Roundup: Media's Take

Tony Benn: Formation of a national government ... A disgrace in 1931, and now

[Tony Benn is a former Labour MP and cabinet minister.] The argument that we might have to consider a national government to deal with the economic crisis, as put in these pages on Monday by Frank Field, is the clearest indication that capitalism and democracy are incompatible. It is of course not a new argument - Ramsay MacDonald, then Labour prime minister, followed that course in 1931, joining with the Tories and the Liberals and calling an election in which only 51 Labour MPs su

Dan Bilefsky: 13 years after Dayton accord, ethnic divisions again threaten Bosnia

[Dan Bilefsky is the International Herald Tribune's Central and Eastern Europe correspondent.] Thirteen years after the United States brokered the Dayton peace agreement to end modern Europe's most ferocious ethnic war, fears are mounting that Bosnia and Herzegovina, poor and divided, is again teetering toward crisis. On the surface, this haunted capital, its ancient mosques and Orthodox churches still pocked with holes from mortar fire, appears to be enjoying a renais

Noam Scheiber: Obama's Relationship With Emil Jones--It's, Uh, Complicated

Besides worsening his own legal problems, one of the things Rod Blagojevich accomplished when he (allegedly) shopped around Barack Obama's Senate seat was to highlight the president elect's relationship with Emil Jones, the outgoing president of the Illinois state senate. As it happens, Jones figures into the scandal in several ways. He was initially rumored to be "Senate Candidate 5," the lone potential Senate appointee who bargained with Blago. Yesterday Jones announced his support f

Ross Douthout: The Foreign Policy Debate, Past and Future

Of my various remarks about foreign-policy schools, a reader writes: "I think you're creating all sorts of divisions where none really exist. There is NO substantive division between Democratic realists and Democratic internationalists and not much between them and their likeminded Republican brethren. The predominant strain of thought in American foreign policy since WW 2 has been liberal/internationalist/realist...." I think thus is rather like Robert Kagan'

Jeff Shear: The Wrong Word for Bailout

[Jeff Shear is the author of Keys to the Kingdom, an investigation into a weapons deal with Japan, published by Doubleday in 1994. His writing and reporting have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone. He was staff correspondent for the National Journal, regularly reporting from the White House and Congress, and co-authored The Buying of the Congress, by Avon Books.] One of the crankier words we hear echoing from Republican ranks describing the f

Andrew North: Iraq presents a lesson from history

[Andrew North is the former BBC Baghdad correspondent.] As the insurgency spread, the letters from the British diplomat in Baghdad grew bleaker. "We are in the thick of violent agitation and we feel anxious… the underlying thought is out with the infidel." And then:"The country between Diwaniyah and Samawah is abandoned to disorder. We haven't troops enough to tackle it at present." A month later:"There's no getting out of the conclusion that we have made an immens

Zephyr Teachout: How the Founding Fathers would clean up K Street

[Zephyr Teachout is a visiting assistant professor at Duke Law School. She was previously the National Director of the Sunlight Foundation and the Director of Online Organizing for Howard Dean's Presidential Campaign.] ... Lobbying today is at the heart of what the Founding Fathers would call "corruption." This is not corruption in the legal sense of "bribery," but the deeper sense, in which public officials and citizens use public channels to serve private ends.

Nick Taylor: F.D.R. Knew How to Spend Carefully

[Nick Taylor is the author of “American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the W.P.A.”] THE plan by Barack Obama to attack unemployment by putting people to work on roads, bridges, schools and new energy projects sounds like a version of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration. If Franklin D. Roosevelt is Mr. Obama’s model, and if the president-elect wants to avoid the disorganized hodgepodge that the financial bailout seems to be so far, then he should look to the structure created

Katha Politt: Bill Ayers Whitewashes History, Again

It couldn't have been easy for Bill Ayers to keep quiet while the McCain campaign tarred him as the Obama's best friend, the terrorist. Unfortunately, the silence was too good to last. On Saturday's New York Times op-ed page, he announced that "it's finally time to tell my true story." Like his memoir, Fugitive Days , "The Real Bill Ayers" is a sentimentalized, self-justifying whitewash of his role in the weirdo violent fringe of the 1960s-70s antiwar left. "

David Neiwert: George W. Bush and those whites-only Texas suburbs

At a cursory glance, the news about George W. Bush moving into a former whites-only enclave in Texas called Preston Hollow looks to be one of those minor, one-day stories. After all, it's not as if these kinds of covenants are still in existence or are being enforced, right? But there's a lot more to this story, because it tells us a lot about not just George W. Bush, but about the cons

