We are closing in on Sequestration Day. Our Dear Leaders are engaged in stenous efforts to outdo each other in fomenting fear among the citizenry. If I am to believe the President and the Democrats, the very fabric of society is about to be torn asunder… more »

The Countdown to Sequestration (sounds like the masochistic sex act it is) is nearing its end. The Congress.... The Congress is on break. The President is playing golf with Tiger Woods.  Lincoln had it half right: The government has not quite vanished f… more »

 David Dayen advocates for the return of the practice of permitting the U.S. Postal Service to offer simple banking services in an online article. His two main points is that such a move would help the USPS financially, and provide a needed financial se… more »

A Hershey Milk Chocolate Bar for my beloved Barbara, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. Harry Reid's waffling on filibuster reform last month has quickly showed results: Senate Republicans are now threatening a filibuster of former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel… more »

As we ponder the important issues of our times, those of us who pay attention to such matters realize that our leaders speak in a peculiar cant, a jargon of neologisms and bizarre uses of familiar terms. As a service, I will attempt to explicate some of… more »

Random musings... The fabulous amounts of money involved in the global sports-as-entertainment industry should be a signal to the public to demand more scrutiny. The recent announcement that as many as 650 soccer matches, including World Cup and Europe… more »

I always find the “big vs.small” government discussion a bit fatuous. “Big government” is a pejorative, and whatever connotation supposedly attaches to the term is fogged over by the very sarcasm of its employment. The proper role of government is to ac… more »

So a man puts a gun to his own head and begins screaming, " If you don't do what I want, I will shoot myself."  There is a murmur from the crowd around him, but no one steps forward to engage him. What's left for him to do but pull the trigger? Such is… more »

I anticipated that the Super Bowl would be a close game and, in the end, it was, as the 49er's had a last-chance shot in the closing minutes to win. Yet, it was a strange, almost bizarre game in the way that football can sometimes be, as captured in the… more »

Oh, boy- a big day leading us into The Big Weekend. This morning's jobs reports shows continued but modest growth in  private-sector employment.  The big news on the jobs front was the upward revision of the November and December figures, meaning that… more »

The National Debt has never been far from the forefront of our political discourse in recent years, serving as the ration d’etre for the Tea Party and similar groups, mostly conservative. It has again percolated to the media surface- on television last… more »