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...

Nate Beeler, The Washington Examiner HOBBS, N.M. — You learn something new every day. In driving around the country, I’ve learned that oil companies reserve large numbers of motel rooms in this city and others so that oil rig workers have places to stay. In some cities it’s almost impossible to get a hotel room. You have to carefully plan in advance. That’s also the story of the months...

Yes, it’s true. Arizona Sen. John McCain’s 2008 opposition research file on former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney has now been posted online. Every page of it HERE. The immediate reaction is to suggest this is bad news for Romney. Actually it’s good news for Romney: if his advisers are smart (and the jury is still out on that) they will go through every line and sentence of it and prepare counter arguments...

At the End of Our Rope? by Peter Funt A few hours with the TV and radio the other night — one lowlight being a commercial for a holster guaranteed to prevent getting “pinched” by your concealed gun — underscored what a troubled and divided nation we have become. Fox News Channel carried the latest debate among GOP presidential candidates, during which Mitt Romney pledged never to support any...

Rick McKee, The Augusta Chronicle This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

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...

Eric Allie, Caglecartoons.com This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

The same Republican presidential wannabe who would send U.S. troops back into Iraq and thus would most likely again need the use of Turkish land and air space to provide logistics support to our troops there, now labels that nation a country that is being ruled by Islamic terrorists — and worse. During Monday’s GOP presidential candidates debate in South Carolina, Texas governor Rick Perry also...

Can’t Rick Perry take a hint? I mean, REALLY…

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...

As you’ve surely heard by now, Jon Huntsman — Huntsman the Formidable, I once called him — has pulled out of the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. His withdrawal at this stage was hardly a surprise. Though he finished a fairly strong third in New Hampshire, where he campaigned relentlessly and into which basket he put pretty much every egg he had, he has never been a viable...

The First Lady turns 48 today. I know because an e-mail from the President last week reminded me with two links to a fund-raising site: “The decision to become part of this campaign was deeply personal for a lot of people, and Michelle and I are no exception… “This fall, Michelle and I will have been married 20 years. The next 10 months will be harder than any we’ve experienced together, and...

Wikipedia is shutting down its English language site tomorrow to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales tweeted the announcement yesterday, “Student warning! Do your homework early. Wikipedia protesting bad law on Wednesday!” “The whole thing is just a poorly designed mess,” Wales said in an email to The Associated Press. “I am personally asking...

Mitt Romney at the debate last night: My care by getting in this race is about my belief in America and my concern that what we’re seeing with this president is a change in course for America to be become something we wouldn’t recognize. I think he is drawing us into becoming more like a European social welfare state. I think he wants us to become an entitlement society where people in this country feel...

Milt Priggee, www.miltpriggee.com This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

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”...

There was a time not long ago when free speech was guaranteed in America, and if someone had a problem with that the Supreme Court would weigh in with a reminder that the concept is a foundation on which our democracy is built. But a funny thing happened on the way to the second decade of the new millennium. According to a new study, the court led by Chief Justice John Roberts is hearing fewer free speech...

First, an observation which I seldom see in print: King remembered going to a lecture on the principles of Gandhi, and how it changed his thinking. And Gandhi remembered reading Henry David Thoreau‘s “Civil Disobedience” while in jail in South Africa. Now, of course, we know that another South African prisoner, Nelson Mandela, was, in turn, inspired by King in South Africa, where Gandhi had...

Polls are coming out faster now than McDonald’s hamburgers — and new ones keep delivering good news for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and mixed news for President Barack Obama. How much in disarray is Romney’s opposition? So much so that evangelicals are now enmeshed in an accusation war about whether the vote of 150 social conservative activists this weekend was somehow rigged so that...

Daryl Cagle, MSNBC.com This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

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...

My Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial “If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.” – Martin Luther King Jr. Doug Bursch blogs and tweets Fairlyspiritual.

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:...

When I read this letter for the many-eth time in my life, I see MLK’s spiritual discipline, the knowledge of how to go forward in four steps, the leadership, the clear demands, the efforts at negotiation, the spiritual self-examination so one doesnt go off half-cocked caught up in the yelling… and the non violent protest for clear cut goals. When I read Reverend King’s letter from Birmingham...