Roundup: Media's Take

Khaled Mattawa: The Milk of Libyan Resistance

Khaled Mattawa, an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Michigan, is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Tocqueville.

Peter Galuszka: The Dodgy World of Southern History

[Peter Galuszka, a writer for Bacon's Rebellion, has been writing about Virginia politics and business since 1975. Now a freelance journalist living in the Richmond area, he has been executive editor of Virginia Business magazine and a reporter at the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk and the Richmond Times-Dispatch. He also spent 18 years at the McGraw-Hill Companies, including 15 years writing for BusinessWeek.] Popular histories about the Confederate States of America can be dodgy, as a

Daniel Henninger: Bring Back the Robber Barons

[Daniel Henninger is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal.] Let's bring back the robber barons. "Robber baron" became a term of derision to generations of American students after many earnest teachers made them read Matthew Josephson's long tome of the same name about the men whose enterprise drove the American industrial age from 1861 to 1901. Josephson's cast of pillaging villains was comprehensive: Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Morgan,

Mikhail Gorbachev: Soviet Lessons From Afghanistan

[Mikhail Gorbachev was the last leader of the Soviet Union.] Afghanistan is in turmoil, with tensions rising and people dying every day. Many of them — including women, children and the elderly — have nothing in common with terrorists or militants. The government is losing control of its territory: of the 34 provinces, the Taliban controls a dozen. The production and export of narcotics is growing. There is a real danger of destabilization extending to neighboring count

Tom Engelhardt: Rebecca Solnit, Earth, Too Big to Fail?

Just last week, a little air armada of at least five Hellfire-missile-armed unmanned aerial vehicles -- robot planes to you -- attacked an area in North Waziristan in Pakistan’s tribal borderlands, reportedly killing 15 or more people. It’s unclear whether these were all Predator drones or some were the more advanced Reapers -- names that might well have come out of the sci-fi memory banks of the generation now flying them via console from hundreds, or even thousands, of miles away.

Sheldon H. Laskin: The Individual Mandate: An Unconstitutional Exercise of Congressional Power

It is generally agreed, by both proponents and opponents of the Administration’s health reform bill, that the lynchpin of the legislation is the individual mandate requiring uninsured Americans to obtain health insurance, or pay a penalty on their tax return for failing to do so. Without the mandate, even the Administration’s wildly exaggerated cost savings estimates simply cannot work. The whole plan is predicated on enlarging the risk pool by bringing in younger, healthier people who currently

Max Blumenthal: Obama, The Fallen Messiah and The Problem With Secular Salvation Narratives

In responding to my initial post, Sarah Posner, Todd Gitlin, and Fred Clarkson make some very important points about the appeal of the Christian right to ordinary Americans. I think their points dovetail with one another. Posner argues quite correctly that those who I described as giving up their individual freedom for the authoritarian structure of the right believe they are gaining new life in the Kingdom of God, along with a sense of community and belonging. She illustrates this trend in her

Michelle Malkin: Hollywood and Howard Zinn’s Marxist Education Project

[Michelle Malkin is a columnist for FrontPageMag.com] The two most important questions for society, according to the Greek philosopher Plato, are these: What will we teach our children? And who will teach them? Left-wing celebrities have teamed up with one of America’s most radical historians to take control of the classroom in the name of “social justice.” Parents, beware: This Hollywood-backed Marxist education [1] project may be coming to a school near you. On Sunday

Tom Engelhardt: Martin Chulov, Is Iraq's Next Crisis Ecological?

With each passing day, the transfer of power from American forces to the Iraqi government looks less like a peaceful exchange and more like a bloody descent into chaos. On December 8th, a series of bombings in Baghdad killed at least 121 people and struck two Iraqi government institutions, an appeals court and the Finance Ministry. Those institutions had only recently been relocat

Joshua Muravchik: The Abandonment of Democracy

[Joshua Muravchik is a fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. His new book, The Next Founders: Voices of Democracy in the Middle East, has just been released by Encounter.] The most surprising thing about the first half-year of Barack Obama’s presidency, at least in the realm of foreign policy, has been its indifference to the issues of human rights and democracy. No administration has ever made these its prim

Nabil Al-Hadithy: A Muslim Lectures Obama

[Nabil Al-Hadithy heads Berkeley's toxic management division addressing hazardous waste problems. He graduated in Geology from University of London in 1975 and obtained Master's Degree from Cranfield University in Material Science in 1977 and doctorate in Welding Technology in 1982. He joined City of Berkeley in 1993 as HazMat Inspector and then became HazMat Manager. An Iraqi, he voted in the country's elections.] Obama delivered a complex speech on June 4th in Cairo to the Muslim and

Muston Kimit: The beauty pageant in the 21st century

I find it depressing that there have been only two choices for defining women for so long; Madonna or tramp. The exception, of course, is Madonna, who has made a career out of playing the tramp. But the social definition of womanhood for the last two hundred years has remained Queen Victoria. She took the throne in 1837 and made such an impression that ever since women have been forced into one of two boxes marked either “saint” (like Victoria) or “tramp” (un-like Victoria). Aphrodite was not so

Harvey Wasserman: Cracking the corporate media's Iron Curtain around death at Three Mile Island

[Harvey Wasserman edits NukeFree.org and is senior editor of http://FreePress.org, where this article originally appeared. His books, including SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, are available at http://harveywasserman.com. ] Chernobyl exploded and Three Mile Island missed by a whisker. They both killed people. But thirty years after the Pennsylvania melt-down, a Soviet-style Iron Curtain has

Dick Morris: Obama's spending plan won't create enough stimulus

The economic stimulus plans unveiled by President-elect Obama over the weekend won't do much to help the economy. But they will vindicate all the dreams of liberal Democrats for higher government spending. Of course, the basic choice facing any politician seeking to stimulate a moribund economy is whether to catalyze the supply side with tax cuts on business or the demand side by way of spending increases. Obama obviously made that choice years ago: He will work the demand side.

Bob Fertik and David Swanson: How History Will View Bush

[Bob Fertik is president of Democrats.com. David Swanson is Washington Director of Democrats.com.] As George Bush prepares to leave office, he and his aides are trying desperately to rewrite history, especially on Iraq. Nearly six years after invading Iraq on the basis of lies that were manufactured inside the White House, the Bush Administration adamantly insists the lies were all innocent mistakes. Were they? Originally, the invasion of Iraq was justified primarily on g

Norman Solomon: The Silent Winter of Escalation

[Norman Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. Information about the documentary film “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” is posted at www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org. To view the C-SPAN “Washington Journal” interview that included excerpts from the film, go here. ] Sunday morning, before dawn, I read in the New York Times that “the Pentagon is

Jim Castagnera: Voting for Obama

[Jim Castagnera is the Associate Provost/Associate Counsel at Rider University. His novels and a collection of his columns are available at http://www.lulu.com.] In 1962 a Rand Corporation strategist named Herman Kahn wrote a controversial book on nuclear war, which he entitled “Thinking About the Unthinkable.” The title came to my mind this week, as I listened to radio reports of polls that put Barack Obama’s lead at anywhere from five to 10

Aaron David Miller: Searching for Arab-Israeli Peace

SOURCE: Spring 2008 Wilson Quarterly [Aaron David Miller is a public policy scholar at the Wilson Center. He worked in both Republican and Democratic administrations as an adviser to the secretary of state on Arab-Israeli negotiations. His new book, The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace, was published in March by Bantam Books.] “The only lesson of history,” the British historian A. J. P. Taylor once observed, “is that there are no

Jim Castagnera: Playing the Great Game (again)

[Jim Castagnera is the Associate Provost/Associate Counsel at Rider University. He is writing his 14th book, about terrorism’s impact on higher education, for Praeger.] The Russians have romped through Georgia. When taken to task, they asked rhetorically, if Uncle Sam can invade Baghdad, why can’t the Bear invade Tbilisi. Secretary of State Rice retorted that this was not Czechoslovakia in 1968. With all due respect, Dr. Rice drew the wrong analogy. Cold War thinking isn’

Mary Anastasia O'Grady: Twenty-Two Years in Castro's Gulag

In late December 1959, nearly a year after Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista had been run out the country by a movement that had a goal of restoring the 1940 Cuban constitution, Fidel Castro was tightening his grip. At the time, Armando Valladares was a 22-year-old government bureaucrat at the Post Office Savings Bank. One day a group from the Communist Party showed up in his office and put a sign on his desk that read "If Fidel is a communist, put me on the list. He's got the r