Roundup: Media's Take

David Freed: Ranking Heroism

[David Freed is a screenwriter. His son is a California National Guard infantry lieutenant.] Much has been made, and rightfully so, of President Obama's Medal of Honor presentation last month to Army Staff Sgt. Salvatore Giunta, the first living recipient of the nation's highest military decoration since the Vietnam War. But the award also raises questions. One is why so few Medals of Honor have been awarded to those who have fought in Afghanistan and Iraq, compared with the numbers

Daniel W. Drezner: Why WikiLeaks Is Bad for Scholars

[Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. His next book, Theories of International Politics and Zombies, will be published by Princeton University Press in February.] Let me share one of my recurring nightmares with you. I'm delivering a paper on why the United States pursued a particular strategy during an international negotiation. Suddenly a former policy principal, groaning with gravitas, emerges

Brian Powell: Marriage and the Court of Public Opinion

[Brian Powell, a sociologist at Indiana University, is the coauthor of "Counted Out: Same-Sex Relations and Americans' Definitions of Family." More about the research and book can be found here.] In 1948, the idea of interracial marriage in the United States was almost unimaginable. The few polls on this topic at the time showed that Americans were nearly unanimous in their disapproval of it. There is little evidence that Californians felt any different. Yet t

Matt Bai: Of Debts and Doubts

[Matt Bai is a reporter for the NYT.] ...[G]enerations of Americans have sacrificed plenty for the nation’s cause, and there’s no reason to think we’ve lost the capacity. What makes this case for sacrifice [now] so much harder to embrace, perhaps, is that it goes to our national psyche, threatening our self-image as a land with limitless potential. While past generations have readily sacrificed for national greatness, debt reduction — at least in the gloomy way its advocates argue f

R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.: Liberalism: An Autopsy

[Mr. Tyrrell, a syndicated columnist, is editor in chief of The American Spectator. His current book is "After The Hangover: The Conservatives' Road to Recovery," published by Thomas Nelson.] In the tumultuous history of postwar American liberalism, there has been a slow but steady decline of which liberals have been steadfastly oblivious. The heirs of the New Deal are down to around 20% of the electorate, according to recent Gallup polls. Conservatives account for 42% of

Pearl Duncan: Architect Frank Gehry Enhances NY's Iconic Skyline

[Pearl Duncan covered Newport-Bermuda Yacht Races, Miami-Montego Bay Yacht Races, Caribbean Ocean Racing Circuit (CORC) Races and others, for Sailing, Sail, and Yacht Racing/Cruising Magazines. Now she writes about historic New York and New Yorkers.] Few experiences are more delightful than speaking with an architect who knows how a city should be built. Some say a city should have the light airy breath of a well-planned park, not the stuffiness of a randomly grown thick forest.

Robert L. Borosage: The Great Tax Reform Mirage

[Robert L. Borosage is the founder and president of the Institute for America’s Future and co-director of its sister organization, the Campaign for America’s Future. The organizations were launched by 100 prominent Americans to develop the policies, message and issue campaigns to help forge an enduring majority for progressive change in America.] David Brooks is always a good marker of establishment conventional wisdom. Today, in a

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend: Sarah Palin is Wrong About John F. Kennedy, Religion and Politics

[Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is a former lieutenant governor of Maryland and the author of "Failing America's Faithful: How Today's Churches Are Mixing God With Politics and Losing Their Way."] Sarah Palin has found a new opponent to debate: John F. Kennedy. In her new book, "America by Heart," Palin objects to my uncle's famous 1960 speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, in which he challenged the ministers - and the country - to judg

Denis MacShane: The Browder Family and Russia's Leaders

[MacShane is a British M.P. and a former minister for Europe.] Had you asked Stalin about Earl Browder, he would have snorted in derision. Ask Putin about Bill Browder, and the reaction will be the same. The Browder family’s tortured relationship with Russian leaders is worthy of a Ken Follett novel. Earl Browder was the leader of the Communist Party USA in the 1930s and during World War II. A Stalin worshiper, he wielded immense influence in the trade-union movement, w

Chris Danello: What Truman Can Teach Obama About the Deficit

[Writer for The Annual Report of the USA, and managing editor of The Harvard Political Review, Chris Danello highlights lessons learned from the Truman presidency on grappling with federal debt.] When the Midwestern Democrat took office, the federal budget deficit was high and rising. The steep costs of dealing with an extraordinary economic calamity, as well the cost of overseas wars, had drained the treasury and pushed the national debt to unprecedented heights. Compounding the Pr

