Roundup: Media's Take

Rich Noyes: Double-Standard on Anti-ObamaCare "Mobs"

With President Obama and congressional liberals facing loud protests over their big government health care plan, journalists are casting the anti-ObamaCare forces as “ugly,” “unruly,” “nasty” mobs, with reporters presenting the most odious images (like pictures of Obama drawn as Hitler) as somehow representative. But when President George W. Bush faced left-wing protests, the media scrubbed their stories of radical voices and depicted demonstrators as mainstream, and even “prescient.”

Bradford Plumer: Should Older Power Plants Get A Free Pass?

When the original Clean Air Act was written back in 1970, it contained a tiny little loophole. Or, at least, it looked tiny at the time. But it actually turned out to be very, very significant. The bill initially set tight pollution limits for all new power plants and refineries, but older facilities were exempt. During the haggling in Congress, electric utility officials had convinced the bill's lead author, Edmund Muskie, that most of those creaky older plants were soon going to be mothballed

Jamie Stiehm: Recalling another time when anger ruled the nation

[Jamie Stiehm is a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.] This summer's dialogue of democracy over health-care reform is bringing out the worst in the body politic. In orchestrated scenes of rage and threats in town-hall meetings, public discourse is now public "discoarse." When a man brings a gun to a New Hampshire meeting, when a Missouri woman tears up a poster of civil rights icon Rosa Parks, and when

Richard Cohen: Sarah Palin ... a Modern Day McCarthy

[Richard Cohen is syndicated columnist for the Washington Post.] Try this on for size: Palinism. What is it? It is an updated version of McCarthyism, which takes its name from the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin liar, demagogue and drunk, and means, according to Wikipedia, "reckless, unsubstantiated accusations, as well as demagogic attacks on the character or patriotism of political adversaries." As far as we know, Sarah Palin is not a drunk. But she

Lawrence Downes: The Big Five-O

The 50th state turns 50 on Friday, and the strange thing is how wildly and jubilantly the islands aren’t celebrating. There are no official parades. No King Kamehameha on a flowery float, surrounded by his court. No bonfires. No blowout concerts with fireworks, aerial acrobats and hula troupes... ...The reasons are sad but obvious. The state is preoccupied by economic worries. Tourism is in the tank. The governor and state unions are battling over layoffs and pay cuts. Unemployment

Bret Stephens: Talking to the Enemy

[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs, which runs every Tuesday in the U.S. and is also published in the European and Asian editions of the paper. He is a member of the Journal's editorial board, and has previously worked for the paper as an assistant editorial features (op-ed) editor in New York and as an editorial writer in Brussels for The Wall Street Journal Europe.] It is the declared policy of the Obama administration that the Uni

Abbas Milani: An Evening in Support of the Bahais of Iran

[Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford, where he is the co-director of the Iran Democracy Project. His latest book is Eminent Persian: The Men and Women who Made Modern Iran, 1941-1979 (Syracuse University Press).] <em>This Tuesday, seven leaders of Iran's Bahai movement will go on trial on capital charges of espionage and threatening national security. They have been in prison for more than a year. The group's two lawyers hav

Scott Horton: Karl Rove's Convenient Memory Lapses

[Scott Horton is a contributor to Harper's Magazine. A New York attorney known for his work in emerging markets and international law, especially human rights law and the law of armed conflict, Horton lectures at Columbia Law School.] The human memory is an amazing engine, but Karl Rove's is something truly extraordinary. Consider Rove's last brush with the law""in connection with the outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame. Rove told investigators that he learned about P

John H. McWhorter: Why The National Review Would Have Loved Zora Neale Hurston

[John H. McWhorter, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, writes and comments extensively on race, ethnicity and cultural issues for the Manhattan Institute. He also writes a regular column in the New York Sun.] The drifting changes in the links between cultural alignments and political ones over time are always interesting, such as the fact that Republicans were once more interested in black rights than Democrats. It’s equally true in black history. Culturally, Booker T. Washin

Justin Fox: Bernie Madoff's Other Legacy

[Justin Fox is the economics and business columnist for Time magazine.] One day in fall 2007, I found myself on the 19th floor of the Manhattan skyscraper known as the Lipstick Building, listening to Bernie Madoff explain to me how he made money. This was in preparation for a discussion called the Future of the Stock Market that I was moderating; Madoff was a participant. (It's a big hit on YouTube — just Google "Madoff video.") Sadly, he didn't happen to mention the now i

Daniel Gross: Who Won the Recession? McDonald's.

