Roundup: Media's Take

Bradford Plumer: Gangster Paradise? Not Quite

[Bradford Plumer is an associate editor of The New Republic.] Some cities have all the fun. Last week, the FBI arrested 125 suspected Mafia members across the Northeast—the largest mob bust in history. New York was, as usual, well-represented in the Mafia round-up, with no less than 34 made guys from the city’s five crime families dragged off to jail. Also getting in on the action were Providence (83-year-old Luigi Mannochio, accused of shaking down local strip clubs) and Newark (va

Fred Siegel: How Public Unions Took Taxpayers Hostage

[Mr. Siegel is a scholar in residence at St. Francis College and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.] The turbulent years of the 1960s and '70s are best known by the headline-grabbing civil rights and women's rights movements. But there was another "rights" movement, largely overlooked, that has also had a profound effect on American life. The looming public-pension crisis that threatens to bankrupt city, county and state governments had its origins in those same y

David Eisenhower: A Tale of Two Speeches

[David Eisenhower is director of the Institute for Public Service at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of "Going Home to Glory: A Memoir of Life with Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961-1969."] On Tuesday, President Obama will deliver his State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress. Shortly after his speech, a spokesman for the Republican Party will offer a televised rebuttal. And if the evening unfolds as usua

Christopher Hitchens: Churchill Didn't Say That

[Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution.] The King's Speech is an extremely well-made film with a seductive human interest plot, very prettily calculated to appeal to the smarter filmgoer and the latent Anglophile. But it perpetrates a gross falsification of history. One of the very few miscast actors—Timothy Spall as a woefully thin pastiche of Winston Churchill—is the exemplar of this bizarre rewriting. He

Richard P. Sloan: A Fighting Spirit Won’t Save Your Life

[Richard P. Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, is the author of “Blind Faith.”] GABRIELLE GIFFORDS’S remarkable recovery from a bullet to her head has provided a heartening respite from a national calamity. Representative Giffords’s husband describes her as a “fighter,” and no doubt she is one. Whether her recovery has anything to do with a fighting spirit, however, is another matter entirely. The idea that an individual has

Dominic Tierney: Do Americans Love War?

[Dominic Tierney is assistant professor of political science at Swarthmore College. He is the author of How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War.]Of course not, goes the traditional answer. Americans have always been reluctant warriors."Of all the enemies to public liberty," wrote James Madison in 1795,"war is, perhaps the most to be dreaded." Our literary heritage is full of anti

Jack Cashill: Sarah Palin and the Legacy of Republican 'Idiocy'

[Jack Cashill has a Ph.D. from Purdue University in American studies, has taught media and literature at Purdue and at Kansas City area universities, and served as a Fulbright professor in France. Sarah Palin may be the reigning Republican "idiot," but she shares in a proud legacy that dates back to at least Dwight David Eisenhower, if not earlier. The "idiot" talk began as soon as Palin was named McCain's running mate. As I drove to the 2008 Republ

Lee Smith: The Long, Withdrawing Roar

[Lee Smith is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.] A few years ago I was in the West Bank with a Christian missionary who worked among Jews and Muslims. The Jewish converts came to his home for Sunday services that were held in both English and Hebrew. But to gather with Arab converts he had to meet them secretly on the outskirts of their town lest his mere presence put their lives in jeopardy.... “The Christians have always been under attack,” explains Lebanese pol

Duncan Currie: The Way We Weren’t

[Duncan Currie is deputy managing editor of National Review Online.] Back in the first season of Mad Men, while pitching a new ad campaign to the suits from Eastman Kodak, creative whiz Don Draper describes nostalgia as “a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.” Will Rogers put it less artfully: “Things ain’t what they used to be and probably never was.” That nugget of wisdom should be kept in mind amid our latest bout of self-indulgent handwringing o

Michael Barone: Shriver, Lieberman, and JFK

[Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner.] Last Thursday was the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech, and while the anniversary did not go unmentioned, it got less attention than I had expected. I suspect that those of us who can remember that snowy day — why do we schedule our great national outdoor ceremony for a day that is as likely as any to be the coldest of the year? — are inclined to overestimate the hold that Kennedy has on

