The idea of replacing Joe Biden with Hillary Clinton on the 2012 Democratic ticket is preposterous, an idea that won’t go away and one that is growing on me. Bill Keller offers the most compelling argument for an Obama-Clinton ticket in The New York Times, and while I have known Biden since we were in our teens and I deeply admire him, my own views track closely to his. I was disgusted with Clinton by the end of the 2008 primary season because of her refusal to rise above the fray and instead...

I will not be watching this evening’s national championship game between LSU and Alabama. I have no interest in either team and have spent little time watching college football in general. This is because with every passing year, the game becomes less an athletic spectacle and more the tip of an immense money-making iceberg. The Rose Bowl was always my favorite post-season game because it followed the marvelous Tournament of Roses parade and pitted the best of the Big Ten against the best...

ROMNEY CAMPAIGNS IN SOUTH CAROLINA Coming off of his razor-thin victory in the Iowa caucuses, tomorrow’s New Hampshire primary is Mitt Romney’s for the taking, but it is South Carolina’s January 21 primary that will determine whether a man who a year ago appeared to be the inevitable Republican nominee can finally leave the competition in the dust. This is because if Romney wins South Carolina, it is all over bar the shouting, which of course there will be a fair amount of. The...

Tea Partiers claim to support smaller government but are most enthusiastic about Rick Santorum, who hearts earmarks and right-wing nanny state paternalism, and Newt Gingrich, who would use big government to finance colonies on the moon. How to explain this contradiction? First of all, I suspect that many Tea Partiers really don’t know what they stand for other than identity politics. Secondly, I suspect as do some other pundits, that many Tea Partiers who gave Santorum a big bump in Iowa...

Back in October, I reviewed Susan Winters Cook’s newly published Nozuko’s Story: The Story of an African Family. The final chapter has now been written. Photograph copyright Susan Winters Cook

Barack Obama’s Achilles heel has been the recession he inherited from George Bush, and without the economy showing real signs of growth — as in new jobs being created — the president will remain vulnerable. But there is (fingers crossed) at long last good news. The December job report released this morning by the Labor Department shows that non-farm employment rose by a robust 200,000 jobs with private employers adding 212,000 of those jobs, while the unemployment rate dipped...

A FRACKING-RELATED OPERATION IN DOWNTOWN YOUNGSTOWN To say that fracking has had unintended consequences would be a misnomer. There have been warnings from the outset of the scramble to extract natural gas from shale formations using environmentally unsafe methods, but the case of Youngstown, Ohio is special. On New Years Eve, the central Ohio city had its 11th earthquake since St. Patrick’s Day — a magnitude 4.0 on the Richter Scale, the highest to date. That would not be unusual...

Experienced Iraq war veterans will decide the fate of Marine Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich, who is charged with voluntary manslaughter and related charges in the massacre of two dozen civilians in the Iraqi village of Haditha in November 2005. The pool of potential jurors being questioned today at Camp Pendleton, California include a colonel, two lieutenant colonels, a major, a captain and six enlisted men. All served at least one combat tour in Iraq and nearly all participated in so-called house...

SANTORUM AFTER HIS 2006 DEFEAT It matters not that Rick Santorum, who is the right-wing Republican flavor of the moment, doesn’t stand a chance of becoming the GOP presidential nominee let alone beating Barack Obama. What matter is that Santorum has never gotten the kind of scrutiny that he deserves with the exception of one reporter working for one newspaper. That reporter is my good friend Will Bunch and the newspaper is the Philadelphia Daily News. Bunch, among the most savvy political...

Take a look at this photograph taken by Thomas Hoepker from the Brooklyn waterfront on the morning of September 11, 2001. Take a really good look. What are the people saying and thinking as they look away from the burning World Trade Center towers? That it’s a lovely morning to go bike riding? That they’ll be inconvenienced because they’ll have to cancel their dinner reservations in Greenwich Village? That flying two passenger jetliners into twin 110-story buildings is no big deal? When...

DETAIL OF “MIGRANT MOTHER” Years of lugging around cameras and lenses has convinced me that luck has a central role in outstanding photojournalism. This is because lucks results from years of practice. That is the story behind pioneering photojournalist Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother,” perhaps the best known rural photograph from the Great Depression of the 1930s. The woman was Florence Thompson, a refugee from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, mother of 11 children and, along...

Homecomings for returning combat veterans have never been easy no matter the war, but the flood of Iraq war veterans who will be mustered out in the coming months, as well as a fair number from the Afghan war, pose a huge challenge. This is because gratitude, and Americans certainly are grateful, will not pay the bill. That bill is formidable: * About 800,000 veterans are jobless and many newly discharged veterans worked in depressed industries like manufacturing and construction prior to enlisting. *...

The three top finishers in the Iowa caucuses tell you all you need to know about the Republican Party in 2012: Mitt Romney, who disavows his greatest accomplishment; Rick Santorum, whose compassionate conservatism does not allow room for anyone not sharing his extreme right-wing views; and Ron Paul, whose sensible ideas keep getting trampled on by wacky ideas tinged with racism. At first glance, Romney’s hair’s breadth 8-vote win over Santorum is a surprise considering the fact that...

Despite having agreed — cowardly so, in my view — to continue Bush Era tax cuts that disproportionately favor the wealthy, it’s likely that a component of President Obama’s re-election platform will be a call to level the playing field through the so-called Buffet Rule, which would insure that no household making more than $1 million a year pays a lower tax rate than middle class families do. Warren Buffet likes to point out that despite being a billionaire, he pays a lower...

This is the sixth year that I am kicking off a new year with a post on the overall state of affairs in the U.S. Some three of these posts riffed on the cowardice of our political elite while a fourth was on what I called The End of an Error, the merciful conclusion of the eight-year Bush-Cheney interregnum, which was as visceral an example of cowardice masquerading as courage seen in my lifetime. And so looking back on the year just passed, I find myself returning once again — and with even...

Sometimes, albeit rarely, politicians speak truths. They don’t mean to do so, but the words come tumbling out. And so it was with House Majority Leader John Boehner, who in his last press conference of the year following the House’s reluctant passage of the extension of pay roll tax deductions and unemployment benefits, spoke the following truth: “Sometimes it’s hard to do the right thing, and sometimes it’s politically difficult to do the right thing.” ...

Jon Swift was a satirist without peer in the blogosphere before his untimely death in 2009. Every year’s end since then, blogger Bottachio has carried on Jon’s tradition of posting a round-up of bloggers’ best self-selected work for the year. Click here for the 2011 edition.

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY’S MAN OF THE YEAR Barring a major development, this will be my last post of 2011, and I thought I would go out with a bang as well as a bit of back patting. While the Democrats and President Obama have not always covered themselves in glory, the bang is a one-word description of the historic mess that the Republican Party has made of things during the year. This is a toxic cocktail of disdain for the middle class and an open loathing of minorities, seniors, the poor and...

I’ve come to view late fall bird feeder activity as an indication of the severity of the coming winter and it looks like this winter will be . . . um, average. The average snowfall at the mountain retreat is about 50 inches a year and there already was a freak one-foot snowfall in late October, so the average is likely to be topped if the pattern of January and February snows holds. But it also has been a warmer than average fall, so who the heck knows? * * * * * I heated with wood for something...

The routine is now familiar: Senate Republicans are in rare agreement with their Democratic colleagues and the GOP’s House leadership is poised to do likewise, but then reverses field, prompting the party’s Senate leadership to renege on its commitment. And so in less than 24 hours, House Speaker John Boehner, having said he approved of the short-term, bipartisan Senate measure to extend a payroll tax break and unemployment insurance, turned tail and said his colleagues (read the Tea...

Following in the footsteps of Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich’s campaign seems to be imploding with the Iowa caucuses approaching as the skeletons come tumbling out of his closet in the form of attack ads by Ron Paul and a host of surrogate groups who fear that his nomination would be a disaster. No surprise here. Attack ads from LBJ’s infamous anti-Barry Goldwater daisy petals and mushroom cloud ad in 1964 on have long proven to be effective,...

The planet has gone around the sun six times since my blog, Kiko’s House, baby-walked onto the scene, and the inexhaustible supply of rich material keeps coming in torrents, making practically every day an adventure in bathos, pathos, mythos and . . . uh, hathos. Herewith some posts from the past 12 months, many of which were cross-posted at The Moderate Voice, in which I stuck my neck out. And as events would prove, occasionally got it loped off.

Former Penn State defense coordinator Jerry Sandusky has continued to declare his innocence despite a small mountain of allegations against him, but in testimony at a preliminary hearing today former assistant coach Mike McQueary put a stake through Sandusky’s claim that he merely engaged in horseplay with the 10 boys who have accused him of sexual abuse. McQueary, recalling a 2002 incident in the football team’s locker room, said he peeked into the shower several times and saw Sandusky...

Christopher Hitchens left this mortal coil on Thursday. Herewith my review of his biography, which was originally posted in October 2010. The last of the several times that I have had the pleasure of being in the same room with Christopher Hitchens was at a university colloquium on the Iraq War. The indefatigable journalist-essayist had supported this fool’s errand at its outset but eventually had come to oppose aspects of it, as well as feel deep guilt after he learned that a young California...

ROY GREENSLADE: Christopher Hitchens managed to be both inspirational and infuriating company. Inspirational because of his wit and his ability in discussions to adopt a counter-intuitive position and argue it with vigour even when it became obvious he believed the opposite. He was infuriating because he always dominated conversations and effortlessly attracted female attention despite appearing not to seek it. GRAYDON CARTER: He was a man of insatiable appetites—for cigarettes, for scotch, for...