Roundup: Media's Take

Tom Campbell: Budget Like It's 1995

Tom Campbell is dean of the School of Law at Chapman University and a professor of economics as well as law. He was a five-term Republican congressman, serving on the banking committee and the joint economic committee.

Daniel Twining: Remember What Happened the Last Time We Walked Away From Pakistan?

Daniel Twining is Senior Fellow for Asia at the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF). A senior U.S. official -- Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- has publicly fingered the Haqqani network as a tool of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency. What's surprising is that this is particularly newsworthy: ISI's relationship with the Haqqanis has been an open secret for years. What's different, of course, is that the latest Haqqani attack was not on American forces deployed in Afghanistan but on the U.S. embassy in Kabul -- and that the U.S. government possesses unambiguous evidence of official Pakistani complicity in last week's assault. In addition to killing American and allied soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and targeting American diplomats in Kabul, Haqqani forces have for years targeted Indian assets in Afghanistan, including several deadly assaults on the Indian embassy in Kabul.

Jed Babbin: The UN House of Lies

Jed Babbin served as a Deputy Undersecretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush. He is the author of several bestselling books including Inside the Asylum and In the Words of Our Enemies. Listening to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas address the UN General Assembly last week, I thought I heard a faint echo in the chamber. I heard it again when President Obama argued that he was for establishing a Palestinian state before he was against it. I thought for a moment that it was the shade of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the liberal Democrat who in 1975 stood up in the General Assembly to pronounce its "Zionism is racism" resolution an obscenity. But when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke, I recognized the voice I heard in the background. Netanyahu chose to stand on the shoulders of a diminutive woman: the late, great, Jeane Kirkpatrick. In tones that ranged from combative to conciliatory to exasperated, the Israeli leader challenged the members of the UN to, for once, impose the same standards by which they judge Israel on the Palestinians. Why not, he argued, hold the Palestinians and Israelis to the same standards of conduct, and morality?..

Paul Krugman: Euro Zone Death Trip

Paul Krugman is an economist and a columnist for the New York Times.On one side, Europe’s situation is really, really scary: with countries that account for a third of the euro area’s economy now under speculative attack, the single currency’s very existence is being threatened — and a euro collapse could inflict vast damage on the world.On the other side, European policy makers seem set to deliver more of the same. They’ll probably find a way to provide more credit to countries in trouble, which may or may not stave off imminent disaster. But they don’t seem at all ready to acknowledge a crucial fact — namely, that without more expansionary fiscal and monetary policies in Europe’s stronger economies, all of their rescue attempts will fail....

Christian Kornblum: Did the Euro Prevent War in Europe?

Christian Kornblum is an American diplomat. For the fathers of the euro, the end of the Cold War in 1990 was a time for worry as well as celebration. As they looked to the future, they were also obsessed with the continent’s bloody past. Would a new Europe, and especially a reunified Germany, reawaken old nationalist sentiments and lead again to the danger of war? Germany’s Helmut Kohl and France’s Francois Mitterrand — and just about every European leader since — saw a common currency as essentially a political project, meant to cement European unity and remove that danger. For them, a world without the euro would have been a world increasingly threatened by conflict and perhaps even war. Because of these fears, the euro project was rushed through without key agreement on the common political institutions that would have turned Europe into a truly unified economic zone. As a result, each country follows its own economic policy; Greece spends, while Germany saves. And markets have been quick to focus on the weakest links, threatening the entire euro by nearly driving countries such as Greece and Portugal to bankruptcy. War would not have come to Europe, with or without the euro.

