Roundup: Media's Take

Donald Luskin: The Trade and Tax Doomsday Clocks

[Mr. Luskin is chief investment officer at Trend Macrolytics LLC.] Thankfully, we're not repeating all the mistakes of 1937. But Congress and the Obama administration are flirting dangerously with one of them by failing to extend the expiring low tax rates for all Americans. What's worse, we're close to repeating the mother of all policy errors, the one made not in 1937 but in 1930—the one that started the Great Depression. We're on track to resurrect the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Ac

Peter Popham: Outsiders ... The trouble with the Roma

[Peter Popham was the Rome correspondent for the Independent, 2002-09.] This Thursday, in a hall in the Council of Europe's headquarters in Strasbourg, a group of academics, government advisers and gypsy representatives will get together to discuss the next steps in a pan-European project entitled "The Decade of Roma Inclusion, 2005 to 2015". The idea of the "decade", according to its authors, is to "improve the socio-economic status and social

Fred Hiatt: Will Obama's foreign policy follow his new democracy rhetoric?

[Fred Hiatt is the editorial page editor of The Post.] After enjoying a good run in the 1980s and 1990s, democracy has been playing defense lately. Dictators have grown wise to people power. China, Russia, Iran and Cuba have been more successful exporting and extolling their systems than democracies have been in promoting theirs. In his first two years, President Obama seemed only sporadically attuned to this negative shift. In Cairo, Oslo and elsewhere, he spoke power

Slavoj Zizek: Liberal multiculturalism masks an old barbarism with a human face

[Slavoj Zizek is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.] The recent expulsion of Roma, or Gypsies, from France drew protests from all around Europe – from the liberal media but also from top politicians, and not only from those on the left. But the expulsions went ahead, and they are just the tip of a much larger iceberg of European politics. A month ago, a book by Thilo Sarrazin, a bank executive who was considered politically close to the

Stephan Salisbury: Surveillance, America’s Pastime

[Stephan Salisbury is cultural writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer. His most recent book is Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland.]The dried blood on the concrete floor is there for all to see, a stain forever marking the spot on a Memphis motel balcony where Martin Luther King, Jr. lay mortally wounded by a sniper’s bullet.It is a stark and ghostly i

Dana Milbank: Glenn Beck is Obsessed with Hitler and Woodrow Wilson

[Dana Milbank is an op-ed columnist for The Washington Post. This is an excerpt from an essay adapted from his book"Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America," forthcoming Tuesday. The full essay can be found here.] Glenn Beck, the conservative television and radio host, is an amateur historian. Very amateur. One day, he rhetorically a

Michael S. Doran: The Second Carter Term

[A visiting professor at NYU’s Wagner School, Michael S. Doran is a former senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council and a former deputy assistant secretary of defense. A version of this article originally appeared in the E-Notes series of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.] President Obama came to power intending to rectify the perceived mistakes of George W. Bush in the Middle East. With that goal in mind, he announced two major initiatives: reac

Philip Terzian: Comedy Central at the House of Representatives

[Philip Terzian is literary editor of The Weekly Standard.] On the Thursday after Memorial Day, 1933, J. Pierpont Morgan Jr. sat at the witness table awaiting the resumption of a hearing by the Senate Banking Committee investigating the practices of New York investment banks. Suddenly, a publicist with the Ringling Brothers circus thrust a German-born dwarf named Lya Graf onto Morgan’s lap: “The smallest lady in the world wants to meet the richest man in the world!” announced the pu

Hannah Beech: Asia's New Cold War Has Begun

[Hannah Beech is a journalist for TIME Magazine.] After surviving a harrowing maritime adventure, the fishermen of Gangfu village on China's eastern coast are sometimes presented with a rejuvenating bowl of noodles topped with duck eggs. But on Sept. 25, Gangfu's Zhan Qixiong was lavished with a more extravagant welcome: bouquets of flowers from cheering local leaders, a chartered flight home courtesy of the Chinese government and, of course, the requisite bowl of noodles.

