If you are an American male under age 67, you should take a moment and give thanks to Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Martin Anderson, who died on January 3. Why? Because he helped contribute to ending military conscription. Conscription ended on June 30, 1973. Until then, American men between age 18 and 26 were subject to it and boys younger than that had conscription to "look forward" to.
Overachieving Andy already beat me to the punch with ten thoughts about the secretary’s speech yesterday. Rather than try to compete, I’m going to keep it simple and stick to three. Anyway, who has time for ten of anything?
On January 5, California governor Jerry Brown delivered his second, second-term inaugural address that also doubled as his 2015 State of the State address.
My Brookings colleagues Daniel Byman, Lawfare‘s Foreign Policy Editor, and Jeremy Shapiro have a new paper out on a very timely subject: returning foreign fighters from Syria and Iraq. Entitled, “Be Afraid. Be A Little Afraid: The Threat of Terrorism from Western Foreign Fighters in Syria and Iraq,” it was the subject of an event yesterday at Brookings—the audio of which I will post as soon as it is available. Here’s the executive summary:
Conservatives have enjoyed quite a comeback since the winter of 2009. But the inherent tension in the conservative imperative to blend liberty and tradition ensures that their path forward will be anything but certain.
Last week, California Gov. Jerry Brown delivered a second-term inaugural address/State of the State message that revealed his intentions both for the calendar year and his remaining time as the Golden State’s chief executive (video here).
The first edition of the magazine since the attack in which 12 people were killed has a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad on its cover. Our writers share their view.
So now that France is “at war” with radical Islam, now that 1.6 million people and forty heads of state and prime ministers have turned out in the streets of Paris, now that the costs to a society of tolerating the most extreme, violent iterations of salafism have been so vividly displayed for the French people, is it too much to ask that France finally stop paying ransoms for its kidnapped nationals in the Middle East?
President Barack Obama's absence from the great gathering in Paris of national leaders from other countries, to show their solidarity with France in its opposition to Islamic terrorists, was another sign of the Obama administration's continuing irresolution in the face of terror.
A new study on MH17 suggests that a trained crew of regular Russian forces operating on separatist territory shot down the aircraft. But doesn’t Putin tell us there are no such forces in Ukraine? The Kremlin can never tell the truth, and international investigators aren’t willing to interrogate separatists and Russian officials who allegedly pulled the trigger even though we know their names, addresses, and in some cases telephone numbers.
Last week, California Governor Jerry Brown delivered a second-term inaugural address that doubled as a State of the State message to reveal his public policy intentions both for this year and for his final four years as the Golden State’s chief executive.
England’s National Health Service is struggling to handle the ever-growing demand for emergency care this winter, and more hospitals have had to declare “major incident” emergency plans.
For most of his six years in office, President Barack Obama utilized virtually every means a Keynesian imagination can cook up to give us the worst economic recovery since World War II.
I am a big fan of MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson. And two books he co-authored with MIT colleague Andrew McAfee, The Race Against the Machine (2011) and The Second Machine Age (2104), are particularly relevant to the discussion of tech employment trends.
One way to improve economic mobility in the United States may be to fix the misconceptions that high-achieving, low-income teenagers often have about college.