Leon Hadar: Pax Americana is Over

Dr. Leon Hadar is a Washington-based journalist and global affairs analyst. For several decades, the world’s leading superpower has been trying to help Jews and Arabs reach an agreement over a disputed territory in the Middle East, and to secure its own hegemonic status in that region. But another diplomatic effort to make peace in the Holy Land reached a deadlock, because it was becoming too costly for the superpower to maintain its military presence and diplomatic influence in Egypt, the Levant, the Persian Gulf, the Eastern Mediterranean and South Asia, at a time of growing financial constraints and challenges from new international players.On Friday afternoon, February 21, 1947, the British ambassador to Washington, Lord Inverchapel, showed up at the State Department and informed Under-Secretary of State Dean Acheson that his country could no longer continue providing financial and military support to Greece and Italy.

Robert Samuelson: Repeating Mistakes of the 1930s

Robert Samuelson writes a weekly economics column that usually runs in The Post on Mondays.  ISIS“We are back in a danger zone,” says a top economist at the International Monetary Fund. Though an understatement, it captures the central paradox of this year’s annual meeting of the IMF and World Bank. Everyone is alarmed at the swift deterioration of the economic outlook, but there is no leadership — no consensus on what to do or, even when crude agreement exists, little conviction that practical politics will permit action. There is a hazardous vacuum of ideas and power. Actually, what needs to be done is not obscure. Europe is now the flash point of global concern. Most of its major countries are heavily indebted. The economy has slowed to a crawl; the latest IMF forecast (perhaps optimistic) puts next year’s growth at about at 1 percent. Banks are threatened by their exposure to depreciating government bonds.

Julia Ioffe: Vladimir the Eternal

Julia Ioffe is Foreign Policy's Moscow correspondent. Back in December 2007, with his second presidential term running out, Vladimir Putin decided not to violate the letter of the Russian constitution. Instead, he chose to step down, become prime minister, and nominate one of his old St. Petersburg buddies, an aide named Dmitry Medvedev, for president. Back then, a good joke started to make the rounds: Russia, 2023. Putin and Medvedev are sitting in one of their kitchens, drinking and shooting the breeze. "Listen," slurs Putin. "I've lost track again. Which one of us is prime minister, and which is president?" "You're the president now, I think," slurs Medvedev. "Well," slurs Putin, "then it's your turn to go and get more beer." It was a prophetic joke, and one that turned out to be all too accurate Saturday, when Medvedev announced the latest switch: Putin will return to the presidency in next year's election and Medvedev will take up the prime minister's post.

Pepe Escobar: The West and the Rest in a One-Model-Fits-All World

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times and a TomDispatch.com regular. His latest book is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). More than 10 years ago, before 9/11, Goldman Sachs was predicting that the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) would make the world economy’s top ten -- but not until 2040.  Skip a decade and the Chinese economy already has the number two spot all to itself, Brazil is number seven, India 10, and even Russia is creeping closer. In purchasing power parity, or PPP, things look even better.  There, China is in second place, India is now fourth, Russia sixth, and Brazil seventh.

Tom Friedman: Our Leaders Should Take Another Look at Herbert Hoover

Tom Friedman is a columnist for the NYT.TO Barack Obama, John Boehner, Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi and Eric Cantor, I just have two words of advice: Herbert Hoover.I know you’re all familiar with that name. Hoover lives in infamy in U.S. history for having been on duty when the Great Depression happened. You’re all courting a similar fate. Your collective behavior is setting all of you up to be known as our generation’s Herbert Hoovers — the leaders who were on duty when we entered our second great economic meltdown.But unlike Hoover, who was just practicing the conventional economic wisdom of his day when we fell into the Depression, you have no excuses. We know what to do — a Grand Bargain: short-term stimulus to ease us through this deleveraging process, debt restructuring in the housing market and long-term budget-cutting to put our fiscal house in order. None of this is easy and the economy will not be fixed overnight; it will take years. But there is every chance it will get healed if our two parties construct the Grand Bargain we need....

