Roundup: Media's Take

Source: Newsweek
Jan 9, 2006

Anna Quindlen: Let's Allow Immigrants to Become President

... Our attitude toward immigrants is paradoxical. As Roger Daniels writes in his history "Guarding the Golden Door," most Americans find themselves "on the one hand reveling in the nation's immigrant past and on the other rejecting much of its immigrant present." They also find themselves reviling illegal immigration and yet benefiting from its underground work culture, the jobs that need doing that we don't want to do ourselves. But there's one potentially dirt

Source: Journal of Commerce
Jan 9, 2006

Alan M. Field: Troubling Commercial-Historical Lessons About China

Can multinational companies confidently entrust the long-term future of their supply chains to a country founded on the Communist legacy of Mao Zedong? I asked myself that question recently while reading "Mao: The Unknown Story," a riveting biography of the Chinese leader that is still banned in China but is a runaway bestseller in Europe and Asia. Authors Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, both reputable historians, portray Mao as a craven, egomaniacal monster who had no genuin

Source: NYT
Jan 8, 2006

Noah Feldman: Who Can Check the President?

Not since Watergate has the question of presidential power been as salient as it is today. The recent revelation that President George W. Bush ordered secret wiretaps in the United States without judicial approval has set off the latest round of arguments over what the president can and cannot do in the name of his office. Over the past few years, the war on terror has led to the use of executive orders to authorize renditions and the detention of enemy combatants without trial - for which the B

Source: NYT
Jan 8, 2006

Todd S. Purdum: The K Street Culture

IN 1872, some Republican elders, revolted by the rampant influence peddling of Ulysses S. Grant's administration, challenged him for re-election. "He has used the public service of the government as a machinery of corruption and personal influence," they complained, and "shown himself deplorably unequal to the task imposed on him by the necessities of the country." Jack Abramoff's trading room was his Signatures restaurant, not the front of the old Willard Hotel,

Source: Financial Times (London, England)
Jan 7, 2006

Martin Arnold: French Left Waits For A Second Mitterrand

"I will be the last of the great presidents . . . the last in the line of de Gaulle. After me, there will be no more in France." This was how Francois Mitterrand immodestly assessed the unpromising prospects for his successors as French president. As the country prepares to commemorate tomorrow the 10th anniversary of Mitterrand's death, most observers agree that in spite of his stature as a towering political figure on the domestic and European stage, France's longest-ser

Source: NYT
Jan 6, 2006

Michael Waldman: Reform Doesn't Always Follow Scandals Like Abramoff

[Mr. Waldman is executive director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.] ...In the long struggle to strengthen democracy, reform sometimes follows scandal, but not always. Often appalling corruption has produced a yawn rather than a shriek. True progress comes only from rare ''reform moments,'' when accumulated public outrage combines with potent policy changes. In the late 1800's, everybody knew that campaigns were financed by

Source: WSJ
Jan 6, 2006

Michael Barone: K Street Woes & History

There are probably a few Washington old-timers left who remember when K Street, N.W., was lined with mansions -- but there can't be many. K Street is now lined with stolid, 130-foot-high office buildings -- Washington has a height limit -- filled with trade associations, law firms and lobbyists. I'm not sure who first used K Street as a shorthand term for Washington's lobbying community, but it might have been me, back in 1971, when I was promoting my first Almanac of American Politics and told

Source: CRS Report : Presidential Authority to Conduct Warrantless Electronic Surveillance to Gather Foreign Intelligence Information
Jan 5, 2006

Congressional Research Service: Presidential Authority to Conduct Warrantless Electronic Surveillance

... Foreign intelligence collection is not among Congress’s powers enumerated in Article I of the Constitution, nor is it expressly mentioned in Article II as a responsibility of the President. Yet it is difficult to imagine that the Framers intended to reserve foreign intelligence collection to the states or to deny the authority to the federal government altogether. It is more likely that the power to collect intelligence resides somewhere within the domain of foreign affairs and war pow

Source: TomDispatch.com
Jan 5, 2006

Nick Turse: What Year Is This Anyway? Rollback to 1214 AD

[Nick Turse is the Associate Editor and Research Director of TomDispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Nation, the Village Voice, and regularly for Tomdispatch.] What might happen to an "often cruel and treacherous" national leader who"ignored and contravened the traditional" norms at home and waged "expensive wars abroad [that

Source: News of Delaware County
Jan 4, 2006

Jim Castagnera: Recollecting the Cleveland of Mayor Dennis Kucinich

With winter well underway, the rain and snow have helped keep Congressman Dennis Kucinich, the Democrat representing Ohio’s 10th Congressional District, on my mind. This baby-faced fifty-nine-year-old tossed his hat into the ring during the presidential primaries of 2004. He has kept himself in the news by continuing to push his campaign proposal for a cabinet-level Department of Peace. Bills to establish the new federal department, pending since September in both houses, thus far hav

Source: NYT
Jan 3, 2006

Adam Cohen: Question for Judge Alito: What About One Person One Vote?

