Roundup: Media's Take

Stephen Spruiell: The Army Corps of Bad Engineering

In the first year of his presidency, Jimmy Carter went to war with Congress over $239 million worth of funding for 19 public-works projects — most of them involving the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Carter rarely found himself on the right side of a policy issue, but as a trained engineer he could see through the Corps’ specious methods of analysis. The waste and fraud angered him. Once, as governor of Georgia, he had described a Corps study as follows: “It became obvious to me that none of the

David Remnick: How Presidents and citizens react to disaster

On September 10, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson had lunch in the Roosevelt Room—the “Fish Room,” as F.D.R. called it—with several aides and half a dozen ambassadors of modest-sized countries. Then he returned to the Oval Office for a routine round of meetings and telephone calls—a fairly ordinary, crowded day amid the growing crisis of the war in Vietnam. At 2:36 p.m., according to copies of Johnson’s daily diaries, the President took a call from Senator Russell Long, of Louisiana. The day befor

David Schoenbrod: The Lawsuit That Sank New Orleans

Mr. Schoenbrod is a professor at New York Law School, adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and author of "Saving Our Environment from Washington: How Congress Grabs Power, Shirks Responsibility, and Shortchanges the People" (Yale, 2005).] After Hurricane Betsy swamped New Orleans in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson stroked its citizens ("this nation grieves for its neighbors") and pledged federal protection. The Army Corps of Engineers designed a Lake Pontchartra

Nils Gilman: What Katrina Teaches about the Meaning of Racism

[Nils Gilman is a high tech executive and entrepreneur in the Silicon Valley. He is the author of Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Johns Hopkins, 2003) and coeditor of Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2003). He is currently working on an intellectual biography of Peter Drucker.] ... One of the most fundamental problems with the discussion of racism in the United States today is

Mike Blanchfield/Randy Boswell: Canada Softens Historical Claims To Hans Island

Just days after it began negotiations with Denmark over the ownership of Hans Island, the Canadian government appears to be backing away from a key argument in its claim for the remote island -- that it was discovered by Britain and therefore ceded to Canada in the 19th century. Throughout the controversy over which nation now has sovereignty over Hans Island, located in a narrow channel between Ellesmere Island and Danish-controlled Greenland, Canada has argued its claim is rooted

Robert Marquand: Taiwan Author Too Free With Speeches

A leading writer and political maverick from Taipei who ardently supports the unification of China and Taiwan - is confounding authorities in a rampaging lecture tour that ends Monday, by doing something no one here ever does: criticize the Communist Party in public. In truth, Li Ao, a TV personality, leftist, and prolific author who was born in northern China, attacked the US, Japan, and nearly everything but the moon in rambling speeches that have embarrassed official China.

Roger Pulvers: Like Soviet Leaders, Bush Is Learning that Ultimately Facts Count

[Roger Pulvers is an Australian author, playwright and theater director, and a professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology. A book of 12 rewritten Bible stories,"The Honey and the Fires," will be published in April 2006 by ABC Books. Click here for his website.] When I was studying Soviet politics at graduate school in the 1960s, my professors were adamant about one thing: Soviet leaders viewed the world through the prism of thei

Charles Krauthammer: China's Moment

In September 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt brokered the Treaty of Portsmouth (New Hampshire), which settled the Russo-Japanese War. Settling an extra-hemispheric dispute between foreign powers marked the emergence of the United States, an economic and demographic dynamo, as a world power and serious actor on the international stage. Exactly 100 years later, a statement of principles has been issued from Beijing on dismantling North Korea's nuclear program. If it holds -- the &qu

Brian Williams: L.B.J.'s Political Hurricane

[Brian Williams is the anchor and managing editor of "NBC Nightly News."] GIVEN President Bush's final decision not to head to Texas in advance of Hurricane Rita, it's worth noting that American presidents have long found both political riches and peril at the scene of a storm. A listen to the tapes of President Lyndon B. Johnson's White House telephone conversations of 40 years ago reveals that history does indeed repeat itself, even if presidential reactions and motivati

Felipe Fernández-Armesto: Cities Do Not Last

THE SURPRISING THING about New Orleans is not that the city should have been engulfed, but that it took so long for it to happen. Cities do not last. Those built in precarious places collapse. The rest are doomed to decay or suffer humanly induced destruction. It is only our historical myopia, which prevents most of us from seeing much of the past at once, that makes us think our cities are solid or enduring. We should know better. There are plenty of authors rushing to put us righ

John Ritter: Anti-War Protesters Take Cause To D.C.