Nicholas Eberstadt: The Global Poverty Paradox

[Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute.] For a brief, glorious, and unforgettable moment 20 years ago, it seemed as if a great and terrible question that had been perennially stalking humanity had finally been answered. That profound question was as old as human hope itself: could ordinary men and women, regardless of their location on this earth or their station in this life, hope that deliberate social arrangements

Jennifer Rubin: California, There It Went

[Jennifer Rubin is Commentary's contributing editor.] More than 40 years later, I still remember the bright sun and the palm trees when we got off the plane. California in 1968 was a magical place, a magnet for those seeking new opportunities or to lose an old identity. The Golden State was allowing the rich to get richer and the middle class to live out the American dream in its pristine state. The public schools and expanding state-university system (two separate systems, in fact)

Phil Gramm: Echoes of the Great Depression

[Mr. Gramm is a former U.S. senator from Texas and former professor of economics at Texas A&M University.] This may not be your grandfather's Great Depression, but many aspects of today's situation would remind him of the 1930s. If the recession that officially ended a year ago feels uncomfortably surreal to you yet familiar to him, it's probably because the recovery went missing. During the average recovery since World War II, gross domestic product (GDP) surpasse

Michael Kinsley: The Least The Boomers Can Do

[Michael Kinsley is an editor at Atlantic Media Company. He was editor of The New Republic, founding editor of Slate, and a panelist on Crossfire.] As they prepare to leave the stage, even Boomers themselves concede that things have not exactly gone according to script. Generalizations about generations are often foolish. Who’s to say when one generation ends and the next one starts? And people are individuals: any characteristic intended to describe almost 80 million people will be

Melissa Harris-Lacewell: Fighting for Change, Longing for the Sea

[Melissa Harris-Lacewell, an associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University] I was recently reminded of a famous quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of the classic text The Little Prince. Saint-Exupéry offered a particularly relevant lesson for our current politics: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity

Ethan Devine: The Japan Syndrome

[Ethan Devine is a partner and portfolio manager at Indus Capital Partners, an investment firm specializing in Asian markets] This year, China overtook Japan as the world's second-largest economy, a shift in the global pecking order that surprised nobody who has been paying attention for the past 20 years. What was truly surprising is that Japan was still No. 2. Like a distant uncle whose death notice reminds you he was alive, Japan is noteworthy for its furtive slinkin

Steve Kornacki: Jimmy Carter's Tea Party

[Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor.] Jimmy Carter has an Op-Ed in the USA Today that makes an excellent point: The 1970s saw the development of a political movement very similar to the Tea Party of today. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to quite understand the nature of that movement. In Carter's telling, his dark horse 1976 presidential campaign became a vehicle for Tea Party-ish sentiments. "We capitalized on deep dissatisfaction with the policies and practice

Daniel Gordis: The Other Existential Threat to Israel

[Daniel Gordis is senior vice president of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and the author, most recently, of Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War that May Never End.] In August, two pieces of news about Iran’s nuclear ambitions were revealed almost simultaneously. The first was that Iran had fired up its first nuclear reactor. The second, delivered in an ostentatious leak to the New York Times, was that the Obama administration had determined that Iran was at least a ye

Henry Olsen: The Fifty Years’ War

[Henry Olsen is vice president of the American Enterprise Institute.] With primary season over, the stage is now set for an epic fall election. The massive electoral repudiation that increasingly looks likely for Democrats is not, however, why this vote will be historic. It will be historic because it is the most intense battle yet in the Fifty Years’ War between conservatives and liberals for possession of America’s political soul. This war has been fought over what de

Jimmy Carter: The 1970s Saw a Tea Party-Like Wave

[Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter (1977-81) is the author of the new book White House Diary.] A number of readers of my new book have noted parallels between today's frustrated and even angry mood and a similar mood in the mid-1970s. Indeed, in some ways my successful campaign for the presidency in 1976 resembled the Tea Party movement of today. We capitalized on deep dissatisfaction with the policies and practices of government officials, especially those who served in Washington

Ronald Sokol: Can the U.S. Assassinate an American Citizen Living in Yemen?

[Ronald Sokol is a lawyer in Aix-en-Provence who practices across France. He taught at the University of Virginia Law School and is the author of “Justice after Darwin” and other books and articles.] Last month, civil liberties groups and the family of Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki filed suit to stop the US government from killing Mr. Awlaki – an American citizen living abroad in Yemen. The government, which is trying to have the case dismissed, labels Mr. Awlaki a threat for alleg