Senator Hillary Clinton looks to be headed to an easy confirmation as secretary of state...

If one can endure the creepy, multifarious Hamas recruiting videos of Gazan children with suicide belts, camouflage uniforms, and toy AK-47s shouting to “kill the Jews”, and then collates all that with the images of young Hamas males with hoods and masks, RPGs and rocket launchers, screaming about the death to come to Israel with the now boilerplate “Day of Death” and “Day of Punishment”—with all the bizarre use of the vocative (“O Israel, you will see your rivers of blood” or “O Olmert, we will cut your head off!”)—then it is hard to comprehend the switch to a sudden victimization mode, in which weeping Hamas operatives appeal to Europeans, the news agencies, and other Arabs for relief from the suddenly militarily competent and fierce Jews...

If the government increased its spending on infrastructure when the economy has full employment, its main impact would likely be to draw labor, capital, and raw materials away from various other activities...

US president-elect Barack Obama on Sunday vowed to take swift action on the Middle East peace process and Iran's nuclear ambitions but played for time to shut down the Guantanamo Bay prison camp...