Roundup: Media's Take

Michael Barone: K Street Woes & History

There are probably a few Washington old-timers left who remember when K Street, N.W., was lined with mansions -- but there can't be many. K Street is now lined with stolid, 130-foot-high office buildings -- Washington has a height limit -- filled with trade associations, law firms and lobbyists. I'm not sure who first used K Street as a shorthand term for Washington's lobbying community, but it might have been me, back in 1971, when I was promoting my first Almanac of American Politics and told

Nick Turse: What Year Is This Anyway? Rollback to 1214 AD

[Nick Turse is the Associate Editor and Research Director of TomDispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Nation, the Village Voice, and regularly for Tomdispatch.] What might happen to an "often cruel and treacherous" national leader who"ignored and contravened the traditional" norms at home and waged "expensive wars abroad [that

Adam Cohen: Question for Judge Alito: What About One Person One Vote?

When Samuel Alito Jr. applied for a top job in the Reagan Justice Department, he explained what had attracted him to constitutional law as a college student. He was motivated, he said, "in large part by disagreement with Warren Court decisions, particularly in the areas of criminal procedure, the Establishment Clause, and reapportionment." The reapportionment cases that so upset young Mr. Alito were a series of landmark decisions that established a principle that is now a cornerstone o

Paul Rogat Loeb: Why Democrats should vote no on Alito

[Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association, and winner of the Nautilus Award for best social change book of the year. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time.] Remember the "nuclear option" compromise? When the group of 14 Senators reached their agreement last Ma

Jim Hoagland: 2006: A Pivotal Year

Decisive leaders make history before history turns around to unmake them. New Year's 2006 finds once again that we live in a time of transition. The politicians who dominated the scene two years ago are gone or greatly diminished. With one or two exceptions, those left standing face a year of living precariously as they cope with change that they helped unleash but could not control. Their further diminution or likely removal gives 2006 the potential to be a global hinge year -- a m

Ronald Brownstein: Bush Resembles Polk

The president whom George W. Bush may resemble most is not his biological father, George H.W. Bush, or even Ronald Reagan, who often seems his ideological father, but James K. Polk, a dynamic and willful leader few discuss anymore. Polk, when elected president as a Democrat in 1844, had more political experience than Bush (Polk had spent 20 years in elective office, compared with Bush's six). But like Bush (who was 54 in 2000), Polk was young (49) and extremely self-confident when h

David Schwartz: UK's Stock Market Set For Down Year

The UK stock market rocketed ahead in 2005. Shares rose by 17pc, the third consecutive year of double digit gains. Optimists hope the painful downturn we endured from 2000-02 was temporary and the roaring bull market of the 1980s and 1990s has returned. However, several long-running trends suggest it is late in the day for the current rally. If the past is any guide, the current strong performance of share prices on both sides of the Atlantic could be about to run out of steam and s

Adam Shell: Wall Street Will Limp Through Year

After the stock market bubble burst, Wall Street pundits predicted the 2000s would usher in a "low-return" world. A "no-return world" would have been more accurate. It's the first day of trading in 2006 and, despite three up years in a row and a modest 3% gain last year, a buy-and-hold investor who invested $10,000 in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index on Dec. 31, 1999, would now have an investment worth $8,493, excluding dividends. That equat

David Jackson and Susan Page: Year 6 Not Kind To Presidents

For President Bush, 2005 was a year of growing public impatience with the Iraq war, angst over record gas prices, devastation from Hurricane Katrina, the collapse of his Social Security plan and, finally, a firestorm over his decision to authorize targeted domestic spying without court warrants. ... It was in the sixth year of their presidencies that Bill Clinton was impeached and Richard Nixon was forced to resign, that Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower faced the worst scandals

Gail Russell Chaddock: Capitol Hill To Be Drama-Filled In 2006

It's going to be a banner year for C-SPAN. That's because Congress is gearing up for the most dramatic slate of hearings since the Clinton impeachment fracas. The high-profile probes underscore efforts by Congress to reclaim power from a war-time White House. And they could reshape this fall's midterm elections. In the closing weeks of the old year, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle set in motion an aggressive oversight agenda, ranging from secret prisons and the tr

