A brilliantly reported piece in today’s WSJ lays bare a mysterious industry: political research and intelligence. Well-connected firms like Marwood Group, founded by Ted Kennedy Jr., use relationships and experience in Washington to offer advice to hedge funds and other investment companies on how upcoming political decisions might affect a company’s stock or a particular […]

You know the blue model is in serious trouble when even New York Times writers turn against it. Yesterday dyed-in-the-wool Democrat Thomas Edsall responded to Via Meadia‘s take on blue model collapse. In his response he struggles mightily with the bluer angels of his nature, calling our take “apocalyptic,” but in the end admits that 20th-century liberalism is […]

Gregory Mann, a West African historian, Columbia University professor, and reporter for the blog Africa Is A Country, has been covering Mali for some time now, and in his latest piece he gives us the informed perspective that is often missing in the accounts of mainstream reporters, who are only now scrambling to catch up to a […]

A year ago, the world was abuzz with talk of the euro crisis and the feared disintegration of the European Union. By the end of 2012, the discussion has shifted to the crisis of the liberal democracy model itself. The debate is no longer “Keynes vs. Hayek” or expansionary vs. austerity fiscal measures. At the […]

Novelist Salman Rushdie, famously, is something of an expert witness on the menace of blasphemy laws. On February 14, 1989, recall, Iran’s fanatical ruler Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa suborning the murder of Rushdie, a foreign citizen, for the crime of writing a work of fiction, The Satanic Verses. Agents of militant Islam from London to Lahore […]

One of the world’s leading credit-rating agencies agrees with us that higher-ed has a serious revenue problem. Moody’s recently released a statement saying that it has given a negative grade to the entire higher-ed industry, citing “diminished prospects for revenue growth.”As the New York Times notes, the recession has put a damper on the effectiveness of […]

New York City is spending a fortune on school buses. The New York Times reports that the city spends an astonishing $7,000 per student each year to bus children to school, nearly twice as much as other large cities.It doesn’t take too much digging to see why NYC busing is so expensive: A complicated system of rules regulates the length of […]

We’ve heard about the war against homelessness, but the hidden tragedy of second homelessness is something new. A new report from Smart Growth America, an anti-sprawl coalition, finds that federal housing policy subsidizes vacation homes at taxpayer expense. Through the federal Mortgage Interest Deduction, tens of billions of dollars ever year go toward second homes for wealthier […]

The Algerian hostage crisis continues to unfold in dramatic fashion: Reuters and other news agencies are reporting that dozens of hostages were able to escape their captors, while an as yet undetermined number were killed, when the Algerian military launched a rescue operation at a remote natural gas facility deep in the desert. A number […]

Well isn’t this a new twist on the American dream: The BBC reports that a creative American software developer outsourced his own job to China. Yes, you read that right. An employee paid a Chinese firm one-fifth of his hefty salary to do his job while he browsed cat videos on the web.His ploy was apparently discovered […]