Roundup: Media's Take

Betsy McCaughey: This Lame Duck Session Should Be the Last

[Ms. McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York state, is the author of "Obama Health Law: What It Says and How to Overturn It".] Americans ought to make this lame duck session of Congress the last in history. Members who lose re-election have no moral authority to continue governing: They were fired by the voters, who should demand that they clean out their desks and go home. On Nov. 2, the voters replaced the Democratic majority in the House of Repr

Simon Tisdall: U.S. & Europe Still Need Each Other

[Simon Tisdall is an assistant editor of the Guardian and a foreign affairs columnist.] Rebuffed in Asia and repudiated at home, Barack Obama's bent and battered bandwagon heads for Europe this week, looking for a change of political fortune, or at least a welcoming smile. But sulky, insecure Eurocrats, awaiting his arrival in Lisbon for Saturday's one-day EU-US summit, have not forgotten last May's Madrid debacle, when he failed to show up at all. Obama's "snub", they say

Dmitri Trenin: Will Killing START Kill Obama's Reset?

[Dmitri Trenin is director of the Carnegie Moscow Center.] Jon Kyl has spoken. The Senate minority whip, emboldened by his party's midterm election gains, said Tuesday that the Senate shouldn't vote on the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty this year, likely sealing the fate of what would have been the signature foreign-policy accomplishment of U.S. President Barack Obama's first two years in the White House. If the Senate doesn't attempt a vote before the end of the year, the

Steve Kornacki: Dittoheads, Race and Denial

[Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor.]On Tuesday, I learned that there is a circumstance under which right-wingers are happy to align themselves with RINOs: in hindsight over the issue of civil rights.I discovered this almost by accident, after including in a post about Rush Limbaugh's confused racial paranoia -- he can't seem to decide

Bjorn Lomborg: Cost-Effective Ways to Address Climate Change

One of the scarier predictions about global warming is the suggestion that melting glaciers and ice caps could cause sea levels to rise as much as 15 to 20 feet over the next century. Set aside the fact that the best research we have - from the United Nations climate panel - says that global sea levels are not likely to rise more than about 20 inches by 2100. Rather, let's imagine that over the next 80 or 90 years, a giant port city - say, Tokyo - found itself engulfed by a sea-level rise of abo

Nick Turse: Twenty-First Century Blowback?

[Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com. An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. His latest book, The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Verso Books), which brings together leading analysts from across the political spectrum, has just gone into its second printing. Turse is currently a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute. You can follow him on Twitter @NickTurse, on Tumblr, and o

John Shattuck: By Admitting Its Human Rights Problems, the U.S. Helps Other Nations Admit Theirs

[John Shattuck is a former Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, a former US Ambassador to the Czech Republic, and the current president of Central European University in Budapest. A version of this essay previously appeared on The Hill’s Congress Blog.] ...Isn’t UN-sponsored human rights reporting just a platform for human rights abusers? On the contrary, these international obligations strengthen the case against abusive governments, especially if the

Jonah Goldberg: The Clinton Road Map Won't Work for Obama

[Jonah Goldberg is editor at large for the National Review and writes a column for the LA Times.] Should Obama pull a Clinton? This has been a burning question inside the Beltway ever since the polls showed the Great Shellacking bearing down on the White House. As most know by now, pulling a Clinton isn't anything kinky; it simply means moving to the center, or "triangulating" between the unpopular left and the unpopular right. That's what President Clinton did a

Michael Gerson: Oklahoma's Faith-Baiting Initiative

[Michael Gerson is a former speechwriter for President Bush and a columnist for the WaPo.] Just to be on the safe side, voters in Oklahoma this month overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment that prevents the Talibanization of the Sooner State. Henceforth, there will be no public stonings in Ponca City, no forced burqa wearing in Bartlesville, no sharia law in Lawton.... But the problem with the anti-sharia movement runs deeper. In its purest form, it is stran

Ramesh Ponnuru: 1995 and 2011 ... Congresses Compared

[Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor at National Review.] Next year in Washington is not going to be a replay of 1995. The analogy is on everyone’s mind in the capital. Many Republicans worry that President Obama will win the public-relations war against Speaker-to-be John Boehner as handily as Bill Clinton bested Newt Gingrich. They should relax. The parallels are obvious. Both times, a young Democrat had succeeded George Bush in the presidency and then worked with a Dem

