Return with us to the thrilling days of yesteryear, where, astride his faithful steed Hedgefund, the fake cowboy/real gazillionaire from Wyoming spurred into the sunset and rode valiantly to Salt Lake City, Utah. The Salt Lake City Tribune takes up the tale [emphasis added]: V.P. talks Iraq, borders in SLC BY ROBERT GEHRKE THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 29, 2007 1:58 AM Vice President Dick Cheney...

Independent voters no longer need to watch TV, go to the movies, attend comedy clubs or listen to Donald Trump insist he is really considering a third party run for amusement. We can just watch the dance of the partisans. Many of us independent voters are not just turned off to political polemics but we have to turn off the increasingly predictable (and often execrable) ideological talk shows of the left and...

Barack Obama’s Achilles heel has been the recession he inherited from George Bush, and without the economy showing real signs of growth — as in new jobs being created — the president will remain vulnerable. But there is (fingers crossed) at long last good news. The December job report released this morning by the Labor Department shows that non-farm employment rose by a robust 200,000 jobs...

A FRACKING-RELATED OPERATION IN DOWNTOWN YOUNGSTOWN To say that fracking has had unintended consequences would be a misnomer. There have been warnings from the outset of the scramble to extract natural gas from shale formations using environmentally unsafe methods, but the case of Youngstown, Ohio is special. On New Years Eve, the central Ohio city had its 11th earthquake since St. Patrick’s Day —...

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

It’s clear more than ever that former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is going to have to make a major effort as it successfully did with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to take apart former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorm. The latest big reason: a new South Carolina prim poll shows Santorum is quickly picking up steam there: What a difference a caucus makes. Rick Santorum who two months ago had...

by WALTER BRASCH One of the fun things sports writers do is try to predict the winners and scores of upcoming games, from high school through the pros. For special “look-at-us-we’re important” bonus points, they create lists of “Top” teams and rank them, both pre-season and weekly. Sports writers have some kind of genetic mutation that leads them to believe they know more about sports than the average...

I had never been hospitalized before. I was in my forties, and, save for a long, sadistic episode in which they WOULDN’T let me sleep, after ten hours in a steel mill in Kansas, having hit my head on pavement and requiring five or six stitches and the creepy claustrophobia of a CAT scan and nothing to eat (which I do not consider hospitalization, but, rather, the eight-hour airport layover from HELL). As...

Is the United States a war-happy nation? With the situation surrounding the Strait of Hormuz escalating, columnist Abd Al Bari Atwan of Samidoon in the Palestinian Territories writes that American embargoes invariably lead to war, and with the U.S. economy in crisis, a war with Iran that would boost weapons sales may be precisely what Washington wants. For Samidoon, Abd Al Bari Atwan writes in part: There...

Terrorist bombs killed another 72 people in Iraq today, on a day considered holy by the Islamic Shia religion. This is a further sign of bloody sectarian strife boiling over after the withdrawal of US troops last December. It also presages a more significant trend that could make 2012 go down in history as the start of a seismic shift in the political makeup of the wider Islamic Middle East, from Morocco...

Like Saddam Hussein, are Iranian leaders boasting of their nuclear program and military prowess when in fact they are quite weak? Ahmed Al-Jarallah, the editor in chief of Kuwait’s Al-Seyassah, warns Iranian leaders to step back from the brink and retract their threat to close the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway through which 40 percent of the world’s oil flows – before it is too late. Al-Seyassah...

Like some other analysts, I have gotten the distinct impression that President Barack Obama would just loooooove the Republicans to make a big fuss over his decision to install Richard Cordray as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Here is a significant sign: Here’s a pretty clear sign of which way the politics are moving in the fight over Obama’s decision to employ a recess appointment to...

NOTE: This column was released last week so some but not most of it is dated. It’s one of the BEST commentary columns since it admits what many pundits try to hide: the self-assured prectictions do not necessarlily reflect the outcomes. A gulp of humble pundit pie By DANA MILBANK WASHINGTON — Pundits say the darnedest things on TV. Take, for example, the genius who said in January that “the...

Our political Quote of the Day comes from First Read that says former Mass. Governor Mitt Romney better be prepared for the attacks coming his way from other Republicans who want to squelch his front-runner status for the 2012 nomination: *** Here come the attacks on Romney: Unlike past presidential-primary front-runners, Mitt Romney has enjoyed this advantage over the past year: His GOP rivals have largely...

Commenting on a USA TODAY editorial a couple of weeks ago on Gingrich’s campaign promise to, as president, haul-in judges whose rulings he doesn’t like, force them to explain their rulings and to abolish entire courts he doesn’t agree with, I said in a letter that “[Gingrich’s] interpretation [of the Constitution] would undermine the timeless, functioning, checks-and-balances system that was so brilliantly...

Well, that didn’t take long, did it? Keith Olbermann is most famous for his hundreds of not-so-special “Special Comments” those melodramatic commentaries more often than not delivered in an indignant tone. He split with MSNBC after clashing with his employers there and then went over to Al Gore’s Current Television.” And now he is showing the second thing for which he has been...

Parsing Iowa results is like trying to solve the old riddle of why French intellectuals loved screwball comic Jerry Lewis, critics gave “The Nutty Professor” their Oscar and the government showered him with honors. In the world of slapstick, you never know which way the croissant will crumble and, post-Iowa, Michele Bachmann is gone, Rick Perry has his foot on a banana peel and Newt is revving up to pummel...

SANTORUM AFTER HIS 2006 DEFEAT It matters not that Rick Santorum, who is the right-wing Republican flavor of the moment, doesn’t stand a chance of becoming the GOP presidential nominee let alone beating Barack Obama. What matter is that Santorum has never gotten the kind of scrutiny that he deserves with the exception of one reporter working for one newspaper. That reporter is my good friend Will Bunch...

Below is the list of negative words Newt proposed be used by potential candidates against their opponents: It is from Newt Gingrich’s 1996 GOPAC memo. I remember reading a nearly identical list of negative words in one of his books and wondered why he would broadcast his strategy that then could so easily be boomeranged back on him by his opposition. It’s odd now, all these years later, his language...

RJ Matson, The St. Louis Post Dispatch I’ve often noted that the more people see, listen to and think about Newt Gingrich and his career and ideas, the more they really don’t like him. He makes more sense when he isn’t high in the polls. And once he’s high in the polls, he blows it. Yes, indeed, in Iowa he was obliterated by the mass of attack ads Mitt Romney — and let’s...

Four of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council will see political changes at the top this year – including the United States. According to Stefan Kornelius of Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung, these decisions, out of the hands of most of the world’s people, could decide the type of civilization most of us end up living in: some form of democracy or as the Chinese call it, ‘benevolent...

DES MOINES — Mitt Romney and his backers decided that to win in Iowa they had to destroy Newt Gingrich’s campaign. Now Gingrich looks eager — and able — to return the favor. Romney got his victory, but it doesn’t feel much like one. It’s embarrassing that the supposed Republican front-runner could only manage to beat Rick Santorum by eight votes out of about 120,000...

What purpose do the Republican Iowa caucuses really serve? They are an unofficial primary in a state with an overwhelmingly white population unlike the national demographic, with the Republican caucuses even more lily-white than the state as a whole. And since 1980, only two of the Republican winners eventually became the Republican nominee for president, Dole in 1996 and Bush in 2000. (Seven of the Democratic...

EDITOR’s NOTE: DUE TO A TECHNICAL GLITCH THIS WENT OUT UNDER THE WRONG BYLINE. WE REGRET THE ERROR MERRIMACK, N.H. — I love watching Republicans engage in class warfare. They condemn it as a sin when Democrats come within 100 miles of even mentioning the sharp and growing class inequalities in the United States. But when conservatives play the class card, they see doing so as a high ethical calling...

Glasgow, Scotland — As I stayed up until 6am this morning, feeling like the only person in Scotland following the events of the Iowa Republican primary thanks to numerous dodgy streams of MSNBC and CNN, as well as Twitter, one thing jumped out at me… Iowa was it for the Republican Party. If the message hasn’t got through to republicans after these caucuses, it never will. Mitt Romney is a weak...