NewsTrust - Culture Wars - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

Murdoch’s Pride Is America’s Poison

Sun, 06 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Bill Keller - May. 06 (Opinion) - Roger Ailes is (a) the genius who midwifed the astoundingly successful Fox News; (b) the sharpest thorn in the side of Barack Obama; and (c) the most important surviving officer in Rupert Murdoch’s global media army. ou can see why he would be a great subject for a biography. He is also (d) a political operator of the first order, which is why there are now three Ailes books in the works, two of which look to me like pre-emptive strikes by Ailes himself.

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Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Thomas E. Mann, Norman J. Ornstein - Apr. 29 (Opinion) - Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. Of course, it’s not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West’s comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates. It’s not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted.

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Arizona Debate: Conservative Chickens Come Home to Roost

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - Feb. 25 (Opinion) - What we have here are chickens coming home to roost. It's as if all of the American public's bad habits and perverse obsessions are all coming back to haunt Republican voters in this race: The lack of attention span, the constant demand for instant gratification, the abject hunger for negativity, the utter lack of backbone or constancy (we change our loyalties at the drop of a hat, all it takes is a clever TV ad): these things are all major factors in the spiraling Republican disaster. Most importantly, though, the conservative passion for divisive, partisan, bomb-tossing politics is threatening to permanently cripple the Republican party. They long ago became more about pointing fingers than about ideology, and it's finally ruining them.

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Santorum living in stone-age

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

CNN - By Stephanie Coontz - Feb. 14 (Opinion) - Presidential candidate Rick Santorum is unhappy with last week's compromise over whether Catholic institutions should be required to cover contraception for their employees, arguing that birth control "shouldn't be covered by insurance at all."

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Gingrich to gay voter: Support Obama

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

CBS News - By Newt Gingrich - Dec. 21 (Interview) - Newt Gingrich agreed Tuesday with a Iowan voter who identified himself as gay that he should support President Obama again in 2012. "If that's what's most important to you then you should support Obama."

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Barney the bully: Congressman Frank’s other legacy

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Dana Milbank - Nov. 30 (Opinion) - The morning after his retirement announcement, Rep. Barney Frank scored an interview on NBC’s “Today” show, gaining the opportunity to act as an elder statesman in front of a TV audience of millions. Instead, the Massachusetts Democrat chose to quarrel with the interviewer.

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Attack of the Attack Ads: Citizens United and the 2012 Elections

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

PBS - By Evelyn Messinger - Oct. 16 (Opinion) - In 2012, two tidal waves will reconfigure the American electoral system and the news media that cover it. A tsunami made of money will buoy up the structure of entrenched political power, while a huge wave of personal technology will disrupt it. I can predict both of these events with certainty because they've happened every election year over the last couple of decades. Still, the changes in 2012 may be dramatic. Angry citizens around the world have been using a potent combination of mobile phones, social networking and broadcast television to upend established political orders. Now it's Americans who are angry, and this election could spark a new level of activism leveraged by these same tools. At the same time, this will be the first general election since the so-called "Citizens United" Supreme Court decision, which tossed out the last vestiges of regulations limiting campaign financing. Among other effects, this will translate into a record numbers of attack ads next fall. Taken together, these two changes may profoundly affect our democracy, and they deserve a closer look.

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Obama Rejects Obamaism

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By David Brooks - Sep. 20 (Opinion) - He claimed we can afford future Medicare costs if we raise taxes on the rich. He repeated the old half-truth about millionaires not paying as much in taxes as their secretaries. (In reality, the top 10 percent of earners pay nearly 70 percent of all income taxes, according to the I.R.S. People in the richest 1 percent pay 31 percent of their income to the federal government while the average worker pays less than 14 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office.)

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The Republicans are now the anti-science party

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

New York Times - By Paul Krugman - Sep. 04 (Opinion) - Jon Huntsman Jr, a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn't a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that's too bad, because Mr Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the Republican party in the United States, namely, that it is becoming the "anti-science party". This is an enormously important development. And it should terrify us. To see what Mr Huntsman means, consider recent statements by the two men who actually are serious contenders for the Republican nomination: Rick Perry and Mitt Romney.

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Of Dystopias and Alphas

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Maureen Dowd - Aug. 21 (Opinion) - Why can’t the president who promised revolution set the Washington schedule rather than bow to it?

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Scientists: Aliens May Punish Our Species for Climate Change

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Megan Mcardle - Aug. 19 (Opinion) - Via Jonathan Adler, I see that a group of scientists doing "scenario analysis" on the potential outcomes of human contact with extra-terrestrial intelligence is worried that global warming will encourage those aliens to wipe us out: The authors warn that extraterrestrials may be wary of civilisations that expand very rapidly, as these may be prone to destroy other life as they grow, just as humans have pushed species to extinction on Earth. In the most extreme scenario, aliens might choose to destroy humanity to protect other civilisations.

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Defending Obama's pragmatism

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

CNN - By Fareed Zakaria - Aug. 15 (Opinion) - Over the last week, liberal politicians and commentators took to the airwaves and op-ed pages to criticize the debt deal that Congress reached. But their ire was directed not at the Tea Party or even the Republicans but rather at Barack Obama, who they concluded had failed as a President because of his persistent tendency to compromise. This has been a running theme ever since Obama took office. I think that liberals need to grow up. As the New Republic's Jonathan Chait brilliantly points out, there is a recurring liberal fantasy that if only the President would give a stirring speech, he would sweep the country along with the sheer power of his poetry. In this view, writes Chait, "Every known impediment to the legislative process - special interest lobbying, the filibuster, macroeconomic conditions, not to mention certain settled beliefs of public opinion-are but tiny stick huts trembling in the face of the atomic bomb of the presidential speech."

