Forbes.com

Over the last several weeks, the world has been focused on the fighting in Gaza, where 1.5 million Palestinians are ruled by an Islamist political movement committed to the destruction of the State of Israel. Yet several thousand miles away, voters in Bangladesh, a nation of over 150 million, have rejected Islamism and nationalist extremism in an extraordinary election. How is it that Gaza commands the attention of the Western press while a country that has roughly one hundred times the population merits barely a cursory mention?… more

Barack Obama and his transition team are already doing the hard work of governing, despite the fact that they haven't even come close to staffing the next White House. Plans for a mammoth economic stimulus bill are proceeding apace, and Republicans are watching glumly from the sidelines. Given that the Democrats hold almost all of the cards--they can freeze the Republicans out of the process entirely and pass just about anything they want--how should Republicans play a weak hand?

Samuel P. Huntington, one of the most creative social scientists of our time, died this Christmas Eve. In 1950, when Huntington began his long tenure at Harvard's government department, there was a great deal of optimism about our capacity to solve social problems. After all, the Second World War seemed to demonstrate that a little elbow grease and Yankee know-how was enough to fix the world. Many very smart people--we'd later call them "the best and the brightest"--believed the impoverished states just then emerging from

Republicans are rooting around for someone who can revitalize their brand. As a result, the race for chairman of the Republican National Committee is attracting more interest than usual. Chances are, the chairmanship will go to some gray, colorless figure who is good at vacuuming up money and not so good at communicating a clear and compelling message. Considering that Republicans don't have a clear and compelling message at the moment, this is an entirely forgivable crime. The truth is that the race for

Over a long and satisfying string of holiday parties, I've been gauging the mood of friends and acquaintances in New York regarding the economic climate we've only half-jokingly come to call "The Depression." Because an unusually large number of my friends are in the arts, media, academia, the law and finance, I'm fully confident that I'm getting a badly distorted view of the coming crunch. These are, after all, the hardest hit sectors. One wag joked that we all belong to the "parasite class," and that… more

Frighteningly enough, the people running the world are essentially children. Think about the Supreme Court clerks who, for several decades, have all but determined the course of American jurisprudence, or the fresh-faced thirtysomethings who are running the Troubled Asset Relief Program. These kids are certainly bright, but there is nothing more alarming than knowing your future is in the hands of some notorious madman you knew from your days in the high school freestyle yodeling club.

... trillion-dollar deficit isn't a wake-up call for the need for fiscal responsibility, I don't know what is," said Maya MacGuineas, president of the CRFB. ...

In the middle of November the bi-partisan nonprofit Committee For a Responsible Budget (CRFB) estimated that the accumulated costs of all the various rescue plans could well tip the 2009 U.S. federal deficit over the $1 trillion line for the first time.

The prior record, set in 2008, has been $455 billion. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated the deficit at $750 billion for 2009.

But the CRFB--which counts Paul Volcker and Lawrence Summers among its directors--added in a bunch of costs it deems… more