Roundup: Media's Take

Dariush Zahedi and Gokhan Bacik: Kemalism Is Dead, Long Live Kemalism

[DARIUSH ZAHEDI is a Research Fellow at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and currently teaches at Zirve University, in Turkey. GOKHAN BACIK is Associate Professor of International Relations at Zirve University and a contributor to Zaman and Today’s Zaman.] In both Turkey and the West, Kemalism -- the principle that Turkey should be secular and Western -- has been pronounced dead. The country is drifting away from both, the argument go

Andrew Blick: Proposal for UK Constitution Should Worry Historians

[Dr Andrew Blick is Senior Research Fellow, Democratic Audit, and co-author, with Stuart Wilks-Heeg, of Governing without majorities: Coming to terms with balanced Parliaments in UK politics.]The Cabinet Office is currently engaged in a process of defining the UK constitution. But its approach gives grounds for concern. First, there is a democratic deficiency in the closed nature of the process being followed. No public consultation has been held, with the Cabinet Office drawing in

Ron Rosenbaum: The Tea Party's Toxic Take on History

[Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.] I am a great believer in used-bookstore serendipity. Sometimes when you're thinking about how to express something, you find a perfect exemplification of it just by chance in the musty stacks of such an emporium. Here's a remarkable example. I'd been trying to find a way to write about Tea Party ideology, and in particular about the fraudulent history and distorted language it indulges in. Listen to Tea Par

Thomas Sowell: Why Was It Necessary to Pay Certain Slaves?

[Thomas Sowell is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.] When I first began to study the history of slavery around the world, many years ago, one of the oddities that puzzled me was the practice of paying certain slaves, which existed in ancient Rome and in America’s antebellum South, among other places. In both places, slave owners or their overseers whipped slaves to force them to work, and in neither place was whipping a slave literally to death likely to bring an

Eric Alterman: Bill Moyers Retires

[Eric Alterman is a Distinguished Professor of English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and Professor of Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.] Nearly twenty years ago, I spoke to Edward R. Murrow's top producer, Fred Friendly, who told me he thought of Bill Moyers as "the Murrow of our time...the broadcaster who most upholds his mantle." But while Murrow remains television journalism's most admired historical figure, it's all but inarguable

Pete du Pont: The VAT Would be Horrible for America

[Pete du Pont is the former governor of Delaware.] A cultural battle is under way in America, a battle between, in columnist Michael Barone's, words, "the culture of dependence and the culture of independence." The culture of dependence is the belief by American liberalism that government can make better decisions for people than people can make for themselves. The U.S. has now created the largest government spending increases, takeovers, and regulation expans

Zachary Karabell: Obama Needs a Reset Button on His Own Foreign-Policy Machine

[Zachary Karabell is an author and money manager. His most recent book is Superfusion; How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World's Prosperity Depends On It. He blogs at www.rivertwice.com.] For the past 18 months, foreign policy has been a distinctly secondary concern for U.S. President Barack Obama, in spite of still-hot wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, nuclear diplomacy with Russia, and simmering crises in Iran and North Korea.

Kathleen Parker: A Library for Our First President

[Kathleen Parker writes a column for the Washington Post.] It was fitting that the buzz around George Washington's homestead recently was about the first president's overdue library books, just as the estate's guardians were plotting a new presidential library in the Founding Father's name. It seems that the man who could not tell a lie failed to return a couple of volumes that were due on Nov. 2, 1789. That comes to more than 220 years late, or about $300,000 in fines.

Mary Dejevsky: Are Britons the next 'new' Europeans?

[Mary Dejevsky is the chief editorial writer and a columnist at The Independent.] New Europe was the neat formula coined by Donald Rumsfeld in aid of the Bush administration's war effort. The "old Europeans" disliked and derided it, as it suggested that Europe was more divided over the Iraq invasion than it actually was. But they could never deny its grain of truth. There was indeed a split between those who signed up to the Bush crusade for democracy in foreign parts – no

Victor Erofeyev: The Past, the Present and the Future of Katyn

[Victor Erofeyev is a Russian writer and television host. Translated from the Russian by the International Herald Tribune.] What will relations between Russians and Poles be like after this disaster? In their response to the tragic air crash that killed dozens of members of Poland’s military and political elite, it was as if the two nations regained their sight and saw each other, for once, as people capable of suffering and compassion. There was a sea of flowers and candles in fron

Christopher L. Eisgruber: Justice Stevens Will Not Be Easily Replaced

[Christopher L. Eisgruber is provost of Princeton University and the author of "The Next Justice: Repairing the Supreme Court Appointments Process." He clerked for Justice John Paul Stevens in 1989 and 1990.] President Obama has said that he will seek to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens with someone who has "similar qualities." If the president is looking for another brilliant lawyer to join the court's liberal wing, he might

Steve Kornacki: The GOP's Changing Definition of "Moderate"

[Steve Kornacki is the news editor for Salon.] Since Barack Obama's inauguration, the right wing of the Republican Party has mobilized against, among others, Arlen Specter, John McCain, Bob Bennett and Charlie Crist. The result: Specter left the GOP over a year ago; McCain is facing a grave primary challenge; Bennett may need luck just to make it to a primary in Utah; and Crist is now poised to abandon his GOP primary campaign and run as an independent....

Gerald P. O'Driscoll Jr.: An Economy of Liars

[Mr. O'Driscoll is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He has been a vice president at Citigroup and a vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.] Free markets depend on truth telling. Prices must reflect the valuations of consumers; interest rates must be reliable guides to entrepreneurs allocating capital across time; and a firm's accounts must reflect the true value of the business. Rather than truth telling, we are becoming an economy of liars. The cause is straigh

Jonah Goldberg: Tea Parties a Delayed Bush Backlash

[Jonah Goldberg is an editor for the National Review and writes a column for the LA Times.] I attended the Cincinnati Tax Day Tea Party rally as a speaker. But it was more interesting to be an observer. First, here's what I didn't see. I didn't see a single racist or bigoted sign or hear a single such comment. Nor did I see any evidence of "homegrown fascism." Though in fairness, such things are often in the eye of the beholder, now that dissent has gone from

Michael Rubin: Iran ... The Case for “Regime Change”

[Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, lectures at the Naval Postgraduate School and Johns Hopkins University.] What to do about Iran, especially now that the international community can no longer deny the nuclear ambitions of the theocratic state that has implicitly promised to destroy Israel? It appears that hopes for a self-generated revolution from below against the Islamic Republic have been dashed for now: the regime succeeded in containing ma

Christopher L. Eisgruber: Justice Stevens will not be easily replaced

[Christopher L. Eisgruber is provost of Princeton University and the author of "The Next Justice: Repairing the Supreme Court Appointments Process." He clerked for Justice John Paul Stevens in 1989 and 1990.] President Obama has said that he will seek to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens with someone who has "similar qualities." If the president is looking for another brilliant lawyer to join the court's liberal wing, he might

Glenn Greenwald: Diane Wood Would Make an Excellent Justice

[Glenn Greenwald is an attorney and a contributor to Salon.com.] If one were to analogize the search for Justice Stevens' replacement to the recently concluded health care debate, Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Diane Wood would be the public option. Just as the truly left-wing health care approach (a single-payer system) was eliminated from consideration before the process even began, so, too, have the truly left-wing candidates to replace Justice Stevens (Pam Karlan, Harol

Aaron David Miller: The False Religion of Mideast Peace

[Aaron David Miller served as an advisor on the Middle East to Republican and Democratic secretaries of state. He is currently a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the author of The Much Too Promised Land: America's Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace.] On October 18, 1991, against long odds and in front of an incredulous press corps, U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Soviet Foreign Minister Boris Pankin announced that Ar

Christian Science Monitor: Take a Cue from Europe and Invest in Surface Infrastructure

The cost to the airline industry of the Iceland volcano has now surpassed that of 9/11, according to the group that represents the world’s air carriers. But unlike in the United States, air passengers stranded in Europe have more transportation options with highly interconnected and efficient trains, buses, and ferries.... Over the decades, the Europeans have worked steadily at building this extensive and generally reliable surface network – not without grumbling. Back

Barbara Crossette: Benazir Bhutto's Death Still Unresolved

[Barbara Crossette, United Nations correspondent for The Nation, is a former New York Times correspondent and bureau chief in Asia and at the UN.] After an eight-month investigation by a United Nations-appointed commission into the assassination in December 2007 of Benazir Bhutto as she campaigned to return to the leadership of Pakistan, the world is no closer to knowing what forces-- militant Islamists, official plotters or even personal enemies--were to blame for her death.