem to recognize.... ...[T]here are two trends that could take a manageable situation and make it something more worrisome. The first is a growing perception in China that it is no longer as reliant on the West, and in particular the United States, as it was. In the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping

Paul Krugman: 21st Century America is Starting to Look Like 18th Century Poland

We’ve always known that America’s reign as the world’s greatest nation would eventually end. But most of us imagined that our downfall, when it came, would be something grand and tragic. What we’re getting instead is less a tragedy than a deadly farce. Instead of fraying under the strain of imperial overstretch, we’re paralyzed by procedure. Instead of re-enacting the decline and fall of Rome, we’re re-enacting the dissolution of 18th-century Poland. A brief history les

Pratap Chatterjee: Could Pakistan 2010 Go the Way of Cambodia 1969?

Sitting in air-conditioned comfort, cans of Coke and 7-Up within reach as they watched their screens, the ground controllers gave the order to strike under the cover of darkness. There had been no declaration of war. No advance warning, nothing, in fact, that would have alerted the "enemy" to the sudden, unprecedented bombing raids. The secret computer-guided strikes were authorized by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, just weeks after a new American president entered the

Ben Fountain: Haiti and the Drug Trade

[Ben Fountain is the author of the short-story collection “Brief Encounters with Che Guevara.”] In 1999 I made a day trip from the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, up to the wanly charming town of Kenscoff, a couple of hours drive into the mountains. I’d done this journey before, but not in several years, and as the road wound upward I couldn’t help being astonished by the sprawling mansions that had taken over the hillsides. Where this road had once offered peaceful vi

Frank Rich: Mullen's Testimony Puts Bigots in a Tight Spot

A funny thing happened after Adm. Mike Mullen called for gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military: A curious silence befell much of the right. If this were a Sherlock Holmes story, it would be the case of the attack dogs that did not bark.... Many... Republican[s]... said little or nothing. The right’s noise machine was on mute. The Fox News report on Mullen’s testimony was fair and balanced — and brief. The network dropped the subject entirely in the Hannity-O’Reilly ho