Roundup: Media's Take

Editorial in the New Republic: Madison Weeps ... How healthcare revealed the sickness of our political system

"Among the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction," James Madison wrote in Federalist Number 10. "The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice." Consider us alarmed. Our sense of alarm has been growing for some time. From

Matt Latimer: Me Talk Presidential One Day

[Matt Latimer worked as one of Dubya’s speechwriters during the president’s final twenty-two months in office. He was there to help sell the surge to a skeptical public. He was there as we pretended that the fundamentals of the economy were strong. And he was there to see a president who failed to grasp his own $700 billion bailout package—even as he was pitching it to the American public on live TV. A disillusioned insider reveals for the first time just how messy things got.] As a

Sakurai Kunitoshi with an introduction by Gavan McCormack: The Guam Treaty as a Modern "Disposal" of the Ryukyus

[Sakurai Kunitoshi is President of Okinawa University in Naha, a well-known scholar in the field of environmental studies, author, inter alia, of Chikyu bunmei no jouken (The Conditions for a Global Civilization), with Sawa Takamitsu, Iwanami Shoten, 1995. This article is based on his testimony on 8 April 2009 as expert witness to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Japanese House of Representatives examining the Guam Treaty. It was published in Japanese as “Arata na Ryukyu shobun

William McGurn: When Speechwriters Kiss and Tell

[William McGurn is a Vice President at News Corporation who writes speeches for CEO Rupert Murdoch. Previously he served as Chief Speechwriter for President George W. Bush.] When the sun rises over our capital city this morning, its denizens will awake to a truly novel tale: The aggrieved ex-staffer—wait for it!—disillusioned by Washington. The tome out today is by former Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer, who describes the White House as "less like Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing an

David Shambaugh: China's 60th Birthday: The Road to Prosperity

[Shambaugh is professor and director of the China Policy Program at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and currently a visiting scholar at the China Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. His latest book is China's Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation] Sixty years ago Mao Zedong stood before a sea of people atop Tiananmen Gate proclaiming, in his high-pitched Hunan dialect, the founding of the People's Republ

Roger Cohen: Of Polish Angst and NATO

[Roger Cohen joined The New York Times in 1990. He was a foreign correspondent for more than a decade before becoming acting Foreign Editor on September 11, 2001, and Foreign Editor six months later. In 2009 he was named a columnist of The New York Times.] LISBON — “How could Obama choose such a day?” That was the anguished outburst of a senior Polish officer attending a meeting of NATO chiefs of defense here when asked what he thought of the U.S. president’s cancellat

David Rockefeller: Present at the Trade Wars

[David Rockefeller is the former chairman and chief executive of Chase Manhattan Bank.] AS if he needed another policy concern to distract him from the health care debate, President Obama now finds himself embroiled in a quarrel with China over his imposition of a steep tariff on automobile tires from that country that is to take effect this week. The Chinese have responded by threatening to impose higher tariffs on American chicken. This may seem like a petty dispute, but the contr

Arnaud de Borchgrave: Middle East tunnel vision

[Arnaud de Borchgrave is UPI's Editor at Large] The only bank this Rothschild ever owned was the West Bank. Danny Rothschild, an Israeli general and onetime coordinator of all government activities in the occupied territories, and now one of 1,200 former intelligence officers in Israel's Council for Peace and Security, says the Palestinians should be allowed to have their capital in Arab East Jerusalem. The very thought of allowing Palestinians to set up a government where 200,000 I

Alan Caruba: At War with Iran for Thirty Years

[Alan Caruba is the founder of The National Anxiety Center (www.anxietycenter.com), a clearinghouse for information about "scare campaigns" whose purpose is to influence public opinion and policy.] Iran has been at war with the United States for thirty years. When one’s life spans time from the beginning of World War Two, the decades of the Cold War, and the emergence of rogue regimes in Libya, North Korea, Venezuela

Jonathan Brent: Postmodern Stalinism

[Jonathan Brent is executive director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and was formerly editorial director of Yale University Press. He remains executive editor of the press's Annals of Communism series and director of its Stalin Archive Project.] Visitors leaving Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport today can purchase a box of chocolates in the duty-free shop with a replica of a poster from the 1930s on the back, in which Stalin grasps the great wheel of the ship of

