Roundup: Media's Take

Raymond J. Lawrence: Let's Take Christ Out of Christmas

[Raymond J. Lawrence is an Episcopal cleric for 46 years, recently retired Director of Pastoral Care, New York Presbyterian Hospital, and author of numerous opinion pieces in newspapers in the U.S., and author of the recently published, Sexual Liberation: The Scandal of Christendom (Praeger).] Many in the Christian community are vexed because of the use of Christmas by the culture at large, and more especially troubled by the use of Christmas themes for purposes that are not thought

David U. Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler: Repeating Nixon's mistaken approach top health care reform

[David U. Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler are professors of medicine at Harvard and the co-founders of Physicians for a National Health Program.] IN 1971, President Nixon sought to forestall single-payer national health insurance by proposing an alternative. He wanted to combine a mandate, which would require that employers cover their workers, with a Medicaid-like program for poor families, which all Americans would be able to join by paying sliding-scale premiums based on thei

Marty Peretz: Andy Young, Barack Obama and the Black Vote

The old-time black politicians and other public figures are mostly in Hillary Clinton's camp. It is, of course, habit -- how could it not have been otherwise? -- for"people of color" to sue for patronage and programs before the white office-holders whom they had helped elect. For nearly eighty years this meant that most people of color (how this differs so greatly from" colored people" is a mystery to me, but...) voted Republican because the Democratic Party as a whole was mortgage

Douglas Kmiec: Might Hillary appoint Bill to the supreme court?

[Mr. Kmiec, assistant attorney general and head of the Office of Legal Counsel to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, is a professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University and a volunteer legal adviser to Gov. Mitt Romney.] Hillary Clinton's commanding lead in the polls has diminished, and with Oprah Winfrey stumping for Barack Obama, she's called increasingly on the "star power" of husband Bill. But the ubiquitous presence of the former president on the

Ken Shear: Op Ed Rediscovered from 1692

[Mr. Shear is a Seattle attorney and a lover of history.] Up in my attic the other night I came across a packet of yellowed papers tied with a frayed ribbon, with the words “For Posterity” written on it. When I picked it up, all the papers but one mostly crumbled into dust. They must have been hundreds of years old so at first I thought it was quite a loss. But, when I looked at the few small scraps remaining, there were phrases like “rights of the people” and &

Peggy Noonan: Would Reagan survive in today's GOP?

What is happening in Iowa is no longer boring but big, and may prove huge. The Republican race looks--at the moment--to be determined primarily by one thing, the question of religious faith. In my lifetime faith has been a significant issue in presidential politics, but not the sole determinative one. Is that changing? If it is, it is not progress. Mike Huckabee is in the lead due, it appears, to voter approval of the depth and sincerity of his religious beliefs as live

Michael Schudson: Lippmann and the News

[Michael Schudson is a professor of communication at the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University, and at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life and The Sociology of News.] The "present crisis of western democracy," the 30-year-old Walter Lippmann announced in 1920, "is a crisis in journalism." A co-founder of The New Republic in 1914, a Wilson Administration confidant and Army cap

David Park: Did "Moral Values" and the Gay Marriage Backlash Play a Key Role in Bush's 2004 Victory?

[I am an assistant professor in political science George Washington University. Before coming to GW, I was an assistant professor of political science and applied statistics at Washington University. I received my BS in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Maryland and PhD at Columbia University.] Journalists (via political pundits)** and political scientists have conflicting accounts of the 2004 elections. Both are very convincing. Let me first start with the journalists’

Simon Lazarus: The Roberts Court repeals the 20th century

[Simon Lazarus is public-policy counsel to the National Senior Citizens Law Center.] If the Roberts Court makes this shift to the right, it will reinstate the goals, though not the strategy or tactics, of its forbears of a century ago. The reactionary bloc of Supreme Court justices who dominated American law in the first third of the 20th century attacked the emerging regulatory state by playing the Court's ace: its unreviewable power to declare state and federal laws unconstitutional

Jeffrey Lord: Mitt Romney has a passion for data. A great president needs a passion for principle.

[Mr. Lord is creator, co-founder and CEO of QubeTV, a conservative, user-generated video site. A former Reagan White House political director and an author, he writes from Pennsylvania. ] Mitt Romney loves data and lusts after process. In a recent cover profile in The Weekly Standard by the magazine's Fred Barnes, Mr. Romney is portrayed as the man who would be the CEO of America. Says Mr. Barnes, quoting Mr. Romney, a Harvard M.B.A.: "His idea of the perfect deal

Sally Bedell Smith: Two Presidents in the White House?

