Roundup: Media's Take

US Navy Captain Ouimette: When WWIII Started ... 1979

AMERICA NEEDS TO WAKE UP! That's what we think we heard on the 11th of September 2001 (When more than 3,000 Americans were killed -AD) and maybe it was, but I think it should have been "Get Out of Bed!" In fact, I think the alarm clock has been buzzing since 1979 and we have continued to hit the snooze button and roll over for a few more minutes of peaceful sleep since then. It was a cool fall day in November 1979 in a country going through a religious and pol

Michael Schwartz: Does the Media Have It Right on the War?

[Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology and Faculty Director of the Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University, has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on American business and government dynamics. His work on Iraq has appeared on numerous internet sites, including Tomdispatch, Asia Times ,Mother Jones, and ZNet; and in print in Contexts, Against the Current, and Z Magazine. His books include Radical Protest and Social Structure, and Social Policy

Katharine Weber: The Factories of Lost Children

[Katharine Weber is the author of the forthcoming novel "Triangle."] NINETY-FIVE years ago, March 25 also fell on a Saturday. At 4:40 p.m. on that sunny afternoon in 1911, only minutes before the end of the workday, a fire broke out on the eighth floor of the Asch Building, a block east of Washington Square in Manhattan. The Triangle Waist Company occupied the top three floors of the 10-story building. There, some 600 workers were employed in the manufacture

George F. Will: The Democrats (again) redesign their primary season

... the Democratic Party has again been tweaking the process by which it chooses its presidential nominees. This time it is considering slipping perhaps two events—caucuses, not primaries; it is graven on the heart of humanity by the finger of God that New Hampshire must be the first primary—in the days between Iowa's caucuses and New Hampshire. Here. We. Go. Again. Presumably the purpose of these recurring tweakings is to produce better, meaning more marketable, nominees. After the

Douglas Besharov: Low-income families are better off now than they were in the '60s

[Mr. Besharov is the Jacobs scholar in social welfare studies at the American Enterprise Institute.] ... While many have proposed revising the official poverty measure, getting agreement is about as likely as Bush carrying Manhattan. The poverty line or its multiple is the basis of eligibility for dozens of government antipoverty programs, involving the distributions of hundreds of billions of dollars. Change it -- up or down -- and hundreds of thousands of people gain or lose benef

Tim Heffernan: The measure of war

... Sixteen million Americans served in the Armed Forces during World War II. That represented 13 percent of the entire population, or roughly one in four American men. Of the 16 million who served, 13.1 million were sent to what were at least nominally combat zones. Nearly 300,000 of them were killed in battle, and another half million were injured. If you were alive in the United States at that time, you knew someone who was fighting, and you quite likely knew someone who didn't come home, or

Mary Turck: Triangle Shirtwaist Fire – Then and Now

[Mary Turck is the editor of the Connection to the Americas, a publication of the Resource Center of the Americas, and of www.americas.org. Email to: mturck@americas.org] One hundred forty-six workers died in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire March 25, 1911 in New York City. Mostly women, mostly young, they were locked inside the factory, trapped as it burned. Many leaped to their deaths from ninth flo

Don Hazen: Bring the Sixties Out of the Closet

[Mr. Hazen is the founder of AlterNet.] Late into Dana Spiotta's brilliant new novel, "Eat the Document," the protagonist, a woman who has lived "underground" for years, hiding from the consequences of a 1960s political protest gone badly awry, flashes back to the moment of choice: "The question is, do we want to leave action to the brutes of the world? … There are some inherent problems built into acting. It lacks perfection. But I believe we m

Max Boot: Pulling out of Iraq now would spark a civil war that the U.S. would have to quash later

THE IRAQ WAR is now 3 years old, and only a paid administration apologist could claim that it has gone swimmingly well. The truth is that the war has cost more and lasted longer than its advocates had envisioned, and there is still no end in sight. It is sobering to reflect how long even an unsuccessful insurgency can run. Israel has been battling Palestinian guerrillas since the 1940s. Colombia has been battling Marxist guerrillas since the 1960s. Britain battled Irish guerrillas n

Robert Dreyfuss: Iran ... Power-Broker

[Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005). Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone.He can be reached through his website:

John Fund: Why is Yale allowing the former spokesman for the Taliban to take classes like any ordinary student?

