That grinding sound you hear are the tectonic plates of Republican presidential politics shifting. In what direction and how far they shift may determine whether Mitt Romney has a chance of beating Barack Obama in November. That is if he can survive brutal attacks from some of his opponents. Although it was not noticeable, the shift began with the burst of Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, first in New York...

Mitt Romney wouldn’t have caught Bin Laden. He would have bought Al Qaeda and fired him. ~ Commenters at DAILY KOS The clashes over class warfare that have bubbled to the surface as the Republican Party scrambles to anoint a challenger to President Obama is a healthy sign that addressing real issues is not completely dead, although the warfare happens to be for the wrong reasons. To find the right reasons,...

Three moderate GOP weathervanes—-George Will, Peggy Noonan and David Brooks—-are being blown by Iowa winds in Rick Santorum’s direction, but in a wobbly way. The usually dour Will starts out almost giddy, claiming Republicans “crave fun. Supporting Mitt Romney still seems to many like a duty…Suddenly, supporting Santorum seems like a lark, partly because a week or so ago he could quit complaining...

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...

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 —...

Is the United States a war-happy nation? With the situation surrounding the Strait of Hormuz escalating, columnist Abd Al Bari Atwan of Samidoon in the Palestinian Territories writes that American embargoes invariably lead to war, and with the U.S. economy in crisis, a war with Iran that would boost weapons sales may be precisely what Washington wants. For Samidoon, Abd Al Bari Atwan writes in part: There...

Like Saddam Hussein, are Iranian leaders boasting of their nuclear program and military prowess when in fact they are quite weak? Ahmed Al-Jarallah, the editor in chief of Kuwait’s Al-Seyassah, warns Iranian leaders to step back from the brink and retract their threat to close the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway through which 40 percent of the world’s oil flows – before it is too late. Al-Seyassah...

Four of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council will see political changes at the top this year – including the United States. According to Stefan Kornelius of Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung, these decisions, out of the hands of most of the world’s people, could decide the type of civilization most of us end up living in: some form of democracy or as the Chinese call it, ‘benevolent...

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...

Yawn, talk to the hand, how about dem Bears? Almost any conversation would be more interesting than one state’s caucuses after months, MONTHS of listening to mostly petty rhetoric that has NO specifics all in one place about how to govern, truly help a suffering country. And neither does the other side either. Tried to refinance lately? How about turning back a foreclosure? Tried to buy health insurance...

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...

Global GDP by Country, via ABC.net.au Imagine what the world might be like had China not entered into a protracted war with Great Britain in the 1800s … a war that resulted from Great Britain’s smuggling opium into the country: Ordinary wars of conquest are to me far less wicked, than to go to war in order to maintain smuggling, and that smuggling consisting in the introduction of a demoralizing...

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...

by Walter and Rosemary Brasch In January 2009, with a new president about to be inaugurated, we wrote a column about the stories we preferred not having to write, but knew we would. Three years later, we are still writing about those problems; three years from now, we’ll still be writing about them. We had wanted the U.S. Department of the Interior to stop the government-approved slaughter of wild horses...

Is US blood and treasure making Afghanistan safe for Chinese exploitation?  It certainly looks like it. In December, 2007, China’s state-owned China Metallurgical Group Corp. (MCC) signed a $2.9 billion agreement with the Kabul government to extract copper from the Aynak deposit, one of the world’s largest unexploited copper deposits with an estimated 240 million tons of ore. And now we...

How sorry is the present state of Iraq – and how bitter do some Iraqis feel about the consequences of the U.S. invasion and withdrawal? For Iraq’s Azzaman, columnist Fateh Abdulsalam accuses President Obama of brazenly using the Iraq withdrawal to his political advantage and leaving the country ‘with a government reveling in the joys of its own corruption and the opportunistic use of the symbols...

I don’t know what caught my attention while browsing the web today. Perhaps it was the similarity to the title of that famous song, “How much is that doggie in the window?” Perhaps it was the similarity to the title I chose for one of my military aviation stories, “How much is that F-35 in the window?” But more likely it was the incongruence in the words in the title of the story itself: “How much...

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The New Year of 2012, a general election year, will be a year when the fortunes of political parties and politicians will rise and fall; it will be a year of unprecedented social and ideological confrontation; most important, it will be a year when “we the people” once again have the opportunity — the obligation — to make necessary adjustments or corrections to the course of our society,...

In the residue of Christmas spirit, an attempt to understand what’s behind a toxic cloud that the Tea Party has cast over American government all year: Yes, the economy has been bad, and many of us have been hurting—-from young people without jobs to the retired with no increases in Social Security and no place to earn interest on their life savings. Yes, bailouts and stimulus have been very costly yet still...

“It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.” –James Madison, The Federalist Papers Madison would have been appalled at the incoherence of much of the legislation enacted by Congress in the modern era. While the body of these bills is generally voluminous,...

Arranging smooth successions has been the bane of despots since the dawn of history – and today’s North Korea is a perfect example. Does the death of Kim Jong-il mean the beginning of the end of the Kim dynasty? Columnist Sohn Gwang-joo of South Korea’s Daily North Korea explains why contradictions in the system coupled with the inexperience of the country’s new despot make it highly...

The U.S. P0stal Service is financially going postal. John Avlon, writing in The Daily Beast, notes that it faces a grave crisis and there si a chance that the Christmas of December 2011 could one day soon be looked back as the Good Old Days — when there was more extensive service than during the rest of the 21st century. In fact, Avlon writes, the Postal Service’s survival could be at stake: A...

I really cannot compete with the many recent and excellent TMV posts on this subject. I particularly enjoyed Walter Brasch’s post from yesterday confirming that anyone can guiltlessly embrace the many versions of this ancient holiday to which many cultures, religions, and people have contributed. I appreciate all the religious and secular aspects of Christmas. I feel sorry for those who wish to define it...

Is the Internal Revenue Service suborning European Banks to keep tabs on their American customers? According to this editorial from Germany’s Financial Times Deutschland, a number of German Banks have ‘understandably’ decided to drop their U.S. customers due to the expense of complying with IRS data provisions and for fear of being on the wrong side of the American tax collector. The Financial...