When the dot.com bubble burst with the coming of the new millennium, the reasons were pretty obvious – a combination of ridiculously high stock prices, rampant speculation, zillions of dollars in available venture capital and giving the finger to traditional business models that sent many a company and investor on a binge that a drunken sailor would envy. What’s going on now as the effects of the subprime mortgage and hedge fund disasters ripple through the economy like the venom from a...

. . . which insult is worse? A Barack Obama aide calling Hillary Clinton “a monster” or a Clinton aide calling Obama a reincarnation of Special Prosecutor Ken Starr? Before you try to answer the question, consider that the Obama aide apologized and resigned while the Clinton aide ain’t going nowhere because Hillary’s campaign plays by its own rules. This includes the refusal of the candidate and her hubbo to release financial records like Obama and John McCain have — which prompted...

JUST ASKING.

I had wanted to wait until we got a little closer to the Pennsylvania primary on April 22 to discuss and diss a state in which I have lived, worked and traveled at various times for many years, but the mainstream media will soon be encamping there and I should get in my two cent’s worth before Wolf Blitzer starts interviewing shy Amish folk, brawny coal miners and flatulent cows. The conventional wisdom is that the Keystone State is tailor made for Hillary Clinton. This is because it has droves...

ANY GUESSES?

Now that Hillary Clinton says that her campaign “has turned the corner,” it’s time for she and Bill Clinton to turn one of their own and come clean about their financial holdings as have Barack Obama and John McCain. The only reason for not releasing their tax returns is not the bureaucratic gobbledygook that Mrs. Clinton’s campaign claims is the hang-up, but because she and The Mister have something to hide — be it insider business dealings, questionable stock trades,...

It has taken no time at all to understand that in his own way Attorney General Michael Mukasey is even worse than Alberto Gonzalez. That is because he is more clever than Gonzo in doing the White House’s bidding, which is to say suborning the law at every opportunity. Law school prof Jonathan Turley has reached a not dissimilar conclusion in writing in a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece that: “The recent decisions of . . . Mukasey to block any prosecution of Bush administration officials...

Despite her primary wins yesterday, Hillary Clinton faces insurmountable odds against having enough convention delegates to win the nomination unless she resorts to destructive backroom arm twisting and dirty dealing to try to get over the top. While Clinton is right to declare that it’s not over until it’s over, she did recapture some of her base in yesterday’s contests and her showing in Ohio was impressive, it is indeed over. The sooner that she can fashion a graceful exit the...

As the enormous costs in blood and money of the Iraq war come into ever sharper focus, it is worth pondering what the electoral landscape would have been like this winter were there not still 150,000 U.S. troops slogging away on a fool’s mission that has no end in sight. One thing is certain: Even a modest infusion of the money diverted for the war into jobs and infrastructure improvement projects in blighted Ohio — say a couple hundred million bucks or so — might have made a difference...

Oil prices today passed their all time, inflation-adjusted record, flirting with $104 a barrel. Barry Ritholtz, for one, thinks that this commodity has legs.

Charlotte Allen has unleashed a spitstorm with publication in the Washington Post of an op-ed piece in which she asserts that women are . . . well, dummies. While the piece itself is amazingly dumb, I was struck by the reaction of the feminist bloggers whom I sampled who to a woman didn’t bother to offer intelligent point-counterpoint responses to the piece but instead engaged in name calling. Zuzu, for example, said that the “mainstream media hates women,” while Jessica grumped...

For not entirely altruistic reasons – including a mix of over stimulation and exhaustion — I hope that when the sun comes up on Wednesday morning Hillary Clinton will have seen the light and is heading home to Chappaqua with with Bill and Chelsea. The mathematical chances of Clinton taking the Democratic nomination away from Barack Obama without huge victories in both Texas and Ohio tomorrow are slim to none depending upon how you do the math. Some 35 primaries and caucuses and 20 debates...

What does it say about the state of world affairs that when high-ranking U.S. officials visit Iraq they wear flak jackets, there is no advance notice and the trips are rushed and cloaked in secrecy, whereas when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad drops by as he did today his trip and itinerary are announced well in advance and he is greeted with pomp and ceremony? Photograph by The Associated Press

Kathy was a girl about my age who lived down the street from me when we were a few years short of our teens. She was an only child and was spoiled rotten. She also had the most and nicest toys in the neighborhood and I and other kids often ended up in her playroom. Woe be it to the playmate who didn’t see or do things Kathy’s way because she would hold her breath, begin turning a bilious shade of green and shriek “These are my toys and you play by my rules!” Kathy came to...

In light of the controversy swirling around the endorsement of John McCain by career bigot Pastor John Hagee, Professor Bainbridge reminds us that there’s an old saying that if you lay down with dogs you get up with fleas, while Glenn Greenwald notes that you shouldn’t judge a candidate by the people who endorse them. Both true. But while Barack Obama has repudiated Louis Farrakhan, to give an oft-cited example of an endorsement not wanted, McCain has gone out of his way to embrace hate-mongering...

MORE HERE ON A MAN MOST PEOPLE KNOW IN ANOTHER INCARNATION. FOR BUDDY AT HIS FINEST, CLICK HERE AND LISTEN TO “MACHINE GUN” FROM JIMI HENDRIX’ CLASSIC BAND OF GYPSYS.

MORE HERE.

A reader responding to my post on what a Democratic president and Congress should do about the Bush administration’s many scandals had a pretty good idea, albeit tongue in check: Send The Decider, Cheney, Gonzo, Rummy and Company to the Navy brig at Guantánamo Bay where they would be held without rights and waterboarded to see if they would yield any good intelligence. The idea in fact has great appeal in the wake of a startling development: Colonel Morris D. Davis, the former chief prosecutor...

No, it’s not all his lobbyist buddies or that woman who looks strikingly like his wife. It’s President Bush, who in a new national poll has surpassed Richard Nixon as the modern president with the highest negative rating. Some 52 percent of those surveyed place Bush at the bottom end of the scale as either “below average” or a “failure”, compared to 50 percent who said the same about Nixon. Bush also beats out Nixon on the failure scale – one in three Americans...