Roundup: Media's Take

Ronald Brownstein: Bush Can Look To Past Second Terms For Inspiration

With the nomination of federal Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. to the Supreme Court and the decision by Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald not to indict Karl Rove -- at least for now -- many of President Bush's supporters believe that last week marked the beginning of his political recovery. It is possible that Bush has hit bottom in public support. Four national polls released last week put his approval rating below 40%. In an ABC/Washington Post poll, nearly half of all adults sai

Marc Coleman: "Celtic Tiger" Era Not Monolithic

When economic historians come to tell the story of the Celtic Tiger, they will not treat it as a single, cohesive era. Not one, but two such animals roamed our land in those times, they will say. As historians do, they will argue over precise dates. But most of them will agree that it was preceded by a gestation period of roughly six years (1987-1992) and was born in 1993. Excluding 2005, for which full-year statistics are not yet available, the subsequent 12-year perio

Howard LaFranchi: Bush and Che Guevara Compared

In the birthplace of Ernesto "Che" Guevara - one of the 20th century's great icons of liberation - and in a nation where most adults remember life under a brutal military dictatorship, you might think there would be greater appreciation for a world leader who champions freedom through prosperity and democracy. But no. President George Bush finds little respect in Argentina. In some ways, the Guevara comparison is unfair. History hasn't judged Bush yet, and analysts here no

Kenneth Duberstein: What Bush Needs to do to Save His Presidency

IN the depths of the Iran-contra fallout in early 1987, President Ronald Reagan was at 37 percent approval in some polls, lower than President Bush is today. Many viewed him as not just a lame duck but a dead duck. Pundits and politicians predicted that the country would drift aimlessly for the last two years of his term. The Soviet Union would become more adventurous abroad. And a Democrat would next win the presidency. Obviously, none of those things happened. And if George W. Bus

A Historian of the Black Plague Explains What We Have to Fear from the Avian Flu

On Tuesday, President Bush announced his avian-flu strategy at the National Institutes of Health, raising the flu — which has yet to hit our shores — to a clear presidential priority. Should it be that? How does it rank in history? How might it? Impossible questions to answer yet, but National Review Online editor Kathryn Lopez picked the brain of historian and science writer John Kelly on Tuesday on the subject anyway. Kelly is author of The Great Mortality: An Intimate History

Holman Jenkins, Jr.: Sitting in the Dark this Winter You Might Think About the Santa Barbara Spill of 1969

... By now millions of Americans have made themselves dependent on natural gas to heat their homes when gas was selling for $2. Two years ago, Fed Chairman Greenspan sounded the alarm and urged Congress to make way for new ports to bring liquefied natural gas from Qatar or Algeria. Nothing happened. In the futures markets last month, natural gas hit $14. No wonder Mr. Frist is eager to be seen naming a villain -- Big Oil -- and proposing windfall profits taxes and gouging investigations that wou

James Ottavio Castagnera: I Was Fooled by Nixon, but Won't Be Again

[Jim Castagnera is a Philadelphia lawyer and journalist, who writes a weekly newspaper column called “Attorney at Large.”] On Friday, October 28th, I felt I was having a flashback. In Washington for a few days for a conference, I walked past the Watergate Hotel, down I Street and Pennsylvania Avenue to the old Willard Hotel (where the term “lobbying” allegedly was invented). In the Rose Garden of the White House at 1:30 PM the cameras were being set up for the press conferen

Max Boot: Plamegate's real liar

'SCOOTER" LIBBY'S indictment was not exactly good news for the White House, but it could have been a lot worse. Feverish speculation had been building that Karl Rove would soon be "frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs," as Valerie Plame's bombastic hubby, Joe Wilson, had hoped. Or even that Dick Cheney would have to resign. But with his investigation all but over, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has found no criminal conspiracy and no violations of the Inte

Warren Richey: Alito's Case Record Reveals Ambiguous Anti-Abortion Stance

If there was any doubt about where US Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito stands on abortion, his 90-year-old mother quickly and decisively put that question to rest. "Of course he's against abortion," Rose Alito told the Associated Press in a telephone interview from her Hamilton, N.J., home. Her candid statement may go down in history as the most blunt and honest admission of a Supreme Court nominee's view on the hot-button issue. But the true te

Stephen Holmes: The War of the Liberals

More instructive than the speechlessness of the Democratic Party, unable to react coherently to the bloody impasse in Iraq, is the debate among progressive writers about the justice of the invasion. To penetrate the thinking of the prowar liberals, whose zeal for toppling a malignant dictatorship split the left and therefore eased the slog to disaster, we need to cast our eyes back to the 1990s. Written by thoughtful observers of the current crisis, two new highly personal books help us understa

