Roundup: Media's Take

Steve Benen: Try Things the LBJ Way?

[Steve Benen a political journalist who writes a blog for the Washington Monthly.] Matt Yglesias shares a story today about Sen. James Eastland of Mississippi, a far-right Democrat back in the Dixiecrat era, that I hadn't heard in a while. It's has quite a bit of relevance to current events."Eastland's chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee obviously made passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 impossible. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and President Lyndon J

Cynthia P. Schneider: The Lockerbie Trial: A Unique Moment in International Justice and Diplomacy

[Cynthia P. Schneider was the U.S. Ambassador to Netherlands during Lockerbie trial.] The understandable outrage at the release of convicted terrorist Abdel Baset al-Megrahi , found guilty of the bombing of Pan Am 103, should not overshadow the memory of the trial that brought Megrahi to justice. It was an extraordinary example of international cooperation, justice, and diplomacy. Early in the morning on May 3, 2000, I approached the compound in Zeist, the Netherlands,

AK Muckracker: Nazis

[This blog post is by Jeanne Devon, a local Democrat in Alaska whose identity was recently confirmed by a Republican, State Rep. Mike Doogan, whom Devon has written about.] On my 21st birthday, I woke up in the morning and drove to Dairy Queen. I got soft serve vanilla ice cream with strawberry topping and I ate it for breakfast. Why? When I was a child I asked once if I could have ice cream for breakfast, and my mother said, “You can have ice cream for breakfast when you’re 21.” An

Rick Salutin: Harper has his Reagan moments

[Rick Salutin is Globe and Mail columnist.] There's been much recent criticism of the Harper government's foreign policy. This week in The Globe and Mail, Jeffrey Simpson rained on its shifting China stance and former official Gar Pardy blamed it for failing citizens in trouble abroad. Yesterday came news of another Canadian left to languish in Kenya. I don't mean to pile on but rather to explore the cause. It seems to me this kind of erratic, distasteful foreign polic

Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason: Saigon 2009

[Thomas H. Johnson is a research professor of the Department of National Security Affairs and director of the Program for Culture and Conflict Studies at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. M. Chris Mason is a retired Foreign Service officer who served in 2005 as political officer for the PRT in Paktika and presently is a senior fellow at the Program for Culture and Conflict Studies and at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies in Washington, D.C.] For those who

Rep. John Conyers: Karl Rove, Rupert Murdoch and Media Bias

[Rep. John Conyers is a Congressman from Michigan.] In today's Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove says that I -- and others -- owe him an apology for allegations that have been made about him during the course of the House Judiciary Committee's investigation into the dismissal of United States Attorneys and related issues about the politicization of the Department of Justice. Mr. Rove's self-serving assertions on this subject are simply inconsistent with the documents that

Kevin Whitelaw: Why the CIA uses so many contractors

News that the CIA worked with a private contractor on a secret assassination program is the latest evidence of how much the agency has outsourced a range of its activities, including covert missions. According to The New York Times, the CIA in 2004 worked briefly with Blackwater, the controversial private security firm, on a program designed to target and kill al-Qaida operatives. The program was scrapped before any missions were launched. But it reflects a prac

Jeremy Scahill: Blackwater: CIA Assassins?

[Jeremy Scahill, a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute, is the author of the bestselling Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, published by Nation Books. He is an award-winning investigative journalist and correspondent for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!.] In April 2002, the CIA paid Blackwater more than $5 million to deploy a small team of men inside Afghanistan during the early stages of US operations in the countr

Jason Leopold: Conyers May Call Rove, Miers to Testify Publicly About Attorney Firings

[Jason Leopold is editor in chief of The Public Record, www.pubrecord.org.] Back in March, when House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers announced that he and his staff had reached an agreement to have Karl Rove and ex-White House counsel Harriet Miers testify privately about their roles in the firings of nine US attorneys, he said his panel also reserved the right to haul the former Bush administration officials before Congress to testi

Josef Joffe: The Default Power

[Josef Joffe is co-editor of Die Zeit and a fellow in international relations at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. A longer version of this essay will appear in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs.] Every 10 years, it is decline time in the United States. In the late 1950s, it was the Sputnik shock, followed by the “missile gap” trumpeted by John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential campaign. A decade later, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger predicted a world

Paul Theroux: (Hawaii) Happily a State, Forever an Island

[Paul Theroux is the author of “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star.” His forthcoming novel is “A Dead Hand.”] Once in the Elks Club in Honolulu, an elderly man of Chinese ancestry said in a low voice to me: “This club used to be very exclusive. And the one next door too.” He meant no Chinese were admitted — or anyone but haoles (whites) or ethnic Hawaiians — to the Elks or the Outrigger Canoe Club. This was true of nearly all of Hawaii’s posh clubs. “But all that changed,” his daughter

Ali Reza Eshraghi: Khamenei vs. Khomeini

[Ali Reza Eshraghi, a former newspaper editor in Iran, is a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, Institute of International studies.] During his August 3 speech formally endorsing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned protesters that "by imitation of Ayatollah Khomeini, they cannot deceive people." Khamenei was mocking the opposition's claim to be to reviving "the values of Ayatollah Khomeini"--the founder of the Islamic Republ

WSJ Editorial: Rose of Freedom (on the passing of Rose Friedman)

The Journal of Economic Literature recently described the last quarter century of rapid economic growth and rising living standards as "The Age of Friedman," after Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winning economist. The editors could as fairly have called it the Age of Friedmans to include Milton's wife of 68 years and collaborator, Rose Friedman, who died Tuesday at age 98. Rose was small in stature like Milton—both were less than five-feet tall—but their ideas were of to

Karl Rove: 'Closing in on Rove'

[Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.] For more than two years, House Judiciary Committee Democrats and the New York Times editorial board have argued that I personally arranged for Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman to be prosecuted in 2004 for corruption and ordered the removal of eight U.S. attorneys in 2006 for failing to investigate Democrats. The Washington Post editorial board also echoed this last charge. The Time

Stephen Pizzo: Will Obama be Like Lyndon B. Johnson?

[Stephen Pizzo has been published everywhere from The New York Times to Mother Jones magazine. His book, Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans, was nominated for a Pulitzer.] On July 2, 1964 a southerner, President Lyndon B. Johnson, signed the Civil Rights Act into law. Here was a white southerner, a guy who just weeks before signing this law complained to an aide in a perplexed Texas drawl, "Goddamnit. I just learnt to say negra and now they want

Justin Elliott: Heavily-Armed '90s Militia, Linked To Anti-Obama Activist

Let's delve a little bit deeper into the black helicopter-infested world of the Viper Militia -- the 90's era group whose members ended up in federal prison and whose most prominent friend and defender, Ernest Hancock, staged the show of arms-bearing at an Obama event Monday. A portrait of a feckless group of paranoid, right-wing, minimum wage-earning weapons enthusiasts -- 10 men and two women -- emerges from press accounts at the time. Take Dean Pleasant, the Viper me

Katrina Browne: Slavery needs more than an apology

[Katrina Browne is the producer/director of "Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North." The documentary has been nominated for an Emmy for research. For more information, see http://www.tracesofthetrade.org/.] The Senate voted to apologize for slavery on June 18. The House apologized last summer. The first family -- descendants of Africans, of enslaved Africans and of slave-holders -- visited a slave fort in Ghana.

Nicholas D. Kristof: The Cost of Prisons

[Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times since 2001, is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who writes op-ed columns that appear twice a week.] At a time when we Americans may abandon health care reform because it supposedly is “too expensive,” how is it that we can afford to imprison people like Curtis Wilkerson? Mr. Wilkerson is serving a life sentence in California — for stealing a $2.50 pair of socks. As The Economist noted recently, he already had two

Simon Jenkins: Today's Afghan election is a moment of truth for zealous liberal aggressors

[Simon Jenkins is a British journalist and author.] During the last Afghan elections, a UN official outside a polling booth grabbed a voter's blue-stained finger and raised it before the cameras. "Look," he said ecstatically. "This is what it's all about." No, it isn't. Even in its present belligerent stance, the western world does not go about bombing and killing people just so they can vote. The Afghan war and occupation were about punishing the Ta

Pamela Dix: Don't forget Lockerbie

[Pamela Dix is a founder member and executive director of Disaster Action, a charity established in 1991 and whose members are survivors and bereaved people from over 20 disasters both in the UK and overseas.] One of the first questions asked of me by every journalist and reporter covering the story about Abdelbaset al-Megrahi is: why is there such an apparent divide between the US and British relatives? Why do they believe he is guilty, and we remain to be convinced? Some imply tha