Roundup: Media's Take

Daniel Mandel: Israel's Self-Inflicted Woes

When foreign pressure mounts on Israel, Israelis, still an embattled people, tend rightly to criticize those applying the pressure. Yet they often neglect their own role in stimulating a climate of foreign pressure. The Oslo process greatly augmented this ruinous pattern. Today, Israel is under pressure from the Obama administration to freeze all settlement construction in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, and to proceed with the creation of a Palestinian state. Most om

Nicolai N. Petro: One Year After the Russo-Georgian War

[Nicolai N. Petro is professor of political science at the University of Rhode Island. He has served as special assistant for policy in the U.S. State Department, and as civic affairs advisor to the mayor of the Russian city of Novgorod the Great.] Response to questions posed by Irina Sivkova of Russia's state owned RIA Novosti News Agency (RIAN). 1. What in your opinion sparked the conflict in the Caucasus last year? While the conflict has it origins in th

Seth Sandronsky: Rethinking US Penal Policy

The proportion of US citizens behind bars far exceeds that of every other nation on Earth. Further, there is a class and race dimension to US incarceration: blacks and Latinos are imprisoned at a much higher rate than are whites. The total incarceration rate per 100,000 individuals, including federal and state imprisonment and local jail detention, is: 820 for whites, 5,126 for blacks, and 1,907 for Hispanics. Latinos represent the fastest-growing segment of the minority prison pop

Walter E. Williams: Politics and Blacks

[Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and a member of the Board of Advisors for the Media Research Center's Free Market Project.] President Barack Obama won an unprecedented 96 percent of the black vote. That’s not much of a news story since blacks typically give their votes to the Democratic candidate. Blacks are probably the most politically loyal people in the nation and it is almost taken as gospel, at least amon

Jason Trenner: Remembering the Reagan Bull Market

[Mr. Trennert is a managing partner with Strategas Research Partners.] For economic historians and defenders of the Reagan revolution, this week will forever be seen as the anniversary of one of the greatest bull markets in history. It was on Aug. 12, 1982, that the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped to its 1980-82 recession low of 776.92—almost precisely where the Index had closed in January 1964. Starting as a trickle, the decline in inflation and long-term interes

Simon Tisdall: Gaddafi's remarkable rehabilitation

[Simon Tisdall is an assistant editor of the Guardian and a foreign affairs columnist.] The return to Libya of the Lockerbie bomber would mark another stage in the remarkable rehabilitation of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and a regime formerly shunned by Britain and other western countries as a dangerous pariah. But relations with Tripoli remain tentative in other respects, with issues such as the 1984 murder outside the Libyan embassy in London of PC Yvonne Fletcher still unresolved.

Bill Emmott: The recovery will prove Thatcherism right

[Bill Emmott was editor of The Economist, 1993-2006 and is the author of Rivals: How the Power Struggle between China, India and Japan Will Shape our Next Decade.] All around the world, economies seem to be turning a corner, moving out of a period of this global recession in which the good news was just that things were getting bad more slowly into one in which things are actually getting better. Exports are picking up, order books are getting fatter, production is starting to rise

John H. McWhorter: Why The National Review Would Have Loved Zora Neale Hurston

[John H. McWhorter, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, writes and comments extensively on race, ethnicity and cultural issues for the Manhattan Institute. He also writes a regular column in the New York Sun.] The drifting changes in the links between cultural alignments and political ones over time are always interesting, such as the fact that Republicans were once more interested in black rights than Democrats. It’s equally true in black history. Culturally, Booker T. Washin

Benjamin Wallace-Wells: Learning the wrong lessons from David Halberstam

[Benjamin Wallace-Wells is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a national affairs correspondent for Rolling Stone.] Washington in the early days of a new administration is a didactic, lesson-drawing place, but even so, it has been striking to see how quickly the commentary on the death of Robert McNamara, defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and architect of the Vietnam war, has turned to abstraction--as if it was not one exception

Mark Hosenball: I Was At Woodstock. And I Hated It.

[Hosenball is an investigative correspondent for NEWSWEEK who covers national affairs.] Stop being nostalgic for the 40-year-old concert. It was wet, crowded, and overhyped. Woodstock wasn't the only thing that happened in the world in August 1969 If it's toxic to overdose on saccharine, then over the next few days, you should try to avoid the gathering deluge of reminiscence about Woodstock. It's the 40th anniversary of the upstate New York rock-and-roll e

Vince Bzdek: The Faces of a 'Royal' Generation Fade Into History

[Vince Bzdek is a Washington Post Staff Writer.] Three days before John F. Kennedy won his first campaign, the 1946 Democratic primary in Boston's 8th District, the enormous Kennedy family threw an enormous party. Eunice, the middlest of the middle children, was the driving force behind the idea: a huge formal reception at the Commodore Hotel in Cambridge, with engraved invitations sent to female voters, plans for ballroom dancing, and tuxedos required. The party was t

James Kirchick: Did Obama vet Mary Robinson before choosing her for the Medal of Freedom?

