The Daily Beast

There’s nothing cooler in today’s overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly Anglo Republican Party than being neither. For its State of the Union rebuttal, the GOP tapped Cuban-American Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. Rubio had already introduced Mitt Romney at the Republican National Convention, while Puerto Rican first lady Lucé Vela Fortuño introduced Romney’s wife, Ann. When a Senate seat opened up in South Carolina last December, party elders chose African-American Rep. Tim Scott. And Republicans have just founded a new organization to groom minorities in the party.

Universities fear this to death, for reasons that education expert Kevin Carey explained in an article in the journal I edit, Democracy, as it could ultimately lead to a reduction in tuition costs. So I applaud that one. Otherwise, the ideas ranged ...

“Coordinated Netizen action against an individual is not at all unusual in China,” says Emily Parker, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and an expert on Internet and democracy. (Parker cautions that she is unfamiliar with Ping's case and ...

We have seen this story of bloodthirsty extremist violence before. In Somalia, in Yemen, in Iraq, and now in Algeria. A militant group moves into an ungoverned space where government lacks will or capability, where the group purports to represent the will of the people by instituting some strict version of Islam and imposing this vision with abhorrent ruthlessness. More broadly, in more than a decade of this global counterterror campaign, we have seen this battlefield shift from Afghanistan to Pakistan, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Europe, and now Africa’s Sahel.

When most Americans hear the results of yesterday’s Israeli elections, they’ll be confused. When Barack Obama hears them, however, he should feel at least a little hope.

Every inaugural address is part Hallmark card to America: liberty, greatness, unity, democracy, yadda yadda. What people remember (when they do, which is rare) are the phrases that capture the national mood at a particular moment in time. Those phrases stand apart from the enduring clichés that every president summons every four years. And they involve some kind of argument, even a rebuke. Inaugural addresses are not convention acceptance speeches. You can’t skewer your foes. But in defining the moment, you must also define them.

From the beginning, Chuck Hagel’s nomination as secretary of defense has been about more than just the policies he’d pursue at the Pentagon. It’s been about the terms of legitimate discourse in Washington, D.C. And in this regard, even though he’s yet to be confirmed, Hagel is already proving an agent of change.

He’s proving an agent of change because over the past week or so, for the first time I can remember, the Jewish right’s tactic of calling people they disagree with on Israel policy anti-Semitic has begun to backfire.

On Reliable Sources Sunday, The Daily Beast's Howard Kurtz talked to Global Voices co-founder Rebecca MacKinnon about recent protests in China, which started when liberal paper Southern Weekend challenged alleged government censorship. Though ...

If media reports are true, Barack Obama will soon nominate Chuck Hagel to be secretary of defense. If so, it may prove the most consequential foreign-policy appointment of his presidency. Because the struggle over Hagel is a struggle over whether Obama can change the terms of foreign-policy debate.

Washington-based think tank the New America Foundation said last week that U.S drone attacks in Yemen have risen to 53 this year, almost triple the attacks last year. The civilian casualty rate from those strikes is estimated to be between 4 percent ...