-
By Michael Barone |
06/11/13 06:35 PM
"Gentlemen do not read each other's mail." That's what Secretary of State Henry Stimson said to explain why he shut down the government's cryptanalysis operations in 1929.
Edward Snowden, who leaked National Security Agency surveillance projects to Britain's Guardian, evidently feels the same...
-
By Michael Barone |
06/11/13 01:30 PM
James Mann, author-in-residence at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, has been one of the most perceptive and fair-minded commentators on foreign policy. I’ve found his books on foreign policy to be illuminating and a pleasure to read. So I thought...
-
By Michael Barone |
06/09/13 07:45 PM
That’s the message of this paper from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The writers point out the American safety regulators require passenger rail cars to be much heavier than European regulators do. But over the years, they say, the European cars have proved just as safe, and perhaps...
-
By Michael Barone |
06/09/13 05:10 PM
Barack Obama's appointments of Susan Rice as National Security Adviser and Samantha Power as Ambassador to the United Nations have naturally triggered speculation about changes in foreign policy.
Rice and Power have been proponents of humanitarian military intervention, a course that Obama...
-
By Michael Barone |
06/07/13 06:55 AM
Can Democrats gain the 17 seats they need to win control of the House in 2014? Maybe, but the numbers look forbidding. Remember that while Barack Obama was reelected with 332 electoral votes he carried only 209 of the 435 congressional districts. Mitt Romney carried 226. Only 17 Republicans were...
-
By Michael Barone |
06/05/13 06:00 PM
Apropos of my Sunday Washington Examiner column on the woes of Detroit, Carl Schramm of the Kauffman Foundation has a wonderful piece on the Forbes website on the possibility that bankruptcy may require the city of Detroit to sell off the arts treasures in the Detroit Institute of Arts. I...
-
By Michael Barone |
06/05/13 10:10 AM
No, I hadn’t been paying much attention either, but there was a special election today in Missouri’s 8th congressional district to fill the vacancy created by the resignation of Jo Ann Emerson. Republican state legislator Jason Smith beat Democrat Steve Hodges by a 67%-27% margin.
Last...
-
By Michael Barone |
06/04/13 05:10 PM
Over the last seven decades, 115 veterans of World War II have served in the United States Senate. This week the last of them, Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, died.
Two World War II veterans still serve in the House -- Ralph Hall of Texas, who was a Navy pilot, and John Dingell, who joined the...
-
By Michael Barone |
06/01/13 11:45 PM
In the latest Weekly Standard Charles Trueheart reviews a book on the overthrow of the Diem brothers in South Vietnam in a coup sanctioned by the Kennedy administration in fall 1963. He mentions in passing that support for the Diems among Americans was diminished because of their suppression of...
-
By Michael Barone |
05/31/13 06:20 PM
Detroit, once one of the nation's most vibranty cities, faces imminent bankruptcy. That's the headline from the report last month of Emergency Fiscal Manager Kevyn Orr, issued 45 days after he was appointed this spring by Gov. Rick Snyder to take over the city's government.
"The path Detroit...