Roundup: Media's Take

Michael Schwartz: The Iraqi Oil Conundrum

[A professor of sociology at Stony Brook State University, Michael Schwartz is the author of War Without End: The Iraq War in Context (Haymarket Press), which explains how the militarized geopolitics of oil led the U.S. to dismantle the Iraqi state and economy while fueling a sectarian civil war. Schwartz's work on Iraq has appeared in numerous academic and popular outlets. He is a regular at TomDispatch.com. His email address is ms42@optonline.net.]

Chris Hedges: The Creed of Objectivity Killed the News

Reporters who witness the worst of human suffering and return to newsrooms angry see their compassion washed out or severely muted by the layers of editors who stand between the reporter and the reader. The creed of objectivity and balance, formulated at the beginning of the 19th century by newspaper owners to generate greater profits from advertisers, disarms and cripples the press. “The very notion that on any given story all you have to do is report what both sides say and you’ve

Christopher Hitchens: Kim Jong-il's Regime Is Even Weirder and More Despicable Than You Thought

Visiting North Korea some years ago, I was lucky to have a fairly genial "minder" whom I'll call Mr. Chae. He guided me patiently around the ruined and starving country, explaining things away by means of a sort of denial mechanism and never seeming to lose interest in the gargantuan monuments to the world's most hysterical and operatic leader-cult. One evening, as we tried to dine on some gristly bits of duck, he mentioned yet another reason why the day should not long be postponed wh

Jeffrey H. Anderson: Obama Is No JFK

[Jeffrey H. Anderson, the director of the Benjamin Rush Society, was the senior speechwriter for Secretary Mike Leavitt at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.] Yesterday’s announcement that the Obama administration plans to scrap funding for voyages to the moon and to Mars, shows how low President Obama’s horizons truly are. As Charles Krauthammer wrote ten years ago this week: It took 100,000 years for humans to get inches off the ground

Amanda Bowman: Blair Teaches a Lesson on Iraq War

[Amanda Bowman is the former New York Director of the Center for Security Policy. She is currently the CEO. of the Atlantic Bridge, a policy organization whose mission is to promote the Special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom.] Last week Tony Blair appeared before the Chilcot Inquiry — a public hearing launched by Gordon Brown with the seemingly innocuous purpose of learning the lessons of the Iraq war. Is this a rare example of a party being transparen

Dean Baker: The Second Great Depression Bogeyman

[Dean Baker is the Co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. CEPR's Jobs Byte is published each month upon release of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' employment report.] Our political leaders continually assert that we should be thanking them that we are not in a second Great Depression rather than complaining about how bad things are. The second Great Depression theme came up repeatedly in the debate over the reappointment of Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Ber

William Rivers Pitt: Schooled

[William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: "War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know" and "The Greatest Sedition Is Silence." His newest book, "House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation," is now available from PoliPointPress.] In my last article, I made the following observation regarding the challenges President Obama faced on the eve of his Wednesday e

Patricia J. Williams: Corpus Ex Machina

[Patricia J. Williams, a professor of law at Columbia University and a member of the State Bar of California, writes The Nation column "Diary of a Mad Law Professor." Her books include The Rooster's Egg (1995), Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race (1997) and, most recently, Open House: On Family Food, Friends, Piano Lessons and The Search for a Room of My Own (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2004.] In 1976 the Supreme Court held in Buckley v. Valeo that the expenditu

Michael Kinsley: No Room for Reagan

In the end, chairman Michael Steele persuaded the Republican National Committee not to require that any candidate hoping to receive help from the party promise to support eight out of ten principles in the so-called Reagan Resolution. That requirement, pushed by some conservatives, has been reduced to mere suggestion under Steele’s leadership. Strike a blow for the party establishment over the "tea-party" element that has the GOP both excited and terrified. It is like a political hand

Bernard Weiner: Drifting Toward Catastrophe

[Bernard Weiner, a poet/playwright and Ph.D. in government and international relations, has peeked inside the diaries of everyone from Karl Rove to Osama bin Laden to Dick Cheney to George W. Bush. He has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked as a writer/editor for the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers.] ...This country, humanity, the globe are rushing pell-mell to disaster, mostly by neglecting what

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: How the British empire is striking back

[Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is a Ugandan-born British columnist for The Independent and the Evening Standard.] I did try to sit through the Blair show. An unfortunate combination of Asiatic high emotion and feminine fragility made me feeble. I had to walk away, knocking over a large goblet of dark red wine, the colour of blood. It stained the beautiful wooden floor. From TB, then, the final words. I Did It My Way and Je ne regrette rien. So long folks. The Tory poster of Blair as the dev

Kathryn Jean Lopez: Condescender in Chief

[Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of NRO.] They called it a “miracle.” Maybe it wasn’t the Spirit of 1776, but something derivative of that was in the air as Republican Scott Brown was elected to the U.S. Senate seat that had been held by Edward M. Kennedy for five decades. Running on resetting health-care reform in Washington, tax cuts, fiscal responsibility, and not trying enemy combatants in criminal courts, Brown did what really was considered impossible. It wa

Editorial in WSJ: Tony Blair's Iraq Statesmanship

The British media are outraged that Tony Blair still does not regret toppling Saddam Hussein. Pundits from left and right are aghast that the former premier, testifying at yet another Iraq war inquiry on Friday, offered no apology for his role in deposing a man who had repeatedly invaded his neighbors and massacred his own people by the hundreds of thousands. We're not sure what real purpose the so-called Chilcot Commission—named for its chairman, retired civil servant John Chilcot

E.J. Dionne: Our Thin-Skinned Supreme Court.

[E.J. Dionne, Jr. is the author of the recently published Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right. He is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University.] ...[Justice Samuel] Alito's inability to restrain himself during the State of the Union address brought to wide attention a truth that too many have tried to ignore: The Supreme Court is now dominated by a highly politicized conservativ

John B. Judis: The Quiet Revolution

[John B. Judis is a senior editor of The New Republic. Lydia DePillis assisted with research on this article.] ...[T]here is one extremely consequential area where Obama has done just about everything a liberal could ask for--but done it so quietly that almost no one, including most liberals, has noticed. Obama’s three Republican predecessors were all committed to weakening or even destroying the country’s regulatory apparatus: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Occupati

John Bolton: U.S. Is the World's Humanitarian Leader

[John Bolton is the former US Ambassador to the United Nations, and author of “Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the UN and Abroad.”] America’s long-dominant role in international relief reflects both America’s innate compassion and its status as the world’s sole superpower. Time and time again, from tropical-storm devastation in Bangladesh, to the Dec. 26, 2004, tsunami in Indonesia, to last month’s earthquake in Haiti, it is America that steps forward first to provi

Michael Hirsch and Daniel Gross: The Wisdom of Crowds

John Dingell is one of the few people in Washington who remembers the last time so much populist anger gripped the country. It was early 1933, the worst year of the Great Depression. The Michigan congressman, now 83, was a wide-eyed kid listening to his father—also a congressman—speak at the family dinner table about losing his entire net worth of $7,500. "Americans all hated the damn bankers, they hated Wall Street," Dingell tells NEWSWEEK. "We had more communists in this country

Nader Mousavizadeh: End of Rogue States

[Nader Mousavizadeh, a special assistant to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan from 1997 to 2003, is a consulting senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.] A year after Barack Obama relaunched America's relations with the world's rogue states, the verdict is in: from Burma to North Korea, Venezuela to Iran, the outstretched hand has been met with the clenched fist. Aung San Suu Kyi remains under house arrest in Rangoon, Pyongyang is testing missil

Mehdi Hasan: The bulletproof case against Blair

[Mehdi Hasan is senior editor of the New Statesman.] On 25 February 2003, less than a month before the invasion of Iraq, and in one of his most important speeches as prime minister, Tony Blair stood up before the House of Commons to deliver a statement on Saddam Hussein and the crisis in the Middle East. “I detest his regime," he said, in a passionate address to sceptical MPs on both sides of the house. "But even now, he can save it by complying with the UN's

Catherine Mayer: Unbowed on Iraq, Blair Makes the Case for Targeting Iran

[Catherine Mayer is London Bureau Chief for Time Magazine and former President of the Foreign Press Association in London.] Anyone who came to the Jan. 29 session of Britain's Iraq Inquiry to watch Tony Blair crumble went home disappointed. When the nation's former Prime Minister returns to center stage, he seldom fails to remind even his sharpest critics of his prodigious political skills — the very same skills that had enabled him to cajole dubious colleagues and a skeptical parli