The vilest four-letter swear word in Washington is so vulgar it forces an extra letter: Taxes. Fiscal policy wonks are salivating when Congress takes up legislation later this summer to replace the Bush tax cuts that dip into Middle Class earnings. The Obama administration frames the issue this way: Continuing tax breaks for the rich will not help lift the economy, but eliminating them will help reduce the deficit. Here’s the deal: No legislation – The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 will expire...

For more than a year, MSNBC television host Ed Schultz has hammered away at Washington for favoring large financial institutions over small community banks. The treatise of his rants is that the community banks cannot borrow at the same low rates as the Big Banks. One of the results is lack of equity the big guys receive the little guys don’t from the Federal Reserve. And that translates into fewer consumer loans on the streets, of, let’s say, New Prague, Minn. Poor Ed doesn’t have much of...

There is no such creature as an indispensable bureaucrat in Washington. Elizabeth Warren comes close. Yeah, we heard that before with the nomination of Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary. Warren is different. She’s on the short list to run the new consumer financial protection agency. Warren designed the damned thing. That’s what. To question her credentials is like asking Tony Gwynn and Ted Williams can they hit. Warren, a law professor at Harvard, proposed such an agency in 2007: “A new regulatory...

Let’s stop pussyfooting around the Shirley Sherrod story and go for the jugular. I don’t give a poop whether Andrew Breitbart and his Big Government website is a conservative post dead set on destroying the Democratic Party. What I do care about is that Breitbart, artificially inflated with a profile in New Yorker Magazine and a darling contributor of false stories to Fox News, the Drudge Report and Rush Limbaugh, fashions himself as a member of the “Free Press.” He is not. He is only exercising...

The federal government, in its infinite wisdom, is spending money to save an estimated $110 billion in fraud and waste. With little fanfare, President Obama signed into law Thursday the Improper Payments Elimination and Recovery Act sponsored by Democratic Sen. Thomas Carper of Delaware and Rep. Patrick Murphy of Pennsylvania. It is designed to reduce the benefits sent to dead people, fraudulent Medicare and Medicaid payments and overpaying government contractors. That waste amounted to $110 billion...

Guess what it cost Tiger Woods for all those out-of-wedlock sexual trysts that caught up with the professional golf star last year? Twenty-two million dollars. Those were only from loss of endorsements. The divorce settlement with wife Elin Nordegren was another $100 million, which included $75 million in child support for his two children. Don’t feel sorry for Tiger. He’s still filthy rich. And he still leads the sports world in endorsements at an estimated $90 million, calculated by Sports...

I was so angry at myself and the craft I serve yesterday that I did what Keith Olbermann does, take the rest of the day off. My sin was rushing to judgment in the firing of Shirley Sherrod, the black USDA official in Georgia based on a video from a website I don’t trust and this conspiratorial account on another website about the now defunct Journolist blog, a group of liberal journalists and academic advocates. On the Sherrod story, I should have known better. It didn’t pass the smell test....

Race relations in the United States is getting testy. Read this account and the smoking gun video attached. I have a theory. Much of the raw feelings are triggered by old animosities surfaced during economic hard times where everyone is looking out for themselves. It’s the me-against-them Catch 22. Blame your woes on the other guy. The biggest victim of this prejudice is President Barack Obama whose election in 2008 was perfect timing for a black and now the worst of times. I fear for his life...

It’s official. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenneger signed a bill making it California state law honoring former governor and President Ronald Reagan on his birthday, Feb. 6. Schwarzenneger signed a second bill Monday establishing a state commission to plan celebrations for the 100th anniversary of Reagan’s birth in 1911. Reagan joins a list of California notables with special commemorative days that include gay rights activist Harvey Milk and environmentalist John Muir. Despite the popular former Republican’s...

My idea of a hero is not some overpaid professional ballplayer hitting a home run to win the seventh game of the World Series. It is always a someone no one ever heard of. Like Ben Sater. Ben is 19, a resident of the Dallas suburb McKinney who Monday completed his dream of raising $1 million for the children’s hospital that provided free treatment to repair congenital damage to his fingers. The payback began with golf tournaments in 2003 for children ages 7-18. Each child is asked to contribute...

When I was a child and completed my chores I went in search of amusement. Here it is, some 60 years later, and I find old habits don’t disappear with age. For amusement purposes after scouring the news sources for partisan politics, the sour economy and the dreadful oil blowout that is a daily soap opera, I head directly to the Huffington Post to indulge in their vast assortment of offerings. The HuffPo never fails. Monday it was Schieffer, Beck and Olbermann. What dastardly deeds were these guys...

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is juggling two beasts in her much ballyhooed trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan to shore up support for U.S. policy and fortunes. Broken down to the commonest denominator, it is squashing al-Qaida and juicing up nation building. Both being paid for with money borrowed from China, for the most part. Clinton wrapped up her visit to Islamabad Monday and takes the road show to Kabul where the message to the two nation’s leaders is the same: Rid the image of the people...

