Has Obama turned his back on ‘Old Europe?’ Americans may not be aware of it, but for quite some time, Russia has been promoting the idea of a new Europe-wide security organization that would exclude the United States. According to this article from Russia’s Gazeta, the Obama Administration, in giving the impression that it considers Europe less important that past U.S. administrations, should provide new impetus to the plan, which was put forward by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. For...

It’s not clear to me whether Sarah Palin really did misunderstand Pat Buchanan’s column to mean that he thought Pres. Obama should bomb Iran (he was in fact making the opposite argument), or whether she was indicating that she thought it was a neat idea and was simply, in her verbally challenged way, citing Buchanan’s column as the place where she first learned about the idea (Buchanan got it from Daniel Pipes, who does want Obama to bomb Iran).

I took Monday off to join a friend help celebrate her 63rd birthday at the local Indian gambling casino here in southwest Riverside County, Calif. Now what I’m about to report is in no way considered on my part a racist comment. So, relax and take it for what it’s worth. The vast preponderance of people at the slots and gaming tables were Filipinos and other Asian decent. I don’t know why but the Orientals are culturally a group of gambling fools. I sat at a 21 table for five hours...

The other day, John Brennan, the Obama administration’s counterterrorism adviser, publicly corrected Republicans in Congress who have been attacking Obama and the FBI for handling the attempting Christmas Day bombing as a criminal justice rather than a military matter. In his letter, he pointed out that he specifically briefed Sen. Christopher Bond, Rep. John Boehner, Sen. Mitch McConnell, and Rep. Pete Hoekstra — on Christmas Day, after Abdulmutallab’s arrest — about the...

First reaction: Great. It’s about time. President Obama and congressional leaders emerged from a rare bipartisan meeting on Tuesday pledging to work together on a range of issues, including a job-creation bill that lawmakers hope to pass this month, along with longer-term goals related to health care, trade and energy. … The jobs bill represents an important test of whether the thaw in relations between the two parties is real. Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa),...

Is it possible to have too much democracy? The founding fathers certainly thought so, as Kurt Andersen reminds us … The tea-party movement takes its name from the mob of angry people in Boston who, in 1773, committed a zany criminal stunt as a protest against taxes and the distant, out-of-touch government that imposed them. Two years later, the revolution was under way and—voilà!—democracy was born out of a wild moment of populist insurrection. Except not, because in 1787 several dozen...

Now here is something I cannot in a million years imagine a Republican administration doing. Anthem Blue Cross of California just announced that it’s jacking up its premiums by as much as 39% — despite a year of enormous profits — and Kathleen Sibelius hit the roof:

In a pre-Super Bowl interview, President Obama told Katie Couric about a televised bipartisan health-care meeting on February 25th to go through “all the best ideas…and move it forward.” If he hadn’t been absorbed in the game, watching Bill Moyers Journal would have given him a more productive idea than meeting with members of Congress who have been bargaining and bastardizing reform into a monstrosity that few Americans understand and the majority disapproves. Moyers interviewed...

While it remains depressingly futile to bang the drum of warning against the dangers posed to the American economy by the new “global economy” there is a piece up at HuffPo this week by Thom Harmann which everyone should read. Globalization Is Killing The Globe: Return to Local Economies The reason I find the subject depressing (which, not coincidentally, is also the reason I get beaten up by my hard core conservative cronies on this) is that there are aspects of it which are glaringly...

From a very recent Rasmussen poll: Eighty-three percent (83%) of Americans say the size of the federal budget deficit is due more to the unwillingness of politicians to cut government spending than to the reluctance of taxpayers to pay more in taxes. Considering the public pillorying that occurs every time a politician dares to suggest cuts, I find that percentage to be absolutely astonishing. Are we really this schizophrenic?

We’re snowed in here in Washington DC. The government will shut down tomorrow for a second consecutive day. Tomorrow night, we’re expecting another storm. One of the nice things about being shut in is the chance to read, and I’ve finally started on Dreams From My Father. In a word, it’s superb. It would be a great book if Barack Obama were still just a lawyer in Chicago. Of course, it’s really not unusual for a Republican to praise the book. Three years ago, at...

Not completely evil. I dialed in to a two-hour conference call from home, which meant I could visit the refrigerator at lunchtime instead of waiting until the call ended to go down the cafeteria. But according to Matt Yglesias, it costs the taxpayers $100 million when the federal government has to shut down because of snowfall. (I’ve heard it costs the taxpayers $200 million when the federal government stays open.) Seriously, why doesn’t the federal government help DC get ready for...

