In case you've been out of the loop for the past couple of weeks, the city of Flint, Michigan, was poisoning its citizens via their water supply from April 2014 through December. This catastrophic failure occurred because of a short-sighted austerity measure put in place by Michigan's Republican Governor Rick Snyder and the emergency manager … Continue reading Reflexive bothsiderism

Now this is a heck of a ride: What's the deal, you ask? All together now: U.S. oil recorded its worst settlement since May 2003 on Wednesday, caught in a broad slump across world financial markets with traders also fearful that the crude supply glut could last longer. U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate (WTI) prices … Continue reading Another fun day on the rails

Syria analyst Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi has been cataloging and translating ISIS administrative documents for about a year now. It's a great resource for, among other things, getting a flavor of what Kevin Drum calls ISIS's "bureaucratic streak" (I agree with him, it's hard not to laugh at this stuff--in fact, I'm about to do just … Continue reading Well, alright, but keep your hands off my 401(k)

Saudi Arabia and Iran are still feuding, but a hero may be coming to the rescue: Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Monday expressed "deep concern" to Saudi King Salman over escalating tensions between the Sunni kingdom and predominantly Shiite Iran. Sharif visited Riyadh in an effort to ease those tensions and is to head … Continue reading Couples therapy for Middle Eastern rivals

Courtesy of BuzzFeed: https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedNews/status/689598100961263617 I...think it may be too late for that, to be honest. My favorite thing about all of this is that it's been strongly suggested that Palin wants to be Secretary of Energy in a Trump administration. Except, shock of shocks, she's got no idea what the Secretary of Energy does: Palin … Continue reading Today in “boy, that meteor sure is running late”

In the aftermath of last week's suicide bombing in Istanbul, I spoke with Gönül Tol, the founding director of the Center for Turkish Studies at the Middle East Institute, for LobeLog. Dr. Tol is an expert on Turkish politics and Turkey's regional activities, plus she's offered to buy me an authentic Turkish lunch one of … Continue reading Turkey after the Istanbul bombing, my latest for LobeLog

I don't like to traffic in conspiracies or thinly-sourced material, although I admit this isn't something I spend a lot of time thinking about so I've probably trafficked in them on a few occasions around here. But as I spend an unfortunate amount of time on Twitter (hey, my #brand isn't going to build itself, … Continue reading The things we (might) do for our kids

There are over a million words in the English language, and we outright pilfer vocabulary from other languages all the time. Can't we do better than calling this a "unity government"? Libya's Presidential Council announced a new government on Tuesday aimed at uniting the country's warring factions, though two of its nine members rejected it … Continue reading Libya gets a unity government, minus the unity