In the February 24th Washington Post, in accompaniment to an article by Karen DeYoung and Elizabeth Sly entitled “In Syria, new influx of weapons to rebels tilts the battle against Assad”, there appeared a genuinely hilarious map. I laughed so hard I nearly dropped my morning bagel.Knowing a little bit about how newspapers operate, I […]

Today the new Secretary of State, John Kerry, began his maiden voyage as dean of American diplomacy. He is headed to nine countries; specifically, to London, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Ankara, Cairo, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. According to the State Department and sources quoting Secretary Kerry’s entourage, and according to […]

The announcement just a few days ago that, Congress willing (and it may not be willing), the USPS will suspend Saturday postal delivery, coming just days after the January 27 rate hike, reminds me of how scurrilous these guys are. It also reminds me of the post I wrote last year, and also of a terrific essay […]

I have had little to say about foreign policy so far, and that may seem odd for someone whose work over the years has been almost exclusively about foreign policy and national security-related topics. But the truth is that America’s deepest and most profound problems are now domestic in nature. There are no existential threats […]

Some of my ten ideas are compatible with a “small is beautiful” or “government is the problem” ideological perspective. I affirm subsidiarity and the return of appropriate government authority from the Federal to state and local levels. But other of my ideas demand that government, including the Federal government, do more, not less. This may […]

We must enact a “New Pioneering” Homestead Act.This proposal, the last of the lot, is an even bigger idea than a National Service/Baby Bond program. It is impossible to take seriously now, but it may not be after the foregoing nine reforms have been undertaken. This one has the potential to produce even more new […]

We must relocate the culture wars, sending them back to the states and the local communities where they have at least some chance of being reasonably well managed.Rather like the real but obscured moral/political aspects of the health care dilemma, the abortion issue and issues concerning marriage for homosexuals and surrogate parenthood and certain related […]

We must enact a national service/baby bond program for America.There is a crisis of civic participation in America, one that marches in step with the erosion in social trust over the past several decades. Notwithstanding the Tea Party (not really an extra-parliamentary phenomenon anyway) and Occupy Wall Street movements, we’ve become increasingly a nation of […]

Having put in place a way to do it, we must pursue a range of institutional reforms.Were we to institutionalize a periodic governmental design review, among the first candidates for reform, among a great many, should be the following: Redesign the Department of Homeland Security The creation of DHS was not a conceptual mistake, as […]

We need to institutionalize government design review and reform. This would have been a good idea in earlier times, but today and for the future it is essential.If we can put some kind of a brake on the logic of collective action, and get the plutocrats and their rental of our Legislative Branch under reasonable […]