For months the stock market has resembled a smoker who knows it’s time to quit but can’t give up the weed just yet. For this smoker there’s always some occasion that seems to require one more butt. A stress situation that can only be met with a smoke. That cup of morning coffee, or the after dinner nicotine closer. Or being with someone else doing the drag you can’t watch without bumming...

Because of a scheduling conflict yesterday, we’ve had to push back the line-up for our weekly show, Mid Stream Radio, to Friday morning at 10 am eastern. (An ungodly 7 am pacific.) We’ll be picking apart the fast breaking, though likely irrelevant David Letterman sexual affairs story, as well as a little reported attempt at a federal landgrab in Utah. If there’s time we’ll look at a few...

Paul B. Fay Jr., who died this week at 91, was a crony so close that John F. Kennedy appointed him Undersecretary of the Navy over the protests of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. The role of Red Fay, as everyone called him, in Kennedy’s life was much more personal than political. Sons of Irish-American wealth who had met in the Navy during World War II, they bonded to the point that Fay was an usher...

We don’t always cover the entertainment world here at TMV but it’s the start of a new TV season and I like to try and find one show each year that is truly worth watching. For me this year that show is the Fox Series Glee. If you aren’t familiar with the program, it is set in a typical High school and focuses on the Glee club. In addition to having the typical school tv show stuff (hard working...

You can’t fit the entire health care debate into a 4 panel comic strip. But you can make one snarky remark about the American people, can’t you?

Yesterday was my daughter’s birthday. She is 20 years old. Joni Mitchell’s achingly beautiful song “The Circle Game” seemed appropriate (especially as I used to sing it to her when she was younger). I found this lovely alternate version of the song, by Ian McCulloch, at YouTube. I hope you all will indulge me:

Funny how he was ok with it when he was making money off of them. http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20309404,00.html

“[Let's] remember we should care about people even after they’re born. …” Alan Grayson, speaking on the floor of the House of Representatives about the recent Harvard study showing that 44,000 Americans die every year because they lack health insurance.

Word coming in now that the death toll in Indonesia could be in the thousands…..

Let me begin by saying that I don’t really have strong feelings one way or another when it comes to President Obama heading to Denmark to push Chicago for the Olympics. But as the story has developed I’ve heard some things that do make me wonder about the whole story. When I first heard the reports that he was going to make this trip I assumed it would be for a few days and would probably involve...

Where have you heard this before: “We believe that the decision to perform a medical or surgical procedure should be made by the ____ in consultation with their ____.” If you filled in the blanks with “patient” and “physician,” you were wrong. The correct answer is your cat and veterinarian. In California, it seems the health care debate has spread to cats. Specifically, the...

Just when you think you couldn’t get angrier about the utter stupidity of our military engagement in Iraq, another news item comes along to extend and enlarge the rage. This was a tidbit I ran across this morning in the English version of today’s Tehran Times. It reports that the speaker of Iraq’s parliament is in Iran now to discuss security cooperation between the two countries with an an...

Here’s the picture, a stay at home mom offers to help out her neighbors by keeping an eye on their kids for the 15-40 minutes between when the parents head to work and the school bus arrives. The kids are all friends, the mom is just trying to be a good neighbor. Well according to the state of Michigan she’s a lawbreaker, illegally operating a day care. The fact that she seems to do it for free and...

Governor Rick Perry has been advising citizens concerned about the prospect of government-sponsored universal health care to “read the book” — the book being Frederick Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom”. The problem? Hayek is surprisingly positive towards government social insurance directed towards things like accidents and sickness — in that very book no less. Maybe Governor...

Continuing our coverage of news surrounding the recent arrest of scumbag, pedophile, child-rapist Roman Polanski, (not that I want you to think your reporter is biased on the story or anything) Paterico is still all over the case. Yesterday we told you of Anne Applebaum’s jaw dropping defense of said child-rapist in which she failed to mention that her husband was working to get President Obama to grant...

One of the nice things about the recent success in uncovering the terror cell that was planning to carry out new attacks is that this is something we can all celebrate without getting partisan about it. To be sure there will be some hard liners on the right who will claim it is a fraud or some hard liners on the left who will claim this is proof that Obama is good but Bush was bad at finding terror cells (the...

When engaged in an argument, it’s always wise to understand the other party’s point of view. Not to agree with this view, of course, but as a means to possibly resolve the disagreement in a way that benefits everyone. With this in mind, here’s some reasons why Iran might think it is both justified and necessary to develop the nuclear weapons that pretty much all objective observers today believe...

Update: Reports now indicate that more than 500,000 people are homeless. Few people have insurance to pay for rebuilding. The death toll now is at 140 but is expected to climb. A story that has not been getting a lot of play in the US media is that of Typhoon, now Tropical Storm Ondoy. The storm has already devastated Manila in the Philippines and is heading for mainland China. The storm has dumped more rain...

As we steadily approach January, by which time President Obama has promised to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, and as the Supreme Court, Congress and the nation continue to ponder appropriate outcomes, my latest interview in my series of interviews relevant to “the war on terror” (by my count, the 50th such interview) is with retired Army Reserve Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, who has perhaps...

As you may have heard by now, infamous film director Roman Polanski has been arrested in Switzerland more than thirty years after the fact of his crimes and may be extradited to the United States. For those of us who have been outraged by this case for decades, it may come as cold comfort to see justice finally served when the criminal is in his twilight years and has lived a live of decadent luxury for all...

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Michael Moore are not enmeshed in a mutual admiration society. Two years ago Blitzer criticized some of the info in Moore’s hit movie “Sicko” and had what they called a “You Tube” moment. To recap go HERE. And now they’ve had yet another one on CNN during Moore’s latest CNN appearance to promote his new movie (which promises to be a smash...

It must be a bittersweet experience for my mother-in-law and hundreds of cannery workers being honored today for their contributions to a city’s industry that was snuffed a generation ago. The San Diego Unified Port District spent a half-million dollars to erect a bronze sculpture and commemorate the site honoring tuna and albacore fishing and cannery workers at the waterfront. The story in the San Diego...

By now, most of the stories behind the dazzling rise and ignominious demise of a proud, magnificent bird, the F-22 Raptor, have been told. Stories about the brilliant design and cutting edge manufacturing and assembly technology. A technology that has been described as “the only thing more complex than the human body.” (I was fortunate to visit the “mile-long” Lockheed Martin F-16 assembly line;...

I thought I knew the history of the Great Depression in this country. I thought it lasted the entire decade of the 1930s. Maybe you thought so, too. And maybe we were both wrong. Such a mistake seems obvious when listening to present pronouncements from our economic masters about our own Great Recession that started at the end of 2007. I’ve been thinking we were still in this Great Recession, but lately...

The building of a prisoner of war camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba was as big a screw-up by the Bush administration as is attempts by the Obama administration to close it. Neither administration understood the long-range problems inherent in the system that was created. That’s the analysis we observe in stories today reported in three major newspapers. Retiring Marine Major Gen. Michael Lehnert was the commander...