Salon

Michael Cohen in Salon | 'How Obama Can Be the Un-Kerry in Denver'

Communications — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 13:21:00 -0400

New America in the News:

On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, and of Barack Obama's announcement of his running mate, Salon asked three noted panelists what makes for a successful convention, how Democrats can avoid the pitfalls of John Kerry's convention, and what to do about those pesky Hillary Clinton supporters.

Michael Cohen: ...I was thinking about how Ronald Reagan's '80 convention speech was a great speech, but actually, there was also a great convention, where basically all four days played up the notion that Reagan was a different kind of conservative, Republicans were the party of change. And I'd compare that to 1988, which before George Bush gave his convention speech was kind of a disastrous convention. I remember the Tuesday was the day they introduced Dan Quayle as the V.P. pick and it was pretty much downhill from there. What Bush did in that speech was sort of reintroduce himself to the country. He was really able to cast himself in a much more positive light than he had been seen in for the previous eight years. And at the same time, I think he set the contrast between the two candidates for the election. And I think that's what any good speech really does -- it lays out, pretty much, what kind of individual you are, what kind of vision you have for the presidency, what your vision of your candidacy is, but at the same time creates a pretty strong contrast between you and your opponent. LINK

The Newer Deal: The Path to a Democratic Supermajority

Articles — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 07:59:00 -0400

Virginia Woolf was wrong when she wrote, in her 1924 essay "Character in Fiction," that "on or around December 10, 1910, human nature changed." But there is no doubt that at some point between 2004 and 2008 American politics changed. It is clear to everyone, not least conservatives, that the era of right-wing hegemony that began with Richard Nixon's election in 1968 has come to an end. But this does not mean the triumph of post-1968 liberalism by default. If we are really in a new era, then the next Democratic Party will be as different and unfamiliar as the next Republican Party. Or so Democrats should hope,… more

Jesse Helms Is Not Dead

Ron Tang — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 03:49:00 -0400

Having devoted his career to shocking and outraging American liberals, the late North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms continues to provoke them from his grave. Progressive journals and blogs are full of Helms horror stories. How he tried to make Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley Braun cry by singing "Dixie" in the Senate elevator. How he won reelection against a black opponent by means of an ad showing the hands of a white man who had allegedly lost a job because of affirmative action. How he never repented of his segregationist past, unlike Strom Thurmond and George Wallace.

All quite true, quite horrifying… more

New America and Terror Free Tomorrow's Opinion Survey in Salon.com | 'Poll Finds Pakistanis Favor Talks with Militants'

Communications — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 08:38:00 -0400

New America in the News:
Pakistanis favor negotiating with Taliban militants rather than fighting them and hold their U.S. allies in the war on terror most responsible for violence in the country, according to a poll released Friday...

The poll by the Washington-based group Terror Free Tomorrow also shows that three-quarters of respondents want U.S.-backed President Pervez Musharraf to resign or be impeached and that the popularity of his chief critic, Nawaz Sharif, is soaring...

Terror Free Tomorrow, a not-for-profit group, investigates why people support or oppose extremism. The poll was co-sponsored by the New America Foundation, a policy institute with prominent current and former journalists on its board... LINK

Parag Khanna in Salon | Can the U.S. redeem itself overseas?

Communications — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 03:10:00 -0400

New America in the News:

Can the U.S. redeem itself overseas? (Salon.com)

Author Parag Khanna considers global superpowers and whether the United States can regain its standing in the world, here on Big Think, presented by Video Dog on Salon.com.

Dems No Better than Bush on Pakistan

adminn — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 11:23:00 -0500

Last week, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto marked the failure of an ill-conceived U.S. attempt to orchestrate the return of a deeply divisive political exile, discredited by allegations of corruption and incompetence, to take power in Pakistan. The Bush administration's aim was to install a leader who would simultaneously "democratize" and secularize her country, fight terrorist groups, and make peace with Israel. Instead, the sad event of Bhutto's murder has exposed the strategic bankruptcy of the administration's Pakistan policy. But Democrats should not feel vindicated by this failure, for they have endorsed virtually all of the Bush team's mistaken views… more

Bush's Real Lie About Iran

adminn — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 15:08:00 -0500

The latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program raises questions once again about the Bush administration's veracity in describing a nuclear threat. But President Bush's worst misrepresentations about the Iranian nuclear issue do not focus on whether Tehran is currently pursuing a nuclear weapons program or when Bush knew the U.S. intelligence community was revising its previous assessments. Rather, the real lie is the president's claim that his administration has made a serious offer to negotiate with the Islamic Republic, and that Iranian intransigence is the only thing preventing a diplomatic resolution.

Negotiations over Iran's nuclear activities started in… more

Flynt Leverett in Salon on the NIE's Report on Iran

Communications — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 12:17:00 -0500

New America in the News:

It was the brightest burst of news from the Middle East in a long time: Iran, it turned out, was nowhere near getting the bomb. But for the White House it was a political bombshell, tossed directly into the Bush-Cheney bunker.

The revelation this week of the latest National Intelligence Estimate, concluding that Iran halted its covert nuclear weapons program in 2003, upended a long-running rhetorical campaign by the president and vice president. Just six weeks prior, in a signature tag-team offensive in late October, Bush had worried out loud about a nuclear-armed Iran setting off "World War III," while Cheney warned in a speech that America "cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its grandest ambitions" to acquire nuclear weapons and lord over the Middle East.

But the president knew the thrust of the NIE's conclusions about a nuke-less Iran at least as early as last August, according to Flynt Leverett, a top Middle East expert and former senior director on Bush's National Security Council. In an interview Tuesday, Leverett said that the bellicose rhetoric in October was accompanied by a telling shift of the goal posts. It was déjà vu all over again. Bush no longer spoke of Iran's imminent weapons of mass destruction, he spoke of its imminent plans to gain the capability for making weapons of mass destruction.

Bush knew the NIE report was going public, of course, and he has tried to spin it as a measure of successful policy. But the White House failed to anticipate the impact of the report, says Leverett, now a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. "Obviously," he says, "this NIE does damage to the credibility of their representations on Iran." ...

For the complete story, please follow this link. Flynt recently spoke at a New America Foundation/American Strategy Program event on Iran. Watch it here.

Steve Clemons' Article on Iran Cited by Salon's Glenn Greenwald

Communications — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 16:41:00 -0400

New America in the News:

...Steve Clemons' recent, much-discussed article in Salon emphasized the role military commanders have played in insisting that a military strike against Iran would be disastrous. And Clemons cited this post from Time's Joe Klein which reported that the Joint Chiefs, when asked last December by Bush about air strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, were "unanimously opposed to taking that course of action," and they warned that "the Iranian response in Iraq and, quite possibly, in terrorist attacks on the U.S. could be devastating..."

Steve Clemons is Director of the American Strategy Program at New America. For the complete story, please visit Salon.com (direct link to article).

Why Bush Won't Attack Iran

Articles — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 04:52:00 -0400

During a recent high-powered Washington dinner party attended by 18 people, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft squared off across the table over whether President Bush will bomb Iran.

Brzezinski, former national security advisor to President Carter, said he believed Bush's team had laid a track leading to a single course of action: a military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities. Scowcroft, who was NSA to Presidents Ford and the first Bush, held out hope that the current President Bush would hold fire and not make an already disastrous situation for the U.S. in the Middle East even worse.

The… more