I’ve grown to hate presidential campaigns. No matter what either candidate does, the other guy, and the  echo chamber of his supporters in Congress and the media, will attack it. Obama may be guilty of over-celebrating the anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden, but one has to ask how the Republicans would be [...]

I hate elections. Campaign rhetoric invariable distracts us from the real issues confronting the nation, and campaigns always seem to bring out the worst in candidates. Romney’s latest is laughable on so many levels, it’s almost impossible to parody, but I gave it a try. Based on an overheard conversation between Obama and Russian President [...]

Now that corporations are people and money is speech, and Superpacs funded by anonymous donors dominate campaign spending, it’s only a matter of time, I figure, before we finally can do away with the annoyance of having actual people run for office. In a perfect world, the corporate sponsors will have their lobbyists write and [...]

Poor Mitt. He just can’t quite close the deal. After the smashing victory in Florida and the large margin in Nevada, it looked as though he would cruise to the nomination. Print the wedding invitations, reserve the bridal suite and schedule the honeymoon. The GOP was going to get hitched to the Massachusetts moderate after [...]

Toyota’s reputation for quality has been severely damaged by the latest problems with their cars. After decades of gridlock and the resulting inability to accomplish anything, the reputation of Congress can hardly be damaged further.  At this point, it looks as though the Democrats, who failed utterly to use the power handed to them a [...]

The attempt by the Taliban to prevent the Afghan election evidently failed miserably. True, the vote totals were down from the last election, especially in areas controlled by the insurgents, but the people of that poor country genuinely want to choose their own government, and few want to return to the insane rule of the [...]

The genie, as they say, is out of the bottle. The hard-line leadership of Iran is trying to do two opposite things at the same time–promote a partially open society and try to control it. Having given the people of Iran, who increasingly chafe under the limits of a rigid authoritarian society, at least the [...]

It remains to be seen if the current unrest in Iran leads to genuine reform, or if it will end in a bloody repression. The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, apparently badly misjudged the mood of the people, and he’s clearly having trouble putting the genie back in the bottle. The Iranian population, young and [...]