Roundup: Media's Take

Lt. Gen. Pacepa: I was Romania's car czar

[Lt. Gen. Pacepa, the highest ranking Soviet bloc official granted political asylum in the U.S., is the author of the memoir "Red Horizons" (Regnery, 1987)] They say history repeats itself. If you are like me and have lived two lives, you have a good chance of seeing the re-enactment with your own eyes. The current takeover of General Motors by the U.S. government and United Auto Workers makes me think back to Romania's catastrophic mismanagement of the car factories it bu

Paul Krugman: Reagan Did It

“This bill is the most important legislation for financial institutions in the last 50 years. It provides a long-term solution for troubled thrift institutions. ... All in all, I think we hit the jackpot.” So declared Ronald Reagan in 1982, as he signed the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act. He was, as it happened, wrong about solving the problems of the thrifts. On the contrary, the bill turned the modest-sized troubles of savings-and-loan institutions into an utter cata

Michael Tomasky: Will Cairo Launch the Obama Doctrine?

[Michael Tomasky is editor of Guardian America.] On Thursday Barack Obama is set to deliver a much-anticipated speech from Cairo in which he will reportedly discuss democracy and human rights. These two traits, of course, are in scant supply in his host country. Whether this is an irony that the president hopes to side-step or a condition he will address head-on is an interesting question. The answer will help us address the larger question of whether, four months along, there ­exis

Paul Krugman: Reaganomics is to blame

[The New York Times's Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winner, blogs about economics and politics.] “This bill is the most important legislation for financial institutions in the last 50 years. It provides a long-term solution for troubled thrift institutions. ... All in all, I think we hit the jackpot.” So declared Ronald Reagan in 1982, as he signed the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act. He was, as it happened, wrong about solving the problems of the thrifts. On t

Dick Morris: The incredible shrinking Clintons

Asked why he was naming some of his rivals to top administration jobs, President Lyndon B. Johnson said it best: "I'd rather have them inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in." President Obama seems to echo Johnson's management style in his handling of Bill and Hillary Clinton. By bringing them into his inner circle, he has marginalized them both and sharply reduced their freedom of action. It may appear odd to describe a secretary of State as marginalized, but

Andrew Cherlin: If the Depression is any guide, in times of economic crisis the divorce rate drops

[Andrew J. Cherlin, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of “The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today.”] IN times of economic crisis, Americans turn to their families for support. If the Great Depression is any guide, we may see a drop in our sky-high divorce rate. But this won’t necessarily represent an increase in happy marriages, nor is the trend likely to last. In the long run, the Depression weakened American fa

Michael Shapiro: Why Sotomayor Couldn't Really Save Baseball

[Michael Shapiro is author of Bottom of the Ninth] Let me add my voice to all the many others -- the President's included! -- who have declared their eternal gratitude to Judge Sonia Sotomayor for doing what she could to save baseball from its self-destructive ways. Sotomayor, as the world now knows, acted swiftly and decisively in 1995 when she issued the injunction that effectively ended the interminable strike that cost the game and its fans the 1994 World Series. So

Daniel Sneider: Wage a Cold War Against North Korea

[Daniel Sneider is the Associate Director for Research of Stanford University's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and a former foreign correspondent who covered Korea for The Christian Science Monitor and the San Jose Mercury News.] Barring a diplomatic miracle, the missile and nuclear tests carried out by North Korea in April and May have driven a stake into the heart of the denuclearization talks carried out for the last six years. North Korea trumpe

Carl Schramm: Schumpeter's Moment

[Mr. Schramm is president and CEO of the Kauffman Foundation and co-author of "Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity".] We continue to be in the middle of a frightening economic drama, one that is putting the core tenets of modern capitalism at the center of the global debate. That is an important debate to have, considering that the fundamental assumptions of modern economics -- that governments have appropriately designed counter-cyc

Richard Lloyd Parry: The pygmy that Dubya turned into a monster

[Richard Lloyd Parry is a British foreign correspondent and Asia Editor of The Times.] Korea has been such a huge and intractable problem for so many decades now that it is easy to think of it as just an unpleasant fact of life, like drizzle or midges or the aches and pains of age. There it lies on the far side of the world; we know something's wrong over there, but we can't always remember what. The Korean War was the one that our grandfathers were too old for, and our

