Roundup: Media's Take

Hillary Clinton: America's Pacific Century

Hillary Clinton is U.S. secretary of state. As the war in Iraq winds down and America begins to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, the United States stands at a pivot point. Over the last 10 years, we have allocated immense resources to those two theaters. In the next 10 years, we need to be smart and systematic about where we invest time and energy, so that we put ourselves in the best position to sustain our leadership, secure our interests, and advance our values. One of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will therefore be to lock in a substantially increased investment -- diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise -- in the Asia-Pacific region. The Asia-Pacific has become a key driver of global politics. Stretching from the Indian subcontinent to the western shores of the Americas, the region spans two oceans -- the Pacific and the Indian -- that are increasingly linked by shipping and strategy. It boasts almost half the world's population. It includes many of the key engines of the global economy, as well as the largest emitters of greenhouse gases. It is home to several of our key allies and important emerging powers like China, India, and Indonesia. At a time when the region is building a more mature security and economic architecture to promote stability and prosperity, U.S.

Gilad Sharon: Israel Is Under Attack

Gilad Sharon is the youngest of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s three sons and was a confidant to his father. Sharon holds a master’s degree in economics and writes a frequent column for a major Israeli newspaper. A major in the Israel Defense Force reserves, Sharon currently manages his family’s farm in Israel. His book about his father, Sharon: The Life of A Leader will be published by HarperCollins on October 25, 2011. The word “spring” is a symbol of blossoming and renewal. But right now the Arab world is filled with demonstrations, shootings, and the replacement of one dictatorship for another. (Except for Saudi Arabia which has announced it will allow women to “vote” and drive by the year 2015!) And, most significantly for Israel, there is a PLO petition for statehood at the United Nations. The Egyptian opposition newspaper Sawt al-Umma has just been shut down and the issues already distributed on the streets of Cairo containing criticism of Omar Suleiman, former Vice President of Egypt, confiscated. Exit Mubarak, enter the military junta, with democracy nowhere in sight. In Syria, the rising toll of the regime’s murder victims speaks more loudly than words about the concept of freedom.

David Sirota: Behind the GOP’s OWS Backlash

David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now."

Robert Reich: Occupy Wall Street Isn’t the Left’s Tea Party

Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was secretary of labor during the Clinton administration. He is also a blogger and the author of "Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future." ...In the early decades of the twentieth century, the Democratic Party had no trouble embracing economic populism. It charged the large industrial concentrations of the era – the trusts – with stifling the economy and poisoning democracy. In the 1912 campaign Woodrow Wilson promised to wage “a crusade against powers that have governed us … that have limited our development … that have determined our lives … that have set us in a straightjacket to so as they please.” The struggle to break up the trusts would be, in Wilson’s words, nothing less than a “second struggle for emancipation.”Wilson lived up to his words – signing into law the Clayton Antitrust Act (which not only strengthened antitrust laws but also exempted unions from their reach), establishing the Federal Trade Commission (to root out “unfair acts and practices in commerce”), and creating the first national income tax.

Steve Kornacki: The Time Republicans Embraced the Buffett Rule

Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor....[T]he GOP’s current Buffett rule posture [is] mainly ... a cynical ploy.It comes from the 1996 Republican primary season, when the party was searching for an opponent for Bill Clinton. Bob Dole, then the Senate majority leader, was the clear front-runner, and in the early going Texas Senator Phil Gramm (“I was conservative before conservative was cool”) was seen as his chief rival. Pat Buchanan, with his populist “American first” message, and Lamar Alexander, who pitched himself as an electable Washington outsider, were also in the mix.Then along came the publishing magnate. Steve Forbes.......Forbes launched a lavish advertising campaign decrying the IRS and touting his own plan’s simplicity (you’d be able to do your taxes on a postcard!) while promising that it would unleash torrential economic growth.......The attacks [his opponents] launched are notable in that they ran counter to just about everything the GOP now says about taxation and the wealthy and “class warfare.”...

