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...

Could this ultimately end in charges of criminal manslaughter?

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...

A Vanity Fair piece in which former staffers of Arizona Sen. John McCain’s failed 2008 Presidential campaign rip into former GOP Vice Presidential running mate Gov. Sarah Palin has accentuated often bitter Republican party divisions — exposing personal resentments and some of the ideological dividing lines within today’s convalescing GOP. According to The Politico, it is now all out verbal war among some in the GOP over this piece — with some prominent Republicans defending...

Is Iran’s defeated but still feisty opposition Presidential candidate Mirhossein Mousavi eventually headed for jail? If you had to read tea leaves, the leaves seem to be lining up to suggest it could well happen. Two big leaves can now be seen. Mousavi is continuing to speak out and lambaste what he calls the illegitimacy of an election that is widely seen by many Iranians, people around the world and most foreign governments as a ham-handedly rigged one. And there are now calls by the country’s...

Isn’t it time to start a 12 step program for partisan demonization and fear mongering?

A new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll provides yet another example of how the talk radio political culture is outside the country’s emerging political center: it basically finds strong support for the Obama administration’s non-intervention stand in the Iranian election as well as President Barack Obama’s comments that have been soundly blasted by conservatives and on radio and cable talk radio: A new national poll suggests that that nearly three out of four Americans don’t...

Members of Arizona Senator John McCain’s 2008 Presidential campaign team have dissed McCain’s former running mate Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in an upcoming issue of Vanity Fair, the New York Daily News reports — and in a big way: In an expansive story in the August edition of Vanity Fair, a slew of senior members of McCain’s campaign team told reporter Todd S. Purdum that they suffer a kind of survivor’s guilt following the 2008 presidential election. “They can’t...

The Christian Science Monitor – that longtime oasis of thoughtful, issue oriented, balanced journalism — is now actively marketing its new weekly print edition as the next step as it implements a unique newspaper business model that will be watched to see if a longtime media institution can survive in the Internet age. Last fall it was announced that the Monitor would axe its daily print edition that was distributed via snail-mail and limit itself to THIS online only news website —...

Iran’s increasingly draconian regime is continuing to throw down the gauntlet to not just Iranians who think recent elections were rigged, but to the world, almost daring critics within and outside to do something. Its latest seemingly provocative act: arresting 8 local employees of the British Embassy. This has brought an immediate response from the European Union: The European Union has demanded the immediate release of Iranian staff at Britain’s embassy in Tehran detained on Saturday...

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is supported by most Americans for that job — and that Obama apparently found the American political center in appointing her: A sizable majority of Americans want the Senate to confirm Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, and most call her “about right” ideologically, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. Senate hearings on Sotomayor, President Obama’s...

The autopsy for “King of Pop” singer Michael Jackson is over and the results are inconclusive – and it may take another six weeks to know the precise cause as medics await toxicology reports. But family friend the Rev. Jesse Jackson has told CNN that the family wants to know more about what the dead singer’s private doctor knows — and wants some answers: Michael Jackson’s family suspects that the singer’s personal doctor, Conrad Murray, knows more about...

The multi-faceted crackdown by the Iranian regime continues with reports that militia are now conducting night-time raids on homes, beating civilians and destroying satellite dishes so Iranians can’t see what the outside world is reporting about the crackdown in their country. The BBC reports: Human Rights Watch has accused Iran’s volunteer Basij militia of carrying out night-time raids, destroying property in private homes and beating civilians. The New York-based group says the raids...

The BBC has a photo gallery of fan reactions HERE.

Our Quote of the Day comes from the site Threat Watch which contends the world media missed events in Iran yesterday when the regime there implemented its own, patently brutal, horrorific version of Tiananmen Square. Here’s part of the post: Iran has executed its Tiananmen Square. Baharestan Square has become synonymous with barbarity, cruelty, massacre and inhumanity. An Iranian blogger (whose URL I will not publish) live blogging from Baharestan Square in central Tehran today captures but...

The announcement by South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford that the “mystery” about his whereabouts stemmed from him being in Argentina conducting an extramarital affair will likely end his political career — and not just because he had an affair. There are two other specific factors that will make him a dream for any Democrat at any level to run against at any point in his life: 1. He was away having his fling on Father’s Day. His emotional press conference where he talked about...

Just when you thought the vulgarization of culture that is now worldwide due to the unifying influence of cable, the Internet and You Tube can’t get any more vulgar, Burger King proves you wrong with news of its new advertising campaign for its “Super Seven Incher Sandwich” that’s fun for journalists to report on, will get lots of buzz but would hurt the company if it was unveiled even five years ago. It leaves nothing to the imagination. (UPDATE: Burger King has a clarification...

Our political Quote of the Day comes from MSNBC’s First Read on the controversy over President Barack Obama calling on a prominent new media Huffington Post reporter to ask a question the White House wanted to be asked since it was a question from Iran: Perhaps the most controversial moment at yesterday’s press conference occurred when Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post got the second question and asked the president a question he had received from an Iranian. Media reports accused that it...

When the news hit that quintessential late night TV sidekick Ed McMahon died, it marked the end of an era. But not the era that many have noted. It wasn’t just that he was a great TV sidekick to the undisputed former King of Late Night, NBC’s Johnny Carson. It wasn’t just that he was a multi-fronted talent threat: a great sidekick, a talented actor, an emcee in his own right, an effective commercial pitchman, and someone who made Carson look even better than he was on off nights...

Have we ever seen a case in recent history of a party taking such careful aim and shooting itself in the foot? This one perhaps is one for the political ages: New poll numbers really seem to bear out the fears of some Republicans: The GOP’s quasi-opposition to Sotomayor seems to be hurting the party among Latinos in a big way. The latest numbers from the nonpartisan Research 2000 for Daily Kos find that only eight percent of Latinos view the party favorably, while an astonishing 86 percent view...

How draconian is the Iran regime’s crackdown and the pointed messages it’s now sending out (demonstrators mowed down in the streets, family members of foes arrested, communications sliced off)? The latest sign that Iranians and the world are now seeing a government that has lost its shaky figleaf of democracy is the news that Newsweek’s Maziar Bahari was arrested in the early in the morning — and has not been heard from since. Among the dozens of people arrested overnight...

Our linkfest taking you to sites of varying viewpoints all over the Internet. No Matter What Happens In Iran, Will The Uprising Have An Impact Throughout The World? Simon Rosenberg believes so: Much has been written about the how events unfolding in Iran are crossing some kind of internal Iranian Rubicon. Fareed Zakaria has a new essay to this effect. But there is a strong argument to be made that the world is crossing that Rubicon right along with the Iranians, and that we wiill all be in a new...

A Muslim cleric has charged that Pepsi is actually a “Zionist plot.” Seriously. Really. No joking. Here are the details proving that the light fizz isn’t just atop Pepsi but is also in the craniums of people who love to hate: Extremist Moslems have not dropped their allegations that Pepsi Cola is essentially the code name for a Zionist plot. MEMRI has released an English transcript of an address given by a Muslim religious leader in Egypt this past February, in which he explains...

The great comedian Charlie Chaplin’s stirring speech about liberty at the end of his 1940 film “The Great Dictator” is more relevant than ever given events in Iran. Watch it in full below: A PERSONAL NOTE: In this sound film, Chaplin, in a dual role, used his beloved “tramp” character to play the double of a dictator not so subtly patterned after Adolf Hitler. At the end, they wind up switching places and the Jewish barber (the tramp) gets up to deliver the tyrant’s...

President Barack Obama has just issued this statement on Iran: The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights. As I said in Cairo, suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. The...