Roundup: Media's Take

Timothy Noah: When Did Trickle-Down Get Respectable?

Timothy Noah is an editor at the New Republic.Sometime while I wasn't paying attention trickle-down economics got respectable.  In 1981, when President Ronald Reagan lowered marginal tax rates, his main purpose was to drop the top rate from 70 percent to 50 percent (and subsequently all the way down to 28 percent; the top rate is currently 35 percent). But it was important not to admit as much, because that would be "trickle-down economics." That was the derisive term Democrats attached to Reaganomics. In 1981 the Atlantic published a profile of the White House budget director, David Stockman, in which Stockman said all kinds of impolitic things. About the most impolitic was his admission that the Reagan tax cuts had been "a Trojan horse to bring down the top tax rate." The article's author, William Greider, could barely contain his delight:

Bret Stephens: What Comes After 'Europe'?

Mr. Stephens writes the Wall Street Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs . When the history of the rise and fall of postwar Western Europe is someday written, it will come in three volumes. Title them "Hard Facts," "Convenient Fictions" and—the volume still being written—"Fraud." The hardest fact on which postwar Europe was founded was military necessity, crisply summed up by Lord Ismay's famous line that NATO's mission was "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." The next hard fact was hard money, the gift of Ludwig Erhard, author of the economic reforms that created the Deutsche mark, abolished price controls, and put inflation in check for generations. The third hard fact was the creation of Jean Monnet's common market that gave Europe a shared economic—not political—identity. The result was the Wirtschaftswunder in Germany, Les Trente Glorieuses in France and il miracolo economico in Italy. It could have lasted into the present day. It didn't. In 1965, government spending as a percentage of GDP averaged 28% in Western Europe. Today it hovers just under 50%. In 1965, the fertility rate in Germany was a healthy 2.5 children per mother. Today it is a catastrophic 1.35.

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 historyand 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.

Christopher Hitchens: In Defense of Endless War

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution. A continuous and repetitive thread in the commentary on the decade since 9/11—one might almost call it an endless and open-ended theme—was the plaintive observation that the struggle against al-Qaida and its surrogates is somehow a "war without end." (This is variously rendered as "perpetual war" or "endless war," just as anti-war articles about the commitment to Iraq used to relentlessly stress the idea that there was "no end in sight.") I find it rather hard to see the force of this objection, or indeed this description.

Alexandros Petersen: Israel: The Vienna of our Time

Alexandros Petersen is Director of Research at the Henry Jackson Society and author of The World Island: Eurasian Geopolitics and the Fate of the West.In his hit BBC 4 series ‘Civilization: Is the West History?’, Niall Ferguson refers to Israel as the new Vienna, ‘a fortified city on the frontier of Western civilization’. For the well-known historian and commentator, this was an off-hand remark on the way to contrasting historical Western vigour with Eastern idleness. For those who focus on Israel a little more closely, however, it was a quip pregnant with meaning.Simon Rocker at the Jewish Chronicle picked it up, saying ‘at least someone likes Israel on Channel 4’. But, the significance of Ferguson’s characterization goes far beyond the calcified battle lines of those traditionally pro and anti-Israel. It is important precisely because it transcends that tired debate. Through historical comparison, it reshapes the way the West ought to be thinking of Israel: not just as the Jewish state or in terms of the Middle East peace process, but as a Western outpost under siege. 

John B. Judis: Doom! Our Economic Nightmare is Just Beginning

John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace....TODAY’S RECESSION does not merely resemble the Great Depression; it is, to a real extent, a recurrence of it. It has the same unique causes and the same initial trajectory. Both downturns were triggered by a financial crisis coming on top of, and then deepening, a slowdown in industrial production and employment that had begun earlier and that was caused in part by rapid technological innovation. The 1920s saw the spread of electrification in industry; the 1990s saw the triumph of computerization in manufacturing and services. The recessions in 1926 and 2001 were both followed by “jobless recoveries.”In each case, the financial crisis generated an overhang of consumer and business debt that—along with growing unemployment and underemployment, and the failure of real wages to rise—reduced effective demand to the point where the economy, without extensive government intervention, spun into a downward spiral of joblessness. The accumulation of debt also undermined the use of monetary policy to revive the economy. Even zero-percent interest rates could not induce private investment.

