I am fairly conversant in the history of presidential campaigning and cannot recall an era, let along a larger number of candidates, that believe that telling lie and after lie will get them elected. Exhibit A in this regard is Michele Bachmann, whose stock has most fortunately fallen as fast as Rick Perry’s has risen. Call them lies, obfuscations, fibs or whatever, but Bachmann is proved herself to...

A progressive Democrat and a conservative Republican were walking together one day on the sidewalk alongside a busy downtown street. They were arguing about various public policies, what to do about the growing number of unemployed Americans, and whether President Obama was partially or fully to blame for the current economy. Then they stopped and observed the following: An unemployed man was standing in the...

Unless Mitt Romney (or Jeb Bush) stops the Rick Perry steamroller, we are heading toward a referendum on the value of human life next year. When Sarah Palin invented death panels to bash health care reform two years ago, with perfect pitch for political devastation, she planted a seed that has now flowered in the Tea Party frontrunner, who is being cheered for multiple executions in Texas by crowds who are also...

Update and correction: Jimmy Leeward, the pilot of the Mustang P51 that crashed in Reno was first reported by media to be 80 years old. He is actually one month shy of being 75. TMV regrets carrying the error forward. Dr.E, M.Ed. Being closer to 80 than to 20 years of age, I bristle when people say ‘old people’ cant, shouldnt, ought not to (fill in the blank with any number of harmless, funny,...

Has the United States been in the midst of a national neurotic episode since the 9-11 attacks? According to this editorial from Japan’s Ibaraki Shimbun, going around the world and “brandishing an ideal” is just as foolish for the United States as it is for al-Qaeda. The Ibaraki Shimbun editorial says in part: Ten years have passed since the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States...

According to a study published this week in the journal Radiology, “abnormal hippocampal blood flow” can be measured in the brains of some ill Gulf War vets. Brantley Hargrove writes: The findings mark a significant advancement in our understanding of the syndrome, which was for years written off by the Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs as a form of combat stress rather than...

Jonathan Cohn at TNR finds one: Need a reason to believe the Affordable Care Act is starting to work? The Census Bureau just gave you a half million of them. That’s how many young adults had health insurance in 2010, as compared to 2009, according to the official estimates. Or, to put it another way, the proportion of 18- to 24-year olds without health insurance fell, by roughly two percentage points, last...

KENT SNYDER AND RON PAUL There was a special moment during the CNN/Tea Party presidential debate on Monday evening when moderator Wolf Blitzer threw out a red-meat hypothetical: What do the candidates think about the case of a young man who could afford health insurance but chose not to buy it and became gravely ill? Should the state pay his bills? “That’s what freedom is all about;...

about whether Perry signed the writ to execute Cameron justly… even though it is thought now that Cameron may have been innocent. 234 people executed during Perry’s governorship. That’s equal to more than a third of the small town population where I grew up. I sit here imagining every third house in the northwoods having the hearse pull up. It seem odd that some politicos say they are pro...

After Michele Bachmann pounced on Rick Perry last night for his executive order mandating young girls to receive the HPV vaccine, former Alaska governor and now conservative darling-celebrity Sarah Palin has also piled on the Texas governor over the same issue, calling it a possible product of “crony capitalism.” Palin has used this term before. According to the New York Times, Palin used it before at...

A quixotic and magnetic new film has been made by Dawn Gifford Engle in which Nobel peace Prize awardees such as Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Rigoberta Menchu Tum and other notables speak about the actual Mayan meaning of the end of the year 2012. There is a good long film clips here... A few years back, there arose a media-inflated rumor about 2012, rivaling, in my mind, a “barricade the...

The word eugenics was not used in Bachmann/ Perry argument. But, here is the definition. Does the matter they are discussing tilt into this: EUGENICS: the science of improving a human population… by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics. Developed largely by Francis Galton as a method of improving the human race, it fell into disfavor only after the perversion...

For most people, today is the day-after 9-11. For me, it’s the 10-year anniversary of a different life-changing event. I don’t watch television in the daytime, and I rarely watch live TV. I learned about 9-11 when Mike came home from work early. The first thing I did was call Bill West, Sr. in Dawson, Georgia — because his daughter, my best friend since high school, lived in New Jersey and...

Do Not Lose Heart, We Were Made for These Times Mis estimados: Do not lose heart. We were made for these times. I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. They are concerned about the state of affairs in our world right now. It is true, one has to have strong cojones and ovarios to withstand much of what passes for “good” in our culture today. Abject disregard of...

Andrea Mitchell, 65, the NBC chief foreign affairs correspondent, announced on the air Wednesday that she has breast cancer and asserted that 1-in-8 women in America today (almost 20 15 million) have breast cancer. “I had planned to be hiking in Wyoming last week,” Mitchell said, “but instead discovered that I am now among the one in eight women in this country–incredibly, one in eight–who...

It mysteriously seemed like Jerry Lewis would not appear on the scaled-back telethon that he made famous and successful. Then it appeared he would. Now it appears he won’t.

Last evening, I left behind almost three million Americans in the Northeast still cut off from the 21st century by the high winds of Hurricane Irene-—without electrical power, TV or Internet access, many depending on iffy private generators that could conk out at any moment to remain unserviced by overwhelmed repair people and deprive them of fresh water and unspoiled food. For five days and nights, it was...

I haven’t posted on TMV for a while due to various personal and business factors. I’ve sort of burnt out my brain with the overall inanity of our public discourse. However I still read Internet blogs of many other writers. A friend from Cleveland, OH sent me an email recently and I thought it was rather humorous and sad at the same time. I have reprinted it below (including extra comments from others)...

TMV columnist Shaun Mullen just posted an interesting article with a little bit of history on and memories of past hurricanes and an excellent list of precautions people in the (possible) path of Hurricane Irene should take. You notice I capitalized “Hurricane.” That is because I have great respect and awe for Hurricanes. This may be because of a an extremely close encounter I (and my family) had with a...

Half a century ago, there was a jokey bumper sticker: “Support Mental Health or I’ll Kill You.” Now British researchers into Chronic Fatigue Syndrome are under physical attack and death threats for suggesting the disorder has psychological origins. Aside from the question of where victims find the energy for such violence, this fatigue-afflicted terrorism reflects nagging questions about where psychiatry...

While Germany is regarded as an axis power that has really confronted its behavior and activities during World War II, Japan is not. That is what makes this editorial from Japan’s Asahi Shimbun so eye-opening. According to Asahi, Japan’s failure to acknowledge and alter the organization of Japanese society since its defeat 66 years ago has led not only to economic crisis, but the post-tsunami nuclear...

GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry reversed himself—some say “walked back, I say “ran back””—on an executive order he issued as Texas governor in Feb. 2007, mandating that young girls receive the expensive HPV (human papillomavirus ) vaccine Gardasil, a vaccine against some strains of a sexually transmitted virus that can cause cervical cancer. A measure that, until last week, he...

I’ll begin this essay by declaring that it is my view that President Obama has not been the major disappointment that has left many liberals and blacks shaking their heads. I’ll also note that given the watershed 2008 election and the eight dark years before it, our expectations for the next four were bound to be much too high. Yet I share some of that sense of disappointment. While acknowledging...

What will become of Iraq when U.S. forces leave at the end of this year? Is the current Iraqi government capable of dealing with life on its own? And if not, what should Iraqis do about it? Columnist Atheer Al Katib of Iraq’s Kitabat newspaper admonishes his readers to begin a great debate about what kind of government – and what kind of country – they want. For Iraq’s Kitabat, Atheer...

If the United States simply had the per-person health-care costs of Switzerland, which has the second-most expensive health-care system in the world, we would spend $3,000 less per person and save about $900 billion a year. Assuming we need to reduce deficits by about $4 trillion over the next 10 years, those savings would do the heavy lifting with about $5 trillion to spare. – Ezra Klein Simon Owens...