He is good at selling things, and now Herman Cain is outdoing his Burger King and Godfather Pizza triumphs by getting hungry GOP voters to order him up for the White House. From the bottom of the pack, Cain has surged to third in the national Fox poll at 17 percent, two points behind Rick Perry, after surprisingly eating the Texas governor’s lunch in a Florida straw poll this week. The political noise is all...

American politics has grown coarse, and ugly where name calling and swearing have somehow begun to impress some as intelligent. In fact, those who do politics this way probably should start a company selling lunch meats: Boorshead. Here’s a prime example of an act that is notably unclassy, cheered on by some and apparently lucrative financially. Warrning adult language in this link. His four letter battle...

Is the United States inching back bit by bit to the 1960s, where demonstrations and counter demonstrations were all the rage (literally and figuratively)? It could be. First came the conservative Tea Party movement with the angry town hall meetings and demonstrations of summer-fall 2010, which impacted the 2010 elections. Now come signs that the country’s left is toying with demonstrations that set up...

Saturday Night Live last night lampooed internet comments sections on weblogs and websites where people comment and say whatever pops into their heads using “pen names.” Another case of satire saying something far more effectively than a zillion serious words:

I recently received an e-mail from a dear Republican friend. You know, one of those e-mails that float around cyber space for years—in this case for more than 10 years—and are sent to the world as being fresh off the cyber press and as containing startling new revelations, usually political and politically motivated. Surprisingly, I happen to totally agree with this one as being timely, almost timeless...

Is the United States behind the times for retaining use of the death penalty? Continuing on with our current theme, this editorial from Colombia’s El Tiempo outlines why execution reflects so badly on the United States, and cites statistical evidence that in any case, it fails to deter murder. The El Tiempo editorial says in part: The tenacity with which the United States clings to this outdated and...

The execution in Georgia of Troy Davis, who many both in and out of the United States believe to have been innocent of the murder charges against him, has once again highlighted the global opprobrium associated with America’s continuing use of the death penalty. According to French philosopher Daniel Salvatore Schiffer, writing for Le Nouvel Observateur, the fact that President Obama failed to mention...

Media Distortion: Newspapers Rarely Mention Suicides by Tina Dupuy I asked a reporter at Unnamed Major Metropolitan Newspaper why they don’t cover suicides. Why is it that traditionally in the press there’s a veil of silence draped over taking your own life? He said it’s because they don’t want to encourage the behavior. The concern is if they report on it, others will copy. There’s...

Osama bin Laden used to brag about making Americans so paranoid about terror attacks that just raising an al Qaeda flag would panic us into self-damage without any effort on his part. His legacy comes back in headlines about the arrest of a 26-year-old Massachusetts man, who has been working for months with FBI sting agents to prepare attacks on the Capitol and Pentagon with remote-controlled aircraft, fake...

Is Washington’s Jewish lobby an impenetrable barrier to the realization of a Palestinian state? Columnist Moqif Mattar of Rumallah’s Al-Hayat Al-Jadidah writes that regardless of the potential benefits of better U.S. ties to Arabs, keeping Palestinian lands under Israeli control is just as much an article of faith for America as it is for Israel. For the Al-Hayat Al-Jadidah, Moqif Mattar writes...

During the recent interview of Congressman Paul with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, Jon asked Ron a question that gets to the crux of the divide between progressive Liberalism and libertarianism. Jon’s question was: Does the failure of government to protect adequately make it a failure of government having that responsibility? Does their inability to do it effectively make it so that they shouldn’t...

I have been fond of saying over the years that “discovery is a bitch,” that is that the pre-trial phase of a lawsuit in which each party can obtain evidence from the other, can be more important — and damaging — than the trial itself. Which is precisely why, to my knowledge, Sarah Palin has never made good on her threats to sue adversaries real and imagined. Palin has most recently...

by WALTER BRASCH Parents demanded it be banned. School superintendents placed it in restricted sections of their libraries. It is the most challenged book four of the past five years, according to the American Library Association (ALA). “It” is a 32-page illustrated children’s book, And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, with illustrations by Henry Cole. The book is based upon the...

