Roundup: Media's Take

Alex Gourevitch and Aziz Rana: America’s Failed Promise of Equal Opportunity

Alex Gourevitch is a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University's Political Theory Project. He also co-authors the blog The Current Moment. Aziz Rana teaches law at Cornell University and is the author of "The Two Faces of American Freedom," recently published by Harvard University Press. He writes on American constitutional development, with a particular interest in issues of citizenship, immigration and national securityAmericans are increasingly aware that the ideal of equal opportunity is a false promise, but neither party really seems to get it.......While Republicans profess a more abiding faith in a self-regulating economy, Democrats believe carefully tailored state interventions are needed to ensure equal opportunity....Most Democrats and Republicans share a commitment to an inegalitarian, early 21st-century version of social mobility first articulated in the United States by Thomas Jefferson. In a famous letter to John Adams, Jefferson argued that there is a “natural aristocracy amongst men” who are marked by “virtue and talents.”

Wadah Khanfar: Syria Between Two Massacres ... Hama's Memory Endures

Wadah Khanfar was the director general of the al-Jazeera network.While Russia and China were using their veto to abort a UN security council resolution against the Syrian regime, the news of a massacre in Homs came thick and fast. In an unprecedented escalation, the Syrian regime sought to exploit the international hesitancy to have a bloody showdown with its opposition.

Peter Van Buren: The Campaign Against Whistleblowers in Washington

On January 23rd, the Obama administration charged former CIA officer John Kiriakou under the Espionage Act for disclosing classified information to journalists about the waterboarding of al-Qaeda suspects. His is just the latest prosecution in an unprecedented assault on government whistleblowers and leakers of every sort.Kiriakou’s plight will clearly be but one more battle in a broader war to ensure that government actions and sunshine policies don’t go together. By now, there can be little doubt that government retaliation against whistleblowers is not an isolated event, nor even an agency-by-agency practice. The number of cases in play suggests an organized strategy to deprive Americans of knowledge of the more disreputable things that their government does. How it plays out in court and elsewhere will significantly affect our democracy.Punish the Whistleblowers

Robert W. Merry: Understanding America's Fall

Robert W. Merry is editor of The National Interest and the author of books on American history and foreign policy.Robert Kagan has produced a fascinating cover piece in the February 2 New Republic entitled, "Not Fade Away: Against the myth of American decline." It’s an excerpt from his forthcoming book entitled The World America Made, due out soon from Knopf. Kagan specializes in diminutive volumes, with small pages and few of them, that pack tight, provocative arguments. A previous such book was Of Paradise and Power, which compared the United States as Mars with Europe’s Venus. It was a huge success. Now he marshals his analytical and writing skills on behalf of the argument that rumors of American decline are vastly exaggerated.He makes a compelling case, and Kagan’s foray into the breach could serve as a bit of a corrective to much of what’s being written today under the voguish consensus that America is roughly equivalent to Great Britain circa 1910. It would be a positive development if Kagan’s essay brought forth a bit more rigor from some of those positing the consensus argument of decline.

Michael Tomasky: The Case for Bombing Iran Shows Hawks Wrong All Over Again

Newsweek/Daily Beast special correspondent Michael Tomasky is also editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.Why did I feel déjà vu all over again while reading Niall Ferguson’s much-discussed Newsweek column from earlier in the week? Simple: not merely because it was wrong, but because it was wrong in such familiar-sounding and well-worn ways. I might have thought that some number of years would pass before we’d be having these arguments all over again.

William Tucker: Romney Can Be the Next Reagan

William Tucker is the author of Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America's Energy Odyssey.I'm hoping Republicans will soon wake up, stop fighting among themselves, and realize that Mitt Romney has the best chance of becoming the nation's next Ronald Reagan.Everybody remembers Reagan for his single-mindedness in cutting federal spending and taking the government out of the central position in everyone's life. What they forget is that it was Reagan's temperament that made all this possible.Think back to Reagan's famous rejoinder to Jimmy Carter in their first and only debate, "There you go again!" What was the significance of that? Carter had just finish a long, beady-eyed recitation about national health insurance, which, he said, promised "not inpatient care but outpatient care" with "an emphasis on hospital cost containment," and how Candidate Reagan, of course, was opposed to all this because he had opposed Medicare in 1964. Reagan stood shaking his head and laughing the whole time and when it finally came his turn, he sighed, "There you go again."

Patt Morrison: Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee, And All That

Patt Morrison's Opinion interviews are published Saturday's. The first Queen Elizabeth was standing under an English oak tree when she learned that she had become queen.The second Elizabeth was high up in a mgumu tree in Kenya when she became queen, at the moment her father, King George VI, died in his sleep more than 7,000 miles away.That was 60 years ago Monday. Come June, when the London weather is as good as London weather gets and the tourists are massing, Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, the second-longest-reigning monarch in British history and only the 40th in nearly 1,000 years, will officially celebrate her diamond jubilee.And so, in our way, will we — the same country that, at bayonet-point, told her great-great-great-great grandfather, King George III, "Here's your crown, what's your hurry?".. 