Roland S. Martin: Herman Cain denies GOP's horrible history with blacks

Roland S. Martin is a syndicated columnist and author of "The First: President Barack Obama's Road to the White House." He is a commentator for TV One cable network and host/managing editor of its Sunday morning news show, "Washington Watch with Roland Martin."You would think that a black man born and raised in Georgia, who was a teenager during the civil rights movement, would understand the transition of African-Americans from voting overwhelmingly Republican to strongly supporting the Democratic Party.But the GOP presidential candidate clearly didn't have the common sense that he often speaks of having when he went on CNN's "The Situation Room" and accused many African-Americans of being brainwashed to vote Democratic."Many African-Americans have been brainwashed into not being open-minded, not even considering a conservative point of view," Cain said. "I have received some of that same vitriol simply because I am running for the Republican nomination as a conservative."So it's just brainwashing and people not being open-minded, pure and simple."...

Eric Alterman: The Era of the 'One Percent'

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is also a columnist for The Nation, The Forward, and The Daily Beast.Whether one agrees or disagrees with the tactics of the Occupy Wall Street movement, it’s easy to understand the inspiration for its anger as well as its impatience.“Historical movements,” the historian Mary Jo Buhle rightly notes, “are rarely judged solely in the light they cast themselves.” In that sense it is a decidedly risky business to try to draw too many hard and fast conclusions about the present moment in history. Even so, I think the Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz was as accurate as anyone is likely to be when he pronounced our age—and our government—to be one “of the one percent, by the one percent, for the one percent.”

Christopher Hitchens: Lord Haw Haw and Anwar al-Awlaki

...Just as most precedents for controversy about citizens joining foreign armies or insurgencies come from the British “Foreign Enlistment Act,” so the best precedent that I can find, in the world where treason meets broadcasting, is a celebrated one from World War II. During that conflict, a man named William Joyce was employed by Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda to make continuous appeals to the British people to surrender. At other times, he went among British prisoners of war, attempting mostly in vain to recruit them to a “British Free Corps” that would fight under the colors of the swastika. He actually became rather a popular entertainment item in Britain, his arrogant drawling tones earning him the nickname “Lord Haw Haw.”

John Reinan: The death of a business legend (not Steve Jobs)

John Reinan is senior director at the Minneapolis marketing agency Fast Horse.The big news last week was the death of Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs. Because the immense legacy of Jobs sucked all the oxygen out of the room, the looming death of another great American technology icon got little attention.But I noticed, because for a few years in the mid-1990s I was a newspaper reporter in Rochester, N.Y. — the home of Eastman Kodak.More than a century ago, Kodak was a company as revolutionary as Apple is today, in its technology as well as its marketing. Before Kodak, photography was a messy and physically taxing activity requiring special expertise.Kodak’s founder, George Eastman, developed celluloid roll film that replaced the glass negatives then in use.But his real genius was in marketing.  Kodak cameras came pre-loaded with enough film for 100 pictures. When you used them up, you mailed the entire camera back to the factory and they sent back your photos and a freshly loaded camera....

Scott MacLeod: Anwar Sadat's Vision for Egypt

Scott MacLeod is a professor at American University in Cairo and managing editor of the Cairo Review of Global Affairs. He was Time magazine's Middle East correspondent from 1995 to 2010. Egyptians have hardly noticed as the 30th anniversary of Anwar Sadat's death approached this week. It isn't only because they're too busy with ongoing political protests and labor strikes as the country zigzags toward democratic elections.They just don't care.To the young people who made the January 25 "revolution" in Tahrir Square, Sadat is a figure from a distant past. If they think of him at all, many are quick to curse him for making peace with Israel. There is little regret or grief over his assassination by Islamic extremists at a military parade in a Cairo suburb on Oct. 6, 1981.And yet, Sadat was a remarkable warrior-statesman…

