Roundup: Media's Take

Joe Nocera: Obama's no FDR

Three quarters of a century ago, President Franklin Roosevelt earned the undying enmity of Wall Street when he used his enormous popularity to push through a series of radical regulatory reforms that completely changed the norms of the financial industry. Wall Street hated the reforms, of course, but Roosevelt didn’t care. Wall Street and the financial industry had engaged in practices they shouldn’t have, and had helped lead the country into the Great Depression. Those practices ha

Nick Turse: Ex-Bush Loyalists Cash In

[Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and the recent winner of a Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction as well as a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, In These Times, and regularly at TomDispatch. A paperback edition of his book,

Max Boot: General McChrystal's New Way of War

[Mr. Boot is a senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is currently writing a history of guerrilla warfare. ] Gen. Stanley McChrystal was appointed commander in Afghanistan to shake up a troubled war effort. But one of his first initiatives could wind up changing how the entire military does business. Gen. McChrystal's decision to set up a Pakistan Afghanistan Coordination Cell means creating a corps of roughly 400 officers who

Hooman Majd: Iran is Betraying its Revolution

[Hooman Majd is author of ‘The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran’ (2008).] In Mein Kampf, Hitler observed: “... and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.” So it has proved with Iran’s presidential elections, which have defied expectations of a close race or

Danielle Pletka and Ali Alfoneh: Iran’s Hidden Revolution

[Danielle Pletka is the vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Ali Alfoneh is a visiting fellow at the institute.] JUST after Iran’s rigged elections last week, with hundreds of thousands of protesters taking to the streets, it looked as if a new revolution was in the offing. Five days later, the uprising is little more than a symbolic protest, crushed by the elite Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Meanwhile, the real revolution

Ben Simpfendorfer: Ben Simpfendorfer on China and the Arab World

[Ben Simpfendorfer works as Chief Economist of China for a major world bank. Previously, he was the Senior China Economist for JPMorgan Chase. Living in Hong Kong for nearly a decade, he wrote about financial matters for an audience of global investors. He began his career in the Middle East, living in Amman, Beirut, and Damascus. (Courtesy, Ben Simpfendorfer)]. Ben Simpfendorfer’s area of expertise—the interaction between the Chinese and Arab worlds—is rare perhaps because it

Adam Holland: Holocaust Museum shooter's letters to Marine Corps General show longstanding ties to racist right

[Mr. Holland runs an investigative blog.] James von Brunn, who is accused of murdering security guard Stephen Johns in the course of a terrorist attack on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on June 10, had longstanding ties to far-right, racist groups. These connections are evident in his letters to retired Marine Corps General Pedro A. Del Valle, himself an activist of the racist far-right, who provided both material support and philosophical inspiration to von Brunn.

Laura Rozen: Obama's Jimmy Carter problem?

[Laura Rozen reports on the world of foreign policy from Foggy Bottom to the White House, the Hill to Embassy Row, for The Cable.] When Fox News reported today from Gaza that former President Jimmy Carter plans to urge President Barack Obama to take the Palestinian militant group Hamas off the U.S. terrorist list in meetings later this week, Washington Democrats and the Obama administration collectively cringed. "The president has addressed Hamas questions, includ

David Paul Kuhn: Will Tiananmen Be Obama's Roadmap?

[David Paul Kuhn is the Chief Political Correspondent for RealClearPolitics and the author of The Neglected Voter. He can be reached at david@realclearpolitics.com] Tehran is beginning to feel like Tiananmen. The inspiring images of this Iranian green revolution, of the young striving for freedom, carries an eerie symmetry with Tiananmen Square. A brave student in a burka standing against armed police feels like that man

Pankaj Mishra: Obama's bulldozer risks turning the Taliban into Pakistan's Khmer Rouge

[Pankaj Mishra is an Indian author and writer of literary and political essays.] Last month Richard Holbrooke, the US state department's special representative, met students from Pakistan's north-west tribal ­areas. They were ­enraged by drone attacks, which – ­according to David Kilcullen, counterinsurgency adviser to General Petraeus – have eliminated only about 14 terrorist leaders while killing 700 civilians. One young man told Holbrooke that he knew someone killed in a Predator

