An Urban Institute study spotlights how the wealth gap between blacks and Hispanics, on one side, and non-Hispanic whites, on the other, has grown during the recession. As of 2010, white families were six times wealthier than black and Hispanic ones, up from four times as wealthy prior to the recession. The mere fact of this gap isn’t as […]

With just five months to go until Germany’s elections, two opposition parties are putting aside their differences to target a bigger enemy: Angela Merkel. It had looked for some time as if the current three-party center-right coalition (Christian Democrats/Christian Social Union/Free Democrats) was headed for re-election, but three developments are throwing that outcome into doubt.First, […]

In a development that should give hope to Republicans in the US, Icelandic voters have turned out the Social Democrats who led the country after the financial crisis—and returned to the pro-market parties once widely blamed for the crash. By Sunday afternoon, it looked like the Independence Party and the Progressive Party had together won more […]

The Mali War was blowback from the Libya War; now we have blowback from the Mali War… in Libya. The Guardian has details on increasing violence against Western targets in Tripoli, including an attack on the French embassy last week, likely in retaliation for France’s decision to extend its mission against the Tuareg nationalists and […]

Russia is regressing to the good old Soviet days. Under Putin’s watch, Moscow continues to tighten the screws, often quite arbitrarily, on contacts between Russian NGOs and foreigners of any kind. Paranoia, meet Xenophobia. The Washington Post reports that a recent visit by American diplomat Howard Solomon to a Russian NGO ended with a trial: Solomon met with […]

This week we continued our series on the failures of the Bush Administration and looked at where the Republican Party needs to go in the years ahead: American political parties are constantly reinventing themselves. Bill Clinton ran as the un-Carter and un-Dukakis. President Obama ran as the un-Clinton. In 1968 Richard Nixon ran as the […]

Slate columnist Matt Yglesias has harsh criticism for districting in public school systems. In most American cities, children can only attend the schools in their district, which Yglesias argues effectively turns these ostensibly public schools into the “private property of local homeowners.” As he sees it, this is a root cause of much of the inequality between high-performing […]

It’s been six months since Hurricane Sandy ravaged much of the East Coast, but the rebuilding process is far from complete. True, much of the more obvious damage has been fixed and the trains in downtown Manhattan are running again, but further from the public eye, tens of thousands are still homeless despite months of cleanup. […]

Chalk up another interest group that might back immigration reform: homeowners. Immigrants are buying up American homes, potentially saving the housing sector and providing a boost to the US economy. The Financial Times reports: Although they represent close to 13 per cent of the US population, immigrants accounted for nearly 36 per cent of growth in home […]

The gun control defeat has been analyzed to death, but there still might be a thing or two it can teach us about American politics more generally. That’s the thesis of an insightful piece by Ross Douthat on the growing support on the right and the left for libertarian policies. He writes: The resistance to […]