James Q. Wilson: A Life in the Public Interest (on the passing of Irving Kristol)

[Mr. Wilson, who has taught at Harvard, UCLA and Pepperdine, is the editor, with Peter H. Schuck, of "Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation" (PublicAffairs, 2009).] Irving Kristol not only helped change the country, he changed lives. He certainly changed mine. When I was a young faculty member at Harvard, I learned that he, along with Daniel Bell, had just created The Public Interest. I wrote him to say how enthused I was to find a magazi

Theodoric Meyer: In Health Care Debate, Republicans Should Look to Disraeli

[Mr. Meyer is a student at McGill] Ask Congressional Republicans to name their political heroes and you’ll most likely get the same few responses. Ronald Reagan. Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps Teddy Roosevelt. But definitely not Benjamin Disraeli. It is to this 19th century British prime minister, however, that Republicans might look to resuscitate their battered party.In Disraeli’s Britain, the goal of expanding the electoral franchise occupied much the same domestic political

Richard Wolffe: Barack Obama confronts America over the racial divide

[Richard Wolffe is the author of Renegade: the making of Barack Obama] The interview was over and Barack Obama was slumped in a chair in his conference room, under a framed copy of some minor legislation of which he had been the author. After an hour of talking about race and politics, his handler wrapped up the conversation and suggested it was time to leave. Then Mr Obama asked me to turn the audio recorder back on. He had something more to say. His staffer looked con

Kathy Shaidle: Media Matters' Lie of the Day: "Right-Wingers" Killed Kennedy — and They're Back

Imagine writing hundreds of words about the death of Abraham Lincoln, without mentioning the name of his assassin. Or writing about 9/11 but putting the word “hijackers” in scare quotes… (Oh wait: if you endorse that kind of writing, you might actually earn yourself a short lived White House czarship. So scratch that…) Last night I stumbled upon a post at Media Matters — or, as I like to call it, the George Soros Steno Pool. Media Matters is a leftwing “media watchdog”

Susannah Kopecky: The Character Assassination of John Adams

Editor’s note: See NewsReal’s previous posts on the John Adams Project here, here, here,  and here.One would hope that a group called the John Adams Project would in som

WSJ Editorial: Irving Kristol, The man who put 'neo' into conservatism.

Perhaps the greatest gift of the gifted Irving Kristol, who died yesterday at 89, was prescience. This does not mean predicting the future. Prescience, a more useful gift, is seeing the direction in which the future is headed. In his early years, Kristol saw that the Marxism which fascinated him and many others at mid-century had no future, and he embraced the ideals of the West, holding them tight for a lifetime. Later as a Democrat, he saw that many of the social welfare policies

Brett Arends: Lessons of a Bull Market That Never Happened

[Brett Arends writes an online personal finance and investing column for the Wall Street Journal.] Much of the financial news this month has revolved around the one-year anniversary of the Panic of 2008 -- the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the takeover of Merrill Lynch, the government's bailout of Wall Street. But there's another anniversary for investors. It is 10 years this weekend since the publication of "Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Comin

NYT Book Review: Tips for Obama from LBJ

President Obama faces perhaps the ultimate presidential test in the weeks ahead: maneuvering a big health care bill through a fractious Congress. For tips on how to manage it, there’s no better advisor than Lyndon B. Johnson, who won Medicare over fierce opposition in 1965. In their new book, “The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office,” David Blumenthal, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and James Morone, a political science professor at Brown University, revi

Peter Boone and Simon Johnson: The Recession Is Over — for Now

[Peter Boone is the chairman of Effective Intervention, a British charity, and a research associate at the London School of Economics’ Center for Economic Performance. Simon Johnson is a professor at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management and a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.] SPEAKING at the Brookings Institution last week, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, remarked that the recession in the United States is “very likely over.” H

Vincent Rossmeier: Is the Internet melting our brains? An Interview with Dennis Baron

By now the arguments are familiar: Facebook is ruining our social relationships; Google is making us dumber; texting is destroying the English language as we know it. We're facing a crisis, one that could very well corrode the way humans have communicated since we first evolved from apes. What we need, so say these proud Luddites, is to turn our backs on technology and embrace not the keyboard, but the pencil. Such sentiments, in the opinion of Dennis Baron, are nostalgic, uninform