...[Ambassador] Haqqani, speaking at the New America Foundation, said that Pakistan's powerful military establishment did not play any political role behind the scenes of Musharraf's resignation. However, he said, military chiefs did refuse to block impeachment moves against Musharraf that had been gaining strength in Pakistan's parliament—a rebuff to Musharraf and a sign that the coup-prone Pakistani military may be accepting a new role for itself. LINK
(USNews.com's Capital Commerce Blog)--I am currently in the middle of reading the fabulous Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam. It's chock full of interesting economic ideas that Republicans can use to better appeal to working-class voters and families. Among them: massively expanding the tax credit for children, a "GI bill" of tuition tax credits for stay-at-home parents who want to get back into the workforce,… more
..."Without a doubt, they had accomplished something just short of miraculous by winning a war against a superior adversary, securing the support of a historic enemy, and then running roughshod over the interests of both in the treaty that ended the war," writes historian Ted Widmer in his forthcoming book, The Ark of Liberties. "But it was a curiously nonidealistic way to advance America's famous idealism..." LINK
...[The ratings] seem to me less a consumer tool than a prod to the public
consciousness. They send a message of great and expensive imbalance,
that part of our national healthcare problem, as Shannon Brownlee
writes in her recent book, Overtreated, is the enormous weight of care that is simply unnecessary. LINK
U.S. News | Voters See Very Different Healthcare Plans from Obama, Clinton, and McCain
. . . "The middle class is worried about affordability. They see it in rising premiums and in copays," says Len Nichols, director of the Health Policy Program at the New America Foundation. Premiums rose 6.1 percent last year, more than twice the rate of inflation and significantly outstripping the 3.7 percent increase in workers' earnings, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation's 2007 Employer Health… more
Look Twice at Loan Advice (U.S. News & World Report)
. . . Stephen Burd, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, says many colleges are affordable without the help of private loans at all. Plus, Burd adds, federal loans also are due only after graduation, and the subsidized ones don't accrue interest while students are still in school, as most private loans do—a fact not mentioned in the ads. . .
A survey released this week came to the unsurprising conclusion that people are having a hard time paying for healthcare. The totally nonrandom sample of more than 26,000 people who took the online survey skewed heavily toward the insured (77 percent), unionized (57 percent), college educated (80 percent), and white (86 percent). If anybody should be able to afford healthcare, it would be these folks, right? So it was interesting to see that… more
Global Public Opinion Turns Against the U.S. on Iran's Nuclear Program (U.S. News & World Report)
. . . Iranian policy figures, adds Afshin Molavi, an analyst with the New America Foundation in Washington, like to play off an expression favored by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. She talks of U.S. support for an emerging "new Middle East" that includes political forces moving the region in the direction of moderation, democracy, and opposition to radical movements… more
As Republicans and Democrats in Congress negotiate the exact details of an economic stimulus package, that debate was mirrored today among the chief economic advisers to several of the major presidential candidates at a forum at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. While none of these plans will be enacted, at least not in full, each adviser claimed his plan shows the superior economic thinking… more
The devil is in the details of President Bush's plan to curb the nation's escalating home foreclosures by freezing for five years the introductory "teaser" interest rates on many subprime loans. Borrowers who qualify—Bush estimates that up to 1.2 million might be eligible—will also have the option of refinancing into a new mortgage or switching to a loan insured by the Federal Housing Administration.
Lenders had already been working out deals with strapped subprime borrowers, but only a small number of… more
