My official Adios to the decade of decay as it appears in the Wednesday Los Angeles Times. Are we poised on a New World? Or condemned to languish in political purgatory? Meanwhile, writing on The Daily Beast, my daughter has her own list of trends we should leave behind/

I was going to try and stay off the blog until New Year but have too many and very disparate reactions to the failed terror bombing in Detroit.  I am way too much in an off-the-grid mind set to try and construct any rational narrative. So, forewarned, here’s my disparate reactions. – I’m glad to [...]

Last week, uber-numbers-cracker Nate Silver laid out in cold, cool stats the “something” in the health care bill that is way better than nothing.  His projection: In short, a family of  four making about $55,000 a year will not be living in Socialist Paradise because of the Senate version of the health care bill. But [...]

The health care bill remains alive if rather unstable and probably permanently deformed. I think the best lesson to derive from all this is summed up rather well by E.J. Dionne and  Paul Krugman, Here are a few other random lessons dished out over the past year.

Nebraska U.S. Senate Election 2006 Party Candidate Votes % ±% Democratic Ben Nelson (Incumbent) 377,907 63.9 +12.9 Republican Pete Ricketts 213,054 36.1 Now, it’s the esteemed Senator from East Jesus, Ben Nelson, who is single-handedly threatening to pull the plug on the already on-life-support national health care bill. Just so you know, Mr. Nelson was [...]

From Politics and Society published by USC. December 18, 2009 The Aughties? The Ohs? Whatever you call them, the years 2000 through 2009 were eventful ones. Marc Cooper of the USC Annenberg School recalls the media moments that captured our attention: September 11, Obama’s election, the expansion of presidential power… 1. The unconventional election process [...]

Jay Rosen interviews Clay Shirky on “newspapers and thinking the unthinkable.” Neon Tommy | Promote Your Page Too

Take a look at this. I’m no big fan of Al Franken and, as I said last night, I’ve pretty much lost interest in the trivia that constitutes “floor debate.” But at least in the vein of watching a good, staged wrestling match, I have to admit to getting a laugh out of watching Franken [...]

I love the name of my friend Tim’s blog – Biped Twilight.  I felt reaffirmed in this pleasure this evening during a chat with my shrink. We heartily agreed that, in the end, it’s up to people. And people don’t always come through. Better said, they rarely come through. It’s not that humans are born [...]

I regret that in 2000 I was able to withhold my vote for Joe Lieberman only once.

We’ll have a good chat.

Sunday’s presidential election in Chile goes into a Jan. 17 run-off round but the front-runner tonight is right-wing billionaire Sebastian Pinera, sometimes known as the Berlusconi of Chile.  The owner of the national Chile airlines and much of the private electronic media, the Harvard-educated businessman is considered to be of the more “moderate” right, though [...]

I wasn’t going to write anything about Tiger Woods until I was provoked into it tonight by some “sports analyst” on Larry King, weeping and moaning about what a great “tragedy” it was that he announced he was indefinitely suspending his golf career.  A tragedy because, this guy said, Tiger really “hated the scrutiny,” hated [...]

As the U.S. Senate tries to figure out what is and is not in its version of a health care bill, we’ll take a domestic time out and turn eyes south for a few minutes toward the forgotten and damned piece of earth known as Nicaragua.

The word Tuesday night is that the Senate Democrats  have, indeed, reached a compromise agreement on a health care reform bill. If true, as it seems, it means there will be final version passed quite soon and signed into law. What’s actually IN the bill will leave a lot to be desired. But we knew [...]

I’ve spent the last handful days, in fits and starts, replaying and parsing Obama’s speech further escalating the war in Afghanistan. I haven’t been obsessive about it, merely thorough. While my immediate reaction was thumbs down on the “new” policy, I kept an open mind as I read through a couple of dozen very diverse [...]

Los Angeles blogger Charles Johnson shook up the ‘sphere last week when he announced his 10 reasons why he was quitting the Right. For years, his site Little Green Footballs had been a watering hole for some pretty frothy anti-Jihadists and related ilk. As I said earlier this week, I always personally liked Charles and [...]

I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t find anybody today who was very pleased with Barack Obama’s escalation-cum-withdrawal-come-and-go policy toward Afghanistan. Republicans, who created this no-win situation in the first place, came up with their predictable objection to Obama’s very loose timetable. The GOP simply loves wars with no end dates. Fight On! As [...]

First of all, thanks to the Rachel Maddow Show for the catchy title. I think it pretty much sums up the irony of President Obama’s surge speech at West Point Tuesday night.  Some on the liberal left are trying to rationalize Obama’s escalation as a smaller piece of  a more “progressive narrative” of U.S. foreign [...]