My first reaction was shock… until reality stepped in. Sarah Palin says she will resign her post as governor of Alaska at the end of July. Nothing this woman does surprises me anymore. It took about a nanosecond for the pundits and second guessers to opine on her future from the cable channels to websites and Twitter. I haven’t a clue what she plans to do, if anything. She’s that flighty. I doubt she will disappear from the frozen tundra. It’s not in her DNA. She worked hard...

There was speculation that Alaska Governor (and right-wing darling) Sarah Palin would not run for re-election in 2010, both to give time to run for President in 2012, and to avoid a potentially embarrassing upset defeat which could derail her political career altogether (see Allen, George). But in a stunning announcement, Gov. Palin is in fact planning to resign the governorship, effective at the end of the month. Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell (R) will take over. I have to say, I consider this...

From MSNBC.com: Report: Palin resigning as Alaska governor I generally don’t try to anticipate the strategies of politicians, I have a life to live, but I certainly wasn’t expecting Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to resign her office this early, before campaigning for the 2012 Presidential election began in earnest. I’m sure even if there is a follow-up announcement regarding the reasons for the resignation, speculation will run rampant. This is why personalities matter in history....

UPDATE: MSNBC is now reporting that sources tell  Andrea Mitchell than Palin is out of politics for good. They indicate this is NOT a first step in a 2012 campaign for President but her decision to shift from political candidate to some sort of pundit type. I agree that there certainly seems to be more behind this story that meets the eye, perhaps a new scandal or possibly some personal family issue. While most of us were thinking we might see a Governor resign sometime this week it turns out to...

Laugh in Tune! Listen to the Capitol Steps’ 4th of July Show on your local NPR station or online! Tune in to hear Mark Sanford, Joe Biden, Arlen Spector, and several Somali pirates as we perform our July 4th radio special in front of a large audience in a confined space. Get local broadcast info now. Hear what’s in store on this promo clip. Find a Station or LISTEN ONLINE.

On the surface, it is extremely suspicious the New York Times news pages are working in concert with the Obama Administration’s initial steps towards immigration reform: A kinder, gentler approach in stark contrast to those employee raids conducted by the junior George Bush. I’ll use the link to the story and you can decide for yourself. What I do know is that Obama’s approach to sanction and fine employers and deport undocumented workers is the most reasonable one the government...

After plunging in 2008 and early this year, since March the Dow soared some 36 percent. In the last two weeks, however, it has taken another nasty slide. Could this a signal we are about to experience…. The Dreaded Double Dip There are few worse fears among the seers who give guidance to The Street, Than an upward turn they claimed to discern that suddenly beats a retreat. Then to save their reps, with practiced steps, they quickly do a back flip, And loudly amend: “This...

Is Michael Jackson - and along with him U2 and Madonna - the last vestige of a music industry in its death throes? For Switzerland’s Nachrichten newspaper, Patrik Etschmayer writes in part: “Ever since Michael Jackson, King of Pop, extra-terrestrial, and whatever else he was dubbed, shuffled off this mortal coil, commentators around the world have absolutely flipped. “What’s rarely mentioned is that Jackson, along with the other giants of the 1980s, such as Prince, Madonna...

A rogue oil commodities broker was caught manipulating a spike in world oil prices forcing his company to eat $10 million in losses. The disclosure occurred Tuesday when the price of crude oil reached a year’s high $73.50 a barrel at a time when the U.S. posts its highest demand on gasoline for the summer vacation season. By Thursday oil prices fell to $66.50 a barrel, down almost 10 per cent from Tuesday’s peak. The unauthorized trading took place on the Brent oil market in Europe, one of...

Being socked in by repeating lines of storm fronts, I find myself with more time for those pesky internets than I might have liked. Today’s exhibit in photography is an interesting effect found when rain clouds totally swamp a set of mountain peaks, with ghostly tendrils hanging down from the main cloud body like moss on a tree. There’s an entire line of mountain peaks beyond there which can not be seen for the density of the clouds. (As usual, be forewarned… the full size image...

Wired: A federal judge on Thursday overturned guilty verdicts against Lori Drew, issuing a directed acquittal on three misdemeanor charges. Drew, 50, was accused of participating in a cyberbullying scheme against 13-year-old Megan Meier who later committed suicide. The case against Drew hinged on the government’s novel argument that violating MySpace’s terms of service was the legal equivalent of computer hacking. But U.S. District Judge George Wu found the premise troubling. “It basically...

Our political Quote of the Day comes from Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt, on GOP opposition to President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor: Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will begin confirmation hearings July 13, shrugged off the GOP concerns being raised about Sotomayor, saying some in the GOP were going to oppose any Obama pick - “even if the president had nominated Moses.” Republicans “were going to object no matter...

I’ve written a lot already on the whole Mark Sanford saga and I don’t intend to write too much more on it this morning. Let me just say this: Is it really necessary to delve into the man’s psyche, and specifically to do so without actually examining him, and, what’s more, so publicly? He does seem to be going through some sort of adolescent mid-life crisis. And he does seem to be something of a narcissist. But what’s with one of his home-state publications, The State,...

With America mired in a recession, and the latest job numbers worse than expected, it’s a natural “hook” for a story about fireworks throughout the country. Is the recession causing fireworks displays to fizzle? There are some contradictory reports. For instance, NBC News reports that financial crisis has caused many communities to either eliminate fireworks, cut back or consider not lighting up the sky next year: The skies will be dark and silent over Colorado Springs, Colo.,...

The headline says it all: LAPD Under Scrutiny After Jackson’s Death Let the speculation and creation of conspiracy theories begin… — Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice. — Technorati : LAPD, Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson death Del.icio.us : LAPD, Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson death Zooomr : LAPD, Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson death Flickr : LAPD, Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson death

THE LITTLEST LAZARUS How can you have died? No, no. ‘Tooo young, tooo young,’ hoot the owls in the night pines… How can you have died with your wings spread out so beautifully, two little silver-gray fans with vanes perfectly aligned, literally zipped shut so as to make your feathers air-tight, impervious to being split by wind… All so you could fly. So you could sing. And fly. Weren’t you meant to remain airborne little dear one? I can see you fledged from the two-hundred...

With US support, the Organization of American States has threatened to expel Honduras. The Pentagon has cut off military ties. Our Secretary of State wants the actions of the Honduran government to be “condemned by all”. Kathy describes this situation as one of regional democracy at work. Personally, I am more inclined to James Kirchick’s view that it is extremely strange for real democratic governments to be lining up so passionately behind Manuel Zelaya, a disciple of Hugo...

Here he is, heaving and gasping, ecstasy contorting his face as he fantasizes:

This week, both the editorial columns in both the New Republic and the New Yorker are demanding that Barack Obama demonstrate his commitment to gay rights by revoking “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” so that gay men and women can serve openly in the US military. The editors at both publications seem to have forgotten the conventional wisdom of just a few months ago: Don’t make the same mistake that Clinton did in his first hundred days; Don’t define yourself by taking sides...

Hooman Majd in TNR: One Mousavi campaign manager was asked about the brutality of [the regime], way back, when [Mousavi] was prime minister in the 1980s. The staffer answered, “We were all Ahmadinejads then.” After 6/12, we Iranians are all Mousavis now, even those who voted for Ahmadinejad, whether they know it yet or not. Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

I don’t have much to add to the news that Fannie/Freddie are allowing homeowners to refinance for amounts up to 125% of their home value that Yves doesn’t cover. The intention of the program is very clear: it’s meant to allow people to stay in their homes/have more money for consumption (or other debt payments) in circumstances when they should most likely just throw in the towel and leave. It is a highly psychological maneuver at best, and a cynical way to generate more money for...

With the White House launching the U.S. military into its first big offensive in Afghanistan since President Obama took office, this angry and sarcastic article from Iran’s state-controlled Kayhan newspaper cannot be good news. Writing for Kayhan, Kian Mokhtari writes in part: “On Saturday, Obama rather swiftly brushed off a call by President Ahmadinejad for an apology for Washington’s ‘meddling in Iran’s internal affairs. ‘Obama replied ‘I don’t...

Please excuse me, I’m a military USAF wife for twenty-one years, and I’ve heard all cuss words, even those not yet invented. I rarely swear… except when something is so outrageous that only the Saxon mean can tell it like it is. In military talk, we say about stump stupid acts; Never, ever sh– where you eat, and especially, Do not sh– in your mess kit. But today the Washington Post Newspaper is trying to not only clean the immense fecal pile off their plates, but also...

The planetary Rorschach test that is Michael Jackson’s death continues with this article from Brazil’s Folha newspaper. For Folha, Joao Pereira Coutinho delves into the inevitable conspiracy theories surrounding Jackson’s death - and how the singer failed to grasp the myths he himself adopted and altered for his own purposes. Joao Pereira Coutinho writes in part: “Poor Michael Jackson. The man dies as we all die. Only more radically. With his heart prosaically saying goodbye...

Simply, the tide is rising against him. His Argentine mistress was his “soul mate,” he claims, but he wants to reconcile with his wife? Okay, but what does his wife think of that? “This was a whole lot more than a simple affair, this was a love story. A forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day.” Sure, I get that. And, in a way, I feel for him — and I feel sorry for him. It must be difficult to have all this out in the open. He admits that there...

