MR. WEINER, WERE YOU EVER FULLY ERECT? ~ Question shouted at press conference The recent falls of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dominic Strauss-Kahn from their lofty perches and the imminent fall of Anthony Weiner from his begs the question as to why people who have everything — money, power and prestige — can’t kept their hands off the help, whether they be secretaries, nannies or hotel maids, or in Weiner’s case sending sexually-laden text messages to women? It seems easy...

PRESIDENT OBAMA AT A TOLEDO JEEP PLANT LAST WEEK The saga of Detroit’s Big Two and a Half automakers over the past decade has been a riches to rags to riches story that Republicans, as has so often been the case, are finding reason to criticize and not celebrate although it is a rare bright spot amidst economic gloom. Long story short, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler were running on fumes at the start of the new millennium, making lots of money from manufacturing boring, fuel inefficient...

TOM AND HIS BELOVED LaSALLE IN SAN FRANCISCO (1969) Tom was my oldest friend and probably my closest. I met him when I was a freshman in college and for the next 30-plus years had some great adventures with him, all the while soaking up his down-to-earth wisdom like a big sponge. There were trips to what we called The Magic Gardens, a replica of a Roman ruins in a great garden behind an estate that could only be trespassed by river and most easily when the moon was full. Our expeditions,...

This post is dedicated to the brilliant Jack Grant (1965-2011), a friend and pioneering blogger who never abided fools no matter their political persuasion. The House Republican leadership’s spectacular record of defeats, concessions and embarrassments remains intact after week in which (not counting the Donald Trump-Sarah Palin pizza party) the most notable event was a mano a mano exchange between Representative Paul Ryan and President Obama. Ryan, who almost singlehandedly has jeopardized...

As best I can figure, Sarah Palin wanted to attract attention when she chartered a ritzy hotel on wheels, had it custom painted (since marred by “Media Whore” spray paint graffiti) and set out on a national tour that will culminate in the premier of a new movie in Iowa about Her Highness. But then maybe I’m wrong, because 10-year-old daughter Piper, last seen carrying a Louis Vitton handbag that costs as much as the average American pays per month in rent, snapped at a Time...

A ROMNEY FAMILY CHRISTMAS CARD It has been 50 years since Americans elected the first Roman Catholic president, yet religion will loom large as Mitt Romney announced his run for the 2012 Republican nomination today. There is an old saying that Americans are suspicious of any religion other than their own, and Romney has the additional handicap of being a Mormon, a widely misunderstood denomination outside of the American spiritual mainstream that some religions consider to be a cult despite, perhaps...

The profligacy of the Republican economic policies of the last decade continue to bite the U.S. in the collective ass as the painfully slow recovery from the Bush Recession seems to have stalled with consumers reluctant to spend, companies reluctant to hire and banks reluctant to loan. Long story short, those policies (which many congressional Democrats went along with), were perversely simple: Keep lowering taxes for the wealthy, keep deregulating financial institutions, keep cutting back on job-creating...

Despite the high marks he gets from Republicans nationally because of his apparent fiscal prudence, Chris Christie is on track to be yet another one-term New Jersey governor. Not unlike his counterpart in Wisconsin, Christie has treated public employee unions harshly while sparing the state’s rich. But Christie has treated no one better than himself. His reputation for profligate spending as a U.S. attorney has carried over to the governor’s mansion, and as if to emphasize his selfishness...

SEXISM: Prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex. ~ Oxford English Dictionary A fellow TMV contributor and a frequent commenter tried to take me to the woodshed last week — picture if you will the contributor grabbing one arm of a 6-foot-2 guy with broad shoulders and big biceps and the commenter my other arm — because of their pique over my latest whack at the Sarah Palin birth hoax conspiracy story. Both made it clear that while they...

SECOND OFFICER: Hast seen the White Whale? DONOVAN HAHN: Hast seen the Yellow Duck? When a load of 28,800 rubber bath toys plummeted into the northern Pacific Ocean from a storm-tossed container ship in 1992, beachcombers and oceanographers were in rapture. The toys washed up on coastlines from Alaska to California to Massachusetts for years, some traveling west to east via the Arctic Ocean, a treasure trove for collectors and a terrific opportunity to study ocean currents for scientists. ...

Gil Scott-Heron, whose spoken-word poetry songs like “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” “Winter In America” and “We Almost Lost Detroit” were precursors to rap, left this mortal coil on Friday afternoon in New York. He was 62. Gil, whom I knew through mutual friends, rejected the notion that he was the father of rap, explaining that his fusion of jazz, blues and soul was just black music. His lyrics were delivered in both rapping and melismatic vocal styling,...

To say that the Republican Party has made a hash of things since its mid-term election victories six months ago is an understatement, and it’s clear that the series of self-inflicted disasters it has suffered since then stem from the mistaken notion that the victories were a mandate. They were no such thing. What the victories were was a stew of anger, resentment and uncertainty amidst a recession that wouldn’t quit. While that was to an extent a repudiation of the Democratic Party,...

Take a look at this photograph. A close look. As a layperson, does this look like a one-month premature baby less than 24 hours after its birth? Of course it doesn’t, which is the view of a neonatologist. The baby is Trig Palin, who was being held in the arms of Sarah Palin’s mother. If you’re sick of the whole business of why Palin continues to be evasive about her alleged pregnancy and Trig’s birth, you have plenty of company and certainly don’t want to...

When it’s the 19th inning of a ballgame approaching six hours and 600 hitters and you’ve used your last pitcher, what you gonna do? Philadelphia Phillies Manager Charlie Manuel scratched his head extra hard and finally turned to infield position player Wilson Valdez, who later said he hadn’t pitched since a backyard game in his native Dominican Republic in 2002. You’d never have know it as Valdez, whose fastball approached a more than respectable 90 miles an hour,...

Five hundred thousand at Tiffany’s? There’s a simple explanation. The guy clearly buys his engagement rings in bulk. ~ STEVEN COLBERT There is little pleasant going on in national politics these days, but the slow but steady self-destruction of Newt Gingrich is a joy to behold. As well as inevitable. It was inevitable that his run for the presidential roses would be derailed not over policy issues but because he is so palpably phony and deceitful. The only question would be his...

KATHY HOCHUL While Paul Ryan’s radical deficit-reduction plan has predictably died in its crib, the Republican Party’s mission to destroy Medicare has not been forgotten by voters, who claimed their first but not last electoral victim of the year: State Assemblywoman Jane Corwin, who was expected to cakewalk to victory in a special election in New York state’s 26th District, a Buffalo area seat that the GOP has owned since we were kicking Richard Nixon around. The special...

This photo of President Obama and his national security staff hunkered down in the White House Situation Room as the Navy SEAL team raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound unfolded has a lock on 2011 Picture of the Year. Well, at least for non-meteorological events. That in turn has triggered an orgy of Photoshopped versions. Kill a few brain cells feasting on the details in the version below. Yes, that’s an ice cream cone in Hillary’s hand. Even had the technology been available,...

Like the White Queen in her youth, the contemporary Republican politician must be capable of believing as many as six impossible things before breakfast. ~ JACOB WEISBERG Props to Mitch Daniels for listening to his family and deciding they were more important than his party and that the prospect of non-stop proctology examinations by the news media and his opponents outweighed the glory of a presidential run. But funny thing, when I took a quick spin around the political blogosphere this morning,...

Benjamin Netanyahu may eventually figure out that Barack Obama is not George Bush, who never seemed to grasp that Israel’s survival depended on the U.S. and not the other way around. Nor did Bush have Netanyahu’s measure. Obama does, understanding that he is a coward masquerading as a bully who is caught between Israeli factions even more bellicose than himself (think far-right Republicans) and a president with whom he will have to deal, in all likelihood, for the rest of his tenure...

No matter what President Obama would say today in a widely anticipated speech on the Middle East had to be tempered with certain expectation-lowering realities. Chief among them is that the pro-democracy fever sweeping the Arab world has much to do with Al-Jazeera and social media and little to do with Obama or Bush foreign policies, and that Israel, determined to be on the wrong side of history, will continue to be an obstacle to regional stability. The speech came in the wake of a flurry of diplomatic...

The blame-shifting excuses that the American Roman Catholic Church keeps coming up with in its decade-long effort to explain away the pedophile priest scandal have ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. My favorite is that this was not an epidemic of pedophilia but homosexuality. On the part of the victims. But now a new excuse is being offered and it’s a whopper: A five-year study commissioned by the church’s bishops concludes that homosexuality actually is not to blame. It is...

IN EXCHANGE FOR A CONTRIBUTION.

So much of what Big Sarah Palin and Little Ricky Santorum say is so nutty that there is a temptation to ignore then. After all, both are attention freaks and one would hope that if they were starved of that commodity they would go away. Alas, it is not that simple for the simple reason that both continue to make noises about running for president, and so long as that is a possibility, they have to be taken . . . well, if not exactly seriously, then something or other. Santorum, who is...

According to local legend, on an afternoon in October 1950, New York Yankee slugger Joe DiMaggio handed a cigarette to Francis Lazaro “Frank” Rizzo, a young cop who was part of the security detail at Shibe Park, and then hit a home run to win Game 2 of the World Series over the Philadelphia Phillies. The story, like many Rizzo told, probably is apocryphal, but it helped cement the Rizzo legend as he rose through the ranks to became police commissioner and then mayor. Even as a young...

Objectively speaking, baby boomers have screwed up virtually everything they have touched as government leaders and politicians. Or continued to perpetrate existing screw-ups. But down at the state level they have gotten something right in a growing number of states: Authorizing medical marijuana use and decriminalizing personal marijuana use. The reason for this is obvious: Many boomers grew up smoking marijuana or at least were exposed to it, and fairly large numbers continue to smoke...