David Sanger: Bush's Swing for the Rafters

BEFORE he retreated behind the fences of his ranch here to ring out a bruising year, President Bush made it clear that even with three years to go, he already regards his presidency as a big one in the sweep of American history. He insists that his real motive in conducting the war in Iraq is to democratize one of the least democratic corners of the earth. He regularly quotes Harry Truman, who rebuilt Japan and Germany while remaking American national security policy from the ground

Jim Castagnera: Recollecting the Cleveland of Mayor Dennis Kucinich

With winter well underway, the rain and snow have helped keep Congressman Dennis Kucinich, the Democrat representing Ohio’s 10th Congressional District, on my mind. This baby-faced fifty-nine-year-old tossed his hat into the ring during the presidential primaries of 2004. He has kept himself in the news by continuing to push his campaign proposal for a cabinet-level Department of Peace. Bills to establish the new federal department, pending since September in both houses, thus far hav

Robert F. Turner: Congress can't usurp the president's power to spy on America's enemies

[Mr. Turner, co-founder of the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, served as counsel to the President's Intelligence Oversight Board, 1982-84.] In the continuing saga of the surveillance "scandal," with some congressional Democrats denouncing President Bush as a lawbreaker and even suggesting that impeachment hearings may be in order, it is important to step back and put things in historical context. First of all, the Founding Fath

Coleman Warner: After Hurricane Katrina, many are saying the federal government should adopt a Marshall Plan for the Gulf States

In the spring of 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall spoke of the halting recovery -- and a new threat of political chaos -- in European nations already torn apart by World War II and disabled by an especially harsh winter. Having just participated in a gathering of foreign ministers in Moscow, Marshall was alarmed that Soviet ruler Josef Stalin seemed pleased at Western Europe's economic troubles, sensing opportunity for the spread of communism. As University of New Orlean

Max Boot: Hollywood's bad guy problem

WHEN YOU THINK about it, World War II was far from black and white. Sure, the German and Japanese militarists were evil, but Britain and the United States did terrible things too. They killed hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese civilians, and they allied themselves with the Soviet Union, which was every bit as awful as the Axis. The outcome was ambiguous because, although Germany and Japan were defeated, the Iron Curtain descended from Eastern Europe to North Korea. Yet fo

Anatole Kaletsky: President the year's biggest loser

A YEAR can be a short time in politics. Surprisingly short, if you compare the stories dominating the media and party conversations in the past week with those of a year ago. Then, as now, gallows humour about the frightening incompetence of the Bush administration, especially in Iraq, was fashionable. Then, as now, everybody in Britain was deriding Prime Minister Tony Blair's lame-duck status and wondering when Chancellor Gordon Brown would replace him and whether the Tories could

James Bamford: NSA, the Agency That Could Be Big Brother

Deep in a remote, fog-layered hollow near Sugar Grove, W.Va., hidden by fortress-like mountains, sits the country's largest eavesdropping bug. Located in a "radio quiet" zone, the station's large parabolic dishes secretly and silently sweep in millions of private telephone calls and e-mail messages an hour. Run by the ultrasecret National Security Agency, the listening post intercepts all international communications entering the eastern United States. Another NSA lis

Brandt Goldstein: Clinton's Guantanamo

[Brandt Goldstein is the author of Storming the Court (Scribner 2005), the story of Yale law students and human rights lawyers who shut down the first Guantanamo detention camp.] ... We sometimes forget that during the Clinton presidency, the United States ran an extralegal detention camp on Guantanamo—and went to federal court to defend its right to do so. The camp during the Clinton years was by no means the nightmarish operation it is now; certainly, there weren't allegations of

Joe Keohane: 'It Can't Happen Here' ?

PICTURE THIS: A folksy, self-consciously plainspoken Southern politician rises to power during a period of profound unrest in America. The nation is facing one of the half-dozen or so of its worst existential crises to date, and the people, once sunny, confident, and striving, are now scared, angry, and disillusioned. This politician, a ''Professional Common Man,'' executes his rise by relentlessly attacking the liberal media, fancy-talking intellectuals, shiftless progressives, pink

Scott Sherman: The Bitter Strike at NYU

On November 28, three weeks after graduate teaching assistants at New York University walked out on strike, president John Sexton dispatched a long missive to the strikers. Buried in paragraph seventeen was an explosive piece of information: For those students who return to work by December 5, Sexton proclaimed,"there will be no consequences." And the fate of those who choose to stay on the picket line? Those"who do not resume their duties...will for the spring semester lose their stipend and