With Rick Perry the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, Democrats have been eager to paint the Texas governor as the second coming of his gubernatorial predecessor, George W. Bush. That is an attractive option for Dem strategists — but it is very unlikely to work. An insightful Washington Post piece describes how Perry has for […]

Want to get paid to do nothing? Go work for the US Postal Service. According to a new report and subsequent story in the Washington Post, in the first six months of 2011, the USPS paid $4.3 million in compensation to workers on “standby time” – work hours where, due to low mail volume, employees […]

Confused about national debt: how much we owe and to whom?  Try this short and clear John Steele Gordon’s piece in the WSJ today.Gordon writes: The total national debt of the United States is the sum of all federal bills, notes and bonds that have been issued by the Treasury and not yet redeemed. The […]

Mickey Kaus has a list of the things President Obama could have done differently throughout his presidency. Take a look here.Ezra Klein provides us with a progressive’s surprisingly substantial list of what, from a liberal viewpoint, are the good things Washington has accomplished since Obama moved in: Indeed, if you had taken me aside in […]

Via old WRM colleague and CFR China fellow Elizabeth Economy comes this link to an English language version of a Chinese editorial on Xinhuanet helpfully explaining to the next Japanese prime minister how his country can contribute to harmonious China-Japan relations: To improve the relationship between the world’s second and third biggest economies, Noda’s cabinet […]

Thirty years ago Nigerian economic troubles would have been quickly blamed on World Bank and general imperialist meddling in domestic affairs, but today that is no longer the case. Poor banking policies and a corrupt bureaucracy are homegrown issues, and Nigerians know that the most important limits on their growth are domestic. The FT reported earlier […]

In case you missed it yesterday, a new Via Meadia essay has been posted. You can find it here. 

Barack Obama won the election, but Dick Cheney is still running the show.That, at least, is the only conclusion I can draw from the news that a writer for the Weekly Standard called in a NATO airstrike during the Libya fighting last week.Via Meadia does not yet have its own air arm, but we are […]

Key conclusions from a paper by Gabe Collins and Andrew Erikson at China Sign Post: –China is likely to follow an S-Curve-shaped path of slowing growth as key internal and external challenges—including pollution, corruption, chronic diseases, water shortages, growing internal security spending, and an aging population—feed off of one another and exact increasingly large costs.–One […]

Lord of the Rings aficionados know that the evil lord Sauron paid little attention to the danger posed by two hobbits slowly struggling across the mountains and deserts of Mordor until he suddenly realized that the ring on which all his power depended was about to be hurled into the pits of Mount Doom.  All […]