The news of Steve Ballmer’s planned retirement next year, announced last month, brought the Microsoft CEO’s critics out of the woodwork. He was widely skewered as the beneficiary of “the luckiest dorm-room assignment in history”—down the hall from Bill Gates when both were Harvard undergrads. Vanity Fair business writer Kurt Eichenwald called Ballmer’s watch at […]

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(Source: Wikipedia) Americans are optimistic sorts. That makes it hard to fathom Haiti’s grim circumstances, even though the country is just 700 miles from Miami. This article was originally published in OtherWords and appears here by way of special arrangement. Business there is controlled by a handful of elite repressive families, the infrastructure doesn’t support […]

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(Source: Bill deBlasio) Victory creates an ex post facto sense of inevitability, so it’s worth remembering how unlikely Bill DeBlasio’s Democratic primary win seemed just a few months ago when Christine Quinn was still thought to be Bloomberg’s anointed successor. Last spring, I went to a forum at New York Law School where all the […]

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(Source: AP via Mint Press News) Let’s compare a couple of accounts of the mass deaths apparently caused by chemical weapons in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta on August 21. One account comes from the U.S. government (8/30/13), introduced by Secretary of State John Kerry. The other was published by a Minnesota-based news site called […]

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Unless AIPAC improves its game, I may need to revise my view that it owns U.S. foreign policy on the Middle East, which it accomplished long ago by buying the US Congress. The perception of weakness leads to more weakness. Its ineptitude on Syria, combined with the clear evidence that the Congressmen who they bought […]

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