AKA Why There Will Be Another Banking Panic And Market Disaster Remember how all the banks made a big show of paying off TARP money to demonstrate how they had recovered? Well that was pretty much a lie and they are all extremely under capitalized. It should be noted that the entire rationale for letting the banks mark to model instead of market was that the market was not functioning, but these new values are...

When I first read the WSJ opinion piece by Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, something seemed a little odd. So, I also went to his blog and glanced at the article he had submitted to the WSJ. It seemed, just to an editor’s squinty eye, that what Mackey wrote was originally about 200 words longer than the WSJ piece. Mr. Mackey is known for quoting stats, people, and studies… and often. There was a dearth...

Sean Hannity, one of the conservative commentators on Fox News I usually find repugnant, deserves credit for calling national attention to a tragic scenario that is playing out in California’s fertile San Joaquin Valley. The nation’s largest bread and fruit basket is experiencing a third year of drought made worse by severe cutbacks in imported water because of federal protection of an endangered...

Guest Voice posts do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of TMV or its many writers. The Gorilla Dust of Health Care by Michael Winship When I was 15, my father was in a near-fatal car collision with a semi-trailer truck. At Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, NY, he lay in a coma for two months. As the medical bills mounted and the insurance was running out, my mother had to make an agonizing...

My friend Maurice and me were talking about the high cost of health care and ways Congress is searching to reduce the inflationary spiral dealing in the trillions of dollars neither one of us could truly comprehend. “How about hospitals refusing treatment for illegal Mexican workers?” Maurice asked. “No,” I opined. “The courts have ruled everyone is entitled to emergency trauma...

I heartily approve of the government’s Cash For Clunkers program. It’s a pleasure to finally see money going directly to consumers for buying a new product (a car) and thereby aiding a troubled auto industry. But I also think this program is discriminatory. Why, after all, should only old and no longer wanted vehicles get a government subsidy? Why should only motorists get a government buying aid?...

Not sure those 176 realize many of them just signed their death warrants to compete with biggie corps that have far deeper pockets. Based on the model as stated so far which has slim details… To choose more than one paper to read, if one had to pay, would cost the heavy reader of news anywhere from $100 to $17,000 a year just to read news. Steven Brill, above, is one of the masterminds. He says there...

If I were you, I’d be on the lookout for pale horsemen flying through the skies, because in addition to other signs of a pending apocalypse, Keith Olberman has named our friend and very conservative pundit, Ed Morrissey, as the best person on the world. Initial rumors that Olberman had: (a) confused him with Ed Schulz, or, (b) suffered from some sort of unfortunate neuro-cardial event, were quickly dismissed....

Some of them clearly carry heavy traffic, at least in relative terms. For those of us who are addicted to politics and regularly haunt sites like TMV, we probably think this is a fairly important and mainstream topic. But it seems that there are other subjects which draw considerably more eyeballs on the old intertubes. I found an article referencing one such avocation which seems to dwarf political blogs in...

Astroturfing is with us now, for better or worse, and everyone is doing it. To stretch the inevitable football analogy to the breaking point, modern technology has put Astroturf in every stadium across the nation, except possibly a few of the smallest high schools. This is the subject of my column this week at Pajamas Media, Of Course There’s Astroturfing by the GOP. As always, I invite you to read, share...

I wouldn’t go as far as comic/satirist Bill Maher saying the American public is stupid. Rather, a large percentage is gullible as we have seen time and again on the town hall video clips Congressmen are conducting this August recess. Wrote Maher in The Huffington Post: I’m the bad guy for saying it’s a stupid country, yet polls show that a majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government,...

The Fed says the recession is almost over. Many leading economists now say it has already ended. You hear this latter view on TV nightly, and if you visit financial web sites, it’s repeated over and over. All of which brings to my mind a simple question: Whose recession has ended—or is even ending? Imagine an emergency room. Six months ago a patient was brought in. He was bleeding very badly and required...

Just a reminder, in case you’re going to be around, that my partner in crime and I will be back on the air at 10 am Eastern time this morning with another edition of Mid Stream Radio. While I’ve grown weary of writing about the subject here and ramming my head into walls, we’ll tackle the question of whether or not health care reform has become the new abortion question in this country, with...

While we might have grown somewhat used to stories of piracy on the open seas, those events usually take place in some isolated part of the Indian Ocean or off the coast of Africa. But a story is now emerging that we may be seeing the first example of piracy in European waters. According to the stories a Maltese flagged ship sailed through the English Channel but never made it to Gibraltar. The story also indicates...

A new Marist poll indicates President Barack Obama is starting to lose independent voter support. It has some good news for Obama: his overall approval rating numbers ( 55 percent of registered voters) has remain largely unchanged. And he continues to have solid support (90 percent) from Democrats. But as President George Bush’s two terms in office indicated, a President is not in a strong position if...

Keep screaming over each other, citizens! We can save America — one insult at a time.

The eulogies for Eunice Shriver as a tireless humanitarian bring to light again the story of a forgotten Kennedy, Rosemary, who was diagnosed as mentally retarded and, at the age of 23, underwent a lobotomy and spent the rest of her life in an institution. When JFK was on his way to the presidency, no one talked publicly about a sibling who did not fit into the picture of a large family of healthy, active achievers,...

There comes a time when the Obama Administration has to show it’s really serious about changing the way Wall Street operates. That time has arrived. And the key decision in this regard involves a new wave of bonuses that banks are planning to give their best “producers” — on top of the $1 million-plus bonuses that more than 5,000 of these Wall Streeters got last year during the great market...

Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the younger sister of the late President John F. Kennedy who founded the Special Olympics and promoted it to the very depths of her soul, has died at 88. As someone who used to write obituaries as part of my stint as a staff reporter on two newspapers (the old Wichita Eagle in Wichita, Kansas and the San Diego Union in San Diego, CA) I know full well the “boilerplate” obits...

Just something to relax you when the well meaning debates get a bit heated.

A riot among predominately Latino and black inmates Saturday night at a medium security prison in Chino, Calif., injured 250 in which 17 remained in hospitals this morning. All were inmates in the 11-hour melee which razed one dormitory in flames and seriously damaged another six. The riot turns the spotlight on the California penal system which the Los Angeles Times contends is the most overcrowded in the nation....

In debating the subject of cash for clunkers I recently heard talk show host Tom Sullivan make some interesting comments. One point he made was the fact that the program is probably not really helping with the people it was intended to help. The theoretical goal of the program is to get polluting cars off the road and to get people into cars that are in better condition. The problem is that while the program...

Watching these town hall battles — which seem to have settled into a stasis as supporters of health reform have decided to show up finally — has convinced me of one thing: Obama is winning this August health care battle. No, his ideas aren’t necessarily winning plaudits among various elements of elite political commentary. Nor are skeptics necessarily embracing any of the five broad proposals...

A couple of weeks ago, Time Magazine’s cover story was “The Final days of Bush and Cheney.” It was a fascinating, intimate look at what TIME’s Managing Editor Richard Stengel himself describes as “The tale of the rift between George W. Bush and Dick Cheney…an inside look at the complex relationship that shaped so much of this decade.” The special report also tells us “why...

The government wanted to reanimate the auto industry. It allocated billions to car makers to help them produce more energy efficient vehicles. This might reduce our dependence on wasteful polluting vehicles in a few years, or it might not. Just by offering cash for clunkers, however, within one week tens of thousands of inefficient gas guzzlers were replaced on our roads by more efficient, less polluting cars. The...