Niall Ferguson claims inflation is at 10 percent. Ponnuru isn't buying it. Nor is Yglesias: Normal people judge inflation by watching fluctuations in the price of low-cost, high-frequency purchases. That means that common perceptions of inflation are dominated by things...

Joel Wing finds few stories on Iraq's protest movement: The protests and fighting in the Middle East and North Africa continue to this day. There are still stories about Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and other countries. That’s no longer true of...

Today on the Dish, Andrew begrudgingly defended Tony Kushner from charges of anti-Semitism, and recalled the past infighting around gay marriage. We rounded up the reax to last night's GOP debate, including some defenses of torture, and checked in on...

This pooch would make a terrible SEAL:

Phil Gyford doubts that 2 billion people worldwide watched the royal event. Cory Doctorow summarizes: In the UK, 39.6% of the population watched the wedding. For the two billion number to be real, the royal wedding would have to be...

A reader writes: Dogs definitely have skin in this game, too. Do you remember the stories of the videos discovered after the fall of Kabul, of Al Qaeda "scientists" sharpening their chemical weapons technology by gassing dogs? That alone would...

Marc Lynch doesn't think that "the presence of U.S. troops [in Iraq] is really a decisive strategic factor anymore." He advocates "thinking past the military mission and devoting adequate resources to the civilian sector:" Iraq is slowly evolving into a...

A new conspiracy theory is born: (Hat tip: Chait)

Felix Salmon explains it: [R]estaurants are much like Groupon itself. It makes money on every sale — but it will only see its margins start to rise impressively if and when its merchants start coming back on a regular basis....

Alissa J. Rubin recently donned a burka for the first time: I looked out at the men in the small bazaars we passed through. I could see them and they couldn’t see me, and I felt a certain satisfaction —...

Queen Elizabeth II visits St George's School in Windsor, England on Friday May 6, 2011. The Queen toured the school, visiting the pre-prep classroom and IT suite, watched a ballet demonstration and a scene from the School's summer show. By...

A reader writes: As a native Southerner and someone who lived in the Northeast for a considerable amount of time, I can tell you that attitudes such as those suggested of Southerners by a previous reader go both ways. My...

The death toll rises: Human rights group Insan said that at least 16 people had been killed in the central city of Homs, six in Hama and two in Jableh. It said the total death toll was 26 but didn't...

To say I am embarrassed to be defending Tony Kushner is an understatement. I was one of very few gay men with HIV who found Angels in America to be pretentious, boring propaganda, and like most propaganda, endless and laden...

The libertarians stood firmly against waterboarding, leaving Pawlenty, Cain, and arch-Catholic Santorum endorsing the torture technique. Ben Smith focuses on the former: Pawlenty introduced the subject unasked: "If it turns out that...the techniques that [Obama] criticized during the campaign led...

Carl Prine has filed an FOIA to see the bin Laden photos: I’m doing it because this White House, Pentagon and CIA have to follow the law, like any other taxpayer who foots their bill. And here’s the dirty little...

Kabul, Afghanistan, 3.30 pm

Peter Moskos outlines his problems with Libertarianism: I’m not fond of ideologies. I don’t like it when people have answers before they know the question. So why shouldn’t libertarianism be dismissed as just another ideology. Perhaps less government is the...

Mark Vernon connects the two, by quoting Thomas Lacquer's essay on America's insistence on the death penalty: Human depravity ... makes it necessary for civil government to assume the power of divine authority. ... In other words, a government here...

The Economist takes the poetic route to send-off Osama bin Laden: Somewhere, according to one of his five wives, was a man who loved sunflowers, and eating yogurt with honey; who took his children to the beach, and let them...

Tim Fernholz and Jim Tankersley put the $3 trillion price tag for the war on terror in perspective: More than actual security, we bought a sense of action in the face of what felt like an existential threat. We staved...

Daniel Levy speaks plainly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: We need to acknowledge that American domestic politics will not allow the US to lead on this issue in a way that is conducive to advancing a breakthrough. Most people would look...

Scott Morgan fumes: [R]ecent months have brought about what can only be described as the rapid collapse of the Obama Administration's support for medical marijuana. Following dozens of aggressive DEA raids, along with some unusual IRS audits, the Dept. of...

Matt Buchanan marvels at the dogs of war: [D]id you know some of them have titanium fangs, designed to rip through enemy protective armor? That titanium grill runs $2,000 per tooth. The end result, US military dog trainer Alex Dunbar...

Jonathan Bernstein explains why the bin Laden killing re-kindled the torture debate: One way to look at it is that torture, right now, clearly divides the parties; indeed, it’s probably the national security/foreign affairs issue that most clearly divides them....

Blair Gibbs complains about drug use inside UK prisons. Alex Massie zooms out: [S]urely the most obvious point to make is that if we cannot keep illegal drugs out of prison at what point do even prohibitionists recognise that the...

