WASP culture is dead! Long live WASP culture!

Solicitor General Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court says a whole lot about the state of white Anglo Saxon Protestant culture in the U.S., but it's not what you think. If her appointment is approved, there will be no white — or any other color for that matter — Protestant on the court. Some joke that this means it's high time to carve out a WASP seat on the bench. Others suggest it spells the end of WASP dominance in general.

Contrary to what the doomsayers have been saying, Greece's debt crisis may turn out to be one of the best things to happen to the European Union.

While the situation has been messy, it also has signaled a badly needed wake-up call to Europe about a flaw at the heart of its monetary union. That in turn has resulted in a move toward reforms that have the potential to lead to sensible financial regulation and transparency, as well as to strengthen Europe's union. These reforms include:

Where did that oil spill go? We've got millions of barrels of oil sloshing around off the most sensitive coastline on the continent, and for lack of oiled birds, the Deepwater Horizon Spill disappeared from the front pages today.

The history of American oil spills is the history of the environmental movement. The 1969 blowout of an oil platform off Santa Barbara, Calif., gave rise to Earth Day as well as President Richard Nixon’s National Environmental Policy Act, and led to a moratorium on new drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts. Twenty years later, the spill from the Exxon Valdez tanker near Alaska quashed the first Bush administration’s ambitions for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and ushered in the laws that made oil shippers liable for damage caused by their cargo.