... Yet roughly
once a week since that day, he has ordered the assassination of suspected
terrorists. These assassinations, carried out with Hellfire missiles fired from
hovering drones, are often messy. According to the New
America Foundation,
a think-tank, it took 15 attempts to kill Baitullah Mehsud, a Taliban leader in
Pakistan
who was finally blown to scraps in August. Hundreds of people, some of them
Len Nichols of the New America Foundation, an influential think-tank, argues that while an individual mandate requiring people to purchase insurance is a good idea, the employer mandate is not: pay or play is, he insists, “essentially a tax on low-wage labour”. Original article
Those exceptions would add $2.5 trillion to the deficit over ten years, reckons Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a non-partisan watchdog. “This is like quitting drinking, but making an exception for beer and hard ...
Only a minority of Californians bother to vote, and those voters tend to be older, whiter and richer than the state's younger, browner and poorer population, says Steven Hill at the New America Foundation, a think-tank that is analysing the options for ...
“Environmentalists have never been a well-mannered lot”, says Terry Tamminen, who has advised Arnold Schwarzenegger on climate change. ...
But as Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a watchdog group, notes, such spending is at most $30 billion a year, ...
According to Steve Coll of the New Yorker, America’s ambassador in India looked into building a nuclear bunker in the embassy. With hindsight, it is not ...
Not everyone buys industry’s arguments about rising health costs
imposing a competitive disadvantage on firms. Conventional economic
theory maintains that firms should be indifferent to whether they pay
employees cash wages or benefits. The two are seen as fungible, and are
both tax deductible. So if the cost of health benefits rises, employers
ought to be able simply to cut wages--or pass on those costs as higher
prices to customers.
This theory is correct over the long term but falls apart in the
short term, argues Len Nichols… more
. . .[R]adical Islam is facing rebellion from within. The same verdict is reached in the New Republic by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, also respected analysts, who chart a swelling tide of former jihadists now critical of al-Qaeda's promiscuous violence. Such critics, they say, have joined mainstream Muslim leaders in “a powerful coalition countering al-Qaeda's ideology”. LINK
In 1519 a group of Spanish soldiers who had been sent to explore Mexico heard an extraordinary rumour. A sailor, Gonzalo Guerrero, had drifted there on a wrecked ship eight years earlier and was living among the Indians. He had married an Indian woman, with whom he had raised three children, and was tattooed and pierced. Odder still, he intended to stay put. Hernán Cortés, the leader of the expedition, was furious. "It will never do to leave him here,"… more
