Roundup: Media's Take

Nathan Richter: Iraq ... Is It All the Indians' Fault?

... The period before the United States’ first major move as an imperial nation — the 1898 Spanish-American War — saw the growth of the propagandist “yellow press” of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. Many Americans were supremely confident of success in the war — though the country had not fought another European power since the War of 1812. Future U.S. President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the Navy, was one of the biggest agitators for the wa

Paul W. Lovinger: Hillary as Hawk

[Paul W. Lovinger, of San Francisco, has been a journalist, author, and antiwar activist. He was a newspaper reporter and columnist for over 20 years. His last published book was "The Penguin Dictionary of American English Usage and Style." ] When Senator Hillary Clinton voted on October 11, 2002, to turn over to President George W. Bush the power that the Constitution vested in her and congressional colleagues to decide whether or not to wage war — or, quoting House Joint

Raymond J. Lawrence: Let's Take Christ Out of Christmas

[Raymond J. Lawrence is an Episcopal cleric for 46 years, recently retired Director of Pastoral Care, New York Presbyterian Hospital, and author of numerous opinion pieces in newspapers in the U.S., and author of the recently published, Sexual Liberation: The Scandal of Christendom (Praeger).] Many in the Christian community are vexed because of the use of Christmas by the culture at large, and more especially troubled by the use of Christmas themes for purposes that are not thought

Jay Janson: Should Hillary Clinton welcome the endorsement of Bob Kerrey?

[Mr. Janson is a 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.] Monday December 17, 2007, all day on TV, “Hillary Clinton has picked up the endorsement of Bob Kerrey, President of New School University, former Senator and Governor of Nebraska!” Long repeating interviews of Kerry on CNN etc. Huh? Back track to spring of 2002, Bob Ke

Adam Freedman: The comma and the 2nd Amendment

[Adam Freedman, the author of “The Party of the First Part: The Curious World of Legalese,” writes the Legal Lingo column for New York Law Journal Magazine.] LAST month, the Supreme Court agreed to consider District of Columbia v. Heller, which struck down Washington’s strict gun ordinance as a violation of the Second Amendment’s “right to keep and bear arms.” This will be the first time in nearly 70 years that the court has considered the Second Amendment. The outcome

James Carroll: America's politics of religion

What in the name of God is going on in American politics? Mitt Romney's "Faith in America" speech, riddled with mistaken assertions about religion, was itself a warning. But other presidential candidates, debate moderators, pundits and religious leaders all share a dangerous confusion about questions of faith and citizenship. Here are only a few: Is America's goodness grounded in God? When Romney and others assert that American virtues, generally summed up in the idea of &

Ruthie Blum: Vilifying Jews

Likening anti-Semitism to pollution, Manfred Gerstenfeld makes a distinction between that "which comes out of a chimney and spreads over a huge area," and that "which comes from the exhaust pipes of millions of cars, each one contributing its little bit." The former, he says, was characteristic of the Nazi era - with its "boss," Adolf Hitler, as the central smokestack the world over. The latter, he claims, describes today's post-modern form of th

Ruthie Blum: Vilifying Jews

Likening anti-Semitism to pollution, Manfred Gerstenfeld makes a distinction between that "which comes out of a chimney and spreads over a huge area," and that "which comes from the exhaust pipes of millions of cars, each one contributing its little bit." The former, he says, was characteristic of the Nazi era - with its "boss," Adolf Hitler, as the central smokestack the world over. The latter, he claims, describes today's post-modern form of th

Arianna Huffington: Huckabee ... The GOP's Cynical Use of Religion Has Come Home to Roost

With Mike Huckabee's continuing surge, the Republican Party now has an Iowa front-runner whose religious beliefs are virtually identical to those of George Bush. He's anti-choice, born-again, against gay-marriage, and gets political advice directly from God. So why is the Republican establishment suddenly in a state of near-apoplexy about Mike Huckabee? Shouldn't they be happy? They've been cultivating

Arianna Huffington: Huckabee ... The GOP's Cynical Use of Religion Has Come Home to Roost

With Mike Huckabee's continuing surge, the Republican Party now has an Iowa front-runner whose religious beliefs are virtually identical to those of George Bush. He's anti-choice, born-again, against gay-marriage, and gets political advice directly from God. So why is the Republican establishment suddenly in a state of near-apoplexy about Mike Huckabee? Shouldn't they be happy? They've been cultivating

David U. Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler: Repeating Nixon's mistaken approach top health care reform

