Roundup: Media's Take

Richard Wolffe: Barack Obama confronts America over the racial divide

[Richard Wolffe is the author of Renegade: the making of Barack Obama] The interview was over and Barack Obama was slumped in a chair in his conference room, under a framed copy of some minor legislation of which he had been the author. After an hour of talking about race and politics, his handler wrapped up the conversation and suggested it was time to leave. Then Mr Obama asked me to turn the audio recorder back on. He had something more to say. His staffer looked con

Kathy Shaidle: Media Matters' Lie of the Day: "Right-Wingers" Killed Kennedy — and They're Back

Imagine writing hundreds of words about the death of Abraham Lincoln, without mentioning the name of his assassin. Or writing about 9/11 but putting the word “hijackers” in scare quotes… (Oh wait: if you endorse that kind of writing, you might actually earn yourself a short lived White House czarship. So scratch that…) Last night I stumbled upon a post at Media Matters — or, as I like to call it, the George Soros Steno Pool. Media Matters is a leftwing “media watchdog”

Susannah Kopecky: The Character Assassination of John Adams

Editor’s note: See NewsReal’s previous posts on the John Adams Project here, here, here,  and here.One would hope that a group called the John Adams Project would in som

WSJ Editorial: Irving Kristol, The man who put 'neo' into conservatism.

Perhaps the greatest gift of the gifted Irving Kristol, who died yesterday at 89, was prescience. This does not mean predicting the future. Prescience, a more useful gift, is seeing the direction in which the future is headed. In his early years, Kristol saw that the Marxism which fascinated him and many others at mid-century had no future, and he embraced the ideals of the West, holding them tight for a lifetime. Later as a Democrat, he saw that many of the social welfare policies

NYT Book Review: Tips for Obama from LBJ

President Obama faces perhaps the ultimate presidential test in the weeks ahead: maneuvering a big health care bill through a fractious Congress. For tips on how to manage it, there’s no better advisor than Lyndon B. Johnson, who won Medicare over fierce opposition in 1965. In their new book, “The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office,” David Blumenthal, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and James Morone, a political science professor at Brown University, revi

Peter Boone and Simon Johnson: The Recession Is Over — for Now

[Peter Boone is the chairman of Effective Intervention, a British charity, and a research associate at the London School of Economics’ Center for Economic Performance. Simon Johnson is a professor at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management and a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.] SPEAKING at the Brookings Institution last week, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, remarked that the recession in the United States is “very likely over.” H

Vincent Rossmeier: Is the Internet melting our brains? An Interview with Dennis Baron

By now the arguments are familiar: Facebook is ruining our social relationships; Google is making us dumber; texting is destroying the English language as we know it. We're facing a crisis, one that could very well corrode the way humans have communicated since we first evolved from apes. What we need, so say these proud Luddites, is to turn our backs on technology and embrace not the keyboard, but the pencil. Such sentiments, in the opinion of Dennis Baron, are nostalgic, uninform

Gerald Posner: How Obama Flubbed His Missile Message

[Gerald Posner is The Daily Beast's chief investigative reporter. He's the award-winning author of 10 investigative nonfiction bestsellers, ranging from political assassinations, to Nazi war criminals, to 9/11, to terrorism. His latest book, Miami Babylon: Crime, Wealth and Power—A Dispatch from the Beach, will be published in October.] President Obama’s decision Thursday to scrap the Bush administration’s missile-defense umbrella for Europe is being bemoaned by Republicans at home

Arnaud de Borchgrave: Middle East tunnel vision

[Arnaud de Borchgrave is UPI's Editor at Large] The only bank this Rothschild ever owned was the West Bank. Danny Rothschild, an Israeli general and onetime coordinator of all government activities in the occupied territories, and now one of 1,200 former intelligence officers in Israel's Council for Peace and Security, says the Palestinians should be allowed to have their capital in Arab East Jerusalem. The very thought of allowing Palestinians to set up a government where 200,000 I

Eric Boehlert: A President was killed the last time right-wing hatred ran wild like this

[Eric Boehlert is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America. ] That being John F. Kennedy, who was gunned down in Dallas, of course. I've been thinking a lot of Kennedy and Dallas as I've watched the increasingly violent rhetorical attacks on Obama be unfurled. As Americans yank their kids of class in order to save them from being exposed to the President of the United States who only wanted to urge them to excel in the classroom. And as unvarnished hate and name-cal

Claude Cartaginese: Obama to Russia: We Surrender!

[Claude Cartaginese writes for Newsreal] On Sept. 17, 1939, Soviet troops invaded Poland. In 1968 they invaded the Czech Republic (then part of Czechoslovakia). In both countries (as well as in most of the other countries in Eastern Europe that fell under Soviet domination), the Russians imposed brutal Marxist dictatorships. When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, many of those countries finally got an opportunity to taste freedom for the first time in decades. In

H.D.S. Greenway: Regional Divides

[HDS Greenway leads the Opinion and nalysis section for GlobalPost. He has been a journalist for 50 years and recently retired from the Boston Globe after a distinguished career.] When Representative Addison Graves Wilson of South Carolina, known to his colleagues and constituents as Joe, yelled “you lie” at President Obama during his address to Congress, it started a national debate on public civility and the coarsening of American culture. Talk show after talk show raised the iss

David Horowitz: Why Israel is the Victim and the The Arabs Are the Indefensible Aggressors In The Middle East

During the Gulf War, Israel was America’s staunch ally while Arafat and the Palestinians openly supported the aggressor, Saddam Hussein. Yet the next two U.S. Governments – Republican and Democrat alike – strove for even-handed “neutrality” in the conflict in the Middle East, and pressured Israel into a suicidal “peace process” with a foe dedicated to its destruction. It is only since September 11 that the United States has been willing to recognize Arafat as an enemy of peace and not a viable n

Ralph Peters: Obama Feeds U.S. Allies to the Russian Bear

[Ralph Peters has been a Post Opinion columnist since 2002.] Still determined to "push the reset button with Russia," President Obama hit the delete key on our allies in Eastern Europe. Obama's decision to abandon missile defense as we know it, cutting the throats of Poland and the Czech Republic, handed Moscow's hard-liners their biggest win since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russian strongman Vladimir Putin insisted all along that we'd ne

Manuel Pastor: Putting Poverty in Its Place

[Manuel Pastor is professor of geography at the University of Southern California and co-author of This Could Be the Start of Something Big: How Social Movements for Regional Equity are Reshaping Metropolitan America.] The Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ) has given new meaning to the adage that failure is an orphan but success has a thousand parents. The zone, a public-private partnership founded and led by the charismatic Geoffrey Canada, has produced significant gains in student achie

BBC Editorial and Opinions: Is it OK to collect Nazi memorabilia?

Marc Garlasco is not the first person to get into trouble for an interest in an aspect of the Third Reich. Two years ago Bryan Ferry was pilloried for expressing admiration for the films of Leni Riefenstahl and the buildings of Albert Speer and other aspects of iconography. And in 1999, then GQ editor James Brown had to resign after Rommel and the Nazis were referred to in a list of the century's 200 most stylish men. But on both sides of the Atlantic there is a burgeon

David Silver: A Short History of Fast Times on Wall Street

[David Silver, a former senior staff lawyer at the Securities and Exchange Commission, was the president of the Investment Company Institute, a trade association for mutual funds, from 1977 to 1991.] Many fear that new technology is giving some investors unfair access to stock market information. Supercomputers allow certain traders to profit by executing trades in milliseconds, a practice known as high-frequency trading. These traders also use a technique called flash orders that g

Samir Ghattas: Let's try something else (on Israel and Palestine)

[Samir Ghattas is director of the Maqdis Centre for Political Studies, in Gaza.] In three months time, we'll mark the anniversary of UN Resolution 181 of 1947, which provided for the partitioning of Palestine into two states, a Jewish one and an Arab one, with Jerusalem being an international zone. David Ben-Gurion agreed to Resolution 181 although it gave him 56 per cent of historic Palestine on which he had hoped to establish the Jewish state. The area given to the J

Iain Martin: Cold War Lessons Lost on Obama?

[Iain Martin is Deputy Editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe. He writes on politics.] The U.S. administration’s abandonment of the missile shield programme today suggests that nobody in the administration has examined the lessons of the Cold War in Europe in any detail. Or if they have, they have been studying the 1970s and drawn precisely the wrong conclusions. They should read on into the 1980s to discover that concessions are only worth making from a position of strength and i

Ben Johnson: Jimmy Carter's Record on Race

As Jimmy Carter portrays conservatives as violent racists, it’s worth remembering Carter’s own history of racial demagoguery. Carter campaigned for governor of Georgia as a self-proclaimed “redneck,” in an era when that word had pronounced racial connotations. His campaign distributed a photo of his gubernatorial opponent Carl Sanders being embraced by black basketball players to a Ku Klux Klan rally. Carter pledged to invite Alabama’s infamous segregationist governor George Wallace to Georgia i