Springfield is finally getting serious about Illinois’s pension crisis. So far the state house has been dragging its feet, rejecting previous reform bills and debating half-measures with little chance of fixing the problem. Yesterday, however, the Illinois House of Representatives finally a passed a bill that looks like the state’s best hope for a solution. The […]

Britain held 34 local council elections yesterday, and the country’s eurosceptic United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) posted huge gains. NYT: Once scorned by Prime Minister David Cameron as “a bunch of fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists,” the party, which wants Britain to leave the European Union and strictly control immigration, gained about a quarter of […]

The US has redesigned its biggest “bunker buster” bomb to be even bigger and smarter, Pentagon officials said today. “Hopefully we never have to use it,” a US official told the WSJ. “But if we had to, it would work.”The Boeing-built bomb is designed to be dropped from a plane and hit the ground with nearly […]

A new study on the efficacy of Medicaid has all sides running the spin machine overtime. On Wednesday, The New England Journal of Medicine released a report comparing the health outcomes of thousands of Medicaid patients in Oregon to an identical group in the state who didn’t receive Medicaid. The study found…well, it depends on […]

EPA mandates have been propping up the corn ethanol industry for nearly six years now. But as the industry struggles in the face of political opposition, weak demand and the after-effects of last year’s drought, ethanol plants are going bankrupt. Workers at one ethanol plant in South Bend, Indiana, hoped an investor would save them from liquidation by […]

Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey: An American Heritage by Michael R. Veach University Press of Kentucky, 2013, 224 pp., $24.95 I began reading Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey: An American Heritage, by Michael R. Veach, with a hangover manifesting itself as a throbbing headache, courtesy of the titular drink. I hoped that by the time I finished the book, […]

In a better world, the horrible travails of the Duke lacrosse team would have led colleges and universities across the country to do more to protect young men from having their reputations destroyed and their lives ruined by false accusations of sexual misconduct. But if anything, young men have been losing procedural safeguards and the […]

Scotland will vote on whether it wants to leave the UK in September 2014, but a new report from UK’s Commons Foreign Affairs Committee wants the country to know this would be a very bad idea for both sides. We’ve noted before the tremendous difficulties that an independent Scotland could face, including possibly negotiating its entrance […]

Fortunately, President Obama’s Syria policy is becoming clearer. Unfortunately, the policy appears to be to dither fecklessly for years as extremists come to dominate the Syrian resistance and vicious fighting radicalizes the country, only to get deeply involved just as our ability to influence the future of Syria has largely disappeared. The WSJ reports on […]

Good news: The city of Los Angeles has solved all of its urgent problems, including underfunded pensions, poor quality education, budget deficits, debt, gang violence, and drugs. Having dispensed with these important issues, the LA city council turned to the most pressing issue at hand: a resolution to condemn the Koch brothers, the libertarian billionaires […]