Jonathan Schell: And Now: Anti-Semitism

[Jonathan Schell is the Doris Shaffer Fellow at The Nation Institute and teaches a course on the nuclear dilemma at Yale. He is the author of The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger.] When Fox News commentator Glenn Beck recently accused investor and philanthropist George Soros, who is of Jewish and Hungarian origin, of running a "shadow government" whose aim is to destroy the American political system, he was drawing on a rich tradition of anti-Semitic attacks

Brian Landers: Corporations are Only Human - At Least in Law

[Brian Landers is the author of "Empires Apart", www.empiresapart.com, a history of American and Russian imperialism, 2009, and has been a Board memeber of private and public sector organizations including Penguin Books, Waterstone's, the Financial Ombudsman Service and the Prison Serrvice.] The US Supreme Court has ruled that corporations can spend whatever they like on influencing elections. It could happen here too as courts ins

Andrew Sullivan: Bill Donohue's World AIDS Day

[Andrew Sullivan is a columnist for The Atlantic.] I got to see the extraordinary and powerful exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery, Hide/Seek, over a week ago. It's impressive, subtle and involving.... For me, the portraits from the era of AIDS, of mass death in the teeth of great hostility, fear and discrimination, struck home most powerfully. That is when I came of age as a homosexual man, and it is what necessarily soldered my heart to those of my brothers and s

Michael Koplow: Hiding in Plain Sight

[Michael Koplow is a doctoral candidate in the government department at Georgetown University.] As the explosive, ongoing release of hundreds of thousands of State Department diplomatic cables shows, official Washington is anxious about the direction that Turkey's government is taking the country -- and particularly the influence of Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, long credited as the architect of its foreign policy. And judging by the academic-turned-international-strategist's do

Andy Kroll: The New American Oligarchy

[Andy Kroll is a reporter in the D.C. Bureau of Mother Jones and an associate editor at TomDispatch.com. You can email him at akroll (at) motherjones (dot) com.]There is a war underway. I'm not talking about Washington’s bloody misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, but a war within our own borders. It’s a war fought on the airwaves, on television and radio and over the Internet, a war of words and images, of half-truth, innuendo, and raging lies. I'm talking about a political war

Ed Meese and Richard Perle: New Start ... What Would Reagan Do?

[Mr. Meese was attorney general and a member of the National Security Council, and Mr. Perle was assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration.] President Obama has taken to the airwaves to pump up support for the New Start Treaty with Russia by arguing that Ronald Reagan would have endorsed it. Both of us had the high honor of knowing our 40th president. We worked for Ronald Reagan, and we're sure that's not the case. There are many reasons why this treat

Harvey J. Kaye: Palin Seeks FDR's Endorsement

[Harvey J. Kaye is Professor of Social Change and Development at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and the author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (Hill & Wang). He is currently writing a new book, The Four Freedoms and the Promise of America] Sarah Palin is running for President of the United States. In her new book, America By Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag, she essentially declares her candidacy—not so much by what she says as by what she does not

Matthew Shaffer: The Espionage Act and Bradley Manning

[Matthew Shaffer writes for the National Review.] ...[T]here is a legal question of whether Manning is guilty of espionage. He handed documents over to, charitably construed, a journalist — not an enemy power. And it’s not clear that he had a specific intent to undermine the U.S., her interests, or her allies. So does this still constitute espionage? Yes. There’s a closely analogous precedent for this case. In 1985, Samuel Morison, the namesake and grandson of the famo

Dana Milbank: A Strange Way to Honor the Founding Fathers

[Dana Milbank is a columnist for the WaPo.] Republicans gained control of the House last month on a promise to "restore the Constitution." So it is no small irony that one of their first orders of business is an attempt to rewrite the Constitution. On Tuesday, Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah), a member of the House GOP's majority transition committee, introduced a constitutional amendment that would allow a group of states to nullify federal laws with which they disag

Lincoln Caplan: Exploring the Meaning of ‘Constitutional Conservatism’

[Lincoln Caplan is the editor and president of Legal Affairs.] John Boehner, the next House speaker, expresses the message of constitutional conservatism in calling for every bill to identify the part of the Constitution it rests on. Sarah Palin used the phrase to campaign for limited government. Tea Party members call themselves constitutional conservatives. It is the new mantle in which Republican politicians are wrapping themselves.... A polemic called the Mount Vern