[David U. Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler are professors of medicine at Harvard and the co-founders of Physicians for a National Health Program.] IN 1971, President Nixon sought to forestall single-payer national health insurance by proposing an alternative. He wanted to combine a mandate, which would require that employers cover their workers, with a Medicaid-like program for poor families, which all Americans would be able to join by paying sliding-scale premiums based on thei

Marty Peretz: Andy Young, Barack Obama and the Black Vote

The old-time black politicians and other public figures are mostly in Hillary Clinton's camp. It is, of course, habit -- how could it not have been otherwise? -- for"people of color" to sue for patronage and programs before the white office-holders whom they had helped elect. For nearly eighty years this meant that most people of color (how this differs so greatly from" colored people" is a mystery to me, but...) voted Republican because the Democratic Party as a whole was mortgage

Douglas Kmiec: Might Hillary appoint Bill to the supreme court?

[Mr. Kmiec, assistant attorney general and head of the Office of Legal Counsel to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, is a professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University and a volunteer legal adviser to Gov. Mitt Romney.] Hillary Clinton's commanding lead in the polls has diminished, and with Oprah Winfrey stumping for Barack Obama, she's called increasingly on the "star power" of husband Bill. But the ubiquitous presence of the former president on the

Ken Shear: Op Ed Rediscovered from 1692

[Mr. Shear is a Seattle attorney and a lover of history.] Up in my attic the other night I came across a packet of yellowed papers tied with a frayed ribbon, with the words “For Posterity” written on it. When I picked it up, all the papers but one mostly crumbled into dust. They must have been hundreds of years old so at first I thought it was quite a loss. But, when I looked at the few small scraps remaining, there were phrases like “rights of the people” and &

Peggy Noonan: Would Reagan survive in today's GOP?

What is happening in Iowa is no longer boring but big, and may prove huge. The Republican race looks--at the moment--to be determined primarily by one thing, the question of religious faith. In my lifetime faith has been a significant issue in presidential politics, but not the sole determinative one. Is that changing? If it is, it is not progress. Mike Huckabee is in the lead due, it appears, to voter approval of the depth and sincerity of his religious beliefs as live

Simon Lazarus: The Roberts Court repeals the 20th century

[Simon Lazarus is public-policy counsel to the National Senior Citizens Law Center.] If the Roberts Court makes this shift to the right, it will reinstate the goals, though not the strategy or tactics, of its forbears of a century ago. The reactionary bloc of Supreme Court justices who dominated American law in the first third of the 20th century attacked the emerging regulatory state by playing the Court's ace: its unreviewable power to declare state and federal laws unconstitutional

Gary Younge: Obama ... Does he reperesent a new generation of black leaders?

[Gary Younge, the Alfred Knobler Journalism Fellow at The Nation Institute, is the New York correspondent for the Guardian and the author of No Place Like Home: A Black Briton's Journey Through the Deep South (Mississippi) and Stranger in a Strange Land: Travels in the Disunited States (New Press). He is also a contributor to The Notion.] At around the age of 7, Barack Obama saw a picture in Life magazine of a black man who had tried to peel his skin off, and Obama had an epiphany.

David Park: Did "Moral Values" and the Gay Marriage Backlash Play a Key Role in Bush's 2004 Victory?

[I am an assistant professor in political science George Washington University. Before coming to GW, I was an assistant professor of political science and applied statistics at Washington University. I received my BS in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Maryland and PhD at Columbia University.] Journalists (via political pundits)** and political scientists have conflicting accounts of the 2004 elections. Both are very convincing. Let me first start with the journalists’

Jeffrey Lord: Mitt Romney has a passion for data. A great president needs a passion for principle.

[Mr. Lord is creator, co-founder and CEO of QubeTV, a conservative, user-generated video site. A former Reagan White House political director and an author, he writes from Pennsylvania. ] Mitt Romney loves data and lusts after process. In a recent cover profile in The Weekly Standard by the magazine's Fred Barnes, Mr. Romney is portrayed as the man who would be the CEO of America. Says Mr. Barnes, quoting Mr. Romney, a Harvard M.B.A.: "His idea of the perfect deal

Sally Bedell Smith: Two Presidents in the White House?

[Ms. Smith is the author of "For Love of Politics: Bill and Hillary Clinton: The White House Years," published this year by Random House.] For many years, one of Bill and Hillary Clinton's closest friends, TV producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, has been fond of saying that when the Clintons "are dead and gone, each of them is going to be buried next to a president of the United States." It is an idea that the Clintons began talking about decades ago.