Dalton Conley and Jacqueline Stevens: Build a Bigger House

[Dalton Conley is a professor of sociology, medicine and public policy at New York University and the author of “Elsewhere, U.S.A.” Jacqueline Stevens is a professor of political science at Northwestern and the author of “States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals.”] WITH the Senate preparing to debate filibuster reform, now is a good time to consider a similarly daunting challenge to democratic representation in the House: its size. It’s been far too long since the House expan

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: Appeasement is the proper policy towards Confucian China

[Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is the Telegraph's International Business Editor.] We all learned at school how the status quo powers mismanaged the spectacular rise of Germany before World War I, a strategic revolution so like the rise of China today. And we all learned how the Kaiser overplayed his hand. That much was obvious. Yet it is difficult to pin-point exactly when the normal pattern of great power jostling began to metamorphose into something more dangerous,

Jacob Heilbrunn: Ronald Reagan, the Anti-Reaganite

[Jacob Heilbrunn, a senior editor at the National Interest, is the author of "They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons."] A Ronald Reagan boomlet is sweeping the nation, thanks in no small part to an army of conservative admirers who have never missed a chance to buff his image — and then use it for their own ends. Nothing looms larger for Reagan worshippers than the centennial of his birthday on Feb. 6. Fittingly, Californians were first off the mar

Robert D. Kaplan: One Small Revolution

[Robert D. Kaplan, the author of “Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia and the Peloponnese,” is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a correspondent for The Atlantic.] THE West stands captivated by Tunisia, where a month of peaceful protests by secular working- and middle-class Arabs has toppled a dictator, raising hopes that this North African country of 10 million will set off democracy movements through

Rebecca Traister: Only Cowgirls Run for Office

[Rebecca Traister is the author of “Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election That Changed Everything for American Women.”] Whether or not you believe there is any connection between the first assassination attempt ever made on an American female politician and the gun-slinging rhetoric of the first Republican woman ever nominated for the vice presidency, what’s undeniably true is that despite the vast philosophical and intellectual chasms between them, Representative Gabrielle Giffords of

Selwyn Raab: Omertà May Be Dead; the Mafia Isn’t

[Selwyn Raab, a former reporter for The Times, is the author of “Five Families: The Rise, Decline and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires.”] QUITE a coincidence: In January 1961, Robert F. Kennedy, newly appointed as attorney general of the United States, orchestrated the first concentrated attack on the American Mafia. Almost to the day 50 years later, the government swept up more than 120 people in a smorgasbord of racketeering indictments, mainly in the New York a

George F. Will: An Anti-Authority Creed

[George F. Will is a columnist for the WaPo.] America is a creedal nation and the creed is, as Robert Penn Warren wrote, the "burr under the metaphysical saddle of America." It is a recurring source of national introspection, discontent, self-indictment and passionate politics. We are in the midst of a recurrence. The tone of today's politics was anticipated and is vindicated by a book published 30 years ago. The late Samuel Huntington's "American Politic

Olivier Roy: The Tunisian Revolt: Where Have All the Islamists Gone?

[Olivier Roy, a professor at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, is the author of “Holy Ignorance” and “The Failure of Political Islam.”] The novel characteristic of the first peaceful popular revolution to topple a dictatorship in the Arab world is that there is nothing Islamic about it. The young Tunisian street peddler who triggered the revolt by publicly burning himself reminds us of the Vietnamese Buddhist monks in 1963 or of Jan Palach in Czechos

Jacob Bronsther: What Does President Obama Really Believe?

[Jacob Bronsther, a former Fulbright Scholar and graduate student in political theory at Oxford University, is a law student at New York University. He writes for ThePublicPhilosopher.com.] Quick quiz: In one sentence, describe FDR's political philosophy. Good, now summarize Reaganism. Pretty easy, right? OK, do the same for President Obama. Still thinking? Don't worry, Mr. Obama is, too. And that's bad news for all of us. Because no matter how you feel about Obama, his

John Diamond: The Gulf Gap

[John Diamond is the author of "The CIA and the Culture of Failure: U.S. Intelligence From the End of the Cold War to the Invasion of Iraq."] Twenty years ago this week, despite fears of "another Vietnam," the House and Senate voted to authorize the use of force against Iraqi troops occupying Kuwait. After days of impassioned debate, the House supported President George H.W. Bush's policy by a comfortable margin. The Senate's 52-47 vote was the close