Stephen Blank: The Real Reset ... Moscow Refights the Cold War

[Stephen Blank is a professor at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College. The opinions expressed are his own.] Presidents Obama and Medvedev have publicly insisted that “hitting the reset button” has improved more than just the atmospherics of U.S.-Russian relations. Russian officials in particular claim that this policy shows that Washington has begun to take Moscow’s interests seriously. But enthusiasts on both sides are hard-pressed to come up with evidence t

Soner Cagaptay: Sultan of the Muslim World

[Soner Cagaptay is a Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and is the co-author, with Scott Carpenter, of Regenerating the U.S.-Turkey Partnership.] Turkey may be the most Muslim nation in the world. It was forged through blood and war as a state exclusively by and for Muslims -- a claim it shares only with Pakistan. Fleeing persecution in Europe, Russia, and the Caucasus, millions of Turkish and non-Turkish Muslims settled there, and today almost half of Tu

Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann: The Fog of Containment

[Flynt Leverett directs the New America Foundation's Iran Initiative. Hillary Mann Leverett heads a political risk consulting firm. Both lecture at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and publish www.RaceForIran.com.] In the coming weeks, the United States may well be joining a new round of nuclear negotiations with Iran. But, rather than working to promote their success, most commentators seem to be consumed with explainin

Craig Fehrman: Reagan is Sarah Palin's Crutch

[Craig Fehrman is at work on a book about presidents and their books.] "Sarah Palin's Alaska" didn't debut until Sunday night, but the former governor has been defending it for weeks. After Karl Rove wondered how a reality show fit "the American calculus of 'that helps me see you in the Oval Office,'" Fox News gave Palin a chance to respond. "You know, I agree with that," she said. "Those standards have to be high for someone who would ever want to

James Woolsey: Old Problems With New Start

[Mr. Woolsey served as an adviser to the Salt I negotiation (1969-70), a delegate-at-large to the Start and Defense and Space negotiations (1983-86), and ambassador and chief negotiator for the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe treaty (1989-91). He was director of Central Intelligence from 1993-95.] A number of years negotiating arms-control agreements with the Soviets taught me that, when dealing with Russian counterparts, don't appear eager—friendly yes, eager never. Regrettably

Chris Hedges: The Origin of America’s Intellectual Vacuum

[Chris Hedges writes a column for Truthdig.] The blacklisted mathematics instructor Chandler Davis, after serving six months in the Danbury federal penitentiary for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), warned the universities that ousted him and thousands of other professors that the purges would decimate the country’s intellectual life. “You must welcome dissent; you must welcome serious, systematic, proselytizing dissent—not on

Jonathan Chait: The Myth of Divided Government

[Jonathan Chait is a senior editor at The New Republic.] No sooner had Republicans swept into power, promising to repeal President Obama’s major initiatives and make his defeat their top priority, than a bevy of pundits declared that this was all just a prelude to a new era of moderation and compromise. What will bring about this outbreak of bipartisanship? Simple: divided government. All you need to do is give each party some stake in the success of government, and watch the cooper

Todd Zywicki: Repeal the Seventeenth Amendment

[Mr. Zywicki is a George Mason University Foundation professor of law and a senior scholar of the Mercatus Center. He has written several law-review articles examining the history and impact of the Seventeenth Amendment.] Joe Miller, Alaska’s Republican nominee for the United States Senate, recently expressed support for an idea that is rapidly gaining steam in Tea Party circles: the repeal of the Seventeenth Amendment. Miller subsequently backtracked from his statement, but he shouldn’t have: Repealing the Seventeenth Amendment would go a long way toward restoring federalism and frustrating special-interest influence over Washington. Ratified in 1913, the Seventeenth Amendment replaced the election of U.S. senators by state legislators with the current system of direct election by the people. By securing the Seventeenth Amendment’s ratification, progressives dealt a blow to the Framers’ vision of the Constitution from which we have yet to recover.

David Rothkopf: The perils of America’s Pacific presidency

[David Rothkopf is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and chief executive of Garten Rothkopf, LLC.] President Barack Obama hoped to find solace overseas following his “shellacking” in the US midterm elections. Instead, despite some progress, he has suffered a series of setbacks. Little meaningful was achieved at the Group of 20 leading nations summit. Trade talks with South Korea have stalled. Even his rather successful trade trip to India produced

Hilary Clinton and Robert M. Gates: Why the Senate Should Ratify New START

[The writers are, respectively, the U.S. secretary of state and secretary of defense.] For decades, American inspectors have monitored Russian nuclear forces, putting into practice President Ronald Reagan's favorite maxim, "Trust, but verify." But since the old START Treaty expired last December, we have relied on trust alone. Until a new treaty comes into force, our inspectors will not have access to Russian missile silos and the world's two largest nuclear arsenals will