Viewer discretion advised: And it's spreading: Taking a cue from Will Ferrell going Beardpocalypse all over Conan's face, Team Coco fans across the country are manning it up and shaving it off!

Bruce Bartlett notes the massive short-term deficits that Paul Ryan proposes: 2012: $995 billion; 2013: $698 billion; 2014: $489 billion; 2015: $431 billion; 2016: $478 billion; 2017: $407 billion; 2018: $378 billion; 2019: $415 billion; 2020: $405 billion; and 2021:...

Assad's army ended an 11-day seige of Deraa yesterday, but his forces are simply shifting elsewhere: Tanks have taken up positions near the urban centres of Homs, Rastan and Baniyas in the past two day, as activists vowed a "Day...

Chris Geidner goes back fifteen years to this week in 1996, when DOMA was introduced into the House of Representatives. But he does something much more valuable at the same time. He revisits the struggle within the gay community to...

I'm sorry to say I couldn't handle it, with gauze jammed in my mouth and Vicodin addling my brain. (On the other hand, perhaps those were the ideal conditions for viewing.) But here are some reactions: J.F. at DiA: The...

Compare and contrast. More here.

Allahpundit counters Frum and Wiegel: This poll was conducted before Obama’s announcement of the Bin Laden killing, in case you’re inclined to attribute the huge bounce to goodwill rather than evidence. Needless to say, the key lines are the ones...

Colorado Rockies, 12 pm Central Illinois, 10 am Sydney Harbor Grand Canyon Mt. Hood, Oregon Florida Keys, 1.55 pm Kansas-Nebraska border San Jose, California

Matt Yglesias defends standarized tests. He insists that schools need to take "checking to see if the kids are learning anything more seriously": Something that I think drives at least some of my disagreements with other liberals about education policy...

J.F. at DiA predicts that any film about the SEAL raid won't show "the hours, days, weeks and months of painstaking, tedious analysis that actually led to Osama bin Laden's death:" The worthwhile, boring, essential parts of war and life...

Rob Delaney swats the tweet: I’m imagining a group of terrorists sitting around a computer, pulling up a photo of Osama Bin Laden’s corpse, and one saying “WHOA GUYS, if we try to ‘destroy America’ they might try put BULLETS...

Today on the Dish, Andrew bemoaned torture creep from the GOP, and set the record straight on Dick Cheney's war crimes. McCain even admitted torture wasn't key, and Rob Delaney rubbed it in Palin's face. We analyzed how Osama was...

Pew deconstructs the ideological composition of both parties. Ed Kilgore summarizes: In general, Pew's analysis reinforces the generally-accepted belief that Republicans enjoy more ideological coherence than Democrats, but there are some pretty striking contradictions between the views of the Staunch...

John McCain is the latest to confirm that the war crimes of the last administration had nothing to do with the discovery and killing of Osama bin Laden: “So far, I know of no information that was obtained, that would...

A reader writes: I am a World Trade Center survivor. I was on the 62nd floor of Tower One when the first plane struck and I was in the police command center in WTC 5 when WTC 2 collapsed on...

Harold Evans, who is against releasing the bin Laden pictures, considers shocking photographs from different eras: Ronald Haeberle’s picture of dead and terrified villagers at My Lai were not the gratuitous violence alleged against the publishers. They were evidence of...

Larison ponders Mitch Daniels' foreign policy: Daniels has been very reticent on foreign policy, which hasn’t bothered me. Still, if his silence is the product of a lack of interest or lack of detailed knowledge of the subject, what are...

Bucky Turco describes the scene: As if Chinese authorities weren’t angered enough by the rash of pro-Ai Weiwei stencils popping up all over Hong Kong, someone is now projecting the same message on unauthorized locations around the city, including the...

David Frum contemplates this poll: It’s my “suspicion” that the collapse of birtherism has as much to do with the bin Laden killing as the release of the long-form birth certificate. Weigel has the same thought: What would the result...

Ryan Avent imagines a wealthier world: I don't think it's impossible to imagine a world in which four times as many people enjoy rich-world living standards as is currently the case. But for it to be possible, humanity must either...

Joel Wing tracks them: Since 2009 the average number of deaths has hit a plateau. In 2009, there was an average of 9.4 deaths per day, compared to 20.4 the year before, and 65.2 per day in 2007. In 2010,...

In 1993, Irving Kristol wrote "My Cold War": There is no "after the Cold War" for me. So far from having ended, my cold war has increased in intensity, as sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted...

Steven Cook prods the Obama administration to undermine the Assad regime: Washington may be missing an important strategic opportunity. After all, with Bashar and the Alawi power structure gone, it is unlikely that the Damascus-Tehran axis would survive. This would...

Catholic women have abortions at about the same rate as women overall; skip the cloying politics at the end of the video: