Randall Enos, Cagle Cartoons This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Microblogging in China: Unstoppable!? by Stephanie Kopf There is a special beauty to blogging. It unleashes a feeling almost akin to reverence. We live for exchange and communication, for feeling connected. Now maybe more than ever before. Each in our different ways, but still, I do believe it’s there in everyone. There is something indescribably thrilling about this mix of freedom of expression and responsibility...

Warren Buffett’s complaint about his secretary paying more in taxes than he does is having a global ripple effect. According to columnist Helena Garrido of Portugal’s Jornal De Negotios, the debate on tax fairness in the United States should be food for thought in Portugal, where the economy is in a tailspin and thanks to widespread tax evasion and tax avoidance, tax revenue has plummeted. For the...

FINAL (SURPRISE) UPDATE: Well, the Huckster — as my favorite talk show host refers to him — has endorsed Mitt Romney saying that Romney is ”not going to allow bad things to continue to happen to this country we all love.” According to Seattlepi.com: Romney said he was honored to receive the endorsement, but hoped even more to win the endorsement of Nevada voters. The state holds presidential...

UPDATE: See posts atop the fold about Komen rescinding their decision to withdraw funding and future applications for funding from Planned Parenthood, dateline Feb 3, 2012) Duke, a progressive university with a strong med school may have ‘a problem, Houston.” They’ve invited Brinker along with four other notable people to do 2012 commencement. Problem may rise up with parts of vocal student...

by WALTER BRASCH Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, Thursday. That means there will be an additional six weeks of winter. Or, it means there will be an early Spring. It doesn’t make much difference. Phil has an accuracy rate of about 39 percent, according to the StormFax Weather Almanac. That’s probably about the same as TV weather forecasters. StormFax has tracked Phil’s predictions since 1897, the year...

NANCY BRINKER KOMEN The Susan Komen-Planned Parenthood debacle is a defining moment for women’s rights in America. As Taylor Marsh writes, it is an egregious example of liberals being asleep at the wheel, but it is much, much more: It is a watershed event in the politicization of women’s reproductive rights in an era in which the Republican Party is doubling down on denying women virtually all...

After listening to Newt Gingrich’s tasteless and graceless concession speech where he invoked the almost sacred words of both President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address and of the signers of our Declaration of Independence in an absurd attempt to link himself to our Founding Fathers, I posted the comment: Many feel that Gingrich — albeit he is the big loser in Florida — gave a pretty...

Reelecting Barack Obama this year won’t be enough. Unless Democrats retake Congress, gridlock in Washington won’t end. Now, a Democratic statistician reports that winning back the House of Representatives “is in the realm of possibility,” citing “a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, in which, when asked which party they prefer to control Congress, voters cited Democrats, 47 to 41 percent, as well...

First off, it’s a pretty thumping win for Mitt. If you look at the CNN results map it shows Romney winning every single county from the conservative panhandle all the way down the keys. But the exit polling does show a mild split between various groups. Men and women both voted for Mitt, but women favored him by a 22 point margin (51-29) while men did so by just a 6 point spread (41-36). Latinos were much...

More than 10 years after September 11, 2001, I thought that I had seen and heard all the stories about that tragic day. But recently I received an e-mail from a friend with a link to a video of a 9/11 event that I was not familiar with, or which I have perhaps forgotten. The video is a documentary made by award-winning documentary filmmaker Eddie Rosenstein and narrated by Tom Hanks. It premiered at the Center...

This morning the US Senate held a hearing on the subject of the leading terror threats facing the US and the world today. As I watched a portion of the hearing two things came to mind. First, that the hearing was to some degree for show and that there were many even more scary threats that they were not going to discuss in public. Second, I pondered, do I really want to know about those threats (or indeed the...

In South Carolina, predictions of Mitt Romney being favored to win in part because women would go for him over Newt did not materialize. And to be clear, we’re not talking the gap between how men versus women vote for Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich. We’re talking about the gap between who women prefer between the two candidates. This time around, in Florida, people seem much more certain that this...

