“It is not just a dangerous escalation. This is part of a pattern of dangerous and reckless behavior by the Iranian government”, said President Barack Obama recently. Visibly angry and frustrated, Obama pledged that his Administration would take steps to ensure that Iran “pays a price.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton branded the most recent […]

Years ago in the happy, halcyon years of the Clinton administration when NATO was bombing Serbia and liberal internationalists were celebrating the end of history, my email inbox at the Council on Foreign Relations was overwhelmed by a rash of first hundreds and then thousands of angry messages, largely identical, from Serbs.  The primitive email […]

Indian call centers have long been the most visible symbols of the outsourcing of American jobs — even inspiring the premise of a primetime NBC comedy. Now many of these call centers are being confronted with a familiar problem: outsourcing. The Washington Post reports that Indian call-center companies are increasingly moving their business abroad: But […]

The debate over the Keystone XL pipeline continues to be a headache for Obama: On the one side are his environmental supporters, who are committed to killing what they understand will be a dirty, environmentally-disastrous project. On the other hand is the opportunity to create as many as 20,000 jobs for Americans. The Washington Post […]

Flannery O’Connor was once approached by someone who complained about the way academic writing programs discouraged so many promising young writers from launching careers.  “Not enough,” was O’Connor’s reply. She was on the wrong side of history; America is a land of enablers, and technology is about to enable a huge wave of new authors […]

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones has a chart showing that in the last five months President Obama was hammered by the mainstream press harder than any of his GOP rivals; there was a 25 point gap between the percentage of his coverage that was positive and the negative stories.These charts and other methods to referee […]

World markets, so depressed and beaten down last week that any news not catastrophic perked them up, rallied for a few days on more European promises to come up with a grand solution to the euro-mess by the end of this month.Those promises were, of course, well meaning lies.  Germany and France are so far […]

Via Meadia staff will be posting a morning news roundup of stories we’re reading each morning while Walter is in China. We’ll stick to themes and topics usually found here on the blog, offering readers a short post of news we think is important, interesting and intelligent. Some of the stories found in the news […]

That pay raise might have to wait until 2021.  At least that is the word of economists in the latest WSJ forecasting survey: From 2000 to 2010, median income in the U.S. declined 7% after adjusting for inflation, according to Census data. That marks the worst 10-year performance in records going back to 1967. On […]

The alleged Iranian assassination plot against Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in the US (if the allegations hold up) is not news in the sense that it doesn’t tell us anything new or represent anything new about the structure of relations in the Middle East.  But it is very important news about the temperature of Saudi-Iranian relations, […]