Steve Richards: Will Nobody Challenge the Falklands War Myths?

Steve Richards is chief political columnist for The Independent newspaper. At a time when many assumptions formed in the 1980s are being challenged, the Falklands is the source of renewed tension, another issue that can't just be confined to the recent past. The Falklands War was a defining event during that decade, the subject of instant mythologising and one of the few episodes in Margaret Thatcher's career highlighted in the film The Iron Lady.What it defined is no longer quite so clear. As the ongoing economic crisis places an intense critical spotlight on the light regulation that began in the Thatcher era, there is a sudden wariness about the Falklands. What seemed to be a decisive military triumph for the Iron Lady is not so decisive as it seemed.

Bruce Bartlett: Why the GOP Should Stop Invoking Reaganomics

Bruce Bartlett was a domestic policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan and a Treasury official during the George H.W. Bush administration. His latest book is The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform — Why We Need It and What It Will Take.In their debates, ads and speeches, the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination are vying for the label of most Reagan-esque.On taxes, "I take the Reagan approach," former senator Rick Santorum said at a recent Florida debate.

Janet Daley: The Lessons of the Fall of Communism Have Still Not Been Learnt

Janet Daley is an American-born, British-based freelance journalist.The air is filled with noisy outrage about the moral emergency of the day. We are, according to the leaders of every major political party, in the midst of a crisis of capitalism. However bountiful the free market system may have been at its best, it is now in such deep disrepute that any politician who wishes to remain credible must join in the general vilification.Even in this storm of condemnation, everyone has to admit that there is actually no alternative to free market economics or to the private banking system. So the competition is strictly between adjectives: “responsible” or sometimes “socially responsible” banking are great favourites, but now Ed Miliband has produced something called a “national banking system”, which is presumably not to be confused with a nationalised banking system. The Miliband neologism is intended to suggest banking that takes the concerns of the nation (or the population?) as its own. Whether he sees this role as voluntary or enforced was unclear from his speech last week.

Thomas J. Sargent: An American History Lesson for Europe

Thomas J. Sargent, winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in economics, is a professor of economics and business at New York University and a fellow at Chicago University's Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics and at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. In 1789, the political price for our federal constitution included a bailout of the 13 indebted states. But it was by refusing to bail out the states a second time in the 1840s that the United States preserved its federal system, with substantial fiscal independence for state governments. Facing a similar moment, Europe might learn from our experience. The 1789 bailout was part of a grand bargain designed by Alexander Hamilton to convert the creditors of the 13 states into advocates of a stronger federal government—one having the ability to raise all revenues required to service the large debts that the Continental Congress and the 13 states had both accumulated to finance that "Glorious Cause," our war of independence. Hamilton and George Washington wanted those debts to be paid. They had to engineer institutional changes to achieve that goal. Under our first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, the continental government had virtually no power to tax.

Uri Friedman: 2012 ... The Darkest Falklands Anniversary Yet?

Uri Friedman is an associate editor at Foreign Policy.My, how the times have changed.In 1992, ten years after Britain beat back an Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands and two years after the two sides resumed diplomatic relations, Argentine President Carlos Menem delivered a speech on the anniversary of the bloody conflict. "Sooner or later, maybe before the year 2000, we will recover the Malvinas Islands without shedding a drop of blood," he pledged, using his country's term for the South Atlantic islands off Argentina's eastern coast, which Britain has controlled since 1833. The Los Angeles Times observed at the time that both Britain and Argentina seemed eager to "negotiate patiently" on everything from trade to petroleum exploration to the conservation of fisheries around the Falklands.

Reza Kahlili: History of Failed Negotiations Shows Iran Won't Deal

Reza Kahlili is a pseudonym for a former CIA operative in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and the author of the award winning book, A Time to Betray. He is a senior Fellow with EMPact America and teaches at the US Department of Defense’s Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy (JCITA). President Obama, in his State of the Union Address, said he will not allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons and that all options to prevent that are on the table.More importantly, Obama said the Islamic regime, which fuels terrorism worldwide and oppresses its own people at home, could still rejoin the international community “if it changes course and meets its obligations.” That is not going to happen – despite glimmers of hope after a trip of UN nuclear inspectors to Iran this week.

