Roundup: Media's Take

Sam Tanenhaus: Jefferson’s Tea Party Moment

Sam Tanenhaus is the editor of The New York Times Book Review.WHATEVER the outcome of the debate on the debt ceiling, everyone seems to agree that it has been one of the most alienating spectacles in recent political history — a peculiarly Beltway form of theater, with much of the public still confused about what exactly is at stake.But here is a disquieting fact: In one version or another, this conflict, centered on protest against the federal debt, has been going on almost since the beginning of the Republic.America’s first elected opposition party, the Democratic-Republican Party formed by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the 1790s, promised a “second revolution” whose axioms included “the general principle that payment of debt should take precedence of all other expenditure,” as Henry Adams put it in “History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson,” his monumental study.The trouble, as Adams noted, was that this principle conflicted with another, “reduction of taxes; and the revenue was not sufficient to satisfy both demands.”...

WSJ Editorial: The Road to a Downgrade ... A Short History of the Entitlement State

Even without a debt default, it looks increasingly possible that the world's credit rating agencies will soon downgrade U.S. debt from the AAA standing it has enjoyed for decades. A downgrade isn't catastrophic because global financial markets decide the creditworthiness of U.S. securities, not Moody's and Standard & Poor's. The good news is that investors still regard Treasury bonds, which carry the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, as a near zero-risk investment. But a downgrade will raise the cost of credit, especially for states and institutions whose debt is pegged to Treasurys. Above all a downgrade is a symbol of fiscal mismanagement and an omen of worse to come if we continue the same habits. President Obama will deserve much of the blame for the spending blowout of his first two years (see the nearby chart).

Mike Davis: What Happens When Three Sputtering Economies Collide?

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.  When my old gang and I were 14 or 15 years old, many centuries ago, we yearned for immortality in the fiery wreck of a bitchin' '40 Ford or '57 Chevy.  Our J.K. Rowling was Henry Felsen, the ex-Marine who wrote the bestselling masterpieces Hot Rod (1950), Street Rod (1953), and Crash Club (1958).Officially, his books -- highly praised by the National Safety Council -- were deterrents, meant to scare my generation straight with huge dollops of teenage gore.  In fact, he was our asphalt Homer, exalting doomed teenage heroes and inviting us to emulate their legend.One of his books ends with an apocalyptic collision at a crossroads that more or less wipes out the entire graduating class of a small Iowa town.  We loved this passage so much that we used to read it aloud to each other.

Teun van Dongen: Why Negotiating with the Taliban Is a Really Bad Idea

Teun van Dongen is a strategic analyst at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies.

Mary Kenny: Is Ireland Divorcing from the Catholic Church?

Mary Kenny is the author of Goodbye to Catholic Ireland (New Island Books).   Our Irish parents and grandparents would find astonishing the acidly anti-clerical views expressed in the Republic of Ireland today. The land that once called itself a foremost Catholic nation and most loyal ally of the Holy Father is awash with sentiments that seem to veer between Ulster Paisleyism and the Spanish republicanism of the 1930s. One newspaper published a photograph of the Pope in full regalia, with “Persona Non Grata” superimposed on his image. The airwaves are full of bitter remarks supporting Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s attack on the “disgraceful” Vatican, and recommending every anti-church measure from the dissolution of the monasteries to the expulsion of the Papal Nuncio and the severing of all links with the Holy See.

Matthew Kaminski: The Arab Spring Is Still Alive

Mr. Kaminski is a member of the Journal's editorial board. This year of Mideast upheaval is barely half gone and the final acts in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia and Syria are yet to be written. But panjandrums of America's foreign policy establishment are pronouncing the grander, idealistic aspirations aroused by these revolutions all but dead. An AP headline the other day summed up the conventional wisdom: "Arab Spring Stalled." "The stalling" in the Middle East, wrote Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass in the Financial Times the week before, leaves the region "less tolerant, less prosperous and less stable than what existed." Mr. Haass, a leading voice in the realist camp, sounded a nostalgic note for the days the U.S. maintained the Arab status quo together with the Saudi royals.

Edwin Meese III and Michael Needham: Will Obama Ever Learn Economics from Reagan?

Former U.S. attorney general Edwin Meese III holds the Ronald Reagan Chair in Public Policy at The Heritage Foundation (www.heritage.org).

