Roundup: Media's Take

David E. Sanger and William J. Broad: New Missile Shield Strategy Scales Back Reagan's Vision

[David E. Sanger is the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times. William J. Broad is an author and a senior writer at The New York Times.] The new plan that President Obama laid out for a missile shield against Iran on Thursday turns Ronald Reagan’s vision of a Star Wars system on its head: Rather than focusing first on protecting the continental United States, it shifts the immediate effort to defending Europe and the Middle East. It is a long way from t

Tom Engelhardt: Is America Hooked on War?

[Tom Engelhardt runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture and coeditor of History Wars, the Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past.] "War is peace" was one of the memorable slogans on the facade of the Ministry of Truth, Minitrue in "Newspeak," the language invented by George Orwell in 1948 for his dystopian novel 1984. Some 60 years later, a quarter-century after Orwell's imagined future bit the dust,

Gene Lyons: Obama gets the Clinton treatment

[Gene Lyons is a political columnist and co-author with Joe Conason of The Hunting of the President: The 10 Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton, a documentary book published in 2000, with a supporting film.] From a political standpoint, the worst thing about blaming President Obama's perceived difficulties on racism is that there's not a damn thing anybody can do about it. Determined bigots can't be shamed, while many see invoking race as more an excuse than an explana

Richard Dreyfuss: We must resume teaching civics

[Dreyfuss, an actor, lives in Encinitas.] I have tried for years to find those words that could make you feel the dread I feel about one fact of American life: we do not teach civics in our public schools anymore. When you really think about that sentence, you begin to understand the selfishness, greed, denial, decay and the belief that the people are the audience, not the performance of America. America is a miracle and the whole world knows it except Ame

Salam Al-Marayati: U.S. Jews, Muslims must look forward, not back

[Salam Al-Marayati is the co-founder and executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.] LOS ANGELES (JTA) -- In the 25 years I have served as a leader in the Muslim American community, I have watched and sometimes participated as the pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian camps have put all their energy into trying to convert each other to their own ways of thinking -- ideologically, not theologically. The conclusion I have reached is that agreement cannot and should

Max Boot: The Goldstone Report

After reading the Goldstone Report on human-rights abuses committed during the Gaza War (December 27, 2008–January 19, 2009), all I can say is, it’s a good thing that the United Nations wasn’t around during World War II. I can just imagine its producing a supposedly evenhanded report that condemned the Nazis for “grave” abuses such as incinerating Jews, while also condemning the

Alexander Zaitchik: Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck's life

On Saturday, I spent the afternoon with America's new breed of angry conservative. Up to 75,000 protesters had gathered in Washington on Sept. 12, the day after the eighth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, sporting the now familiar tea-bagger accoutrements of "Don't Tread on Me" T-shirts, Revolutionary War outfits and Obama-the-Joker placards. The male-skewing, nearly all-white throng had come to denounce the president and what they believe is his communist-fascist agenda.

Bruce Judson: Economic Inequality: The Wall Street Journal Is Just Wrong

[Bruce Judson is a Senior Faculty Fellow at the Yale School of Management. He is the author of"It Could Happen Here: America on the Brink" which will be released by HarperCollins in October 2009.] For anyone with even a passing familiarity with issues associated with economic inequality, The Wall Street Journal front page story last week was shocking. It's use of bad data was a misuse of this important forum. In effect, the article says that economic inequality was

Michael Crowley: Why is Obama repeating Bush's Iraq mistakes...in Afghanistan?

[Michael Crowley is a journalist and political commentator for The New Republic.] With the Iraq war spinning out of control in mid-2005, retired Marine General James L. Jones spoke with his old friend Peter Pace, the incoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Jones, who is now Barack Obama's national security advisor, had been sounded out for the Joint Chiefs job but demurred. One reason: He felt that civilian leaders in Washington were warping the military planning process. &q

Sakurai Kunitoshi with an introduction by Gavan McCormack: The Guam Treaty as a Modern "Disposal" of the Ryukyus

[Sakurai Kunitoshi is President of Okinawa University in Naha, a well-known scholar in the field of environmental studies, author, inter alia, of Chikyu bunmei no jouken (The Conditions for a Global Civilization), with Sawa Takamitsu, Iwanami Shoten, 1995. This article is based on his testimony on 8 April 2009 as expert witness to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Japanese House of Representatives examining the Guam Treaty. It was published in Japanese as “Arata na Ryukyu shobun

