Paul Krugman is throwing Obama under the bus.  His latest column can be summarized like this:  The idiot Republicans are turning the US into a banana republic; Barack Obama could have easily stopped them but he is feckless and weak.Obama was going to be the new Lincoln or FDR.  Then the new Clinton.  Then it […]

Top story of the day: manufacturing won’t save the US middle class.  It won’t even save China’s.  From The Financial Times: Foxconn, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer by revenue, plans to increase the use of robots in its factories 100-fold to 1m within three years, according to Terry Gou, chairman and chief executive.The move […]

The latest Gallup survey of US political ideologies is out, and anybody who wants to understand why Democrats kept ceding ground during the debt battle should take a look at these numbers.41 percent of American adults call themselves conservative, 21 percent call themselves liberals.  36 percent call themselves moderate; the biggest change in American political […]

In yet another humiliation for the battered New York borough of Brooklyn, investigators report that its wannabe trendy Prospect Park is home to bands of roaming vagrants who hunt and kill squirrels, ducks and pigeons.  Geese and cygnets have been mutilated and killed; pigeons have been seen roasting over fires.This is not a one time […]

A pre-Ramadan crackdown by the tottering Syrian regime seems to have backfired.  Tank attacks in Hama killed 100 or more but failed to crush the resistance.  There are preliminary reports of demonstrations in Damascus.  Check #Damascus on Twitter for updates.  Much of the violence has been, as usual, in the suburbs, but there are reports […]

According to a survey of historians, experts and practitioners by Michael Cohen, 4 of the 5 worst foreign policy presidents of the 20th century were Democrats: Truman, Wilson, Carter and LBJ.  (Nixon was the sole Republican to make the Bottom 5; George W. Bush served in the 21st century and, luckily for him, wasn’t eligible.)Only […]

Eli Lake’s must read piece in TNR lays out the geography of foreign policy in the emerging GOP field.  Bottom line: necons in decline, isolationists contained, engage with Islam contentious.  Reading this piece will help you make sense of the news.

Glenn Greenwald is not the left’s most dispassionate thinker, and his bitterness at what he sees as the White House’s betrayal of its liberal base has been growing for some time.  What looks to him like a comprehensive cave-in by President Obama on the debt ceiling talks has inspired him to a comprehensive attack on […]

The glamorous and exclusive residential borough of Queens is truly a special place.  For the skeptics, comes word from Philip Gourevitch in The New Yorker that in this borough at least, even the lowly pig can aspire to greater things.  Eat your heart out, Manhattan.  Queens is the home of kosher pork.

Religion is a touchy subject for the Chinese government; an independent source of social cohesion that stands outside the state worries a government concerned about keeping an increasingly rambunctious society stable.In recent weeks (here and here), Catholics have found themselves on the wrong side of Chinese authorities. This week, a leader of one of China’s […]