Roundup: Media's Take

Adam Winkler: Will George Zimmerman Be Convicted?

Adam Winkler is Professor of Law at UCLA and an expert on constitutional law. His book "Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America", was published by W. W. Norton in September 2011.The news that Florida prosecutors are bringing charges against George Zimmerman for the death of Trayvon Martin raises two questions: Will Zimmerman be convicted? And what role will Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law play in the case?Before considering either of these two questions, however, one must recognize that we don't have all the relevant facts yet.Yet one thing is clear: prosecutors are not going to have an easy time convicting Zimmerman. There are too many conflicting accounts of what occurred that night, which creates the possibility of the jury finding reasonable doubt.What no one apparently disputes is that Zimmerman, an active neighborhood watch volunteer, saw Martin out on the street of the residential community; called 9-1-1 to report a suspicious person; followed Martin despite being told that wasn't necessary by the 9-1-1 dispatch; and eventually shot Martin at close range.

John Nichols: Some of the Earliest Republicans were Buddy-Buddy with Karl Marx

by John Nichols

John Nichols is the author of The "S" Word: A Short History of a American Tradition—Socialism (Verso). Florida Congressman Allen West was wrong when he suggested that there were dozens of communists in the current Congress. Misled by crank websites, the out-there Republican from Florida suggested Tuesday that: "I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party that are members of the Communist Party... They actually don’t hide it. It’s called the Congressional Progressive Caucus." It would be generous, indeed, to suggest that West is confused. The Congress is not currently a haven for followers of Karl Marx.... [But] the banner around which radicals have historically gathered in official Washington has been that of the Republican Party.

Aaron David Miller: The Second-Term Illusion

Aaron David Miller is a distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. His new book, Can America Have Another Great President?, will be published this year. "Reality Check," his column for Foreign Policy.com, runs weekly.

Brian Bolduc: Ryan Isn’t a Randian

Brian Bolduc is an editorial associate for National Review.The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman thinks Representative Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) “isn’t especially interesting” — so much so that he wrote a whole column about him last weekend. In it, Krugman dubbed the congressman “an Ayn Rand devotee,” an oft-employed epithet among Ryan’s detractors....[This doesn't] prove that Ryan is a Randian.First, Ryan is a practicing Catholic. Yes, he has cited Rand’s influence on his thinking, but he has also cited the Church’s....

Eric J. Weiner: Economics' Big Shakeup

Eric J. Weiner is the senior editor and director of communications at the Institute for New Economic Thinking in New York.There is a growing student protest movement against orthodox economics that could change the field as we know it. If it is sustained, historians likely will cite Nov. 2, 2011, as the start of the revolution. On that day at Harvard University, roughly 70 students organized a walkout of an introductory economics class taught by N. Gregory Mankiw. The students who walked out of Mankiw's class explained their reasoning in an open letter printed in the Harvard Political Review. It began with this declaration: "Today, we are walking out of your class, Economics 10, in order to express our discontent with the bias inherent in this introductory economics course. We are deeply concerned about the way that this bias affects students, the University [sic], and our greater society."...Their argument struck a chord with the wider economics community. Suddenly, many more economists started to acknowledge, at least in private, that something is terribly wrong with the field....

Walter Rodgers: Political Dynasties (Romney, Bush, Kennedy) Betray Basic American Values

Walter Rodgers is a former senior international correspondent for CNN....[O]ver the past half century, no two families have been as powerful as the Bushes and Kennedys. They share deep New England roots and a seeming sense of entitlement to the White House....This practice of hereditary ambition and home-grown royalty betrays a basic premise of the American Revolution, “that all men are created equal.”Andrew Jackson’s defeat of incumbent John Quincy Adams swept away much of our earlier faith in ruling families, and successive waves of immigrants made a mockery of it....

Brian E. Keeley: Hey SCOTUS, We Already Have a Federal Mandate for Health Care

Brian E. Keeley is president and CEO of Baptist Health South Florida, a $3.6 billion not-for-profit healthcare organization based in Coral Gables, Fla. with seven hospitals, 30 outpatient centers, and 15,000 employees.The United States, the richest nation in the world, is the only advanced country without some form of universal health care for all its citizens. And the US now spends around 18 percent of its gross domestic product on health care – the highest percentage in the world....The best argument to implement universal health care through an individual mandate, other than the national embarrassment that the wealthiest country in the world does not provide basic health care for all its citizens, is that America already provides universal health care – by default. It’s called EMTALA.

