Roundup: Media's Take

Jon Talton: What Happens After the Crash? America Faces a Future of Discontinuity.

[Jon Talton is the economics columnist for the Seattle Times and proprietor of the blog Rogue Columnist.His latest book is the mystery novel

Harvey Wasserman: Cracking the corporate media's Iron Curtain around death at Three Mile Island

[Harvey Wasserman edits NukeFree.org and is senior editor of http://FreePress.org, where this article originally appeared. His books, including SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, are available at http://harveywasserman.com. ] Chernobyl exploded and Three Mile Island missed by a whisker. They both killed people. But thirty years after the Pennsylvania melt-down, a Soviet-style Iron Curtain has

Jonathan Freedland: Where is the new JFK we expected? He's stuck in a rut with Gordon Brown

[Jonathan Freedland has been a columnist for the Guardian since 1997.] Someone tore up the script. Here's how it was meant to go. Barack Obama was supposed to sweep into Europe on his first major trip abroad as the new JFK, greeted by adoring fans moistly waving little American flags. His progress would be part celebrity world tour, part celebration of the end of the Bush era. A needy Gordon Brown would bask in the Obama glow, hoping its rays would improve his own deathly pallor. Me

Jonathan Chait: Why the Democrats Can't Govern

The last Democrat who held the White House, Bill Clinton, saw the core of his domestic agenda come to ruin, his political support collapse, and his failure spawn a massive Republican resurgence that made progressive reform impossible for a decade to come. The Democrat who last held the White House before that, Jimmy Carter, saw the exact same thing happen to him. At this early date, nobody can know whether or not Barack Obama will escape this fate. But the contours of failure are no

NYT: The Day the S.E.C. Changed the Game

An audio recording from 2004 shows levity, even laughter, as the S.E.C. made a little-noticed, but fateful change to rules governing the five largest U.S. investment banks.

Humberto Fontova: Civil Rights Activist Dying on Hunger Strike Near Guantanamo

[Humberto Fontova is the author of four books including Exposing the Real Che Guevara. Visit hfontova.com.] A civil rights activist inspired by Nelson Mandela, Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King has been on a hunger strike since Feb.17th near Guantanamo Cuba, protesting the incarceration and "abuse" of hundreds of what he labels "prisoners of conscience." "The Armed Forces call these men "enemy agents" and "terrorists," h

William Rees-Mogg: Reform the monarchy? Let's wait for a century

[William Rees-Mogg has had a distinguished career with The Times and The Sunday Times.] The Act of Settlement 1701 is a central constitutional statute; it determines the succession to the Crown of England. As the historian Andrew Roberts has pointed out, it has been a success. In the three centuries since it was enacted, the UK has led the global industrial and scientific revolution, emerged victorious from five world wars, built and liquidated an empire comparable to

Ellis Weintraub: Israel Can Learn from 'The Troubles'

[Ellis Weintraub is currently pursuing a Masters in Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.] Upon the arrival of Sinn Fein President and Northern Irish Republican leader Gerry Adams into the Middle East, Israeli officials will give him the cold shoulder - "We expect all dignitaries who come here to make it clear that they will not dignify Hamas with a meeting," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor. On Adams's previous 2006

William Pesek: Reagan's Revolution Is Getting Chinese Makeover

[William Pesek is a Bloomberg News columnist.] Ronald Reagan wouldn’t be happy. The free-market revolution that the U.S. president championed in the 1980s isn’t just over. It’s about to get a Chinese makeover as officials in Beijing assert themselves as rarely before. The way they are scolding the world ahead of this week’s Group-of-20 meeting leaves little doubt about that. Now let’s see, what can China teach us about running an economy? First, don’t len

Jonathan Alter: Obama is following Roosevelt's approach of making early down payments on big ideas

Mid-tweet in last week's press conference, reporters were already complaining that President Obama wasn't making news. And by the old standards, they were right. Obama didn't drop any bombshells, or rein in his agenda, as so many have been urging, or tee up a YouTube-ready sound bite. The same gasbags who had blasted him for demeaning the presidency by cracking jokes on "The Tonight Show" and drinking a beer at a basketball game (hadn't some favored George W. Bush over Al Gore in 2000

Jonathan Rauch: Is Obama Repeating Bush's Mistakes?

[Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer and columnist for National Journal magazine in Washington and a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly.] What year is this? Ross Douthat of The Atlantic asked that question in a smart Wall Street Journal article three years ago. What he meant was that how you viewed foreign policy depended on which of several watershed years you thought 2006 resembled: the 1938 of appeasement, the 1948 of containment, the 1972 of Vietnam, and so on.

Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff : Don’t Buy the Chirpy Forecasts

The good news from our historical study of eight centuries of international financial crises is that, so far, they have all ended. And we confidently predict this one will end, too. We are just not quite so sure it will be nearly as soon as the chirpy forecasts coming from policymakers around the globe. The U.S. administration, for example, is now predicting that growth will renew in the latter part of this year and continue at a brisk pace of 4 percent for several years thereafter. Is this a fa

Richard L. Hasen: Will Bush v. Gore bite Democrats in Coleman v. Franken?

[Richard L. Hasen is the William H. Hannon distinguished professor at Loyola Law School. ] Justice Antonin Scalia has repeatedly told questioners to "Get over it" when they raise questions about the fairness of Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court's decision ending the 2000 Florida recount and handing the 43rd presidency to George W. Bush. The case is so radioactive that no justice on the Supreme Court has cited it in any opinion in the eight years since it was decided. And des

Simon Jenkins: At last we get it - this war is Vietnam for slow learners

[Simon Jenkins is a journalist and author. He writes for the Guardian and the Sunday Times, as well as broadcasting for the BBC.] One word shines through the spin surrounding this week's Barack Obama policy review on Afghanistan. The word is exit. Before he became president, Obama was much taken by the idea that Afghanistan was a good and winnable war, a usefully macho contrast to his retreatism on Iraq. But in a military briefing at the time, he asked what was the exit strategy fro

Alvaro Vargas Llosa: Peru’s Legacy of Graft

[Alvaro Vargas Llosa is Senior Fellow of The Center on Global Prosperity at The Independent Institute. He is a native of Peru and received his B.S.C. in international history from the London School of Economics. His weekly column is syndicated worldwide by the Washington Post Writers Group, and his Independent Institute books include Lessons From the Poor: Triumph of the Entrepreneurial Spirit, The Che Guevara Myth: And the Future of Liberty, and Liberty for Latin America. ] Most bo

Phillip Longman: Think government can’t fix the auto industry? Then how did it manage to fix the railroad industry—twice?

[Phillip Longman is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the author, with Ray Boshara, of the forthcoming book The Next Progressive Era.] The massive corporate bailouts that Washington is undertaking as a result of the economic crisis have left most of us feeling deeply nervous. It’s not just the price tag, measured in incomprehensible trillions. It’s also the fear that the problems of the financial and auto industries may be so deep and so tangled that no one can fix t

Harvey Wasserman: People Died at Three Mile Island

[Harvey Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030, is at www.solartopia.org. He is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and writes regularly for www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared.] People died--and are still dying--at Three Mile Island. As the thirtieth anniversary of America's most infamous industrial acciden

Alan Wolfe: Obama vs. Marx (Hint ... One of them's not a socialist)

[Alan Wolfe is a contributing editor at The New Republic.] The word "liberal" was first used in its modern political sense in 1812, when Spaniards wrote a new constitution liberating themselves from monarchical rule. As it happens, the word "socialism" originated in roughly the same period; it came into existence to describe the utopian ideas of the British reformer Robert Owen. Such timing suggests two possibilities: Either the fates of liberalism and socialism

Dan Rather: What Obama Doesn't Know About Afghanistan

There’s been a lot of news concerning Afghanistan since President Obama took office, from the president’s decision to increase the U.S. force there by 17,000, to reports he is considering an outreach to moderate elements of the Taliban and being advised to carry out missile strikes in and around the Pakistan city of Quetta. Now there is word that President Obama will, within days, announce a new set of diplomatic and military tactics for the war he promised to put front and center. As

Lawrence Kudlow: A Hidden Agenda Behind the 90 Percent Tax?

Taking advantage of the populist revolt against Wall Street and AIG bailouts, the House Democrats have passed a vengeance tax on TARPed financial firms that amounts to a 90 percent marginal tax rate on bonuses. This is being done in the name of AIG outrage, and nobody wants to defend the insurance company -- including me. The financial-products division helped blow up the global credit system, and it shouldn't be rewarded. Yet one wonders about this 90-percent tax rate. If it passes