The New Republic

The Unraveling

adminn — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 05:30:00 -0400

Within a few minutes of Noman Benotman's arrival at the Kandahar guest house, Osama bin Laden came to welcome him. The journey from Kabul had been hard, 17 hours in a Toyota pickup truck bumping along what passed as the main highway to southern Afghanistan. It was the summer of 2000, and Benotman, then a leader of a group trying to overthrow the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, had been invited by bin Laden to a conference of jihadists from around the Arab world, the first of its kind since Al Qaeda had moved to Afghanistan in 1996. Benotman, the scion of an aristocratic family marginalized by Qaddafi, had known… more

Mark Schmitt in the New Republic | 'McCain's cynicism'

Communications — Fri, 30 May 2008 08:17:00 -0400

New America in the News:
...Apropos my question about McCain's cynicism, Mark Schmitt has an interesting piece in The American Prospect arguing that conservatism has been so discredited that McCain's only hope of winning will be a kind of right-wing identity politics that pits "Americans" versus "others," with Obama playing the role of chief "other..." LINK

We Have To Clean Up Bush's Messes Before We Can Focus On China

Ron Tang — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 02:15:00 -0400

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 -- not because I feel that advocating for human rights is wrong, but because the approach Hillary Clinton is advocating will… more

Why Hillary's Olympics Stance Is Immature

Ron Tang — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 02:31:00 -0400

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 Meddle," that struggled with the moral dilemma of sending America's Olympians to compete in a country that still jailed and… more

The Persian Pragmatists

Ron Tang — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 14:05:00 -0400

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 state, combined with a conservative ascendancy, grants him a political shield that will be difficult to penetrate.

But this year's script… more

A More Perfect Soundbite

Ron Tang — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:10:00 -0400

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 phrasing -- grammatically impossible, as some high school English teacher is doubtless pointing out somewhere, because nothing perfect can be… more

The Killer Question

Ron Tang — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

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 a plane accident in Pakistan nine years later. What was especially strange about the crash was that there was no… more

Steve Clemons in The New Republic | U.S. Foreign Policy with Cuba

Communications — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 17:17:00 -0500

New America in the News:
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. ...

Len Nichols in The New Republic on Individual Mandates

Communications — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 11:38:00 -0500

New America in the News:

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 why all three Democrats have proposed adopting the same set of strategies to make insurance more affordable: Requiring insurers to sell to everybody, at the same price, regardless of medical condition; creating a public program into which anybody can enroll; cutting down on wasteful treatments that drive up the price of medicine unnecessarily; and offering financial assistance to those people who might still need help paying for coverage. Make those changes--in other words, make insurance affordable--and most of the uninsured will leap at the chance to get coverage. ...

It's not the theory of mandates so much as the practice of them that worries other critics. This is usually the place where car insurance enters the discussion. Most states require that drivers carry liability insurance. But, in some states, more than a third of all drivers don't have coverage. (If you've ever had an accident with an uninsured motorist, you've learned this the hard way.) If Americans aren't complying with requirements to buy car insurance, the argument goes, why would they comply requirements to buy health insurance? ...

According to Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist, it's impossible to peg the likely impact of a mandate with even the very rough degree of precision he and other economists use for other estimates, simply because it requires making even more assumptions. But he also stressed that the question isn't whether a mandate will make a difference--it's how much of a difference and how close to full, 100 percent coverage an individual mandate system would get. Nor is Gruber alone in this assessment: It's pretty much conventional wisdom among policy makers. Just yesterday, the Wharton School's Mark Pauly--another highly regarded health economist, but one who tends to embrace more conservative views--co-signed a letter with Gruber and the New America Foundation's Len Nichols affirming that an individual mandate is essential for achieving universal coverage. ...

The complete The New Republic article can be found here. For additional reading on individual mandates, check out “Health Debate Reality Check: The Role of Individual Requirements,” a policy brief explaining the value of an individual mandate when seeking a system of coverage for all Americans. Also, in a teleconference last week, the brief's authors--Mark Pauly of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Jonathan Gruber of M.I.T., and Len Nichols, Director of the Health Policy Program at the New America Foundation--discussed their reasons for supporting an individual requirement to purchase health insurance, and answered questions about the feasibility of enforcing a mandate.

War of Error

Articles — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 03:14:00 -0400

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 men know the terrorist mastermind so well. When the Sudanese government exiled bin Laden in 1996, Omar was part of… more