When Samuel Alito Jr. applied for a top job in the Reagan Justice Department, he explained what had attracted him to constitutional law as a college student. He was motivated, he said, "in large part by disagreement with Warren Court decisions, particularly in the areas of criminal procedure, the Establishment Clause, and reapportionment." The reapportionment cases that so upset young Mr. Alito were a series of landmark decisions that established a principle that is now a cornerstone o

Source: Column submitted to HNN
Jan 3, 2006

Paul Rogat Loeb: Why Democrats should vote no on Alito

[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, and winner of the Nautilus Award for best social change book of the year. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time.] Remember the "nuclear option" compromise? When the group of 14 Senators reached their agreement last Ma

Source: WSJ
Jan 3, 2006

Jim Hoagland: 2006: A Pivotal Year

Decisive leaders make history before history turns around to unmake them. New Year's 2006 finds once again that we live in a time of transition. The politicians who dominated the scene two years ago are gone or greatly diminished. With one or two exceptions, those left standing face a year of living precariously as they cope with change that they helped unleash but could not control. Their further diminution or likely removal gives 2006 the potential to be a global hinge year -- a m

Source: USA TODAY
Jan 3, 2006

David Jackson and Susan Page: Year 6 Not Kind To Presidents

For President Bush, 2005 was a year of growing public impatience with the Iraq war, angst over record gas prices, devastation from Hurricane Katrina, the collapse of his Social Security plan and, finally, a firestorm over his decision to authorize targeted domestic spying without court warrants. ... It was in the sixth year of their presidencies that Bill Clinton was impeached and Richard Nixon was forced to resign, that Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower faced the worst scandals

Source: USA TODAY
Jan 3, 2006

Adam Shell: Wall Street Will Limp Through Year

After the stock market bubble burst, Wall Street pundits predicted the 2000s would usher in a "low-return" world. A "no-return world" would have been more accurate. It's the first day of trading in 2006 and, despite three up years in a row and a modest 3% gain last year, a buy-and-hold investor who invested $10,000 in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index on Dec. 31, 1999, would now have an investment worth $8,493, excluding dividends. That equat

Source: Christian Science Monitor
Jan 3, 2006

Gail Russell Chaddock: Capitol Hill To Be Drama-Filled In 2006

It's going to be a banner year for C-SPAN. That's because Congress is gearing up for the most dramatic slate of hearings since the Clinton impeachment fracas. The high-profile probes underscore efforts by Congress to reclaim power from a war-time White House. And they could reshape this fall's midterm elections. In the closing weeks of the old year, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle set in motion an aggressive oversight agenda, ranging from secret prisons and the tr

Source: Los Angeles Times
Jan 2, 2006

Ronald Brownstein: Bush Resembles Polk

The president whom George W. Bush may resemble most is not his biological father, George H.W. Bush, or even Ronald Reagan, who often seems his ideological father, but James K. Polk, a dynamic and willful leader few discuss anymore. Polk, when elected president as a Democrat in 1844, had more political experience than Bush (Polk had spent 20 years in elective office, compared with Bush's six). But like Bush (who was 54 in 2000), Polk was young (49) and extremely self-confident when h

Source: The Daily Telegraph (LONDON)
Jan 2, 2006

David Schwartz: UK's Stock Market Set For Down Year

The UK stock market rocketed ahead in 2005. Shares rose by 17pc, the third consecutive year of double digit gains. Optimists hope the painful downturn we endured from 2000-02 was temporary and the roaring bull market of the 1980s and 1990s has returned. However, several long-running trends suggest it is late in the day for the current rally. If the past is any guide, the current strong performance of share prices on both sides of the Atlantic could be about to run out of steam and s

Source: NYT
Jan 1, 2006

David Sanger: Bush's Swing for the Rafters

BEFORE he retreated behind the fences of his ranch here to ring out a bruising year, President Bush made it clear that even with three years to go, he already regards his presidency as a big one in the sweep of American history. He insists that his real motive in conducting the war in Iraq is to democratize one of the least democratic corners of the earth. He regularly quotes Harry Truman, who rebuilt Japan and Germany while remaking American national security policy from the ground

Source: WSJ
Dec 28, 2005

Robert F. Turner: Congress can't usurp the president's power to spy on America's enemies

[Mr. Turner, co-founder of the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, served as counsel to the President's Intelligence Oversight Board, 1982-84.] In the continuing saga of the surveillance "scandal," with some congressional Democrats denouncing President Bush as a lawbreaker and even suggesting that impeachment hearings may be in order, it is important to step back and put things in historical context. First of all, the Founding Fath