Mike Spicer's Cartoon Blog...

The careful balance of institution versus institution that the founders created is under attack today. Corporate interests in conjunction with the Republican Patty are trying to destroy American unions.

That we have spent more on arming Middle Eastern nations than on helping their people learn the art of republican government may well come back to haunt us in the months ahead.

While I strongly disagree with the modern libertarian movement, I understand why my government-averse friends believe the things they believe, as opposed to, say, my friends who are Yankee fans.

Last fourth of July, while sitting in the living room of my historic farm house in Lenox, Massachusetts, which was built by Elijah Northrup in 1770 ...

We have lost our way and the Egyptian people in the streets of Cairo are shining a light for the world to see. If our President will not say it, then we must go to our proverbial rooftops and scream that freedom lives eternally.

The ingenious left ventricular assist device heart pump used by the former vice president was developed by the National Institutes of Health with taxpayer money.

We must separate our ire at the Congress of the moment from the nobility of the legislative task performed by the people we choose, and demand that congressional pay be doubled -- at least.

The present Congress, the 112th since we first met in Philadelphia 223 years ago, has had the temerity to read, and perhaps even revise, the sacred words by which we govern ourselves.

The newly-Republican House of Representatives is going to start off their tenure reading the entire Constitution on the floor of the House. There's one problem with this: Who gets to read the uncomfortable bits?

Barack Obama understands that the country wants a president who acts. And as the new, Tea Party-tainted Congress is spoiling for confrontation, now is the ideal moment for a true veto strategy.

The boast of American exceptionalism betrays ignorance of the Founding Fathers and the tarnished history of the United States. In any event, to overlook faults because other nations are more flawed is juvenile, and leads nowhere.

The state of civil liberties and national security in the United States is alarming. In the American Empire, the former are routinely crippled or lacerated in the false name of the latter.

Beware of Republicans bearing populist speeches. Republican populism is an oxymoron, a con-job, a Fox friendly flimflam for those in lemming lockstep ...

Obama may find with the 112th Congress that executive branch-only action may be the only path open to advance anything more than token parts of his agenda.

"Freedom" means maximizing freedom, the possibility of controlling our own lives, for all. This may sometimes require restricting the freedom of the powerful to control others.