Brian Dooley: Red Scare in Pearl Square

Brian Dooley is director of Human Rights First's Human Rights Defenders Program. He recently returned from his second trip to Bahrain since the uprisings began. For those too young to remember the hot intensity of the Cold War, the mentality of looking for "Reds under the bed" must seem quaint, if not prehistoric. Even so, those fears were real: The Soviet Union really was trying to stir up trouble for the United States, causing overzealous U.S. officials to sniff the air for the whiff of communism at home or abroad. In the mid-1980s, I was researching anti-apartheid legislation for Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), and was continually questioned by other Capitol Hill staffers about possible Soviet links to the pro-democracy movement in South Africa. Was Bishop Desmond Tutu an unwitting Politburo puppet? Did the Kremlin secretly fund the democracy activists? That guy Mandela... if he's in jail, he must have done something, right? Such a simplistic mindset would seem vaguely amusing if it were not reappearing in the context of Bahrain, where the United States appears to be running scared of an alleged Iranian hand in the democracy protests of this year. An Oct.

Matt Latimer: Is Romney the Next Kerry?

Matt Latimer is the author of the New York Times bestseller SPEECH-LESS: Tales of a White House Survivor. He was deputy director of speech writing for George W. Bush and chief speech writer for Donald Rumsfeld. Mitt Romney was more likable as a liberal. That, at least, was my conclusion after watching a devastating video put together by the Democratic Party’s best (and maybe only) strategist: comedian Jon Stewart. Before my eyes was an early Rombot model, circa 1994, that we’ve not seen since: emotional, passionate, lively. He sneered derisively at the “Reagan-Bush” years, bragged about being a political independent, and indignantly defended his “consistent” support of abortion rights. Romney was so proud of his pro-choice pedigree that he even tweaked his Senate opponent, Democrat Ted Kennedy, for equivocation.

Alan W. Dowd: Bush Should Get Some Credit for the Arab Spring

Alan W. Dowd is a senior Fellow, defence and security research, the Fraser Institute. Adm. Eric Olson, former commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command, recently noted that “al-Qaeda Version 1.0 is nearing its end.” The reason? In his view, the takedown of Osama bin Laden and the anti-autocracy revolutions of the Arab Spring combined for a staggering one-two punch. To extend Olson’s tech-related metaphor, it seems fair to say that the Middle East is no longer firewalled from freedom. This, too, is partly a function of the global campaign against terrorist groups and terrorist states, which began on Oct. 7, 2001 with the U.S.-led strikes on al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Ten Octobers ago, the dominant – and seemingly unchangeable, unchallengeable – form of government across the Greater Middle East was dictatorship. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq represented the horrific end of the spectrum, Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt the merely objectionable end. The only alternatives seemed to be the violent fundamentalisms of the Taliban, bin Laden, and Iran. The reformers, if there were any, kept quiet. Ten years later, the reformers are shouting.

Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi: No, Syria Won't Mirror Iraq

Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi is a student at Brasenose College, Oxford University, and an intern at the Middle East Forum. He wrote this commentary for The Daily Star. The Iraqi government recently reversed its support for Syrian President Bashar Assad amid the ongoing unrest in Syria, and is now calling on Assad to step down. However, it is true that many Iraqi Shiites deeply fear the possible consequences of an overthrow of the Alawite-dominated regime in Damascus. Specifically, the Shiites’ concern is that hard-line Sunnis might come to power next door and embolden Iraqi Sunnis, reigniting sectarian violence and civil war in Iraq. As one anonymous, senior Iraqi Shiite politician put it to Reuters: “Change in Syria will cause major problems for Iraq. They [Sunnis] will incite the western [Sunni] part of Iraq.” However, are these anxieties justified? In a word: No. To understand why, it is necessary to examine the question of what was primarily responsible for the dramatic drop in violence in Iraq from 2007 onward...

David Leonhardt: The Depression: If Only Things Were That Good

David Leonhardt is The New York Times Washington bureau chief.UNDERNEATH the misery of the Great Depression, the United States economy was quietly making enormous strides during the 1930s. Television and nylon stockings were invented. Refrigerators and washing machines turned into mass-market products. Railroads became faster and roads smoother and wider. As the economic historian Alexander J. Field has said, the 1930s constituted “the most technologically progressive decade of the century.”Economists often distinguish between cyclical trends and secular trends — which is to say, between short-term fluctuations and long-term changes in the basic structure of the economy. No decade points to the difference quite like the 1930s: cyclically, the worst decade of the 20th century, and yet, secularly, one of the best.

