Roundup: Media's Take

Tim Rutten: The GOP/'Tea' Party Radicalism

[Tim Rutten is a columnist for the LA Times.] In an afterword appended to the White House diaries he published this week, former President Carter muses, "It may be difficult for some younger readers to realize how much the Washington political scene has changed in the last 30 years." Carter points out that the congressional bipartisanship on which he relied for his considerable number of legislative achievements no longer exists and that the "pernicious e

David Green: Adam Smith would stand by British Business Secretary

[David Green is the Director of Civitas, the Institute for the Study of Civil Society.] Vince Cable criticised the behaviour of some businesses and banks and found himself under attack as a crypto-Marxist who was hostile to free enterprise itself. This morning he had to assure listeners on the Today programme that he is solidly in favour of a market economy. And yet he could have been quoting the arch free-marketeer Milton Friedman, who famously once said: "With s

José R. Cárdenas: Cuba move is a victory for U.S. policy

[José R. Cárdenas is an associate with the consulting firm VisionAmericas, based in Washington, D.C. From 2004-2009, he served in various senior positions in the Bush administration working on inter-American relations.] The Castro regime's stunning announcement that it is planning to lay off more than 500,000 state workers in the next six months, dropping fully one-tenth of the country's labor force into a barely existent "private sector" has sparked a flurry of commentary

Brent Scowcroft and Jake Garn: Ratify New START now

[Brent Scowcroft was national security adviser during the Ford and George H.W. Bush administrations. Jake Garn is a former Republican senator from Utah.] The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has just approved the new U.S.-Russian nuclear arms treaty (New START) and sent it to the Senate floor. We are writing to urge that the Senate move promptly to ratify it. The arguments that have been advanced in favor of the treaty are strong and compelling. Why is New START impor

John Fund: The Carter-Obama Comparisons Grow

[Mr. Fund is a columnist for WSJ.com.] Comparisons between the Obama White House and the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter are increasingly being made—and by Democrats. Walter Mondale, Mr. Carter's vice president, told The New Yorker this week that anxious and angry voters in the late 1970s "just turned against us—same as with Obama." As the polls turned against his administration, Mr. Mondale recalled that Mr. Carter "began to lose confidence in his abi

John Fund: The Carter-Obama Comparisons Grow

[Mr. Fund is a columnist for WSJ.com.] Comparisons between the Obama White House and the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter are increasingly being made—and by Democrats. Walter Mondale, Mr. Carter's vice president, told The New Yorker this week that anxious and angry voters in the late 1970s "just turned against us—same as with Obama." As the polls turned against his administration, Mr. Mondale recalled that Mr. Carter "began to lose confidence in his abi

Timothy Egan: Curse of the Scorned Class

[Timothy Egan worked for The Times for 18 years – as Pacific Northwest correspondent and a national enterprise reporter. His column on American politics and life as seen from the West Coast appears here on Thursdays. In 2001, he was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that wrote the series “How Race Is Lived in America.” He is the author of several books, including “The Worst Hard Time,” a history of the Dust Bowl, for which he won the National Book Award, and most recently, “The Big Burn: T

Maureen Dowd: Truly Madly Purely Jimmy

[Maureen Dowd is a Washington D.C.-based columnist for The New York Times and best-selling author.] Christine O’Donnell has accomplished the impossible: She’s made Jimmy Carter look like a libertine. The last time the phrase “lust in your heart” swept through American politics was in 1976 when Carter admitted to Playboy that, while he had always been faithful to soul (and sole) mate Rosalynn, he had committed adultery in his heart. “I dropped 15 percentag

Michael Lind: The Right Picked the Wrong Historical Analogy

[Michael Lind is policy director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation] ...The [Tea Party] movement chose the wrong historical precedent when it selected the Boston Tea Party of 1773, a genuinely revolutionary event, as its symbol. Today’s Tea Party movement is much more like the misguided and ill-fated Whiskey Rebellion of the early 1790s, during the first term of America’s first president, George Washington.... Today’s Tea Party movement resembl

Yana Yakovleva: Russia Needs It Own Franklin D. Roosevelt

[Yana Yakovleva is founder of Business Solidarity, a nongovernmental organization that lobbies for legal changes and defends businesspeople against extortion, raiding and false criminal charges initiated by government officials. This comment appeared in Vedomosti.] There has been a lot of talk lately about forming a partnership between business and government. The idea is that the business community should become a full-fledged partner with the authorities in implementing President

