It’s often said that Republicans are the Daddy Party in American politics, while the Democrats stand in for Mom. Mom is about putting nice meals on the table, pushing us to do well in school and teaching us to be kind to other kids; Dad worries about the budget, enforces the rules, teaches us to […]

Michigan made it official this week: Detroit can no longer survive without adult supervision. Michigan’s governor named Kevyn Orr, a DC bankruptcy lawyer, to handle the city’s affairs on an emergency basis as the deep blue city makes a last ditch effort to avoid the biggest municipal bankruptcy in American history.During the long grim slide, […]

The new Netanyahu government reflects the confluence of two revolutions, one religious the other social, that is embodied by the unexpected rise to power of two political novices, Yair Lapid and Nafali Bennet. Both campaigned on a program that called for relief of a middle class suffering from a lack of affordable housing, stagnant wages, […]

G.K. Chesterton tells the story of the time that St. Francis of Assisi visited Rome and the pope of the day proudly showed him all the wondrous treasures of the Vatican. Referring to a story in the Biblical Book of Acts in which St. Peter spoke with a beggar in Jerusalem and told him he […]

As usual, I was struck by two seemingly unrelated items reported by Religion News Service on February 28, 2013. I think they are worth being reflected upon together.The first story is about an action by the New York City Commission on Human Rights, which has decided to charge seven ultra-Orthodox Jewish businesses with gender discrimination. […]

One of the primary foreign policy dilemmas facing the second Obama Administration is whether to make a concerted push for Israeli-Palestinian peace, possibly including presentation of a U.S. peace plan, the ultimate form of American involvement, or conversely, to maintain the standoff approach that followed the failed attempts of its first year in office. President […]

Eleven month old baby Omar died horribly and tragically during Israel’s eight day bombardment of the Gaza Strip last November. A striking and heart-wrenching photograph of his distraught father became a centerpiece in the usual and predictable Hate-Israel campaign accompanying the military strike. Baby Omar, the son of BBC journalist Jihad al-Masharawi, died with two relatives, […]

During the past several months, David Kramer, president of Freedom House, and Lilia Shevtsova, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center, have written a series of sharp criticisms of the Obama administration’s Russia policy and outside experts who advocate a strategic approach toward Russia, as opposed to their preferred normative one. Their latest missive […]

As I finished writing the article “In the Army Now” (for the September/October 2010 issue of American Interest), I was literally en route to a year-long assignment in Afghanistan as part of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force. The mission I joined was a daunting one to execute: a vigorous counterinsurgency strategy in a theater that […]

America’s Polarized Public: A Reply to Fiorina In his essay, “America’s Missing Moderates: Hiding in Plain Sight”, Morris Fiorina reprises many of the claims that he and his co-authors have made in books such as Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, and Disconnect: The Breakdown of Representation in American Politics. The central argument […]