Brad Pitt, when asked why he would never run for Mayor of New Orleans replied, "I would never be elected.  The voters would hate everything I stood for."  Brat Pitt is a sissy compared to my politics.  I love gay whales, treehuggers, Woodrow Wilson Progress… Read full post »

The  5-4 decision by the Supreme Court to uphold the Affordable Care Act was a total surprise to just about everyone.  Certainly if you had listened to the oral arguments of the justices as they heard the case argued, you would have been sure that Obamacare was a goner. J… Read full post »

I've collected a little grab bag of American political campaign secrets that they don't want you to know, and I've spilled the beans.  Little folks like you shouldn't know garbage like this.

We'll start out with one of the jokes of the week.  Bill Maher made a funny about the possibility… Read full post »

 Last year things seemed to be going so well for the democratic and popular movements in the Middle East known as the Arab Spring.  The self-immolation of the Tunisian fruit seller started a revolutionary blaze that extended from the Western Sahara to Turkmenistan.  Tunisian a… Read full post »

 As it's covered in the media, free trade policy is somewhere below pit bull breeding as an interest to the American public. When I say the words free trade, I can hear people say, "That's nice" before their eyes begin to glaze over and they fall asleep.  And… Read full post »

 I have no proof of anything that I'm blogging about because if I did, I'd probably be dead already.  But it all makes horrible common sense.

 One of the mysteries of the 21st Century is why America continues to do battle on the war on drugs.  When the European… Read full post »

 Preliminary results of the Wisconsin recall election indicate a 55%-44% win for Scott Walker. By any stretch of the imagination, this represents a major setback for progressive forces all over the United States. And just as the Spanish Civil War of 1938 was a dress rehearsal for World W… Read full post »

When most people think of the Great Depression, they think of the year 1929 when the stock market crashed.  However, if us oldsters actually talked to our parents or grandparents, we'd find that people somehow managed to survive the 1929-31 period more or less well. The year 1931 was… Read full post »

 This blog is not about Rahm Emanuel. It's about his spirit that I channeled almost immediately when I got back from Mexico.  I'd been in town only a few hours, when a neighbor gave me an invite to a local art center where one of my favorite photographers was holding… Read full post »

Nothing much big happening this week.  Just piddly little stuff.  So, I'm going to draw some numbers out of the hat and give you their run down.

BAD ECONOMY

Surprise, surprise, surprise.  The current period is entering a little late, but more or less exactly where I thought it would be… Read full post »

May Day has come and gone, and in many respects, the Occupy protests this month were just pale imitations of what occurred in November.  And supporters of the movement appear to have put a happy face on  a diminished presence.  There are a number of factors that account… Read full post »

 FOREIGN

I live in Mexico, so I don't get to experience the cacaphony and barrage of media extravaganza and spectacle that is the US mass media. It's my observation that for the most part, Americans are insular people, unaware of their greater global surroundings.  Many Ameri… Read full post »

Bullish sentiments in the worldwide stock market were taken for a rude awakening by a double clap of thunder emanating from France and the Netherlands over the weekend. First, the defeat of French President Nicholas Sarkozy seems almost certain. He's the first French president in history to f… Read full post »

  I've said for some time that China was an accident waiting to happen.  First, we have the exponential growth of the Chinese economy since the time of Deng Xiaoping that overturned the social contract established under the old governmental system established by Mao Tse Tung. … Read full post »

 Mitt Romney and the Republican Party seem to be channeling Soviet nostalgia, and well they might.  The death of communism has not been good overall to the health of the conservative movement, and oddly enough -- Karl Marx is one of the sharpest political theorists  now to expl… Read full post »

I started out on my journey to the long lost cave paintings of San Borjita, but I didn't have the foggiest idea of how much trouble I'd actually be getting into.

When your truck has its second flat tire in the middle of the desert, and you wander for a… Read full post »

 Lucky and Superlucky were something else.  Unlike the suits at the embassy who didn't know their ass from a hole in the ground, Lucky and Superlucky were the real McCoy.  For one thing, they were kids, and they were true believers.  For another thing, they looked… Read full post »

Israel is at a crossroads.  Stratfor says that Israel is now in a completely new environment.  Since 1967 Israel's main concern had been the Palestinians and what to do about them.  Thanks to the manuvering of the Israeli government, the Palestinians are much less… Read full post »

I've always been a sucker for Lawrence of Arabia.  Maybe because I was at an impressionable age at that time, and maybe  it's because I saw one of the greatest and most influential movies in history.  But  Thomas Edward Lawrence has always been a talisman for me. He… Read full post »

The Supreme Court is certainly facing interesting times lately.  Not only are they currently hearing conservatives' challenges to Obamacare AKA the Affordable Care Act, but down the road they're going to revisit the infamous Citizens United v. FEC decision with their hearing on the recent Montan… Read full post »

My wifey owes me TWO FREE PASSES!  Not one, but two.  I had already made arrangements with Steve for my next great Mexican adventure (profusely illustrated!), but wifey gets a phone call from Brenda.  Brenda says, "Do you have an extra space for dinner right now?  We need a hen fe… Read full post »

When you're looking at a website that has a picture of a demonic Barack Obama being guarded by giant soldiers in hell, you can figure that there might be a few people looking at you.  I had to wipe off 536 megabytes of cookies on my computer before I began to… Read full post »

The clown show that passes for the Republican primaries has been truly astounding.  Never before in American history has the public ever witnessed such a collection of nitwits, retards, mountebanks, religious zealots, zombies, flat earth enthusiasts, and tinfoil hat wearers.  I do not have… Read full post »

In reading the animal spirits of the world economy, a major sea change has occurred in the last six months.  We went from a time of great fear, where a collapse of the euro and Greece seemed imminent, to a time where it's been publicly announced that the transition on Greek… Read full post »

There's no there -- there.

Gertrude Stein

Perhaps you've noticed the  news drought lately.  Things are so slow, I swear I saw one  news source have coverage of a murder that happened a hundred years ago.  And even on Open Salon there's a strange tranquility.  It's not like th… Read full post »