I want to make one correction to an assertion I made in my last blog post.  In it, I said that delivery of services like education and health care is something that “states accomplish, and not the institutions that check them.”This is a big overstatement.  The checking institutions actually play a big role in improving […]

News this morning that the unemployment rate fell to 7.8 percent is welcome. As we’ve been observing at Via Meadia, the United States is not only in better shape than other developed economies, there are some powerful trends—onshoring, foreign investment, the new energy revolution—pointing toward a more prosperous future than many pessimists assume.The White House […]

Has Romney shifted to the center? Is he spewing misleading numbers and making conflicting promises in an effort to be everything to everybody?Well, yes, to some extent. It’s what campaigners do. But the fetish of this New York Times piece in particular, and the wonk press in general, for “specific programs” and detailed numerical projections […]

Things sure do look different once you’re in power. Having campaigned against the EU fiscal pact negotiated by President Sarkozy, François Hollande now appears to have made a U-turn and is trying to convince the skeptics in his party to back the treaty’s ratification.Hollande, a protégé of Jacques Delors, one of the fathers of the […]

The website of the Free Gaza Movement, a sponsor of the Gaza Flotilla, lists some impressive celebrity endorsements. One of the most impressive names on the list is that of Desmond Tutu, revered throughout the world for his courageous stand against South Africa’s apartheid government and for his leadership of initiatives like the Truth and […]

The U.S. has been criticized, especially by human rights groups, for rushing too fast into Burma after its rulers “opened” the resource-rich but undeveloped country to investment. But the reality is that the U.S. is still lagging far behind Japan in exploring new business ventures in Burma, writes Reuters in a special report: A fast-track deal negotiated […]

The Economist ominously reports: The struggle to digest the swollen generation of ageing baby-boomers threatens to strangle economic growth. As the nature and scale of the problem become clear, a showdown between the generations may be inevitable.The statistics are frightening: The average federal tax rate for a median American household, including income and payroll taxes, […]

On a day that America’s focus was fixed on the presidential combatants at the University of Denver, a leadership struggle of another kind was taking place in Central Asia. AP: Protesters clashed with police and tried to break into a building housing the parliament and government offices in Kyrgyzstan’s capital Wednesday during a rally to demand […]

Anyone wondering what WRM would look like on a presidential advisory team need only look at Lee Smith’s recent piece for Tablet. Also featured in the piece (and photo—undoctored, of course) are Elliot Abrams, Tom Friedman, and Aaron David Miller. Lee asked each to offer advice to the next President of the United States on […]

Contrary to exclamations from the Obama administration and the mainstream press, Al-Qaeda is not dead, not gone, and not “on its last legs.” In fact, the regional groups that together make up “Al-Qaeda” have had different fortunes in recent months, as Daveed Gartenstein-Ross reports for Foreign Policy, but its fighters are still out there: This isn’t […]