Roundup: Media's Take

John Fund: Why is Yale allowing the former spokesman for the Taliban to take classes like any ordinary student?

Three weeks after the New York Times revealed that former Taliban official Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi is attending classes at Yale, many at the university still have little to say about the controversy. Meredith Startz, president of the Yale Political Union, told me "there's more discussion of military recruiting among people at Yale than about the Taliban student."... The case of Vladimir Sokolov presents an interesting contrast with how Yale is reacting to its Talib stude

Fred Block: What Dems Need to Do

The daily headlines suggest that a toxic combination of arrogance, corruption and incompetence is weakening the Republican Party's hold on national political power. As the Democrats struggle to capitalize on this opportunity, progressives should remember what happens when one side wins an election without defeating the opponent's main ideas. Back in 1992 Bill Clinton campaigned successfully for President with promises to "put people first" and provide health insurance for

Nancy Salvato: It’s Time to Revisit the Electoral College (Redux)

[Nancy Salvato is the President of The Basics Project, (www.Basicsproject.org) a non-profit, non-partisan research and educational project whose mission is to promote the education of the American public on the basic elements of relevant political, legal and social issues important to our country. She is also a Staff Writer, for the New Media Alliance, Inc., a non-profit (501c3) coalition of writers and grass-roots media outlets, where she contributes

Joshua Holland: Womenomics 101

Women play a greater role in the American economy today than at any time since Rosie the riveter gave up making bombers for the baby boom after World War II, but American corporations -- enabled by a political class dominated by men -- continue to punish them for the high crime of being female. The irony is that if public and corporate policies were to take the needs of working American women seriously, it wouldn't just give a boost to working families, it would also strengthen the

Norman Solomon: War-Loving Pundits

The third anniversary of the Iraq invasion is bound to attract a lot of media coverage, but scant recognition will go to the pundits who helped to make it all possible. Continuing with long service to the Bush administration’s agenda-setting for war, prominent media commentators were very busy in the weeks before the invasion. At the Washington Post, the op-ed page’s fervor hit a new peak on Feb. 6, 2003, the day after Colin Powell’s mendacious speech to the U.N. Security Coun

Sidney Blumenthal: Iraq ... The big lie

On the eve of the third anniversary -- March 20, 2003 -- of the invasion of Iraq President Bush began the fourth of his series of speeches in his second term attempting to articulate his strategy for the war. None of his previous explanations had succeeded in bolstering public confidence, so he tried again. His speech on Monday was a reiteration of the theme he had elaborated in his last round. Bush is rigidly adhering to the guidelines suggested by public opinion specialist Peter Feaver, a prof

Max Boot: Best supporting neocon

DEAR George Clooney, Congratulations on that best supporting actor Oscar you picked up last week. I couldn't be happier for you. Not only because I admire your Cary Grant-esque panache but because I admire your politics. As an advocate of a hawkish but high-minded foreign policy, I can't find much to cheer about in Hollywood, but you, my friend, consistently deliver. Dare I say it — you're the No. 1 neocon in Never Never Land. Oh, I know you try to hide your real views

Patrick Buchanan: Cultural Warmongers

If you wish to get along with a man, you do not insult his faith. And if you seek to persuade devout Muslims that al-Qaeda is our enemy, not Islam, you do not condone with silence insults to the faith of a billion people. Understanding this, President Bush ceased to call the war on terror a "crusade." Visiting a mosque, he removed his shoes. He has hosted White House gatherings for the breaking of the fast at the end of Ramadan. He sent Karen Hughes to the State Department

Bruce Bartlett: Give Bush power to impound funds

[Mr. Bartlett is the author of "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy," just published by Doubleday.] Last Monday, President Bush sent legislation to Congress that would give him a kind of line item veto. Congress granted such authority to the president in 1996, but in 1998 it was struck down by the Supreme Court in Clinton v. City of New York. It ruled that the law granted the president unconstitutional authority to amend bills pas

David Swanson: Did Bush Make Mistakes?