Joseph Olmert: Erdogan in Cairo ... Not a New Nasser

The writer is an Adjunct Professor at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. He served as the director of the Government Press Office and was an advisor to several prime ministers. This is the season of hot air in the Middle East, and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is responsible for more than his fair share of it. Not a day passes without a threat/warning/challenge directed at Israel. One threat, which raised a few eyebrows, was that of sending the Turkish navy to escort and defend the next flotilla to Gaza. Hours later, Erdogan’s office published a clarification, according to which the translation to English was faulty. In the meantime, there were those in Israel who recalled the story about the Ottoman admiral who was sent to attack Malta, but couldn’t find it. “Malta yok” (no Malta), he informed his superiors.Funny stuff aside, the current state of affairs between Israel and Turkey is bad enough. Belligerent statements only serve to inflame it further. Take for example the initial reaction of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. As if by Pavlovian reflex, sources close to Lieberman said he would retaliate by meeting in public with Armenian and Kurdish adversaries of Turkey.

Reza Aslan: Yes to Palestine

Reza Aslan is the founder of AslanMedia.com and the author of "No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam."

Steven Plaut: If the UN Recognizes Palestine, Israel Should Recognize Everybody's Secessionist Movements

Steven Plaut is a professor at the Graduate School of the Business Administration at the University of Haifa.As the reader knows, much of the world is getting ready to recognize a “state” for “Palestinians” in coming days.  The U.S. may veto the vote in the Security Council to set up “Palestine” in Israeli lands, and then again maybe it will not veto it.  Other countries are going ahead with plans to vote for “Palestine” in the General Assembly, to grant “Palestine” embassy space, to grant it formal recognition, and so on.After years of paying lip service to the righteous need for granting “Palestinians” a state, Netanyahu and his crew are scratching their heads about what to do and how to stop all this.  The best Bibi has come up with is a plan to give a speech in that building on the East River near 42nd Street.I have a better idea.  My suggestion is this.

Steve Kornacki: The Return of Ross Perot Syndrome

Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor.It's been nearly 20 years since an erratic Texas billionaire with a fondness for charts and a paranoid sensibility became an overnight political sensation, briefly emerged as the leading candidate for president of the United States and wound up securing nearly 20 percent of the national popular vote.And now, for the first time since that 1992 election, the conditions that made H. Ross Perot's unlikely rise possible are again poised to shape a presidential election.It takes a lot for a truly credible independent candidacy to take off. There are a few third party options in every national election, and sometimes even big names step forward -- like Eugene McCarthy in 1996 or Pat Buchanan in 2000. But almost always, they go nowhere. McCarthy, a two-term Minnesota senator who helped take down Lyndon Johnson in the 1968 Democratic primaries, attracted just 0.9 percent when he went outside the two parties, while Buchanan got 0.4 percent when he tried it.  And while Ralph Nader's campaign in '00 may have been consequential, he still failed to attract even three percent of the vote.

Michael T. Klare: America and Oil -- Declining Together?

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet. A documentary movie version of his previous book, Blood and Oil, is available from the Media Education Foundation.America and Oil.  It’s like bacon and eggs, Batman and Robin.  As the old song lyric went, you can’t have one without the other.  Once upon a time, it was also a surefire formula for national greatness and global preeminence.  Now, it’s a guarantee of a trip to hell in a hand basket.  The Chinese know it.  Does Washington?

Boris Kagarlitsky: How Russia Resembles Libya

Boris Kagarlitsky is the director of the Institute of Globalization Studies. Russia’s leaders have searched for the proper approach to the revolution in Libya like a person who hopes to find a picture of reality in a distorted mirror in a fun house. Instead, they have found only the reflection of their own prejudices and stereotypes. Just like after the Russia-Georgia war in 2008, the discussion on Libya has focused on nonessential questions. In place of an analysis of Libyan society, Russian officials have become bogged down in an argument over a clash of values.  These arguments do not further our understanding of the events in North Africa. Russian analysts and commentators either condemn the regime of ousted Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi or sympathize with it.

Thomas Sowell: Obama, Stop Intervening in the Economy

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Some people are hoping that President Obama’s plan will get the economy out of the doldrums and start providing jobs for the unemployed. Others are hoping that the Republicans’ plan will do the trick.Those who are truly optimistic hope that Democrats and Republicans will put aside their differences and do what is best for the country....The grand myth that has been taught to whole generations is that the government is “forced” to intervene in the economy when there is a downturn that leaves millions of people suffering. The classic example is the Great Depression of the 1930s.What most people are unaware of is that there was no Great Depression until after politicians started intervening in the economy.

