So the latest incarnation of the bank rescue plan is as follows: Banks have crap. Changes in accounting rules allow banks to paint crap gold. Bank buys “gold” from other banks at prices that allow it to declare itself healthy by selling off its own “gold”. This is a viable business model because the “gold” … Read more
New Orleans takes a chance on charter schools In his recent response to the State of the Union address, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal took the unusual step of drawing national attention to an issue in his own home state: education reform. He declared, “After Katrina, we reinvented the New Orleans school system, opening dozens of … Read more
Georgia’s troubles in the aftermath of the Ossetia conflict The South Ossetia conflict last August was a tragic farce that ran its full course in barely a week, inviting paraphrasing Porfirio Diaz’s saying about Mexico; poor Georgia, so far from God and so close to Russia! In days, it re-established Russian superiority in the Caucasus … Read more
New role, new tactics for Kathleen Sebelius In December 1999, Kansas Insurance Commissioner Kathleen Sebelius expressed concern that new privacy rules imposed by the federal department of Health and Human Services would undercut state jurisdiction over health information. Federal bureaucracy, she argued, could not handle enforcement as nimbly as the states. A decade later, Sebelius … Read more
Thoughts on a career in politics While still in high school, I read a book by Pete Carril, who for 29 years coached a series of exceptionally disciplined basketball teams at Princeton University, in which he recounted a lesson from his childhood. “In this life,” Carril’s father would tell him and his sister every morning, … Read more
Can a powerful Iran advance American national interests? Former CIA officer Robert Baer’s new book, The Devil We Know: Dealing With The New Iranian Superpower, is sure to make waves. Baer contends the erratic Islamic Republic of 1979 has vanished; modern-day Iran may be secretive, but it is a rational, clever actor that harbors an … Read more
Anticipating the next pandemic In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the American Gulf Coast, killing thousands and destroying the region’s economy. Such natural disasters cannot be prevented, only prepared for, in hopes of diminishing their impact. Yet the threat posed by a hurricane pales in comparison to that of an influenza pandemic, the outbreak of an … Read more
What Israel in Gaza tells us about modern warfare If there is one lesson that modern security institutions have learned about combating terrorist insurgencies, it is that a sledgehammer is not the appropriate tool. Armies and security forces created to deal with Cold War–style confrontations prove painfully inadequate when confronted by modern low-intensity conflicts, as … Read more
A novel and compelling treatment of the 37th president The legendary filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock once remarked, “The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture.” Given this formula, it is hardly surprising that Richard Milhous Nixon, quite possibly the most despised and maligned political figure of the past half-century, would naturally lend his story … Read more
Howard Zucker on the World Health Organization and health policy Howard Zucker is the former Assistant Director-General of the World Health Organization in charge of the Health Technology & Pharmaceuticals cluster, and Representative of the Director-General on Intellectual Property, Innovation, and Public Health. Zucker previously worked in Washington as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Health. … Read more