Featured Articles — July 13, 2009

July 13, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Featured Articles 

Interesting Takes From Home And Abroad:

With Sotomayor comes new era in judicial politics By Joan Biskupic, USA Today
When a national television audience tunes in to the Senate hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, it will get a crash course in the law beginning with the perennial three R’s: race, religion and Roe.

The Seinfeld Hearings By Randy Barnett, The Wall Street Journal
If you suspect this week’s Senate confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor will be, like “Seinfeld,” a show about nothing, you are probably right. To understand why, we need to revisit an era that remade how lawyers and the public think about law, and especially the Constitution.

The Five Pillars of Obama’s Foreign Policy By Michael Scherer, Time
The introductory phase of Barack Obama’s foreign policy ambitions concluded on July 11 before the Ghanaian Parliament, when a solo trombonist sounded a few ceremonial notes. Obama had just finished his fourth major address on international affairs in as many months, and a few hours later, he would depart home to Washington from his fourth overseas trip.

Obama Rewrites the Cold War By Liz Cheney, The Wall Street Journal
There are two different versions of the story of the end of the Cold War: the Russian version, and the truth. President Barack Obama endorsed the Russian version in Moscow last week.

Obama Is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong About Honduras By Jennifer Rubin, Pajamas Media
The Obama administration seems to have gotten just about everything wrong about the ouster of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. Wrong on the law. Wrong on the politics. Wrong on the foreign policy.

A bipartisan blueprint for immigration reform By Jeb Bush, Thomas F. McLarty III and Edward Alden, Los Angeles Times
The U.S. needs to create a system that responds to labor market needs, provides more effective enforcement and offers a fair way to deal with those living here illegally.

Obama’s Other Wife By Tina Brown, The Daily Beast
Left behind on major presidential trips, overruled in choosing her own staff—Hillary Clinton is the invisible woman at State. But Obama’s brilliant foreign policy spouse may not stay silent forever.

China’s empire must end reliance on one man By Jonathan Fenby, Financial Times
Behind the high death toll and continued swapping of blame, the crisis confronting the Chinese leadership in the far western Xinjiang region says much about the way China is run. For all the record of economic growth, the shiny cities and the speculation about Beijing and Washington forming their own “G2”, it is, in many ways, still an old-fashioned state. Habits stretching back to imperial times influence the behaviour of the nine men in dark suits with uniformly full heads of black hair who make up the ruling standing committee of the politburo.

The G-8 Is Dead By Dirk Kurbjuweit, Der Spiegel
The L’Aquila summit showed just how irrelevant the G-8 has become, as emerging economies demand more and more of a say at the negotiating table. But the new focus on common survival means that Western values such as human rights and democracy are being neglected.

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