Editorial in the Times: No Cause for Iraq Inquiry

Gordon Brown announced yesterday an inquiry into the Iraq war. It will begin work under Sir John Chilcot, a former civil servant, next month. To the derision of opposition MPs, it will take a year to report (so beyond the date of the next election) and will hear evidence in private. Scepticism is the right response, but not for the reasons advanced by Mr Brown's critics. The military campaign to oust Saddam Hussein was intensely controversial and led to the deaths of 179 British se

Harlan K. Ullman: Wars of necessity and of choice

[Harlan K. Ullman is a senior adviser at the Atlantic Council. His last book was "America's Promise Restored: Preventing Culture, Crusade and Partisanship From Wrecking Our Nation."] "So who's in favor of a war-losing strategy?" The answer was self-evident. The same skewering should apply to the equally misleading phrase of "wars of necessity and wars of choice." Wars are ultimately about judgment and should be so regarded and defined.

Robert D. Kaplan: Iran, Iraq, North Korea ... What Now?

[Robert D. Kaplan is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.] Seven-and-a-half years ago, in his 2002 State of the Union address, then-President George W. Bush declared that the regimes of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea constituted an "axis of evil." He thereby put the United States on a war footing with them. In rhetorical terms, Bush's use of the phrase was highly successful: It was repeated endlessly by the m

Fred Kaplan: Disengagement With Iran

[Fred Kaplan is Slate's"War Stories" columnist and author of 1959: The Year Everything Changed.] It's time for President Obama to rethink his policy of"engagement" with Iran. Given the near-certainty that Iran's election was fixed and the documented fact that protesters are being brutalized, there is no way that Obama or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could go to Tehran, Iran, and shake hands with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, much less to expect that any talks would be w

Emily Badger: Get a Life? Not If You Want to Be One of the Nine

[Emily Badger is a freelance writer living in Atlanta who has contributed to The New York Times, International Herald Tribune and Christian Science Monitor. She previously covered college sports for the Orlando Sentinel and lived and reported in France.] Sonia Sotomayor's critics and backers have spent the last two weeks parsing one line of a speech she gave in 2001 during a conference at Berkeley on Latino representation on the judiciary."I would hope," she said,"that a wise Latina woman

Paul M. Barrett: J.P. Morgan's bankers invented dangerous ways of dispersing risk

[Paul M. Barrett is an assistant managing editor of BusinessWeek.] To understand the calamity on Wall Street, we need erudite financial analysis and good old-fashioned stories about human fallibility. Gillian Tett, who oversees global market coverage for The Financial Times, offers some of each. In “Fool’s Gold,” she describes how a small group of bankers at storied J. P. Morgan built a monster that got out of control and helped destroy much of their industry. Tett’s tale doesn’t ex

Debra J. Saunders: The media are showing their bias in reports on "right-wing" extremists

After the shooting deaths of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller last month and security guard Stephen T. Johns at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum last week, I knew it was only a matter of time before I would receive an e-mail like one sent from Ann Pinkerton of Oakland: "Several weeks ago, I wrote you because I thought you dismissed the Homeland Security Report on right-wing extremism unfairly. Since then, Dr. George Tiller has been shot and killed, and a security guard at

Paul Krugman: Stay the Course

The debate over economic policy has taken a predictable yet ominous turn: the crisis seems to be easing, and a chorus of critics is already demanding that the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration abandon their rescue efforts. For those who know their history, it’s déjà vu all over again — literally. For this is the third time in history that a major economy has found itself in a liquidity trap, a situation in which interest-rate cuts, the conventional way to perk up the econ

Howard Fineman: What Pittsburgh (Don't Laugh) Can Teach Obama

[Howard Fineman is Newsweek's Senior Washington Correspondent and Columnist, senior editor and deputy Washington bureau chief. He is the author of "Living Politics," a column that began on MSNBC.COM and Newsweek.com and that now also appears in the print magazine. An award-winning reporter and writer, Fineman also is an analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, appearing regularly on "Countdown with Keith Olbermann," "Hardball with Chris Matthews" and "TODAY." The a

Stephen C. Rose: President Obama's FDR Problem

[He attended Phillips Exeter and finished Williams College Phi Beta Kappa with a double major in Political Science and English. He received his Masters from Union Theological Seminary and spent the 1960s as a participant-writer in the Civil Rights movement, reporting from Birmingham, Oxford and Selma. He interviewed Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Saul Alinsky. He also wrote extensively on church and urban affairs and founded a prize-winning magazine Renewal in Chicago...] Pr