There is a one-ups-man’s-ship game being played by the more responsible anchors of the three major cable networks. The bait is the same. Each uses a countdown on the number of days some bloke in the news fails to appear on their shows. This copycat format goes like this: Chris Matthews of MSNBC’s Hardball issues an ultimatum invitation to any Republican elected politician to say he does not take marching orders from conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh. Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday...

Sports fans, sports writers and sports broadcasters are idiots. I know. I’ve been all three. I give you LeBron James, one of the greatest athletes of modern times. When LeBron was drafted as the most hyped high school basketball player in history by the Cleveland Cavaliers seven years ago, I was worried. Not for the fame I knew he would achieve on the court — barring injuries — but of his pedigree. I had seen too many athletes from low income to ghetto families strike it rich and blow it, ending...

Call me an elitist. A prude. A dinosaur. But, I’m a purist when it comes to ethics. It is who I am, how I was raised and what I stand for. I am also a pragmatist. We do not live in a perfect world. And I respect those who make an honest buck. So, it was with heavy heart that I’m reading the New York Times story on ethical and possible tax evasion problems of Transocean, the platform owner of Deepwater Horizons leased to BP that exploded and killed 11 crew in the Gulf of Mexico.. And run into...

If you think the Deepwater Horizons oil blowout disaster, the worst in the nation’s history, is horrific, add this to the on-going horror story: An exhaustive investigative report by the Associated Press released Wednesday said there are more than 27,000 abandoned wells in the Gulf and 17% or 4,590 could be leaking. Abandoned off-shore Gulf wells are not inspected but the rate of abandoned wells on land that leak is that 17% factor. The AP said there was concern for at least 3,500. The AP investigation...

The Justice Department filed suit as promised Tuesday against Arizona claiming the state’s anti-illegal immigrant law is invalid under the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution and must be struck down.” Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 is scheduled to become effective July 31. The Justice Department’s next step is seeking an injunction to block its enforcement. The suit was filed in federal court in Phoenix and names the state and Gov. Jan Brewer defendants. Among its...

There’s a former White House policy adviser in the Carter and Clinton administrations who says President Obama can bypass Congress on additional stimulus efforts by the stroke of his pen. If I understand this law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, an executive order to compliant federal contractors would improve wages and job standards that would set an example to the rest of the nation’s businesses and decrease the shackles of national unemployment. No legislation required....

I can’t help from wondering if new Afghan NATO commander Gen. David Petraeus plea for unity is letting the country’s Interior Ministry take credit for announcing a sting operation that killed 63 insurgents and confiscated 16 tons of opium. All the news accounts of the bloody sting in southern Afghanistan near the Pakistan border indicated only that some locals may have been undercover agents who infiltrated the drug processing plants blown to smithereens. The Interior announcement came...

The White House political and economic teams are split over adding more stimulus or cutting the deficit to salvage the sputtering economy. That puts them in the same boat as the rest of the country. No one knows what the hell to do. President Obama, as is his nature, is seeking a middle road of using the best options of both arguments. The split in the White House was outlined in a boring analysis in the New York Times Saturday I’ll try to enliven. But, first the schism within 1600 Pennsylvania...

Joe Gandelman, my brother Larry, my sister-in-law of another brother, my cousin Pete Ellsworth and longtime friend Steve Casey all called me this morning asking what the hell was I doing in Scotland and asking for $1,500 to get home. Well, sports fans, I got hacked. For those of you on my email address book who got the strange email written by some foreigner not versed in English grammar, sorry. For those of you not in my email address book but who still received the request for dough, forgetaboutit....

The nation’s unemployment rate dropped to 9.5%, the government reported Friday, the lowest level since June 2009. That is terrible, depressing news when you consider 652,000 left the labor force after failing to find jobs. About 1.3 million of the 6 million unemployed have exhausted their unemployment benefits. The data released by the Labor Department Thursday and Friday in many sectors indicates to me that what gains we made as an indirect result of Congress’s $787 billion stimulus...

Shortly after President Obama in a highly political speech Thursday said the U.S.-Mexican border is the safest in 20 years, 21 persons were killed in a gun battle between rival drug and immigrant trafficking gangs. Although the shootout occurred 12 miles south of the Arizona border, residents north of the border fear the motive for this kind of violence spills into the United States in other forms. One aspect of such collateral damage is Phoenix being turned into the kidnapping capital of North America,...

One thing President Obama is not is accused of being incapable of walking and chewing gum at the same time. The president has so many major platters on his agenda it dwarfs the size of a picnic table jammed with plates of enchiladas and tamales at a Mexican fiesta. For the first time in 18 months as president, Obama Thursday delivered a major speech calling for immigration reform legislation. It fulfills a campaign promise to his Hispanic supporters. He called for a path to citizenry for an estimated...