Jeff Jacoby: A President with Migraines? Ask Thomas Jefferson

Jeff Jacoby is a Globe columnist and can be reached at jacoby@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @Jeff_Jacoby. When the Daily Caller, a news site based in Washington, D.C., reported last week that Michele Bachmann gets migraine headaches, it labored to give the impression that it was breaking an important story. “Stress-related condition ‘incapacitates’ Bachmann; heavy pill use alleged,’’ the foreboding headline read. (Cue the grim background music.) The article, by Jonathan Strong, depicted a woman who crumples in the face of stress, reacting to the normal aggravations of political life - a staffer’s resignation, a missed flight - with “medical episodes’’ that leave her “incapacitated’’ for days at a time. To cope, she “takes all sorts of pills. Prevention pills. Pills during the migraine. Pills wherever she goes.’’ These “debilitating’’ migraines “occur once a week on average,’’ and at least three times have landed Bachmann in the hospital. Her staff must “constantly’’ consult with doctors to “tweak’’ their boss’s medication. Bottom line?

Marc A. Thiessen: Boehner’s Reykjavik Moment

Marc A. Thiessen is a columnist for the Washington Post and a former speechwriter for the George W. Bush administration.At their 1986 Reykjavik summit, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev were tantalizingly close to a “grand bargain” that would have abolished all nuclear weapons in ten years. But then Gorbachev laid out his price: Reagan had to effectively kill the Strategic Defense Initiative. When the Soviet leader made clear he would not budge on SDI, Reagan walked away. The press pilloried Reagan for giving up a historic agreement. But looking back today, it was one of the greatest moments of his presidency — and a turning point in the Cold War.

Daniel Byman: Norway's Oklahoma City?

Daniel Byman is a professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University and a Senior Fellow at the Saban Center at Brookings. His latest book is A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism. As the horrors of the bombing and shooting spree in Norway become clearer, Americans are both expressing their sympathy and asking whether it could happen here. As of writing, it's still unclear whether these gruesome attacks are the act of a lone domestic gunman, an international terrorist network, or some odd, imagined combination of both. This may yet turn out to be Norway's 9/11 or its Oklahoma City. But the scene of destruction in downtown Oslo does beg the question: why haven't there been more large-scale terrorist attacks on the U.S. homeland? Yes, the United States remains vulnerable to violence, whether terrorist or not.

Martin Sandbu: Norway Lost its Innocence a Long Time Ago

Martin Sandbuis the FT’s economics leader writer. I was born in Oslo. My journey to school passed by the government quarter. When I was 15, I spent a week as an intern in the complex that was blown up by a complex that was blown up by a car bomb, on Friday afternoon. The city of my childhood is now scarred by terrorism, its streets patrolled by soldiers.

Steve Kornacki: Obama, George H.W. Bush, and the Ghosts of 1990

Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor. Reach him by email at SKornacki@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @SteveKornacki Let's stipulate that we don't know yet whether there will even a "grand bargain" deal between President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner, much less what the precise details of any deal might look like.But it's hard to ignore the fury that the latest reports, which suggest a compromise that would aim to produce $3 trillion in savings from spending cuts and only vague, conditional promises of new revenue in the future, are prompting from Democrats and activists and commentators on the left.If Obama does end up pursuing something like this, he may be left relying on Republican votes to enact it, a situation that would call to mind one of the last suspenseful Washington showdown over deficits: The 1990 budget deal, in which President George H.W. Bush formally went back on his "No new taxes!" pledge and cut a sweeping deficit reduction deal with congressional Democrats. It ended up haunting Bush in varying ways for the rest of his presidency.

Paul Krugman: The Lesser Depression

Paul Krugman is an economist and a columnist for the NYT.These are interesting times — and I mean that in the worst way. Right now we’re looking at not one but two looming crises, either of which could produce a global disaster. In the United States, right-wing fanatics in Congress may block a necessary rise in the debt ceiling, potentially wreaking havoc in world financial markets. Meanwhile, if the plan just agreed to by European heads of state fails to calm markets, we could see falling dominoes all across southern Europe — which would also wreak havoc in world financial markets....In fact, policy makers seem determined to perpetuate what I’ve taken to calling the Lesser Depression, the prolonged era of high unemployment that began with the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and continues to this day, more than two years after the recession supposedly ended....For those who know their 1930s history, this is all too familiar. If either of the current debt negotiations fails, we could be about to replay 1931, the global banking collapse that made the Great Depression great. But, if the negotiations succeed, we will be set to replay the great mistake of 1937: the premature turn to fiscal contraction that derailed economic recovery and ensured that the Depression would last until World War II finally provided the boost the economy needed....