Cindy Sheehan, the "Peace Mom" who led anti-war protests near President Bush's Texas ranch last month, was virtually unknown a year ago. The U.S. body count in Iraq hadn't hit 1,000 and a solid majority thought the war was just. The anti-war movement seemed dead. As activists converge this weekend on Washington, D.C., for what they hope will be the biggest anti-war demonstration since before the invasion of Iraq, a majority now tell pollsters the war was a mistake and that

Richard Cohen: Bush and LBJ

On Aug. 3, 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent a message to Congress in which he said that the United States could not continue to fight a war in Vietnam and at the same time continue his Great Society programs without, among other things, raising taxes. George Bush ought to read that message. It was titled "The Hard and Inescapable Facts." For Bush, facts are neither hard nor inescapable. He believes in "magical math" -- a firm understanding that somehow, in

Bruce Babbitt: What Florida Can Teach Us

Disasters such as the one that hit New Orleans are usually foreshadowed by similar events that can provide important lessons for the future. In 1928 one such precursor hurricane swept across Florida, taking dead aim at Lake Okeechobee. Storm waters smashed through the dikes, sweeping away the small agricultural communities south of the lake. More than 2,000 residents perished, most of them African American. Many bodies were never recovered. Others were retrieved, separated by race,

Sidney Blumenthal: Bush's responses to the crisis in Iraq and the aftermath of Katrina are jarringly repetitive

Even the words are the same. On Iraq, President Bush declared on Feb. 4, 2004,"We will do what it takes. We will not leave until the job is done." On post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction, on Sept. 15, he eerily echoed,"We will do what it takes. We will stay as long as it takes." It was reassuring for the nation to be told by the president in his televised address that he intends to"stay"

Douglass Daniel: Bush Is Sounding More and More Like LBJ

Bush officials bristle at the suggestion the war in Iraq might look anything like Vietnam. Yet just as today's anti-war protests recall memories of yesteryear, President Bush's own words echo those of President Johnson in 1967, a pivotal year for the U.S. in Vietnam. "America is committed to the defense of South Vietnam until an honorable peace can be negotiated," Johnson told the Tennessee Legislature on March 15, 1967. Despite the obstacles to victory, the president said

Fareed Zakaria: Leaders Who Won't Choose

...Whatever his other accomplishments, Bush will go down in history as the most fiscally irresponsible chief executive in American history. Since 2001, government spending has gone up from $1.86 trillion to $2.48 trillion, a 33 percent rise in four years! Defense and Homeland Security are not the only culprits. Domestic spending is actually up 36 percent in the same period. These figures come from the libertarian Cato Institute's excellent report "The Grand Old Spending Party," which e

George F. Will: Mr. Breyer's 'Modesty'

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer's new book is more interesting than its author probably intended. "Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution" demonstrates how a posture of judicial "modesty"—Breyer's word—can empower a judge to wield immodest power in cutting down constitutional impediments to a—his—political agenda. Breyer begins by asserting a distinction between what he considers two kinds of liberty—"modern liberty," meaning free

Nicholas Lemann: The President Should Have Stepped in with Federal Troops to Save Katrina's Victims

[Why didn't President Bush sendfederal troops to Louisiana after the governor refused to turn over control of the state's National Guard?] ... Article I of the United States Constitution gives the federal government the power to “suppress insurrections.” This has always been a touchy subject—especially in the South, and most especially during the Reconstruction period, after the biggest insurrection in American history had been successfully suppressed. The Insurrection Act of 1807 o

Irene Wang: Taiwanese Politician On Free Speech At Peking University

Outspoken Taiwanese legislator, author and talk-show host Li Ao delivered an appeal for free speech at Peking University yesterday and called on students to embrace the Chinese Communist Party. Quoting Mao Zedong and former premier Zhou Enlai , he said different voices should be heard. He compared freedom of speech to the legalisation of pornography, saying the number of sex crimes had dropped in northern Europe when pornographic movies were legalised. "Freedom of

Jessica Gresko: L.A.'s Bullfighting Tradition Maintained

Ready to charge Bill Torres at Griffith Park on a Saturday afternoon is a man clutching a bar barbed with two bull's horns. Torres, 65, holds his ground, feet together. ... Practices like this one have gone on for more than three decades at Griffith Park and generally draw half a dozen \o7aficionados practicos, \f7or amateur bullfighters, swishing capes and brandishing dummy swords. Practicing in the tradition of matadors worldwide, some of the Saturday bullfighters ar