Roundup: Media's Take

Sidney Blumenthal: Fall of the Rovean Empire?

For 30 years, beginning with the Nixon presidency, advanced under Reagan, stalled with the elder Bush, a new political economy struggled to be born. The idea was pure and simple: centralization of power in the hands of the Republican Party would ensure that it never lost it again. Under George W. Bush, this new system reached its apotheosis. It is a radically novel social, political and economic formation that deserves study alongside capitalism and socialism. Neither Adam Smith nor Vladimir Len

New Zealand Candidate Denies Racism

[unsigned] National leader Don Brash admits that before the election he may have failed to be clear enough about his respect for Maori and his multicultural views. Dr Brash contacted the Herald yesterday to praise a speech on race relations given by his predecessor Bill English at Auckland University on Monday, reported by the Herald. But he took umbrage at any suggestion Mr English was more moderate on the subject than himself, saying he had endorsed the s

Marvin Olasky/Peter Olasky: Miers Roots Are Not Ivy League

[MARVIN OLASKY is a University of Texas professor and editor in chief of World, a weekly news magazine. PETER OLASKY is a Manhattan lawyer.] Q: WHAT DOES Harriet Miers, a highly successful lawyer, longtime member of Valley View Christian Church in Dallas and confidant of the president of the United States, want more than anything else? A: The approval of the faculty of Yale Law School. Or at least that is the fear among conservatives. They worry that althou

WSJ Editorial: Faith-Based Nomination

If his track record on judges is a guide, Mr. Bush deserves some deference. His appellate nominees have been uniformly solid, and often distinguished. One of those nominees was John Roberts, who at 50 years old is now the Chief Justice. For five years Ms. Miers has been part of the President's judicial-selection committee that promoted those nominees, and for the last year was its chairman. The fact that Mr. Bush has known Ms. Miers so well and for so long also makes it unlikely tha

Randy E. Barnett: Alexander Hamilton wouldn't approve of Justice Harriet Miers

[Mr. Barnett is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Law at Boston University and the author of "Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty" (Princeton, 2004).] During the Clinton impeachment imbroglio, Alexander Hamilton's definition of "impeachable offense" from Federalist No. 65 was plastered from one end of the media to the other. With the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, get ready for another passage from Hamilton to get simi

Russell Shorto: All Political Ideas Are Local

In January 1861, as Southern states were in the process of seceding from the union, Fernando Wood, the mayor of New York, made a modest proposal to his city council. New Yorkers - whose city profited from the shipping of Southern cotton - weren't crazy about the idea of a civil war. Wood's idea was that if the South severed its ties to the United States, New York should, too. Under his plan, the city would refashion itself into "a free city" called Tri-Insula - comprising Manhattan, S

Steven Plaut: The Leftwingers Who Have Emerged from the CIA

The Left has long painted the CIA as a far-Right neofascist bogeyman, dominated by reactionary Dr. Strangeloves, and paranoid “neoncons.” The reality, of course, has long been very different. In fact, the CIA has long been dominated by liberal ideology and the left-leaning, blame-America mindset. Those who are skeptical of this last assertion should read one of the most important books ever written about intelligence services: Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century by Angelo Cod

Larry Margasak: DeLay's Indictment Seen As Historic

Tom DeLay, a powerful ally of US President George W. Bush, stepped down as Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives yesterday after being indicted on a campaign finance fraud charge that could put him behind bars. Delay, who comes from Mr Bush's home state of Texas, is known as "The Hammer" for how he kept party discipline and pushed the President's conservative agenda through Congress. A Texas grand jury indicted Delay, 58, on a state charge

Patrick Barkham: Great Minds Disagree Over List Of 100 Top Intellectuals

Noam Chomsky is up against Paul Wolfowitz, Germaine Greer against Pope Benedict XVI and Yusuf al-Qaradawi against Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Heated and catty conflict on campuses around the globe is inevitable after Prospect magazine drew up a list of 100 eminent thinkers and asked people to vote for the top public intellectual in the world. Ordinary intellects can now choose their top five from the academics, novelists, clerics, politicians and most contentiously of all, journalists, chosen

Simon Kuper: Toryism Seeks Connection To Past Supporters

Ten years ago I had a boss who wanted to be a Lib-Dem MP. He spent his weekends campaigning in a Tory-held seat, and he showed up on Mondays tired and depressed. "This is a Tory nation," he explained. The voters he encountered on the doorstep disliked taxes, immigrants, gays, Brussels and welfare cheats. What they liked was hanging criminals. In other words, their instincts were the instincts of the Conservatives, which explained why the party was having an 18-year run in power.