Akiba Solomon: How Personhood Mississippi Perverts Black History to Fight Abortion

Akiba Solomon writes Colorlines' Gender Matters blog and is an NABJ-Award winning writer, freelance journalist, editor and essayist from West Philadelphia. A graduate of Howard University, the Brooklyn resident co-edited Naked: Black Women Bare All About Their Skin, Hair, Hips, Lips, and Other Parts (Perigee, 2005), an anthology of original essays and oral memoirs about Black women and body image. One of the most sickening features of the radical anti-choice movement is how it uses the meat of racial and gender justice struggles to manufacture its rhetorical sausage.So far in 2011, they’ve cast black and Latino wombs as genocidal time bombs; they’ve twisted structural analyses of female infanticide in Asia beyond recognition; and they’ve branded fetuses the most persecuted minority in the world.

Shadi Hamid: Reviving Bush's Best Unfulfilled Idea ... Democracy Promotion

Shadi Hamid is director of research at the Brookings Doha Center and a fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. Crises have a way of provoking interesting, occasionally useful intellectual debates. September 11 was no exception, forcing foreign policy analysts and policymakers to grapple with bigger ideas. Oddly enough, it was some in the Republican Party who made perhaps the most radical argument, that the attacks that day were, in fact, a direct result of Middle East's democratic deficit. In the absence of freedom, Arabs lacked legitimate outlets to express their political grievances, making them more likely to resort to political violence and terrorism.This formed the intellectual justification for the Bush administration's rhetorical emphasis on democracy promotion and for what would later become the "forward strategy for freedom." As President George W.

Mike Davis: What the Future Will Remember About America’s Decline and Fall

Mike Davis teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of California, Riverside.  He is the author of Planet of Slums, among many other works.  He’s currently writing a book about employment, global warming, and urban reconstruction for Metropolitan Books.1. Twin TowersTwo years from now the staffs of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker will move into the most haunted building in the world.  There, the elite of American celebrity photographers, gossip columnists, and magazine journalists may meet some macabre new muses.Aloft in the upper stories of 1 World Trade Center (where Condé Nast publishing has signed the biggest lease), they will gaze out their windows at that ghostly void, just a few yards away, where 658 doomed employees of Cantor Fitzgerald were sitting at their desks at 8:46 AM, September 11, 2001.

Michael Lind: Pax Americana is Collapsing -- Here's the Debate We Need to Have

Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution."We Americans are not good at thinking in terms of national and global strategy. That is no surprise; Madison's America, with its checks and balances and decentralized federalism, is not Bismarck's Germany or Colbert's France. But this inability to think in terms of the whole is a handicap, especially when the whole is collapsing.Today we have economists rethinking American economic policy and national security experts pondering American military policy. But that is like assigning one team to fix the crack in the kitchen floor and another to work on repairing the bedroom wall, while ignoring the fact that the entire house is sliding into a sinkhole that has opened up beneath it.

Jaime O'Neill: Where's Today's Dorothea Lange?

Jaime O'Neill is a writer in Northern California.

Karlyn Bowman and Andrew Rugg: As the Boomers Turn

Karlyn Bowman is a senior fellow and Andrew Rugg a research associate at the American Enterprise Institute.

Richard Cohen: Israel’s Hostile Neighborhood

Richard Cohen is an op-ed columnist for the WaPo.Back in 1953, an Egyptian army officer was asked by the magazine Al-Musawwar what he would write to Hitler if he were still alive. “My Dear Hitler,” he began gushingly, “I admire you from the bottom of my heart.” He proceeded to extol the German dictator for, among other things, creating dissension between “the old man Churchill and his allies, the sons of Satan.” If the mass murder of Jews bothered the officer in the least, he did not mention it. Years later, as the president of Egypt, he was himself murdered for making peace with the Jewish state. His name, of course, was Anwar Sadat.The peace that Sadat manufactured is now unraveling, a thread here, a thread there. The Israelis and the Egyptians have traded insults of all sorts, and now the Israeli Embassy, always an edifice constructed out of wishful thinking, has been sacked by a Cairo mob. The Israeli ambassador is gone, and when he will return, if ever, is not clear.