Members of Indian Parliament listened mesmerized as US president Barack Obama today transformed himself from being a mere salesman-in-chief of America to a visionary world leader who aspired to live up to the great ideals that had inspired Indian and US founding fathers in laying the foundations of the two democratic republics. (Of course, he did also make major policy commitments, such as US support for India’s...

Eric Cantor told Chris Wallace today that he would not rule out shutting down the government and allowing the United States to default on its debts — and then he announced that if Republicans did do that, Pres. Obama would be responsible.

If you want to know why Republicans trounced the Democrats on Tuesday, read this piece by Glenn Greenwald. Skip the part about the on-air fight between Glenn and Lawrence O’Donnell over what O’Donnell said or didn’t say on Scarborough’s show. It’s both amusing and appalling, but the truly important stuff comes when Glenn takes on O’Donnell’s specific argument about why...

Democrats took a shellacking, but the big loser was the Untied (no typo) States of America, with the electoral map now looking like a big red blob with thin blue parentheses on both coasts. Politically, the President is still dazed, but there are early signs that Republicans will turn out to be sore winners with a Tea Party headache that won’t go away. Some GOP Senators are livid that Sarah Palin and her...

Politics That Matters by Ron Almberg, Jr. Thank goodness it is over: mid-term elections. The day following elections, November 3rd, is almost as bad as the days leading up to Election Day on November 2nd. The whole day is taken up with pundits and analysts telling us what the election results mean; as if we are too ignorant to figure that out ourselves and need someone to tell us. Of course, even the analysis...

The national, statewide and local results of the November 2nd Midterm elections were hardly unexpected. The winners will accomplish nothing with respect to altering the real direction of the country which is a seriously ailing and quickly declining hyper-empire. The electorate was never provided any meaningful choice but instead had to pick between the two defunct and corrupt political parties. The Tea Party...

WASHINGTON — President Obama allowed Republicans to define the terms of the nation’s political argument for the past two years and permitted them to draw battle lines the way they wanted. Neither he nor his party can let that happen again. Democrats would be foolish to turn on themselves in fruitless bickering over whether their troubles owe to a failure to mobilize and excite their base or...

If polls and media pundits are to be believed, large majorities of Americans who are not ideologues for either party and who may, in fact, be just as disgusted with Republicans as with Democrats, are planning to vote for GOP candidates tomorrow simply out of frustration with a terrible economy that shows few signs as yet of getting better. Republican policies of the past may have created the financial crisis...

Wow! We really told them phony-baloney Democrats this past Tuesday. What a great day for patriots, for Real America, for Real Americans. We voted for real change, not for that phony hopey-changey. We finally took our country back. We really cleaned their clocks. We threw the bums out. Bums who had the chance to build upon our accomplishments, but who, instead, had the audacity to—in two short, miserable...

The copyrighted cartoon by Nate Beeler, The Washington Examiner, is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved.

Bull has enjoyed a central place in mythology cutting across many civilizations. In agrarian India it enjoyed a special place but is now in decline owing to widespread artificial insemination of cows. The photo above of a bull in an Indian town is symbolic of the waning power and majesty of the bull. I am reminded of the following poem… “I am monarch of all I survey; My right there is none to dispute;… I...

This is certainly something that conservatives would vociferously condemn if a Democrat had done it:

You remember that lie the right spread during the health care reform debate that the mandate to buy health insurance included jail time for Americans who refused to do so?

Bacon has become ubiquitous. But has it caused us to stumble? Or is it our food salvation?

Joining the Obama Administration’s outreach to women, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro (D, CT-3) held a conference call last week, focusing on issues affecting women. Pelosi and DeLauro plowed through accomplishments for and concerns about the status of women in the United States. On the 2010 health care bill, DeLauro emphasized that the real benefits in the bill, for women,...

Today, Oct. 25, the 72nd year and 331st day of my life, the hammer dropped. I have 3rd stage cancer of the lungs and surrounding lymph nodes, colon cancer, a cancerous skin lesion and an aggravated congestive heart disease compounded by the fickle ravages over the years by diabetes. Did I mention I recently had a cataract removed on the left eye? Laser surgery on the right eye is scheduled next month. I am dead...

The investigation into the disappearance of U.S. tourist David Hartley by narco-trafficking pirates in Mexico has raised the hackles of U.S. officials, who are exasperated by the lack of progress of the probe and the general lawlessness across the border. But according to this editorial from Mexico’s La Jornada, Mexicans hold the United States responsible – not only for Hartley’s presumed...

I don’t enjoy reading. I’ve been told this is the definition of dyslexia. Or at least part of the definition. Dyslexics lose their desire to read, or they never gain a desire, or they can’t seem to maintain a desire to continue along the written page. It seems dyslexia is more than the reversal of letters and words. It’s more than a punch line about atheists who don’t believe in dog. It’s more...

Columnist Mario Antonio Sandoval of Guatemala’s Prensa Libre has a suggestion for how the United States could help compensate Guatemalans for the experiments U.S. doctors and scientists performed on unwilling Guatemalan subjects in the 1940s. In George W. Bush’s time in office, Guatemala President Alvaro Colom pushed hard for ‘Temporary Protected Status’ for Guatemalans in the U.S....

Posting articles like these is no pleasure. But part of the practice of journalism is to alert the public to things they might not want to see or hear, and which, in our judgment as journalists, they ought to see or hear. Global reaction to how the United States government intentionally infected unknowing Guatemalans and perhaps even American troops – is one such occasion. Over the past 24 hours we have...

Continuing with our coverage of the U.S. syphilis experiments from the Guatemalan side, now that it has been revealed that the United States performed the deadly research in the 1940s, columnist Dina Fernandez of Guatemala’s El Periodico writes that regardless of the righteous indignation that the people in her country feel toward their ‘neighbors to the north,’ Guatemalans must take responsibility...

I love honey. I used to gift honey, especially from Germany, to my close relations on my return from my travels abroad. Now I have stopped gifting honey and even stopped eating it. My friend Sunita Narain, an indefatigable public-spirited person, tells us that even health-conscious companies, in this case from Australia and Switzerland, “do not check antibiotics in products they export to our world.” If...

Faced with the prospects of rising costs for providing mandated increases in health care coverage, some companies have floated the possibility of dropping employee coverage altogether, most notably McDonald’s. In response, the Obama administration has granted 30 one-year waivers to McDonald’s and other businesses and insurance companies, exempting them from regulatory changes that will affect the...

Today is an important day for Gypsies, also known as Romani (estimated population 6-11 million worldwide). A group of academics, government advisers and gypsy representatives are meeting in Strasbourg to discuss the next steps in a pan-European project entitled “The Decade of Roma Inclusion, 2005 to 2015″. The Independent describes Gypsies/Roma as “Europe’s most persecuted minority that...

Now that the U.S. has admitted to performing deadly syphilis experiments on unknowing Guatemalans, a debate in Guatemala has erupted about why and who in the Guatemalan government might have approved them in the first place. According to this news item from Guatemala’s El Periodico, some Guatemalans suspect that the ‘gringos’ are planning to pin blame for the crime on former Guatemala President...