When we watch a video of Bush being informed of the danger of Hurricane Katrina and recall that he claimed that there was no way he could have known of that danger, our faith in his good intentions may be shaken. And when we learn that Bush has long since authorized wiretapping without court approval, what are we to make of his public statements (such as last June 9, or July 14, 2004, or April 20, 2004) when he reassured us that all wiretapping requires court approval?Our President

Gershom Gorenberg: Israel's Tragedy Foretold

[Gershom Gorenberg is the author of "The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements."] WITH Israel's national election approaching, each day's news emphasizes a clear political shift: the settlement enterprise has lost the support of the country's mainstream voters. Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the front-runner in the March 28 vote, plans to evacuate more West Bank settlements unilaterally, a top figure in his party said this week. Mr. O

Steven Aftergood: The incomprehensible espionage act of 1917 --- and why it matters

The Espionage Act is "in many respects incomprehensible," wrote Harold Edgar and Benno C. Schmidt, Jr. in a definitive law review article three decades ago which explored the potential use of the Act to prosecute leaks to the media. The espionage statutes are "so sweeping as to be absurd," they argued (previously noted in Secrecy News, 10/19/05). "If these statutes mean what they seem to say and are constitutional, public speech in this country

Arianna Huffington: Rummy Flunks History

Earlier this week, I blogged about the Bush administration's increasingly absurd efforts to spin the war in Iraq, including Don Rumsfeld's attempt to lay the blame for the White House's Iraq troubles at the feet of America's history teachers:"I think the biggest problem we've got in the country is people don't study history anymore. People who go to school in high schools and coll

Howard Husock: How to put the New Deal behind us

[Mr. Husock is director of the Manhattan Institute's Social Entrepreneurship Initiative and a research fellow at Harvard University's Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations.] No matter whose priorities prevail in this year's budget debate, it is a certainty that the federal government will continue to devote billions to activities known as "social services." ... But should this role be considered beyond debate? It is a question worth pondering today because

William E. Odom: Iraq through the prism of Vietnam

The Vietnam War experience can’t tell us anything about the war in Iraq – or so it is said. If you believe that, trying looking through this lens, and you may change your mind. The Vietnam War had three phases. The War in Iraq has already completed an analogous first phase, is approaching the end of the second phase, and shows signs of entering the third. Phase One in Vietnam lasted from 1961 until the Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in March 1965, authori

WSJ Editorial: The dictator's trial reveals a telling historical parallel

In the late spring of 1942, the world learned the name Lidice. Czech resistance had assassinated deputy SS chief Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, and Adolf Hitler ordered Heydrich's successor to "wade through blood" to find the killers. Nearly 2,000 innocent civilians were murdered by the Nazis without turning up the culprits. So the decision was made to obliterate an entire village, so that the world would know the price of Nazi blood. On the evening of June 10, German troops

Max Boot: Guess What? We're Winning

[Max Boot is a senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. His War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of Modern History is due out in the fall of 2006 from Gotham Books.] To listen to the critics, you would think that the Iraq war was the biggest blunder in U.S. history and George W. Bush the worst president ever. Comparisons with Vietnam have already become a cliché, but that's not going far enough for the respected Israeli military hi

Michael T. Klare: The Coming Resource Wars

[Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author of Resource Wars and Blood and Oil, both available in paperback from Owl Books.] It's official: the era of resource wars is upon us. In a major London address, British Defense Secretary John Reid warned that global climate change and dwindling natural resources are combining to increase the likelihood of violent conflict over land, water and energy. Climate change, he indicated

Gunnar Heinsohn: Babies Win Wars

[Mr. Heinsohn is professor of sociology at Bremen University and founder and president of the Raphael-Lemkin-Institut.] Dying nations are usually defined as those with fertility rates of 1.5 or lower. By that measure, 30 European countries are either dying today or -- like France -- seeing their cultures and populations transformed by growing ethnic and religious minorities. Europe is shrinking just as the population in Islamic, African and Asian countries is exploding.

Jim Sleeper: An open letter to John Fund, our intrepid, two-footed truth teller on the Hashemi-at-Yale case

Dear John Fund, You called me at home Saturday, March 4, seeking information or a comment on the enrollment of the former Talibani spin doctor Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi as a non-degree student at Yale. You told me, as you tell readers in this, your second column in a row on the subject, that you are shocked, shocked that no one in authority at Yale would say anything about it to you. When I asked if you'd tried Charles Hill, a neoconservative Diplomat in Residence there, a Vulcan o