Roundup: Media's Take

Fred Kaplan: The White House's New Afghanistan Plan? Be Nice to Hamid Karzai

[Fred Kaplan is a journalist and contributor to Slate magazine. His "War Stories" column covers international relations and US foreign policy.] Hamid Karzai is in Washington for a four-day love fest designed to show the world that, despite the occasional quarrel, the state of the Afghan-American partnership is sound. But not quite beneath the surface, discordant noises are all too evident. Take the May 10 White House press conference, featuring the commander o

Mike Rogers: Fighting terror like it's 1993

[Rep. Mike Rogers (Mich.) is the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee's Terrorism Subcommittee and a former FBI special agent.] NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly noted last week that the investigation of the Times Square bombing attempt was in some ways similar to the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. He was talking about the police work that nabbed Faisal Shahzad -- but the comment also highlighted the similarity of our government's response then and now.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: The Mother of Hung Parliaments?

[Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the author of “The Strange Death of Tory England” and “Yo, Blair!”] A reliable rule in politics is that whenever something is decried as an unprecedented innovation, you can be sure that this is a tradition with many precedents. The British have just experienced a strange election campaign, and then a convulsive few days since Thursday when the votes were cast. But, as ever, there is little new under the sun. For the first time since

Gabriel Winant: What's with Conservatives' Fetish for the Founding Fathers?

[Gabriel Winant is a freelance writer and graduate student, currently living in the United Kingdom.] It's pretty revealing that, when casting about for a plan to oppose Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, the Republican National Committee decided to accuse her of not loving the Constitution enough. The item that the RNC thought was so dynamite? Kagan had quoted her mentor, Justice Thurgood Marshall, on the subject of the "defective" Constitution -- that is, the document tha

Michael Lind: Will the Great Recession Lead to World War IV?

[Michael Lind is policy director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and author of "The American Way of Strategy."] ...To those accustomed to thinking of the left-right spectrum in economic terms, the success of the recession-era right might seem peculiar. After all, you would think that the collapse of the deregulated financial system that helped cause the great recession would have discredited the market-worshiping right. And you would think that

David Swanson: Afghan Escalation Funding -- More War, Fewer Jobs, Poor Excuses

[David Swanson is the author of Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union and blogs at his website, War Is a Crime. To catch Timothy MacBain's TomCast audio interview with Swanson on the media, Congress, and the administration's latest request for escalation funding, click

Bernard Weiner: Get Out of Afghanistan Now

[Bernard Weiner, Ph.D., has taught government & international relations at universities in California and Washington, worked as a writer/editor for the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org). To comment: crisispapers@hotmail.com.] Many of us progressives now in our 60s and 70s spent years of our young

Bret Stephens: What Is Happening to Turkey?

[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.] Last week I asked Bernard Lewis where he thought Turkey might be going. The dean of Middle East historians speculated that in a decade the secular republic founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk might more closely resemble the Islamic Republic of Iran—even as Iran transformed itself into a secular republic. Reading the news about Turkey from afar, it's easy to see what Prof. Lewis means. S

Richard Lourie: The Next Round of the Great Game

[Richard Lourie is author of “The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin” and “Sakharov: A Biography.”] The April uprising in Kyrgyzstan illuminates the latest phase of the Great Game. The game’s initial phase ran from 1807, when Napoleon proposed to Tsar Alexander to invade British India, until 1907, when tsarist Russia and imperial Britain sat down and — like civilized Europeans — divided spheres of interest, some of which ran right through countries like Iran.

