The European monetary crisis is like a botched root canal: painful, expensive, interminable. Weeks, months and even years go by and the world helplessly sits in the chair as the incompetent dentists poke, scrape, bicker and endlessly, endlessly drill.  From time to time there are shots of Novocaine—usually in the form of liquidity injections from […]

For much of the American public, Mitt Romney remains a cipher. As Via Meadia has noted previously, Romney has too often ceded control of his personal narrative to the press and his opponents, making him particularly vulnerable to countless attacks on his character and to damaging stories like the account of his prep school days. […]

For all the talk of globalization, until quite recently the world did not look flat or well integrated when seen from most Central Asian airports. Many capital cities in Central Asia, like Tashkent, Bishkek, or Dushanbe offered primarily flights to Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other Russian cities popular for the hundreds of thousands of labor […]

“Crisis in the eurozone” stories are getting boring and this is one two year old soap opera the world would just as soon see disappear. Nevertheless it grinds on; yesterday the German finance minister said it could go on for another two years.  Unfortunately, he’s right.But while the news from Europe is complicated and inconclusive […]

Remember when Occupy Wall Street was sweeping the nation? The media branded it the left’s answer to the Tea Party, the start of a grand national mobilization; depending on who you ask, half of America once supported the OWS protestors, double the amount who back the Tea Party. The Huffington Post even launched a separate […]

“American Presidents have long been criticized for being too in thrall to the Jewish lobby. The American Jews influence US foreign policy and that explains Washington’s unwavering support for Israel.”Who made this statement this past week?(a) A disgruntled fringe neo-Nazi (b) Some poor soul ranting on their Facebook page (c) The BBCSadly, as you can […]

The eurozone crisis has captivated audiences around the world, but it is recent economic data from China that should be capturing the attention of policymakers. Despite confident predictions from Wen Jiabao that the economy was heading for more growth, April figures across a range of sectors make for grim reading: industrial production is down, fixed-asset […]

Few readers will be surprised to learn that decades of incompetence and entrenched corruption in Detroit’s government have not only helped wreck the city; firms linked to former Democratic mayor Kwame Kilpatrick also looted the pension fund.The latest scandal, which leaves even hardened observers of the abysmal Democratic machine that has run the city into […]

No good deed goes unpunished; this must be what US Ambassador to China Gary Locke must have been thinking as a firestorm of criticism erupted over his embassy’s handling of the Chen Guangcheng case. Under great pressure, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner arriving for high profile talks with China’s […]

Now that the Obama White House has lost that shiny, new-president feel, and hope and change has turned into more of the same, gridlock is back in Washington and fury beyond the Beltway. With the distinctly uninspiring prospect of an Obama-Romney battle stretching endlessly across an infinite series of news cycles all the way to […]