Roundup: Media's Take

Rhodes Cook: Changing the way we elect presidents would have altered the outcome many times

[Mr. Cook is a senior columnist for Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball. ] It would not be surprising if the most important single primary in 2008 takes place in California. But don't look for it to be the presidential primary on Super-Duper Tuesday Feb. 5. Look instead to the state primary on June 3, up to now a low-profile event that could become fraught with significance if some California Republicans succeed in getting a highly controversial proposition on the ballot. If su

Raúl Zibechi: Fujmori's Trial ... An Opportunity for Peru

[Raúl Zibechi is a member of the Editorial Council of the weekly Brecha in Montevideo, Uruguay, a teacher and researcher focused on social movements at the Multiversidad Franciscana de América Latina, and adviser to social groups. He is a monthly collaborator of the Americas Policy Program (www.americaspolicy.org). Translated by Tony Phillips.] ... The nervous 69-year-old Fujimori, suffering from hypertension, arrived in Lima on Sept. 22,

Mark Danner: Bush's Faith Run Over by History

[Mark Danner, who has written about foreign affairs and politics for two decades, is the author of The Secret Way to War, Torture and Truth, and The Massacre at El Mozote, among other books. He is Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs, Politics, and the Humanities at Bard College. His writing on Iraq and other subjec

Dick Morris: Al Gore could beat Hillary and win the White House

[Dick Morris is a former adviser to President Clinton. To get all his columns e-mailed to you, register for free at DickMorris.com.] If the bumper sticker of ’92 and ’96 (Clinton-Gore) divides, and we find Gore running against Hillary Clinton, Al Gore could not only beat the former First Lady for the Democratic nomination, he could win the presidency. Gore can seize this opportunity as the campaigns of Obama and Edwards are fading, out-fundraised, out-managed and outman

Don Feder: America is a Christian nation

[Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who is now a political/communications consultant. He also maintains his own website, DonFeder.com.] John McCain stumbled upon something significant in the course of a recent interview: that America was built on a foundation of Christian morality.... Take a stroll through U.S. history and try not tripping over evidence of America’s Christian heritage:In a 1776 message to his troops, George Washington expressed the h

Steven Malanga: The Rise of the Religious Left

[Mr. Malanga is senior editor at the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, from whose autumn issue this is adapted.] Everyone knows the potent force of the Christian right in American politics. But since the mid-1990s, an increasingly influential religious movement has arisen on the left, mostly escaping the national press's notice. This new religious left does not expend its political energies on the cultural concerns that primarily motivate conservative evangelicals. In

Robert McHenry: Norway Decides the U.S. Presidency?

It’s the trifecta for Albert Gore, Jr. – Emmy, Oscar, and Alfred. No matter how you feel about his position on global warming, this much must be confessed: The man knows how to create a wave, and he knows how to surf. Gaia’s future seems secure now. In part this is because that future was never as bleak as Gore painted it in his Hollywood-wowing movie “An Inconvenient Truth” (yes, that would be the same Hollywood that thought “Ishtar” was a good idea).This same week in Britain, wher

Roger Pulvers: Why elections in Japan are so different from the US variety

[Roger Pulvers is an Australian author, playwright and theater director, and a professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology. His latest book is a collection of 12 secular bible stories, "The Honey and the Fires," from ABC Books (Australia).] Every four years Americans want to believe they can reinvent themselves. Elections for the presidency offer them the opportunity, as they faithfully see it, to renounce the past and "get this country moving again."

Jim Castagnera: Bush, Gore and Oil

[Jim Castagnera is the associate provost/associate counsel at Rider University and a 2007-08 Fellow of the Foundation for Defense of Democracy.] Last Friday I envied Al Gore. He woke up the co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, awarded for his work on global warming. People may still chuckle that in 2000 he came close to claiming he invented the Internet. No one can laugh at him now. The Peace Prize comes to the former Vice President and Democratic presidential candid

Alexander Cockburn: Al Gore's Peace Prize ... It's As Ridiculous As If They'd Given Goebbels One in 1938

Put this one up on the shelf of shame, right next to Henry Kissinger's, or the peace prize they gave to Kofi Annan and the entire UN in 2001, sandwiched between the UN's okay for the bombing of Serbia, the killing of untold numbers of Iraqis, many of them babies and children in the years of sanctions, and its greenlight for the bombing of Baghdad in 2003. In 1998 the Nobel crowd gave the prize to Medecins Sans Frontieres, whose co-founder Bernard Kouchner is now France's foreign secretary urging