Now that the recession is most likely over, it's time to start looking at which companies, institutions, and individuals thrived during this grim period. In the harsh downturn that began in December 2007, success was redefined—flat became the new up, and muddling through became a triumph. In a recession that hit all rungs of the income ladder and ravaged the wealthiest consumer markets—the United States, Europe, Japan—there were very few safe havens. But some countries, such as Peru, managed to

Selig S. Harrison: Afghanistan's Tyranny of the Minority

[Selig S. Harrison is the director of the Asia program at the Center for International Policy and a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.] As the debate intensifies within the Obama administration over how to stabilize Afghanistan, one major problem is conspicuously missing from the discussion: the growing alienation of the country’s largest ethnic group, the Pashtun tribes, who make up an estimated 42 percent of the population of 33 million. One o

Steve Benen: Where The Crazy Tree Blooms

[My name is Steve Benen. I’m a freelance writer, researcher, and political consultant, working in politics in one capacity or another for about 10 years. My articles and op-eds have appeared in a variety of publications, including Washington Monthly, The American Prospect, The Gadflyer, and Church & State.] The estimable Rick Perlstein has a terrific piece in the Washington Post today, providing some historical context for the right-wing rage we're seeing today. It's ugly and it

Rifat N. Bali: Confronting Turkish Anti-Semitism

[Rifat N. Bali is a FrontPageMag columnist.] One of the most illuminating methods of explaining and accurately describing present-day Turkish anti-Semitism and the reasons for its widespread nature is to examine the reactions among Turkish intellectuals and the Turkish press to various Israeli military actions in recent years. Surveying articles by Turkish columnists during Israel’s most recent military operations, the summer 2006 war with Hizballah in Lebanon and the more recent Op

Raymond Ibrahim: The Dark Side of Zakat, Muslim "Charity" in Context

[Raymond Ibrahim is the associate director of the Middle East Forum and the author of The Al Qaeda Reader, translations of religious texts and propaganda .] From what American schoolchildren are being taught by their teachers to what Americans are being told by their presidents, concepts unique to Islam are nowadays almost always "Westernized." Whether the product of naivety, arrogance, or downright disingenuousness, this phenomenon has resulted in epistemic (and thus ende

Benjamin Wallace-Wells: Learning the wrong lessons from David Halberstam

[Benjamin Wallace-Wells is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a national affairs correspondent for Rolling Stone.] Washington in the early days of a new administration is a didactic, lesson-drawing place, but even so, it has been striking to see how quickly the commentary on the death of Robert McNamara, defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and architect of the Vietnam war, has turned to abstraction--as if it was not one exception

L. Gordon Crovitz: Google Searches for Property Rights

[Gordon Crovitz is a media and information industry advisor and executive, including former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, executive vice president of Dow Jones and president of its Consumer Media Group.] The biggest book deal ever is about to come under attack. Google reached a $125 million legal settlement last year with book publishers and authors so that it could digitize some 18 million books. A federal judge will soon review its terms, with the Justice Department likel

David Ottaway: The U.S. and Saudi Arabia Since the 1930s

[David Ottaway is a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center and a former correspondent for the Washington Post. This essay is based on his presentation at "U.S. Foreign Policy and the Modern Middle East," a Summer Institute for Teachers sponsored by The American Institute for History Education and The Wachman Center of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, held June 25-27, 2009, in Philadelphia. ] There have been two constants in U.S.-Saudi relations for decades: oil

Glenn Hubbard: Think Again ... A Marshall Plan for Africa

[Glenn Hubbard, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2001 to 2003, is dean of Columbia Business School. With William Duggan, he is co-author of the forthcoming book The Aid Trap: Hard Truths About Ending Poverty.] Just six months into his term, U.S. President Barack Obama is already modeling himself after the country's most transformational Democratic leader, Franklin D. Roosevelt. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visits Africa this month, now would be

Peter Wehner & Michael Gerson: The Path to Republican Revival

[Peter Wehner worked in the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. Michael Gerson was formerly a speechwriter and policy adviser to President George W. Bush.] At some point about five years ago, America became a “One-Party Country”—and the party in question was the GOP. Such, at least, was the conclusion of Los Angeles Times reporters Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten in the book they wrote under that title following the 2004 presidential election. Bi