Steven Hill: Senate "Minority Rule" Is the Disease, Not the Cure, for Health Care Reform

The United States is now the last advanced nation that does not have universal health care. So it's not just the senators' credibility on the line if they fail to provide to all Americans a similar level of health care benefits that they themselves enjoy as senators. It's the very democratic legitimacy of the body in which they serve. The United States is now the last advanced nation that does not have universal health care. So it's not just the senators' credibility on the line if

David Horowitz: The Shadow Party

In understanding how far the Democratic Party has moved from its center of gravity in an earlier generation, it is salutary to remember that Democrats were once known as the more international and hawkish of the two political parties. Until the late 1960s, Democrat presidents were consistently more likely than Republicans to flex America’s military might abroad. Democrat administrations led America into both World Wars. Democrat president Harry Truman promulgated the Truman Doctrine which like

Lee Siegel: Is Obama the New Nixon?

[Lee Siegel has written about culture and politics and is the author of three books: Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination; Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television; and, most recently, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.] Let’s all calm down. The Tea Party Express rally in Washington wasn’t the beginning of some political apocalypse that is going to plunge the country into civil war. If anything, its noisiness was inve

Sam Ferguson: Beating Up Thurgood Marshall

[Sam Ferguson is a Yale Law School Robina international human rights fellow.] Based on the tenor of the argument yesterday at the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. FEC, the Supreme Court is poised to overrule the 1990 decision in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce. If they do, corporations will be allowed to use general treasury funds to run advertisements and campaign on behalf of federal candidates. Corporate cash will flood our elections and special interests will be enshri

Harvey Wasserman: Will the Corporate Supremes now dance on democracy's corpse?

[Free Press Senior Editor and "Superpower of Peace" columnist Harvey Wasserman is also senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service. He is author or co-author of a dozen books, including SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030 and HARVEY WASSERMAN'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.] The Four Courtsmen of the Apocalypse are poised to finally bury American democracy in corporate money. The most powerful institution in human hi

Heidi Przybyla: Socialism Threat Has Long History for Health-Care Overhaul Foes

[Heidi Przybyla is a reporter for Bloomberg] Sept. 14 (Bloomberg) -- The debate is about health care. The threat is of a march toward “socialism.” The words come from a famous voice. Not Sarah Palin in 2009. It was Ronald Reagan in 1961. “From here, it’s a short step to all the rest of socialism,” Reagan, then an actor, warned in a 1961 record sponsored by the American Medical Association after President John F. Kennedy created a commission that laid the

James Carroll: Obama Must End 'Pottery Barn' Policy

[James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe.] President Obama's speech to Congress last week concluded on a moving and uplifting note, an evocation of the late Senator Kennedy’s appeal to the nation’s character and moral purpose as the ground of change. All at once, with his forceful display of leadership, the president had made the transformation of American society, beginning with health care reform, seem possible. But, like a dark storm cloud edging in from the horizon

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: We abandon the teaching of history at our peril (UK)

[Yasmin Alibhai-Brown writes a weekly column in the Independent.] History may soon become extinct in our secondary schools, go the way of domestic science and handwriting classes, only less missed and less lamented than either. A major new study by the Historical Association and teacher training experts found that three out of 10 comprehensives no longer bother to teach the subject, which isn't part of the core curriculum after the age of 13. Only 30 per cent do GCSE history.

Chip Ward: The End of Welfare Water and the Drying of the West

[Chip Ward told of his adventures as a grassroots organizer of campaigns to make polluters accountable in Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West. He is a TomDispatch.com regular and a former library administrator who now lives next to Capitol Reef National Park.] Pink snow is turning red in Colorado. Here on the Great American Desert -- specifically Utah's slickrock portion of it where I live -- hot 'n' dry means dust. When frequent high winds sweep across our increasingly

Mike Kohr: Tmes Marches On, But Not Always Forward

[Kohr is a Township Trustee and active in local politics and has for the last 14 years volunteered time lecturing at local schools on Native American history and culture.] In 1941, shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor two brothers, related to six US presidents, enlisted in the Army. In 1944, these brothers, Stanley and Ralph Dunham went ashore at Normandy and served their Nation fighting the Nazi's across France, Italy and Germany. Another young American, S