Don’t anyone tell Nancy Pelosi, but Spain’s socialist government and opposition are embracing constitutional limits on public sector borrowing and enforced balanced budgets. It’s a man bites blue dog story: European socialists and social market conservatives are embracing radical fiscal ideas that the Tea Party loves and American liberals hate.Spain isn’t acting alone. Nicolas Sarkozy […]

Fearful of soaring prices, China will not relax strict measures put in place a year ago to restrict its growing housing bubble. As the FT reports: With the real estate market looking bubbly early last year, the government introduced a series of policies to rein in prices, from higher mortgage rates to restrictions on the […]

More bad news for Boomers watching their retirement portfolios shrink and their home equity dwindle.  If the San Francisco Federal Reserve is right about long term stock market trends in a spinechilling new study, Boomers can expect depressed stock prices for most of the rest of their lives.For decades, the rising American stock market has […]

Classic tactics from Washington: Find a popular program and threaten to kill it if Congress doesn’t fork over some dough. As the Washington Post reports: Federal officials are warning Congress that funding cuts and program delays will create a gap in weather satellite coverage starting in about 2016. That’s when a key polar-orbiting satellite is […]

In Samuel Johnson’s famous poem on London, he described some of its dangers: Here falling houses thunder on your head And here a female atheist talks you dead.In southern California, houses may fall on your head, but the female atheists are doing less talking than looming; apparently a particularly attractive one is going to be […]

The phrase ‘nation building’ conjures up ideas of foreign policy as social work: public health clinics, democracy workshops and so on.  Yes, but the first and foremost requirement of nation building is state building — building a strong government that can enforce the law and suppress armed opposition — and the main task of state […]

Brazil, last seen obsessing over rumors of a US plot to take over the Amazon, has since begun to fight back against real-life invaders. Various observers report that the Brazilian military has gone on the offensive on its own soil this month to push out heavily armed militias controlled by drug cartels that have set […]

In its issue of August 9, 2011, The Christian Century reported that Michele Bachmann, the Republican presidential candidate, had resigned from her church six days before launching her campaign. (This was also reported in some secular media.) The church in question is Salem Lutheran Church in Stillwater, Minnesota, which is affiliated with the Wisconsin Evangelical […]

With Vice President visiting Japan and the NATO assisted Libyan rebels consolidating (one hopes) their control of Tripoli, this is an odd and impolitic moment to say so, but the decline of the trilateral alliance is picking up speed.Trilateralism was the response of the US and its closest allies to the perceived decline in American […]

I really cannot resist commenting on two phenomena that seem quite different in nature but whose simultaneity suggests a few curmudgeonly observations. I am of course still on curmudgeon alert, but I can’t get to my real work today until I get these observations off my chest.First, about Washington’s earthquake yesterday early afternoon. There isn’t […]