November 4, 2009
This month, on Nov. 9, Germany will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

October 28, 2009
The United States has often turned to war heroes for executive leadership, but usually in peacetime.

October 21, 2009
New technologies, when sufficiently developed, are often more effective than old ones in nearly every way.

October 14, 2009
It would’ve made a fine Onion headline or an epic SNL skit.

October 7, 2009
In going back to do a favor for his adopted hometown by personally lobbying for Chicago to host the 2016 Olympics, the president brought the weight of his new office to bear.

October 5, 2009
The severity of the current recession has engendered all sorts of dubious Great Depression comparisons.

August 19, 2009
The pre-election consensus is dead — and good riddance.

August 5, 2009
What is the most dangerous thing you can do? Idolize a president.

July 22, 2009
We must have standards — even in not-so-lean times.

July 8, 2009
It’s another day, and another Latin American coup.

June 24, 2009
The mistake most political scientists often make in the process of studying a nation’s institutions is giving too much weight to what exists on paper, ignoring the actual distribution of power.

June 3, 2009
The greatest mistake of those who would seek to end racism has been to continue thinking of other people, and themselves, in terms of race.

May 28, 2009
I often wonder what it must be like to be a UW professor or TA who has to grade papers.

May 14, 2009
The administration is treading lightly on the health-care front.

May 11, 2009
It’s that time of the quarter again: registration.

May 4, 2009
At some point between a politician’s election and the time he takes office, there generally comes a shift.

April 27, 2009
Since the end of the Cold War, the Russian military, despite being powerful, has been a shadow of its former self.

April 20, 2009
When threatened by a criminal, many people respond with neither fight nor flight, but by giving the criminal what he or she wants.

April 13, 2009
It’s that time of year again.

April 6, 2009
If you have any significant number of friends on Facebook, you’re treated every year to a virtual swarm of well-wishers descending on your profile to post birthday salutations.

March 31, 2009
“I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” The eager supplicants from the houses of General Motors (GM) and Chrysler averted their eyes, kowtowed eagerly and said, “Thank you, President Obama.” Then the Bringer of Change named his price: “Bring me the head of Rick Wagoner.” Nobody bothers to ask how firing GM CEO Rick Wagoner is going to help.

March 9, 2009
This year’s recession is the first in which the media has truly been unleashed.

March 3, 2009
If there’s one institution in the state budget that shouldn’t lose funding, it’s UW.

February 23, 2009
What comes to mind when you think of California? Silicon Valley, gold mines, beaches, huge trees, surfer girls, Hollywood, skyrocketing unemployment, rising taxes or dysfunctional government? Wait, what?

February 17, 2009
On the surface, it is hard to find fault with the recent and often repeated claim that the size of government, big or small, is irrelevant as long as that government works.

February 6, 2009
Before 2008, Ashley Alexandra Dupre was just another down-and-out pop singer working as a call girl.

February 3, 2009
Back in 2006, Congressional Republicans were deservedly criticized for their egregious abandonment of spending restraint.

February 2, 2009
Art, like religion, is a beautiful thing when kept far away from worldly concerns.

January 20, 2009
Nothing fails to capture the news like a thwarted terrorist attack.

January 12, 2009
Now that the election is over and there’s no need for anyone to care about what voters in the UW community think, Gov.

January 6, 2009
Much has been said concerning the potential of a two-state solution for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

December 2, 2008
There was a time when people of all political stripes saw a threat of epic proportions coming and resolved that they would stop it in its tracks.

November 18, 2008
People on the East and West Coasts tend to think of themselves as superior to everyone else.

November 6, 2008
While the presidential election was closer than the polls had predicted, the outcome was hardly a surprise to anyone.

October 28, 2008
In an age of endless voter registration drives and histrionics about power to the people, it can be hard to remember that the Constitution was deliberately designed to cushion the raw will of voters through representative democracy.

October 23, 2008
In 2004, the most rabid Bush haters often batted around the threat of moving to Canada if John Kerry lost the presidential election.

October 14, 2008
Republicans and Democrats generally agree that the current employer-based healthcare insurance model is flawed.

October 9, 2008
For a country known in the West for its historic — and more often fictional — ninjas and samurai, Japan hardly has a strong military.

September 30, 2008
Is John McCain really dead-set on having an Iran invasion as the primary goal of his presidency? Comedian Garrison Keilor thinks so.

September 25, 2008
So much for the myth that the United States is fighting the war on terrorism alone.

August 5, 2008
If you listen to some pundits these days, you’d think that the U.S. Department of Justice was an arm of the Republican National Committee. Not so fast — prosecutors from the department indicted Republican Sen. Ted Stevens on federal corruption charges.

July 22, 2008
Most people would agree that, on the whole, women have come a long way toward achieving social parity with men during the past few centuries.

July 8, 2008
The rescue of Ingrid Betancourt and three Americans held captive by the FARC puts a face on the wider, hard-fought success of the Colombian government in its fight against the terrorist group.

June 25, 2008
Queen Rania reconciles Middle East with West

June 23, 2008
Leaders like Nestor Kirchner, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa and, most infamously, Hugo Chavez plague the continent

June 2, 2008
I’m not entirely sure if John McCain and Barack Obama are trying to gain or lose the votes of college students

May 29, 2008
In the aftermath of World War I, a large crop of anti-war films rose up from the muddied battlefields of Western Europe.

May 19, 2008
Walk into a 450-person lecture classroom on test day and look around.

May 15, 2008
Imagine you’ve been stranded at sea in a rather large lifeboat for weeks with a hundred survivors of a shipwreck, including two ex-convicts, who have taken over through intimidation and force.

May 5, 2008
Vocal people who hold an ideological orthodoxy lying outside the broadly accepted bounds of political debate are an inevitable consequence of the First Amendment.

May 1, 2008
We’ve come a long way in economic thought since Nixon blithely ushered in the era of stagflation with the words, “We are all Keynesians now.”

April 21, 2008
Africa can be a depressing place to turn to for any political commentator.

April 17, 2008
When you first hear him speak, the Dalai Lama appears to be above the world in a way, as though he’s not entirely in sync with it.

April 7, 2008
Daniel Henninger’s description of the epic battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in The Wall Street Journal is at once gleeful and resigned: “The Democratic primary is starting to look like World War I.

March 13, 2008
Nearly every e-mail we receive from the police contains another report of an alarming incident of violence on or near the UW campus, followed by something along the lines of this: “Responding UWPD officers were unable to locate the suspect.” First things first: This is not the UWPD’s fault.

March 3, 2008
The battle lines in the Democratic primary have been drawn heavily upon racial and gender lines, with Hillary Clinton favored among Hispanics and women and Barack Obama among blacks and men.

February 14, 2008
Religion and science have never gotten along properly.

February 4, 2008
Now that John McCain has found his political mojo following big wins in states such as New Hampshire and Florida, he faces his toughest challenge: defending the position of front-runner in what has essentially become a two-man race against Mitt Romney.

January 31, 2008
Finding enjoy- ment in man-kind’s artistic achievements — painting, photography, literature, film, — is uniquely fulfilling.

January 7, 2008
“The richest people in America are getting richer. The big corporations’ profits are going through the roof. What is happening to the middle class? What is happening to working people in this country?”