Does this help or hurt Palin with the GOP base?
HP-In its “Oral History of the Bush White House,” Vanity Fair hears from Lawrence Wilkerson. The former top aide to Colin Powell compares our current president to none other than Sarah Palin:
Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to Secretary of State […]

What do you think?
WP-Should Bush administration officials be put on trial for crimes such as authorizing torture?
Personally, I’m just relieved to have this crowd heading out of office and its policies — on torture, on indefinite detention, on warrantless wiretapping, on overweening executive power — soon to be inoperative.
But the imminent arrival of […]

Will China be the financial power house? What will the world look like with a socialist country as the center of money?
WSJ-The new edition of Foreign Affairs magazine has a pair of articles about the global financial mess that carry these disturbing headlines: “A Weakening of the West,” reads one, and “The Rise of […]

Could this be a problem for all of us?
HP-While panicked investors caught up Bernard Madoff’s $50 billion Ponzi scheme scramble to recover their money from the disgraced executive, one woman is going a different route: going after the SEC:
A New York woman who lost nearly $2 million investing with Bernard Madoff has filed a claim […]

How will history treat Bush?
Politico-Faced with a faltering economy and a precarious national security position, President George W. Bush made the best of a bad situation and sought to unite the country in spite of Washington’s toxic political culture.
That’s how Bush views his tenure in office, according to a recent round of exit interviews […]

What do you think?
Pejman Yousefzadeh, Attorney and blogger:
Given the stance he took against what he perceived to be illegal and unethical methods of interrogation during his time at the Office of Legal Counsel, one presumes that law professor Jack Goldsmith would have some valuable advice to dispense on this subject, along with the moral authority […]

Is this not a slippery slope? Will this not open up any healthcare worker to challenge providing any needed procedure they believe violates religious beliefs?
NPR-Health care workers, hospitals and even entire insurance companies could decline to perform, refer or pay for abortion or any other health care practice that violates a “religious belief or […]

Obama has a point!
NPR-President-elect Barack Obama says the government has been “asleep at the switch” when it comes to overseeing the nation’s financial system.
He says Americans are “feeling frustrated that there’s not a lot of adult supervision.”
Obama spoke in Chicago as he announced appointments to head the Securities and Exchange Commission and to other regulatory […]

Do we not have a pattern here with Bush and company?
WP-The nation’s chief securities regulator said yesterday it was “deeply troubling” that his agency had failed to catch perhaps the largest Ponzi scheme in history despite “credible and specific allegations . . . repeatedly brought to the attention of SEC staff” regarding the activities of […]

What do you think?
PP-I have never voted for a Democrat for the Office of President.
I have never voted for a Democrat for the US House, either, though I did vote for Sam Nunn once.
But as of now, I am anxiously looking forward to the swearing in of Senator Barack Obama if for no […]

Bush and company!
NYT-An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of […]

NPR-President Bush is making what is likely to be his “farewell” trip to Iraq before he leaves office next month. At a news conference in Baghdad, today, Bush defended the U.S.-led invasion.
He also applauded passage of an Iraqi-U.S. security pact that keeps American troops in Iraq for three more years.
A lot of people in Iraq […]

I guess debt does matter Dick!
Politico-Senate Republicans’ dramatic revolt against a White House-backed auto industry rescue plan is fraught with political risk.
While the high-stakes gambit places them squarely within the mainstream of anti-bailout public sentiment, at the same time it exposes the party to potentially devastating criticism that its failure to compromise doomed the […]

Who does Bush work for?
(Bloomberg) — The Federal Reserve refused a request by Bloomberg News to disclose the recipients of more than $2 trillion of emergency loans from U.S. taxpayers and the assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.
Bloomberg filed suit Nov. 7 under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act requesting details about […]

This is flat out rude! What type of person would punish children over an election?Any decent person would let children start school over a visit to the White House. As someone who had to move his children from schools mid-year I find this very insensitive!
NYT-The White House has turned down a request from the […]