It's easy to get jaundiced covering politics and government after awhile. So much of what happens in Washngtonworld is so predictable it's like the old joke about old jokes. They're so familiar someone assigns numbers to them.

Even after the historic election of Barack Obama, the collapse of the economy,...

It may be one of the dumber Supreme Court rationales in quite some time. Writing for the 5-4 majority which ruled in favor of New Haven's white firefighters and effectively against anti-discrimination in employment, Justice Anthony Kennedy said

"Fear of litigation alone cannot justify an employer's reliance on race...

It's easy to get confused. Until bloggers started disparaging "Mainstream Media," I always thought "MSM" was a gay guy thing in the personals.

One can only imagine the quandary for a gay guy blogger. Does he place his "MSM" ad in the "MSM"?

This is not LGBT-bashing, by the way....

Let's assume we recover from our near collapse. If we do, or even if we pretend to, we need to ponder the overarching lesson we should learn from all this: UNFETTERED CAPITALISM DOES NOT WORK.

We inevitably get sucked into what President Obama calls a "culture of irresponsibility." Truth be...

Sometimes they have all the right ingredients: By that I mean news stories which combine Twitter's vacuousness, with parochial political pandering (known as a "3-P") and media desperate for news on a slow day.

I refer, of course, to the short outbursts from Sen. Charles Grassley who used Twitter to...

It's a variation on one of our great philosophical questions: "If Newt Gingrich says something utterly ridiculous, and nobody is listening, did he really say it?".

The answer is "Of course not. What a silly question".

The problem is that the Newts, and Rushes and their counterparts on...

Those of us who enjoy being pretentious are quoting Aristotle who criticized the law as "Mind without reason".

Step aside Aristotle. Make way for Barack Obama. In announcing his nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, he borrowed from Oliver Wendell Holmes, to many the supreme Supreme Court Justice....

Consider one of the Franken Rules of Life: "There is nothing good that someone won't corrupt."

Today we talk about secrecy. Obviously there are many worthwhile reasons to keep things confidential. There is sensitive personal information that is no one's business except those who require that you reveal it to...

"Breaking News!!!" "Today's economic indicators have improved from 'Disastrous' to 'Dismal'!!!"

That's the gist of the breathless cable news we're hearing in the last couple of weeks...followed, of course, by a request for viewers to send in their Twitter Tweets.

It's exciting stuff to a world so paralyzed with economic...

As all powerful as the US Supreme Court has been in shaping our society, it is usually ignored by we the people whose actions are controlled by its interpretations of the rules. In large part, that's due to media indifference to any story that can't be told in news snippets.

Pity the poor news media. Their hysteria over the Swine Flu disrupted all their elaborate plans for overcovering Barack Obama's first hundred days.

Not that it put a stop to them but things can get confusing when a contrivance is interrupted, particularly when it doesn't mean a whole hell of...

I can see why our intelligence officials were so opposed to the release of those memos. Without a doubt, they were embarrassed.

Not by the admissions that U.S interrogators tortured the prisoners, we knew that. If I were them, I'd be mortified that the public knew how pathetic the torture...

It pains me to admit this, but I am among the Twits who Twitter. There are millions of us and millions more Twitterheads who pay attention-deficit to these self-absorbed mind squirts.

To the few who complain that nothing intelligent can possibly be discussed in such tiny fragments, get over...

It won't happen but it should. Democratic Senator Mark Begich of Alaska won't step aside, but he should. Chances are, former Senator Ted Stevens would clean his clock in a new special election, so don't look for Begich to do the right thing.

Stevens has become the latest symbol of...

Permit me to be the gazllionth person to ask what you would call the ouster at the top of General Motors, and answer, "It's a start."

It's a tired but true line to describe what is desperately needed in the failed oligarchial world of finance.

Let's face it:...

While it may be true that some clouds have silver linings, they're still clouds. These days the storm clouds of desperation are darkening the lives of most of us, because a corrupt few have pockets that are lined all right with our money.

For the hopeless cockeyed optimist who insists...

There's something pathetically remarkable about the political competition these days. What we have is a tug of war between two opposing forces both pulling us in the wrong direction.

On one side are the anti-intellectuals...those who raise the clarion call of simple-mindedness. They make their appeal to the average Joes,...

As you fans of edgy thinking well know, this column has been your "edge"-fund of ideas...one whose time has yet to come...brilliant ones, revolutionary, to be sure, but based on precepts like value, honesty, common sense... concepts far too radical for the mainstream..

True to that mission,...

There's a word we used to use to describe children born out of wedlock. Since this is a G rated column I won't use the term. Let's substitute "Illegitimate" of course, with changing mores, we no longer use either of those beastly pejoratives, to describe a circumstance that...

ONE CITY TWO RAGS

I do not normally advocate layoffs, and I'm not about to start, since all too often that's the way the corporate fats cats keep their own jobs and bloated salaries.

No, I will not be advocating layoffs here. But I am demanding that certain...