The good news is Afghanistan has at least $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits that could transform that impoverished war-torn nation what oil accomplished for Saudi Arabia. The bad news is the minerals will test corrupt Afghan government and tribal leaders, stimulate the Taliban to retake the country and China and the rest of the drooling major powers to compete and exploit its new found riches. This is a game-changing story first reported Monday by veteran writer James Risen of the New York...

As many of us who believe in strict enforcement of governmental regulations designed for safety and protection of consumers and the environment, the concept is idyllic in theory but detrimental far too often in practice. As far back as the Franklin Roosevelt administration, Americans have fought the battle of what’s too much and what’s too little in our regulation of commerce. My concept has always been to do just enough to level the playing field and keep the bastards honest. What I...

Through no fault of his own, Alvin Greene landed in the middle of disgraceful South Carolina politics as if he arrived from Mars. Greene won the Democratic nomination to oppose Republican incumbent Jim DeMint for one of the Palmetto state’s two U.S. Senate seats in Tuesday’s primary elections. For four days I have been squeamish to write about Greene because he is an honest, proud man who in my opinion is a pawn of some demonic Manchurian candidate plot hatched by the sleazebags who...

So much of the BP oil spill damage in the Gulf of Mexico is predicated on educated guesses but the speculation I consider most relevant in the long-term is whether the British-based conglomerate will declare bankruptcy for its North American division. At first blush, the idea appears preposterous because it would involve shutting down or selling all its drilling and contractual obligations to the U.S. Defense Department. BP is the world’s fourth most profitable industry and Britain’s...

I have always detested being accused of being a member of what I think is described as “herd” or “pack” journalist. I detest labels assessed by journalists on groups such as the Tea Party because even though they share a few common bonds, they are as different in South Carolina as they are in California. I detest Sean Hannity’s ilk that all Democrats are liberal and even a few moderate ones are taking our nation down in a hand basket. I detest the blanket phrase that...

California Republican voters love their new-found fat-cat beach girls Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina and had the good sense to chain the lifeguards to their stations while kicking sand in the face of the original birther girl Orly Taitz. The Democrats, meanwhile, had a bunch of putzes on the ballot, including an old geezer who was the state’s governor about a zillion election cycles ago who they picked for governor again because his competition was more putzes. While on a roll, voters from...

The unions and progressive put their money where their mouth was on Bill Halter in the Arkansas Democratic Senate runoff race and ate it because President Obama’s No. One arm-twister and fix-it man Bill Clinton still got it by backing incumbent Blanche Lincoln. So, a jubilant and surprised Lincoln survives a scare from a formidable opponent who really did run a good race as a long shot only to face a longer shot herself in the November general election against Republican Rep. John Boozman. The...

If you like your politics dirty, vulgar and blatantly racist, take a jet to South Carolina where political consultant Stuart Rotenberg calls the Republican national stinkpot. Tuesday’s primary vote in South Carolina was not about politics but about sex, lies and innuendos. It may be a Tea Partier’s dream but you will need to ask one yourself. How these folks can tout family values in one breath and whisper gossip in the next, boggles the mind. Republican voters in the Palmetto state will...

Frankly, Rod and Patti Blagojevich, I don’t give a damn if you Twitter during Rod and his brother’s criminal trial for selling President Obama’s Senate seat and shaking down a children’s hospital for campaign contributions and 22 other federal corruption charges. I don’t Twitter so count me out as adding to Rod’s list of 819 and Patti’s 121 followers, according to Politics Daily. But, were I U.S. District Court Judge James Zagel, whom I’m not, I would...

I confess to be a North Korea watcher only to the extent of how far this paranoid bully can go before some adult in his neighborhood slaps him silly. The latest incident is a North Korean border guard killing three Chinese citizens and wounding a fourth on the two country’s border in the industrial trading town of Dandong. The guard suspected the four were crossing the border for illegal trade activities. The only authoritative report of the incident was filed by the Associated Press in a dispatch...

The president of the United States says he would have fired the chief executive of the world’s fourth most profitable corporation if he worked for him. Ouch. With that assertion on NBC’s Today Show, President Obama has stepped into the metaphoric bloviating of infamous responses such as President Coolidge saying “The business of America is business,” and the dollar-a-year Defense Secretary who claimed “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.” “He...

If residents in the Gulf Coast think BP and the federal government is slow to respond to your claims and grievances … If victims of the 1989 Exxon Valdez in Alaska thought the U.S. justice system moved at a glacier pace to address your damages … Then, you got nothing over the 15,000 killed and hundreds of thousands born with birth defects from the 1984 gas leak of a Union Carbide Indian subsidiary in Bhopal where a court Monday convicted seven former senior employees for “death...

In her day, Helen Thomas was a pit bull with skin as tough as an armadillo who survived the cut-throat, stab-in-the-back culture of United Press International and asked questions that dropped U.S. presidents to their knees. Despite all the milestones she accumulated in her lifetime for women as well as a beacon for freedom of information, Helen Thomas is leaving the public specter under a black cloud of bigotry. That is tragic. And, she, better than anyone working in the world of communications where...

