Roundup: Media's Take

Emily Badger: Get a Life? Not If You Want to Be One of the Nine

[Emily Badger is a freelance writer living in Atlanta who has contributed to The New York Times, International Herald Tribune and Christian Science Monitor. She previously covered college sports for the Orlando Sentinel and lived and reported in France.] Sonia Sotomayor's critics and backers have spent the last two weeks parsing one line of a speech she gave in 2001 during a conference at Berkeley on Latino representation on the judiciary."I would hope," she said,"that a wise Latina woman

Paul Krugman: Stay the Course

The debate over economic policy has taken a predictable yet ominous turn: the crisis seems to be easing, and a chorus of critics is already demanding that the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration abandon their rescue efforts. For those who know their history, it’s déjà vu all over again — literally. For this is the third time in history that a major economy has found itself in a liquidity trap, a situation in which interest-rate cuts, the conventional way to perk up the econ

Debra J. Saunders: The media are showing their bias in reports on "right-wing" extremists

After the shooting deaths of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller last month and security guard Stephen T. Johns at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum last week, I knew it was only a matter of time before I would receive an e-mail like one sent from Ann Pinkerton of Oakland: "Several weeks ago, I wrote you because I thought you dismissed the Homeland Security Report on right-wing extremism unfairly. Since then, Dr. George Tiller has been shot and killed, and a security guard at

Stephen C. Rose: President Obama's FDR Problem

[He attended Phillips Exeter and finished Williams College Phi Beta Kappa with a double major in Political Science and English. He received his Masters from Union Theological Seminary and spent the 1960s as a participant-writer in the Civil Rights movement, reporting from Birmingham, Oxford and Selma. He interviewed Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Saul Alinsky. He also wrote extensively on church and urban affairs and founded a prize-winning magazine Renewal in Chicago...] Pr

Editorial in the Independent: The 'axis of evil' revisited

It was one of the stupidest sound bites in history. George Bush, in his State of the Union address on 29 January 2002, stigmatised North Korea, Iran and Iraq as "an axis of evil". But it is important to be clear about what was wrong with it. It was not wrong to identify those three states as threats to international security. All three last week confirmed that they still pose immensely difficult challenges to the rest of the world. The North Korean dictatorship said that

Mira Kamdar: Time to Bring Mahatma Gandhi Back

[Mira Kamdar is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute and a fellow at the Asia Society. She is the author of “Planet India: The Turbulent Rise of the Largest Democracy and the Future of Our World."] The Congress Party’s unexpected landslide in India’s general election was greeted with euphoria. Many believe that Congress - with its commitment to secular values, economic growth, and helping the poor - now has a mandate to transform India into a great power. Business and

Oliver North: Obama Appeases North Korean Outlaws

[Oliver North is the host of "War Stories" on Fox News Channel, the founder and honorary chairman of Freedom Alliance and the author of "American Heroes."] Here in Europe, there is little media coverage about North Korea's May 25 nuclear-weapons test or its increasingly frequent ballistic-missile launches. There is even less mention of Pyongyang's decision to sentence two American female journalists to 12 years of "reform through labor" for "commit

Paul M. Barrett: J.P. Morgan's bankers invented dangerous ways of dispersing risk

[Paul M. Barrett is an assistant managing editor of BusinessWeek.] To understand the calamity on Wall Street, we need erudite financial analysis and good old-fashioned stories about human fallibility. Gillian Tett, who oversees global market coverage for The Financial Times, offers some of each. In “Fool’s Gold,” she describes how a small group of bankers at storied J. P. Morgan built a monster that got out of control and helped destroy much of their industry. Tett’s tale doesn’t ex

Frank Ching: China must face up to Tiananmen

[Frank Ching is a senior columnist at the China Post.] Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, which culminated with the Beijing massacre in which hundreds, possibly thousands, of people were killed. In Hong Kong, the annual candlelight vigil in Victoria Park was attended by some 150,000 people, who listened to excerpts from the late party leader Zhao Ziyang's memoirs, a taped message from Ding Zilin, leader of the group known as T

Paul Rogat Loeb: Gutting the Health Care Plan

[Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org ] Will serious health reform meet the fate of the scorpion and the turtle? In that fable, the scorpion pleads with the turtle

