NewsTrust - All Rated Stories

The worst mistake America made after 9/11

Sun, 04 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Anne Applebaum - Sep. 04 (Opinion) - On Sept. 11, 2001, the post-Cold War era that began so euphorically on Nov. 9, 1989, abruptly ended. The long decade that stretched from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the fall of the World Trade Center was marked by military spending cuts, domestic political scandals, and a general sense that American foreign policy was adrift. President George H.W. Bush had talked of the "New World Order" but had no policy to fit the clever phrase. President Bill Clinton had a clutch of policies but never found a neat way to describe them.[more ...]

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The Great Recession, Part II

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Joseph E. Stiglitz - Jul. 07 (Opinion) - Regrettably, the financial markets and right-wing economists have gotten the problem exactly backward: They believe that austerity produces confidence, and that confidence will produce growth. But austerity undermines growth, worsening the government's fiscal position, or at least yielding less improvement than austerity's advocates promise. On both counts, confidence is undermined, and a downward spiral is set in motion.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The Do-Nothing Plan

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Annie Lowrey - Apr. 13 (Opinion) - Slate proposes the Do-Nothing Plan for Deficit Reduction, a meek, cowardly effort to wrest the country back into the black. The overarching principle of the Do-Nothing Plan is this: Leave everything as is.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.1 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Cowardly, Stupid, and Tragically Wrong

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Dahlia Lithwick - Apr. 06 (Opinion) - In reversing one of its last principled positions—that American courts are sufficiently nimble, fair, and transparent to try Mohammed and his confederates—the administration surrendered to the bullying, fear-mongering, and demagoguery of those seeking to create two separate kinds of American law.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.5 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

If the FCC had regulated the Internet: A counterfactual history of cyberspace.

Fri, 24 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Slate - By Jack Shafer - Dec. 24 (Opinion) - The FCC immediately determines that the lack of interoperability among the online systems harms consumers and orders that each company submit a technical framework by January 1994 under which all online companies will unify to one shared technology in the near future. The precedent for this are the technical standards that the FCC has been setting for decades for AM and FM, and for television. The online services threaten legal action again, and again Congress passes new legislation authorizing the FCC to do as it wishes. The online companies hustle to submit a technical framework. Microsoft wants in on the game, so it persuades the FCC to extend the framework deadline to July 1995.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.0 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Julian Assange's Great Luck

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Slate - By Jack Shafer - Dec. 07 (Opinion) - Although a stay in stir and the prospect of Swedish prosecution might not sound appealing or even advantageous, it's actually a lucky break for Assange. I don't expect him to express his gratitude publicly, but I'll bet he's gamed out how to turn the Swedish arrest warrant, the extradition hearing, and beyond to his benefit.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.5 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Turn Yourself In, Julian Assange

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Slate - By Christopher Hitchens - Dec. 06 (Opinion) - The cunning of Julian Assange's strategy is that he has made everyone complicit in his own private decision to try to sabotage U.S. foreign policy.

NewsTrust Rating: 2.8 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Listen to Me, Barack!

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Slate - By David Weigel - Nov. 15 (Opinion) - On Friday, the Washington Post published the worst column of the year. It's been a long year, and a stupid year, so this is no light accusation. And pollster-pundits Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell write a lot of bad columns—they are good ways to spend the slow hours between Fox and Friends and Hannity, more productive than knitting or Sudoku. Still, the hackwork in their call for President Obama to retire after one term was something special.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.2 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

What's Mine Isn't Yours

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Slate - By Farhad Manjoo - Nov. 11 (News) - Mark Zuckerberg's favorite phrase is "social graph." In nearly every public appearance, the Facebook founder describes his company as a kind of cartographer on an endless mission to build an ever larger, more comprehensive, and more accurate map of humanity. A social graph is a digitized map of connections between people in the real world—the lines that connect you to your friends, your friends to their friends, and on and on until we're all ultimately joined to Kevin Bacon. At the moment, no corporation has a more comprehensive graph of these connections than Facebook, a fact that will surely bring the social network insane profits. Yet before Facebook, there was another way that people mapped their world online. It's called e-mail—and without it, Facebook would be nowhere.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.0 average - 7 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Democrats didn't lose the battle of 2010. They won it.