Dan Savage: Could Gay Marriage Lead to Demands for Polygamist Rights?

QUESTION: I fully support gay rights and wrote a letter to the prime minister—I'm up in Canada—supporting gay marriage. But whenever I get into debates about the issue with right-wing acquaintances, they bring up "the thin edge of the wedge" and insist that gay marriage will lead to polygamy. This leaves me stymied. I have no argument with adults who choose to enter into open relationships. My problem is with fundamentalist cults that indoctrinate their followers from birth and

David Brooks: Tom DeLay's History of Partisanship

In 1989, a young Republican congressman named Tom DeLay dreamed of climbing to a position of power in the House of Representatives. He hitched his wagon to Ed Madigan, who was running to be party whip. But another ambitious young Republican, Newt Gingrich, stood in the way. DeLay ran Madigan's campaign and Gingrich ran his own, and the contest was so brutal that after Gingrich won, DeLay and Gingrich reportedly didn't speak for two years. DeLay didn't give up. He raised tons of mone

Nat Hentoff: John Roberts v. Thurgood Marshall

On the first day of the Senate Judiciary Committee's questioning of John Roberts—who is a strong supporter of the sanctity of adhering to the precedents of Supreme Court decisions (stare decisis)—Democrat Joseph Biden of Delaware bluntly emphasized, however, that the Constitution is a living document. For a striking example, Biden pointed out to Roberts that 58 years after the Supreme Court made "separate but equal" racial segregation the law of the land (Plessy v. Ferguso

Charles Murray: The Hallmark of the Underclass

Watching the courage of ordinary low-income people as they deal with the aftermath of Katrina and Rita, it is hard to decide which politicians are more contemptible -- Democrats who are rediscovering poverty and blaming it on George W. Bush, or Republicans who are rediscovering poverty and claiming that the government can fix it. Both sides are unwilling to face reality: We haven't rediscovered poverty, we have rediscovered the underclass; the underclass has been growing during all the years tha

Vincent Boland: Ankara Stands On The Threshold

Last Saturday morning, a few hundred protesters gathered outside Istanbul Bilgi University and threw eggs and insults at a group of historians and human rights workers as they rushed between riot police into the sanctuary of the university's main building. Amid the shouts of "treason" and "lies", it seemed that, despite many indicators to the contrary, the battle between progressives and reactionaries that has been such a notable characteristic of modern Turkey has not yet be

Joe Nawrozki: Image From Pakistan Causes Fiery Reaction

From a Las Vegas hotel, two former Dundalk residents smile for the camera. In another shot, three vacationers are shown at the Salem Witch Museum in New England. They are posing with copies of The Dundalk Eagle, and the pictures are part of the paper's popular "Take the Eagle on Vacation" feature. Then there was Khurshid Khan's trip. The Dundalk resident returned to his homeland of Pakistan and, surrounded by family members, stood with the histori

Cathy Lynn Grossman: Bioethics Today and Its History

Any given Sunday morning, a bioethicist somewhere in America suits up for a TV appearance on the hot issue of the day or stands by a hospital bed to consult on a wrenching dilemma. Should doctors prolong the life of a baby born without a brain? Should they be allowed to help the terminally ill kill themselves by prescribing a lethal drug dose? Should there be limits on embryonic stem cell research? But who are these people opining on what we should do? &quo

Charles Mandel: Britain's Prospect Magazine Names Top Intellectuals

A newly published list of the Top 100 public intellectuals and an associated online contest is prompting curiosity and consternation among Canadian thinkers and scholars. Some scorn the egghead "beauty contest," while others dismiss what they view as an American Idol-style competition for the worldwide brains trust. The only Canadians on the list are Michael Ignatieff, the human rights theorist whose name has been bandied about as a possible future prime minis

Max Boot: Cracking down on terror's cronies

ONE OF THE KEYS to defeating any guerrilla movement is to cut off its outside support. That is what the United States managed to accomplish in the Philippines from 1899 to 1902 but spectacularly failed to do in South Vietnam, where communist fighters benefited right up until the end from the Ho Chi Minh Trail leading to havens in North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Today, even as the U.S. is making considerable progress in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are failing to isolate the battlefiel

Brendan Miniter: Democrats try to reinvent themselves as the party of fiscal discipline

If Democrats retake the House next year, we can mark the start of the party's resurgence to a speech Nancy Pelosi delivered on Capitol Hill last week. It was there, at a press conference called to attack Republicans over their response to Hurricane Katrina, that the House minority leader actually used the words "waste, fraud and abuse" in talking about government spending. What Ms. Pelosi and a few other Democrats seem to be figuring out in the wake of Katrina is that Amer