Roundup: Media's Take

Peter Dreier: La Follette’s Wisconsin Idea

[Peter Dreier is E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics at Occidental College. This essay is adapted from The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century, due to be published in November by Nation Books.] IN FEBRUARY 2011, more than 15,000 Wisconsinites marched on the state capitol building in Madison. By the middle of March, more than 100,000 protestors had joined this challenge to Governor Scott Walker’s steep budget cuts, his proposal to strip public employees of collectiv

Corey Robin: Reclaiming the Politics of Freedom

[Corey Robin, a visiting fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, teaches political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. His second book, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.] Conservatives often complain that they’ve been exiled from power, whether in the corridors of the Capitol or the pages of the New York Times. Yet conservative ideas have dominated American politics for thirty years. The

Bruce Piasecki: The Ben Franklin Solution for the Coming Age of Scarcity

[Bruce Piasecki, president and founder of the management consulting firm AHC Group, is the author of several books on corporate strategy. This essay is based on his forthcoming book, "Doing More with Less: Another Way to Wealth."] ...[W]e must embrace a spirit of competitive frugality in the service of less. "Doing more with less" must become our mantra, aim, and rallying call to become more frugal, inventive, and diplomatic. It may seem like a radical concept, b

Jackie Ashley: Britain Must Turn Its Back on Imperial Past

[Jackie Ashley is a Guardian columnist and political interviewer.] There are three ways to respond when the going gets tough: head in the sand, try to sort things out, or suddenly get very busy elsewhere. Which perhaps explains why David Cameron has been focusing so much on "abroad" recently, and I don't just mean his bargain break in Spain. With his government's two flagship policies in crisis, Cameron has decided to apologise for Britain's role in world conf

George P. Shultz: The Constitution Doesn't Mention Czars

[Mr. Shultz, former secretary of labor (1969-70), secretary of the Treasury (1972-74) and secretary of state (1982-89), is a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.] ...In national security and foreign policy, the National Security Council (NSC) was established after World War II by the National Security Act of 1947. As late as 1961, under President Dwight Eisenhower, the NSC was supported by a small staff headed by an executive secretary with a "passion for anonymi

Maureen Dowd: Blowin’ in the Idiot Wind

[Maureen Dowd is a columnist for the NYT.] Bob Dylan may have done the impossible: broken creative new ground in selling out. The idea that the raspy troubadour of ’60s freedom anthems would go to a dictatorship and not sing those anthems is a whole new kind of sellout — even worse than Beyoncé, Mariah and Usher collecting millions to croon to Qaddafi’s family, or Elton John raking in a fortune to serenade gay-bashers at Rush Limbaugh’s fourth wedding....

Elbegdorj Tsakhia: What Mongolia Can Teach the Middle East

[Elbegdorj Tsakhia is president of Mongolia.] Perhaps no man has done more to change the face of the Middle East in the past 100 years than Mohamed Bouazizi. The Tunisian street vendor's ultimate act of defiance -- self-immolation in the face of continued humiliation and degradation -- has unleashed pent-up forces that are sweeping across North Africa and hold the potential for bringing freedom to tens of millions of people. As coalition forces act against the brutality of Libyan le

Gideon Rachman: It’s 1989, but we are the Russians

[Gideon Rachman is the FT’s chief foreign affairs columnist.] For the western world, the “Arab spring” threatens to be a classic case of good news and bad news. The good news is that this is the Arab 1989. The bad news is that we are the Soviet Union. An exaggeration? Certainly. But there is enough truth in the analogy to explain why both the US and the European Union are uneasy about revolutions that – on one level – promote core western values, such as democracy and i

Caroline Alexander: Taking Homer Out of Context

[Caroline Alexander is the author, most recently, of “The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer’s ‘Iliad’ and the Trojan War.”] THE 9/11 memorial in New York, still being planned, is to be dedicated on the 10th anniversary of the attack. Intended as a place for commemoration, reflection, education and solace, the memorial and museum will serve as a repository for the remains of the victims.... ...[One] feature of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum

Aaron David Miller: Obama's Withdrawal Doctrine

[Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. Middle East negotiator, is a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and author of the forthcoming book, Can America Have Another Great President?.] With the exception of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, 20th-century wars haven't been kind to American presidents; 21st-century wars promise to be even crueler. Welcome to Libya, Mr. President. You've got your very own 21st-century war, where