Nick Dearden: Argentina’s "Falklands Debt" Goes to the Heart of UK's Unethical Foreign Policy

Nick Dearden is the director of Jubilee Debt Campaign.The anniversary of war should be a time for learning the lessons of history - particularly when the injustice of a war continues to this day. Some documents exposed by Jubilee Debt Campaign this week expose a cynical approach to British foreign policy which should shock both British and Argentine citizens. Argentina’s outstanding debt to the UK is £45 million. This week we have uncovered how much of this debt was run-up. In the years leading up to the Falklands War the British government was flogging one of the most unpleasant dictatorships in the world British weapons.  A military coup in 1976 brought a wave of terror to Argentina. The ‘dirty war’ which the coup ushered in was a period of state terrorism in which as many as 30,000 people were killed or ‘disappeared’. Political parties and trade unions were banned, whilst religious groups had to apply for approval from the state. The British government at the time was well aware of the nature of the regime in Argentina...

Firat Cengiz: Turkey's 1980 Coup Lives on its Legal System

Firat Cengiz is assistant professor in international and european public law at Tilburg University, Netherlands. She holds a masters and a PhD degree in law from the University of East Anglia.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Israel-Iran History, Holocaust Perverted in Grass’s Poem

Jeffrey Goldberg is a Bloomberg View columnist and a national correspondent for The Atlantic. The opinions expressed are his ownGuenter Grass, the German writer and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, brought forth last week an odious little poem that focuses on the threat to world peace posed by the Jewish state, and congratulates its author for the courage to point out this truth.The poem, published in the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung and elsewhere, was titled “What Must Be Said,” which is quite a vainglorious title. There is very little in the world that is safer (or less novel) than criticizing Israel in a European newspaper....

Max Fisher: Blowback ... In Aiding Iranian Terrorists, the U.S. Repeats a Dangerous Mistake

Max Fisher is an associate editor at The Atlantic, where he edits the International channel.

Doyle McManus: A Ticking Clock on Syria

Doyle McManus a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.The interventionist liberals of the Obama administration were a doleful bunch last week. It was the 20th anniversary of the siege of Sarajevo, when a Bosnian Serb army battered a city full of civilians with artillery while the United States issued ineffective cries of alarm. The comparison with this year's massacres in Syria was painfully apt. Now, as then, the United Nations Security Council has asked both sides to stop shooting, to no great effect. Now, as then, the United States and its allies are rejecting the idea of military intervention as too difficult, too risky, too likely to add to the violence instead of ending it. In Bosnia, it took the United States more than three years and many massacres to decide that diplomatic measures and sanctions weren't enough. But finally, in August 1995, then-President Clinton ordered airstrikes against the Bosnian Serbs; that turned the tide of the war and led to peace negotiations within weeks. But there's one big difference between the situation in Bosnia and that in Syria: This time, the clock is moving faster...

William Deresiewicz: A Man. A Woman. Just Friends?

William Deresiewicz is an essayist, critic and the author of “A Jane Austen Education.”CAN men and women be friends? We have been asking ourselves that question for a long time, and the answer is usually no. The movie “When Harry Met Sally...” provides the locus classicus. The problem, Harry famously explains, is that “the sex part always gets in the way.” Heterosexual people of the opposite sex may claim to be just friends, the message goes, but count on it — wink, wink, nudge, nudge — something more’s going on. Popular culture enforces the notion relentlessly. In movie after movie, show after show, the narrative arc is the same. What starts as friendship (Ross and Rachel, Monica and Chandler) ends up in bed.There’s a history here, and it’s a surprisingly political one. Friendship between the sexes was more or less unknown in traditional society. Men and women occupied different spheres, and women were regarded as inferior in any case. A few epistolary friendships between monastics, a few relationships in literary and court circles, but beyond that, cross-sex friendship was as unthinkable in Western society as it still is in many cultures.

Ross Douthat: Divided by God

Ross Douthat is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times. This article is adapted and excerpted from his new book, “Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics.”IN American religious history, Nov. 8, 1960, is generally regarded as the date when the presidency ceased to be the exclusive property of Protestants. But for decades afterward, the election of the Catholic John F. Kennedy looked more like a temporary aberration....That is, until now. In 2012, we finally have a presidential field whose diversity mirrors the diversity of American Christianity as a whole.Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum all identify as Christians, but their theological traditions and personal experiences of faith diverge more starkly than any group of presidential contenders in recent memory. These divergences reflect America as it actually is: We’re neither traditionally Christian nor straightforwardly secular. Instead, we’re a nation of heretics in which most people still associate themselves with Christianity but revise its doctrines as they see fit, and nobody can agree on even the most basic definitions of what Christian faith should mean....

