The U.S. global financial crisis has gone global, which illustrates the still potent impact of the U.S. economy on the rest of the world. It also highlights the fact that central banks and other financial institutions in other parts of the world were too highly...
I have had to listen to the presidential and vice presidential debates and comment on them, often enough in real time, as part of my job, but sometimes it feels as if it's a form of penance for my sins. To keep this as understated as possible, these are not...
If the presidential debate Friday night told us anything, it was that whichever of these candidates is elected, we can expect more wars, or at least more conflicts that put U.S. forces or citizens in danger for dubious reasons. Neither John McCain nor Barack Obama...
It should be becoming increasingly obvious that the present arrangement with Pakistan is simply not working for the United States. Although various U.S. military leaders keep traveling to Pakistan to try to tweak things around the edges, it is of course unlikely that...
It looks as if 9/11 is on the verge of becoming a national holiday. It is curious that this should be so, on a number of levels. The cable news channels, whose attention span is already amazingly limited, couldn't get enough of remembrance, with Fox replaying its...
You can definitely count me among those who are skeptical of the official cover story that Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide recently as the FBI seemed to be closing in on him, was solely responsible for the series of anthrax attacks on people in Congress and the...
Among the reasons the Russians have offered to justify their aggressive counterattack into Georgian territory proper during the recent (ongoing?) Russo-Georgian war was Kosovo. When the United States strong-armed (wheedled? persuaded? bribed?) most of the Western...
There's not much point denying it, even though many people who have long opposed this stupid war might want to do so. One of the reasons, of course, as renegade neocon Francis Fukuyama wrote recently (in the Wall Street Journal, of all places!), is that if you do say...
George Orwell once made an important distinction between patriotism and nationalism, one that has since been elaborated upon many times by others, notably the quirky but often insightful historian John Lukacs, but that still has not caught on sufficiently, apparently,...
Before considering whether this week's outcome means the commissions are out of commission or not, wasn't there supposed to be a tradition called an Olympic Truce, whereby active hostilities were supposed to stop for the duration of the Games? But of course, the best...