John Ibbitson: Barack Obama is no Ronald Reagan - yet

[John Ibbitson is the Globe and Mail's Washington columnist.] “These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. And these are the heroes who helped end a war.” - Ronald Reagan, address on the 40th Anniversary of D-Day “Friends and veterans, we cannot forget. What we must not forget is that D-Day was a time and a place where the bravery and the selflessness of a few was able to change the co

Douglas Davis: Gordon Brown ... Britain's Nixon

[Douglas Davis is a writer and journalist currently based in London. His work appears in the Spectator (London) and the National Post (Toronto). Previously he was a senior editor and European correspondent for the Jerusalem Post. His most recent book is "Israel in the World: Changing Lives through Innovation."] Gordon Brown has come a long way from those heady days in April when he basked in the praise of U.S. President Barack Obama and other world leaders attending the G-

Patrick Buchanan: Obama, The Anti-Reagan

[Patrick Buchanan is an American political commentator, author, syndicated columnist, politician and broadcaster.] Despite his boldness, Barack Obama seems as fated to fail as were Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter. And for the same reason: a belief in his own righteousness and moral superiority, and a belief that his ideals and his persona count mightily in the modern world. Wilson declaimed about America's fight to "make the world safe for democracy" when in h

Mikhail Gorbachev: We Had Our Perestroika. It's High Time for Yours

[Mikhail Gorbachev, the last general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, heads the International Foundation for Socio-Economic and Political Studies, a Moscow-based think tank.] Years ago, as the Cold War was coming to an end, I said to my fellow leaders around the globe: The world is on the cusp of great events, and in the face of new challenges all of us will have to change, you as well as we. For the most part, the reaction was polite but skeptical silence.

Robert Kagan: Woodrow Wilson's Heir

[Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writes a monthly column for The Post.] President Obama likes to see himself as a pragmatist, but in foreign policy he is proving to be a supreme idealist of the Woodrow Wilson variety. Like Wilson's, Obama's foreign policy increasingly seems to rest on the assumption that nations will act on the basis of what they perceive to be the goodwill, good intentions or moral purity of other na

Howard Fineman: What Pittsburgh (Don't Laugh) Can Teach Obama

[Howard Fineman is Newsweek's Senior Washington Correspondent and Columnist, senior editor and deputy Washington bureau chief. He is the author of "Living Politics," a column that began on MSNBC.COM and Newsweek.com and that now also appears in the print magazine. An award-winning reporter and writer, Fineman also is an analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, appearing regularly on "Countdown with Keith Olbermann," "Hardball with Chris Matthews" and "TODAY." The a

Michael Barone: Obama needs to brush up on Middle East history

[Michael Barone is an American political analyst, pundit and journalist.] For a man of his impressive educational credentials, Barack Obama has sometimes shown a surprising ignorance of history. During the 2008 campaign, when challenged on his pledge to meet with foreign tyrants without preconditions, he said that presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt on had met with leaders of enemy nations. Funny thing, but in my books on World War II, I haven’t been able to find the chapters on t

Jonathan Freedland: Obama's Triumph in Cairo

[Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist.] IN AN ancient city, America's still-new President aimed to heal a rift that has endured for decades, if not centuries. Barack Obama stood before a crowd of 3000 in the great hall of Cairo University on Thursday to deliver a speech that demonstrated not only his trademark eloquence, but also the sheer ambition of his purpose — nothing less than bridging the divide between Islam and the West. "No single speech can eradica

Andrew Bast: Obama's Wilsonian Ideals

[Andrew Bast has reported from four continents for several publications, including Newsweek and the New York Times. His weekly WPR column, Under the Influence, appears every Friday.] In his comprehensively titled tome, "Diplomacy," legendary U.S. statesman Henry Kissinger laid out the two competing schools of thought that have guided American foreign policy in its rise to power. The first was realist, embodied by Theodore Roosevelt, based on power and obsessed with the zer

Robert Scheer: Reagan Didn't Do It

[Robert Scheer is the editor of Truthdig, where this article originally appeared. His latest book is The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America(Twelve).] How could Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics and author of generally excellent columns in the New York Times, get it so wrong? His column last Sunday--"Reagan Did It"--which stated that "the prime villains behind the mess we're in were Reagan and his circle of adv