Roundup: Media's Take

Jason Leopold: Conyers May Call Rove, Miers to Testify Publicly About Attorney Firings

[Jason Leopold is editor in chief of The Public Record, www.pubrecord.org.] Back in March, when House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers announced that he and his staff had reached an agreement to have Karl Rove and ex-White House counsel Harriet Miers testify privately about their roles in the firings of nine US attorneys, he said his panel also reserved the right to haul the former Bush administration officials before Congress to testi

Josef Joffe: The Default Power

[Josef Joffe is co-editor of Die Zeit and a fellow in international relations at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. A longer version of this essay will appear in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs.] Every 10 years, it is decline time in the United States. In the late 1950s, it was the Sputnik shock, followed by the “missile gap” trumpeted by John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential campaign. A decade later, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger predicted a world

Paul Theroux: (Hawaii) Happily a State, Forever an Island

[Paul Theroux is the author of “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star.” His forthcoming novel is “A Dead Hand.”] Once in the Elks Club in Honolulu, an elderly man of Chinese ancestry said in a low voice to me: “This club used to be very exclusive. And the one next door too.” He meant no Chinese were admitted — or anyone but haoles (whites) or ethnic Hawaiians — to the Elks or the Outrigger Canoe Club. This was true of nearly all of Hawaii’s posh clubs. “But all that changed,” his daughter

AK Muckracker: Nazis

[This blog post is by Jeanne Devon, a local Democrat in Alaska whose identity was recently confirmed by a Republican, State Rep. Mike Doogan, whom Devon has written about.] On my 21st birthday, I woke up in the morning and drove to Dairy Queen. I got soft serve vanilla ice cream with strawberry topping and I ate it for breakfast. Why? When I was a child I asked once if I could have ice cream for breakfast, and my mother said, “You can have ice cream for breakfast when you’re 21.” An

Rick Salutin: Harper has his Reagan moments

[Rick Salutin is Globe and Mail columnist.] There's been much recent criticism of the Harper government's foreign policy. This week in The Globe and Mail, Jeffrey Simpson rained on its shifting China stance and former official Gar Pardy blamed it for failing citizens in trouble abroad. Yesterday came news of another Canadian left to languish in Kenya. I don't mean to pile on but rather to explore the cause. It seems to me this kind of erratic, distasteful foreign polic

WSJ Editorial: Rose of Freedom (on the passing of Rose Friedman)

The Journal of Economic Literature recently described the last quarter century of rapid economic growth and rising living standards as "The Age of Friedman," after Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winning economist. The editors could as fairly have called it the Age of Friedmans to include Milton's wife of 68 years and collaborator, Rose Friedman, who died Tuesday at age 98. Rose was small in stature like Milton—both were less than five-feet tall—but their ideas were of to

Brent Baker: A Look at Robert Novak's Insights About the Media

[Brent Baker is Vice President for Research and Publications at the Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog.] Sadly, news came this afternoon (Tuesday, August 18) that Robert Novak passed away, at age 78, after a battle with brain cancer. A reporter, columnist and television commentator over his long career, starting in 1994 Novak generously helped the MRC as a judge for our annual “Best Notable Quotables” annual awards for “the year's worst reporting,” lending his cred

Justin Elliott: Heavily-Armed '90s Militia, Linked To Anti-Obama Activist

Let's delve a little bit deeper into the black helicopter-infested world of the Viper Militia -- the 90's era group whose members ended up in federal prison and whose most prominent friend and defender, Ernest Hancock, staged the show of arms-bearing at an Obama event Monday. A portrait of a feckless group of paranoid, right-wing, minimum wage-earning weapons enthusiasts -- 10 men and two women -- emerges from press accounts at the time. Take Dean Pleasant, the Viper me

Stephen Pizzo: Will Obama be Like Lyndon B. Johnson?

[Stephen Pizzo has been published everywhere from The New York Times to Mother Jones magazine. His book, Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans, was nominated for a Pulitzer.] On July 2, 1964 a southerner, President Lyndon B. Johnson, signed the Civil Rights Act into law. Here was a white southerner, a guy who just weeks before signing this law complained to an aide in a perplexed Texas drawl, "Goddamnit. I just learnt to say negra and now they want

Katrina Browne: Slavery needs more than an apology

[Katrina Browne is the producer/director of "Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North." The documentary has been nominated for an Emmy for research. For more information, see http://www.tracesofthetrade.org/.] The Senate voted to apologize for slavery on June 18. The House apologized last summer. The first family -- descendants of Africans, of enslaved Africans and of slave-holders -- visited a slave fort in Ghana.