Matthew Shaffer: Britain and Libya’s Special Relationship

[Matthew Shaffer is a William F. Buckley Fellow at the National Review Institute.] The British were vocal proponents of international military intervention in Libya. David Cameron was the first Western leader to call unambiguously for a no-fly zone, and he later won accolades as an essential player in securing the U.N. Security Council resolution that implemented it. Then, Cameron’s secretary of state for defense, Liam Fox, became the first to acknowledge the unspoken truth that the

Keith Allred: In Defense of Military Tribunals

[Capt. Allred is a retired Navy judge who presided over the military commission trial of Salem Hamdan, the first American war crimes trial since Nuremberg. He was associate dean of the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies from 2003-2005.] The Obama administration announced Monday that it would try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other 9/11 conspirators in military commissions at Guantanamo Bay. This is heartening news. Presidents from both parties have signed bipartisa

Michael Lind: Bad influences ... JFK, Ike and Obama

[Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution."] When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, it was clear what the nation needed: a return to robust New Deal-style programs in domestic policy to help Americans with stagnant wages and shrinking benefits, and a reduction of U.S. defense spending and commitments abroad. To put it an

George Melloan: Obama's Half-Rumsfeld in Libya

[Mr. Melloan, a former columnist and deputy editor of the Journal editorial page, is author of "The Great Money Binge: Spending Our Way to Socialism".] Defense Secretary Robert Gates promised Congress last week that the U.S. will put no "boots on the ground" in Libya to enforce President Barack Obama's edict that Moammar Gadhafi must step down. Yet it has been leaked that CIA operatives are on the ground in Libya aiding efforts by the eastern tribes to unseat Gad

Kenneth Rogoff: History will rue US and Europe debt woes

[Kenneth Rogoff is professor of economics at Harvard University.] Will 23rd-century historians look back on today’s fiscal follies with the same mixture of bemusement and disdain with which we now view the financial affairs of 18th-century French kings? Policymakers throughout the world are trying to find ways to stabilise government debts, now approaching record postwar levels. As US legislators fumble towards a budget deal, there is the laudable bipartisan Bowles-Simpson commiss

Melissa Harris-Perry: Are We All Black Americans Now?

[Melissa Harris-Perry is an associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University.] In the months following September 11, my colleague Cornel West offered this insight: national political elites used the devastating attacks to promote the “niggerization of the American people.” West understood that long before 9/11, African-Americans were intimately familiar with terrorism. Through the Jim Crow century, they were routinely and randomly brutalized and m

Lynette Holloway: Marchers Remember: MLK Was Pro-Union

[Lynette Holloway is a Chicago-based writer. She is a former New York Times reporter and associate editor for Ebony magazine.] In what is being hailed as a national Day of Solidarity, hundred of thousands of teachers, nurses, students, clergy, firefighters and other workers from across the nation will hold "We Are One" demonstrations to show support for Wisconsin union employees to demand a stop to overreaching policies by Republican lawmakers trying to balance budgets on

Andrew Cockburn: The Limits of Air Power

[Andrew Cockburn is the author of, most recently, "Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall and Catastrophic Legacy."] ...The very first bombing raid ever occurred almost 100 years ago on Nov. 1, 1911, when an Italian airman hand-dropped four 4.5-pound bombs on forces defending Tripoli against Italian invaders. This momentous event went down well with the press: "Italian Military Aviator Outside Tripoli Proves War Value of Aeroplane," headlined the New York Times. But it had lit

Henry Shukman: Unlearned Lessons from Chernobyl and Fukushima

[Henry Shukman is a poet and novelist who lives in New Mexico. His most recent work is the novel "The Lost City."] As far as I could tell from the advertising at the hotel where I stayed in Kiev last year, Ukraine's chief export these days is brides. But it wasn't always that way. Twenty-five years ago this month, Ukraine's best-known export was a whole lot of radiation. After Reactor No. 4 blew up at Chernobyl power station on April 26, 1986, the resulting di

Robert Pape: The New Standard for Humanitarian Intervention

[Robert Pape is Professor and Director of Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism at the University of Chicago and author of three books, most recently Cutting the Fuse: The Global Explosion of Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It.] ...We may be witnessing an historic shift in international norms. After World War II, genocide appeared to be the widely accepted standard for humanitarian intervention. The 1948 UN Convention against genocide defined it as a set of acts "committe