In Throw Them All Out, Peter Schweizer argues that Congress is a route to riches that is exempt from the same sort of laws that govern mere mortals. He shares an anecdote about George Washington Plunkitt and “honest graft” that reflects the largess of Tammany Hall, New York’s infamous political machine. He argues that modern Congressional graft is more insidious. Schweizer is a research fellow...

I think this is the conclusion. But this isn’t easy stuff, and the preceding parts (see below for index) were meant to set you up for the finale. And fireworks, we got! Strap in, pilgrims … Ivan Petrovich Pavlov Selling the New Nixon, part i (2011/12/01) Selling the New Nixon – A Clockwork Luntz (2011/12/05) Selling the New Nixon – What Ailes Us (2011/12/07) Selling the New Nixon – Pavlov...

Of course two people — even if they were once on the same ticket for president and vice president of the United States — can, three years later, change some of their views and root for and endorse different candidates in the GOP presidential primaries. It happens to the best of us, and in the best of families, including husband and wife — just look at James Carville and Mary Matalin … Thus...

After months of trying to ameliorate a disease ravaging the GOP, Jon Huntsman Jr. has moved into fighting cancers that afflict human beings rather than the body politic by taking over as chairman of a foundation that funds his family’s Institute, a research, education and treatment center with a full-time faculty and staff of 1300. In his political hiatus, Huntsman worked hard but failed to offer Republicans...

Mike Keefe, Cagle Cartoons Mom, Dad: The “Choking Game” Must Be Stopped by Danny Tyree Columnist’s note: Let’s get the “But seriously folks…” disclaimer out of the way first. This column’s satirical tone is an exercise in “whistling past the graveyard.” Asphyxiation “games” are deadly serious. Parents must be watchful. The DB Foundation...

Why is Mexico’s ‘war on drugs’ proving to be the longest and most deadly battle in the nation’s history? Columnist Luis Javier Garrido of Mexico’s La Jornada outlines in great detail how the companies and government agencies which are supposed to battle narco-trafficking are proving so profitable, neither governments nor the companies they pay wish it to end. For La Jornada,...

For a while the other day, my life turned upside down—-literally. My computer screen inverted itself and would not return to normal no what matter what I did. After numerous shutdowns, I adjusted to a world in which the cursor moved in the opposite direction from the mouse, managed to find a “restore point” and, clicking on it, brought the screen back to normal. Curious about why the computer had turned...

Ghosts of GOP past are rising from political tombs to sound alarms about Newt in the White House even as the last Florida debate has him on the defensive about the past and future. Gingrich fails in his attempt to use Wolf Blitzer as the kind of tackle dummy he made out of CNN colleague John King in South Carolina, while 1996 candidate Bob Dole is joined by Tom Delay, Ann Coulter, Elliott Abrams and other Conservatives...

On the night of his triumph in the South Carolina primary, Newt Gingrich declared that “The centerpiece of this campaign, I believe, is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky.” That reference and subsequent references to Alinsky surely puzzled viewers of a certain age and probably many viewers of all ages. This is because Alinsky, a legendary community organizer, died in...

Milt Priggee, www.miltpriggee.com by WALTER BRASCH Gov. Tom Corbett (R-Pa.) praised Joe Paterno and ordered flags on all state buildings to fly at half-staff for four days. That would be the same Tom Corbett who had said he was “personally disappointed” in Joe Paterno for not doing more to alert authorities in the Jerry Sandusky case, while acknowledging that Paterno did nothing illegal and followed university...

And What It Means To You Photo @PCBritzGoogle, the “don’t be evil” company, is slipping and sliding along a fibre optic cable that terminates in Dante’s inferno. According to The Guardian: US regulators are reportedly looking into whether Google manipulates its search results to favour its own products and have expanded the investigation to include Google+. That’s a far cry from...

David Fitzsimmons, The Arizona Star This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.