Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett just added his name to the growing list of governors taking on runaway pension costs in their state. In a recent interview, Corbett likened pension expenses to a “tapeworm” slowly devouring more and more revenue from the budget. The comparison is apt: The growth in pension costs is now equal to 62 […]

With the election safely behind us, the New York Times has taken a long, hard look at President Obama’s anti-terrorism policy in North Africa and called it a comprehensive failure: … [A]s insurgents swept through the desert last year, commanders of this nation’s [Mali’s] elite army units, the fruit of years of careful American training, […]

Slowly, the people who run Assad’s machine are deserting. The Washington Post has an interview with Brig. Gen. Mohammed Hassoun, an officer in the Syrian military who defected to Turkey with his family. Hassoun is one of a handful of defectors now in a Turkish camp set up specifically for Syrian officers: Hassoun said he knew […]

The U.S. has been on the edge of an economic precipice since the election, as the two parties play chicken with the federal budget. Fortunately the economy has been more resilient than the political system has been flexible, and the damage so far has been contained.But the next battle over the debt ceiling has no […]

As the week kicked off, the story on every front page was the urgent breaking news that President Obama was picking Chuck Hagel to be his Secretary of Defence. Generally speaking, at Via Meadia we think presidents should be allowed to work with the team they want. We also think that important policy isn’t settled […]

Yesterday’s suicide of Aaron Swartz, 26, one of the founders of Reddit and a passionate activist for Internet causes, has shaken the tech world. By all accounts a brilliant and fiercely idealistic (if somewhat troubled) young man, Swartz had his fingerprints on many of the things we take for granted online today, from the RSS […]

On the Reuters blog this past Friday, Zachary Karabell picked up some themes we’ve addressed here from time to time and suggested that much of the green-induced hysteria and pessimism over climate change is counterproductive: That the planet is getting warmer there should be no doubt… It does not, however, follow that the future arc of […]

The original Panama Canal was a revolution in geopolitics and economics; before it was built, the sea voyage was shorter from London to San Francisco than from New York to California, and the Caribbean was a strategic dead end that nobody in world politics cared much about.A generation of U.S. foreign policy involved extending power […]

The U.S. embassy in Beijing has been monitoring the air quality in the city since 2008. In November 2010, a State Department employee, startled when meter crept above 500—the very top of the EPA’s Air Quality Index standard—tweeted that the quality was ‘crazy bad’. Though the undiplomatic tweet was quickly removed, and the ‘crazy bad’ […]

Whenever a ‘must pass’ bill comes up in Congress, lobbyists and special interests move heaven and earth to attach their favorite items to it—and that’s happening in spades with the Sandy relief act. USA Today brings us some choice morsels from the sausage factory floor: A Senate-passed version from the end of the last Congress included […]