[James Kirchick is an assistant editor of The New Republic.] Today, Barack Obama will award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 16 recipients. What should be a joyous affair, however, has been the subject of growing controversy due to the selection of Mary Robinson--a former United Nations official who presided over the notoriously anti-Zionist 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. For this, Obama has earned himself much criticism from the American Jewish co

Edward Luttwak: Why U.S. Diplomacy Will Fail With Iran

[Edward Luttwak, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is the author of the forthcoming "The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire" (Harvard).] Long before his inauguration, Barack Obama lucidly explained how he would deal with Iran. During the campaign he said he would "engage" its leaders by offering talks without preconditions—without even asking them to stop chanting "death to America" when concluding their speec

Thomas F. Cooley: The Rocky History Of Fed Independence

[Thomas F. Cooley, the Paganelli-Bull professor of economics and Richard R. West dean of the NYU Stern School of Business, writes a weekly column for Forbes. He is a contributor to a new book on the financial crisis entitled Restoring Financial Stability (Wiley, 2009).] My fellow columnist John Tamny wrote an excellent column last week arguing that the notion of an independent Fed is a myth. I come to a different conclusion than he does about the evidence and the implications. But o

Daniel Gross: Who Won the Recession? McDonald's.

Now that the recession is most likely over, it's time to start looking at which companies, institutions, and individuals thrived during this grim period. In the harsh downturn that began in December 2007, success was redefined—flat became the new up, and muddling through became a triumph. In a recession that hit all rungs of the income ladder and ravaged the wealthiest consumer markets—the United States, Europe, Japan—there were very few safe havens. But some countries, such as Peru, managed to

Charles Lane: Here's to You, Mrs. Robinson

[Charles Lane in an opinion writer for The Washington Post] On Wednesday, President Obama will drape the Presidential Medal of Freedom around the neck of former Irish president Mary Robinson. The White House says Robinson deserves it because she was the first female president of Ireland and is a “prominent crusader for women’s rights.” I think honoring Robinson will dilute an already somewhat overextended award. I agree with those who say Robinson showed a prosecutorial

Jefferson Flanders: Birthers, Truthers, and Buffs: The Paranoid Style

[Jefferson Flanders, an independent journalist, has taught at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. He blogs at Neither Red Nor Blue. ] The tone and tactics of the Birther movement—those who dispute Barack Obama’s American citizenship and consequently, his legitimacy as America’s 44th president—are eerily familiar. Birthers embody that mixture of “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” that historian Richard Hofstadter indeli

Edward P. Djerejian: Damascus and the Road to Mideast Peace

[Mr. Djerejian, U.S. ambassador to Syria from 1988-91 and to Israel from 1993-94, is the author of “Danger and Opportunity—An American Ambassador’s Journey Through the Middle East” (Simon & Schuster, 2008). He is the founding director of the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.] Though in recent months some have derided the power of dialogue, the truth is that strategic engagement with our enemies remains absolutely essential for our national security. Talking

Humberto Fontova: Cuba's Healthcare a model for the U.S. says CNN

[Humberto Fontova recieved his Masters Degree from Tulane University in Latin American Studies. He is a journalist and author. Humberto has appeared on such shows as The O'Reilly Factor with Bill O'Reilly, Hannity and Colmes, Fox and Friends, The Dennis Miller Show and various shows for Telemundo.] The CNN report included clips from Michael Moore's Sicko as CNN's Morgan Neill, on location in a Potemkin Havana hospital, gushed about Cuban healthcare's"impressive statistics.""Cuba's i

John S. Baker and Elliott Stonecipher: Our Unconstitutional Census

[Mr. Baker teaches constitutional law at Louisiana State University. Mr. Stonecipher is a Louisiana pollster and demographic analyst.] Next year’s census will determine the apportionment of House members and Electoral College votes for each state. To accomplish these vital constitutional purposes, the enumeration should count only citizens and persons who are legal, permanent residents. But it won’t. Instead, the U.S. Census Bureau is set to count all persons physicall