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No Sympathy for Poors from the Silver Hordes
March 26, 2015
According to a new Brookings Institution study, the majority of America’s elderly don’t want the government to help poor people. And they sure as hell don’t want the government to provide them with health insurance. (Get our government hands off their Medicaid?) The ...

David Petraeus Does D.C.
March 19, 2015
It’s easy to get distracted by all the titillating details when we think about the David Petraeus story. There’s the suggestive title of his lover Paula Broadwell’s fawning biography, All In. There’s Broadwell’s penchant for showing off her well-toned arms, and their ...

The Iran Letter: Explaining the Joke
March 12, 2015
By now everyone’s familiar with the infamous and outrageously embarrassing open letter signed by forty-seven Republican senators that condescendingly warns Iran that any nuclear agreement it reaches with the West will die once Obama is out of office. It not only seeks to ...

On Clinton’s Emails and Kissinger’s Vault
March 10, 2015
It’s been almost a decade since the last Clinton-related archival scandal; here we go again. First, the New York Times reported that Hillary Clinton, while Secretary of State, used a non-official email to conduct government business. Soon after, the AP ...

A Work in Progress
March 05, 2015
It took about thirty years for the major temples of the Acropolis in Athens to be built in the fifth century BCE. It has been forty years since the Acropolis Restoration Project was founded, and it is not known when its work will be completed. What the casual visitor sees on the ...

For Love of Country (and Money)
March 05, 2015
“I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America,” Rudy Giuliani said recently to a room of right-leaning businessmen at Manhattan’s 21 Club. ”He doesn’t love you, and he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way ...

Bad Faith and Bull from ACA Critics
February 27, 2015
Bad Faith, from the French mauvaise foi, is a concept in existentialist thought used to describe people who are deceiving themselves by dutifully accepting larger social illusions of identity. One of the examples that Jean-Paul Sartre uses is a waiter who too self-consciously ...

The Merchants of Europe
February 24, 2015
Unfortunately, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice provides one of the best models for understanding the drama of the debt crisis in Greece today. I say “unfortunately” because, after all, the (sympathetic) villain of the play is Shylock, a Jew whose very Jewishness ...

Guns, Money, and Ukraine
February 19, 2015
Despite this week’s deadline for Russia and Ukraine to stand down, an end to the fighting is unlikely. And as often happens in situations like this, where no vital American interests are at stake, but there appears to be a “bad guy” doing bad things, Washington ...

Delhi Needs Another Hero
February 18, 2015
There is something delightful about seeing the chief minister of an Indian state going on protest against his own police force, which is what happened in January 2014 when Arvind Kejriwal, leader of the Aam Aadmi (Common Man) Party (AAP), took charge of the state of Delhi after ...

Obama in the Land of the Blind
February 12, 2015
Last Friday the White House released its 2015 National Security Strategy, outlining President Obama’s vision for the future of national defense. It’s no surprise that there’s a lot of fluff in there. (“Our economy is the largest, most open, and most innovative in the ...

Media Misdeeds and Blind Spots
February 09, 2015
The “war on terror” is only the most recent threat used to rationalize our military’s extensive global footprint. The military and intelligence establishment possesses hundreds of military bases worldwide, making us the only country with permanently forward deployed ...