Sloppy Pool of Tizzy in the Gobi Desert Raging Moderate, by Will Durst At first, the party-line strategy was to affirm a unified opposition to the bill because it helped Wall Street. By regulating it. Yeah. Okay. Well, nobody said it was going to be an easy sell. All 41 GOP senators signed a letter proclaiming steadfast opposition to any overhaul and if they had to shut down the process, they were prepared to...

During and after the debate and passage of health care reform legislation last month, several Democratic lawmakers received death threats or were humiliated in some repulsive ways. In what seems be déjà vu all over again, at least one Democratic representative has received a death threat and his offices have been flooded with calls, some from people threatening violent acts and shouting racial slurs, as a...

The Commerce Department reported Friday that new home sales increased 27% last month, the largest monthly increase in 47 years. Before you get your hopes up that the housing market is rebounding from the crash in 2007, a closer look at the monthly report is somewhat of a downer. The 441,000 homes were not sold and moved into, actually. They reflect signed contracts to purchase with many new prospective buyers...

After a bipartisan blip on financial regulation in Washington, the President was in Manhattan yesterday, warning Wall Street, “A free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it.” This tough talk comes after his lofty Earth Day anniversary proclamation: “Forty years from today, when our children and grandchildren look back on what we did...

While Wall Street financial manipulators concocted exotic deals to sink the economy, some of the top regulators and contractors regulating their activities at the Security Exchange Commission were watching pornography on government computers. An internal memo written by SEC Inspector General David Kotz said 33 commission regulators downloaded the sexually explicit images on government time during a period when...

Financial reform is the new focus of the Obama White House and Democrats in Congress.  Coming on the heels of a grueling and politically costly fight over health care reform, Democrats can be forgiven for seeking once again to be seen as champions of the apocryphal “little guy” who is the unquestionable saint of American political discourse.  Republicans got to ride that pony for nearly a year...

Cola Wars and the Campaign to Sell Wall Street Status Quo by Tina Dupuy In the past hundred years Coca-Cola and Pepsi Cola have spent billions in advertising and employed millions of people to get you to think this caffeinated bubbly sugar water is different/better/worse than that caffeinated bubbly sugar water. People are fiercely loyal and opinionated on the subject. All this marketing and bloviating ignores...

Although one would generally describe The New Yorker as a progressive publication, it seems to slip into a reactionary mindset when the interests of the literary establishment are on the line. In this week’s issue, Ken Auletta takes a look at the Kindle, the iPad and the threat that e-books present to old school publishing houses. The article presents Amazon as the ill-mannered bully that wants to drive...

I was listening to David Gregory interview Timothy Geithner. I always knew that I didn’t understand financial regulation. Then I began to sense that Gregory didn’t either. My purpose isn’t to single him out. When I listen to all the Sunday morning shows, I wonder if any of the hosts are capable of asking tough questions about financial regulation and reform, the way they are about healthcare...

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — What does President Obama’s visit to California this week on behalf of embattled Sen. Barbara Boxer have to do with passage of the financial reform bill? Far more than you’d imagine. That Boxer is in any trouble says much of what you need to know about this year’s election. California has become a Democratic bastion and Boxer has been a liberal institution...

Our linkfest providing you with links to websites of varying viewpoints. Links do not necessarily reflect the opinion of TMV or its many writers. WHY SARAH PALIN IS DANGEROUS has been a key narrative of Andrew Sullivan’s in recent months. Now Sullivan points out something most notable to those of us who worked in the mainstream news media or who do work there: Palin has set herself up now as being protected...

John Cole, The Scranton Times-Tribune This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to appear on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved.

Since stronger sanctions are likely to cause Iranians to rally around a regime they dislike, would a better approach be to allow Tehran to continue on its present course without sanctions, and trust the Iranian people to topple the unpopular regime? As risky as this sounds, Le Monde columnist Caroline Fourest writes that of all the available options, this is the most likely to succeed. For Le Monde, Caroline...

I know Nick Canepa and he is no Dan Quail. I knew Nick as a copy kid on the old Evening Tribune in San Diego where he now perches as one of the nation’s best sports columnists at the new, revitalized San Diego Union-Tribune. I thought Canepa, a San Diego native, lost his Italian navigation system when his column siren beckoned Tuesday for a new domed stadium for the San Diego Chargers and perhaps the San...

In a stunning display of outrage and shocking words, Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony has denounced an Arizona crackdown on illegal immigrants that forces people to turn each other in as the same techniques used by “German Nazi and Russian Communist(s).” “The Arizona legislature just passed the country’s most retrogressive, mean-spirited, and useless anti-immigrant law,” he wrote...

About one third of the normal fly zone over Europe will be reopened on Tuesday as anger began to boil with over seven million airline passengers stranded around the world. Airline losses are estimated at more than $200 million a day and losses to business may run into billions (there are no reliable estimates yet). Surprisingly it took five days for the ministers to agree on a meeting held by teleconference...

I enjoy reading the Brit pub The Economist because it offers a fresh viewpoint on American politics we cannot find in this country. But, this yuck yuck by B.G. misses the mark on conservatives and Tea Partiers by, oh, say, the width of the Atlantic Ocean between New York and London. The article’s author suggests conservatives turned against former President George W. Bush because he was too liberal. Gee,...

The latest Pew Research Center survey says 78% of Americans polled the past two months don’t trust the federal government. The timing is akin to asking a husband if he trusts his wife after finding her in bed with another man. Pew said the results are a perfect storm — “a dismal economy, an unhappy public, bitter, partisan-based backlash and epic discontent with Congress and elected officials.”...

WASHINGTON — The tea party is nothing new, it represents a relatively small minority of Americans on the right end of politics, and it will not determine the outcome of the 2010 elections. In fact, both parties stand to lose if they accept the laughable notion that this media-created protest movement is the voice of true populism. Democrats will spend their time chasing votes they will never win....

Monte Wolverton, Cagle Cartoons This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved.

At the age of two, my parents moved me and our family from El Monte to the rolling, fertile hills back of San Juan Capistrano in Southern California where my father grew vegetables. While we lived there until I was 11, my best friends were from the white families in town, not because the Mexican kids were social outcasts, but because the whites formed the nucleus of the public schools, the lone Protestant church,...

The first time I visited Temecula, Calif., more than 40 years ago it was an oasis off Hwy. 395 to Riverside. I was there on assignment covering the murders of two Border Patrol officers shot down by drug runners on the old highway some 10 miles south of the town which then boasted only vineyards. I was shocked, I tell you, shocked when I returned in 2006 to live nearer my son who had joined the Riverside County...

My favorite all-time author and columnist, multiple Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas L. Friedman, knows more about the Middle East and the global economy than all of the idiot pundits on television combined. In his New York Times column Sunday, Friedman waxes poetic about one of his pet projects, this one a start-up company in St. Louis which is developing sort of a pacemaker to combat acid reflux. EndoStim is in...

It’s come to this: The President is publicly calling the Senate Republican Leader a liar–and worse. In his weekly address, Barack Obama says flatly that, after meeting with “two dozen top Wall Street executives to talk about how to block progress” on financial industry regulation, Mitch McConnell “came out against the common-sense reforms we’ve proposed. In doing so, he made the...

The volcanic ash cloud spewing forth from Iceland continues to cause havok in Europe: grounding airlines, shutting down airspace — and potentially delivering a body blow to European countries’ already reeling economies. How bad has it been? Bad enough that a high profile news story was the fact that the ash cloud caused some world leaders who planned to fly to Poland’s President’s state...