Erwin Chemerinsky: Even Terrorism Suspects Have Rights

[Erwin Chemerinsky is dean of the UC Irvine School of Law.] Last week, following the attempted bombing in Times Square, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) proposed that those aiding foreign terrorist activity should be stripped of their citizenship. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton quickly agreed, with a few reservations, that the idea had merits. On Sunday, Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. said on morning news shows that

Linda Greenhouse: Just Answer the Question, Ms. Kagan

[Linda Greenhouse, the winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The New York Times from 1978 to 2008. She teaches at Yale Law School and is the author of a biography of Justice Harry A. Blackmun, “Becoming Justice Blackmun.”] AMONG its other virtues, the nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court is an opportunity to rescue the confirmation process from the “vapid and hollow charade” that it has become. The words in quot

David Brooks: The Proliferation of "Organization Kids"

[David Brooks is a columnist for the NYT.] About a decade ago, one began to notice a profusion of Organization Kids at elite college campuses. These were bright students who had been formed by the meritocratic system placed in front of them. They had great grades, perfect teacher recommendations, broad extracurricular interests, admirable self-confidence and winning personalities. If they had any flaw, it was that they often had a professional and strategic attitude to

Anne Applebaum: Greece and the New Colonialism

[Anne Applebaum is a columnist for the Washington Post and Slate.] For the time being, the markets have been pacified. For the moment, the riots in Athens have subsided. Only "hundreds" of demonstrators came out over the weekend, fewer than the 50,000 who killed three people during a violent petrol-bomb attack on a bank last week. But this temporary truce in Greece has been bought at a high price—by which I don't just mean that it was expensive. Here in front

Norman Solomon: Kagan in Context: Shafting Progressive Values

[Norman Solomon is co-chair of the national Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign, launched by Progressive Democrats of America. He is the author of a dozen books including"War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." For more information, go to: www.normansolomon.com.]If President Obama has his way, Elena Kagan will replace John Paul Stevens - and the Supreme Court will move rightward. The nomination is very disturbing, especially because it's part of a pattern.

Andrew Cohen: Elena Kagan and John Roberts: Yin and Yang or Two of a Kind?

[Andrew Cohen is a two-time Edward R. Murrow Award-winner and legal editor and chief network legal analyst and commentator for CBS News Radio and its hundreds of television and radio affiliates around the country.] They both attended and excelled at Harvard Law School. They both worked for their respective patron/presidents at the Office of the White House Counsel. He clerked for his predecessor, the late chief justice of the United States, before working in the solicitor general's

Gabriel Winant: Smart Money Says Kagan Will be Confirmed, with Some Grumbling

[Gabriel Winant is a freelance writer and graduate student, currently living in the United Kingdom.] So, now that President Obama has nominated Solicitor General Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court, at least we know the main thing we'll be arguing about for the next few months. But it's not entirely clear just what that argument will be about, or what shape it will take. Thanks to a nominee who seems to have purposefully kept herself something of a blank slate, at this stage, we're ju

Paul Campos: Is Elena Kagan the Next Harriet Miers?

[Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado at Boulder.] As the rumblings become louder that President Obama is going to choose U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan as our next Supreme Court justice, somebody needs to ask a rather impolitic question: How, precisely, is Kagan's prospective nomination different from George W. Bush's ill-fated attempt to put Harriet Miers on the nation's highest court? On its face, the question seems absurd. Five years a

Ilya Somin: Preliminary Reflections on the Kagan Nomination

[Ilya Somin is an Associate Professor at George Mason University School of Law. His research focuses on constitutional law, property law, and the study of popular political participation and its implications for constitutional democracy.] I don’t have a lot to say about Obama’s nomination of Elena Kagan that can’t be said better by others. Unlike now-Justice Sotomayor, she does not have an extensive record on issues that are within my core areas of expertise. I do, however, want to

John Nichols: Will Kagan Take Up Stevens's Fight for Checks on Executive Power?

[John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written the Beat since 1999. His posts have been circulated internationally, quoted in numerous books and mentioned in debates on the floor of Congress.] When President Obama taps Solicitor General Elena Kagan as his nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens this morning, he will be will making a cautious choice that runs the risk, in the words for former National Lawyers Guild president Marjorie Cohn "

Tom Goldstein: The Ten Biggest Issues Elena Kagan Will Face

[Tom Goldstein is a partner at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, and lecturer at Stanford and Harvard Law Schools. He is the founder of SCOTUSblog, where this piece was originally posted.] Here is how I think the nomination process is likely to play out. I divide it into process and substance. First, the process: Note the relationship between Monday’s announcement and the Senate calendar. There are seven weeks between Monday and June 28. Six to seven weeks is traditio