President Obama was officially re-elected by the electoral college yesterday, but as he turns toward a new term, he is still haunted by one of the biggest failures of the first four years of his presidency: Israeli-Palestinian peace relations. At Via Meadia, we think that the President needs a better approach to get better results.Israeli-Palestinian peace […]

Thanks to a leak from an anonymous insider, we learned Thursday that a report commissioned by the State of New York has given fracking a clean bill of health. The insider “did not think it should be kept secret” and released the document, which is now nearly one year old, to the New York Times, […]

It’s long been conventional wisdom in the media and the chattering classes that average Americans reject realism, the approach to foreign policy that prioritizes the power games nations play to protect their interests in a world without a global government. But according to a paper by Daniel Drezner, Americans are more realist than people think: Americans […]

One of the final obstacles to the Keystone pipeline has just been cleared: A report released yesterday by Nebraska’s Department of Environmental Quality found that building the pipeline would not pose a threat to any of the state’s environmentally sensitive areas. The Wall Street Journal reports: The much-anticipated final review of the pipeline found that a […]

In California, a massive fight between two of the country’s largest and most active labor unions offers a look into the dynamics of the deepening crisis of the American labor movement.Globalization and automation first began to challenge the American labor movement in the 1970s and since then labor’s record has been one of almost uninterrupted […]

As the Christmas season draws to a close and the return of regular blogging looms, I’m looking back over this short period of intense religion writing and thinking about how writing on religion is and is not like writing on other controversial topics.There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s important to write about religion.  […]

Lawyers are famous for being able to argue their way out of anything, but even they might have trouble defending the schools that trained them. International Human Rights Attorney Chris Fletcher warns in the WSJ that law schools are being less than forthcoming with potential applicants about the grim job prospects that await them on […]

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) are one of the best things going right now. They increase crop yields in extreme climates, are resistant to disease, and are one of our best technological solutions to feeding an ever-growing global population in an environmentally sustainable way. But to many people, they are just creepy, which is why much […]

A car bomb ripped through a procession of Shia pilgrims today in Musayyib, Iraq, almost 40 miles south of Baghdad, killing 27 people. The bombers were most likely Sunnis trying to reignite Iraq’s civil war.As the Shia regime of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki grows increasingly authoritarian and sectarian violence gets worse and worse, the fear grows […]

While Spain is raiding its pension funds to settle its government debt, many cities in America are doing the opposite: borrowing hundreds of millions of dollars to pay short-term pensions costs. As the AP notes (h/t Huffington Post), city governments hope that in the long term, pension investments will make up for the cost of the […]