David Olive: Ottawa, Canada's Quarter-Century Old Oil Revenue Sharing Plan Solid

Ottawa's oil revenue sharing plan of a quarter-century ago was reviled by Alberta, but it was well intentioned, writes business columnist David Olive In speeches across North America in recent years to attract investment dollars to his province, Alberta Premier Ralph Klein sometimes includes a potted history of the Canadian oil patch. In Klein's telling, Alberta fought Ottawa tooth and nail in the 1930s for control of its resource wealth, then went cap in hand to foreig

Bill Adair: Second Terms Almost Never Successful

Historian Don Ritchie racked his brain trying to remember the last president with a successful second term. "Hmmmmmmmn," he said. "It wasn't Johnson . . . Ike had the U-2 . . . Truman had the Korean War . . . ." Ritchie, the associate historian for the U.S. Senate, kept thinking. Not Franklin Roosevelt, who struggled because of his plan to pack the Supreme Court. And Abraham Lincoln and William McKinley were assassinated in their second terms.

Tim Cuprisin: Is Murrow-style, "Advocacy Journalism" Set To Make A Comeback?

The release of George Clooney's "Good Night, and Good Luck," a big-screen docudrama on pioneering broadcast newsman Edward R. Murrow, raises a natural question a half-century after he tangled with Wisconsin's own Sen. Joseph McCarthy: Who are Murrow's heirs in television news today? One of the veterans of Murrow's CBS News team, 89-year-old Daniel Schorr, now a senior news analyst with National Public Radio, has a quick answer. "There has bee

Michael E. Kanell: Federal Reserve Always A Lightning Rod For Credit, Blame

The nation's central bank has faced a series of crises in its 92 years as the chief economic overseer. From some, the Federal Reserve has emerged with kudos for averting disaster. Other times, it has been tarred for taking a situation from bad to worse. That is mainly because --- except for the White House --- there is no other door at which to lay the blame, said economist David Feldman of the College of William & Mary in Virginia. "The United States has only one agency th

Michael Parenti: Right-Wing Judicial Activism

[Michael Parenti's recent books include Superpatriotism (City Lights), The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press), and The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories Press), all available in paperback; also visit: www.michaelparenti.org. ] Appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee as nominee for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts assured the senators that he would not be one of those noisome activist judges who inject their personal values into court decisions.

Christopher Hitchens: Republican-drafted statutes come in handy for the embarrassment of Team Bush

The Republicans who drafted and proposed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act in the early days of the Reagan administration, in a vain attempt to end the career of CIA defector Philip Agee, could not have known that their hasty legislation would one day paralyze the workings of a conservative wartime administration. Nor could the eager internationalist Wilsonians who rammed through the 1917 Espionage Act -- the most repressive legislation since the Alien and Sedition laws -- have expected

Norman Solomon: After the Libby Indictment, the Press Is Acquitting Itself

A lot of media outlets are now scrutinizing some of the lies told by the Bush administration before the invasion of Iraq. Yet the same news organizations are bypassing their own key roles in the marketing of those lies. A case in point is the New York Times. On Oct. 29, hours after the indictment of Lewis Libby, the lead editorial of the Times ended by declaring that “the big point Americans need to keep in mind is this: There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.” On O

David Brooks: The Prosecutor's Diagnosis: No Cancer Found

On March 21, 1973, John Dean told President Nixon that there was a cancer on his presidency. There was, Dean said, a metastasizing criminal conspiracy spreading through the White House. Thirty-two years later, Patrick Fitzgerald has just completed a 22-month investigation of the Bush presidency. One thing is clear: there is no cancer on this presidency. Fitzgerald, who seems to be a model prosecutor, enjoyed what he called full cooperation from all federal agencies. He found enough

Adam Cohen: Sandra Day O'Connor's Careful Steps Through the Judicial Landscape

When Sandra Day O'Connor was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1981, she had more of a problem with the religious right than Harriet Miers. Anti-abortion forces didn't just suspect she was soft on abortion - they had proof: her vote years earlier as an Arizona legislator to legalize it. Justice O'Connor even had an antagonist from back home in Phoenix, a member of the National Right to Life Committee who knew her socially and was dead set on keeping her off the court. During the con

Elizabeth de la Vega: The White House Criminal Conspiracy

[Elizabeth de la Vega is a former federal prosecutor with more than twenty years' experience. During her tenure she was a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force and chief of the San José branch of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California.] Legally, there are no significant differences between the investor fraud perpetrated by Enron CEO Ken Lay and the prewar intelligence fraud perpetrated by George W. Bush. Both involved persons in authority who used ha