Roundup: Media's Take

Simon Heffer: Honouring Ted Kennedy is an insult to IRA's victims

[Simon Heffer is a British journalist, columnist and writer.] Even I felt sorry for Ted Kennedy when I heard he had a brain tumour. I temporarily forgot the support he gave to IRA murderers during the 1980s and 1990s. Since some nasty people flew airliners into a few buildings in 2001 the Americans have stopped seeing the glamour of terrorism. Until then, however, Fenian murderers were routinely feted on St Patrick’s Day, and no American welcomed them more warmly than

Michael Lind: Obama's timid liberalism

Barack Obama's bold, ambitious budget plan proves that he is the true heir of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Consider Obama's Rooseveltian energy plan. In 1939, President Roosevelt decided to mobilize Americans to create a new source of energy: atomic power. Although he was urged to focus on government-funded R&D, FDR chose a different route. He wisely encouraged private capital to invest in atomic energy research by a variety of tax incentives. To make atomic power investment more pal

David Stokes: Lessons From Lyndon’s Successful Failure

[Mr. Stokes is the senior pastor of Fair Oaks Church in Fairfax, VA.] When Lyndon Johnson was a boy growing up near the Pedernales River in the Texas hill country his parents would regularly play a record on their Victrola. But it wasn’t music. It was William Jennings Bryan, the Great Commoner, who was known for his charismatic oratory and populist ideals. This was one factor, though small and symbolic, in how the future president developed the ideas he would work feverishly to translate

Winslow T. Wheeler and Pierre M. Sprey: Cutting military spending is politically unpopular, but more dollars don’t make a better Army

... In his farewell article in last fall’s Foreign Affairs and in his welcome-back testimony to the House and Senate in January, [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates decried a defense budget riddled with “baroque” and irrelevant weapons at unaffordable cost. He warned, “the spigot of defense funding opened by 9/11 is closing.” This is important, perhaps prophetic, rhetoric. But if, like Greenspan’s “irrational exuberance,” Gates’s ringing words remain untainted by action, they will simp

Daniel Henninger: Has Obama Buried Reagan?

The Democratic idea bank of Robert & Robert says it's safe to unload on Ronald Reagan. Robert Reich: "It is the boldest budget we have seen since the Reagan administration, and drives a nail in the coffin of Reaganomics. We can basically say goodbye to the philosophy espoused by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher." Robert Shrum: "Obama is not only unwinding Reagan's policies, he is offering a Rooseveltian paradigm that justifies government pragmatica

Jonathan Chait: In Defense of Democratic Starve-the-Beast

Ross Douthat charges President Obama with doing George W. Bush's budget strategy in reverse: what you see in his budgeting proposals, I think, is the liberal equivalent of the conservative attempt to "starve the beast." In both the Reagan and Bush eras, Republicans passed tax cuts and ran up large deficits while hoping that by starving the federal government of revenue they would curb its long-run growth. Obama's spending proposals would effectively reverse that dynamic -

Karen J. Greenberg: Obama's Guantanamo?

[Karen J. Greenberg is the Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law. Her latest book, The Least Worst Place, Guantanamo's First 100 Days (Oxford University Press), has just been published. She is also the co-editor of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib, among other works.] Just when you think you've woken up from a bad dream…

James Quinn: As General Motors Goes, So Goes the Nation

[Cutting Edge Economic Crisis Analyst James Quinn is a senior director of strategic planning for a major university. This article reflects the personal views of James Quinn. It does not necessarily represent the views of his employer, and is not sponsored or endorsed by them.] General Motors was founded in 1908 in Flint, Michigan and grew to be the largest corporation in the world. Its market capitalization reached $50 billion in 2000. In the past week its market capitalization has dropped

Mitchell Bard: Israeli Restraint & Palestinian Responsibility in the Gaza War

[Mitchell Bard is the Executive Director of the nonprofit American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE) and the director of the Jewish Virtual Library. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from UCLA and has been published in academic journals, magazines, and major newspapers. He has written and edited 18 books, including Myths and Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israel Conflict, Second Edition, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Middle East Conflict, 1001 Facts Everyone Should Know About Israel, and Wil

Nicholas von Hoffman: The Second Geat Depression

[Nicholas von Hoffman is the author of A Devil's Dictionary of Business, now in paperback. He is a Pulitzer Prize losing author of thirteen books, including Citizen Cohn, and a columnist for the New York Observer.] The pause morphed into the correction, which got transmogrified into the drop in business, which shifted into the crash. The crash became the slump, which changed into the downturn and/or the slide, or the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Scarier yet, P

