A huge chunk of downtown DC will be closed for three days to accommodate next week’s Nuclear Security Summit.  A memo went out sometime yesterday and a colleague passed it on late in the afternoon. As Josh Rogin notes, this will be incredibly inconvenient in a city whose infrastructure is already stretched to capacity: If [...]

Artificial intelligence guru Patrick Henry Winston, who has been involved with MIT as either a student or faculty member since 1961, notes that tuition increases at the venerable technical school have radically outpaced inflation during that period. So relative to the rest of the economy, MIT’s educational productivity has lagged behind by a factor of [...]

NYT economic columnist David Leonhardt argues that the Obama economic stimulus package has “had a huge impact on jobs — employing something like two million people who would otherwise be unemployed right now.”  Kevin Drum agrees and presents a chart by Organizing for America (aka, Obama’s campaign PAC) to argue that “We still have a [...]

Former UN Ambassador John Bolton argues that we need to get the bureaucracy out of intelligence if we are to adequately assess the threats facing the country. Although the U.S. intelligence community (IC) has been stung by failures relating to the Christmas terrorist attack, these failures are symptomatic of far larger problems. In analyzing the [...]

In the current Atlantic, Amanda Ripley offers this summary of an exhaustive report from Teach for America: Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day [...]

In the thread discussing the idiotic new TSA guidelines issued in overreaction to the Detroit terror plot, longtime commenter DC Loser observes, As a lifelong civil servant, anytime you create a large bureaucracy to deal with a specific problem, it is not in the interest of said bureaucracy for the root problem to go away. [...]

Reason‘s Nick Gillespie does his best John Stossel impression in explaining why whatever winds up in the final compromise health care bill will be just the beginning. [Y]ou don’t have to side with those who warn of euthanasia classes to recognize that government programs often end up doing all kinds of things that weren’t in [...]

One of my commenters brought to my attention an issue that’s not receiving much attention:  Residents of several U.S. states could have to show their passports for domestic travel — or to enter a federal government building — starting January 1 because of the REAL ID Act.  Chris Strohm for Congress Daily: More than half [...]

“[C]ongressmen like military toys, and they especially like military toys manufactured in their districts.  I guess we’re about to find out whether they like them even more than they like winning actual wars.” – Kevin Drum To be fair, Congress often winds up getting it right on weapons systems that the Pentagon opposed.  The military [...]

Steven Aftergood notes that, “The United States Air Force has published a detailed organizational chart of its headquarters (pdf) including the names and telephone numbers of key personnel” and points out that this seemingly uninteresting fact “represents a departure from the post-9/11 Pentagon practice of withholding the names and phone numbers of Pentagon officials from [...]

The country’s first black president will also be its most heavily protected, WaPo‘s Spenser Hsu reports. As jubilant Democrats nominated Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) for president in a Denver convention hall in late August, the U.S. Secret Service in Washington placed its largest ever order for bulletproof glass. The service requested about 5 tons of [...]

A gay museum executive is being touted as the next Secretary of the Navy, Washington Times reports. Some top retired military leaders and some Democrats in Congress are backing William White, chief operating officer of the Intrepid Museum Foundation, to be the next secretary of the Navy – a move that would put the first [...]

Shankar Vedantam notes that in the executive branch, there are a lot of political appointees staffing jobs that really ought to be manned through the normal civil service process. In an unusual new analysis, another political scientist compared the Bush administration’s own evaluations of more than 600 government programs with the backgrounds of the 242 [...]