Some recent changes at YouTube… They’ve doubled the allowable size of uploads: We’re happy to announce that the size of standard uploads has doubled from 1GB to 2GB. The increase means you can upload longer videos at a higher resolution as well as large HD files directly from your camera. In addition, the team’s implemented some new features to make it easier for you to show these videos off to the world. The changes allow you to share links directly to the HD version of your...

We all get sucker punched by clever advertisements.This one is from Air New Zealand which headlines its latest ad of nude pilots and stewards in body paint in order to get passengers’ attention on safety precautions. Bummer. I demand a refund.

Maybe you read about it at Crooks and Liars (which has the video), maybe you heard about last night on The Daily Show. Here’s what Michael Scheuer told Glenn Beck, crazy meets crazy, on Tuesday: The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States. Because it’s going to take a grass-roots, bottom-up pressure. Because these politicians prize their office, prize the praise of the media and the Europeans. It’s...

The Delhi High Court today declared Section 377 of Indian Penal Code (IPC), a relic of the British Raj, “violative of articles 14, 21 and 15 of the (Indian) Constitution in so far as it criminalizes consensual sexual acts of adults in private.” That means, from now on, police will no longer be able to arrest adult homosexuals having consensual sex. Gays have so far been living under terror in India because section 377 IPC empowered police to put behind bars those who committed “unnatural...

Michael Masnick provides a link-filled road map to the star-studded fire touched off by Malcolm Gladwell’s critical review of Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Masnick rolls in his own critique of the book and concludes: Gladwell’s review…does Anderson’s book a disservice. It criticizes it because it doesn’t answer questions the book didn’t set out to answer, and then attacks the picture today without acknowledging the trendlines and...

RJ Matson, The St. Louis Post Dispatch This cartoon is copyrighted and licensed to run on TMV. All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Confession time: I’m still all over the board on the health care reform debate. I share the cost concerns of the cost concerned. I share the coverage concerns of the coverage concerned. I like the “cooperatives” idea; but I’m not opposed to the “public plan” idea, especially if it can be honestly structured to “compete on a level playing field with private insurers,” as suggested by Sen. Schumer and seconded by Sen. Specter. Better yet, “the...

His death, at the age of 97, won’t get nearly the attention that Michael Jackson’s got, or perhaps even that Farrah Fawcett’s got, but Karl Malden was truly one of the great American artists of the last century, an exceptional film actor who starred in over 50 movies, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1951 — for which he won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor), On the Waterfront (1954 — as in Streetcar, playing opposite one of Marlon Brando’s iconic roles),...

Yes I know, the Sanford affair has been covered ad nauseam by the U.S. media. As a translator for Watching America, I have been scanning the Latin press for any spicy articles on the subject. Surprisingly—except for the initial flurry of rather factual articles—the Spanish and Latin press have been quite sedate about the entire episode. In a piece about a week ago, I posted a few links to some of those initial articles—articles with headlines such as “Governor Sanford had not...

There’s bad economic news for the nation and, in political terms, for the Obama administration: new statistics indicate the job market has worsened and that the stimulus package isn’t doing anything yet on the labor front: Employers in the U.S. cut 467,000 jobs in June, the unemployment rate rose and hourly earnings stagnated, offering little evidence the Obama administration’s stimulus package is shoring up the labor market. The payroll decline was more than forecast and followed...

Since I likely shall not get to do as much publishing as normal over the next week or so, I would share with our readers a bit of vacation experience. (And, according to some of you, a period of decompression which I’ve been badly in need of. I agree. I’ve been much more short tempered of late, and I offer my apologies for that.) In any event, if you click on the thumbnail image in the upper left, you’ll get a brief taste of what I’m currently up to. (Warning: The full size...

Clueless About America: Why Civics Education is Essential to America’s Health by Daniel Reeder I recently had a conversation with my father, who was questioning a long-held tenet of American Government, specifically the need for a judiciary free from political consideration. That conversation brought to mind an article I read some time ago in a legal publication about the need to teach Americans the rules of civics. It was my father’s ignorance that most disturbed me. Here was a man who...

Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune This cartoon is copyrighted and licensed to run on TMV. All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

In America, commerce trumps speech: In a 37-page ruling, [Judge Deborah A. Batts, of the United States District Court in Manhattan] issued a preliminary injunction — indefinitely barring the publication, advertising or distribution of the book in this country — after considering the merits of the case. The book has been published in Britain. In a suit filed on June 1, lawyers for Mr. Salinger in the copyright infringement lawsuit contended that the new work was derivative of “Catcher” and...

While Mark Sanford continues to go for his own jugular with new confessions that will force him out of office, there is news about his neighbor to the north, John Edwards, that should bury him politically once and for all. The two offer a fascinating contrast in self-destructive styles. Now that his erotic secrets are out, the South Carolina governor just can’t stop blabbing that he has “crossed lines” with other women, each revelation costing him the loss of more political allies,...

