Roundup: Media's Take

Eduardo Porter: Tales of Republicans, Bonobos and Adultery

... It is hard not to be bemused by the contrast between the straight-and-narrow political persona of Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina and his messy, steamy circumstances. Still, I am somewhat perplexed by the surprise and the outrage over a transgression that has been around forever. We all have heard the Kinsey statistics: half of married men reported having an extramarital affair at some time during their marriage; a quarter of married women had an affair by the time they were

Paul Krugman: The 30's Show

[Krugman is a Noble Prize Winner who blogs about the economy and politics.] O.K., Thursday’s jobs report settles it. We’re going to need a bigger stimulus. But does the president know that? Let’s do the math. Since the recession began, the U.S. economy has lost 6 ½ million jobs — and as that grim employment report confirmed, it’s continuing to lose jobs at a rapid pace. Once you take into account the 100,000-plus new jobs that we need each month just to keep up w

Johann Hari: The Other 9/11 Has Returned to Stalk Latin America

[Johann Hari is a columnist for the London Independent. He has reported from Iraq, Israel/Palestine, the Congo, the Central African Republic, Venezuela, Peru and the US, and his journalism has appeared in publications all over the world. In 2007 Amnesty International named him Newspaper Journalist of the Year. In 2008 he became the youngest person ever to win Britain's leading award for political writing, the Orwell Prize.] The ghost of the other, deadlier 9/11 has returned to stal

A. Serwer: Obama, Lincoln, and Gay Rights

[Serwer is a staff writer for The Atlantic.] Sean Wilentz's lengthy book review of several Lincoln biographies isn't up on The New Republic's website yet, [actually it is, my bad] but his criticism of several books on Lincoln--and his general objection to the"two Lincolns" narrative that rejects the fact that Lincoln was anti-slavery to begin with, may offer some insight into President O

Rhodes Cook: Is the GOP poised for another quick comeback?

[Rhodes Cook is a senior columnist.] The current state of the Republican Party is a good-news, bad-news situation. The good news is that the GOP has gone through several debilitating elections over the last generation and each time has recovered quickly. The bad news is that the conditions may not be as ripe this time for a fast Republican comeback as they were after the elections of 1964, 1976 and 1992. The presidential election of 2008 is the fourth since

Max Boot: How Piracy Was Defeated in the Past and Can Be Again

[MAX BOOT is Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power and War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today. He is currently writing a history of guerrilla warfare.] The world's attention was riveted in April 2009 when Somali pirates tried to seize the Maersk Alabama, a U.S. cargo vessel delivering relief supplies

Justin Raimondo: History Haunts Honduras

About the crisis in Honduras, let’s get this out of the way from the very beginning: the U.S. government has no right to lecture the Hondurans about the virtues of democracy. It was, after all, Uncle Sam that encouraged, even masterminded, the dominance of the military that colors so many chapters in the history of Honduras. For the president of the United States to get up on his high horse and call for the return of democratic rule is like the Iranians hectoring us about Waco – as they did rece

Zbigniew Brzezinski: Russia must re-focus with post-imperial eyes

[The writer was US National Security Adviser 1977-1981. He is co-author with Brent Scowcroft of the recently published ‘America and the World’.] President Barack Obama should have three central goals in mind when he meets Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin next week: first, to advance US-Russian co-operation in areas where our interests coincide; second, to emphasise the mutual benefits in handling disagreements between the two countries within inte

Monica Crowley: Obama and American Exceptionalism

[Monica Crowley is a nationally syndicated radio host, a panelist on "The McLaughlin Group" and a Fox News contributor.] One day in 1984, at the height of his fame, Michael Jackson made a visit to the White House. President and Nancy Reagan may not have dug his music, but they understood the power Mr. Jackson commanded as a common pop-cultural touchstone for just about everyone else. Mr. Jackson had given the White House permission to use his smash hit "Beat It"

Jonathan Chait: The Obama Method

The thing that people haven't figured out about President Obama's conduct of foreign policy is that it's the same as his conduct of domestic policy. Obama believes in the power of negotiation and public dialogue to split his adversaries--Republicans at home, Islamists abroad--and strengthen his own position. Obama's speech in Cairo to the Muslim world was simply the foreign analogue of his dealings with the GOP. Obama's method begins with attempts to find common ground, expressions

Stanley B. Greenberg: Why health care reform could fail again

[Stanley B. Greenberg is the author of Dispatches from the War Room: In the Trenches with Five Extraordinary Leaders. ] Nothing brings on a headache quite like health care reform. My head has throbbed lately, as Congress has begun to consider a serious overhaul--a debate that forces me to recall the painful last time we embarked on a similar effort some 16 years ago. At the time, I was conducting polls for Bill Clinton and, on the eve of his address to a joint session of Congress in

Caroline Glick: Obama, Like Carter, is No 'Realist'

[Caroline Glick is an American-Israeli Journalist and is the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post.] For a brief moment it seemed that US President Barack Obama was moved by the recent events in Iran. On Friday, he issued his harshest statement yet on the mullocracy's barbaric clampdown against its brave citizens who dared to demand freedom in the aftermath of June 12's stolen presidential elections. Speaking of the protesters Obama said, "Their bravery in t

Christina Hoff Sommers: Persistent Myths in Feminist Scholarship

[Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She is the author of Who Stole Feminism? (Simon & Schuster, 1994) and The War Against Boys (Simon & Schuster, 2000), and editor of The Science on Women and Science, forthcoming from the AEI Press.] "Harder to kill than a vampire." That is what the sociologist Joel Best calls a bad statistic. But, as I have discovered over the years, among false statistics the hardest of all to slay

Con Coughlan: Why Iran hates Britain so much

[Con Coughlan is the author of 'Khomeini's Ghost: Iran Since 1979', published by Macmillan.] Not so long ago, Britain was held in such low esteem in Iran that it was simply dismissed as the "little Satan". So far as the ayatollahs were concerned, the real enemy was America, the "great Satan", whose love of liberty and free market capitalism was thought to pose the gravest threat to the Islamic revolution's survival. It was for this reason that the Am

Adam Holland: The NY Times, John Birch Society and Father Feeney

[Mr. Holland runs an investigative blog.] Last week, the Times ran an article on the John Birch Society which was brief but good. It's especially vital reading for people who hear about the conspiracy theories driving a lot of far-right politics without knowing their historical context. The John Birch Society invented a number of these theories, and they're still going strong in promoting them. By the way, their national convention this year featured a keynote address by a John Birch

Rupert Cornwell: Left and right turn on 'Bush-like' Obama

[Rupert Cornwell writes for the Independent.] Like their British counterparts at Westminster, American Congressmen are not people who normally arouse much sympathy. If the former specialise in fiddling expenses, the latter are best at avidly seeking publicity – usually to the detriment of doing anything that actually benefits the country. Right now though, you have to feel sorry for them. If any one deserves a decent 4 July holiday break, it is these grossly overworked souls.

Laura Bush: Do Not Forget Burma

[The writer is the former first lady of the United States.] For two weeks, the world has been transfixed by images of Iranians taking to the streets to demand the most basic human freedoms and rights. Watching these courageous men and women, I am reminded of a similar scene nearly two years ago in Burma, when tens of thousands of Buddhist monks peacefully marched through their nation's streets. They, too, sought to reclaim basic human dignity for all Burmese citizens, but they were

George F. Will: Will It Be 1972 Forever?

[A Newsweek Contributing Editor since 1976, Will produces a back page column addressing diverse topics from politics to baseball.Will's newspaper column appears twice weekly in 480 newspapers and has been syndicated nationally by The Washington Post Writers Group since 1974...Will was born in Champaign, Illinois in 1941, and educated at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut; Magdalene College, Oxford University, and at Princeton, where he received an M.A. and Ph.D. in politics. He has taught

Fareed Zakaria: Historical parallels don't work in Iran

[Fareed Zakaria is Editor of Newsweek International whose column appears in Newsweek, Newsweek International and The Washington Post.] whenever we see the kinds of images that have been coming out of Iran over the past two weeks, we tend to think back to 1989 and Eastern Europe. That time, when people took to the streets and challenged their governments, those seemingly stable regimes proved to be hollow and quickly collapsed. What emerged was liberal democracy. Could Iran yet under

Obama's Favorite Theologian? A Short Course on Reinhold Niebuhr

Ever since then-Sen. Barack Obama spoke of his admiration for Reinhold Niebuhr in a 2007 interview with New York Times columnist David Brooks, there has been speculation about the extent to which the 20th-century theologian has influenced Obama's views on faith, politics and social change. At the Pew Forum's biannual Faith Angle Conference in May 2009, Wilfred McClay, a historian specializing in American intel