Roundup: Media's Take

Amy Davidson: A Beer with the General

[Amy Davidson is a senior editor at The New Yorker.]It’s always good to read the footnotes, especially when they’re written by Seymour Hersh. This week, President Obama asked the Senate to restore the rank of General John Lavelle, who had been demoted and forced to resign in 1972 for supposedly ordering the unauthorized bombing of targets in North Vietnam—bombings that violated the rules of engagement at the time. (A sergeant had written to his senator about being told to falsify

Andy Yee: China rising ... what would Mackinder do?

[Andy Yee is a writer, blogger and translator, who is based in Hong Kong. He blogs at Global Voices Online and China Geeks.] In a lecture in 1904, British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder predicted how the Russo-Japanese War would have its effects fed back to Europe. With its ambitions in the Far East thwarted, Russia renewed its interests in the Turkish straits and the Balkans, putting it into a collision course with the Austro-Hungarian empire and Germany. This further heightened

John Murray: The 'C' Should Stay in the YMCA

[Mr. Murray is headmaster of Fourth Presbyterian School in Potomac, Md.] Last month, the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) unveiled a new brand strategy to address America's needs, as well as a name change to "the Y." After surveying "a cross section of Americans to learn more about the most pressing issues and challenges facing their communities today," the Y had found that only 51% of Americans were optimistic about the future while 49% were not....

Peggy Noonan: America Is at Risk of Boiling Over

[Peggy Noonan is a columnist for the WSJ.] ...Our problems as a nation have been growing on us for a long time. Their future growth, and the implications of that growth, could be predicted. But there is one thing that is both new since 1994 and huge. It took hold and settled in after the crash of 2008, but its causes were not limited to the crash. The biggest political change in my lifetime is that Americans no longer assume that their children will have it better than

Michael Barone: Midterms: Route 66 for the GOP?

[Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner.] Everybody, even White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, agrees that the Republicans are going to pick up seats in the House and Senate elections this year. The disagreement is about how many. Some compare 2010 to 1994, when Republicans picked up 52 House seats and won majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time in four decades. That was a reaction to the big-government programs of t

Jeremy McCarter: James Baldwin is Still Angry After All These Years

When I play reverse time travel and imagine historical figures turning up today (what would Ben Franklin say about the iPad? Or Jane Austen about Jersey Shore?, etc.), James Baldwin’s name comes to mind. The essayist and novelist spent four decades picking at the scab of American race relations. He could be incendiary, but at his best he was sly, writing with a sharply ironic sensibility that gave him one of the most distinctive voices of the early postwar years. In part because he warned that t

E.J. Dionne: Is the GOP Shedding Its Birthright?

[E.J. Dionne is a columnist for the WaPo.] ...Nothing should make Republicans prouder than their party's role in passing what are known as the Civil War or Reconstruction amendments: the 13th, ending slavery; the 14th, guaranteeing equal protection under the law and establishing national standards for citizenship; and the 15th, protecting the right to vote. In those days, Democrats were the racial demagogues. Opponents of the 14th Amendment used racist arguments against

Yoani Sánchez: Fidel Castro, Present and Past

[Yoani Sánchez is a writer in Cuba. Her awards include the 2009 Maria Moors Cabot Prize. She blogs at www.desdecuba.com/generationy. This column was translated from Spanish by M.J. Porter. ] Fidel Castro's return to public life after a four-year absence provokes conflicting emotions here. His reappearance surprised a people awaiting, with growing despair, the reforms announced by his brother Raúl. While some weave fantasies around h

Edwin Black: Judge in Rubashkin Kosher Slaughterhouse Case Accused of Conflict-of-Interest

[Edwin Black is the author of IBM and the Holocaust and the forthcoming book The Farhud: The Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust]Chief District Judge Linda Reade both coordinated with prosecutors and acted as judge in the contentious conviction of Agriprocessors kosher slaughterhouse operator Sholom Rubashkin, according to internal federal documents and court filings obtained by this reporter. According to the documents, Judge Reade personally participated in many aspects of the r

Joe Klein: Iraq ... Requiem for a Profound Misadventure

[Joe Klein is TIME's political columnist and author of six books, most recently Politics Lost.] It is a matter of some relief that Barack Obama did not announce the end of major combat operations in Iraq under a banner that said "Mission Accomplished." He did it in a speech to the Disabled American Veterans (DAV), the most grave and sober audience imaginable. And appropriately so, after a war that should never have been fought, a war that by some estimates will cost $3 tri