Margaret Weiss: George W. Bush, Disliked But Appreciated

Margaret Weiss is a research associate at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. She wrote this commentary for The Daily Star. The foreign policy of the United States is not a top concern for most Americans, who are struggling to make ends meet and are afflicted with growing election fever. However, in the Arab world Washington’s foreign policy has many feeling disappointed and abandoned as they continue to struggle more than a year into the Arab uprisings. Despite the initial enthusiasm for President Barack Obama, the administration’s reactive, incoherent policies toward the Arab uprisings have some Arabs reminiscing about the Bush years. During a recent trip to Egypt, I heard the deputy head of a Cairo-based nongovernmental organization that champions racial, religious, gender and political tolerance mention that he and his friends made John McCain T-shirts before the 2008 U.S. presidential election. He explained that he evaluated U.S. presidents based on their efforts to spread democracy, and believed that President George W. Bush had put more pressure on the Egyptian government than Democratic presidents, because the Democrats were more concerned with maintaining good relations with Cairo. My source added that most Egyptians indisputably disliked Bush, but there was no love lost for Obama either.

Laura Miller: The Puritianical Ethic of Reading Sans Enjoyment Lives On

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com.Tests like this, the couple asserts, do students “a double disservice: first, by inflicting on them such mediocre literature, and second, by training them to read not for pleasure but to discover a predetermined answer to a (let’s not mince words) stupid question.” The problem, they feel, stems from the standardized testing regime, which forces the learning experience into a too-rigid structure. Even a “banal” story like this tiger-cub number admits “multiple interpretations,” and the prod to “reduce the work to a single idea” does a disservice to both reader and text.

Garland S. Tucker III: Obama’s Seizure and Truman’s

Garland S. Tucker III is president and CEO of Triangle Capital Corporation and author of The High Tide of American Conservatism: Davis, Coolidge, and the 1924 Election.On November 14, 2011, the Supreme Court agreed to review the constitutionality of President Obama’s health-care act. The central question is, What limits does the Constitution — specifically, the Commerce Clause — impose upon the federal government’s exercise of power? This health-care act is the defining legislation of the president’s term, and the issue of limited government is at the very heart of the debate between Obama and his opponents. The political, economic, and constitutional stakes are very high. These arguments before the Court will provide a dramatic — and perhaps even decisive — backdrop for the 2012 election.Constitutional crises of this magnitude are not without precedent. Indeed, the seeds of this case can be found in the court battles of the 1930s and 1940s, as Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation challenged traditional constitutional bounds. Supported by record congressional majorities, FDR and his fellow Democrats passed a blizzard of programs designed to alleviate the economic hardship of the Great Depression — and to alter the very fabric of the U.S. capitalistic system.

Alex Seitz-Wald: How Newt Gingrich Crippled Congress

Alex Seitz-Wald is the Assistant Editor of ThinkProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.How much Americans hate Congress has become cliché. Congress’s approval rating is at an all-time low, and it’s not hard to see why: the institution is broken. Plenty of structural forces have contributed to Congress’s dysfunction: the increasing flow of money in politics, the emergence of the 24/7 cable news cycle, the increasing polarization of the electorate. But perhaps no single person bears as much responsibility as Newt Gingrich.

Walter Zelman: Romney ... An Executive in Chief?

Walter Zelman has a doctorate in American politics and is chairman of the Department of Public Health at Cal State Los Angeles. Campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney continues to assert that his private-sector experience makes him particularly suited to the office of president. That experience, he emphasizes, would be central to his unique capacity to turn the economy around, keep it growing and create jobs. He may be right. But a review of recent U.S. history offers little evidence that private-sector experience is linked to presidential success.Since 1901, 21 men have served as president; 16 had no real experience as a businessperson in the private sector.

Walter Shapiro: Doing It For the Gipper: Why Old People Could Be Newt Gingrich's Saving Grace

Walter Shapiro is a special correspondent for The New Republic. He also writes the “Character Sketch” column for Yahoo News. Follow him on twitter @waltershapiroPD.During the 1960 West Virginia primary,  John Kennedy campaigned in tandem with Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. to claim that he—and not liberal stalwart Hubert Humphrey—was the rightful heir to FDR. The biopic shown at the 1992 Democratic Convention showcased difficult-to-locate footage of Bill Clinton shaking hands with JFK at the White House in 1963 as an Arkansas delegate to Boy’s Nation.Even by these bygone standards of the-torch-is-passed iconography, it is hard to top the battle for Ronald Reagan’s legacy being waged in the Florida primary. All that's left is for a smiling Reagan to step through the gates at Disney World to set the record straight as Marshall McLuhan did in Annie Hall.

Stephanie Coontz: Couples are Marrying Later, But They're Still Marrying

Stephanie Coontz teaches at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and is director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families. Her most recent book is "A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s."As of 2010, according to a recent report from the Pew Research Center, married couples had fallen to barely 51% of U.S. households, with a full 5% drop in new marriages between 2009 and 2010 alone. The data for 2011 aren't in yet, but if that decline continued last year, less than half of American adults are in a legal marriage now. Is marriage going the way of the electric typewriter and the VHS tape? Not exactly....