Even before she became Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi was a lightening rod for the Republican attack machine, the epitome of a liberal, free-spending Democrat from — gasp — San Francisco. In my family and circle of friends in California, Pelosi is the face of all what is wrong with Democratic liberals for she is seen as an elitist, environmental tree hugger, bleeding heart, anti-war activist, big government advocate and, worst of all, from a city that harbors illegal immigrants and...

The $787 billion stimulus package passed by Congress in 2009 did better than Republicans would have you believe and worse than the progressive Democrats maintain. The U.S. economy needs another transfusion of gigantic proportions but without the pratfalls of the last one to avoid what Kensyian economist Paul Krugman predicts a third prolonged depression since 1873. Actually, I have one foot on Krugman’s boat and one on the dock. Which poison would you prefer: Risking inflation and a massive...

To hear Democratic media cheerleaders tell it, Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner had a tough day at the office Tuesday. The office of the editorial board of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, that is. His interview did not go well and the film clips I saw made him look like he swallowed a month’s prescription of a sedative moments before the sit down. I disagree with Rachael Maddow his comments spoken in a monotone laced with no doze may cost the Republicans the November midterm elections. Judge...

In a 1995 book review, Elena Kagan wrote that the Supreme Court confirmation hearings were an “air of vacuity and farce.” Now that Kagan is the nominee, she changed her mind and agrees the lifetime appointees should remain mum if questions from senators “have some bearing on a case that might some day come before the Court.” Her epiphany came, she testified Tuesday, when Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah took her aside and urged caution in her testimony. Furthermore, she testified she...

A friend from the 1960s tracked me down after all these years and in our email exchanges asked what I thought about Joe McCain. Joe is Arizona Sen. John McCain’s younger brother. He worked briefly for the two San Diego dailies in the late 1960s where my friend and I toiled. Joe immediately established himself as a legend. Not as a reporter. As a prankster of which survivors of those days still fondly recall. Joe is the literal definition of a Navy “brat.” It was beneath his dignity...

The loss of Sen. Robert Byrd who died Monday is not any particular game changer of politics played out in Washington for it is peanuts compared to other people’s pork he fed the folks in his home state of West Virginia. Byrd was dubbed the “King of Pork” and damned proud wearing that mantel no matter how hard the watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste tried to embarrass him. Byrd even flipped the bird at his detractors. I come before you today not to bury or malign the...

There are conflicting reports out of the Afghanistan capital of Kabul that President Hamid Karzai has held face-to-face talks with Sirajuddin Haqqani, leader of a particularly brutal militant group with ties to al-Qaida. Al Jazeera, a normally reliable Arab news agency in these matters, reported the meeting Sunday. The presidential palace denied such a meeting. The U.S. Embassy in Kabul had nothing to report. British Foreign Secretary William Hague said earlier in the week that the Haqqanis were...

I have battled obesity most of my adult life and in the past year considered gastric bypass surgery or at least a lap band procedure. I mention it only because a story Saturday is circulating about a New Jersey researcher who concluded two family members having the surgery are more successful in weight loss and improved health yardsticks than those who try it alone. That makes sense even though it rules me out since I’m single. Dr. Gus Slotman, a clinical professor of surgery at the University...

Let’s see if I got this right. The Washington Post hired an on-line reporter to cover the Tea Party and other conservative causes because his resume was that of a libertarian conservative. Three months later the Post fires the reporter, Dave Weigel, because a gossip website published snide remarks in emails he wrote about the very conservatives he was paid to cover. That’s when all hell broke loose. You would have thought Ben Bradlee, managing editor of the Washington Post, had fired...

In the polarization of politics, parsing words of politicians has become a fine art form by opponents to score points as if the public has a mental scoreboard in their heads. I’m drawing from memory here as most voters would on criticism tossed at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Banking chairman Chris Dodd. After passage of the health reform legislation, Pelosi said we won’t know what’s in the law until it plays out in real time. After the joint conference agreement on the...

Relief well drilling, capping and cleanup crews will be forced to evacuate in as early as three days if the first tropical storms of the hurricane season find a path to the Gulf of Mexico. The National Hurricane Center by mid-Friday placed a 70% chance one of the storms with winds in excess of 100mph will whip through the area where an oil well blowout of volcanic proportions has spewed an estimated 60,000 barrels of oil and gas daily since April 20. However, computer models were divided evenly whether...

In the campaign to be elected California governor — a job no one in their right mind would want — the opening salvos between Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown perfectly frame the candidates’ Achilles heels. The Republican Whitman paints Brown as a chameleon in a television ad released Friday. In a montage of old news video clips, one shows a 1992 debate where Bill Clinton says Brown “reinvents himself every year or two.” Brown’s union supporters earlier blanketed the...

Provincetown, Mass., school district now allows free condoms given to first graders upon request. This is serving a softball right up Bill O’Reilly’s alley. Film at the click of your finger.