The more one sees of the Republican field, the more it seems clear that President Obama’s biggest problems do not come from his domestic opponents.  The more voters, even Republican voters, learn about the candidates jostling for the party’s nod, the less they like them. The more the President’s opponents campaign, the stronger the White […]

The Greek government, staggering under what may be its terminal political crisis, stunned the country and infuriated the opposition by making sudden and sweeping changes to the military leadership.  From the Athens Times: In a surprise move, on Tuesday evening the defence minister replaced the country’s top brass. An extraordinary meeting of the Government Council […]

Via Meadia normally passes over the sports world in silence, but is making an exception for a story from Yahoo Sports.  The story relates how two teen age rowers demonstrated real sportsmanship and humanity by choosing to help two competitors whose boat capsized in 45 degree water in the Schuylkill River.  After helping their rivals […]

The number 7 billion is getting a lot of attention this year, with the world’s population estimated to hit that milestone sometime this week.  Of course, for the makers of Spam 7 billion is old news; the 7 billionth can of Spam was sold back in 2007.There is the usual hand wringing from the usual […]

On her recent trip to Pakistan, Secretary Clinton announced a change in Washington’s recent hard stance against Islamabad. She called the revamped approach “Fight, Talk, Build” and said “We want to fight, talk and build all at the same time.”It’s not clear what the strategy is here. Not long ago we were threatening Pakistan and […]

Other than that charity which divine commandment mandates that we extend to all our fellow human beings, Via Meadia has no special love for Butcher, sorry, Bashar Assad, but distaste has not blinded us to the strategic reality: the Syrian government has found a winning strategy in its fight against domestic opposition.  It has found […]

Megan McArdle has a wonderfully meaty post at the Atlantic on the complicated class and status issues that are increasingly reverberating in American politics today.  At this point, the noisiest divide isn’t between the working class and the plutocrats; it’s between the upper-upper middle class and the lower-upper middle class.  The bankers and the successful […]

Thus far, the Arab Spring has been a disappointment for those who expected that the Arab world would immediately embrace western-style democracy and the secular rule of law. In another way, however, Arab culture seems to be following a decidedly American path. The Economist reports: SCREAMING hordes of teenage girls are a common sight at […]

A tiny tax on tea destroyed the first British empire by driving the 13 colonies into revolt; will a tiny little tax on financial transactions split the European Union? The Tobin tax (first proposed by economist James Tobin in 1972) is a small tax that would be levied on all financial transactions and would, proponents […]

Thanks to a Time Warner Cable outage at the stately manor, the world has been cut off from the many insights and observations offered on this website for the last 18 hours.  After no more than three calls to the service center, six repetitions of my account information, a few long waits and a number […]