Roundup: Media's Take

Brent Baker: NBC Exploits Kennedy to Push ObamaCare: 'National Sorrow Has Created Political Momentum Before'

[Brent Baker is Vice President for Research and Publications at the Media Research Center.] Proffering how “national sorrow has created political momentum before,” Wednesday's NBC Nightly News devoted a story to the hope of Democrats that Senator Ted Kennedy's passing will propel ObamaCare to victory. Noting how Kennedy was “passionate” about more government in health care, from Hyannis anchor Brian Williams proposed “ironically, the fact that he did not live long enough to see a

Carol Peasley: The Unfinished Agenda on Women's Equality Day

[Carol Peasley is the President and CEO of the Centre for Development and Population Activities (CEDPA). She is a recognized expert in international development, having served at senior levels within the U.S. government including as Counselor to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).] Eighty-nine years ago today the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, finally giving women full voting rights. Thanks to Congresswoman Bella Abzug, since the early 1970s

Ronald Brownstein: Why Ted Kennedy Was the Last of His Kind

Edward M. Kennedy was romantically described as the last lion, but it might be more accurate to think of him as a river. Especially earlier in his long career, he could be tumultuous and overflow his banks, both politically and in his personal life. But mostly he was steady, forceful, and above all persistent. Particularly in the three decades after his failed 1980 presidential bid, Kennedy didn’t so much charge into political obstacles as patiently wear them down. He pressed on the Senate the w

Sam Stein: Dodd hopes "Maybe Teddy's Passing" Will Spur GOP To Act On Health Care

Senator Ted Kennedy's closest friend and ally in the Senate urged Republican lawmakers on Wednesday to take a renewed and sincere interest in passing health care legislation in light of Kennedy's death. A sorrowful Senator Chris Dodd, (D-Conn.) who is recovering from cancer himself, said that Kennedy's loss would have "tremendous" reverberations throughout the Senate. He said he hoped that one consequence would be to remind lawmakers that work needs to be done to fulfill K

Humberto Fontova: Looking the Other Way on Castro

[Humberto Fontova is the author of 'Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him.' Visit www.hfontova.com] When longtime CBS News producer Don Hewitt passed away last week, media accounts teemed with tributes to the “legendary” newsman, fondly recalling a visionary who “changed television news.” Hewitt may have been a historic figure, but his media career is not without blemish. Among the less admirable legac

Norman Solomon: The Afghanistan Gap: Press vs. Public

[Norman Solomon is the author of many books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” which has been adapted into a documentary film. For more information, go to: www.normansolomon.com] This month, a lot of media stories have compared President Johnson’s war in Vietnam and President Obama’s war in Afghanistan. The comparisons are often valid, but a key parallel rarely gets mentioned -- the media’s insi

Jacob Heilbrunn: Darth Cheney

[Jacob Heilbrunn is a senior editor at The National Interest.] Poor President Obama. He campaigned to put an end to the Bush-Cheney era. Instead, he may be about to relive it. Attorney General Eric Holder says he has no choice but to investigate the conduct of CIA officials who interrogated so-called HVDs—high-value detainees—and has appointed John Durham as the Justice Department prosecutor. Actually, Holder does have a choice and he’s taken the wrong path. The likelih

Dean Baker: Kennedy's Quick Win for Social Security

[Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. He is the author of Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy. He also has a blog on the American Prospect, "Beat the Press", where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues.] I first met Ted Kennedy in the fall of 1995. The context was truly bizarre. Alan Greenspan had testified to the Senate Finance Committee in the fall of 1994 that the

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.: Does the World Still Need the Swiss?

[Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. is a journalist, editorial writer and member of the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board.] Harry Lime gave a shout-out to the cuckoo clock but he might have mentioned Switzerland’s other contribution to global culture, the secret numbered bank account, fortified by a 1934 law that made it a crime to betray an account holder. We do mean "contribution." By accident or design, customers at the time included German Jews hiding their money f

Boris Nemtsov: War Clouds in the Caucasus

[Mr. Nemtsov was deputy prime minister of Russia (1997-1998) and is a leader of the Solidarity opposition movement.] One of the biggest myths perpetrated by Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine is that during his 10-year rule over Russia, the former president and current prime minister succeeded in “pacifying” the North Caucasus. Nothing could be further from the truth. What we are witnessing today is the start of the third Caucasus war in 15 years, following the two Chechen wars of

Jonathan Freedland: Peace plans come and go. Obama may have to try a wholly new approach

[Jonathan Freedland is the Guardian's policy editor and has been a columnist for the paper since 1997. He served for four years as the Guardian's Washington correspondent and US affairs remain a keen interest, along with British politics and the Middle East.] Surely the heart should give a cheer at the hints and signals that suggest Barack Obama will stand before the world next month, either at the UN general assembly or the G20 in Pittsburgh, and launch his own bid for Middle East

Marc Thiessen: Obama Versus the CIA

[Mr. Thiessen served in senior positions in the Pentagon and White House, most recently as chief speechwriter to President George W. Bush. He is writing a book on the CIA interrogation program to be published by Regnery in 2010.] On Monday the Obama administration released a 2004 CIA inspector general's report on the agency's detention and interrogation program. Yesterday, the New York Times reported some gruesome abuses on its front page, above the fold: "Excessive physical fo

Irwin Stelzer: Lockerbie bomber ... A grievous blow to the Special Relationship

[Irwin Stelzer is an economist who is the U.S. economic and business columinst for The Sunday Times (UK), The Courier-Mail and a contributing editor of The Weekly Standard.] Eleven and a half days. That's how much prison time the American commentator Charles Krauthammer reckons Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi served for each of the 270 people he murdered when he planted the bomb that blew Pan Am Flight 103 out of the skies. Alex Salmond is wrong when he says that Scotland's relatio

Rachel Ehrenfeld & Millard Burr: Death of a Libel Tourist

[Rachel Ehrenfeld’s book, Funding Evil, and Millard Burr’s Alms for Jihad were banned in the U.K. after Mahfouz’s libel tourism hobby was rewarded, as many times before, by Justice Eady ruling against them in London’s High Court.] Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz died in Jeddah last Saturday. The 60-year-old former owner of the Saudi National Commercial Bank and banker for the Royal family also owned a charity, the Muwafaq (blessed relief) Foundation that funded al-Qaeda and Ham

Josh Xiong: Afghanistan is Not Vietnam

[Josh Xiong is a third year University of Toronto undergraduate specializing in International Relations and Economics. He is Opinion Editor of the Toronto Globalist, a student-run international affairs magazine, and author of the blog Neocon Blues, which can be found at joshxiong.com.] This Foreign Policy [Johnson and Mason's 'Saigon 2009'] essay suffers from the misguided human tendency to read too much into the historical past... ... What Johnson and Mason leave out i

Quentin Letts: British weariness with terrorism

[Quentin Letts is political sketch writer and theater critic for London's Daily Mail newspaper. A former New York bureau chief for the London Times, he is the author of Fifty People Who Buggered Up Britain, a series of vituperative torpedoes aimed at Britain's political and cultural elite. He writes a weekly column for Forbes.] The only surprising thing about Britain's release of Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi is that certain big shots in the U.S. were surprised. FBI d

Arianna Huffington: Lessons in Leadership: Why Obama Needs to Brush Up on His FDR

[Arianna Huffington is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the The Huffington Post, a nationally syndicated columnist, and author of twelve books...graduated from Cambridge University with an M.A. in economics...] Watching the gun-toting, Nazi-sign-holding town hall crazies, the talk radio charlatans, and the Palin-infected politicos, my first instinct has been to rally around President Obama and defend his handling of the health care debate against this Cuckoo's Nest menagerie.

Adam L. Silverman: Religion and Politics in Iraq: What Type of Sectarianism Really Exists?

[Adam L. Silverman, PhD is a Social Science Advisor with the US Army’s Human Terrain System and was previously deployed in Iraq from April through October 2008 as the Field Social Scientist and Socio-Cultural Advisor for the 2nd Brigade Combat Team/1st Armored Division assigned to Human Terrain Team Iraq 6 (HTT IZ6). The views expressed here are his alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the US Army’s Human Terrain System, the US Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, the 2BCT/1AD, and/or

Wendy Williams: History's shadow over Obama's Vineyard vacation

[Wendy Williams lives on Cape Cod in Mashpee, said to be the nation's first Indian Plantation, on land that once belonged to the Wampanoag tribe.] On Martha's Vineyard island, in the wealthy town of Chilmark where Barack Obama is vacationing this week, sits a strange, rather ancient stone wall hidden in the protected woodlands. It ends at a large boulder – Waskosim's Rock – perched atop a hill. The wall, known locally as "the Middle Line," is a kind of New Wo

Paul Wolfowitz: Obama Is No Realist

[Ambassador Paul Wolfowitz, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and former president of the World Bank, was U.S. deputy secretary of defense from 2001 to 2005.] "We're All Realists Now." No. Pragmatists maybe, but not "realists." Barack Obama's election as U.S. president delighted many people, especially the self-described foreign-policy "realists" who accused his predecessor, George W. Bush, of denying reality in favor