I’ve got a lousy cold and a lot of work – and ideas – backed up but I cannot endure one more column headline opining on why there’s a gender gap between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. The gap exists because of reality: when women look around and on an every day occasion, see and experience where we aren’t included or even thought about, or, when we are included or thought about,...

Milt Priggee, www.miltpriggee.com Print the artist's attribut This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Are the U.S., South Korea, Japan, China and Russia all wrong about Pyongyang’s launch of a satellite atop a rocket capable of delivering a nuclear weapon? According to this lengthy Stalinist commentary from North Korea’s state-run Rodong Sinmun, the U.S., Japan and the ‘group of traitors’ running south Korea had better reconsider plans to intercept the rocket, which is expected to be launched this...

Here’s a new definition of neo-Nazis: a “civil rights group.” Or so says a Florida Fox affiliate. Footnote: Quite seriously, I am now reading the classic history book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer. Using this Fox affiliate’s definition, I guess you could say this is a 1,000 page plus book about a guy with a mustache who was associated with a group sort of like...

A British writer with an Asian wife scandalizes the Web with a “talk” to his children about American race, providing them with outlandish statistical reasons to fear and avoid black people. Such casual racism and paranoia rightly provoke outrage left and right and, in this old white heart, rouse…what? Disgust, sorrow and painful memories. I was born and spent my first years in America’s largest...

Are we living at a time in which politicians – American and non-American alike – need to choose their words more carefully? For Russia’s Gazeta newspaper, columnist Semen Novoprudski writes of the dangers of fast-and-loose political rhetoric, and why, for the good of the world at large, all politicians, instead of using divisive Cold-War language, should from now on ‘speak exclusively...

American journalism has lost one of its most iconic, journalistically reliable, often controversial and enduring figures: CBS News’ Mike Wallace is dead at 93: Broadcasting legend Mike Wallace has died, CBS News announced on Sunday. He was 93. Host Charles Osgood broke the news on “CBS News Sunday Morning.” The network did not announce when or where he died. CBS News has a long tribute on...

To all those who wonder if in this political climate where being over the top gets you attention, readship, invitations to be on cable, book and radio deals there are limits. Here’s a development that underscores that there are limits, indeed. National Review has fired popular conservative columnist John Derbyshire over a column that was racist. The only question is whether it was satire that was racist...

On big stories the tendency is to try and “advance the story” and find a new twist or something someone else missed. Sometimes there are perils, sometimes there are errors and sometimes career heads roll. As here with NBC: NBC News has fired a producer who was involved in the production of a misleading segment about the Trayvon Martin case in Florida. The person was fired on Thursday, according to...

While campaigning in vain in Wisconsin last week, Rick Santorum claimed: I was just reading something last night from the state of California. And that the California universities – I think it’s seven or eight of the California system of universities don’t even teach an American history course. It’s not even available to be taught. Of course he was soon called on the carpet for such an outlandish “inaccuracy”...

Has the threat posed by North Korea become so great, that Beijing will fully join the rest of the world in bringing the maximum pressure to bear against Pyongyang? Expressing friendly skepticism about geopolitical naivete on the part of President Obama and issuing a plea to China to get off the stick, this editorial from Japan’s Nishi Nippon Shimbun laments that the signs aren’t promising for preventing...

To many people in the outside world, the killing of Trayvon Martin seems to be stretching the fabric of American society to the breaking point. For France’s Le Monde, U.S. correspondent Corine Lesnes writes with surprise of how the events of the past month could have occurred three years after the election of America’s first Black president. For Le Monde, Corine Lesnes writes in part: Thousands...

Are President Barack Obama and the Democrats political toast? There are signs that could be the case. Even signs that Democrats could lose the Senate, not win back the House and lose the Oval Office. But…WAIT! Welcome to our manic depressant election year where you can choose the poll or argument of your partisan liking and the only certainty will be: predictions are risky. But there is good data out there. For...

I thought I had seen all the self-promoting, self-obsessed, self-centered, self-aggrandizing, self-delusional, self-opinionated sides of egomaniac Donald Trump. (Did I mention self-aggrandizing, derived from the Latin/old French grand/ adj. “impressive in size, appearance, or general effect”?) But I had not — until now. You can read this little man’s inflated offer to attorney Gloria Allred here. And...

I’m out. I’m just all out. I can read more, talk more, opine more. But really — how much more is there to actually say, that hasn’t already been said, about the Republican candidates remaining in the primary battle to be the party’s nominee for the 2012 general election? Even his three wins last night, in Wisconsin, Maryland, and the District of Columbia, have failed to seal the...

Today marks the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968, even as a racial uproar does violence to his memory. The gulf between reactions to his death then, universal public grief, and that of Trayvon Martin tells much about how America has changed in those years. Even when still alive, Dr. King’s preaching of peaceful protest was being challenged by angrier voices of Black Power and Black Panthers. Yet, in his...

I mean, really.. Question: are these folks moles put in place by the Democratic Party to cause a stampede of independent voters to vote Democrat in 2012? What is certain: this is proof that all the nuts around aren’t on your supermarket shelf. P.S. Most serious news organizations would say “adios” to someone like this. But there are serious news organizations and then — apparently —...

In the eyes of the world at large, the killing of a young Black man in Florida named Trayvon Martin has done nothing to diminish the image of America as a gun-totting, shoot first, ask questions later country. For Germany’s Frankfurter Rundschau, correspondent Olivia Schoeller explains to her readers that on gun violence and racism, his death should be a wake-up call to Americans: ‘It’s time...

GOP presidential candidate Santorum made the wrong kind of headlines a few weeks ago when he spouted the wrong kind of information on euthanasia in the Netherlands. Among the claims he made were these: That 10 percent of all deaths in the Netherlands are due to euthanasia. That half of those deaths — or five percent of all deaths in the Netherlands — are people who are euthanized involuntarily. Santorum...

“Mad Men” makes news with a passing dig at Mitt Romney’s dad (calling the elder “a clown”) but, for serious fans, the growing question is what’s happening to the show’s core character, the creative but mercurial, lusty but haunted, sexually greedy but sensitive Don Draper? We could be in “Answered Prayers” territory here, Truman Capote’s never-finished novel of that era based on the...