Roundup: Media's Take

Faith J. H. McDonnell: Pebbles in their Mouths

[Faith J. H. McDonnell directs The Institute on Religion and Democracy's Religious Liberty Program and Church Alliance for a New Sudan, and is the author of Girl Soldier: A Story of Hope for Northern Uganda’s Children (Chosen Books, 2007).] Victims of North Korea's brutal regime once died in anonymity. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) deliberately isolated itself from the rest of world. But now news of Kim Jong Il's prison nation escapes almost as frequently as North

John Bolton: Clinton's Unwise Trip to North Korea

[John Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from August 2005 to December 2006.] The Obama administration characterized Bill Clinton's unexpected visit to Pyongyang to secure the release of two American reporters, held unjustifiably by North Korea for nearly five months, as a private, humanitarian mission. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has insisted that the fate of the women who strayed into the North (whether ac

Barbara F. Walter: History shows it's too soon to leave Iraq

[Barbara F. Walter is professor of political science at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at UC San Diego. She is the author of "Committing to Peace: The Successful Settlement of Civil Wars" and the forthcoming "Reputation and Civil War: Why Separatist Conflicts Are So Violent."] Over the next 2 1/2 years, the United States is scheduled to withdraw all of its troops from Iraq. Americans, for the most part, are elated. The war in Iraq has b

Fouad Ajami: Autocracy and the Decline of the Arabs

[Mr. Ajami, a professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and an adjunct fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is the author, among other books, of "The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice since 1967"(Cambridge University Press, 1981).] ‘It made me feel so jealous,” said Abdulmonem Ibrahim, a young Egyptian political activist, of the recent upheaval in Iran. "We are amazed at the organization a

C. B. Liddell: Hammer (and Sickle) Time for Japan?

The high-point of Communism as an ideology was the early 1930s, before the worst excesses of Stalinism. At this time not only did Communism control the vast territory of the Soviet Union, but powerful Communist movements could be found in many of the major industrial states, sometimes provoking its antithesis in Fascism. Even in countries like Britain and America, where mass support was lacking, Communism held powerful sway among intellectuals and some members of the elite, providing a ready sou

Katsunori Nagayasu: How Japan Restored Its Financial System

[Mr. Nagayasu is president of Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ and chairman of the Japanese Bankers Association.] Regulatory authorities around the world are currently discussing ways to prevent another financial crisis. One idea is to mandate higher levels of capital reserves. Japan’s banking reform shows that a comprehensive solution would work better. After our bubble economy collapsed in the 1990s, it took policy makers many years to address the real issue: the health

Thomas L. Friedman: Green Shoots in Palestine

[Thomas L. Friedman won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, his third Pulitzer for The New York Times. ] In 2002, the U.N. Development Program released its first ever Arab Human Development Report, which bluntly detailed the deficits of freedom, women's empowerment and knowledge-creation holding back the Arab world. It was buttressed with sobering statistics: Greece alone translated five times more books every year from English to Greek than the entire Arab world translated from

Dick Morris and Eileen McGann: Clinton Boosts North Korea

[Dick Morris served as Bill Clinton's political consultant for twenty years. A regular political commentator on Fox News and other networks, he is the author of six New York Times bestsellers (all with Eileen McGann) and one Washington Post bestseller. Eileen McGann, an attorney and consultant, works with Dick Morris on campaigns around the world.] Was it only a week ago this past Sunday that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the North Koreans "unruly children" on

Afua Hirsch: A proud 700-year history of double standards on torture

[Afua Hirsch is the Guardian's legal affairs correspondent. She has practiced at the bar in criminal defence and public law and teaches constitutional and human rights law.] There is nothing new about British officials condemning the use of torture in unequivocal terms. "The illegality of torture in England has been a subject of boasting among Englishmen for more than five centuries," wrote Harvard law professor Lawrence Lowell in 1897. The rejection of torture as a sensib

Maggie Fox: Aquino's "People Power" Swept Up Reporters, Too

[Maggie Fox has been a correspondent for Reuters for 19 years. Before she joined the company she worked as a journalist for the U.S. Mutual Radio news network in Manila in 1986 when Corazon Aquino challenged Ferdinand Marcos for the presidency, won, and proceeded to lead the peaceful revolution that made him relinquish power.] It was a brilliantly sunny morning in March of 1986. Several dozen foreign journalists were up on the roof of the Manila Hotel looking down in disbelief at th

Jack Shafer: The Newspaper-Web War, Ever get the feeling this battle was fought before?

[Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.] The newspaper industry and its allies have many grievances against the Web. They say the Web is parasitic, that it copies newspaper content and steals its advertising. They claim that Web creators will never provide the deep reporting that democracy needs and that newspapers provided before the Web arrived and ruined the media neighborhood. They want to tame the Web by rejigging copyright law. And they protest that the Web has undermined qua

Thomas B. Edsall: The Modern GOP Return To The "White Voter Strategy"

[Thomas B. Edsall is the political editor of the Huffington Post. He is also Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. From 1981 to 2006, he was a political reporter at the Washington Post.]With Republican party leaders so constrained by ideological blinders that none of their positions is likely to produce gains among non-white minorities, especially Hispanics, the GOP is finding it has no real alternative but to revert to a"w

David Frakt: Let the military commissions die

[David Frakt was a lawyer for Guantanamo detainees.] As President Obama considers reviving the military commissions, and Congress considers various revisions to the Military Commissions Act, they should do so with a clear understanding of why the military commissions of the Bush administration were created, why they were such a catastrophic failure, and whether there would be any useful purpose to reviving them. The military commissions clearly failed to achieve their i

Douglas J. Feith and Abram N. Shulsky: Is Obama Reviving the Cold War?

[Mr. Feith, a former under secretary of defense for policy (2001-05), is the author of “War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism” (HarperCollins, 2008). Mr. Shulsky is a former Defense Department official who dealt with arms control issues. Both are senior fellows at the Hudson Institute.] The Cold War ended nearly 20 years ago. Isn’t it time we abandoned policies specifically designed to deal with it? Arms-control talks are a case in point. Why shou

Dalton Conley: Safe at Home

[Dalton Conley, the dean of social sciences at New York University, is the author of "Elsewhere, U.S.A."] ... Now that prices have collapsed in many areas, low-income Americans might be able to afford to purchase homes for the first time in years. Sales of new homes in June were down 21 percent from last year. This would seem an ideal time to encourage low-income families to buy homes — if we weren't haunted by misconceptions about the roots of the subprime mortgage crisis

Chris Kelly: The Constitution Says Obama Can't Be President. And Neither Could Reagan

[Chris Kelly is a writer for Real Time with Bill Maher.] Barack Obama's birthday is tomorrow (or IS IT?) and in the spirit of gift giving, I've got something for the 28% of Republicans who don't believe Obama was born in America: An invitation to common ground. Here's the first place we can agree: It would be nice if the President would ask Hawaii to release his original, long form birth certificate. There are all kinds of perfectly good moral, legal and politic

Immanuel Ness: Could the great recession lead to a great revolution?

[Immanuel Ness is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and editor of "The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest: 1500 to the Present."] For the first time in generations, people are challenging the view that a free-market order – the system that dominates the globe today – is the destiny of all nations. The free market's uncanny ability to enrich the elite, coupled with its inability to soften the sharp experienc

William K. Black: A thorough investigation of the financial collapse

[William K. Black, J.D., Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Law and Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He was the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention, Litigation Director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, General Counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and Senior Deputy Chief Counsel of the Office of Thrift Supervision.] The original Pecora investigation documented the causes of the economic collapse that led to the Great Depres

Rodrigue Tremblay: Nothing in Sight to Replace the US Dollar as an International Reserve Currency

[Rodrigue Tremblay is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Montreal.] ... Presently, there is a vacuum in international affairs coming from the decline in the moral and economic stature of the United States. It is a vacuum because no other country or organization has the credibility, legitimacy and capability to fill the gap. This is particularly true in monetary and financial affairs. By default, the U.S. dollar is de facto the main supranational key currency used t

Sherwood Ross: King Would Object to Obama's Wars

[Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based public relations consultant who formerly worked for major dailies and wire services. He also worked in a professional capacity in the civil rights movement during the Sixties.] In his rousing speech to the NAACP, President Obama praised the civil rights leaders of the past whose sacrifices “began the journey that has led me" (to the White House). He neglected to mention, however, that the majority of those civil rights leaders, most notably Rev.