Political Math (blogger): Obama's wracking up debt much faster than any previous president

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Damon Linker: Taking Stock Of The Intellectual Right In The Age Of Obama

Roughly four months into Barack Obama's presidency, it's possible to make a few observations about the factions forming on the intellectual right as it adjusts to life in the political wilderness.It's fitting that National Review -- the intellectual incubator of the conservative movement that rose to power with Ronald Reagan -- seems poised to go down with the ship. In the magazine and more recently on its lively website N

Gordon Silverstein: Why it's good for liberals that Sonia Sotomayor is not the standard-bearer that they have been waiting for

[Gordon Silverstein is an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. His latest book, Law's Allure: How Law Shapes, Constrains, Saves and Kills Politics, was published by Cambridge University Press in February. ] When Sonia Sotomayor's name surfaced on almost every short-list for Souter's potential replacement, a very strange thing happened: Some on the left were being just as hard on her as movement conservatives, questioning the judicial pr

Abdul Malik Mujahid: Why Do Afghans Have a Life Expectancy of Only 44 Years?

[Abdul Malik Mujahid served as Chairman of the Council of the Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago. Mujahid is the founder and the president of the Sound Vision Foundation. Born in Pakistan, he now lives in Chicago]. According to the CIA World Factbook, an Afghan’s life expectancy is merely 44 years. That's 20 to 30 years less than neighboring Pakistan and all other surrounding countries. It is just one result of the ongoing devastation in that country. The war in A

Natan Sharansky: Make Libya Pay for Dissident's Death

[A human rights activist, Natan Sharansky spent nine years in the Soviet gulag. He is chairman of the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem.] Fathi Eljahmi, the most prominent democratic dissident in Libya, died last Thursday. Eljahmi had endured seven years in unspeakable conditions in the Libyan prison system. His crime? He spoke out, unflinchingly, for freedom of speech and democratic reforms. Two days before his death, with Eljahmi already in

Nicholas Carr: Woodrow Wilson was the First Twitterer

[Carr is a former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review and has written for the New York Times, the Financial Times, Wired, and many other publications. He is also a member of Britannica's Editorial Board of Advisors. He blogs at www.roughtype.com.] Twitterification continues. Not only are other social networking sites, such as Facebook, scrambling to pour their members’

Ben Stein: Decline and Fall: A View From 2089

[Ben Stein is a lawyer, writer, actor and economist. E-mail: ebiz@nytimes.com.] THE future is now. To see how history might look back on our economic crisis, we bring you this excerpt from “The Decline and Fall of the United States of America,” Beijing University Department of Western Hemisphere History (Beijing Press, 2089): The demise of an economy as mighty as that of the United States as of 2000 cannot be accounted for by anyth

Eugene Robinson: Obama World vs. Cheney World

[Eugene Robinson is an Associate Editor and twice-weekly columnist for The Washington Post.] Which reality do you inhabit, Obama World or Cheney World? If it's the latter, remember that storm clouds are always gathering. Don't forget your umbrella. In Obama World, it's always morning. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping and the pollen count is low. In Cheney World, it's perpetual twilight. Somewhere in the distance, a lone wolf howls at the rising moon.

Cesar Chelala: Nuremberg set a valid precedent for trials of war-crime suspects in Iraq's destruction

[Cesar Chelala, a cowinner of the Overseas Press Club of America award, writes extensively on human rights issues.] The Nuremberg Principles, a set of guidelines established after World War II to try Nazi Party members, were developed to determine what constitutes a war crime. The principles can also be applied today when considering the conditions that led to the Iraq war and, in the process, to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them children, and to the devast

Media Matters: Politico ignores history of conservatives' citing importance of empathy in a judge

A May 26 Politico article reported, "President Barack Obama's first Supreme Court nominee, Second District Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor, began taking hits from the right as her nomination was announced Tuesday morning." Politico cited former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee asserting, "The notion that appellate court decisions are to be interpreted by the 'feelings' of the judge is a direct affront of the basic premise of our judicial system that is supposed to apply the law wit