If you were a political junkie who missed last night’s presidential debate, you could have quickly found out what happened by flipping between Fox and MSNBC. On Fox it was all high-fiving and smiles; MSNBC was all dour and ‘coulda, woulda, shoulda.’ After listening to the President’s closing statement, a distraught Andrew Sullivan asked “How […]

Current U.S. drug policies have produced mediocre results, at best. Pessimists say that trying to eradicate drug use by making it illegal has failed altogether. Even optimists mostly view the prohibition approach as just holding the line, which is a polite way of saying that we are mired in an ugly status quo, in which […]

In early September, AI publisher Charles Davidson spoke with Jack Blum—chairman of Tax Justice Network USA and one of the world’s premier experts on tax evasion, money laundering, banking and real estate scams, and corporate fraud—about the failure of both presidential campaigns to face up to America’s serious budget and taxation problems.  CD: Let’s turn […]

It is a curious fact that in contemporary American political science, very few people want to study the state, that is, the functioning of executive branches and their bureaucracies. Since the onset of the Third Wave of democratizations now more than a generation ago, the overwhelming emphasis in comparative politics has been on democracy, transitions […]

Today is one of those days in which we are particularly grateful that George W. Bush is no longer the president of the United States.The news from Afghanistan is grim. With the latest round of deaths, we pass a milestone: 2,000 US combatants have died in what is now the longest war in American history. […]

As a way to save the planet, not many policies are worse than government-backed ethanol. It’s bad for the economy, bad for the environment, doesn’t reduce greenhouse gases, and has led to rapidly rising food prices.Now a recent report links ethanol mandates to civil unrest, social upheaval, and even war.As the report shows, rising food […]

As everybody knows, there is no such thing as a global war on terror anymore. Instead we live in a harmonious world of interfaith comity with only the occasional criminal act that is quickly and competently handled by law enforcement officials. As a result we can cut our defense budgets and get on with the […]

The President of the United States, even in the midst of an election campaign, and even when the country is reeling from a series of attacks and policy setbacks is more than a political leader. He is more than a prime minister; he is the Chief of State and the closest thing this republic has […]

In the October 2012 issue of First Things there is an article by Stanton Jones and Mark Yarhouse, respectively on the faculties of Wheaton College and Regent University (two banner institutions in the vanguard of the Evangelical intellectual resurgence). The article deals with a curious event in the world of “reparative therapy”, which seeks to […]

The repercussions from 9/11/12—the day the roof fell in on the Obama administration’s Middle East policy—continue to rumble across the diplomatic and political landscapes. Before that day, much of the country’s political and media establishment had been studiously ignoring signs of trouble in the Middle East or, when problems were too serious to ignore, studiously […]