Back in September of 2009, I started one of my several articles on the Afghanistan War as follows: As the fighting in Afghanistan intensifies; as that war claims more and more casualties; and as critical decisions loom on national objectives, strategy and corresponding troop levels and deployments there, the debate also intensifies. As the war has continued unabated and has indeed claimed more and more young...

Israeli Ambassador to the USA Dr. Michael Oren (a native of New Jersey) spoke this evening at Cincinnati’s Mayerson JCC. It is still rather icy out and over 700 people came to hear him. These are not his exact words, just my notes on some things he said: Someone asked how we live with uncertainty – we do it every day and have done so since 1948. Keeping in mind what Iran has done without...

Barack H. Obama 2012 State of the Union Drinking Game Raging Moderate, by Will Durst What you need to play: Four taxpayers: One white, Wall Street type in full suit and yellow power tie (MBA Guy); two ordinary folks sporting jeans, one in blue work shirt, other in white shirt (the Jeans); and one person wearing clothes that look like they were used for floor covering at a tire-changing shop for a minimum of...

CHARLESTON, S.C. — You know-it-alls who think unemployment is the most urgent crisis facing the nation are wrong, I’ve learned from watching a zillion Republican campaign ads on television this week. All you deficit hawks, rise-of-China worrywarts and alarmed observers of the Iranian nuclear program are wrong, too, and should stop bothering yourselves with trifles. One of Mitt Romney’s...

Cardow, The Ottawa Citizen This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to appear on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Are America’s ‘big three’ credit agencies at fault for wrongly downgrading Eurozone debt at the worst possible time – or are European leaders just looking for someone else to blame for their troubles? According to this editorial from Germany’s Die Welt, the blame for the mess in Europe rests squarely on the shoulders of European officials who would rather tell their constituents...

I have for some time now been dismayed as I watched a conservative movement I once respected, and considered myself a student and sometime sympathizer of, apparently become adrift in a haze of “free market” rhetoric that was more style than substance, more twitch than thought. I remember well one such “conservative” who went utterly ballistic on me not too long ago when I noted the rather...

Only months ago Wisconsin’s union-busting Gov. Scott Walker seemed to feel he was on the path to becoming another President Ronald Reagan. But now it sounds as if he’s more likely to be on the path to becoming another California Gov. Gray Davis, the Governor recalled by voters in 2003: Critics of Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin submitted to the state on Tuesday more than a million signatures, nearly...

By all accounts, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is poised to win the South Carolina primary and go on to win big in Florida. Very soon this lady will have sung. But now — at the seeming moment of his triumph — things are suddenly getting rockier for Romney. You can see it in three development. DEVELOPMENT ONE: The Democratic National Committee was apparently ecstatic over his performance...

Does being a CEO of an organization mean you are better qualified to be President of the United States? While I was studying for a masters degree in Political Communications, this was the most interesting question that I came across. It is a question I asked myself when I was studying George W Bush’s candidacy in 2000 and it is a question I have been asking myself as I have watched Mitt Romney’s campaign. As...

WASHINGTON — From all evidence, the issue of economic justice isn’t going away. Break the news gently to Mitt Romney, who seems apoplectic that the whole “rich get richer, poor get poorer” thing is being discussed out loud. In front of the children, for goodness sake. “You know I think it’s fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms,” he told the “Today”...

Is there any historical basis for the alliance between certain Latin American nations and Islamic fundamentalist Iran? For Spain’s La Vanguardia, apparently exasperated columnist Pilar Rahola says that, “If Simon Bolívar were raise his head and see Ahmadinejad and Chávez in his noble land, he would die a second time of pure shame.” For La Vanguardia, Pilar Rahola writes in part: At what...

Steve Roth wonders, how do incarceration rates affect unemployment numbers? Europe has consistently higher unemployment than the U.S., but the U.S. has far and away the highest incarceration rate in the world — .75% of the population. (World Prison Population List [PDF], compiled since 1992 by Roy Walmsley of the International Centre for Prison Studies.) Only Russia comes even close, at .63%. (Canada:...

Is This Land Made for You and Me? by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship The traveling medicine show known as the race for the Republican presidential nomination has moved on from Iowa and New Hampshire, and all eyes are now on South Carolina. Well, not exactly all. At the moment, our eyes are fixed on some big news from the great state of Oklahoma, home of the legendary American folk singer Woody Guthrie, whose...

Mitt Romney’s Anti-European rhetoric is stronger than the Anti-American statements by leading German politicians in the last few election campaigns. Romney seems to assume that Republican voters are so stupid, uninformed and Anti-European that he can get their votes with scaremongering. His Europe bashing seems to be his response to the criticism of his "socialist" health care policy in Massachusetts...

Krugman reports that neo liberal technocrat Frau Merkel gave her response to the S&P downgrades in Europe. German chancellor Angela Merkel has called on eurozone governments speedily to implement tough new fiscal rules after Standard & Poor’s downgraded the credit ratings of France and Austria and seven other second-tier sovereigns. More austerity – exactly a reason S&P gave for the downgrade. We...

From an excellent piece in The New Yorker on the rising economy in Brazil: [Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff] has to keep revving the engine of prosperity for ordinary Brazilians, and make sure people know who’s responsible for it… …In the United States, during the second half of the twentieth century, this kind of political apparatus fell victim to its own success. Policies that succeed...

Venezuelan columnist Jose Toro Hardy is upset. Why? Because, according to him, President Hugo Chavez’ embrace of Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad not only puts Venezuelans at odds with almost the entire developed world, it goes against Venezuela’s historic strict adherence to neutrality when it comes to conflicts it has nothing to do with. For Venezuela’s El Universal, Jose Toro Hardy starts...

I have just watched When Mitt Romney Came to Town and it is, in a word, devastating. The 28-minute film from Newt Gingrich’s Super PAC, a series of interviews with ordinary folk whose lives were never the same after Romney’s Bain Capital bought and took down local companies, is a double condemnation — both of his private equity work and the business model he used to get filthy rich. The...

There surely will be a statue of Sarah Palin when the Temple of Political Chutzpah is erected. The former half-term governor and failed candidate, who never came clean about anything, says that Mitt Romney has brought his Bain Capital problems on himself by not being transparent and offering no documentation for the claim that he created 100,000 net jobs and refusing to release his tax returns. For the record,...

Even as tension over the Strait of Hormuz escalates, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is touring Latin America as a way of showing Iran has friends in the U.S. ‘backyard.’ But this tongue-in-cheek welcome to the Iranian leader by columnist Luis A. Vivanco of Ecuador’s La Hora goes to show that not everyone is buying the story. For La Hora of Ecuador, Luis A. Vivanco starts out this...

WASHINGTON — Thanks to Mitt Romney and such well-known socialist intellectuals as Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich, the United States is about to have the big debate on the nature of modern capitalism that should have started back in 2008. The focus will be on whether some kinds of capitalism are bad for the system as a whole. As a political matter, the discussion will be a classic test of an old Karl...

Is it the United States – and not Iran or Venezuela – that the world’s people need to worry about? According to this news account by María Lilibeth Da Corte of Venezuela’s El Universal, the arrival of Iran President Ahmadinejad in Latin America has begun with a Venezuelan ‘love fest’ of sorts, with lots of spicy language about the United States. For Venezuela’s El...

And it reflects ills far more insidious than the current GOP presidential contest. A Wall Street Journal analysis of Mitt Romney’s days at Bain Capital (1984-1999, the “greed is good” … “Bonfire of the Vanities” … pre-dot-gone era) reminds us that investment banking (and the far-too-often vaunted stock market) is simply a legalized form of gambling: The Journal analysis...