Some years ago, particularly after the 1963 assassination of President John F.Kennedy was accurately predicted by psychic Jeane Dixon (but some say her prediction was exaggerated), the mainstream media and tabloids had a field day with end-of-the-year predictions. Sometimes these predictions were silly and didn’t come true. But sometimes they were spot on. It’s much harder to find lists of predictions these days, but they do exist. Some are often funny and the psychics will make a ton...

No, her campaign is not officially over since this guy has not sung, but if it isn’t now in the tea leaves that Rep. Michelle Bachmann’s campaign is going nowheresville, it is in the coffee grinds: EARLY, Iowa – During a swing through a conservative pocket of the state Friday, with only four days before the Jan. 3 Iowa caucus, Michele Bachmann visited a local restaurant to discover only a handful of people waiting for her. Bachmann was accompanied by Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, the district’s...

The candidate’s son Matt steps into a brouhaha by answering a question about his father’s refusal to release tax returns by being flip about Obama’s birth certificate. Bad move. The elder Romney has a valid Michigan birth certificate, but there is also the question of a death certificate, officially stamped on his passport (“He is dead”) by the French police after a lethal auto accident while he was a missionary there in 1968. If the Birthers can see a Manchurian candidate scenario...

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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 and burros in the southwest, but were disappointed that the cattle industry used its money...

Let’s face it. Politics is a brutal game that takes every ounce of the energy for a Presidential wannabe, with incoming political missiles and the threat of sudden political death present at all moments. Throughout American political history, politicians under pressure have cried. Today it was Newt Gingrich’s turn. Early reports suggest women voters in the room were highly sympathetic. But, in the end, Gingrich’s baggage, Bennie’s Bargain Basement campaign budget, and the...

A new NBC Poll shows the growing political drama shaping up in Iowa in the race for the 2012 Republican Presidential nomination. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Rep. Ron Paul are in a near tie — and once-politically-hot former House Newt Gingrich is dropping so fast that you could swear he had been talking about a “nahn nahn nahn” plan. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Texas Rep. Ron Paul are running neck-and-neck in Iowa, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum...

If Mitt Romney wins in Iowa next week, he could find nipping at his heels still another challenger. Two weeks ago, in post-debate stupor, I woozily compared the GOP race to an action movie: “If the Great Screenwriter in the Sky is following the…plotlines, after all the car chases, explosions and reversals, the eventual nominee is clear: Rick Santorum. He’s been a bit player who has never had a big scene and, by all conventions of the genre, has to be revealed as the powerful genius who...

A new poll shows former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is headed for a big win in New Hampshire — as other polls show in surging in Iowa and nationally. Unless there is yet another abrupt reversal in trending in the battle for the 2012 Republican nomination, it may turn out that the original belief of Romney’s “inevitability” will prove true. Mitt Romney holds a commanding lead in the run-up to the Jan. 10 New Hampshire primary, according to a new poll released Thursday afternoon...

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 say when a presidential candidate, the Governor of Texas, does not remember an extremely...

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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, Social Security, Medicaid, etc. unconstitutional. Plus, I kind of like his newsletters. I...

Is US blood and treasure making Afghanistan safe for Chinese exploitation?  It certainly looks like it. In December, 2007, China’s state-owned China Metallurgical Group Corp. (MCC) signed a $2.9 billion agreement with the Kabul government to extract copper from the Aynak deposit, one of the world’s largest unexploited copper deposits with an estimated 240 million tons of ore. And now we have this: KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) – Afghanistan’s government signed a deal...

Jon Swift was a satirist without peer in the blogosphere before his untimely death in 2009. Every year’s end since then, blogger Bottachio has carried on Jon’s tradition of posting a round-up of bloggers’ best self-selected work for the year. Click here for the 2011 edition.

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 unearths Georgia court documents showing that his wife wanted to stay married. Even worse,...

I’ve spent most of my adult life (unlike many of my generation, I could both drink and vote at age 18) being wary of single-issue politics. However, as the parties have become increasingly indistinguishable from one another once they get into power, making a decision based on a single issue may not be as much of a cop-out as I used to think. Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) has been portrayed as opportunistic in his political views, but his recent comments in Iowa on abortion go beyond campaign hyperbole. Texas...

According to two “evangelical” Iowa pastors, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum are being pressured to collaborate: one should bow out and endorse the other. “Otherwise, like-minded people will be divided and water down their impact,” said Rev. Cary Gordon, a Sioux City minister. He said he asked Santorum several weeks ago to consider exiting the race but has since endorsed the former Pennsylvania senator, who is rising in polls. Rev. Albert Calloway, a retired pastor from...

Greetings, students. I hope you all have a copy of your syllabus. Yes, you are in the correct classroom. This is Hypocrisy 101 at Political University. Last year we dealt with the TelePrompter issue and how Sarah Palin was blasting President Barack Obama for using a TelePrompter and many conservative talk show hosts did, too. But then she wrote notes on her hand and she and the talk show hosts pretended that was somehow different than a TelePrompter. And now we have Michelle Bachmann: Republican...

If you want to understand Pakistan and a good deal about South Asia buy “Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi.” South Asia has always been of huge interest to me, from the time I was a student at Colgate University, to my internship on “The Hindustan Times” in New Delhi in the early 1970s, to a couple of years I spent in that city after graduating the Medill School of Journalism and working as a freelance journalist, writing for papers such as the Chicago Daily News. It’s...

MANCHESTER, N.H. — No matter what happens in Iowa, Mitt Romney has a safety net in New Hampshire. And that could rank as the year’s most perilous sentence. Why shouldn’t Romney be surprised in the state that temporarily derailed Barack Obama’s supposedly rapid march toward nomination four years ago? Hillary Clinton humbled many a pundit here in 2008, reason enough to challenge the rapidly jelling conventional wisdom about the Republican presidential campaign. ...