Three weeks after the New York Times revealed that former Taliban official Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi is attending classes at Yale, many at the university still have little to say about the controversy. Meredith Startz, president of the Yale Political Union, told me "there's more discussion of military recruiting among people at Yale than about the Taliban student."... The case of Vladimir Sokolov presents an interesting contrast with how Yale is reacting to its Talib stude

Patrick Buchanan: Cultural Warmongers

If you wish to get along with a man, you do not insult his faith. And if you seek to persuade devout Muslims that al-Qaeda is our enemy, not Islam, you do not condone with silence insults to the faith of a billion people. Understanding this, President Bush ceased to call the war on terror a "crusade." Visiting a mosque, he removed his shoes. He has hosted White House gatherings for the breaking of the fast at the end of Ramadan. He sent Karen Hughes to the State Department

Barbara McKenna: Beware the new thought police

... Recently, the Horowitz campaign to restrict faculty speech took an even more negative turn with the publication of The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (Regnery Publishing Inc., 2006). The promotional blurb reads: “Coming to a Campus Near You: Terrorists, racists, and communists—you know them as The Professors. “Horowitz exposes 101 academics—representative of thousands of radicals who teach our young people—who also happen to be alleged ex

Nancy Salvato: It’s Time to Revisit the Electoral College (Redux)

[Nancy Salvato is the President of The Basics Project, (www.Basicsproject.org) a non-profit, non-partisan research and educational project whose mission is to promote the education of the American public on the basic elements of relevant political, legal and social issues important to our country. She is also a Staff Writer, for the New Media Alliance, Inc., a non-profit (501c3) coalition of writers and grass-roots media outlets, where she contributes

Joshua Holland: Womenomics 101

Women play a greater role in the American economy today than at any time since Rosie the riveter gave up making bombers for the baby boom after World War II, but American corporations -- enabled by a political class dominated by men -- continue to punish them for the high crime of being female. The irony is that if public and corporate policies were to take the needs of working American women seriously, it wouldn't just give a boost to working families, it would also strengthen the

Norman Solomon: War-Loving Pundits

The third anniversary of the Iraq invasion is bound to attract a lot of media coverage, but scant recognition will go to the pundits who helped to make it all possible. Continuing with long service to the Bush administration’s agenda-setting for war, prominent media commentators were very busy in the weeks before the invasion. At the Washington Post, the op-ed page’s fervor hit a new peak on Feb. 6, 2003, the day after Colin Powell’s mendacious speech to the U.N. Security Coun

Sidney Blumenthal: Iraq ... The big lie

On the eve of the third anniversary -- March 20, 2003 -- of the invasion of Iraq President Bush began the fourth of his series of speeches in his second term attempting to articulate his strategy for the war. None of his previous explanations had succeeded in bolstering public confidence, so he tried again. His speech on Monday was a reiteration of the theme he had elaborated in his last round. Bush is rigidly adhering to the guidelines suggested by public opinion specialist Peter Feaver, a prof

Max Boot: Best supporting neocon

DEAR George Clooney, Congratulations on that best supporting actor Oscar you picked up last week. I couldn't be happier for you. Not only because I admire your Cary Grant-esque panache but because I admire your politics. As an advocate of a hawkish but high-minded foreign policy, I can't find much to cheer about in Hollywood, but you, my friend, consistently deliver. Dare I say it — you're the No. 1 neocon in Never Never Land. Oh, I know you try to hide your real views

Bruce Bartlett: Give Bush power to impound funds

[Mr. Bartlett is the author of "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy," just published by Doubleday.] Last Monday, President Bush sent legislation to Congress that would give him a kind of line item veto. Congress granted such authority to the president in 1996, but in 1998 it was struck down by the Supreme Court in Clinton v. City of New York. It ruled that the law granted the president unconstitutional authority to amend bills pas

David Swanson: Did Bush Make Mistakes?

When we watch a video of Bush being informed of the danger of Hurricane Katrina and recall that he claimed that there was no way he could have known of that danger, our faith in his good intentions may be shaken. And when we learn that Bush has long since authorized wiretapping without court approval, what are we to make of his public statements (such as last June 9, or July 14, 2004, or April 20, 2004) when he reassured us that all wiretapping requires court approval?Our President