LA Times Editorial: GOP needs class warfare history lesson

...To be clear: America has seen class warfare, and the debate over deficit reduction doesn't qualify. Class warfare is what happened at the turn of the 19th century, when nationwide rail strikes prompted violent confrontations between management and labor. In those days, terrorists weren't Muslim extremists; they were often union men with bombs and guns who blew up industrial buildings (including, in 1910, the Los Angeles Times building in downtown L.A. as a protest against the paper's then anti-union stance) and tried to assassinate wealthy individuals. At the heart of the unrest was a yawning gap between rich and poor, which was encouraged by a laissez-faire government approach to industrial regulation....

David J. Theroux: Founding Fathers' advice to deficit 'super committee': Bring US troops home

David J. Theroux is founder, president, and CEO of The Independent Institute and publisher of “The Independent Review.”As the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction (otherwise known as the deficit “super committee”) gets down to business, the 12-member panel should give serious consideration to what America’s Founding Fathers would have done to control federal spending. If the committee members did that, they would have little choice but to recommend that the Obama administration immediately begin a steady withdrawal of all US troops from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and reduce America’s military presence overseas.

Jay Cost: Obama 2012=Mondale 1984

Jay Cost blogs for the Weekly Standard....In both cases, we see the same basic argument: increase taxes to lower the deficit and engage in more social welfare spending. Mondale campaigned in 1984 as an unabashed Great Society liberal, looking to rally the old groups of the Roosevelt/Truman/Kennedy/Johnson coalition – working class whites, union workers, middle class Catholics, and so on.Will a similar strategy work for Obama?No.To start, it never worked for Mondale. Not only was the former vice president road kill on Ronald Reagan’s triumphal march to reelection, he got shellacked among the core New Deal groups. Reagan won 60 percent of those born before 1924 (and thus experienced the Great Depression first hand), 70 percent of Southern whites, 58 percent of working class whites, 51 percent of Catholics, and even 47 percent of union workers. In other words, Mondale’s old time liberal message of higher taxes and more social welfare spending did not work on any level in 1984....

Isaac Chotiner: Republicans Used to at Least Talk About Poverty. What Changed?

Isaac Chotiner is the executive editor of The Book at TNR.com.

Lindsay Beyerstein: Michele Bachmann's Anti-Vaccination Rhetoric Is Not Only Bad Science—It's Bad History

Lindsay Beyerstein writes about health care for the Media Wire project at the Media Consortium. She is a freelance investigative journalist and photographer based in Brooklyn, NY.For the past week, Rep. Michele Bachmann has tried to revive her flagging presidential campaign by turning a HPV vaccine into a Tea Party litmus test. During a debate on Monday, Bachmann tore into front-runner Gov. Rick Perry for his 2007 executive order that would have required all sixth grade girls in Texas to get the Gardasil vaccine, unless their parents opted out of their program.If it hadn’t been for mandatory smallpox inoculation, the Republic might never have survived. General George Washington ordered the Continental Army inoculated against smallpox in 1777, the first large scale inoculation of an army in history. Washington was supported in this effort by Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signatory to the Declaration of Independence and the chair of the Continental Congress’ Medical Department.

Richard Cohen: Upwardly Mobile "Mad Men" America Will Never be Seen Again

Aside from his multiple infidelities, prodigious drinking and having the personality of a mud wall, what finally caused Betty Draper to separate from Don Draper, her husband and the protagonist of the wildly popular series “Mad Men,” was a clutch of Heineken beer. As Don Draper knew she would, Betty purchased the beer for their home: He had infuriatingly pigeonholed her as the typical upwardly mobile housewife of the early 1960s. The American Dream, it turns out, is about 5 percent alcohol.The Heineken affront was the last straw, a bizarre crisis even for the “Mad Men” series. In a trenchant essay in the New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn explains the show’s appeal by saying it “represents fantasies, or memories, of significant potency.” For me, the memory — now, alas, a fantasy — is the assumption that Americans would get richer and richer, and that, if you were an ad man or a client, it made sense to market products to the affluent. Heineken, imported and thus hardly prole in origin, oddly represents an America that used to be and we may never see again.

