Our political Quote of the Day comes from Andrew Sullivan, who concludes what I have also concluded: Barack Obama seems to be operating on a different wavelength than many past Presidents so his foes may underestimate him at their peril. I’ve concluded that when history is written Barack Obama won’t be categorized as “another JFK” or like FDR, Harry Truman, or even as his critics suggest...

How hateful has our politics become? This hateful: An email recently sent by Kansas House Speaker Mike O’Neal (R-Hutchinson) to his Republican colleagues appears to endorse a controversial prayer that some say calls for the untimely death of President Obama. “Pray for Obama. Psalm 109:8.” That’s the slogan an email from O’Neal refers to, a phrase that’s become popular in...

With the primary season underway it is already time for people to speculate the winner in November. Of course this is hardly a new situation; pundits have been trying to predict the outcome of the elections for decades and usually with mixed results at best. In the early 1980′s, a political scientist named Allan Lichtman decided to try and figure out a way to predict the outcome of Presidential elections...

AP reports that Jon Huntsman will endorse Mitt Romney for the GOP Presidential nomination sometime Monday in South Carolina. Ironically, the state’s largest newspaper, The State, endorsed Huntsman on Sunday. But the unhealthy demand for ideological purity obscures a hopeful fact about the GOP presidential field: There are actually two sensible, experienced grownups. And while Mr. Romney is far more appealing...

It can happen. Miraculous resurrection can sometimes emerge from unspeakable tragedy. On Sept. 11, 2001 Lauren Manning, senior vice president and partner at Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment bank which had several floors of offices in the World Trade Center, was on her way to work and getting ready to enter the elevator at the North Tower when the 9/11 terrorist attack punched the building — and a giant,...

WASHINGTON — This is what progress looks like for a president named Barack Hussein Obama. Not so long ago, many in conservative and Republican ranks were eager to paint him as an alien creature far removed from American life as most Americans understand it. A determined cadre insisted Obama was not even eligible to be president, claiming he was born outside the United States. Obama eventually put...

UPDATE: As expected, Former Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr. of Utah formally announced that he is ending his Republican presidential run “with a call for party unity, asking the five candidates he leaves on the field to end their negative ads and chastising President Obama for engaging in ‘class warfare.’” More from the New York Times: “This race has degenerated into an onslaught of negative and personal...

Reports breaking this evening that Jon Huntsman will drop out of the 2012 Presidential race and endorse Mitt Romney for the nomination. I can’t say I am surprised but I am disappointed that such a well qualified candidate could not proceed in the increasingly narrow Republican party.

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...

From the Super PAC now headed by Jon Stewart, Attack In B Minor For Strings, “If corporations are people, then Mitt Romney is Mitt the Ripper.” Watch: The ad is narrated by John Lithgow, who won an Emmy for his role as a family man serial killer in season 4 of Dexter. The note and press release from Jon Stewart, who took over Colbert’s Americans For A Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow Super PAC, is...

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...

WASHINGTON — He would be an elder statesman now, a lion in winter, an American hero perhaps impatient with the fuss being made over his birthday. At 83, he’d likely still have his wits and his voice. Surely, if he were able, he would continue to preach, and to pray — and to dream. For the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., dreaming was not optional. It was a requirement of citizenship to...

Moyers & CompanyCheck your local PBS schedule*, fire-up your DVR. Bill Moyers is back with a new show, Moyers & Company. The series, produced by American Public Television, begins with three broadcasts focused on the intersection of politics and money. Moyers, who will “believe corporations are people when Texas executes one” (Stephen Colbert interview, 10 January), interviews Jacob Hacker...

Manny Francisco, Manila, The Phillippines This new poll out of South Carolina could be subtitled in two ways: #1 Romney Soars in South Carolina #2 Gingrich Self-Destructs in South Carolina The bottom line is that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich had been doing well in South Carolina, and then seemed according to one poll within a few points of the presumptive front-runner, former Massachusetts Mitt Romney....

Adam Zyglis, The Buffalo News Is South Carolina a tossup or isn’t it? My betting is: it is NOT and that, in the end, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney will win and then win big in Florida — where a recent poll shows him with a whopping lead. On the other hand, the question is the trending on polling. And this poll suggests it is close in South Carolina, indeed: As the GOP races settles into...

Seeing the likely nomination of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, 150 conservative activists gathered in Texas have decided to give their support to former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum in an effort to halt what now seems to be in the political cards: the splitting of social conservatives’ votes among several candidates which would allow Romney to sail his way to victories in South Carolina, Florida...

Adam Zyglis, The Buffalo News This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

You may go see the Non Sequitur cartoon from Friday, 1/13/12 which the Plain Dealer did not run. I used it as a teaching moment with my 6th grader and he got why it could be objectionable right away. Whether or not it should have been published is of course a different matter. Here are the comments at my Facebook thread and many times more can be found at former Plain Dealer journalist Connie Schultz’s...

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

Some Inconvenient Facts by Michael Reagan Mr. President: Do you really think you are riding high with the rate of unemployment standing at a whopping 8.5 percent? 8.5 percent! Wow!! Perhaps we should take a real good look at the real numbers. The rate of unemployment was 7.8 percent when you took office, and look how much money you have spent since then trying to improve it. Remember that before you took office...

The GOP debates could make a profit on Pay TV if they let Stephen Colbert join the panel. How much would it be worth to see him match wits with Mitt Romney and Rick Perry? Sadly, like his other ventures, Colbert’s South Carolina candidacy is only fodder for his reality-blurring show, the perfection of a trend that began to emerge in the 1960s when TV made American life too complicated for Bob Hope-Milton Berle...

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...

You’ve heard of “suicide by cop”? America is now seemingly witnessing political suicide by tea. Tea Party, that is. Only a few months ago Republicans seemed poised to fulfill a dream: if the economy continued to recover slowly or was barely on the mend, and if President Barack Obama continued to appear to be a nice guy who could give a terrific scripted speech but was inept as a leader and problem-solver,...

As Mitt Romney tries to seal the deal in the Palmetto state and keeps slipping in the polls there, memories come back of a culture clash when I was in basic training there during World War II. How much has changed in those seven decades? The country boys in my company were excited by anything exotic and, given their lives before induction, it took little to tickle them. One day they were chortling over a guy...

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...