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By William Saletan - Nov. 05 (Opinion) - I'm not buying the autopsy or the obituary. In the national exit poll, voters were split on health care. Unemployment is at nearly 10 percent. Democrats lost a lot of seats that were never really theirs, and those who voted against the bill lost at a higher rate than did those who voted for it. But if health care did cost the party its majority, so what? The bill was more important than the election.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 6 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Electile Dysfunction - The GOP's incredible shrinking Boehner.

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By William Saletan - Nov. 03 (News Report) - "While our new majority will serve as your voice in the people's House, we must remember it's the president who sets the agenda for our government." The president? You've just been handed 60 House seats by voters disgusted with the president, and you're deferring to him?

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 6 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The Elephant in the Room

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By John Dickerson - Nov. 03 (Opinion) - In broad terms, the election was a rebuke of the president. In specific geographical areas, the pain was acute. Obama's home state of Illinois elected a Republican, Mark Kirk, to fill Obama's old Senate seat. The state of Ohio essentially gave the president the finger. Obama has visited the state 12 times since his inauguration. He made his last stop before Election Day in Cleveland. Vice President Joe Biden was an honorary resident of the state, party officials joked. Democrats boasted about the turnout organization being the best in the country.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The right's favorite scare word is "elitism." What does it mean?

Sat, 02 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Jacob Weisberg - Oct. 02 (Opinion) - If there's one epithet the right never tires of, it's "elitism." Republicans are constantly accusing Democrats of it this campaign season, as when Kentucky Senate nominee Rand Paul attacked President Obama as "a liberal elitist … [who] believes that he knows what is best for people." With the Tea Party's rise, conservatives have even begun accusing each other of it, as Sharron Angle, the Nevada GOP nominee did when she charged that Robert Bennett, the outgoing senator from Utah, "has become one of the elitists that is no longer in touch." Other days, they simply lament that the entire country is falling prey to it, as California Senate nominee Carly Fiorina recently did in asserting that "the American Dream is in danger" because of the "elitists" in charge of the government.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 7 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The Great Divergence

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Timothy Noah - Sep. 07 (News Analysis) - In 1915, a statistician at the University of Wisconsin named Willford I. King published The Wealth and Income of the People of the United States, the most comprehensive study of its kind to date. The United States was displacing Great Britain as the world's wealthiest nation, but detailed information about its economy was not yet readily available; the federal government wouldn't start collecting such data in any systematic way until the 1930s. One of King's purposes was to reassure the public that all Americans were sharing in the country's newfound wealth. King was somewhat troubled to find that the richest 1 percent possessed about 15 percent of the nation's income. (A more authoritative subsequent calculation puts the figure slightly higher, at about 18 percent.) This was the era in which the accumulated wealth of America's richest families—the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies—helped prompt creation of the modern income tax, lest disparities in wealth turn the United States into a European-style aristocracy. The socialist movement was at its historic peak, a wave of anarchist bombings was terrorizing the nation's industrialists, and President Woodrow Wilson's attorney general, Alexander Palmer, would soon stage brutal raids on radicals of every stripe. In American history, there has never been a time when class warfare seemed more imminent.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.5 average - 6 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Free Exercise of Religion? No, Thanks.

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Christopher Hitchens - Sep. 06 (Opinion) - A recent blizzard of liberal columns has framed the debate over American Islam as if it were no more than the most recent stage in the glorious history of our religious tolerance. This phrasing of the question has the (presumably intentional) effect of marginalizing doubts and of lumping any doubters with the anti-Catholic Know-Nothings, the anti-Semites, and other bigots and shellbacks. So I pause to take part in a thought experiment, and to ask myself: Am I in favor of the untrammeled "free exercise of religion"?[more ...] Islam - Religion - Religious toleration - Religion and Spirituality - Religious Tolerance

NewsTrust Rating: 3.4 average - 6 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

A Brilliant Ruling

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Dahlia Lithwick - Aug. 05 (Opinion) - Judge Vaughn R. Walker is not Anthony Kennedy. But when the chips are down, he certainly knows how to write like him. I count—in his opinion today—seven citations to Justice Kennedy's 1996 opinion in Romer v. Evans (striking down an anti-gay Colorado ballot initiative) and eight citations to his 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas (striking down Texas' gay-sodomy law). In a stunning decision this afternoon, finding California's Proposition 8 ballot initiative banning gay marriage unconstitutional, Walker trod heavily on the path Kennedy has blazed on gay rights: "[I]t would demean a married couple were it to be said marriage is simply about the right to have sexual intercourse," quotes Walker. "'[M]oral disapproval, without any other asserted state interest,' has never been a rational basis for legislation," cites Walker. "Animus towards gays and lesbians or simply a belief that a relationship between a man and a woman is inherently better than a relationship between two men or two women, this belief is not a proper basis on which to legislate," Walker notes, with a jerk of the thumb at Kennedy.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.0 average - 8 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Adios, Democrats