Dick Polman: Should Michelle Bachmann's Headaches Disqualify Her from the Presidency?

Dick Polman is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.Michele Bachmann reportedly suffers from "frequent" migraine headaches. She takes lots of pills to lessen the pain and prevent their recurrence. Given the stresses of the presidency, should her chronic condition be a cause for serious concern?...

Norman Ornstein: Worst. Congress. Ever.

Norman Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a weekly columnist at Roll Call.Dana Carvey had a character during his years on Saturday Night Live who was a crotchety old man complaining about how much better everything was "in my day," the imagined halcyon times of his past. After almost 42 years immersed in the politics of Congress, I have to check myself regularly to avoid falling into the same trap. When I came to Washington in 1969, for example, the city was riven with division and antagonism over the Vietnam War, which segued into the impeachment of a president, followed by many other difficult and contentious moments. In this case, though, Carvey's old man would be right: The hard reality is that for all their rancor, those times were more functional, or at least considerably less dysfunctional, than what we face with Congress today.

Mike Eckel: Cambodia's Kangaroo Court

Mike Eckel is now a freelance writer in Cambodia and a foreign correspondent who has worked throughout the former Soviet Union. It was a damning indictment by any estimation: a 100-plus-page report published 10 years ago by a Khmer-speaking, British-based scholar of Cambodian history with the help of American University.

Morton Abramowitz: The Death of the Bosnian State

  Morton Abramowitz is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. The Dayton Accords left Bosnia a divided ethnic quasi state, and their implementation has not much changed that fact. The decisive event solidifying the ethnic divide was the failure to stop the exodus of several hundred thousand Serbs from Sarajevo to the Serb entity in Bosnia—Republika Srpska (RS)—or Serbia itself. The multiethnic Sarajevo is history. The present major feature in Bosnia is a hardening ethnic divide. The RS basically seeks independence or, at a minimum, a great deal of autonomy. Bosnia’s Croats—still in a diminishing federation with the Bosniaks—have Croatian passports and many are leaving for Croatia or elsewhere, a trend stoked by the new, less restrained Croatian government. Only the Bosniaks seem determined to keep the state going.

Holman W. Jenkins: A British Watergate?

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. is a journalist, editorial writer and member of the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board. Sometime between the Johnson and Nixon administrations the rules on dirty tricks, secret taping and suitcases full of cash changed. It wasn't entirely "fair," in some sense, but who doubts American politics is cleaner and less tolerant of shenanigans than it used to be? This process is occurring in Britain on media behavior. The Milly Dowler revelations played a role—the allegations that News of the World reporters had hacked into the voicemail of a missing girl later discovered to have been murdered. But it also seems relevant that the dam broke when a new party arrived in power after a long period of ascendancy by its rival. Easy to exaggerate is how much the bursting is really due to new info.

John B. Judis: Stop Blaming Wall Street: It Isn't the Reason Our Economy is in Shambles

John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic.As the U.S. economy fails to recover, there is a growing fear that the United States has entered a phase of long-term decline. Conservatives blame “big government” for throttling entrepreneurship; liberals tend to take aim at Wall Street. Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi memorably described Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Among less inventive critics, the term in vogue is “financialization.” According to author Kevin Phillips, who popularized this notion, financialization is “a process whereby financial services, broadly construed, take over the dominant economic, cultural and political role in a national economy.”...

Dana Milbank: The New Party of Reagan

Dana Milbank is a columnist for the WaPo.After he switched to the Republican Party in 1962, Ronald Reagan famously quipped: “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The party left me.”Now, the Republican Party is doing the same thing to him — and Democrats are happy to take Reagan back.At Tuesday morning’s meeting of the House Democrats, caucus chairman John Larson rallied his colleagues for the day’s debt-limit debate by playing an audio recording of the 40th president.“Congress consistently brings the government to the edge of default before facing its responsibility,” Reagan says in the clip. “This brinkmanship threatens the holders of government bonds and those who rely on Social Security and veterans benefits. Interest rates would skyrocket, instability would occur in financial markets, and the federal deficit would soar. The United States has a special responsibility to itself and the world to meet its obligations.”...