So, I am given to understand that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B‘nai B‘rith, which more or less boils down to its national director Abe Foxman’s personal view of the planet from his Manhattan bubble, is not thrilled with the prospective (not even real yet) nomination of Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense. According […]

The Sueddeutsche Zeitung is generally regarded as one of the two best newspapers in Germany. I don’t normally read it, but a German colleague sent me the issue of December 7, 2012, thinking that it might interest me. It did. A story, filed by a reporter named Renate Meinhof, covered a breakfast meeting on the […]

Editor’s Note: The following is Ambassador Ronald E. Neumann’s testimony to the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs on “Benghazi and Beyond”, from November 15, 2012. Ambassador Neumann, president of the American Academy of Diplomacy, served as U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007. He also served as U.S. Ambassador to Algeria and Bahrain, […]

Sergei Magnitsky was a 37-year-old lawyer who was beaten, deprived of vital medical attention, and left to die in a Russian prison nearly a year after uncovering a massive fraud allegedly committed by Russian officials to the tune of $230 million. The very people whom Magnitsky implicated in the fraud arrested him in 2008; a […]

If we can get some kind of grip on the power of money in our electoral politics by going directly after television, then maybe we can proceed to assault the next great—indeed, probably the greatest—bastion of plutocratic corruption in the United States: our banking and financial elite.Over the past four years I have come to […]

My family has always had a low taste for over the top hymn lyrics. My mother’s favorite line in the 1940 Episcopal hymnal came from James Russell Lowell’s protest against the Mexican War: “By the light of burning martyrs, Jesus’ bleeding feet I track.” As I kid, I was struck by a couple of verses […]

It seems that no matter what I do, I can’t beat my colleague here at TAI, Walter Russell Mead, into print on any significant news story. Walter does it fast and, almost invariably, does it very well. He did it again yesterday, early in the day too, on the news that the Michigan state legislature […]

The 2012 election season is over, but, unfortunately, the country is none the wiser for having endured it. We live at a time when consultants and pollsters all but forbid their principals from saying anything that might smack of intelligent speech. Those aspirants to high political office who ignored this counsel this time around, Ambassador […]

The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is an icon of religious freedom, and rightly so. It contains a double prohibition: no establishment of religion and no hindrance to the free exercise of religion. The two clauses often grind against each other. Adopted by Congress in 1791, the Amendment still comes up […]

The process of getting into college grows more expensive, arcane, mysterious and nettlesome by the year for families and students alike. It doesn’t have to be this way.