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Molly Ball - Jul. 25 (Opinion) - For Democrats, the most frightening candidate of 2010 may well be Susana Martinez, the Republican nominee for governor in New Mexico. If she wins in November, she will be the first female Hispanic governor in U.S. history—and an instant national GOP spokeswoman.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.8 average - 8 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

What Obama's speech on the BP oil spill was lacking

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By John Dickerson - Jun. 16 (Opinion) - ... the president made the situation worse for himself. The use of the language of war created the imbalance. He talked of a "battle" and "siege," but like all the other times when war has been misused—the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the economic war Joe Biden declared last year—the action taken didn't match the words used to describe the menace. Prudent, methodical, and secure … Wait a minute. There's a war going on. Shouldn't we be doing something more?

NewsTrust Rating: 3.3 average - 8 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The dangerous new era of "extreme energy."

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Daniel Gross - Jun. 06 (Opinion) - We've entered an age in which the production of energy, especially from fossil fuels, demands ever-more-expensive environmental trade-offs. We've entered what Michael Klare, professor at Hampshire College, calls the era of "extreme energy."

NewsTrust Rating: 3.5 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Why is North Korea suddenly so aggressive?

Wed, 26 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Fred Kaplan - May. 26 (News) - North Korea's recent sinking of a South Korean warship was not an inexcusable act of aggression that came out of nowhere. It was an inexcusable act of aggression that had been building up for many years.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.8 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Kagan Pick Proves Obama Has No Judicial Philosophy

Fri, 14 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Dahlia Lithwick - May. 14 (Opinion) - ... we know that Obama is opposed to judicial activism, no matter what the flavor. He wrote about this in The Audacity of Hope, making clear that liberals had become too dependent on the judicial branch to solve their political problems: "[I]n our reliance on the courts to vindicate not only our rights but also our values, progressives had lost too much faith in democracy," he wrote. "Elections ultimately meant something. … Instead of relying on Senate procedures, there was one way to ensure that judges on the bench reflected our values, and that was to win at the polls." In a piece last fall about Obama's judicial philosophy, the New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin amplified this point and argued that the reason Obama wasn't packing the federal courts with hard-core liberal judges was that "Obama's jurisprudence may rest less on any legal theory or nomenclature than on a more primal political skill—the ability to keep winning elections."

NewsTrust Rating: 3.8 average - 6 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Why President Obama revealed how many weapons are in the U.S. nuclear stockpile.

Sat, 08 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Fred Kaplan - May. 08 (News Analysis) - In 1967 the United States had 31,255 nuclear warheads...In 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, we still had 22,217. Over the next four years, as the Cold War's demise sank in, the number was cut in half, to 11,511...Starting in 2004, the cuts resumed, winding down to the current 5,113.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.0 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

A brief history of alarmist & wrong Wall Street predictions

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Daniel Gross - Apr. 30 (Opinion) - Wall Street predictions that new regulations will stunt the industry have a history of being wrong going back to the creation of the SEC and FDIC.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The Tea Party's Toxic Take on History

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Ron Rosenbaum - Apr. 26 (Opinion) - Most people with a basic grounding in history find Tea Party ignorance something to laugh about, certainly not something to take seriously. But I would argue that history demonstrates that historical ignorance is dangerous and that it can have tragic consequences, however laughable it may initially seem. And thus the media, liberals, and others are misguided in laughing it off. And educated conservatives are irresponsible in staying silent in the face of these distortions.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.1 average - 10 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Who Killed the Responsible Republican?

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Jacob Weisberg - Apr. 17 (Opinion) - If Responsible Republicans are in fact nearing extinction, I think we can identify the crucial event that signaled their demise. It was a December 1993 memo by conservative strategist and commentator William Kristol. Kristol's advice about how Republicans should respond to Bill Clinton's 1993 health care effort—and a series of follow-up memos he wrote in 1994—pushed the GOP away from cooperation with Democrats on any social and economic legislation. His message marks the pivotal moment when Republicans shifted from fundamentally responsible partners in governing the country to uncompromising, hyperpartisan antagonists on all issues.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.7 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer