Roundup: Media's Take

David Ottaway: The U.S. and Saudi Arabia Since the 1930s

[David Ottaway is a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center and a former correspondent for the Washington Post. This essay is based on his presentation at "U.S. Foreign Policy and the Modern Middle East," a Summer Institute for Teachers sponsored by The American Institute for History Education and The Wachman Center of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, held June 25-27, 2009, in Philadelphia. ] There have been two constants in U.S.-Saudi relations for decades: oil

Larry Allen Brown: A Rebuttal to Dick Armey's OpEd in the Wall Street Journal

[Mr. Brown is a professional musician and teacher. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama along with his wife Kathryn and their two dogs, Murphy and Dipstick. Larry's website is http://Larryallenbrown.com.] Mr. Armey, you wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal titled, “Washington could use less Keynes, and more Hayek." I took you to be a conservative. Am I wrong about this? If you are a conservat

Jon Wiener: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business

[Wiener teaches American history at UC Irvine and is a contributing editor to the Nation.] The Retail Revolution How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business Nelson Lichtenstein Metropolitan Books: 312 pp., $25 Bentonville, Ark., may be unknown to most Americans, but it is the center of the world for some 750 corporations that manufacture consumer goods -- because Bentonville is the legendary home office of Wal-M

Abbas Milani: An Evening in Support of the Bahais of Iran

[Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford, where he is the co-director of the Iran Democracy Project. His latest book is Eminent Persian: The Men and Women who Made Modern Iran, 1941-1979 (Syracuse University Press).] <em>This Tuesday, seven leaders of Iran's Bahai movement will go on trial on capital charges of espionage and threatening national security. They have been in prison for more than a year. The group's two lawyers hav

Raymond Ibrahim: The Dark Side of Zakat, Muslim "Charity" in Context

[Raymond Ibrahim is the associate director of the Middle East Forum and the author of The Al Qaeda Reader, translations of religious texts and propaganda .] From what American schoolchildren are being taught by their teachers to what Americans are being told by their presidents, concepts unique to Islam are nowadays almost always "Westernized." Whether the product of naivety, arrogance, or downright disingenuousness, this phenomenon has resulted in epistemic (and thus ende

Todd Wilkinson: A history of presidential visits to Yellowstone National Park

[Information provided by Yellowstone historian Lee Whittlesey] From Chester Arthur to Barack Obama, American presidents have come to the peace and quiet and grandeur of Yellowstone, a refreshing change from the political heat and conflict of Washington. 1883 — Eleven years after Yellowstone was created and just seven years after the nearby Battle of the Little Bighorn between the U.S. Cavalry and three native American tribes, Chester Arthur rides on horseback through Ye

Supna Zaidi: Saving Pakistan From Itself

[Supna Zaidi is assistant director of Islamist Watch, a project at the Middle East Forum and editor of Muslim World Today.] Despite being born at the same time as India, Pakistan seems to be regressing while India becomes an increasingly influential player in global politics. This is because Pakistan has refused to end the feudal system unlike India. Pakistani land reforms were first attempted in the 1950s by General Mohammad Ayub Khan's government, who wanted, among other social im

Newsweek Editorial: Did Britain Wreck the World?

[Sources: Sean Hanretta and Priya Satia, Assistant Professors, Department of History Stanford University; Research By Jesse Ellison] By Jove, it certainly seems that way. Most of today's festering conflicts can be traced to colonial-era meddling, either through partition—slicing and dicing the planet as they saw fit—or, worse, indiscriminately corralling unrelated ethnic groups into a single, quarrelsome country. To wit: SRI LANKA During their 150-year rule, th

Devin Nunes: It's Fish Versus Farmers in the San Joaquin Valley

[Mr. Nunes is a Republican congressman representing California's 21st district.] In 1931, a severe drought began that within a few years engulfed the Oklahoma panhandle and a third of the Great Plains in a "Dust Bowl." Tens of thousands of people fled the region—many traveling to California along Route 66, which John Steinbeck called "the mother road, the road of flight" in "The Grapes of Wrath." A lot of the "Okies" settled in th

Joe Conason: Winston Churchill was a Bolshevik

[Joe Conason writes a weekly column for Salon and the New York Observer. His new book is "It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush." ] Long before many of today’s frothing right-wing demagogues were born, American conservatives came to idolize Winston Churchill, the late Tory prime minister whose wartime leadership of the British people transformed into the living symbol of democracy armed. That reputation was cemented by his legendary Missouri speech in

