Via Meadia has talked about Illinois Governor Pat Quinn before as one of the blue-state democrats forced by fiscal reality to take on blue orthodoxy. Last month, Quinn announced new proposals that would increase state employee contributions to benefit plans, lower increases in pension payouts, and raise the age at which workers become eligible for […]

For many Poles and Jews it came as a pleasant surprise when the United States announced on April 23 that it was awarding Jan Karski (1914–2000) the Presidential Medal Of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States. While Karski was indeed one of the greatest heroes of the 20th century, his accomplishment—risking his […]

Republicans in Indiana have spoken.  They have decided that Senator Richard Lugar does not deserve another term in Washington.  That’s too bad—not just for Senator Lugar, who after all has had a long and successful 36-year career in the Senate—but for the institution of the Senate and the country as a whole.  Let me explain […]

“The glass is 10 percent full,” says Nigel Fisher, the U.N.’s humanitarian coordinator for reconstruction efforts in Haiti. “It’s now time to tackle the remaining 90 percent.”Yet more than two years after the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and after billions of recovery dollars pledged by the United Nations, foreign governments, and private aid organizations, […]

Incidences of writers taking ownership of words are few and far between. Moses or whoever wrote Genesis certainly owns begat; the authors of the Declaration own inalienable; and Maurice Sendak owns rumpus. I cannot hear the word without thinking of reading Where the Wild Things Are to my children. When we reached the moment when […]

France gave the modern world the political idea of progress, and even today the French still ardently believe their politics must be both trailblazing and without precedent. Thus, in his successful run for the presidency, François Hollande could stake his fortunes on “changement.” He modelled France’s first get-out-the-vote “ground game” on the Obama 2008 playbook, and […]

The Struggle for Egypt: From Nasser to Tahrir Square by Steven A. Cook Oxford University Press, 2011, 424 pp., $27.95 Adam Garfinkle: Your new book on Egypt certainly is timely, but we both know that the lead-time to produce a book of this kind, one with history, with real substantive analysis, is quite long. I […]

Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization has created a quandary for Congress. On the one hand, members want to respect WTO rules and allow free trade with Russia, thereby further integrating that country into the world economy. On the other hand, many in the policymaking community have concerns over the Russian government’s human-rights record […]

Ces 600 Milliards Qui Manquent à La France (“The Missing 600 Billion”)by Antoine PeillonSeuil, 2012, 192 pp., 15 Euros “Après Sarkozy, le chaos!” Down to the last straw, as polls show him in dead heat with his rival, Francois Hollande, Nicolas Sarkozy issued a threatening prediction of the economic anarchy sure to rain down on […]

For all his pretensions of being a “transformative” president, Barack Obama’s foreign policy prescriptions are rooted in a deeply conservative and nostalgic tradition. When it comes to Russia, the tradition this White House channels most is that of Richard Nixon. This seemingly incongruous resemblance was well illustrated in a recent controversy over the nullification of […]