Few eyes in the world, including those in California, will be focusing on Tuesday’s state special election which sets out to prove it is the most financially dysfunctional government in the nation. Most of the six ballot measures, according to recent polls, will fail, sending the state into deeper economic chaos. Even if they pass, the state’s fiscal problems will only be prolonged. The only measure expected to pass is one limiting pay increases for state legislators. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger...

A terrible scenario is unfolding in the Sadr City district of Baghdad where the U.S. military outposts will pull out June 30. Some U.S. and Iraqi military officials and civilian leaders believe the impoverished Shiite community will return to lawlessness and ignite a civil war. “When the Americans leave, everything will be looted because no one will be watching,” an Iraqi army lieutenant newly deployed there said. “There will be a civil war — without a doubt,” predicted...

About a month ago John McCain was asked on one of those political talk shows who he thought were viable Republican presidential candidates in 2012. The first name mentioned was Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman. My first reaction was “who is that guy?” I filed the name in the back of my mind as a to-do list to check out some day. Utah is not exactly the news capital of the universe. President Barack Obama beat me to the punch. The president Saturday nominated Huntsman as U.S. Ambassador to China. In...

Earnings of America’s blue collar working class has lost ground in recent years because of a variety of factors, one of which is the decline of organized labor as the nation shifts from a manufacturing to a service-oriented economy. To reverse this trend, President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, labor leaders and a Democratic-controlled Congress are pushing for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act — also known as “card check.” It is akin to a child of divorced parents,...

I can’t remember what I did yesterday. But I can recall a scenario in which the Clinton administration and in its early stages the Bush White House promoting home ownership for all Americans. Clinton got his folks in Congress to soften lending standards at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. A housing market bubble ballooned for several years, aided by Bush’s penchant for deregulation. While everyone enjoyed the good times, the housing bubble burst as we now know because of subprime loans, default...

HELP WANTED: The Obama administration is seeking private investors to infuse billions of dollars into struggling banks. SERVICES OFFERED: Dozens of equity capitalists are standing by to invest billions in these banks. Problem solved? Not exactly. Here’s the catch: Investors want controlling interest in the banks they salvage. The Federal Reserve says no they can’t buy controlling interest. Folks, what we have here is a game of chicken. It will start playing out Thursday when Treasury...

So much has been written and aired about what’s wrong with the Republican Party that I figured, what the hell, maybe former Sen. Howard Baker of Tennessee, writing an op-ed piece in Tuesday’s Washington Post, would put his finger on it. I was shocked, I tell you. Shocked. “Things change because things change, not because of any ideological primacy or purity on a particular end of the political spectrum,” Baker writes. The depth of his perception is as deep as a 90-pound jackhammer...

If President Obama sticks to his way of governing incubated in his days at Harvard Law School, his top priority for a new Supreme Court Justice will not be a woman or Hispanic. It will be a person skilled in constitutional law but who by judicial demeanor understands the impact jurists have on the common man. If that person he selects is a woman or Hispanic, so much the better. When Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review he remained aloof to the student rebellion against professors and judges...

I’ll cut to the chase. My grade for President Barack Obama’s first 100 days in office is B+. Now, I’m writing this off the top of my head without referring to notes because this type of grading is always subjective. The kind of images embedded in our minds. The charisma factor: A+ This is a no brainer. Obama gets a break here. All one does is compare Obama with the last eight years of George W. Bush. No contest. Obama’s job approval ratings hold steady around 60%. Polls strongly...

What a great day for news. Here’s my favorites: (1) Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania is switching political parties as he announced he is running for re-election in the 2010 Democratic primary. Translation: He thinks he would lose to Republican Pat Toomey in the GOP primary who damned near beat him last time out. “I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans,” Specter said, adding that the “change in party affiliation does not mean that...

Two stories about two gifted teenagers struck my fancy today. One passed her three college entrance exams with perfect scores and will enroll at Princeton. The other is expected to be the No. 1 pick in the National Basketball Association draft when he becomes eligible in two years. While the 17-year-old girl from Michigan is lauded for her great mind, the 17-year-old from San Diego steals the limelight. He is Jeremy Tyler, a 6-foot-11 forward, who announced last week he will skip his senior year...

The nation’s financial markets collapse has introduced to the public new games the institutions played in pursuit of the almighty buck. One under the radar is auction-rate securities. “Auction-rate preferred securities is the largest largest fraud ever perpetuated by Wall Street on investors,” said Harry Newton, a private investor who operates the AuctionRatePreferreds.org website. “It dwarfs all frauds in history, including (Bernard) Madoff.”

The political definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. This applies to the sadist(s) in the Bush administration ordering waterboarding of two al-Qaeda prisoners 266 times. Even the Central Intelligence Agency interrogators questioned their superiors about the continued practice of brutal interviewing techniques. It begs the question of more valuable information obtained between the first and 83rd waterboarding in March 2003 against Khalid Shaikh...