Stephanie Hanson: International Criminal Court charged Sudan's president with war crimes ... The Background

[The Council on Foreign Relations explains the political backdrop.] For the past four years, significant U.S. attention has been devoted to the crisis in Sudan's Darfur region, in which roughly two hundred thousand have died and more than two million have been displaced. A hybrid African Union/United Nations peacekeeping force remains only partially deployed, and peace negotiations have stalled. Meanwhile, clashes in South Sudan have raising fears that the fragile peace brought by

David Leonhardt: The Great Recession likely to result in less inequality

... The main reason that recessions tend to increase inequality is that lower-income workers are concentrated in boom-and-bust industries. Agriculture is the classic example. In recent years, construction has become the most important one.... All of these trends will serve to increase inequality. Yet I still think the Great Recession will eventually end up compressing the rungs on the nation’s economic ladder. Why? For the same three fundamental reasons that the Great Depression did

Dick Morris: Waging war on prosperity

President Lyndon Johnson's administration was known for his War on Poverty. President Obama's will become notable for his War on Prosperity. We're speaking, of course, of Obama's plans to hike income taxes on the most wealthy 2 or 3 percent of the nation. He's not just raising the top rate to 39.6 percent; he's also disallowing about one-third of top earner's deductions, whether for state and local taxes, charitable contributions or mortgage interest. This is an effective hike in th

Editorial in the Newstatesman: Margaret Thatcher ... still guilty after all these years

It is 30 years since Margaret Thatcher entered No 10, setting in motion a revolution that would destroy the quasi-socialist political consensus of the postwar decades and, after much strife, turn Britain into the country it is today: riven, atomised, debt-stricken, hugely unequal, its prosperity excessively dependent on financial services, its public spaces degraded, and its towns, at least at night, the preserve of the binge drinker and the brawler. Many of us may have grown more w

Jack Shafer: J. Edgar Hoover, Bill Moyers and the investigation of homosexuals

[Jack Shafer is editor at large for Slate magazine.] When Bill Moyers left his show Now With Bill Moyers at the end of 2004, he told the Associated Press that his immediate project would be a book about the year he worked for Lyndon B. Johnson. Upon returning to PBS in the spring of 2007 to relaunch Bill Moyers Journal, he informed the AP that the book was progressing. Progressing, yes, but not progressing sufficient that Moyers could say anything definitive about his White Ho

Paul Smalera: Lost Decade? We Just Had One

[Paul Smalera has written for Condé Nast Portfolio, The New York Times and The New York Observer among others. He lives in New York.]" ‘Jesus,' he said to himself. ‘Drunk for ten years.'"—F. Scott Fitzgerald,"The Lost Decade" For months, the"lost decade" meme has been wending its way through blog posts, economics journals, cable news shows, and newspaper think pieces until, like a minor leaguer on a hot streak, it finally reached The Show, the White House, where President Barack Ob

Paul Craig Roberts: A Banana Republic By 2012?:

[Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. ] President Obama has presented the most irresponsible budget in US history. His fiscal year 2010 budget projects federal spending of $3.5 trillion and a federal deficit of $1.75 trillion. In other words, 50 percent of the government's budget consists of red ink. And Americans are angry that sub-prime borrowers too

George F. Will: FDR’s Sweater Fable

On April 12, 1933, the 40th day of his presidency, Franklin Roosevelt met with reporters and recounted to them "a story that was told to me the other day." The story of what FDR called "a certain little sweater factory in a little town"—"I won't even give you the location of it"—helps to explain why the Depression lingered through the 1930s, and why it is troubling to see the Obama administration auditioning for the role of the New Deal Redux. The facto

Barbara Bornet Stumph: Inauguration of Obama ... What Can We Tell Our Children?

[Barbara Bornet Stumph is an English Language Development and Ancient World History Teacher and Teacher/Researcher with the Bay Area Writing Project (sponsored by University of California at Berkeley), who retired from Mt. Diablo Unified School District. She graduated from the University of Oregon in Asian Studies , Mandarin Chinese, and California State University at Hayward with a Masters in Curriculum Education.]As Barrack Obama gave his Inauguration Address, I thought to myse

Stuart Taylor Jr.: Let The Honest Talk About Race Begin

Dear Mr. Attorney General: Your speech commemorating Black History Month by calling America "a nation of cowards" because we "do not talk enough with each other about race" -- a topic about which we talk incessantly -- was unworthy of the admirable public servant I believe you to be. The speech was, as others have pointed out, embarrassingly misinformed, hackneyed, and devoid of thoughtful contributions to racial dialogue. You can do muc