Roundup: Media's Take

Dayo Olopade: Why Eric Holder’s “race speech” was better than Barack Obama’s

[Author bio: Dayo Olopade is a Washington reporter for the Root magazine. ] Eric Holder’s confrontational speech to members of the Justice Department on Wednesday spoke plainly and bluntly about the level of racial discourse in America. “Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot,” he said, “in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.” However equivocal his windup, Holder’s line was a punc

Stuart Taylor Jr.: Let The Honest Talk About Race Begin

Dear Mr. Attorney General: Your speech commemorating Black History Month by calling America "a nation of cowards" because we "do not talk enough with each other about race" -- a topic about which we talk incessantly -- was unworthy of the admirable public servant I believe you to be. The speech was, as others have pointed out, embarrassingly misinformed, hackneyed, and devoid of thoughtful contributions to racial dialogue. You can do muc

Amity Shlaes: Cheering for Obama Stimulus Buys Into 1930s Myth

[Amity Shlaes, author of “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression,” is a Bloomberg News columnist.] It takes only a few seconds to make history new again. Leaders around the world are talking up economic stimulus, channeling U.S. President Barack Obama, who in turn is channeling Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Obama bases his confidence on an old story line with some appealing parallels to today: A disastrously high stock market

Charlie Savage: Obama's war on terror may resemble Bush's

[Charlie Savage is a newspaper reporter in Washington, D.C., with the Boston Globe.] Even as it pulls back from harsh interrogations and other sharply debated aspects of George W. Bush's "war on terrorism," the Obama administration is quietly signaling continued support for other major elements of its predecessor's approach to fighting Al Qaeda. In little-noticed confirmation testimony recently, Obama nominees endorsed continuing the CIA's program of transferr

Jonathan Cohn: The Big-Picture Reasons The U.S. Needs Reform, Daschle Or No Daschle

At first blush, the findings of a study group called the Committee on the Costs of Medical Care might not seem particularly surprising. It's no longer news that millions of American families face financial ruin or physical catastrophe because they have no way to pay medical bills. Nor is it a great revelation that, as a committee staff member put it, "[v]ery few of these families are indigent in the accepted meaning of the word. They have a home, they buy their own food and clothing and pay

Sam Tanenhaus: Conservatism Is Dead ... An intellectual autopsy of the movement

[Sam Tanenhaus is editor of The New York Times Book Review and Week in Review and is at work on a biography of William F. Buckley Jr.] In the tumultuous history of postwar American conservatism, defeats have often contained the seeds of future victory. In 1954, the movement's first national tribune, Senator Joseph McCarthy, was checkmated by the Eisenhower administration and then "condemned" by his Senate colleagues. But the episode, and the passions it aroused, led to the

Ronald Bailey: The morality of resurrecting our closest evolutionary cousins

[Ronald Bailey is the award-winning science correspondent for Reason magazine and Reason.com, where he writes a weekly science and technology column.] The ancestral lines of Neanderthals and modern humans split about 800,000 years ago, making them our closest relatives on the hominid family tree. Neanderthals inhabited ice age Europe and parts of the Middle East before going extinct 30,000 years ago. A team of researchers led by geneticist Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute in Lei

Robert J. Samuelson: Our Lost Decade

We argue by analogy. The president says that Japan's history demonstrates the need for his "stimulus package." To the contrary, claim Hannity and other conservatives, Japan shows that stimulus plans don't work. Up to a point, they're both right. But the possible parallels between Japan's experience and our own are much broader and pose the question of whether we, too, might face a "lost decade." What happened to Japan in the 1990s? It did not, as so

Shaun Walker: Will there be another Russian revolution?

[Shaun Walker is the Moscow correspondent of the Independent.] These are hard times for the town of Asbest, deep in Russia's Urals industrial belt. For more than a century, asbestos has been mined here on a grand scale. And in recent years, despite an EU ban on the use of asbestos, the 19 factories that make up the world's biggest asbestos mining and processing operation have been working at full stretch, fuelled by Russia's construction boom. Andrei, a 37-year-old loca

Mary Dejevsky: Regime change happens fast – so how stable is Medvedev?

