Andrew Jackson still lives: The American public’s foreign policy priorities look very much like something the former President would have recognized. In a recent Gallup poll, 88 percent of Americans ranked “preventing future acts of international terrorism” as a “very important” foreign policy goal, narrowly beating out stopping the spread of nuclear weapons and supplying America’s […]

Big Tobacco and the anti-smoking lobby are now unlikely allies against a common enemy: Obamacare. Under the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies can hit smokers with significantly higher premiums. Here’s the problem, as the Washington Post reports: Although low- and middle-income tobacco users will get premium subsidies meant to make health insurance more affordable, that government […]

If you need yet another hint that something is way off in America’s education system, you need look no further than this story in yesterday’s New York Times. It gives a brief snapshot of today’s labor market, where a college degree has become the effective equivalent of a high school diploma: the minimum requirement for getting […]

On February 8, 2013, The Christian Century carried an article by Lauren Markoe entitled “Did gun control prevent Jews from stopping the Holocaust?” It reported on what must be one of the most bizarre misuses of the Holocaust. As the debate over gun control has moved to the forefront of policy debates in the wake […]

Why see a doctor for routine health care when a nurse practitioner can offer the same care at a lower cost? That’s the question raised by a recent post on Slate by Matthew Yglesias. He quotes from a roundup of studies on the quality of nurse practitioner care that gives them high marks: Studies comparing the quality […]

A report released today by a computer security company confirms what many of us have long suspected: for years, the Chinese army has been running a clandestine operation with a skilled group of hackers, and is behind many recent computer attacks on Western governments and companies. The NYT reports: On the outskirts of Shanghai, in a run-down neighborhood […]

Yesterday we wrote about a bombing Saturday in Quetta, Pakistan that killed upwards of 80 people. While violence there threatens to become so routine that attacks like this get little response, public anger is rising. Reuters reports: [G]rieving relatives refused to bury their kin in a powerful rebuke to a government they say has repeatedly failed […]

Guess who’s green in the Emerald Isle? Northern Ireland has just discovered that it’s sitting on shale gas reserves estimated to be the equivalent of about 1.5 billion barrels of oil worth £80 billion. But Phil Flanagan, the energy spokesman for Sinn Féin, said the government is being manipulated by greedy energy companies. He voiced his […]

Delivering on one of President Obama’s State of the Union promises, the Department of Education recently unveiled the “College Scorecard,” which conveys information on average student debt, graduation rates and loan defaults at nearly 3,500 schools. Yes, much of the data is a few years old, and it doesn’t yet include graduates’ average starting salaries, […]

If you think you can balance a budget with huge tax increases alone, take a look at France: President François Hollande’s plan to avoid necessary spending cuts by soaking the rich isn’t panning out. Awaiting Hollande is a major showdown with Angela Merkel, the FT reports: The problem for Mr Hollande is that Brussels and Berlin may […]