Roundup: Media's Take

Andy McSmith: The Rothschilds and their 200 years of political influence

[Andy McSmith is a senior reporter at The Independent.] Nat Rothschild, the financier at the centre of allegations that threaten to engulf the shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, is no stranger to laws which forbid politicians from accepting donations from abroad. Political donations from overseas are also illegal in the US, where John McCain's campaign team is under investigation for allegedly accepting a benefit in kind from two mega-rich British citizens, namely Nat R

Editorial in the Telegraph: Islanders denied justice

The former inhabitants of the Chagos archipelago exhausted their recourse to British justice yesterday, when the House of Lords ruled against their being allowed to return home. For the past decade, the Indian Ocean islanders have been batted like a shuttlecock between the Government and the judiciary. In 2000, the High Court decided they could return to 65 of the islands, from which they were evicted between 1966 and 1973, but not to the atoll of Diego Garcia, the site of a leased

Dick Morris: The Populism Divide

As the election enters its last two weeks, social populism wars with economic populism to become the major outlet for American anger and angst and to satisfy the demand for change. In his book The Populist Persuasion, Michael Kazin articulates the difference between these two types of populism: economic and social. Economic populism, the staple of the Democratic left, demonizes Wall Street and glorifies Main Street. It rails against unequal distribution of wealth and warns, perpetua

Howard Wolfson: The End of Nixonland

Rick Perlstein's Nixonland brilliantly covers a period that is finally coming to an end. Perlstein's book focuses on Richard Nixon's runs for the White House, beginning in 1966. Democrats, facing a voter backlash over rioting, crime, and the Vietnam War lost 47 House seats in 1966. Nixon rode that revolt into the White House two years later and exploited it while in office to win re-election in a landslide in 1972. Perlstein correctly states that Nixon came "to

Michael Barone: Are the Polls Accurate?

[Mr. Barone, a senior writer at U.S. News & World Report and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is co-author of "The Almanac of American Politics 2008" (National Journal Group). From 1974 to 1981 he was a vice president of Peter D. Hart Research Associates, a polling firm.] ... It is commonly said that the polls in the 1982 California and the 1989 Virginia gubernatorial races overstated the margin for the black Democrats who were running -- Tom Bra

Fiona Govan: Spaniards divided on picking over the bones of the Civil War

[Fiona Govan has written articles published in The Daily Telegraph (Madrid Correspondent).] More than 70 years after the start of a conflict that ripped apart the people of Spain, and 33 years after the death of General Francisco Franco, an inquiry into the country's darkest era is expected to reopen old wounds. Judge Baltasar Garzón decided last week to launch a criminal investigation into the fate of the thousands who "vanished" during the Civil War of 1936-39 and the en

Jonah Goldberg: The media vs. Joe the Plumber

At a John McCain rally in Virginia on Saturday, Tito Munoz had come to face the enemy: the news media, which had declared war on Joe Wurzelbacher. "Why the hell are you going after Joe the Plumber?" he yelled at a group of reporters, including my National Review colleague, Byron York. "Joe the Plumber has an idea. He has a future. He wants to be something else. Why is that wrong? Everything is possible in America. I made it. Joe the Plumber could make it even better

John Taylor: Biden Implies McCain Would Be Prudent Choice

Sen. Biden: It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy. Here’s how that worked the first time. President Kennedy met N

Jason Zengerle: How David Axelrod learned to conquer race

In 1992, a Chicago woman named Bettylu Saltzman met Barack Obama, who had graduated from Harvard Law School one year earlier and was now in her city leading a voter-registration drive called Project Vote. Saltzman, an heiress to a shopping-mall fortune who's long been active in Democratic politics, was volunteering for Bill Clinton's presidential bid when, one day, Obama dropped by the campaign's Chicago office to discuss Project Vote. Saltzman came away from the encounter very, very impressed.

Peter Johnson: Learning from Argentina

[Peter Johnson is managing editor at the Buenos Aires Herald.] Financial crisis is nothing new for Argentina, which has undergone too many of its own in the last 20 years. The South American country has experienced everything, from the fallout of the Mexican crisis in 1995, bouts of hyperinflation in the 1990s that took the cost of living to over 5,000 percent a year, to a 10-year reliance on neoliberal economic policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund that l

Amy Sullivan: How Catholics Are Judging Obama and the Democrats

This year's Al Smith Dinner — the annual gala that raises funds for the Archdiocese of New York and has become an essential social ticket for the city's political and media class — will be remembered as a rare cease-fire moment in the heated 2008 presidential campaign. Exchanging rolled-up shirt sleeves for white ties, John McCain and Barack Obama cracked each other up on topics that usually result in outraged press statements when raised on the campaign trail. "I got my name, Barack, from

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: Do our rulers know enough to avoid a 1930s replay?

[Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is International Business Editor at the Telegraph.] The commodity and emerging market booms are breaking in unison, leaving no more bubbles left to burst. Almost every corner of the world is now being drawn into the vortex of debt deflation. The freight rates for Capesize vessels used to ship grains, coal, and iron ore have fallen 95pc to $11,600 since May, hence the bankruptcy of Odessa’s Industrial Carriers last week with a fleet of 52 vessel

Aaron David Miller: Searching for Arab-Israeli Peace

[Aaron David Miller is a public policy scholar at the Wilson Center. He worked in both Republican and Democratic administrations as an adviser to the secretary of state on Arab-Israeli negotiations. His new book, The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace, was published in March by Bantam Books.] “The only lesson of history,” the British historian A. J. P. Taylor once observed, “is that there are no lessons.” Maybe Taylor was right. But even with all

Jon Meacham: America remains a center-right nation—a fact that a President Obama would forget at his peril

It was a grand evening. On Thursday, Dec. 5, 1985, at the Plaza Hotel, William F. Buckley Jr. rose to toast the president of the United States on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of National Review. Charlton Heston was the master of ceremonies; the audience included William J. Casey, Nancy Kissinger, Roy Cohn and Tom Selleck. Thirteen months earlier Ronald Reagan had been re-elected, carrying every state in the Union except Walter Mondale's Minnesota. "As an individual you incarnate Ame

E.J. Dionne: Hoover vs. Roosevelt?

Hope versus fear, new versus old: Barack Obama and John McCain have placed their bets. These are the terms on which the 2008 presidential campaign will be decided. That's why it's unfair for political bystanders to attack Obama and McCain for offering few specifics as to how they'd fix an ailing economy. And it's foolish to ask them to jettison their campaign promises in order to pay homage to the God of Balanced Budgets. Each campaign has given voters ample notice abou

Brian M. Carney: Bernanke Is Fighting the Last War

[Mr. Carney is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.] ... Most people now living have never seen a credit crunch like the one we are currently enduring. Ms. [Anna] Schwartz, 92 years old, is one of the exceptions. She's not only old enough to remember the period from 1929 to 1933, she may know more about monetary history and banking than anyone alive. She co-authored, with Milton Friedman, "A Monetary History of the United States" (1963). It's the definiti

Jay Janson: U.S. Nuremberg Trials Prosecutor Would Have Proudly Prosecuted McCain As a War Criminal

[Jay Janson: Musician and writer, who has lived and worked on all the continents and whose articles on media have been published in China, Italy, England and the US, and now resides in New York City.] Gen. Telford Taylor, a chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials is reported as having said that he would be proud to lead the prosecution of U.S. pilots captured in Vietnam. Robert Richter, an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker, and political director for CBS News from 1965 to

Editorial in the Times (UK): Careful with your Keynes, Mr Brown

When President Richard Nixon declared: “We are all Keynesians now,” in 1971, he could hardly have been wider of the mark. The 1970s saw the start of the revolt against economic orthodoxy that had prevailed since the 1930s, when John Maynard Keynes provided the intellectual firepower for the fight against the Great Depression. That revolt, carried through energetically by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, endured until recently. Adam Smith and Milton Friedman were up

Tim Collins: I have no regrets about my Gulf War speech

[Colonel Tim Collins commanded the 1st Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment in Iraq, 2003.] I recall the first day of the second Gulf War clearly. It was the day I made a speech that quickly became very famous, and which has now been criticised by a former soldier as having left my men "fearful of the dangers that faced them". The Americans had attacked Iraq with, once again, no warning to us, their British allies. It was just like the last time: the first Gulf War, when the f

Robert Fisk: From the fourth century BC, words our leaders should heed

[Robert Fisk is a British journalist and is Middle East correspondent for the Independent.] Let us now praise famous men. And after yet another US presidential candidates' debate of awesome sterility – not to mention their shameless refusal to tackle the real, bloody issues that confront America – I'm referring principally to one of the first journalists to understand war and, so far as he could, to check his sources: Thucydides. If only our masters would turn to his ac