President Obama’s re-election campaign received a major boost as brown jobs helped rekindle the economy in states like Ohio, but his administration has fought the brown jobs machine almost every step of the way. The federal permitting system for drilling, for example, now takes twice as long as it did in 2005 and more than […]

Euphoria over the energy revolution is continuing to reach the mainstream. Aviezer Tucker has penned an excellent essay in Foreign Affairs arguing that the discovery of alternative energy sources from the U.S. to Poland to India is making the 21st century a better and safer place: We are moving away from a world dominated by […]

Google co-founder Sergey Brin predicted last year that his company’s autonomous cars would be fully operational within five years, but, as the NYT points out, cars with some self-driving functions are already here: Someday soon, few drivers will have to worry about car crashes and collisions, whether on congested roads or on empty highways, technology companies and […]

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett just added his name to the growing list of governors taking on runaway pension costs in their state. In a recent interview, Corbett likened pension expenses to a “tapeworm” slowly devouring more and more revenue from the budget. The comparison is apt: The growth in pension costs is now equal to 62 […]

With the election safely behind us, the New York Times has taken a long, hard look at President Obama’s anti-terrorism policy in North Africa and called it a comprehensive failure: … [A]s insurgents swept through the desert last year, commanders of this nation’s [Mali’s] elite army units, the fruit of years of careful American training, […]

Slowly, the people who run Assad’s machine are deserting. The Washington Post has an interview with Brig. Gen. Mohammed Hassoun, an officer in the Syrian military who defected to Turkey with his family. Hassoun is one of a handful of defectors now in a Turkish camp set up specifically for Syrian officers: Hassoun said he knew […]

The U.S. has been on the edge of an economic precipice since the election, as the two parties play chicken with the federal budget. Fortunately the economy has been more resilient than the political system has been flexible, and the damage so far has been contained.But the next battle over the debt ceiling has no […]

As the week kicked off, the story on every front page was the urgent breaking news that President Obama was picking Chuck Hagel to be his Secretary of Defence. Generally speaking, at Via Meadia we think presidents should be allowed to work with the team they want. We also think that important policy isn’t settled […]

Yesterday’s suicide of Aaron Swartz, 26, one of the founders of Reddit and a passionate activist for Internet causes, has shaken the tech world. By all accounts a brilliant and fiercely idealistic (if somewhat troubled) young man, Swartz had his fingerprints on many of the things we take for granted online today, from the RSS […]

On the Reuters blog this past Friday, Zachary Karabell picked up some themes we’ve addressed here from time to time and suggested that much of the green-induced hysteria and pessimism over climate change is counterproductive: That the planet is getting warmer there should be no doubt… It does not, however, follow that the future arc of […]