Yesterday we wrote about the blue civil war that could rip the Democratic Party down the middle, but today Republican leaders faced a smaller civil war of their own. Around 1 a.m. some Senate Republicans, led by tea partier Rand Paul, ended a thirteen hour filibuster protesting the confirmation of John Brennan to the CIA. More […]

As reported by Religion News Service and other media, on February 19, 2013, Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada appointed Andrew Bennett to be Ambassador for Religious Freedom. Bennett, a Catholic with a doctorate in political science from Edinburgh and dean of a small college in Ottawa, is to head a new Office on Religious […]

Catching up on some stuff I don’t want to slip by:The most important news of the past few days is arguably contained in a somewhat-buried article in the New York Times by Robert F. Worth and C.J. Chiver, entitled “Seized Chinese Weapons Raise Concerns on Iran.”  The subtitle gives a hint of one of the […]

There is a rare gem in Sunday’s New York Times in the business section.  Former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Dr. Christina Romer, has provided a balanced honest, accurate and concise summary of the arguments concerning the minimum wage. Given that a significant rise in the minimum wage was one of President Obama’s main […]

Over at the New York Times where hostility to all things Roman Catholic is a longstanding tradition, Frank Bruni has mixed a unique cocktail of one part sharp observation, two parts confusion about Christian teaching, a dash of schadenfreude and splash of scandal. It is, in other words, business as usual at the newspaper of […]

Financial markets around the world reeled when the Italians rejected the European status quo and their own political establishment in the last election.  This should not have come as such a surprise; few political establishments anywhere in the democratic world are as spectacularly rotten as Italy’s, and the European status quo is the biggest man-made […]

The Washington Post headline blares: “China is happy with John Kerry because it thinks he’ll drop the ‘pivot to Asia’”. The Post article itself gets its ammunition from this Liz Economy post over at CFR which rounds up some of the reactions to the new security team from around China. The mood is upbeat. China Institute of International […]

Never let it be said that there is not considerable entertainment value in political life. Watching the First Lady at the Oscar ceremony trying to position herself for post-White House celebrity is pretty funny—to me at least. Gazing upon the affection that the Italian electorate still has for Silvio Berlusconi is more than amusing; it […]

I saw Argo a few weeks before the Oscars, and I liked about 99 and 44/100 of it. Once the plot action starts, the tone, images, language and emotional pitch of the main characters all seem high-quality replicas of historical reality. Not that I have any expertise in making or evaluating film as an art […]

It has come to light in recent days that alongside French and other African troops fighting in Mali are both Chadians and, more important, cadres of the MNLA—the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad. The few media expressions of this latter datum generally dump this key piece of information far down in their articles. […]