“Americans,” Robert Kaplan has observed, “champion idealism while employing realists perhaps because we need to have a high opinion of ourselves while pursuing our own interests.” There’s a lot of truth to this. After all, beneath the soaring rhetoric about spreading freedom and democracy, the most successful foreign-policy presidents tend to espouse a kind of […]

Little did I suspect when I put down my pen on August 30, having finished “Painted into a Corner, Obama Ponders Cosmetic Strikes”, that yet another self-inflicted verbal wound from the White House could possibly make the crisis of U.S. Syria policy even worse. I guess I misunderestimated the man. President Obama’s decision to go […]

Japan will increase military spending by 3 percent in the coming year, the defense minister said today; it’s the biggest increase in 22 years. “There are various tensions ongoing in Asia, and in some cases, there are countries that even use threats,” the AP reports the defense minister as saying.The top dangers facing Japan these days […]

It’s not just retiring Americans enjoying the benefits of expatriation; entrepreneurs are also finding that discount luxury living abroad can spur creativity. One company, Happy Hubs, is looking to combine the start-up incubation experience with resort life. Happy Hubs is launching a beta version of a workspace in Costa Rica, but plans to open up […]

A consensus is building that the ACA outreach may not be able to prepare people in time for the October 1st exchange launch. A new study by the insurance company Aflac finds that seven in ten workers haven’t heard anything from their companies about how the ACA will affect their benefits, while only 9 percent […]

The closer we look at the “recovery”, the weaker it looks. Last week we reported that most of the decrease in the ranks of the “unemployed” amounts to people leaving the workforce rather than new jobs being created. This week the WSJ notes that the longer people stay out of the labor force, the less likely they […]

Former NYC Comptroller Bill Thompson is looking to vault ahead of frontrunner Bill de Blasio in the city’s mayoral race, but a recent exposée of his tenure as comptroller will do little to help his chances. As Comptroller, Thompson was responsible for handling  investment decisions by the city’s pension systems. Thompson has touted this experience […]

Just as our cars are getting fancier, sleeker, smarter, and more energy efficient, so too are our roads. Coordinated traffic lights, crowdsourced, realtime traffic apps, the proliferation of ride-sharing communities, and even an experimental concept called “road trains” (in which cars sync speeds wirelessly and draft behind one another on the highway) all have the […]

This is the season when major pillars of the Obama administration’s foreign policy are coming apart so visibly that the mainstream media and even the administration itself are shifting from smug denial to grappling with painful truths. The reset with Russia is as much of a flop as the outreach to the Islamic world, the […]

Nurse practitioners in California have just been handed a major defeat in their campaign for more autonomy. State Senator Ed Hernandez introduced a bill to allow them to provide care without doctor supervision, but intense physician lobbying killed the bill in committee on Friday. This is bad news for California, and for the national push to […]