I admire Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, and, gulp, Sen. David Vitter, for standing up against BP and the federal government in demanding what they consider is the right approach to protect the state’s coastline from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. It isn’t, a boatload of scientists agree. The in-your-face approach by the two Republican leaders as well as a contingent of angry parish presidents in their quest to build even tiny portions of a 128-mile protective wall of sand berms has won the...

Terrific! And I don’t mean that in the sense of “Hooray” but more like a Harry Callahan aka Clint Eastwood terrific. Reuters news agency is reporting that Iran’s independent saber rattling Revolutionary Guards is poised to provide military escort to cargo ships trying to break Israel’s blockade to Gaza. It quotes Ali Shirazi, a representative of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Guard’s “naval forces are fully prepared to escort the peace and freedom...

Two New Jersey men were arrested late Saturday at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York where they were about to board separate flights to Egypt and later join forces with the terrorist group Al Shabaab in Somalia to kill American troops. The only official announcement of the arrests came from Jose Lozano, a spokesman for the New Jersey state Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness and U.S. Attorney’s Office spokeswoman Rebekah Carmichael. Both statements said “the arrests do not relate...

Tony Hayward, the BP chief executive whose credibility has jumped the shark told a British Broadcasting Co. audience Sunday that engineers have siphoned off a majority of the Deepwater Horizons oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. Hayward, who earlier made such pronouncements that the spill will have only minor environmental impact on the Gulf Coast region, said engineers have managed to divert 10,000 barrels of oil per day since it capped and jerry-rigged a contraption on the broken pipe gushing anywhere...

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. For me, Michele Bachmann is neither. As I wrote in a column posted last week, she is who she is and is the sole responsibility of voters in her Sixth Congressional District in Minnesota. Bachmann is one of those political gadflies who is constantly in the news as a mouthpiece of ratings for Fox News and darling of ridicule, primarily by Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews on MSNBC. So it came as a surprise to me and a shocker for the Washington Post...

John Wooden was and will be the greatest basketball coach ever, a truly gracious gentleman who would bring tears to every family values Republican and created a motivational pyramid of success Fortune 500 companies follow. John Wooden died Friday night at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. He was 99. His life as a teaching lesson we can all live by. He won seven straight NCAA national basketball championships, 10 in all and six more than the leading active and former coaches today. People forget...

California which had led the nation in innovative approaches to complex problems is back in the forefront by becoming the first state to ban plastic shopping bags at retail stores. “Paper or plastic?” no longer will be asked by checkout clerks when the new law goes into effect Jan 1, 2011. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenneger is expected to sign the law which he endorsed earlier before Thursday’s passage by the Legislature. The state was first in the nation to adopt controls on property tax...

If there is one department in the federal government that is shirking its responsibilities as responders to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill it would be the Environmental Protection Agency. It must act fast and now to determine the toxic damage the dispersant Corexit 9500 is inflicting on humans, sea and plant life, birds, and the underground water tables on the Gulf coastline. The pungent oil globs permeated in the toxic chemicals sprayed on the surface and at the source of the Deepwater Horizons leak...

Selection of a jury which Rod Blagojevich has wooed or tried to taint since his indictment 18 months ago on 24 corruption charges entered its second day Friday. The impeached Illinois governor has written a book, hosted a radio talk show, stormed the national television networks with self-serving interviews and appeared on a reality TV series and just may have talked himself into prison to claim his innocence of backroom wheeling and dealing. In Chicago? Whose kidding whom? “The truth shall...

Forrest Gump’s mother was right. “Stupid is what stupid does,” Forrest would quote his mother. It got me to thinking about comments Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann have said about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. For Rush, two comments have drawn attention from his 10 million daily fans and equal number of antagonists. One is environmentalists working as eco-terrorists blew up the Deepwater Horizons exploratory drilling platform that killed 11 crew April 20. The...

As a news reporter, I learned the hard way to be leery of police arrests of high-profile personalities, but the Peruvian case of a young woman’s death linked to Joran van der Sloot of Natalee Holloway fame certainly attracted my attention. Van der Sloot is being sought by Lima, Peru, police for questioning in the bloody death of Stephany Flores, 21, found in a Lima hotel room. He was arrested twice by police in Aruba but never prosecuted in the disappearance of Holloway. The circumstances in...

I should not make light of this but to those engineers who by remote control watched their diamond-edge saw get stuck on a ruptured pipe deemed too fragile to withstand the earth’s pressure to suck oil, I feel their pain. I can’t tell you how many times my chainsaw stuck on a tree trunk during my years as a landscape contractor. Unlike BP’s experience of deja vu failure again Wednesday morning, my stuck chainsaw cost me time and money I could least afford. And my toils were at ground...