Rhodes Cook on THE GOP: POISED FOR ANOTHER QUICK COMEBACK? The current state of the Republican Party is a good-news, bad-news situation. The good news is that the GOP has gone through several debilitating elections over the last generation and each time has recovered quickly. The bad news is that the conditions may not be as ripe this time for a fast Republican comeback as they were after the elections of 1964, 1976 and 1992. The presidential election of 2008 is the fourth since 1964 that has left...

What’s at the intersection of politics and technology? More than a thousand people at 60th and Broadway on June 29 and 30th, aka Personal Democracy Forum 2009. I attended Day 2 of PdF and suggest that first, before anything else, you check out the new IT Dashboard that lets you see how your taxpayer dollars are being spent by the federal government in a way you’ve never seen before (the system is said to have crashed just an hour after it was unveiled yesterday but it’s fine right...

It looks like <insert your own metaphor here> has come to pass and Governor Sanford will very soon become former Governor Sanford. But then you never know what this guy is gonna do……

Could this ultimately end in charges of criminal manslaughter?

David Fitzsimmons, The Arizona Star This cartoon is copyrighted and licensed to run on TMV. All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and prominent leader of the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) movement against Israel, is an apologist for anti-Semitism at the UN. Indeed, she goes out and directly blames the victims, accusing them of “sabotage” for having the temerity to call out bigotry at the Durban II conference this past year.

The member nations of the Organization of American States came together in a closed-door all-night emergency session today in Washington, D.C. that resulted in the Honduran government being given three days to restore Pres. Manuel Zelaya to his rightful position as Honduras’s democratically elected leader, or face the possibility of having the country’s membership in the OAS suspended:

Many amazing things were accomplished in the days before computers became ubiquitous and the world wide web became a distraction as well as a tool. Nazi Germany built the first jet fighter in the world, and was in the process of building a plane that bears a remarkable resemblance to the modern B2 bomber (although I think the stealth aspects of the “Hilter’s Stealth-Fighter” were an accidental byproduct and not the result of considered design). There was no computer modeling available...

Today is the day that the Obama administration is supposed to finally release that much-anticipated 2004 Inspector-General’s report on the Bush administration’s use of torture. The CIA has already twice pushed the release date back; the most recent delay being the one Greg Sargent reported last week:

Andrew Sullivan takes a break from the Vanity Fair fuss to point to Sarah “I’m a runner” Palin in Runner’s World. The photo above is from photographer Brian Adams’ slide show. Sullivan quotes a Dish reader: It’s not proper to display the flag to have it draped over a chair. Just imagine the outrage on Fox News if there was a photo of Obama and an improper display of the Stars and Stripes! He points to an online guide to flag etiquette “which Palin clearly...

From Woot: New mascot: a wide-eyed lemur voiced by Justin Timberlake DRM limitations require biometrically encoded MP3s audible only to the purchaser Each torrent will include a 4GB “bonus pack” with different versions of Solitaire and a playable demo of “Dinosaur Alphabet Learning” Seeders get points that can be redeemed for novelty pencil erasers or plastic whistles Before you can get any torrents, you have to scroll through several pages of idiotic quizzes taken by “friends”...

Have you even wondered as I have about the people who make Keith Olbermann’s “Worst Persons” list who are not politicians or household names? I confess it is oftentimes my favorite segment on his nightly show on MSNBC. Tuesday night Olbermann singled out a San Diego County sheriff’s deputy who he said maced and roughly threw to the ground and then handcuffed the hostess of an event at her home where a neighbor complained about loud noises. He made it sound the deputy over-reacted...

In 1971, while Americans were still debating how and when to leave Vietnam, a young officer in battle fatigues named John Kerry testified before Congress. I don’t remember his exact words during that appearance. But it came down to something like this: What do we tell the family of the last soldier who dies in Vietnam that it was all a mistake? Yesterday, on the same day that the last combat troops left cities in Iraq, the U.S. military announced that four more troops had died the day before...

He probably doesn’t have many remaining friends on the left, as it is, and I’m guessing he’ll not win them back (or win over new, leftish friends) with gut-check statements like these. Regardless — for what it’s worth, Senator — at least one independent voter continues to appreciate and applaud your call-’em-like-you-see-’em approach. And I say that having voted for the presidential candidate who was not the one you supported during the campaign. *...

Our political Quote of the Day comes from a must-read-in-full piece by Dick Polman, as he notes that Al Franken finally being declared the winner in the hotly contested Minnesota race will most assuredly not mean easy sailing for Democrats — and could foreshadow problems for President Barack Obama: Unless Obama can somehow twist arms in the tradition of Lyndon Johnson, it’s hard to see how he can herd the 60 cats. And not even LBJ, if resurrected today, could twist arms the way he did...