Roundup: Media's Take

Steven Hill: Senate "Minority Rule" Is the Disease, Not the Cure, for Health Care Reform

The United States is now the last advanced nation that does not have universal health care. So it's not just the senators' credibility on the line if they fail to provide to all Americans a similar level of health care benefits that they themselves enjoy as senators. It's the very democratic legitimacy of the body in which they serve. The United States is now the last advanced nation that does not have universal health care. So it's not just the senators' credibility on the line if

Eric Boehlert: A President was killed the last time right-wing hatred ran wild like this

[Eric Boehlert is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America. ] That being John F. Kennedy, who was gunned down in Dallas, of course. I've been thinking a lot of Kennedy and Dallas as I've watched the increasingly violent rhetorical attacks on Obama be unfurled. As Americans yank their kids of class in order to save them from being exposed to the President of the United States who only wanted to urge them to excel in the classroom. And as unvarnished hate and name-cal

Claude Cartaginese: Obama to Russia: We Surrender!

[Claude Cartaginese writes for Newsreal] On Sept. 17, 1939, Soviet troops invaded Poland. In 1968 they invaded the Czech Republic (then part of Czechoslovakia). In both countries (as well as in most of the other countries in Eastern Europe that fell under Soviet domination), the Russians imposed brutal Marxist dictatorships. When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, many of those countries finally got an opportunity to taste freedom for the first time in decades. In

Noam Chomsky: Dialogue on the Responsibility to Protect

Address to the United Nations General Assembly Thematic Dialogue on the Responsibility to Protect, the United Nations, New York, 23 July 2009 The discussions about Responsibility to Protect (R2P), or its cousin "humanitarian intervention," are regularly disturbed by the rattling of a skeleton in the closet: history, to the present moment. Throughout history, there have been a few principles of international affairs that apply quite generally. One is

Manuel Pastor: Putting Poverty in Its Place

[Manuel Pastor is professor of geography at the University of Southern California and co-author of This Could Be the Start of Something Big: How Social Movements for Regional Equity are Reshaping Metropolitan America.] The Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ) has given new meaning to the adage that failure is an orphan but success has a thousand parents. The zone, a public-private partnership founded and led by the charismatic Geoffrey Canada, has produced significant gains in student achie

Judith Miller: Three reminders of terrorism's enduring threat

[Judith Miller is a contributing editor of City Journal, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a FOX News contributor.] More than most Americans, New Yorkers remember September 11. Almost everyone in this city lost someone, or knew someone who lost someone, in the Twin Towers. For months following the attack, our air was filled with acrid smoke and the smell of death. Some New Yorkers have never stopped grieving for those who died in the deadliest terrorist strike in Ame

BBC Editorial and Opinions: Is it OK to collect Nazi memorabilia?

Marc Garlasco is not the first person to get into trouble for an interest in an aspect of the Third Reich. Two years ago Bryan Ferry was pilloried for expressing admiration for the films of Leni Riefenstahl and the buildings of Albert Speer and other aspects of iconography. And in 1999, then GQ editor James Brown had to resign after Rommel and the Nazis were referred to in a list of the century's 200 most stylish men. But on both sides of the Atlantic there is a burgeon

David Silver: A Short History of Fast Times on Wall Street

[David Silver, a former senior staff lawyer at the Securities and Exchange Commission, was the president of the Investment Company Institute, a trade association for mutual funds, from 1977 to 1991.] Many fear that new technology is giving some investors unfair access to stock market information. Supercomputers allow certain traders to profit by executing trades in milliseconds, a practice known as high-frequency trading. These traders also use a technique called flash orders that g

H.D.S. Greenway: Regional Divides

[HDS Greenway leads the Opinion and nalysis section for GlobalPost. He has been a journalist for 50 years and recently retired from the Boston Globe after a distinguished career.] When Representative Addison Graves Wilson of South Carolina, known to his colleagues and constituents as Joe, yelled “you lie” at President Obama during his address to Congress, it started a national debate on public civility and the coarsening of American culture. Talk show after talk show raised the iss

Samir Ghattas: Let's try something else (on Israel and Palestine)

[Samir Ghattas is director of the Maqdis Centre for Political Studies, in Gaza.] In three months time, we'll mark the anniversary of UN Resolution 181 of 1947, which provided for the partitioning of Palestine into two states, a Jewish one and an Arab one, with Jerusalem being an international zone. David Ben-Gurion agreed to Resolution 181 although it gave him 56 per cent of historic Palestine on which he had hoped to establish the Jewish state. The area given to the J

Iain Martin: Cold War Lessons Lost on Obama?

[Iain Martin is Deputy Editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe. He writes on politics.] The U.S. administration’s abandonment of the missile shield programme today suggests that nobody in the administration has examined the lessons of the Cold War in Europe in any detail. Or if they have, they have been studying the 1970s and drawn precisely the wrong conclusions. They should read on into the 1980s to discover that concessions are only worth making from a position of strength and i

David Horowitz: Why Israel is the Victim and the The Arabs Are the Indefensible Aggressors In The Middle East

During the Gulf War, Israel was America’s staunch ally while Arafat and the Palestinians openly supported the aggressor, Saddam Hussein. Yet the next two U.S. Governments – Republican and Democrat alike – strove for even-handed “neutrality” in the conflict in the Middle East, and pressured Israel into a suicidal “peace process” with a foe dedicated to its destruction. It is only since September 11 that the United States has been willing to recognize Arafat as an enemy of peace and not a viable n

Ben Johnson: Jimmy Carter's Record on Race

As Jimmy Carter portrays conservatives as violent racists, it’s worth remembering Carter’s own history of racial demagoguery. Carter campaigned for governor of Georgia as a self-proclaimed “redneck,” in an era when that word had pronounced racial connotations. His campaign distributed a photo of his gubernatorial opponent Carl Sanders being embraced by black basketball players to a Ku Klux Klan rally. Carter pledged to invite Alabama’s infamous segregationist governor George Wallace to Georgia i

Ralph Peters: Obama Feeds U.S. Allies to the Russian Bear

[Ralph Peters has been a Post Opinion columnist since 2002.] Still determined to "push the reset button with Russia," President Obama hit the delete key on our allies in Eastern Europe. Obama's decision to abandon missile defense as we know it, cutting the throats of Poland and the Czech Republic, handed Moscow's hard-liners their biggest win since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russian strongman Vladimir Putin insisted all along that we'd ne

David E. Sanger and William J. Broad: New Missile Shield Strategy Scales Back Reagan's Vision

[David E. Sanger is the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times. William J. Broad is an author and a senior writer at The New York Times.] The new plan that President Obama laid out for a missile shield against Iran on Thursday turns Ronald Reagan’s vision of a Star Wars system on its head: Rather than focusing first on protecting the continental United States, it shifts the immediate effort to defending Europe and the Middle East. It is a long way from t

Tom Engelhardt: Is America Hooked on War?

[Tom Engelhardt runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture and coeditor of History Wars, the Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past.] "War is peace" was one of the memorable slogans on the facade of the Ministry of Truth, Minitrue in "Newspeak," the language invented by George Orwell in 1948 for his dystopian novel 1984. Some 60 years later, a quarter-century after Orwell's imagined future bit the dust,

David Horowitz: The Shadow Party

In understanding how far the Democratic Party has moved from its center of gravity in an earlier generation, it is salutary to remember that Democrats were once known as the more international and hawkish of the two political parties. Until the late 1960s, Democrat presidents were consistently more likely than Republicans to flex America’s military might abroad. Democrat administrations led America into both World Wars. Democrat president Harry Truman promulgated the Truman Doctrine which like

Salam Al-Marayati: U.S. Jews, Muslims must look forward, not back

[Salam Al-Marayati is the co-founder and executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.] LOS ANGELES (JTA) -- In the 25 years I have served as a leader in the Muslim American community, I have watched and sometimes participated as the pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian camps have put all their energy into trying to convert each other to their own ways of thinking -- ideologically, not theologically. The conclusion I have reached is that agreement cannot and should

Alexander Zaitchik: Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck's life

On Saturday, I spent the afternoon with America's new breed of angry conservative. Up to 75,000 protesters had gathered in Washington on Sept. 12, the day after the eighth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, sporting the now familiar tea-bagger accoutrements of "Don't Tread on Me" T-shirts, Revolutionary War outfits and Obama-the-Joker placards. The male-skewing, nearly all-white throng had come to denounce the president and what they believe is his communist-fascist agenda.

Gene Lyons: Obama gets the Clinton treatment

[Gene Lyons is a political columnist and co-author with Joe Conason of The Hunting of the President: The 10 Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton, a documentary book published in 2000, with a supporting film.] From a political standpoint, the worst thing about blaming President Obama's perceived difficulties on racism is that there's not a damn thing anybody can do about it. Determined bigots can't be shamed, while many see invoking race as more an excuse than an explana