I don’t know whether President Obama has any musical talent or if he plays any particular instrument. But his actions over the past few weeks have made me start to wonder if he’s taking a page from the Clinton playbook. After his landslide defeat in the 1994 elections President Clinton adopted the the now famous triangulation strategy in which he pitted himself against Congressional Republicans on...

It’s unfortunate that what I brought online yesterday was colored by some distracting background noise, and I very much regret that I allowed a defensive reaction to intrude on the larger point I was trying to make. Since that point got lost in the shouting and attacks (and with the acknowledgment that I may have some hitherto unrecognized masochistic pathology), I’m going to try again. Let’s...

Kevin Rudd’s government is in a celebration mode following Australia’s twin victory in finalizing 20-year-long liquefied natural gas (LNG) supply deals with India and China. A sales and purchase AUD 25 billion agreement between ExxonMobil and Petronet LNG of India signed last week is the “dawning of a new trading partnership.” Under the agreement, Exxon Mobil will supply about 1.5 million...

According to news reports the ‘missing ship’ wasn’t really missing as officials had good evidence of where it was the whole time. The secrecy was intended to protect the crew from a hijacking and the danger of being killed by those in control of the ship. I’m still not sure what is really going on here. I’m not saying the story doesn’t pass the smell test, it is possible that...

I had a dream. It took place in the White House. At the dining table was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sipping a glass of California sherry and nibbling on one of those dainty sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid stared at his plate of fried zucchini and glass of iced tea. Vice President Joe Biden was telling stories of his youth in Scranton while talking with his mouth full of...

We call her Dr. E., one of the most remarkable women I have had the privilege of knowing almost exclusively through TMV and one delightful hour-long telephone conversation on her nickel. We share numerous ailments brought about by the scavenging effects of diabetes but, if you read her post today, it dwarfs my ailments to a mere pittance. Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes in simple terms argues for insurance carriers...

I feel connected with Michael Corleone in Godfather III when he was on the brink of ridding himself from Mafia past, they pull him right back. Take today’s news. Please. Item: One of candidate Barack Obama’s agent of change messages was to improve the professionalism of our diplomatic corps. So far, 38 of his first 65 ambassadorial appointments have been political. Among them, Charles H. Rivkin,...

This is a (very) lightly modified version of a letter composed at my house this weekend. The only changes are the removal of my personal information and the name of the company. FWIW — I thought very hard about going Galt with the whole credit card industry. Still thinking about it, in fact… ***** August 15, 2009 To: My (former) Credit Card Services Company Re: Your response to the Credit Cardholders’...

The country is now remembering the Woodstock weekend’s 40th anniversary. I missed that big mud slide four decades ago. I was bumming around Europe at the time after doing my military service. But Woodstock and my bumming have something in common — both, in very different ways, represented the very acme of American economic life. I don’t want to pretend that the Ozzie & Harriet generation’s...

For a hopefully relaxing Sunday morning, a few scenes from the garden to put your spirit at ease. Mother Nature is still failing to cooperate for the most part, but our plants are gamely working away during an unusually cold and rainy summer. What? You thought that somebody who totally fails to qualify as a liberal could enjoy working in a garden? Remember… even Hitler painted landscapes and flowers.(There...

Guest Voice posts do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of TMV or its many writers. Hot, Loud August by Will Durst If you’ve ever been fortunate enough to visit Washington, D.C. in August, you understand the custom of the federal government releasing all its high-profile delinquents back into their home communities and calling it recess. D.C. was built on a swamp, and walking around our Capital right now...

If you’re like me, busy working ten hours a day or so, the claims and counterclaims in the current “discussion” over health care reform may lead you a bit confused, with little opportunity to check the veracity of the claims. Here are two overviews of the health care reform issue and the arguments advanced by its advocates and opponents. One from The New York Times and the other from The Wall...

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...