The one state to continue its rebellion against President Obama’s education reform is that liberal stronghold and king of the Blues: California. The LA Times reports: California has defiantly refused to follow the administration’s lead in grading the performance of teachers and using those measurements to reward the best teachers and punish the worst. The state […]

Many men are lingering on the threshold of the new economy, either unable or unwilling to cross it. So argues David Brooks in a riff on the decline of men narrative: But, surely, there has been some ineffable shift in the definition of dignity. Many men were raised with a certain image of male dignity, which […]

The IMF released a study of China’s economy today that carried a dire warning: reform soon or risk a crash.“Since the global crisis, a mix of investment, credit and fiscal stimulus has underpinned activity,” the assessment reads. “This pattern of growth is not sustainable and is raising vulnerabilities. While China still has significant buffers to weather shocks, the […]

Here’s something we haven’t seen in a while—good news for California’s Calpers pension fund. After earning only 1 percent on its investments in 2011, Calpers rebounded in 2012, earning 12.5 percent, well above the expected rate of return of 7.5 percent. As Bloomberg notes, this growth was largely driven by the strong performance of the stock market […]

In an opinion piece for the Financial Times yesterday, the Environmental Defense Fund’s vice president and its senior economist defended the EU’s carbon cap-and-trade system. The EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme has fallen on hard times; carbon permits were over-allocated, leading to an extremely low price of carbon (the current price for a permit is roughly one-seventh its price […]

As the money runs low, life in the blue model box is becoming Darwinian: cash-strapped governments are attempting to squeeze traditionally tax-exempt enterprises for revenue. The WSJ reports that Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee signed a bill allowing the town of Smithfield to bill Bryan University for public safety services: Most states, including Rhode Island, […]

Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited several disputed islands a few hours after his government announced a new defense strategy that included the right to preemptively attack aggressive foreign forces and organize a new coast guard unit to protect Japan’s coastlines and islands.Abe spoke to coast guard officers on Ishigaki Island, which is part of Okinawa Prefecture […]

Yesterday Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius compared opponents of the Affordable Care Act to opponents of civil rights legislation. In remarks at the 104th NAACP Annual Conference, Sebelius said: The Affordable Care Act is the most powerful law for reducing health disparities since Medicare and Medicaid were created in 1965, the same year the Voting […]

Forty-two-year-old Tabish Gauhar wants to turn on the lights in Karachi. But when he tried to make the necessary reforms to the Karachi Electricity Supply Company so that he and his fellow citizens could do something we all take for granted, workers rioted and looted his office, the government tried to arrest him, and gunmen threatened to […]

The US has a law on the books, the Renewable Fuel Standard, that mandates an ever-increasing amount of ethanol to be blended into gasoline. Under the 2007 law, oil companies must blend the required amount of ethanol or, in lieu of that, buy credits, known as renewable identification numbers (RINs). The price of those credits […]