The New Republic

This article is the third part of a TNR debate between Steven Clemons and Richard Just, deputy editor from The New Republic, on the appropriate response to the Beijing Olympics.

Please click here for the first part of the debate. For the second part, please click here.

From: Steven Clemons To: Richard Just

Richard reads me pretty well. I don't believe that the U.S. government should throw its weight behind an Olympics-tethered human rights rebuke of China --… more

This article is the first part of a TNR debate between Steven Clemons and Richard Just, deputy editor from The New Republic, on the appropriate response to the Beijing Olympics.

From: Steven Clemons To: Richard Just

Hillary Clinton recently called on George W. Bush to boycott the Beijing Olympic opening ceremonies, and I think she's showing a strategic blind spot that is worrisome.

To add a bit of context, last October, The New Republic's editors ran a thought-provoking editorial, "Gold… more

Iran's recent parliamentary elections, conducted on Friday, stuck closely to a script familiar from the past four years: Conservatives predictably won the majority of seats from a ballot cleansed of reformists by the Guardians Council; turnout in cosmopolitan Tehran was lower than the provinces; and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei blasted the U.S. for interfering in Iran's elections. The election's only clear winner -- as usual, in this script -- is Khamenei, whose virtual veto power over all matters of… more

Barack Obama's speech acquired a title nearly as soon as it was delivered. On both the campaign website and YouTube, where it has been seen more than two million times, it was identified as "A More Perfect Union."

The four words refer, of course, to the preamble to the Constitution, which was appropriate both as a gesture to Obama's hosts (Philadelphia's National Constitution Center, conveniently located in Pennsylvania) and as a reflection on our very imperfect society. It is a strange… more

The last time I saw Benazir Bhutto was over dinner at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., three weeks before her October return to Pakistan. She was in enormously good spirits, almost effervescent. The years in the political wilderness looked like they were coming to an end. But, at one point, the conversation took a more serious turn as she began discussing the mysterious death of General Zia, the dictator who had hanged her father in 1979.

Zia died in… more

The Failed Policy That Won't Die (The New Republic) And as Steve Clemons notes, Mike Huckabee, who backed greater engagement with Cuba when he was governor of Arkansas, now says he wants to put more pressure on Havana than the Bush administration did. ...

The New Republic Columnist Johnathan Cohn wrote about the presidential candidates' health care proposals, and explored a point made by Health Policy Director Len Nichols--individual mandate is necessary for achieving universal health coverage. An excerpt from Cohn's Column is below:

The logic of a mandate begins with understanding exactly why Obama's essential diagnosis of the problem--that it's all about affordability--is wrong. It's certainly true that cost is the single biggest reason 45 million Americans don't have health insurance today. That is… more

Omar bin Laden, the fourth son of the Al Qaeda leader, cuts a striking figure. In one photo, he stares out from beneath an Adidas baseball cap, his beard closely trimmed -- an entirely different look from his father’s seventh-century aesthetic. He wears jeans and sits next to his much older wife, a pale-faced British woman with pig tails, whom he divorced a mere five months into their marriage. While his father would not approve of his lifestyle choices, few… more

...All three Democrats [meaning presidential candidates Edwards, Obama and Clinton] have turned to the same informal network of health-care experts for ongoing counsel--people like Gruber and Hacker and the New America Foundation's Len Nichols. And all three candidates have smart people working exclusively for them. But it was Clinton who inherited the senior staff from her husband's White House, including Chris Jennings and Gene Sperling, who spent years figuring out how to navigate legislation through a hostile Congress. (Whether that… more

...Under the Healthy Americans Act, the federal government would discourage insurance companies from competing to avoid medically risky beneficiaries--the way they do now--by prohibiting insurers from discriminating based on pre-existing conditions. That's a whole lot of regulation. People with high incomes and generous health benefits would end up losing some of their existing tax breaks--which is to say, they would pay (slightly) higher taxes. Some conservatives are sure to attack that. And, of course, it would achieve universal coverage--the traditional… more