Bruce Anderson: Cameron as Radical as Thatcher

Bruce Anderson is a British conservative political columnist.It might seem blasphemous to compare Easter to the interval between rounds in a boxing match, but 10 Downing St is certainly grateful for the break. The last round went badly for David Cameron. Although it is hardly unprecedented for a Government to be on poor terms with the opinion polls at this stage of a Parliament, it would be unwise for No 10 to regard its recent travails as a mere glitch. As it is unlikely that there will be a full-throated economic recovery between now and 2015, the Tories’ next general election campaign will have to emphasise economic competence and leadership. So it is not a good idea for the Government to fumble and stumble. But there is a more basic difficulty. Most voters – and many of his own colleagues – still do not understand Mr Cameron. That might seem strange. He is not a complicated fellow; what you see is what you get. Yet few politicians’ characters have ever been so misread. His detractors insist that he is an insubstantial figure who uses his public relations training to conceal the extent to which he is trapped in his background. That is a travesty. The real Cameron is that most unusual phenomenon: a serene radical...

Wlliam S. Lind: That Old Romanov Feeling

Wlliam S. Lind is director of the American Conservative Center for Public Transportation.In 1914 the Houses of Hapsburg and Romanov sat transfixed, mesmerized by the central question: which would win this latest round in their old quarrel? But the paradigm had changed and both would lose, while the winners would be a distant American republic and a guy named Ulyanov sitting in a café in Zurich.States, all states, now find themselves in a similar situation. The rise of Fourth Generation war, war waged outside the state framework, puts the state system itself in jeopardy. When one state fights another, the most likely outcome is that the loser disintegrates into another stateless region. Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya offer painful examples.But the governments of states don’t get it. They continue to act within the old paradigm of state vs. state even as doing so feeds the new post-state order. As Martin van Creveld—whose books The Transformation of War and The Rise and Decline of the State define the new paradigm—said to me, “Everyone can see it except the people in the capital cities.”...

Charles Krauthammer: Obama v. SCOTUS

Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist.‘Unprecedented”? Judicial review has been the centerpiece of the American constitutional system since Marbury v. Madison in 1803. “Strong majority”? The House has 435 members. In March 2010, Democrats held a 75-seat majority. Obamacare passed by seven votes.In his next-day walk back, the president implied that he was merely talking about the normal “restraint and deference” the courts owe the legislative branch. This concern would be touching if it weren’t coming from the leader of a party so deeply devoted to the ultimate judicial usurpation — Roe v. Wade, which struck down the abortion laws of 46 states — that fealty to it is the party’s litmus test for service on the Supreme Court.

Andrew Koppelman: The 1918 Case That May Have Foreshadowed Obamacare's Demise

Andrew Koppelman is professor of law and political science at Northwestern University....The parallels between the child labor issue and the health care issue are remarkable. In both cases, the legislation in question was the product of a decades-long struggle. Universal health care has famously been a goal of American liberals since Theodore Roosevelt proposed it in 1912. The movement to abolish child labor, for its part, stretches back to the first years after the Civil War: When the Knights of Labor was founded in 1869, its constitution included a provision calling for abolition of child labor, and a similar position was adopted by the American Federation of Labor when it was created in 1886. The National Child Labor Committee was organized in 1904, and the first federal law was introduced in 1906. For his part, Roosevelt supported a national study of the problem....Both then and now, challengers to the statutes had to propose that the Supreme Court invent new constitutional rules in order to strike them down. At the time it considered the issue in 1918, there was nothing in the Supreme Court’s case law that suggested any limit on Congress’s authority over what crossed state lines. On the contrary, the Court had upheld bans on interstate transportation of lottery tickets, contaminated food and drugs, prostitutes, and alcoholic beverages....

Gary Gambill: Bush Was Right

Gary Gambill, a Philadelphia-based political analyst, has published widely on contemporary Arab politics.When mass demonstrations began spreading across the Arab world early last year, conservative commentators lost no time in singing the praises of George W. Bush, the first U.S. president to aggressively push for democratization in the region.Today, with Islamists dominating politics wherever tyrants have stumbled or fallen, many of those who waxed eloquent about Bush's Freedom Agenda have either fallen silent or taken to arguing that Islamist ascendancy will prove to be a temporary setback on the road to liberal democracy. Those who were critical of it all along are having a field day.In fact, even if the Arab Spring constitutes "an unshackling of Islam, not an outbreak of fervor for freedom in the Western sense," it is proof positive that the Bush administration correctly diagnosed the causes of Arab political dysfunction and made extraordinarily sound -- if short-lived -- policy changes to combat it....

Ari Ratner: A Passover to Remember -- for Egypt

Ari Ratner is a former appointee at the Obama administration State Department, where he worked on the U.S. response to the revolution in Egypt and the broader Arab Spring. Twitter: @amratner.