Providence Journal

The end of the hunt for Osama bin Laden came in May, and Nicholas Schmidle's researched report of how it went down is full of excruciating detail, but the reporter notes that "some of t(the Navy Seals') ...

Local talk-radio hosts on Thursday noted that, in a 2008 appearance at the Washington think tank the New America Foundation, Chafee called Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential candidate, a “cocky wacko,” an apparent contradiction to his more recent desire to tone down the political rhetoric. ...

In a new book entitled “Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction,” ... Barry C. Lynn, a journalist and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, lays out the case against the new monopolies and their role in stifling competition, ...

With Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick’s announcement that the Bush administration had agreed to increase and extend its support for Massachusetts’s bold health-care reform initiative, we witnessed the kind of bipartisan leadership that has thus far eluded those trying to stabilize the financial markets.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees not only the freedom to speak but also the freedom not to listen. The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized that "no one has a right to press even good ideas on an unwilling recipient." Nevertheless, American businesses are increasingly violating the First Amendment freedoms of their employees.

For better or worse, America has a habit of conducting much of our policymaking through the presidential election process. This can be dangerous when meaningful reform efforts get trumped by volatile politics. Sure, we’d like campaign promises to mean something but it’s counter-productive if we let the consideration of good ideas get easily diverted into the gutter.

A half-century ago, many urbanists, including the late Lewis Mumford, believed that the inexorable shift to the suburbs was transforming cities into discarded parcels of "a disordered and disintegrating urban mass." Yet today, cities seem in many ways not to be disintegrating; rather, they are widely believed to be enjoying a revival of considerable proportions.

No sooner has the ineffective and unlamented "lockbox" gone to its grave than the next Social Security gimmick enters the scene.

Congressional Republicans are promoting legislation to issue certificates to each new retiree to "guarantee" their Social Security benefits would never be cut. Designed to make necessary reforms more palatable, these guarantees are little more than a P.R. stunt and, worse, one that is likely to backfire. Even today, as criticism of guarantee legislation mounts, Republican leaders hope to sneak it through as part of the larger budget bill.