Our auto company GM is “repaying” some of the bailout money early! Or so say the headlines. But the reality is a little bit different. Some background, in case you don’t remember all the payments you made to own 61% of GM. The government placed $6.7 billion in a “contingency fund” in case things got [...]

So, I read Doug’s take as well as John’s angle and followed it all with Justin’s comments and Jacob’s snark. The bottom-line (as far as I’m concerned) is that this really is not a big deal. I understand the interest and argument posited by Doug and John, but I think that the answers to their [...]

Seniors: One super-voting bloc politicians mess with at their peril For months now, it’s been clear that the road to “deficit neutral” health care reform is a bumpy, maybe even dangerous, one for seniors. Ironically, in their zeal to extend health insurance to the roughly 40 million people who don’t have any, President Obama and [...]

Not surprisingly, The New York Times review of Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue: An American Life isn’t exactly positive: “Going Rogue,” the title of Sarah Palin’s erratic new memoir, comes from a phrase used by a disgruntled McCain aide to describe her going off-message during the campaign: among other things, for breaking with the campaign over [...]

To Charles De Gaulle… To the wife of Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Gronchi… To Pope John XXIII… Maybe he just liked to sneak a peek at their shoes? (h/t: Gaucho Politico & Lawyers, Guns & Money)

Maggie Mahar has an interesting observation in Sunday’s Washington Post: If you’re a progressive like me, and you’re upset by the Stupak amendment, which bars federally subsidized insurance from covering abortions, consider this: What if we had a single-payer health-care system and someone like Jeb Bush or Sarah Palin were running the country? The Stupak [...]

In what can only be called an Epic Win, President Obama has turned his back on Superman! USA rules! With this daring breach of protocol (at the risk of a super-wedgie) Obama has done what no American President has ever done – disrespected Superman. I think we can all agree that this is truly a [...]

Hey all, I’ve heard quite a bit of back channel chatter about the last two posts on the blog and I wanted to explain how I was responsible for the topic even showing up here in the first place. Doug and I are friends on Facebook and he feeds his posts through his profile. I [...]

I found the following numbers from Gallup about government’s role in health care to be, well, eye opening. Check it out… Hmmm, what happened in 2008…I can’t really think of anything. Republicans can not like Obama all the want, but this smacks of “Soreloserism.” Why, just look at how this drop has effected the overall [...]

Not unless the White House is making up its own “protocol” as Obama cruises through his latest road trip. For the past 24 hours, a lot of eyebrows have been raised around the world about this photo of the President of the United States bowing low — very low — before the Emperor of Japan, [...]

I’ll start this out by saying that I’m sure several of you are going to disagree with me. Unlike conservatives, I was willing to give Obama the benefit of the doubt when he appeared to give a deferential bow to the King of Saudi Arabia. Perhaps it was just a rookie mistake, or the result [...]

We all know we’re on an unsustainable course with all of this spending. And this is why I voted for this guy: he’s a realist. We needed a short term shot in the arm when he first got in here, but now we have to worry about the long term consequences. Politico has more: On [...]

Greg Craig, White House Counsel, has tendered his resignation (PDF file), in what The Washington Post calls the administration’s highest level shake up: The departure comes after months of dissatisfaction over Craig’s management of Guantanamo policy and other matters and less than a month after officials said Craig was no longer guiding the effort to [...]

Where the Independent Voters — and Independent Candidates — Are in 2010 You’ll never see what happened last Tuesday looking through a two-party microscope! Nope. You need an independent historyscope to get this one! I had the pleasure of hearing independent strategist Jackie Salit give her analysis of the November elections on Sunday night on [...]

Vice President Joe Biden has been up to all sorts of good stuff lately… but mostly making phone calls and eating. Whether it’s snacking on picnic lunches with the veterans, hosting an extravagant dinner with His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholemew of Constantinope, or wolfing down chili dogs with Governor Granholm of Michigan, the VP [...]

Before you get nervous, know that Joe Biden was NOT in the armored vehicles when they crashed on Wednesday around 2:27 am. US Park Police said the VP’s regular convoy — two armored vehicles, a limousine and a sport utility vehicle — struck and killed a pedestrian in Maryland. Larry D. Moore, 53, of Temple [...]

The Obama administration is reacting to recent events: Item 1: The public feud with Fox News ended with the premature departure of Communications Director Anita Dunn and the follow-up announcement that President Obama will grant an interview with Fox News White House correspondent Major Garrett. Evidently he is now considered a “real journalist”. As the [...]

Gallup is out with a poll that suggests more problems for the Dems and a 10 point shift in voter preference since July. First, the numbers… The bigger news here? Independents are swinging wildly in favor of the generic Republicans. There’s about a year to go before the 2010 elections, but this shift does not [...]

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c

Climate science is a technical field. Modern measurements, reaching back only a few decades, provide us with a degree of precision not found in historical records (yet even modern measurements have problems). To calculate the tiny changes that may be the beginning of global warming we need modern precision for past ages as well. So [...]