WASHINGTON — Before there was the tea party to define the phrase “far-right fringe,” there was Rick Santorum. He’s a nice-guy zealot who should never be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office. It’s understandable that progressives would be tempted to cheer Santorum’s sudden rise as a viable candidate for the Republican nomination. The likely nominee, Mitt Romney,...

Was it ever the truth? Or a form of blind idealism our teachers wished for us. Many of us were taught, we too could grow up to be president. Even us rag-bag kids in handmedowns either too small or too big, scuffed shoes that would never shine cause they were down to the bone of the leather, crowded in 65 to a classroom, sharing desks, not enough books to go around, never ever being able to take a book home....

Three moderate GOP weathervanes—-George Will, Peggy Noonan and David Brooks—-are being blown by Iowa winds in Rick Santorum’s direction, but in a wobbly way. The usually dour Will starts out almost giddy, claiming Republicans “crave fun. Supporting Mitt Romney still seems to many like a duty…Suddenly, supporting Santorum seems like a lark, partly because a week or so ago he could quit complaining...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

We are all familiar with the separation of the sexes in Saudi Arabia and in other Islamic countries and with the many laws restricting and limiting the rights and activities of women. While many of the Sharia laws are ostensibly to protect women from the prying eyes and other inappropriate gestures or advances by men, curiously women shopping for panties, bras, negligees, etc. had to endure the embarrassment...

Homecomings for returning combat veterans have never been easy no matter the war, but the flood of Iraq war veterans who will be mustered out in the coming months, as well as a fair number from the Afghan war, pose a huge challenge. This is because gratitude, and Americans certainly are grateful, will not pay the bill. That bill is formidable: * About 800,000 veterans are jobless and many newly discharged veterans...

Yawn, talk to the hand, how about dem Bears? Almost any conversation would be more interesting than one state’s caucuses after months, MONTHS of listening to mostly petty rhetoric that has NO specifics all in one place about how to govern, truly help a suffering country. And neither does the other side either. Tried to refinance lately? How about turning back a foreclosure? Tried to buy health insurance...

As readers who have followed my writings — some call them rants — for the past few years know, while I have always opposed and condemned our invasion and occupation of Iraq, I have supported our efforts in Afghanistan to catch and punish the perpetrators of 9/11 and, in some measure, to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban. However, so many of the reports coming out of that country about the government’s...

America is far from being the only country currently obssessed with presidential politics and national elections. After a year of astounding despotic topplings and revolutions, is Vladimir Putin’s reign over the vast territories of the Russian Federation finally coming to an end? For Russia’s Yezhednevniy Zhurnal, journalist and opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza bravely explains why a Russian...

CODA: Doing some “Googling” on languages and dreams, I was amazed at how many entries there are on the subject, “What language do you dream in?” There’s even a book at Amazon.com titled — you guessed it — “What language do you dream in?” So, given the interest and since it has been more than three years since I wrote about it here, let me try it again,...

Despite having agreed — cowardly so, in my view — to continue Bush Era tax cuts that disproportionately favor the wealthy, it’s likely that a component of President Obama’s re-election platform will be a call to level the playing field through the so-called Buffet Rule, which would insure that no household making more than $1 million a year pays a lower tax rate than middle class families...

I will be haunted for a long time by this. On the other hand, it gave lots of hope. FOOTNOTE: My father had an experience like this about three years before he died.

This is the sixth year that I am kicking off a new year with a post on the overall state of affairs in the U.S. Some three of these posts riffed on the cowardice of our political elite while a fourth was on what I called The End of an Error, the merciful conclusion of the eight-year Bush-Cheney interregnum, which was as visceral an example of cowardice masquerading as courage seen in my lifetime. And so looking...

Jump Links Back Story How Much Does Ticketmaster Charge In Fees? What About The Competition? What Do Competing Ticket Companies Charge? How Should Fees Be Structured? Text of Settlement Email From the “you may have missed this in real time” department: If you are an online Ticketmaster customer, you may be eligible for a $1.50 per purchase discount on tickets purchased from 2012-2016. No joy,...

The Lost Story About What The Old Man and the New Baby Used to Mean for Human Renewal of Body, Mind, Spirit, Heart and Soul… at New Year’s We’re led to believe that New Year’s images are about the Old Year going out as a bent over old man… and the New Year toddling in as a grinning infant. That’s what the buycandy buywine buybeer folks would have us believe. But those are degraded images. Long...

by Walter and Rosemary Brasch In January 2009, with a new president about to be inaugurated, we wrote a column about the stories we preferred not having to write, but knew we would. Three years later, we are still writing about those problems; three years from now, we’ll still be writing about them. We had wanted the U.S. Department of the Interior to stop the government-approved slaughter of wild horses...

When Texas Governor Rick Perry couldn’t remember the third government agency he would eliminate should he become president, one could chalk that up to “well, everybody has a mental freeze once-in-a-while.” When Perry couldn’t remember the name of a Supreme Court Justice or made a mistake in the number of judges on that Court, one could say “well, we all make mistakes.” But what does one...

If I were a Republican this coming election year … I would vote for Rick Santorum because of his views on gays and lesbians and gay marriage, his promise to reinstate “don’t ask, don’t tell” and his stance on singling out Muslims for extra screening at airports. I would vote for Ron Paul for wanting to eliminate almost all of government, income taxes, the IRS and for declaring MEDICARE,...

Breaking up is hard to do, but much more expensive in today’s Hollywood than rural Georgia of three decades ago. Mel Gibson is finally divorced from his wife of more than 30 years and mother of seven children after turning over an estimated half of his $850 million in movie earnings. At the same time, the nation’s other Lethal Mouth seems to have been lying about his first divorce three decades ago as CNN...

How sorry is the present state of Iraq – and how bitter do some Iraqis feel about the consequences of the U.S. invasion and withdrawal? For Iraq’s Azzaman, columnist Fateh Abdulsalam accuses President Obama of brazenly using the Iraq withdrawal to his political advantage and leaving the country ‘with a government reveling in the joys of its own corruption and the opportunistic use of the symbols...