I was shocked, I tell you shocked. Muslims want to build a mosque near my backyard, here in Temecula, Calif., a city of 100,000 conservatives in southwest Riverside County. “The Islamic foothold is not strong here, and we really don’t want to see their influence spread,” said Pastor Bill Rench of the Calvary Baptist Church. The Baptist Bastille is located on a cul-de-sac where the Islamic Center of Temecula Valley plans to build. Rench said said the two religions “mix like oil and water”...

As I write this, BP and government scientists were still monitoring extended pressure tests and seismic probes on the site of the blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. Bob Cavner, the oceanic engineer who is becoming a media star explaining the capping process, said the pressure of 6,700 pounds per square inch (psi) is below what Adm. Thad Allen, the government’s on-site commander, hoped to rise to 8,000 psi or better. Cavner suggests a small leak in the pipe between 1,200 and 18,300 feet below the wellhead....

Two Utah state employees have been suspended and at least a dozen more are under investigation for anonymously releasing private databank names of 1,300 alleged undocumented residents. Ironically, the names of the two suspended employees in the Department of Workforce Services were not released. Between 1,200 and 1,400 DWS employees can access the records of those on Medicaid. State investigators said this “list” was finely culled over a period of months and first issued to U.S. Immigration...

In Utah, hackers or undisclosed state employees have sent an anonymous letter to government officials containing the names, addresses and other personal data of 1,300 residents they claim are illegal immigrants. The list initially was sent in April to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Salt Lake City. The same list or one updated with additional names was sent earlier this week to state and local agencies and some news outlets. “We ask that you remember who you work for in this country...

In 18 months, President Obama has captained three major pieces of legislation with an economic stimulus package, healthcare reform and overhaul of financial institution regulations. Yet, his popularity is heading south and if it were not for 90% of his black constituents could reach depths not seen since George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter. Here’s my assessment. Jobs. Despite flutters of improvements, the American people consider the economy still in a recession. The mood is angry and confidence shaken....

I have been waiting patiently as most of the civilized world that ought to give a damn should on whether this latest attempt to cap the BP oil blowout is successful. What is critical is not that the cap has plugged the gusher 5,000 feet under the Gulf of Mexico. But the pressure tests as to the well’s integrity 8,000 feet below close to the reservoir holding billions of barrels of crude. Lose pressure, and we have a worst case scenario that even the relief wells might fail. If the thousands of...

Someone of greater stature and fortune than myself once wrote that the only thing you can count on is death and taxes. Two scribes, Dave Carpenter and Stephen Ohlemacher, were chastised for writing in the Huffington Post how the estimated $1.1 billion fortune of George Steinbrenner might escape inheritance tax to his heirs because of the timing of his death Tuesday. My colleague felt the timing of the article was rather crass. I know the feeling. I wrote a column on the day Sen. Robert Byrd died,...

I spent the morning researching records of Senate Republicans who have voted in lockstep against extending unemployment benefits to some 2.5 million Americans. Although some temporary watered down version may pass, much of the blame is on the shoulders of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for screwing up the process. Rather, my focus was on the Republicans as to why their apparent disdain for the unemployed now numbering in total at about 26 million. One argument is the $22 billion additional cost...

My day brightened when I read that Newt Gingrich is “seriously” considering running for president in 2012. If he does, what Gingrich would that be. Would it be a replay of his performance as Speaker of the House from 1995 to 1999. Would it be Gingrich the college professor. Gingrich the historian. Gingrich the fiction writer. Gingrich the political consultant. Gingrich the brains behind the nonpartisan 527 group American Solutions For Winning The Future. Gingrich the mouthpiece for Fox News....

A series of bomb blasts in crowds watching the Word Cup finals in Kampala, Uganda, killing at least 74 people is a reminder that Al-Qaida is a terrorist group with no borders. U.S. intelligence officials have been telling us since 9/11 a favorite weapon of Al-Qaida is indiscriminate bombing of large gatherings, preferably those marking patriotic, religious or sporting events. The Uganda bombings fit the Al-Qaida M.O. to the letter and intelligence officials are pointing the finger to the Somalia-based...

Oh, you poor, maligned Tea Party advocates who want to address your grievances through means of the Second Amendment. You poor, neglected souls who want government off your back. Less rules, less taxes, less spending of your blood, sweat and tears for someone who does not look like you. You think you have it tough? Some of you have even suggested seceding from the United States as a last resort to retain your freedoms. Furthermore, how would you like it if the government announced a 70% tax increase,...

Atty. Gen. Eric Holder said Sunday the Justice Department will file a second law suit against Arizona if they find evidence of racial profiling in the multi-litigated state law aimed at prosecuting illegal immigrants. Interviewed on CBS’s “Face The Nation,” Holder said Justice will monitor the law as it is applied and sometime in the next six months to a year decide whether civil rights violations have become evident. The state law goes into effect July 29 barring an injunction pending before...

Unless you eat organically grown fruits and vegetables whose prices are a rip-off, the veggies you select from the produce aisles in your grocery store lack the nutrients they carried 30 years ago. The reason is synthetic fertilizers and faster growing hybrids that growers believe produce large specimens more attractive to dimwitted buyers. A review of USDA data shows broccoli, for example, contained 130mg of calcium in 1950 compared to 48mg in 1999. The loss of nutrients is across the board in...