Yesterday we wrote about the blue civil war that could rip the Democratic Party down the middle, but today Republican leaders faced a smaller civil war of their own. Around 1 a.m. some Senate Republicans, led by tea partier Rand Paul, ended a thirteen hour filibuster protesting the confirmation of John Brennan to the CIA. More […]

Over at the New York Times where hostility to all things Roman Catholic is a longstanding tradition, Frank Bruni has mixed a unique cocktail of one part sharp observation, two parts confusion about Christian teaching, a dash of schadenfreude and splash of scandal. It is, in other words, business as usual at the newspaper of […]

Financial markets around the world reeled when the Italians rejected the European status quo and their own political establishment in the last election.  This should not have come as such a surprise; few political establishments anywhere in the democratic world are as spectacularly rotten as Italy’s, and the European status quo is the biggest man-made […]

The Washington Post headline blares: “China is happy with John Kerry because it thinks he’ll drop the ‘pivot to Asia’”. The Post article itself gets its ammunition from this Liz Economy post over at CFR which rounds up some of the reactions to the new security team from around China. The mood is upbeat. China Institute of International […]

On his first official trip abroad, Secretary of State John Kerry is sending a message to the Syrian rebels that, after months of dithering and halfhearted support, the Obama administration is planning to step up assistance of their effort to unseat Butcher Assad: “We are determined that the Syrian opposition is not going to be […]

According to Dante, the last pope to resign couldn’t even make it into Hell. Pope Celestine V, a 13th century monk whose brief elevation to the papacy ended with resignation, is found among the ‘neutrals’ who neither God nor the Devil wants anything to do with. Dante was hardly an objective observer; he blamed Celestine’s […]

Iran can sometimes be very hard to read, but the announcement that even as talks approach it is installing advanced and more capable centrifuges at its nuclear facility in Natanz doesn’t need much interpreting: Iran isn’t afraid of Barack Obama. The Ayatollahs have looked at the clues, added up the numbers, and come to the […]

The next financial market meltdown may already be brewing: not in the housing market, this time, but in municipal bonds. Greedy bankers, opportunistic politicians and hobbled regulators are putting a time bomb in the muni market that could set off another devastating crash.California is leading the way.It is starting out innocently enough. Looking to expand […]

Slate’s Matt Ygelsias is trying to start a small business by renting out a condo, and he’s finding out just how hard the blue model is on entrepreneurs. After detailing his personal battle with the DC bureaucracy for a single basic business license, travelling from office to office, filling out form after form, and losing precious […]

Does the American middle class (and by extension, the middle class in other advanced democracies) have a future in a post-blue world? That is the basic question at the heart of American politics;. As I’ve noted, 4.0 liberals think that it doesn’t, and think that the defense of the blue social model is the only […]