Roundup: Media's Take

Jack Goldsmith: The Cheney Fallacy ... Why Obama is waging a more effective war on terror than Bush

[Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School and a member of the Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law, was an Assistant Attorney General in the Bush administration and is the author of The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration (W.W. Norton 2007).] Former Vice President Cheney says that President Obama's reversal of Bush-era terrorism policies endangers American security. The Obama administration, he charges, has "moved to

Victoria Toensing: Critics Still Haven't Read the 'Torture' Memos

[Ms. Toensing was chief counsel for the Senate Intelligence Committee and deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration. ] Sen. Patrick Leahy wants an independent commission to investigate them. Rep. John Conyers wants the Obama Justice Department to prosecute them. Liberal lawyers want to disbar them, and the media maligns them. What did the Justice Department attorneys at George W. Bush's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) -- John Yoo and Jay Bybee -- do t

Richard Posner: Is the Conservative Movement Losing Steam?

I sense intellectual deterioration of the once-vital conservative movement in the United States. As I shall explain, this may be a testament to its success. Until the late 1960s (when I was in my late twenties), I was barely conscious of the existence of a conservative movement. It was obscure and marginal, symbolized by figures like Barry Goldwater (slaughtered by Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential election), Ayn Rand, Russell Kirk, and William Buckley--figures who had no appe

Alan S. Blinder: Let's hope 2010 is not 1936

[Alan S. Blinder is a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. He has advised many Democratic politicians.] CONTRARY to what you may have heard from some doomsayers, 2009 is not 1930 redux. What we must guard against, instead, is 2010 or 2011 becoming another 1936. Realistically, there is little danger that the economy is heading toward a repeat performance of the Great Depression — when real gross domestic

Frank Rich: Obama Can't Turn the Page on Bush

[Frank Rich is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times.] TO paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather III,” just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high

Jared Genser and Meghan Barron: The Burmese Junta Still Fears Suu Kyi

[Mr. Genser and Ms. Barron, lawyers with Freedom Now in Washington, D.C., represent Ms. Suu Kyi.] After spending 14 of the past 19 years under house arrest, Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma's ailing pro-democracy opposition leader, now sits in the military junta's Insein prison, notorious for its filth, disease and the mental and physical torture deployed against its prisoners. She faces a five-year prison sentence if convicted of breaching the terms of her house arrest because a stranger sw

Jonathan Alter: Now is not the time to compromise on health care

The latest buzz on President Obama's health-care plan is that the White House is in űber-pragmatic mode. Their favorite cliché is that we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Something, we're told, is better than nothing. Well, maybe not. At the very least, that shouldn't be the administration's negotiating position going in. Here the New Deal experience on health care might be instructive. In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt told his Labor secretary, Frances Perki

Arnold Holle: Let Them Talk

[Arnold Holle is an investment banker from Germany living in London.] When it comes to interrogating prisoners, perhaps the United States and Britain could take a page from their own history — Germany did. ... Part of the impetus for the postwar German interrogation policy stemmed from the fact that many of the reconstituted army’s new leaders had been P.O.W.s recently released from Allied — especially British — custody. These men had been well-treated by the British an

Joseph S. Nye: Democracy Promotion Reconsidered

[The writer, a professor at Harvard, was rated by a recent poll as the most influential scholar on American foreign policy.] Former president George W. Bush was famous for proclaiming the promotion of democracy a central focus of American foreign policy. He was not alone in this rhetoric. Most American presidents since Woodrow Wilson have made similar statements. So it was striking when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified to Congress earlier this year about the

David Neiwert: Famed WWII historian Bill O'Reilly smears yet another Allied hero

For some time now, Bill O'Reilly has been so desperate to prove that the Bush administration's use of extreme tactics in the"war on terror" -- including torturing detainees and killing civilians -- that he's even been willing to smear the memories of American veterans of World War II to make that point. Last night on his Fox News show, he added Winston Churchill to the list of smear victims.We all remember the

James Carroll: Why the Catholic Fight Over Obama Matters

[James Carroll is a scholar-in-residence at Suffolk University, columnist for the Boston Globe, and author of the bestselling Constantine's Sword. His most recent book is Practicing Catholic, from which this essay draws.] President Obama goes to Notre Dame University this Sunday to deliver the commencement address and receive an honorary degree, the ninth U.S. president to be so honored. The event has