Weekly Standard Scrapbook: Dodd's Father ... The Real Story

THE SCRAPBOOK enjoys a good cry as much as anyone, and we suspect there wasn't a dry eye in the New York Times newsroom last week when they published "Dodd's Other Campaign: Restoring Dad's Reputation" by Elisabeth Bumiller. There was a front-page snapshot of toddler Christopher Dodd (now senator from Connecticut and Democratic candidate for president) sitting in the lap of his father, who is reading him a story in front of a fireplace. His father, of course, was the

Andrew Ferguson: Alan Shrugged ... And Washington fell to its knees

[Andrew Ferguson, a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is the author, most recently, of Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America.] I? was in the midst of reading up on Alan Greenspan, whose new memoir, The Age of Turbulence, has just been published to wide publicity and boffo sales, when I saw in a local gossip column that he and his wife had been spotted (somehow!) spending yet another Sunday afternoon in the owner's box at FedEx Field, watching the Washington Redskins.

Roger Pulvers: Japan's Democracy--Different from the US, but Still a Democracy

[Roger Pulvers is an Australian author, playwright and theater director, and a professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology. His latest book is a collection of 12 secular bible stories, "The Honey and the Fires," from ABC Books (Australia).] US President Lyndon B. Johnson used to say of people, "Once you've got 'em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow." Such a blunt, corporeal philosophy may have worked for LBJ, but how do politicians captu

Alvaro Vargas Llosa: Can Peru Keep Itself From Taking Revenge on Its Ex-President? (Fujimori on Trial)

[Alvaro Vargas Llosa is the director of the Center on Global Prosperity at the Independent Institute and the author of Liberty for Latin America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).] The recent extradition of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori to face charges of human rights violations and corruption is a welcome development. It is also a monumental challenge to the institutions of a country that has not been able to establish the rule of law as successfully as it has been able to g

Scott Horton: "We Do Not Torture"

This last week, the nation’s leading newspaper established that the Bush Administration continues to use torture techniques as a matter of formal policy, crafted at its highest levels. This comes more than three years following the exposure of the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and more than two years after the Administration’s lies about the use of torture, unconvincing to start with, were finally exploded by the issuance of a series of internal reports. We face now a leadership stained with

Garrett Epps: Let's abolish the Electoral College

[A former reporter for the Washington Post, Garrett Epps teaches Constitutional Law at the University of Oregon. His most recent book is Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Civil Rights in Post-Civil War America.] he California Electoral College Initiative has been exposed for what it is: a Republican plan to steal the 2008 presidential election. The idea was to divvy up the electoral votes of the nation's biggest state by congressional district rather than

Robert J. Samuelson: Lessons From the 1987 Crash

The stock-market crash of 1987 was horrifying even to Americans who weren't shareholders. On Oct. 19, the Dow Jones industrial average dropped 508 points, which was 22.6 percent and nearly twice the largest one-day decline during the 1929 crash. A comparable free fall today would be almost 3,200 points. Twenty years later, the crash of 1987 has changed the way we think. It's stripped us of the illusion that financial panics are a thing of the past: they remain a clear and present danger for the

Max Boot: Mercenaries are ok

[Mr. Boot is the author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power.] Since I have been defending, in recent days, the general idea of using mercenaries—even while calling for greater oversight of what they are actually doing in Iraq—I have often heard from skeptics that it is somehow “un-American” to rely on hired hands to do your fighting. Often cited is the fact that Americans have long hated the Hessians (actually, they came from all over Germany, not ju

Jim Castagnera: Local Body Snatchers Are Part of a Long Tradition

[Jim Castagnera of Havertown is the Associate Provost/Associate Counsel at Rider University and co-author of a new novel available at www.lulu.com. ] “I collected bones from charnel-houses…. The dissecting room and the slaughterhouse furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation…. It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toil…. How can I describe my emotions

John Yoo: Clarence Thomas's fidelity to the Constitution often leads to results liberals like

[Mr. Yoo is a professor at the Law School of the University of California at Berkeley, and a former Supreme Court clerk for Justice Thomas.] Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas again finds himself in the crosshairs of liberals. After 16 years of diligently avoiding the press, he has written a memoir, "My Grandfather's Son," that describes his life story--from birth into poverty and an upbringing by a grandfather descended from slaves to the tough confirmation battle that