Roundup: Media's Take

Michael Lind: What is a "Good" Job, Anyway?

Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution."

Ian Jack: Time for a Royal Wedding ... While England Is Royally Screwed

Jack is a British journalist and author of The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain....The country is used to the idea of national decline: “declinism” became a feature of British historical study many years ago—the U.S. is just now catching up. Public fears over the nation’s capability date back to at least the Boer War.

Noam Chomsky: Is the World Too Big to Fail?

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works.

Tim Rutten: Obama's Lack of Moral Clarity on Armenian Genocide Issue

The line between prudence and moral cowardice can be a fine one, particularly when it comes to the conduct of diplomacy.

Robert Park: When Will We Stop the Genocide in North Korea?

The writer is a human rights activist and missionary who was detained in North Korea from December 2009 to February 2010.“Holocaust” is the word used to describe the systematic extermination of millions of innocent European Jews during World War II. In the aftermath of this mammoth failure of humanity, many nations “repented” and declared that “never again” would such inhumanity and absolute disregard for human dignity and life be tolerated.

Peter Godwin: Making Mugabe Laugh

Peter Godwin is the author of The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe....The parallels between Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe are striking: both were once viewed as the singular successes in their respective regions, the envy of their neighbors. Both Mr. Gbagbo, a former history professor, and Mr. Mugabe, a serial graduate student, are highly educated men who helped liberate their countries from authoritarian regimes.

Bret Stephens: Damascus Needs Regime Change

[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.] It's coming on close to four decades since the U.S. foreign policy establishment got into the business of making excuses for the Assad regime in Syria. Maybe it's time to stop. The excuses come in many forms.

Alexander Golts: NATO's Half-Hearted War

Alexander Golts is deputy editor of the online newspaper Yezhednevny Zhurnal.

Erwin Chemerinsky and James J. Sample: You Get the Judges You Pay For

Erwin Chemerinsky is the dean of the law school at the University of California, Irvine. James J. Sample is an associate professor of law at Hofstra.LEGAL elites must come to terms with a reality driven by the grass-roots electorate: judicial elections are here to stay. Given this reality, we should focus on balancing important First Amendment rights to financially support campaigns with due process concerns about fair trials....

Jeff Bridoux: Why Libya will not be a second Iraq

[Jeff Bridoux is the author of American Foreign Policy and Postwar Reconstruction, published by Routledge in 2011, and a Postdoctoral Fellow in ‘Politico-Economies of Democratisation’, Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University.]

Daniel J. Flynn: Echoes of Carter

[Daniel J. Flynn is the author of Why the Left Hates America, Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas, A Conservative History of the American Left, and the forthcoming Blue Collar Intellectuals.] Do you ever get the feeling that you’re really living in a television program? For 2011 America, the rerun we are collectively forced to act in is That ’70s Show. Supermarket prices have skyrocketed. An energy crisis looms. The economy sputter

Patrick Cockburn: Libya's parallels with Iraq under Saddam are truly ominous

[Patrick Cockburn is a foreign correspondent at The Independent.] The conflict between pro and anti-Gaddafi forces in Libya could, according to Moussa Koussa, the former Libyan foreign minister, who has fled to Britain, turn the country into another Somalia. The ingredients are certainly there for a prolonged conflict. Claims that Muammar Gaddafi is about to fall sound unnervingly similar to predictions in 1991 that Saddam Hussein was going to lose power in Iraq after his calamitous

Walter Rodgers: Rural American Tradition of Disregard for Law Still Thrives

[Walter Rodgers, a former senior international correspondent for CNN, writes a biweekly column.] The classic children’s story begins, “A wild, ringing neigh shrilled up from the hold of the Spanish galleon.” “Misty of Chincoteague” is one of those books you really wanted to believe as a kid: A shipload of Moorish ponies destined for the New World founders in a storm off the Virginia and Maryland barrier islands. The author tells us that for centuries they roamed “free, free, free,”

Scott Horton: How Not to Declare a War

[Scott Horton is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine who teaches at Columbia Law School.] In 2007, the Boston Globe's Charlie Savage asked then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama whether the president could authorize the bombing of Iran without first seeking congressional authorization in circumstances in which there was no imminent threat to the United States. Obama's answer was clear and succinct: "The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize

Stephan Vormann: The End of German “Normalization“?

[Stephan Vormann is working on a PhD on German Foreign and Security Policy at the “Centre for the Study of Wider Europe” at NUI Maynooth.] For the last 20 years German foreign policy has been remarkably continuous. Despite widespread fears over the future course of the country after the end of the Cold War, a mix of strong normative and material interests has ensured that Germany continued to work towards further European integration and towards the further development of NATO and t

Peter Dreier: La Follette’s Wisconsin Idea

[Peter Dreier is E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics at Occidental College. This essay is adapted from The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century, due to be published in November by Nation Books.] IN FEBRUARY 2011, more than 15,000 Wisconsinites marched on the state capitol building in Madison. By the middle of March, more than 100,000 protestors had joined this challenge to Governor Scott Walker’s steep budget cuts, his proposal to strip public employees of collectiv

George P. Shultz: The Constitution Doesn't Mention Czars

[Mr. Shultz, former secretary of labor (1969-70), secretary of the Treasury (1972-74) and secretary of state (1982-89), is a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.] ...In national security and foreign policy, the National Security Council (NSC) was established after World War II by the National Security Act of 1947. As late as 1961, under President Dwight Eisenhower, the NSC was supported by a small staff headed by an executive secretary with a "passion for anonymi

Bruce Piasecki: The Ben Franklin Solution for the Coming Age of Scarcity

[Bruce Piasecki, president and founder of the management consulting firm AHC Group, is the author of several books on corporate strategy. This essay is based on his forthcoming book, "Doing More with Less: Another Way to Wealth."] ...[W]e must embrace a spirit of competitive frugality in the service of less. "Doing more with less" must become our mantra, aim, and rallying call to become more frugal, inventive, and diplomatic. It may seem like a radical concept, b

Jackie Ashley: Britain Must Turn Its Back on Imperial Past

[Jackie Ashley is a Guardian columnist and political interviewer.] There are three ways to respond when the going gets tough: head in the sand, try to sort things out, or suddenly get very busy elsewhere. Which perhaps explains why David Cameron has been focusing so much on "abroad" recently, and I don't just mean his bargain break in Spain. With his government's two flagship policies in crisis, Cameron has decided to apologise for Britain's role in world conf

Maureen Dowd: Blowin’ in the Idiot Wind

[Maureen Dowd is a columnist for the NYT.] Bob Dylan may have done the impossible: broken creative new ground in selling out. The idea that the raspy troubadour of ’60s freedom anthems would go to a dictatorship and not sing those anthems is a whole new kind of sellout — even worse than Beyoncé, Mariah and Usher collecting millions to croon to Qaddafi’s family, or Elton John raking in a fortune to serenade gay-bashers at Rush Limbaugh’s fourth wedding....