TV Newser reports that Times’ Mark Halperin scored a historic broadcast first: he did his analysis for MSNBC from an airplane bathroom. GO HERE to see their post and the video (its such a scoop that we prefer you go to their site). I REFUSE to make any immature jokes about how I would think the analysis would be done by a lab after he uses the bathroom. No jokes about crappy analysis will appear here...

Since Rick Perry stepped out of the protective shade provided by the beautiful Texas Live Oak trees onto the harsh, unforgiving light of the national stage, much has been said and written about his obvious unpreparedness—perhaps inability—to face the scrutiny of the national electorate or even of a relatively friendly and forgiving Republican audience. But while some may have been surprised by the...

It seems that mild-mannered, coach-class flying U.S. Ambassador to China Gary Locke is making life uncomfortable for Beijing’s coddled, cloistered senior officials. In this thin-skinned editorial from the state-controlled Global Times, the Beijing regime criticizes Chinese media fawning over the new U.S. envoy, thereby exposing its own discomfort over the more extravagant behavior of its own senior officials. The...

As deadlines near for filing to get on the ballot, the most peculiar Republican candidate of them all is running (or not) true to form-—in all directions. The chief of Sarah Palin’s PAC is panhandling supporters by telling them time is “running out,” that “someone must save our nation from this road to European socialism” and she is “on the verge of making her decision of whether or not to run...

Seriously. Having somewhat rescaled the credibility cliff back to some degree of better journalism, the struggling LA Times was once more embarrassed by its most partisan hack, over the most trivial of issues, broadly hinting at anti-Semitism. Seriously. Malcolm in the muddle Here’s that “cut to the chase” moment:

The reports of President Obama’s ‘gaffe’ during a speech to the Congressional Black Caucus has sparked another round of silliness from some of the net pundits. For those who may have missed it, Obama was trying to say that he wanted millionaires to pay more taxes than janitors but he made a minor slip that seemed to come out ‘jews’ instead of janitors. This has led to all kinds...

The very blunt comments of outgoing Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen that Pakistan intelligence has been actively assisting the Haqqani terrorist network has triggered another tremendous upwelling of anti-American sentiment in that nation. These three editorials from Pakistan’s The Nation and The Frontier Post well illustrate the skyrocketing passion and anger toward America now felt in that country. Just...

Trump, Bachmann, Perry…and, on the horizon, Chris Christie. Republicans are using up frontrunners like disposable tissues, evoking a personal memory. FDR was inaugurated on March 4, 1933, my ninth birthday. In 1945 I was a 21-year-old foot soldier sleeping on the floor of a German farmhouse shaken awake to hear that the only president I could remember was dead. Our world now manufactures public figures...

The good news from Florida came for former Godfather’s Pizza boss Herman Cain: in a political shocker, he won the highly watched straw poll that has picked the winner of the GOP Florida primary in the last three Presidential elections. The bad news from Florida came for Texas Gov. Rick Perry: he had been expected to win and this will be seen as a sign that conservatives no longer consider him their darling...

Did Arabs and more importantly, Palestinians, put too much faith in Barack Obama? According to columnist M. Saadoune of Algeria’s Le Quotidien d’Oran, anyone who thought President Obama would shake up the balance of power in the Middle East and make possible a Palestinian state was extremely naive, and now has learned the truth. For the Le Quotidien d’Oran, columnist M. Saadoune writes in...

Will the Arab street erupt in protest if the United States vetoes recognition of a Palestinian State in the U.N. Security Council, as President Obama has promised to do? According to columnist Osama al-Farra of Al-Hayat Al-Jadidah in the Palestinian Territories, unless Arabs rise up to defend Palestinians and their own dignity, there will be nothing left to do but await the next U.S. insult. For Al-Hayat Al-Jadidah...

Independent-minded talk radio host and Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Michael Smerconish gives us our political Quote of the Day — on something I have long contended: that the growth of talk radio which has turned politics into verbal professional wrestling and big bucks entertainment has damaged America’s political landscape by accentuating the left/right and Democratic/Republican partisan divides...