Gareth Evans: Israel and America on the Wrong Side of History

Gareth Evans, Australia’s Foreign Minister from 1988 to 1996, and President Emeritus of the International Crisis Group, is Chancellor of the Australian National University.Shortly before Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination by a right-wing Jewish extremist in November 1995, I met him in Tel Aviv. I was visiting Israel as Australia’s foreign minister to argue the case for rapid implementation of the Oslo peace accords – all the way through to negotiated acceptance of Palestinian statehood. I concluded my pitch by saying, with perhaps a little more cheek than was appropriate, “But of course I’m preaching to the converted.” Rabin’s response is etched in my memory. He paused, then said with a little half-smile: “To the committed, not the converted.”For all his deep emotional attachment to the idea of Israel embracing all of historical Judea and Samaria, Rabin knew that the only way to ensure a democratic Jewish state with viable, secure borders was to accept a Palestinian state alongside it, equally secure and viable. They would share Jerusalem as a capital, and find a mutually acceptable solution to the enormously sensitive issue of the return of Palestinian refugees.

Bhupinder S. Liddar: A Palestinian State — Reality or Mirage?

Bhupinder S. Liddar is a former Canadian diplomat and former publisher/editor of Diplomat & International Canada magazine. “What wrong have these people done not to have a Palestinian passport — one of their country of birth, but are carrying passports of different countries?” the late Yasser Arafat asked Heath MacQuarrie and me, pointing to a room full of people next door. MacQuarrie, a Progressive Conservative senator, and I had just walked past a room full of Palestinians to meet Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, in Beirut in 1978. One is tempted to ask the same question today as the Palestinian Authority (PA) tries to secure statehood status for the land of Palestine, which existed as an entity from the end of World War I until 1947 under British mandate. In 1947 Israel got what Palestine is seeking now. On Nov. 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a Resolution 181 outlining a partition plan for the creation of two states — one Jewish, one Arab, with Jerusalem-Bethlehem to remain under special international protection administered by United Nations. The UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), which recommended the partition, was led by none other than own very own Lester Pearson. He was awarded a medallion of valour by the newly created state of Israel.

Aaron Goldstein: Do Palestinians Really Want Their Own State?

Aaron Goldstein writes from Boston, Massachusetts. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is expected to submit an application to the UN Security Council to recognize Palestine as an independent state later this week. The Obama Administration is expected to use its veto in the Security Council to quash that application. Yet given its implacable hostility towards the State of Israel, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if the Obama Administration does an about-face and gives a Palestinian state its blessing. Then watch the UN General Assembly welcome Palestine into the family of nations with open arms. One could make the argument that George W. Bush opened the door to this mess when he became the first president to call for a Palestinian state back in June 2002. Bush proclaimed: "I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror. I call upon them to build a practicing democracy, based on tolerance and liberty." Well, the Palestinians in Gaza elected new leaders all right. But in choosing Hamas they elected leaders not only compromised by terror but defined by it.

David Winston: Obama & Reagan: No Comparison

David Winston is the president of The Winston Group and for over a decade has advised House and Senate Republican leadership.Since Barack Obama took the oath of office, inside-the-Beltway Democrats have spent the first Friday of every month trying to answer one simple question, “Where are the jobs?” It’s becoming increasingly difficult to defend what is arguably one of the worst presidential economic records in modern history and put a positive spin on the president’s reelection prospects.Democrats’ optimistic view of President Obama’s reelection chances seems to be based on the false notion that the president’s current dire political situation is analogous to President Reagan’s at this point in his presidency. As they try to conjure up a second round of hope, this time for 2012, their mantra has become, “Not to worry. Reagan’s unemployment numbers were this bad or worse in his first two years in office and he was reelected.”They like to point to the fact that on election day, 1984, unemployment was at 7.2 percent; if President Obama can start to bend the unemployment figures down toward 8 percent, they figure, he stands to win a second term.