Robert Maguire's Profile

A wave
of young British Islamists who trained to fight – who cheered as their
friends bombed this country – have recanted. Now they are using everything
they learned on the inside, to stop the jihad.

Seventeen former radical Islamists have "come out" in the past 12
months and have begun to fight back. Would they be able to tell me the
reasons that pulled them into jihadism, and out again? Could they be the key
to understanding – and defusing – Western jihadism? I have spent three
months exploring their world and befriending their leading figures. Their
story sprawls from forgotten English seaside towns to the jails of Egypt's
dictatorship and the icy mountains of Afghanistan – and back again.

“With the aging of the boomers and those who responded to Kennedy's call to service, we need to replenish the government work force,” says Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service.

Stier, a one-man evangelizing squad on behalf of government service, notes that the government must fill 273,000 “mission-critical” positions in the next three years. This will require vast improvements in the way government recruits and a new willingness to invest in its work force.

The military, he says, gets roughly 40 percent of its officer corps through ROTC. It makes sense to undertake a comparable investment in the civil service.

In the small and underappreciated world of those who care passionately about improving government's performance and prestige, there are competing visions of how to achieve this. One group of activists and legislators has been pushing to create a Public Service Academy, modeled after the military academies, to prepare a new generation of leaders in government.

It's a good idea and would send another powerful signal that government work is and should be valued. But with the extraordinary constraints on the federal budget, the prospects of the large investment that would be required to build a new institution are not exactly rosy. A civilian ROTC would be a good first step. The Roosevelt program has the benefit of drawing on the entire higher education system's capacity to produce specialists.

The Roosevelt program could also be an antidote to two debilitating trends in our politics. It would push back against the tendency of politicians to deride government (an odd habit, since politicians are themselves engaged in government service). And it might open the way for a bipartisan achievement at a time when such endeavors are in very short supply.

History professor and Alaskan David Noon corrects Palin for repeating the myth of "Seward's Folly" - the purchase of Alaska in 1867 by Secretary of State William Seward. From Going Rogue:

Critics ridiculed Seward for spending so much on a remote chunk of
earth that some thought of as just a frozen, inhospitable wilderness
that was dark half the year. The $7.2 million purchase became known as
“Seward’s Folly” or “Seward’ Icebox.” Seward withstood the mocking and
disdain because of his vision for Alaska. He knew her potential to help
secure the nation with her resources and strategic position on the
globe. . . . [D]ecades later, he was posthumously vindicated, as
purveyors of unpopular common sense often are.

From the historian:

So far as public opinion was concerned, most newspapers actually supported the purchase. The major exception was the New York Tribune,
which was owned by Horace Greeley, a Republican who was nevertheless
one of William Seward’s avowed enemies.