Kenneth T. Walsh: Looking Back on President George W. Bush's Troubled Presidency

It wasn't supposed to end like this. Not for George W. Bush, the inveterate optimist who thought his presidency would somehow conclude on a high note despite his abysmal job-approval ratings and his unpopular policies. As recently as September, he told friends of his confidence that positive news out of Iraq, where a surge in U.S. troops had helped quell rampant violence, would soon dominate the headlines and give him a PR lift. Instead, the media today are focusing on the financial meltdown and

Mark I. Pinsky: Why Barack Obama should resurrect the Federal Writers Project and bail out laid-off journalists

[Mark I. Pinsky, former religion writer for the Orlando Sentinel, is at work on his fourth book.] Barack Obama sounds like he wants to reach back to the New Deal's Works Progress Administration to jump start the economy with an economic stimulus proposal featuring infrastructure repair. If so, it may be time for the man who would be FDR to take a look at another successful--but largely forgotten--jobs program from the Depression era: the Federal Writers Project. America

Andy Worthington: Obama and Holder Must Return to a September 10th Mind-Set

[Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press).] During the election campaign, one of the sticks with which John McCain’s team attempted to beat Barack Obama was a claim that he was soft on terrorism, or, as Senator McCain’s national security director Randy Scheunemann declared to reporters in June, “Senator Obama is a perfect manifestation of a September 10th mind-set ... He does not u

Ben Lynfield: Civil rights group claim Israeli occupation is 'reminiscent of apartheid'

[Ben Lynfield has written articles published in The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and The Scotsman.] Israel's leading civil rights organisation yesterday broke a taboo by describing Israeli policies in the occupied West Bank as being “reminiscent of apartheid” in South Africa. Alleging an intensification of human rights abuses against Palestinians, the respected Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) made the comparison in an annual repo

Andrew Anthony: Our cruelty to Obama's family is no excuse for fresh tyranny

[Andrew Anthony has been writing for the Observer since 1993 and for the Guardian since 1990.] Last week, it was revealed that Barack Obama's paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was imprisoned and tortured by the British authorities in Kenya during colonial rule in the late Forties and early Fifties. According to his third wife, whom the President-elect calls 'Granny Sarah', the experience left Hussein Onyango with a lifelong bitterness towards Britain. And not

David Shribman: Stop ... In the name of history

[David M. Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Shribman was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in journalism in 1995 for his coverage of Washington and the American political scene.] ... We have an economic crisis our grandchildren surely will find in their history textbooks. We know that when they read the phrase "first black president" they will be looking back at our times. The heartbreak in India late last month, occurring poignantly as Americans gather

Richard Larsen: Troublesome issues from past election

[Richard Larsen of Pocatello is president of the brokerage firm Larsen Financial. He graduated from Idaho State University with degrees in political science and history.] After a month of pondering the outcome of the recent election, I’m still troubled by certain aspects of the presidential campaign. Yes, I was disappointed with the outcome, but unlike the intolerant bigots in California who continue to harass, intimidate, and terrorize supporters of Proposition 8, I accept the resu

David Horowitz: Obama Derangement Syndrome ... Conservatives Need to Shut Up About the Birth Certificate

The continuing efforts of a fringe group of conservatives to deny Obama his victory and to lay the basis for the claim that he is not a legitimate president is embarrassing and destructive. The fact that these efforts are being led by Alan Keyes, an unhinged demagogue on the political fringe who lost a senate election to the then unknown Obama by 42 points should be a warning in itself. This tempest over whether Obama, the child of an American citizen, was born on American soil is t

Alex Koppelman: Why the stories about Obama's birth certificate will never die

Barack Obama can't be president: He wasn't really born in Hawaii, and the certification of live birth his campaign released is a forgery. He was born in Kenya. Or maybe Indonesia. Or, wait, maybe he was born in Hawaii -- but that doesn't matter, since he was also a British citizen at birth because of his father, and you can't be a "natural-born citizen" in that case. (But then, maybe his "father" wasn't really his father; maybe his real dad was an obscure communist poet. Or M

Douglas R. Burgess Jr.: Piracy Is Terrorism

[Douglas R. Burgess Jr. is the author of “The Pirates’ Pact: The Secret Alliances Between History’s Most Notorious Buccaneers and Colonial America.”] THE golden age of piracy has returned. Just as Henry Every and William Kidd once made their fortunes in the Red Sea, a new generation has emerged, armed with grenade launchers and assault rifles, to threaten trade and distract the world’s navies. With the recent capture of the Saudi supertanker Sirius Star, a crime that once seemed rem