Don Williams: Shout it from the rooftops--Al-Libi--keep his torture story alive

[Don Williams is a prize-winning columnist for "Knoxville Voice," professional blogger at Knoxvoice.com and a contributing editor to Media With Conscience (MWCnews.net). He is a also a short story writer, freelance journalist and the founding editor and publisher of New Millennium Writings (see www.newmillenniumwritings.com), an annual anthology of literary writings. His awards include a National Endowment for the Humanities Michigan

Gershom Gorenberg: There are multiple accounts of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Making peace is not a matter of choosing one side's story over the other's

[Gershom Gorenberg is a senior correspondent for The Prospect. He is the author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 and The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount. He blogs at South Jerusalem.] ... The debate between Israelis and Palestinians -- and more so, in the online screams and screeds of their supporters abroad -- is devoted in no small part to the question of who has the correct version of the past. The answ

Muston Kimit: The beauty pageant in the 21st century

I find it depressing that there have been only two choices for defining women for so long; Madonna or tramp. The exception, of course, is Madonna, who has made a career out of playing the tramp. But the social definition of womanhood for the last two hundred years has remained Queen Victoria. She took the throne in 1837 and made such an impression that ever since women have been forced into one of two boxes marked either “saint” (like Victoria) or “tramp” (un-like Victoria). Aphrodite was not so

Humberto Fontova: Britain Welcomes Che Guevara's Daughter -- But Bans Michael Savage

For “fostering extremism and hatred " Britain's home Secretary has barred the popular U.S. radio commentator Michael Savage from setting foot in the UK. “Coming to the U.K. is a privilege,” explained Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, “and I refuse to extend that privilege to individuals who abuse our standards and values to undermine our way of life. Therefore, I will not hesitate to name and shame those who foster extremist views as I want them to know that they are not welcome here."

Yonatan Touval: A Recognition Israel Doesn’t Need

[Yonatan Touval is a senior policy analyst with the Geneva Initiative, an Israeli nonprofit organization which seeks to advance a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.] Here is a statement you will not hear today from Jerusalem: “I wish to declare that the government of Israel will not ask any nation, be it near or far, mighty or small, to recognize our right to exist.” But it is a statement that was made in June 1977 by then-prime minister Menachem Be

Adam Cohen: The Supreme Court’s Hostility to the Voting Rights Act

... The 13th Amendment, which barred slavery, the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment were the first to give the federal government new powers. The nation had a large problem, eradicating the vestiges of slavery and racial inequality, and it knew that Congress needed potent tools to get the job done. When the framers drafted these amendments, they were worried that Congress would have too little power to get the job done, not too much. Senator Lyman Trumbull warned that if Congres

Maureen Dowd: So Republicans think it's ok NOW for a former veep to criticize the incumbent POTUS?

When Bush 41 was ramping up to the Gulf War, assembling a coalition to fight Saddam, Jimmy Carter sent a letter to members of the U.N. Security Council urging them not to rush into conflict without further exploring a negotiated solution. The first President Bush and other Republicans in Washington considered this treasonous, a former president trying to thwart a sitting one, lobbying foreign diplomats to oppose his own country on a war resolution. In 2002, when Bush Junior was ramp

Jonathan Freedland: Progress is doomed if Obama is merely a cleverer version of Bush

[Jonathan Freedland has been a columnist for the Guardian since 1997.] Binyamin Netanyahu can comfort himself with one thought as he heads to Washington next week. At least when he stands alongside a popular US president who radically disagrees with him on the future of the Middle East, it will not be the first time. Netanyahu will be able to draw on the memory of a similarly tense encounter back in 1996 – the day, shortly after his election victory, when he had to make nice with a

Jack Shafer: Learning from the 1962-63 New York newspaper strike

What would life without newspapers be like?... No conversation about newspapers' dismal present is complete without some anguished mention of how democracy will go off the rails unless the press is there to set it straight. (See last week's Senate hearings, chaired by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., for an example.) But even though the 1962-63 strike upended New York, neither the dozen newspaper accounts I've read about the strike nor the histories or memoirs from the era that I've pulled