The Los Angeles Times

Is America in decline? Is our global influence waning?

Expect that question to get plenty of airtime as the presidential campaign heats up. According to the Republicans, President Obama's fundamental foreign policy problem is that he thinks America is a fading power and all we can hope for is to "manage the decline."

The CIA has launched 17 drone strikes in Pakistan since Petraeus took over last September, including three this month, according to the New America Foundation, a think tank that tracks reported attacks. That was down from an average of two a week under ...

Teacher wars are raging across the nation. One side blasts the "bad" teachers, waving around student test-score data and demanding accountability. On the other side are teachers: Defensive, closing the doors to their classrooms — and to the promise of improving their practice.

How do we halt the teacher-bashing, as President Obama urged in his State of the Union address, and still improve the quality of teaching? The answer is to radically change the evaluation conversation. A focus on watching teachers work — on how they actually interact with students — is long overdue.

We are told that in California politics and government, 2012 is shaping up as a very big year. That there will be — says Gov. Jerry Brown as he channels the philosopher Thomas Hobbes — "a war of all against all." That parties and interest groups are headed to the ballot with initiatives to gore one another's oxen. That we are about to decide the big questions of taxes and budgets and schools and maybe pensions.

Nonsense.

Irving Berlin wrote "White Christmas," one of the biggest-selling songs of all time, with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Although the wistful tune soothed homesick soldiers in such God-awful places as Guadalcanal more than half a century ago, and no doubt it still plays in Kandahar today, Berlin most likely wrote what he called "the best song that anybody's ever written" somewhere in the sunny Southwest, probably while sitting by a swanky hotel swimming pool.

Among Republican presidential candidates, it's been demagoguery as usual. Why have a substantive debate when you can exchange inflammatory sound bites instead, especially on immigration?

But something surprising happened last week far from the campaign trail — on Capitol Hill, of all places. Just when we thought Congress would never act to address the nation's broken immigration system, members of the House made a critical breakthrough, voting overwhelmingly to approve a fix that will make American companies more competitive and the immigration system fairer and more welcoming.

"The context is much more volatile than when this happened a few years ago," said Brian Fishman, counter-terrorism research fellow at the New America Foundation. "It's very dangerous now because you can get in a situation where especially in Pakistan, ...

The Redcoats are coming! The Redcoats are coming!

Remember what your elementary school teacher taught you about the War of Independence? The British wore scarlet coats, which made them easy marks and symbolized institutional pomposity, adherence to status over efficiency and an out-of-touch empire bent on doing things the old way. The rebellious American colonists, on the other hand, wore whatever; they were nimble, unencumbered by institutional baggage and not too proud to employ guerrilla tactics.

Barry C. Lynn, the author of "Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction," suggests that Americans' growing infatuation with power has led us to cede too much control to corporate giants. Likewise, military historian Andrew ...

“I have much broader intellectual interests than Richard Nixon's presidency, and I'm going back to them,” said Naftali, who will also join the New America Foundation, a think tank, as a senior research fellow. Naftali's most visible imprint on the ...