America, or the entire cinematic world, celebrates next month the centenary of Hollywood’s first movie. The filming in February 1910 of D. W. Griffith’s “In Old California” was considered a cultural landmark. Equally fascinating are the details about the development of Hollywood (situated just 11 kms from Los Angeles) coinciding with the birth of the first movie. Director D.W. Griffith...

A snip from Barack Obama’s interview with Diane Sawyer:

Hello there, Dr. E. here. The following is a Guest Contributor opinion column by Will Marshall, who is the founder and president of the Progressive Policy Institute, which describes its blog as “…Lively political commentary informed by rigorous analysis and evidence. Inspired wonkery — a constant stream of bold ideas for solving big public problems. And a distinctly progressive point of view...

The Chronicle: The president’s new student-loan plan would sweeten a program known as income-based repayment, created by Congress in 2007, in which borrowers with a federally subsidized loan are required to make payments on the loan each year that total no more than 15 percent of their discretionary income. The new proposal could cut that maximum payment to 10 percent, and could allow those loans to be...

Increasingly, if the Democrats want to analyze why they are now sinking in the polls (and votes) you get back to the old slogan: “It’s the economy, stupid.” And the latest economic news is grim, indeed: Existing-home sales took their biggest tumble in at least 40 years last month as the impact of a buying spree spurred by a tax credit for first-time buyers waned, according to industry data...

“We have to consider everything. We have to put taxes on the table.” “There is nothing good for America that will come out of arguing which part of the debt each party is responsible for.” – Former Republican Senator Pete Domenici, the co-leader of an independent bipartisan group to be announced today. It’s goal: To study and recommend ways to reduce the national debt, not to be confused...

When the truth doesn’t serve, lie:

The world expectantly awaits word from its most powerful man, Barack Obama who delivers his State of the Union address on January 27. On that day, France’s Nicholas Sarkozy will make a keynote speech at Europe’s most prestigious annual gathering in Davos, Switzerland, of global political, business and civil society leaders. The only significant American personality at the World Economic Forum’s Davos...

Fiction. As in, not real. Which is pretty much what the United States Supreme Court has made of our fundamental right to freedom of speech when political speech is involved.  As in, made it not real but just a fiction of a concept. From SCOTUSblog on this point of corporations being only legal fiction: Justice Stevens, writing for the dissenters, turned Chief Justice John Marshall’s celebrated comment in...

Progressives: Don’t Mourn, Organize by Michael Winship Tragic events continuing out of Haiti make all the bad news for progressives this week wither in comparison. Nonetheless, over these last few days, for liberals in particular, there has been no joy in Mudville – aka American politics. Just for starters: Thursday’s Supreme Court decision opening the floodgates for corporate dollars dominating...

The Barack H Obama 2010 State of the Union Drinking Game Raging Moderate, by Will Durst What You Need to Play: • Four taxpayers: One rich white guy banker type wearing a suit (Bank Boy). Two ordinary folks wearing jeans, one in a blue work shirt, the other in a white shirt, no tie, sleeves rolled up (the Jeans), and one person wearing clothes that look like they were involved in some sort of sewage treatment...

“All I really need is love but a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt,” said Lucy van Pelt of Peanuts. To that I’d add, “A little Swiss chocolate please, especially chocolate coated almonds that caress the tongue.” Is there really anything better than plain milk chocolate or truffles that melt in the mouth?. Not for me! And to my delight that is also where innovations are increasing. As many...

It’s been a wild ride on the political escalator this past week in which feathers of all stripes were ruffled. People were going crazy trying to understand its totality. That’s where I come in as a columnist to make sense of the world around us. My prayers for an answer came with three minor news items on today’s menu. I think they bring us back to reality. The real world as we know it. Remember...

A surprising Swiss federal court ruling is forcing the government to gear up for a new battle against the US Internal Revenue Service, which is trying to punish rich Americans hiding their wealth abroad to avoid taxes. If it occurs, the Swiss resistance could derail a main plank of the Obama administration’s drive to choke foreign tax havens. The ruling also heaped trouble upon a former Swiss President who...

President Barack Obama’s weekly You Tube/radio address this week is notable for two things: he blasts the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on campaign finance reform (which swept away 100 years of legal and judicial precedents) and as is taking a notably populist tone about battling special interests:

As we all know, the Democrats have had a massive loss of nerve as the result of losing one Senate seat to a Republican. (Yes, I know, it was Ted Kennedy’s seat for decades, but it’s still only one seat.)

Ever since the beginning days of his Administration, Obama has had an official economic team led by Treasury Secretary Geithner/Advisor Larry Summers and an unofficial economic advisory team led by Paul Volcker. Geithner/Summers are pro-financial consolidation and believe the government should spend its efforts into keeping asset prices up and liquidity cheap, and the real economy will follow. By contrast Volcker...

Matthew Yglesias is frustrated with conservative Democrats who influence party direction and then blame progressives for the results (emphasis is in original):

Americans are angry with both political parties and their President because they see Washington DC operating in an alternate reality completely removed from the rest of the country and world. During all of 2009, unemployment steadily increased to “unprecedented” levels (to use a favorite word of the President). Growing under-employment, despondency by many long-term laid-off workers, and general job insecurity...

Will Rogers, America’s beloved humorist of the 1930s, claimed he was not a member of any organized political party. “I’m a Democrat,” he quipped to the guffaws of his Great Depression audiences. Today’s Democrats find themselves still disorganized but also the victims of Murphy’s Law: When things go bad, they’re only going to get worse. The pinnacle of what’s gone...

Editor’s Note: This column has been updated so we’re running this again at the top of TMV. WASHINGTON — It turns out there were core contradictions in the promises Barack Obama made to the country in 2008. They caught up with his party on Tuesday in Massachusetts. Things will not get easier. Republicans in Congress will be empowered to hold to their course of obstruction by Sen.-elect...

If Democrats were Republicans, they would be doubling down the day after electoral defeat. They would be pushing through their agenda even harder — not bemoaning the “message” voters had sent. But Democrats are not Republicans. Democrats are Democrats, and so they are doing what Democrats do better than anyone else on the planet: cave, run, admit defeat.

CSI POST MORTEM So the long-serving popular Liberal Lion of the Senate from one of the most Democratic states has a successor: An unknown conservative Republican who will be the 41st Member of the Minority dedicated to stopping the Democratic Juggernaut (or more aptly Train Wreck) before it even starts. No matter how you try to malign your candidate’s performance, you silly Democrats chose her and created...

This is no criticism of U.S. military and humanitarian relief aid in the first week after the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that flatten half of Haiti last Tuesday. God knows their intentions were sound. No one seems in charge. Not the Haitian government which was feeble before the quake and totally crippled beginning with the first after shocks. Not the United Nations blue-helmeted security forces shaken to the...

My extensive business and legal background causes me to read a wide variety of publications on the Internet every day. I often find very good political analysis on many different business journals that is welcomed balance to the many extremely partisan political blogs out there. Naturally TMV is a excellent alternative to the extremism. Our country has abandoned a reasonably regulated free enterprise system...