’cause these are the good old days.

2009 was a disappointing year partly because President Barack Obama fell short of the hopes raised when he came to power last January following his inspiring electioneering. Perhaps we expected too much of just a man. Most of the world, even North Korea, expected a healer’s touch but Obama looks increasingly like a fly trapped in a spider’s web of political complexities. 2010 will tell whether he is mainly an orator or an incisive player thinking several moves ahead to win through masterly preplanned...

A California Superior court has ruled that the furloughs ordered by the Guv are illegal. The order is being appealed so it won’t go into effect. Details here

There is a wall… The CIA memorial wall at CIA headquarters, is located in the Old Headquarters Building. There are 83 stars on the wall. Each represents the a death of a CIA agent in the course of duty. Though the image of CIA might for some be slouch hats, spy vs spy, old guys with white hair and hoary knowledge, these are the faces of the mostly very young CIA employees. Here, they were celebrating the installation of Leon Panetta. The names of 48 of the 83 agents who died are written...

For those of us unwilling or unable to brave the wilds of NYC’s Time Square to ring in the New Year, there are at least three good choices for a live video stream… CBS News New Year’s Live Stream: Livestream’s Times Square 2010 Live: Hulu’s Times Square 2010 Stream:

Happy New Year Moderate Voice people! So which superpower or superpower pretender had the best year in 2009? Was it China, Russia or the United States? According to columnist Fyodor Lukyanov of the Russian newspaper Gazeta – the answer is unequivocally China. Outlining the challenges both the United States and Russia have in dealing with the new powerhouse, for Gazeta, Fyodor Lukyanov writes in part: Argentine Federal Judge Octavio de Lamadrid has a chance to enter the annals of history. The...

Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune This cartoon is copyrighted and licensed to appear on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved.

From the blame scramble over the aborted Christmas bombing comes a CIA defense of the failure to ground Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. The New York Times quotes an anonymous official: “You had a young man who was becoming increasingly pious and was turning his back on his family’s wealthy lifestyle. That alone makes him neither St. Francis nor a dead-eyed killer. “Every piece of data, of course, looks different when you know the answer, as everyone does now.” By this smug reasoning, Osama bin...

Google has a fun little search easter egg for the new year. Go to Google, leave the search box empty and click on the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. In bold blue numbers Google’s counting down to the new year. You will see a count down to the new year in large blue numbers under the search box. That, and the Google New Year logo above, via Search Engine Land’s collection of New Years logos.

Way back in early June, when Mr. Cheney was well into his “Obama is soft on terrorism” tour, Frank Rich wrote a column in the New York Times titled, “Who Is to Blame for the Next Attack?” In his piece, Rich rightly condemned Cheney’s attempts to once again “using lies and fear… rewrite history and escape accountability for the failed Bush presidency…” Rich was referring to Cheney’s infamous “no middle ground” speech on torture at the American Enterprise Institute, and also...

After noting on TMV that Mr. Limbaugh was taken to hospital suddenly, I see across the blogosphere that there are in various hamlets, outbreaks of some kind of madness regarding Rush Limbaugh, with some issuing the equivalent of “armchair fatwahs” against the man. I think that’s wrong-hearted. I know Mr. Limbaugh from prior associations through our books being neck and neck on the NYT bestseller list some years back, and we appeared on various networks at the same time, so we met more than...

This week everyone has been talking about the start of the 10′s. Technically of course just as the millenium really began in 2001 and not 2000 the 10′s start in 11 and not 10 (since there is no year zero). Or do we just count the first decade of the AD’s as 1-9 ? Why is it we count up from 1 but down to 0 ? So when does the decade really start ? And just to add a political element, how is this <insert political figure here>’s fault ?

RJ Matson, The St. Louis Post Dispatch This cartoon is copyrighted and licensed to appear on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved.

The White House has finally begun to push back against the right-wing campaign of lies and smears that began immediately after the Christmas Day aborted airline bombing and continue to this moment. In a post on the White House communications blog, Dan Pfeiffer responds to yesterday’s Politico interview with Dick Cheney in which Cheney accused Pres. Obama of “pretending we are not at war”:

The cover of the current issue of the New Republic blares, The Battle for Tora Bora: The Untold Story. It’s a good article, but it’s actually an old story. Some of the details are new, but I think it’s been at least five years since we’ve known that Bin Laden was cornered in the caves of Tora Bora in December of 2001, but the chain of command rejected a request to send in US ground forces. Instead we sent in some Afghan militia and Bin Laden got away. The individual clearly...

…publishes enough cliche polemics to justify the adjective “liberal”. Now, it is certainly true that TNR generates enough heresy to justify its reputation as much more than a liberal meat grinder. That’s why I have a subscription. But TNR also provides enough simplistic GOP-bashing to fortify the perpetually indignant, self-satisfied liberal intellectualism to which so many of its readers subscribe. Case in point: The Rise of Republican Nihilism by Jonathan Chait. Here’s...

What qualifies me to do a retrospective review of the best films of the decade? Well, I’d like to think that I know a lot about film, that I’ve seen a lot of movies, that I love movies, and that I have good taste. Plus, I’m a blogger, so here you go, like it or not. (Oh, and I was a film critic way back when for The Tufts Daily.) Seriously, it’s been an interesting exercise looking back over the decade in film. These lists don’t mean much — and there are way too...

My boss is not an Obama fan. No, I’m not referring to Mr. Gandelman. I’m referring to the other boss — the one at the company that pays me for what I do. That boss is not an Obama fan — and he struggles to understand why I am. Two days before Christmas, that boss dropped by my office. I was one of the few still there; many had already left for some extended R&R over the holidays. We chatted about work-related items; about our sons, who long ago attended the same...

HAPPY NEW YEAR’S EVE DAY TMV READERS! “To us the things on cable news seem so freakin’ dumb, And we can only hope that we’re not the only ones… But since they’re still reporting it….we just might be the only ones.” — Lyrics by Hank, Music by Rhett & Link.

Economists still argue about whether the New Deal policies of the 1930s saved the economy or prolonged the Depression. You can make a good case either way. But there’s no argument about the fact that it was an enormous political success. It gave people in this country hope for their future, a belief that their institutions were being fixed for the better, and that their government was on the side of the majority of our people not special interests. As commentators of all stripes do their end-year...