People who think outside the box are either nut cases or geniuses. Isaac Newton, Socrates, Leonardo daVinci, Henry Ford and Newt Gingrich come to mind. Now comes columnist and author Thomas Ricks with a proposal I’m uncertain jumps the shark. Ricks proposes elimination of West Point and other service academies to, uh, save money. The savings would expand ROTC scholarships. I can only presume Ricks is serious and by coincidence or timed at the moment President Obama is asking his cabinet to...

I enjoy reading The Economist because most of the time it offers a dispassionate view of American politics. This article on the Obama haters speaks for itself.

Justice is in the eye of the beholder. Most Americans are repulsed at the brutal interrogation techniques sometimes used by our Central Intelligence Agency on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. You want to be really repulsed? In Pakistan, al-Qaida and Taliban thugs shoot you by a firing squad for spying. No trial. Just a forced confession. By their convoluted reasoning, it’s humane. They used to chop your head off. Here’s a detailed account of justice as carried out by the Taliban this past...

That was a gutsy decision by President Barack Obama to release detailed Justice Department memos authorizing brutal interrogation techniques by the Central Intelligence Agency while at the same time announcing he would not prosecute the agency’s operatives who carried them out. It was a decision of biblical proportions comparable to the one made by King Solomon. Metaphorically, he cut the baby in half. By releasing the classified memos, Obama appeased the piranhas looking for blood. By assuring...

If I wore a pacemaker it would have beeped in alarm mode upon reading David Lazarus’s column in The Los Angeles Times that my cable company may charge me as much as $150 a month for online access. By coincidence, an hour earlier I ripped an $82.66 check to Time Warner for Internet and basic cable television access. This monthly ransom note amounts to about 7% of my gross monthly income. For sheer entertainment value, I’m willing to pay the price. Certainly, almost doubling the cost will...

We can only hope Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke revised his speech Tuesday claiming the economy is showing “tentative signs” of improvement. At least President Obama in a major speech on the economy later in the day wasn’t caught with his pants on fire. More on that later. In remarks prepared for students and faculty at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Bernanke mentioned improvements in recent data on home and auto sales, home building and consumer spending as flickering signs of encouragement. In...

My cousin Peter Ellsworth, an attorney now retired but still prominent in the San Diego business and health care community, once commented tongue-in-cheek he didn’t realize there were moderate websites on the Internet. I told him I was a frequent contributor to themoderatevoice.com and boasted the stature of that venue was gaining respect throughout the communications world. Never in my six months of affiliation with TMV has that respect shown so brightly on the news and commentary postings...

Being Easter Sunday and all that, I felt redemption for something I wrote in passing reference about Rachel Maddow. I called the MSNBC cable news hostess a “liberal flame thrower.” Maddow is, yes, a liberal. The “flame thrower” element is a description applied by Fox’s Bill O’Reilly for anyone on the left of which he disagrees. I’m in agreement with Ms. Maddow more often than not. As is so often the case, the post in question mentioned Maddow once in a critical...

Certainly, I cannot be the only one on the planet wondering how in hell can a bunch of Somali renegade pirates outwit, out maneuver and out perform the world’s combined fleet of navy vessels. And earning big bucks in the process. Perhaps the key is that so far the pirates haven’t killed any of their hostages. And, so far, only the French have shown some spunk in retaliatory commando attacks on the pirates, the latest killing three pirates and one hostage. But the U.S. and other nations...

I’ve been reluctant commenting on the demise of newspapers, a place of work I enjoyed immensely for a quarter century. But I’m a fossil, quitting the business in 1985, and lack the hands-on experience of what really happened during the past 29 years. I do know this: Federal bailout for newspapers is a really really dumb proposal. Difficult as it is to say, newspapers are dinosaurs. It reminds me of a lousy movie starring Danny DeVito and Gregory Peck about a New England wire manufacturing...

Next Wednesday, April 15, is the deadline to file our income tax returns. ‘Tis the season for creative lawyers and taxpayers to take advantage of weird deductions in the more than 20,000 pages of rules and regulations established by the Internal Revenue Service. Yes, 20,000 pages. That’s equivalent of reading a 400-page book by Ernest Hemingway 50 times. And, nowhere near as concise. Every year during the drudgery of preparing our taxes, some expert pounces on the wild and wacky tax exemptions...

For a guy in the broadcast industry for 30 years, one would expect Ed Schultz not to be conned by a politician. That’s exactly what transpired in Monday’s launching of “The Ed Show” on MSNBC. Politicians are notorious for not answering questions directly. President Barack Obama is the best of the best. His Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is in his boss’s league. Mr. Ed, as I shall call him until he gets his act together, asked what safeguards are in place so small...