[One of the country’s most respected commentators on Russia, the EU and the US, Mary Dejevsky has worked as a foreign correspondent all over the world, including Washington, Paris and Moscow. She is now the chief editorial writer and a columnist at The Independent and regularly appears on radio and television.] When all else fails, seek a parallel in history. So it is that the Great Depression and the works of John Maynard Keynes have become fashionable reference points across the E

Editorial in the Telegraph: Khmer Rouge ... Cambodia must lay to rest the ghosts of the past

It is 30 years since the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia committed one of the most terrible crimes against humanity of the 20th Century. In a period of four years, as many as two million Cambodians died – either executed in the "killing fields", or worked or starved to death in forced labour camps. The man who ordered this carnage, the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, died peacefully a decade ago in his jungle hideaway. No member of the regime has ever been brough

Eduardo Porter: Dangers of the D-Word

More than 500,000 people are losing their jobs every month. Companies are failing left and right. Thousands of homeowners are facing foreclosure every day. A reasonable person might ask: Are we in a Depression? Government officials say no. Aides to Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain quickly backpedaled after he suggested that fiscal stimulus was needed to pull the world out of a “depression.” The aides called it an unfortunate slip of the tongue. When the International Monetary

Sue Black: Save Bletchley Park ... Why I'm ashamed to be British

[Dr Sue Black is Head of Department of Information and Software Systems at the University of Westminster.] Have you heard of Bletchley Park? It’s just north of London, where more than ten thousand men and women worked during WW2 to decode messages sent between the German forces, most notably by Hitler, and the German high command. The cracking of the codes, the use of the intelligence gained and the subsequent related actions of the Allies is said to have shortened WW2 by two years

Anne Applebaum: We're all free traders now. So why are protectionist policies so popular?

Some think the New Deal rescued the United States from economic crisis in the 1930s. Others argue precisely the opposite. But whatever their ideology and whatever their credentials, most of the pundits, historians, and economists who debate the Great Depression agree about one thing: Whatever may have caused the crisis, protectionism, trade barriers, and, yes, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act helped ensure that it lasted as long as it did. So uncontroversial is this view that it is virtually U.S. gov

William Rees-Mogg: In times of crisis, never forget the value of gold

[William Rees-Mogg has had a distinguished career with The Times and The Sunday Times.] Last week was a bad one for bank shares; after the HBOS £8.5 billion loss, Lloyds shares fell by a third and other bank shares fell as well. Yet it was a very good week for the gold price, which closed on Friday at $935 an ounce, after reaching what was nearly a seven-month high of $953.30 on Wednesday. Barclays Capital commented that gold prices were resuming their long-run bull tre

Denis MacShane: The writing is on the synagogue wall

[Denis MacShane, MP, is a former Minister for Europe and the author of Globalising Hatred: the New Anti-Semitism.] The periodic crises that have shaken world capitalism in the century and a half since Marx wrote Das Kapital are marked by a common political phenomenon. It is the rise of political anti-Semitism. Attacks on Jews and Jewishness constitute the canary in the coal mine that tells us something is going seriously wrong. Last month a 32-year-old IT worker, Micha

Richard Beeston: Facts paint a different picture of Britain's role in Iraq

[Richard Beeston has written articles published in The Times (Foreign Editor, Diplomatic Editor) and The Sunday Times (Diplomatic Editor).] With a few months to go before British Forces withdraw from Iraq, a fierce debate is under way over the legacy of Britain's six-year military engagement in the country. The British military is determined that when the last soldier goes he will leave with his head held high and the Army's reputation intact. According to Lieutenant-G

Peter Preston: Bismarckian board games

[Peter Preston was editor of the Guardian for 20 years, from 1975 to 1995, and now writes columns for the paper and for the Observer.] The question - from Gaza to Pristina - is whether peace arrives top down or bottom up, whether it's ordinary folk or diplomatic men in suits who do the business. And from an island of strife 45 long years ago is the beginning of a surprising answer. Can we find friendship and understanding between warring communities? Perhaps we can. The

Adam Cohen: Is the Supreme Court About to Kill Off the Exclusionary Rule?

In 1957, the Cleveland police showed up at Dollree Mapp’s home looking for a bombing suspect. Ms. Mapp would not let them in without a search warrant, but they entered anyway. The police did not find the bomber, but they came across a trunk containing “lewd and lascivious” books and pictures. Ms. Mapp was convicted of possessing obscene materials, even though the evidence was taken without a warrant. She was tried in state court, like the overwhelming majority of criminal defendants

Jessica Bennett: We should stop making kids learn cursive writing

... The folks who want to make us script conscripts have formulated all sorts of rationalizations. Chief among them: education. Some studies have shown a link between good handwriting and improved academic performance. A recent one found that the majority of primary-school teachers believe that students with fluent handwriting produce better work, though it seems just as likely that the teachers might "believe" that because legible handwriting makes their jobs easier. And you could ju