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Party Line

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 11:13:52 -0700

Weekly Standard - By Charlotte Allen - Aug. 12 (Review) - Those liberal leanings distort the news in subtle but telling ways. Groseclose dissects a 2006 story in the Los Angeles Times that linked a record low number of black freshmen at UCLA to the passage 10 years earlier of Proposition 209, a ballot initiative that forbids public institutions from considering race in admissions and hiring. The reporter, Rebecca Trounson, had quoted six sources, not for factual information but for their opinions. Five of those sources expressed conventional left-of-center views, complaining, for example, that the campus was insufficiently “diverse” and accusing UCLA of practicing racism. Only one source, former University of California regent Ward Connerly, architect of Proposition 209, suggested that fewer black high school graduates might be academically competitive, or that some blacks might have chosen to attend historically black colleges instead of UCLA. Not only did Trounson not examine the tortuous routes that UCLA’s admissions committee (on which Groseclose served at the time) followed to get around Proposition 209 so as to maximize black enrollment, but she failed to report a record number of black transfer students to UCLA that fall so that the black student population actually increased slightly. She also failed to notice what might have been the real story: the huge increases in Asian enrollments at UCLA, to the point that white people, once the overwhelming majority, now constituted only about a third of the overall student population.

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What Happened to Obama?

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Drew Westen - Aug. 07 (Opinion) - The president is fond of referring to “the arc of history,” paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his profound failure to understand bully dynamics — in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness and just punch harder the next time — he has broken that arc and has likely bent it backward for at least a generation.

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How the GOP lost on the debt deal

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By Daniel Markovits - Aug. 03 (Opinion) - The deal reached by Congress eliminates the leverage that would have been created by another imminent default until after the next election, where it will be exercised by new and possibly differently constituted players.

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The Chart That Should Accompany All Discussions of the Debt Ceiling

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By James Fallows - Jul. 25 (Opinion) - You can be against deficits. You can be for preserving tax cuts. You cannot be for both -- logically, that is.

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2 Dads, 2 Daughters, 1 Big Day

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Frank Bruni - Jul. 21 (Opinion) - Even in a city as diverse as New York and a neighborhood as progressive as the West Village, a little kid knows that having two dads is different. Eight-year-old Maeve certainly did.

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Men of a Certain Rage

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Daily Show - By Jon Stewart - Jul. 15 (Opinion) - If Obama and Congressional Republicans don't settle their heated argument by raising the debt ceiling, man will be sentenced to an eternity of licking his own pets' genitals.

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Michele Bachmann signs anti-gay pact that says times were better for black kids during slavery

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By Andrew Malcom - Jul. 08 (Opinion) - "Slavery had a disastrous impact on African American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African American baby born after the election of the USA's first African American president."

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Argument, Truth and the Social Side of Reasoning

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Gary Gutting - Jun. 30 (Opinion) - In a recent discussion about reasoning, one point was overlooked: Knowledge of the truth is a social process. Philosophers rightly think of themselves as experts on reasoning. After all, it was a philosopher, Aristotle, who developed the science of logic. But psychologists have also had some interesting things to say about the subject. A fascinating paper by Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier has recently generated a lot of discussion.

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Violent video games, California and the ambiguity of freedom

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Keith Stuart - Jun. 28 (Opinion) - The US Supreme Court has ruled that an attempt by California to ban the sale of violent games to children was unconstitutional. We look at the factors involved and why this isn't a clear-cut victory for free speech.

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Captured photographer to UM students: You must have passion to tell the story

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Miami Herald - By Erica Del Riego - Apr. 14 (Interview) - Photojournalist Joseph Raedle knew the risk he was taking when he arrived in Libya on March 18. As a veteran war correspondent, Raedle, 45, had spent two years documenting the United States’ involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq.

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On the budget, Obama has Republicans cornered

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Michael Gerson - Apr. 05 (Opinion) - If there were any doubts about the political skills of the new White House team under Chief of Staff William Daley, they have now been satisfied.

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NPR's Toothless Defense Strategy

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Howard Kurtz - Mar. 20 (Opinion) - Steve Inskeep, A veteran National Public Radio correspondent, is calling from Cairo, having just visited a 23-year-old man with welts on his back who says the Egyptian Army tortured him. “That, to me, is a real story,” he says. At a time when he is trying to get flak jackets to his colleagues in Libya, Inskeep has little patience for charges that NPR leans to the left. “What’s important to us is the work we do,” he says. “I actually get accused of being a conservative as often as I get accused of being a liberal.” In Chicago, Ira Glass, who hosts This American Life, has used his own network’s airwaves to challenge his bosses for being timid. “Public radio is being hit with a barrage of criticism that it’s left-wing media–biased, reprehensible—and we’re doing nothing to stand up for our brand,” he tells NEWSWEEK. “They’re not responding like a multimedia organization that’s actually growing and superpopular.” These exasperated reporters are speaking out against their embattled company in what amounts to a revolt in the ranks. NPR, reeling from an undercover sting that cost the network its chief executive and a chunk of its credibility, is facing the biggest threat in its 41-year history. The House just voted 228 to 192 to eliminate the federal funding that makes up 10 to 15 percent of public-radio budgets, an effort fueled by longstanding conservative complaints about NPR’s alleged leftist leanings. But with its future on the line, NPR’s decimated management has opted for quiet diplomacy rather than a full-throated defense of one of the few news operations that is actually expanding, reaching an impressive 27 million listeners a week.

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Clarence Thomas' dangerous conceit

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Los Angeles Times - By Jonathan Turley - Mar. 06 (Opinion) - The Supreme Court justice argues that criticism of him is an attack on the court itself. But a single justice doesn't define the institution.

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