Jay Janson: No Hillary Apology For Ike Ordering the Murder of Lumumba

[Jay Janson is a musician and writer, who has lived and worked on all the continents and whose articles on media have been published in China, Italy, England and the US, and now resides in New York City.] On Tuesday, Secretary of State Clinton, while visiting the war torn Congo, couldn't have apologized for President Eisenhower ordering the first Prime Minister of a free Congo to be"eliminated" even if she would have wanted to, because it has never been officially admitted, (declass

Michael Gerson: At the Town Halls, Trivializing Evil

[Michael Gerson is an op-ed columnist for The Washington Post and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.] During live television coverage of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, novelist Gore Vidal famously called William F. Buckley a "crypto-Nazi." To which Buckley famously replied (in addition to other choice words), "Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I'll sock you in the goddamn face and you'll stay plastered." Buckley later a

Rami G. Khouri: Perpetual and collective failures

[Rami George Khouri is a Palestinian-Jordanian and US citizen whose family resides in Beirut, Amman, and Nazareth. He is the Director of the Issam Fares Institute of Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut as well as editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper. He is an internationally syndicated political columnist and author.] Two opposing trends were affirmed in Israel and Palestine this week, and one of them must disappear.

Steven Plaut: The 14 Lies Blocking Peace in the Middle East

[Steven Plaut is a professor at the Graduate School of the Business Administration at the University of Haifa and is a columnist for the Jewish Press.] If a Martian were suddenly to land on earth and start listening to and reading the mainstream media, he would form the impression that the entire Middle East conflict were due to Israel building some settlements in land that much of the world thinks should become a Palestinian state. A near-consensus exists among the governments of t

Glenn Hubbard: Think Again ... A Marshall Plan for Africa

[Glenn Hubbard, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2001 to 2003, is dean of Columbia Business School. With William Duggan, he is co-author of the forthcoming book The Aid Trap: Hard Truths About Ending Poverty.] Just six months into his term, U.S. President Barack Obama is already modeling himself after the country's most transformational Democratic leader, Franklin D. Roosevelt. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visits Africa this month, now would be

Benjamin F. Carlson: Spoiling for a Bush-Cheney Fight

The former vice-president plans to slam Bush in his memoir, and pundits are oddly eager. Dick Cheney, the most powerful American vice-president in history, thinks his considered opinion was ignored under Bush's second term. His upcoming memoir, as reported by Barton Gellman in this morning's Washington Post, purports to detail the inconveniences he believed he suffered. These include: *Bush bowed to hostile public opinion *Bush "moved away" from him on waterb

Portia Siegelbaum: As Castro Turns 83, Cuba Caught Between Past, Future

[Portia Siegelbaum is a CBS News producer reporting from Havana, Cuba.] Former Cuban President Fidel Castro turns 83 Thursday, his birthday defying all predictions of his death. Those predictions escalated in frequency and frenzy following his collapse and intestinal surgery at the end of July 2006. At exactly midnight, Cuban television interrupted all programming to put on a three-minute photo and video montage of Castro's life, accompanied by patriotic music. Included

Healthcare A Priority For Richard Nixon

[Jonathan Movroydis recently graduated from the University of California, Irvine. His research and writing interests include political ideology, religion, and their respective impact on domestic and world politics.] Flashback thirty-five years, and you have a national healthcare debate that involves RN. On the CBS Evening News in 1974, Washington correspondent Daniel Schorr provided a compare and contrast between President Nixon’s plan for expanding private insurance c

Paul Begala: Health Care Reform: Progress Over Perfection

[Paul Begala is a Democratic strategist and political analyst, was a political consultant to President Bill Clinton during the 1993-94 health-reform effort and later served as counselor to the president. He is an affiliated professor of public policy at Georgetown University.] ...Progressive politics is, in my view, a movement, not a monument. We cannot achieve perfection in this life, and if that is our goal we will always be frustrated. The right has far more modest goals: At eve

Christopher Walker: A Decade of Putinism

[Mr. Walker is director of studies at Freedom House and the editor of "Undermining Democracy: 21st Century Authoritarians" (Freedom House, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, 2009).] Ten years ago on Sunday, Russia's Duma confirmed Vladimir Putin as prime minister. The vote took place only one week after then-President Boris Yeltsin had nominated the little-known former KGB operative for the post. Yeltsin's surprise resignation only four months later left