Bernard Weiner: Let's Get Real About the November Election

[Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, worked as a writer/editor with the San Francisco Chronicle for nearly two decades, has taught at universities in California and Washington, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org). To comment: crisispapers@hotmail.com.] I'm finding it difficult to believe that the following reminders ar

Alexander Zaitchik: A Kremlin-Flavored Anti-Defamation League

[Alexander Zaitchik, a writer living in Brooklyn, is the author of Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance.] On a jetlagged June morning in downtown Kiev, I briefly but completely lost my mind. Three hundred of us had been flown in for the founding conference of a new Moscow-based watchdog organization, World Without Nazism. For the event’s kick-off, conference participants gathered in a sun-dappled Vichnoyi Slavy Park, home to the city’s Monument of E

Josef Joffe: Why Palestine Won’t Remake the Middle East

[Josef Joffe is editor of Die Zeit and a senior fellow of the Institute for International Studies, and an Abramowitz Fellow at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford. This article ran in the September 23, 2010 issue of the magazine.] The most durable myth in the Middle East is: "It's Palestine, stupid." It lies at the heart of Barack Obama's Middle East diplomacy, which is why the president has been pummeling the Israelis and pushing the Palestinians to resume talks. Accordin

Michael Klare: China, Energy, and Global Power

[Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet.  His previous book, Blood and Oil, was made into a documentary film and is available at

Jacob Weisberg: The Tea Party's Anarchist Streak

[Jacob Weisberg is chairman and editor-in-chief of the Slate Group.] After its primary victories last week in Delaware and New York—following ones in Kentucky, Arizona, and Alaska—we have no choice but to take the Tea Party seriously. Come 2011, we are likely to have mama grizzlies in the House and Senate, and the movement’s gravitational pull is capturing traditional Republicans by the day. So who are these people and what do they want from us? A series of polls, as we

Peter Ludlow: WikiLeaks and Hacktivist Culture

[Peter Ludlow, a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, is the editor of Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias.] In recent months there has been considerable discussion about the WikiLeaks phenomenon, and understandably so, given the volume and sensitivity of the documents the website has released. What this discussion has revealed, however, is that the media and government agencies believe there is a single protagonist to be concerned with—something of a Jame

Mark A. Chancey: Islam Resolution Reflects Frightening Agenda

[Mark A. Chancey is chair of the Department of Religious Studies in Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences at Southern Methodist University. His e-mail address is mchancey@smu.edu.] Let's not pretend that the resolution on Islam that the Texas State Board of Education is considering is about balance in textbook coverage of the world's major religions. While its final lines sound reasonable – "reject future prejudicial Social Studies su

Shikha Dalmia: Obama is a Keynesian Stimulator, Not a Kenyan Anti-Colonialist

[Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation and a Forbes columnist.] Just when the ObamaCare debate was heating up, I was dining with a renowned conservative professor with impeccable Ivy credentials when the conversation suddenly turned surreal. Encouraged that I too had deep misgivings about the direction in which the new president was taking the country, the good professor opined that America had put in the White House a subversive radical. Obama wasn’t a well intenti

Michael Weiss: Hamas Isn't the IRA and the Middle East Isn't Northern Ireland

[Michael Weiss is the executive director of Just Journalism, a London-based think tank that monitors how Israel and Middle East issues are reported in the U.K. media.] With the resumption of Arab-Israeli direct talks comes the regurgitation of a minority view that these talks are destined to fail because Hamas is excluded.... Didn't the British government eventually sit down with Sinn Fein, the IRA's "political wing," after decades of murderous mayhem in Belfast and bombin

Tristan McConnell: Rwanda's Other Genocide

[Tristan McConnell, a journalist based in Nairobi, covers east and Horn of Africa as a correspondent for the Times of London and GlobalPost.] Paul Kagame, the country’s de facto leader since marching into Rwanda at the head of a Tutsi rebel army in the summer of 1994, calls himself a Rwandan. The words “Tutsi” and “Hutu” have been erased from identity cards and excised from open conversation. But still, everyone knows. There are laws against “divisionism” and “genocide