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

According to this sobering editorial from the NRC Handelsblad of The Netherlands, recent tension between China and the United States is the opening tremor of a tectonic shift in the relative influence of the world’s two top two powers – and that shift strongly favors Beijing. The NRC Handelsblad editorial says in part: According to conservative estimates, it will be less than fifteen years before China surpasses the United States as a superpower. It was just 2003 when this was predicted...

Iran has again thumbed its nose the U.S. and other countries that want to halt its nuclear program with its latest defiant move: it has started the higher enrichment process: Iran says it has begun enriching uranium to a higher level, defying international efforts to curb its nuclear activity. Iranian state television quoted officials who said the process started Tuesday at Iran’s Natanz facility in the presence of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors. Iran told the IAEA Monday of...

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

Arizona Sen. John McCain’s blunt spoken daughter Meghan McCain gives us our political Quote of the Day in her response to the Tea Party convention — particularly former Rep Tom Tancredo’s remarks that a lot of the voters who voted for Barack Obama couldn’t spell the word “vote” or say it in English…and that it would have been worse if John McCain had won the election. On Monday, Meghan McCain fired back. “People were saying that this is the new movement...

Avatar has turned out to be a politically explosive film. By and large, most writers see the film as a challenge to militarism/corporatism/fascism and a rejection of colonialism that extols the values of indigenous people. Chinese viewers see in the film a challenge to corporate interests that pay off corrupt officials to raze the homes of people unable to defend themselves. Like an earlier article from Germany’s Die Zeit: Avatar: A Shameful Example of Western Cultural Imperialism, this article...

I read with great interest Rick Moran’s post on Glenn Reynolds’ comparison of the Tea Party Movement to the Great Awakening. While I disagree with some of the historical analysis of the First Great Awakening – the institutional church against which George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards railed was the Congregationalist Church, which represented New England authority and not England – the larger point is a valid one. There is an incipient and anti-establishment movement afoot...

Some have been dismissing the iPad as just “a large iPod touch: a great device to draw your inspiration from, but perhaps not the seismic shift in technology that we were expecting.” Hutch Carpenter sees it as much more; he’s sensing a seismic shift. Writing at Blogging Innovation, Carpenter says it’s Apple’s skill with design-driven innovation that will make the iPad a success. And what is the significant design-driven innovation in the iPad? It’s touch, of course: In...

Or so Fox News now seemingly suggests. What truly is stunning is how in recent years partisans will jump through all kinds of mental hoops to try and excuse things that people on their side do that they berated others on the other side for doing. You could say “mind-boggling” but now this is the norm. Outrage and ridicule is only directed at those who you seek to politically defeat, but you look the other way or play defense attorney if your own side does it. As noted in another post,...

On The Media spoke last week with Don Corrigan, editor of The Webster-Kirkwood Times, a small community paper published weekly. Two years ago in his Missouri town, reporters at that paper found themselves covering — and in one instance witnessing — the murders of some friends and neighbors: Probably the low point for me was a call about 1:30, 2 in the morning after this had happened, and The CBS Morning Show wanted an interview with our reporter who witnessed this firsthand. And I said,...

The old saying is the two things you cannot avoid are death and taxes but these days it seems politics are much more entwined with death and to me that is a sad thing. Certainly the death of a political incumbent has political aspects, especially where  the district is marginal and thus subject to takeover. But you do not discuss such things while the body is still warm. Although most of the mainstream on both the left and the right have been properly respectful regarding the death of Congressman...

John Darkow, Columbia Daily Tribune, Missouri This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to appear on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved.

Dude. If you don’t like being mistaken for Torquemada, stop acting like Torquemada (emphasis is in original):

There was one thing that surprised me about this past weekend’s “news coverage” – it’s not that the Tea Party Convention was covered but the fact that it was covered seriously. I would even go as far as to say that I was shocked …wait that’s too far… mystified to find that reputable news outlets were giving serious discussion and analysis to Tom Tancredo opening speech (and the entire convention for that matter). What I would describe shocking is reputable and respected...

I just saw the headline; don’t have details yet. I’ll post again when I do.

Ezra Klein makes what I think is an unassailable argument that the health care reform bill in Congress right now already does incorporate many Republican ideas:

Remember when Nancy Pelosi said she wasn’t briefed about the C.I.A.’s use of waterboarding and other forms of torture, and C.I.A. officials provided documentation that she had been briefed, and there was this whole huge back and forth about what she knew and when, and whether she should have gone public with her knowledge? Remember how Republicans in Congress at the time buttressed their argument that there should be no legal investigation or trials of Bush administration officials involved...

The image of a pet rabbit in a boiling pot arises after a night of passion in Nashville, with Sarah Palin auditioning for the Glenn Close role in a remake of “Fatal Attraction.” If the GOP establishment was hoping for a one-night stand with the Tea Party, Palin evoked some serious stalking ahead by promising to campaign for challengers to traditional Republicans: “Contested primaries aren’t civil war. They’re democracy at work, and that’s beautiful.” The...

Should the tea party movement be seen as a phenomenon as large and consequential as another Great Awakening? Glenn Reynolds thinks so: I attended this past weekend’s National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, Tennessee, and I came away feeling that I had seen something important. The Tea Party movement is part of something bigger: America’s Third Great Awakening. America’s prior Great Awakenings, in the 18th and 19th Centuries, were religious in nature. Unimpressed with self-serving, ossified,...

My Two Cents Raging Moderate, by Will Durst I’m only guessing, but a major problem with being president has to be people around you being more likely to stick their face in a cast iron oscillating fan than tell you the truth. Let’s say you slip and fall and rip a hole in your pants down to your ankle while spilling hot coffee on a little blind girl in a wheelchair in front of a nationally televised audience. The worst you could expect to hear from a staffer is “Well, that could have gone better.”...

Ok, the headline is nothing but snark, but for those of us living in the Empire State it might not seem like such a bad idea at this point. I mean, why mess around with yet another governor who might build up our hopes only to dash them on the rocks of scandal? Let’s just put in somebody who is already on the docket for some federal crimes. If you’re wondering exactly what it is that I’m going on about today, reports are circulating that the New York Times is getting ready to unleash...

Our political Quote of the Day comes from independent commentaror John Avon’s take on the Tea Party convention in Nashville, which he attended. He begins it this way: As the National Tea Party Convention concluded this weekend, it’s clear that the Tea Partiers are propelled by two competing claims — a principled commitment to fiscal conservatism and a serious case of Obama Derangement Syndrome. The first group remains true to the roots of the movement as it emerged almost one year...

Much comment about Sarah Palin’s performance at the Tea Party convention (including from yours truly on a CNN panel) noted that her speech did contain some substance and that she is a political force who GOPers hoping to run for President (and Democrats) may have to contend with. But did she also show that she has limited talents and a seeming unwillingness to grow?

WASHINGTON — If President Obama gets to sign a health reform bill, as I believe he will, one reason may be Rep. Jay Inslee’s difficult experience renovating his kitchen. He told his kitchen story at a House Democratic caucus held after Republican Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts sent Inslee’s colleagues into paroxysms of dismay, chaos and fear. Brown’s triumph reduced the Democrats’ majority in the Senate to “only” 59, and this led many...

Now that the hub-hub over the Superbowl is finally fading away, we have time to turn our attention to the more important, but often sadly overlooked sports which make up the American way of life. These include activities such as eight-ball, shuffleboard, horseshoes and Foosball. What is it that makes sports such as these so superior? They are some of the only competitive athletic activities you can engage in while eating chicken wings and consuming copious quantities of alcohol. But even better than...

A conservative’s perspective.

And House Democrats push back.

Are rocky times ahead for the United States and China? Ted Galen Carpenter, vice-president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, thinks so and explains why in a must-read post on RealClearPolitcs. Here is the beginning of it: A nasty spat has erupted between Washington and Beijing over the Obama administration’s arms sales to Taiwan. As soon as the US made the official announcement of the US$6.4 billion package last Friday, Beijing responded with both harsh words and...

Eric Allie, Caglecartoons.com This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved.

How has it all seemingly gone wrong for President Barack Obama? Providing a unique, and uniquely French prospective on the question, is historian Alexandre Adler, who suggests that at root of the president’s problem is ironically, a failure to truthfully communicate in a way “more in keeping with some of his deepest intuitions.” In one meaty section of his analysis, Alexandre Adler writes for Le Figaro in part: There emerges in the person of the president an image of haughty...

So for all the hype and panic the ad turns out to be nothing. All it was is Mom talking about how she had a rough time with Tim and almost lost him a number of times. Then some humor with her and Tim and a link to the web site. That’s it. No mention of abortion, no agenda, nada. Which likely explains why CBS approved it.