Ali Reza Eshraghi: Khamenei vs. Khomeini

[Ali Reza Eshraghi, a former newspaper editor in Iran, is a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, Institute of International studies.] During his August 3 speech formally endorsing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned protesters that "by imitation of Ayatollah Khomeini, they cannot deceive people." Khamenei was mocking the opposition's claim to be to reviving "the values of Ayatollah Khomeini"--the founder of the Islamic Republ

Nicholas D. Kristof: The Cost of Prisons

[Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times since 2001, is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who writes op-ed columns that appear twice a week.] At a time when we Americans may abandon health care reform because it supposedly is “too expensive,” how is it that we can afford to imprison people like Curtis Wilkerson? Mr. Wilkerson is serving a life sentence in California — for stealing a $2.50 pair of socks. As The Economist noted recently, he already had two

Simon Jenkins: Today's Afghan election is a moment of truth for zealous liberal aggressors

[Simon Jenkins is a British journalist and author.] During the last Afghan elections, a UN official outside a polling booth grabbed a voter's blue-stained finger and raised it before the cameras. "Look," he said ecstatically. "This is what it's all about." No, it isn't. Even in its present belligerent stance, the western world does not go about bombing and killing people just so they can vote. The Afghan war and occupation were about punishing the Ta

Pamela Dix: Don't forget Lockerbie

[Pamela Dix is a founder member and executive director of Disaster Action, a charity established in 1991 and whose members are survivors and bereaved people from over 20 disasters both in the UK and overseas.] One of the first questions asked of me by every journalist and reporter covering the story about Abdelbaset al-Megrahi is: why is there such an apparent divide between the US and British relatives? Why do they believe he is guilty, and we remain to be convinced? Some imply tha

Karl Rove: 'Closing in on Rove'

[Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.] For more than two years, House Judiciary Committee Democrats and the New York Times editorial board have argued that I personally arranged for Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman to be prosecuted in 2004 for corruption and ordered the removal of eight U.S. attorneys in 2006 for failing to investigate Democrats. The Washington Post editorial board also echoed this last charge. The Time

Alex Koppelman: Various rememberances of Robert Novak

[Alex Koppelman is a staff writer for the online magazine Salon.com] Conservative columnist Robert Novak died Tuesday of cancer at the age of 78. Known most recently for his involvement in the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame, Novak was a famed Washington insider and reporter for decades. Here's a look at how Washington and the media world are already reacting to his death. Washington Post: "He was a committed conservative, but he was not easy to characterize. H

Bill Glucroft: The Holocaust's shadow over Israel's choices

[Bill Glucroft is a writer who has worked in Israel for both Zionist and Israeli-Arab organizations. He blogs at mediabard.org.] No people mourn better than the Jewish people. For seven days after death, the family sits shiva, a vigil at home for loved ones to comfort one another and reflect on the life lost. During the following year and then beyond, the stages of mourning develop to allow next of kin to continue their lives while still remembering who is gone from them.

Martin, Calderone and Allen: Remembering Robert D. Novak

[Jonathan Martin, Michael Calderone and Mike Allen are writers for Politico] Robert Novak, one of Washington's most influential political journalists of the past half-century, died Tuesday after a battle with brain cancer. He was 78. ... He began his famed column 'Inside Report' with Rowland Evans in 1963, continuing as a duo until the latter's retirement in 1993. Novak kept the column going until he was diagnosed with a brain tumor in July 2008. Outside the Beltway, Novak was a fam

Jose Ramos-Horta: In Support of the Struggle for Democracy in Burma

[Jose Ramos-Horta is the President of East Timor] The horrors of World War II should have shocked humanity into rejecting violence and wars forever, and ushered in an era of peace. Yet we continue to see countless abuses and crimes, in some instances, amounting to genocide because those who can prevent these crimes did little or nothing. The "Killing Fields" of Cambodia in the 70s, the genocide in Rwanda in '94, the ongoing barbarities in Darfur (Sudan), Somal

Thomas Frank: Dissent Commodified

[Thomas Frank is an American author, journalist and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, authoring The Tilting Yard since May, 2008.] The 40th anniversary of the Woodstock music festival has certain pundits in a misty-eyed nostalgic funk for the days when youth culture came of age, challenging conformity, standing up for individuality, and making awesome music before it all got so commercialized. The memory it brought back for me came from the late Trader Monthly mag