David J. Rothkopf: Redefining the Meaning of No. 1

David J. Rothkopf is the author of the forthcoming “Power, Inc.: The Epic Rivalry Between Big Business and Government — and the Reckoning that Lies Ahead.”...Calculating national income is a relatively new concept. Previously, countries measured their economic well-being by tallying land holdings or counting railroad boxcars. But in the midst of the Great Depression, Congress, showing a great deal more intellectual curiosity than it does today, commissioned a group of economists led by a future Nobel Prize winner named Simon Kuznets to better measure economic activity.Although Kuznets and his team fulfilled their mission, they released their results with considerable unease. Not only were they aware that the statistic they devised ignored many types of economic activity — from the work of housewives to illegal enterprises — they also knew their number did not assess the social benefits of what they were tracking.

Frank Bruni: One Country’s Big Gay Leap

Frank Bruni is a columnist with the NYT....With minimal international attention, Portugal — tiny, overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Portugal — legalized same-sex marriage last year. Although the country is hardly seen as a Scandinavian-style bastion of social progressivism, it’s one of just 10 countries where such marriages can be performed nationwide, and in this regard it finds itself ahead of a majority of wealthier, more populous European countries, like France, Germany, Italy and Britain. In the United States, only six states and the District of Columbia allow gay marriage. How did that happen? And what wisdom do the answers offer frustrated supporters of same-sex marriage here and elsewhere around the globe?With a potent case of Portugal envy, I went there and talked with advocates and politicians at the center of its same-sex-marriage campaign and with gay and lesbian couples who married after the law took effect in June 2010. All were still pleasantly stunned by what Portugal had accomplished.

Todd Gitlin: The Left Declares Its Independence

Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism and communications at Columbia and co-author of “The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election.”IF some aspects of the Occupy Wall Street protest feel predictable — the drum circles, the signs, including “Tax Wall Street Transactions” and “End the FED” — so does the right-wing response. Is it any surprise that Fox News and its allied bloggers consider the protesters “deluded” and “dirty smelly hippies”?...And yet it remains true that the core of the movement, the (mostly young and white, skilled but jobless) people who started the “occupation” three weeks ago, consists of what right-wing critics call anarchists. Indeed, some occupiers take the point as a compliment — because that is precisely the quality that sets them apart from the Tea Party. Anarchism has been the reigning spirit of left-wing protest movements for nearly the past half century, as it is in Zuccotti Park.

Marvin Kalb: The Other War Haunting Obama

Marvin Kalb is a former network correspondent and is an emeritus professor at Harvard and a co-author of “Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama.” TEN years after the start of the war in Afghanistan, an odd specter haunts the Obama White House — the specter of Vietnam, a war lost decades before. Like Banquo’s ghost, it hovers over the White House still, an unwelcome memory of where America went wrong, a warning of what may yet go wrong.

Ross Douthat: Up From Ugliness

Ross Douthat is a columnist for the NYT.FROM the 1960s through the 1980s, the United States of America conducted a long experiment in ugliness. Our architects grew bored with beauty, our designers tired of elegance, our urban planners decided that function should trump form. We bulldozed row houses and threw up housing projects. We built public buildings out of raw concrete. We wore leisure suits and shoulder pads, buried heart-of-pine floors under shag carpeting, and paneled our automobiles with artificial wood.This is the world in which Steve Jobs came of age. It was, not coincidentally, a world in which it became easy to believe that the United States was in decline. Our churches looked like recreation centers, and our rec centers looked like re-education camps. Our campuses and civic spaces were defaced by ziggurats of cement. Our cities had crime-ridden towers and white elephant shopping centers where the neighborhoods used to be. Our suburbs were filled with what James Howard Kunstler described as the “junk architecture” of strip malls and ranch houses....