There are rumblings now that New York’s Gov. David Paterson will resign once a New York Times expose about a purported sex scandal involving him is published.

Monte Wolverton, Cagle Cartoons This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved.

On my way to tennis this morning, I was listening to NPR and caught the end of an interesting conversation on an alleged correlation between the Super Bowl winner and the stock market. However, I didn’t catch the name of the professor who had done such a study. Curious as to how my stocks will be doing after tonight’s Super Bowl, I “Googled” the subject and hit the jackpot. The professor is finance professor George Kester at Washington and Lee University. In an article on Newswire.com,...

New York Times columnist Frank Rich must not read The Moderate Voice. In a column today in the Times, discussing the reaction to Adm. Mullen’s testimony on “don’t ask, don’t tell,” Rich says: A funny thing happened after Adm. Mike Mullen called for gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military: A curious silence befell much of the right. If this were a Sherlock Holmes story, it would be the case of the attack dogs that did not bark. Rich contends that, perhaps with the exception...

TPMDC reports,  Report: Shelby Blocks All Obama Nominations In The Senate Over AL Earmarks: Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) has put an extraordinary "blanket hold" on at least 70 nominations President Obama has sent to the Senate, according to multiple reports this evening. The hold means no nominations can move forward unless Senate Democrats can secure a 60-member cloture vote to break it, or until Shelby lifts the hold. "While holds are frequent," CongressDaily’s Dan...

UPDATED: Battelle got it exactly right. The ad ran, the one in the original post below. Schmidt’s Google Blog post from after the game invites us to view the rest of the ads in the series. Jeff Jarvis doesn’t get it, tweeting: Disappointed Google didn’t make a new commercial appropriate to the Super Bowl. France? Football? Google? ++++++++++++ A standard line I used to use in lectures on marketing in a Web 2.0 world, “Google’s method is viral attraction followed by...

Political satire started in prime time as Sarah Palin preempted SNL with a parody of herself at the Tea Party convention. “How’s that hopey-changey stuff working out for you?” she twinkled during a $100,000 standup (to be donated to “the cause,” destination unclear) for hundreds who paid $349 to hear her pummel Obama with one-liners about everything from bailouts to the Christmas bomber (in the war on terror, “we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law...

Simon Johnson, who has made a career of studying and intervening in countries that have sovereign debt crises, has a very blunt post today, “Europe Risks Another Global Depression.” Notice the full stop; there is no passive aggressive question mark at the end to give him any wiggle room should it all blow over. Considering his expertise about identifying when countries have gone past the event horizon, that is quite worrying. Things could get real ugly real fast, with the financial markets...

And so the 24/7 media jumps into the fray. Some images of Sarah Palin at the Tea Party Convention have now emerged that she probably wishes didn’t and some others that won’t spark debate but, rather, provide more context for the environment in which she made her speech. THE FIRST GROUP qualifies a bit of an eyebrow raiser. Did Palin have crib notes on her hand? It looks that way. GO HERE. So does this mean those who keep using the Obama teleprompter line will ignore yet another politician...

Our political Quote of the Day comes from a must-read-in-full column by Nashville Post Politics’ Kleinheider on the Tea Party movement, Sarah Palin and the GOP. Here’s the first part of his piece: The tea party movement is dead. The one I was familiar with anyway. Judson Phillips held it down and Sarah Palin drove a stake right through its heart live last night on C-Span in front of an unsuspecting audience. Sarah Palin didn’t give a tea party speech last night. She gave a partisan...

Hey, football fans. Huddle up. Here it is, eight hours before kickoff at this writing, and I can’t decide who to root for in the Super Bowl. I’ve been back and forth as an out-of-control yo-yo for two weeks. I have no dog in this show. My place kicker, who went the entire season without missing one from 40 yards out, missed two against the Jets and you know the rest. Really, it’s no fun going into a game without silently rooting for one team or another. I like both teams and expect...

I’m mad as hell and can’t stand it any longer. I’ve heard conservative and moderate Democrats, Republicans and Independents complain too much taxes, too many regulations and a trend of socialism taking over our lives. President Barack Obama said he’s been accused of being a Bolshevik. I’m mad as hell because these complainers have failed to offer workable alternatives. And yes, I agree that some proposals by Republican congressmen and Senators fell on Democratic deaf...