WRM’s latest op-ed in the WSJ analyzes the dangerous gap between President Obama’s words and his actions: Both President Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last year told the world boldly that Syria’s President Bashar Assad “must” go. Yet the despot remains, gaily crossing American “red lines” and making U.S. policy look feckless. […]You […]

On June 22, 2013, the New York Times (in a story by Mark Oppenheimer, one of its regular religion reporters), carried an account of yet another skirmish in the culture war within the Episcopal Church. Katharine Jefferts Schori, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States, preached a sermon in Curacao, the […]

It’s the most open secret in Washington that America’s Afghanistan policy is in deep disarray. Afghan President Hamid Karzai was quick to try to derail the most recent attempt between the US and the Taliban to negotiate an end to the Afghan war; Karzai fumed that the effort was “in reality an attempt to cut him out and make an […]

A surgery center in Oklahoma has started a bidding war by offering drastically lower prices than other providers and posting them online. The center describes itself as “free-market loving”—an unorthodox but welcome branding for a health care provider. The evidence of its success, however, is eye-popping. Where some hospitals charge more than $16,000 for a breast biopsy, […]

Walter Russell Mead has brought to my attention that a Turkish colleague we know, Mustafa Akyol, indirectly and, as it turns out, unfairly, implicated me as a coup-lover and disparager of Islam in a Hurriyet column he wrote recently called “How one can defend Egypt’s Coup.” Actually, Akyol was not attacking me but rather taking […]

The public pensions crisis is one of the greatest challenges facing the states today, but thus far it has mostly met with silence from Washington. This may be about to change. Mary Williams Walsh, who has been all over the pensions story for the New York Times, is now reporting that Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah […]

by Jamie HorganFirst, a grainy image of a hose on fire; next, a slow shot of verdant, rain-drenched woods. That’s how Josh Fox’s documentary film Gasland II opens, and it encapsulates his vision of the two sides of the fracking debate: those who seek to destroy nature, and those who defend it. What follows is […]

Europe’s biggest oil companies, Shell and BP, are floundering in the green energy department. Both companies have decided to stop funding their advanced biofuel programs, which produced fuel from woody plants and waste, due to their high production costs. These biofuels require intense capital investment, but haven’t begun yielding much profit, and the oil companies […]

China has become increasingly belligerent and North Korea increasingly threatening, the Japanese government reported in its annual defense paper today.China has been engaged in “dangerous actions that could cause a contingency situation,” the report warns, and “has attempted to change the status quo by force based on its own assertion, which is incompatible with the […]

Speaking of failed states, California’s prison system is dysfunctional and broken. Earlier this year, a Federal Appeals Court found that the state had yet to comply with the Supreme Court’s 2011 ruling that conditions in its prison system amount to “cruel and unusual punishment.” The three-judge Appeals Court panel issued a stern rebuke to Governor […]