Aleh Tsyvinski and Sergei Guriev: That ’70s Show in Russia

[Aleh Tsyvinski is professor of economics at Yale University, and Sergei Guriev is rector of the New Economic School in Moscow.] Can Russia escape the “resource curse” implied by high oil prices, or will it succumb to what we call a “70-80” scenario? That is the question confronting Russians today, and we fear that their fate will be the “70-80” scenario. If oil prices remain at $70 to $80 per barrel, Russia is likely to relive key features of the Brezhnev era of the 1970s and 1980s

Joe Conason: Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich Need a History Lesson

[Joe Conason writes for the New York Observer.] No recent controversy has so plainly revealed the hollow values of the American right than the effort to prevent the construction of a community center in Lower Manhattan because it will include a mosque. Arguments in opposition range from a professed concern for the sensitivities of the Sept. 11 victims’ families to a primitive battle cry against Islam—but what they all share is an arrant disregard for our country’s founding principle

Timothy Egan: In Fire Country

[Timothy Egan worked for The Times for 18 years – as Pacific Northwest correspondent and a national enterprise reporter. 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: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America.”] ...It’s early in the fire season,

Seumas Milne: The U.S. Isn't Leaving Iraq, It's Rebranding the Occupation

[Seumas Milne is a Guardian columnist and associate editor.] For most people in Britain and the US, Iraq is already history. Afghanistan has long since taken the lion's share of media attention, as the death toll of Nato troops rises inexorably. Controversy about Iraq is now almost entirely focused on the original decision to invade: what's happening there in 2010 barely registers. That will have been reinforced by Barack Obama's declaration this week that US combat tro

Aristotle Tziampiris: Athens Meets Israel

[Aristotle Tziampiris is an assistant professor of international relations at the University of Piraeus. The views represented herein are his own.] Despite recent economic challenges, Greece still has a constructive role to play—in the Middle East, acting as a bridge between Israel and Europe. Such efforts should be actively facilitated and supported by Washington. Today, the state of Israel is becoming ever more isolated: it faces an existential threat from a potential

Bernard Weiner: Come the Revolution: Are We There Yet?

[Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked for two decades as a writer/editor with the San Francisco Chronicle, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers.] It may well be time for a kind of revolution. For those too young to remember, or for those who believe history still has much to teach us, here's a primer before we get to our shared 2010 reality. Back in "The

James Doty: Obama-FDR Parallel Should Make Dems Shiver in '10

[James Doty is a writer and lawyer living in New York.] Comparisons between President Obama and Franklin Roosevelt often assume that Obama’s electoral fortunes will rise the closer he hews to FDR. A look at past election results, though, suggests that Obama is indeed heading down a path trod by FDR -- one that bodes ill for Democrats’ hopes this fall. Obama’s tenure has frequently been likened to the first few years of the FDR administration, but the better comparison i

Bill McKibben: We’re Hot as Hell and We’re Not Going to Take It Any More

[Bill McKibben is founder of 350.org and the author, most recently, of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. Earlier this year the Boston Globe called him “probably the country’s leading environmentalist” and Time described him as “the planet’s best green journalist.]Try to fit these facts together:* According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adm

Dorothy Rabinowitz: Liberal Piety and the Memory of 9/11

[Dorothy Rabinowitz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American conservative journalist and commentator.] Americans may have lacked for much in the course of their history, but never instruction in social values. The question today is whether Americans of any era have ever confronted the bombardment of hectoring and sermonizing now directed at those whose views are deemed insufficiently enlightened—an offense regularly followed by accusations that the offenders have violated the most sacre

Matthew Norman: Obama ... an enigma instead of a leader

[Press Awards Columnist of the Year 2008, the political commentator Matthew Norman also writes The Independent’s media diary.] In a race on which a small fortune rests, fellow compulsive gamblers will confirm, there is often a moment of doubt when your horse comes under pressure and for an agonising while, it's unclear whether what looked a magnificent beast in the paddock is the thoroughbred you took it to be or yet another arthritic mule. With Barack Obama, that momen