The Facebook IPO, valued at tens of billions of dollars, is going to make some people very, very rich. Where does this incredible value come from? From the personal information that the millions of Facebook users willingly provide the dominant social networking site. Most of that data will be used to customize advertising designed to [...]

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” Nick Carraway observes that “the rich are different from you and me.” Mitt Romney’s tax returns confirm it. The rich have access to deductions, evasions, loopholes and favorable rates we working stiffs can only dream of. The absurd truth is that the wages earned by those of us [...]

I’ve noticed that as the primaries heat up, all the Republicans are channeling the sainted Ronald Reagan. In the last debate before the South Carolina vote, Mitt Romney used the famous “shining city on a hill” line, and Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels repeated it in his rebuttal to Obama’s State of the Union address. Somehow, [...]

It looks as though Congress, in the face of numerous protests, including the Wikipedia shutdown, is backing off passage of SOPA and PIPA, the laws which would have allowed the government to block or shut down websites suspected of posting pirated material. The laws, written on behalf of the film, music and publishing industries, had [...]

  Every once in a while, we cartoonists find a happy accidental convergence that makes for a fun cartoon. I came up with Romney’s line first, and the other two just fell into place. The historical irony here is that Al Gore never actually claimed to have invented the internet. He rightly took credit for [...]

The Romney campaign is rolling, both in votes and in cash. If he wins in South Carolina, with a much heavier concentration of evangelical Christians and Tea Partiers, it will likely be game, set and match. He’s already running his campaign as though Obama is his opponent, and not the assemblage of Republican wannabees, as-beens [...]

Remember that moment in the State of the Union address two years back when the president chided the Supreme Court justices in attendance about their appalling Citizens United decision, predicting that a tsunami of anonymous cash would flood elections? Justice Alito responded by silently mouthing the words, “not true.”  Fast forward to 2012. As predicted [...]

I watched enough of the debates leading up to Iowa to conclude that the Republican candidates for president seem to live on a different planet than the rest of us, one where the only problem this country has is named Obama. Unemployment at 9 percent? Millions of homes foreclosed? The erosion of the middle class? [...]

Interesting story yesterday about how wide the economic gulf has become between members of Congress and their constituents.  According to the New York Times, the median net worth of the folks in Congress grew 15 percent from 2004 to 2010, while the public saw its net worth drop 8 percent. Senators and representatives have always [...]