[Ms. Smith is the author of "For Love of Politics: Bill and Hillary Clinton: The White House Years," published this year by Random House.] For many years, one of Bill and Hillary Clinton's closest friends, TV producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, has been fond of saying that when the Clintons "are dead and gone, each of them is going to be buried next to a president of the United States." It is an idea that the Clintons began talking about decades ago.

Paul Joseph Watson: America's Fascist Coup Owes to Bush's Nazi Grandfather

Author Naomi Wolf, who made headlines earlier this year after she identified the ten steps to fascism that were being followed to a tee by the Bush administration, spoke publicly for the first time yesterday about the origins of what we see unfolding today, Prescott Bush's attempt to launch a Nazi coup in 1930's America. Speaking on the Alex Jones Show, Wolf said that she was first alerted to begin researching America's slide into fascism when her friend, the daughter of a Holocaust

Scott Horton: The President-Tyrant

The irreplaceable Fritz Stern reminds us that as a democracy with two-hundred thirty years of experience, America is better situated than most to weather the storms of a wannabe tyrant. “But that,” he adds, “would presuppose that such a nation really understood its heritage and had a genuine historic sense.” We live now with a Government that shamelessly fabricates and alters history—both from the last two hundred years and from the last six years. It does so with a purpose—making its outrageous

Steve Fraser: War, Depression, and Turning-Point Elections

[Steve Fraser is a writer and editor, as well as the co-founder of the American Empire Project. He is the author of Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life. His latest book, Wall Street: America's Dream Palace, will be published by Yale University Press in March 2008.] Will the presidential election of 2008 mark a turning point in American political history? Will it terminate with extreme prejudice the conservative ascendancy that has dominated the country

NYT Editorial: Dissing Romney's Religion Speech

... Mr. Romney tried to cloak himself in the memory of John F. Kennedy, who had to defend his Catholicism in the 1960 campaign. But Mr. Kennedy had the moral courage to do so in front of an audience of Southern Baptist leaders and to declare: “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.” Mr. Romney did not even come close to that in his speech, at the George Bush Presidential Library in Texas, before a carefully selected crowd. And in his speech, he

Peggy Noonan: How Mitt Romney came to give The Speech--and how he did.

Did Mitt Romney have to give a speech on religion? Yes. When you're in a race so close you could lose due to one issue, your Mormonism, you must address the issue of your Mormonism. The only question was timing: now, in the primaries, or later, as the nominee? But could he get to the general without The Speech? Apparently he judged not. (Mr. Romney's campaign must have some interesting internal polling about Republicans on the ground in Iowa and elsewhere.)... He started with a full

David Brooks: Faith vs. the Faithless

... When this country was founded, James Madison envisioned a noisy public square with different religious denominations arguing, competing and balancing each other’s passions. But now the landscape of religious life has changed. Now its most prominent feature is the supposed war between the faithful and the faithless. Mitt Romney didn’t start this war, but speeches like his both exploit and solidify this divide in people’s minds. The supposed war between the faithful and the faithless has exact

Dilip Hiro: Bush in a Humiliating Zero-Sum Iranian Game of His Own Making

[Dilip Hiro is the author of The Iranian Labyrinth, Secrets and Lies: Operation "Iraqi Freedom" and After, and, most recently, Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil Resources, all published by Nation Books.] Bush's woefully misguided invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, carried out under false pretences, has not only drained the United States treasury, but reduced Washington's standing in the Middle East in a way not yet fully grasped by most com

Kenneth L. Woodward: Mitt Romney Is No Jack Kennedy

[Kenneth L. Woodward, a contributing editor at Newsweek, is writing a book about religion and American culture since 1950.] INEVITABLY, Mitt Romney’s long-awaited speech on faith and religious freedom tomorrow at the George Bush Presidential Library at Texas A&M will be compared to John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech to Protestant ministers in Houston, just 90 miles away. Like Kennedy, Mr. Romney faces questions about his religious beliefs and how they might affect his judgments as pr

Jeffrey Herf: Where Are the Anti-Fascists? ... The danger of Germany's strange silence on Ahmadinejad

The memory of the crimes of the Nazi era and the determination to oppose anti-Semitism in all its forms have been constitutive and distinctive features of German democracy since 1949, when it was articulated by the founding generation of political leaders of West Germany's Federal Republic. Judging by the memorials, commemorative days, books, and films about Nazism and the Holocaust, this tradition of remembering the murdered Jews of Europe remains firmly embedded in the political culture of con