(Some Americans believe President Obama is trying to effect gun control by buying up all the ammunition. Ads like this can be found on U.S. Senator Jim Inhofe’s Facebook page.) On Feb. 26, as the sequester crisis loomed, Sarah Palin took to Facebook to administer Washington a sharp tongue-lashing. “DC: Cut the Drama. Do Your […]

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Editor’s Note: Federal and local authorities were called to the compound of a diplomatic mission from Soudi Arabia this week to “rescue two women,” according to Jackie Bensen, a TV reporter for an NBC affiliate in Washington, citing an unnamed source. “One woman had reportedly tried to flee by squeezing through a gap in the […]

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As a general rule, important decisions—say, for instance, deciding whether or not to invade a Middle Eastern nation—turnout better when they are well-informed. Poorly informed choices tend to end in disaster.

Consider our invasion of Iraq—a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and is by no means over, even though our troops have mostly left. That war killed 4,500 American soldiers, injured at least 32,000 at a dollar cost measured in trillions. If you measure defending our national security in blood and money, this war was more damaging to our national security than the Sept. 11 attacks themselves.

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(Jackie Robinson, the subject of the movie 42, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1949). I am not a person who romanticizes Jim Crow. Separate but equal was never equal, and activists were right to upend that system of apartheid. But everything comes at a price and the price Jackie Robinson paid, at […]

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The defeat of the Senate’s gun bill last week reflects the strength of the NRA and other pro-gun membership organizations. But it also reflects the potency of a less examined political force: the gun industry. Senators who scuttled the most ambitious gun regulation bill in decades weren’t just representing their constituents. They were also protecting […]

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