Swopa

How must it feel to be Mitt Romney right now, seeing Rick Santorum bubbling up to the top in the latest national polls? Is he starting to get the hint yet that — presumptive front-runner or not — the Republican base just doesn’t want him to be their nominee for the White House?

You really have to give some credit to Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. From a distance, you might expect him to be feeling a bit stressed out and sorry for himself. Not only did citizens gather 1 million signatures on petitions to force a recall election this summer, but a legal investigation into political corruption at his pre-gubernatorial stint in Milwaukee County keeps broadening, having already ensnared several former Walker aides.

When you have the kind of power Grover Norquist has held — namely, decades of unquestioned dictatorial control over the Republican Party as its grand ayatollah of anti-tax orthodoxy — it’s easy for a wee bit of hubris to creep into your thinking. The result is the occasional burst of excessive honesty, as exemplified by [...]

Like a lot of folks, I’ve been having a grand time poking fun at the Republican 2012 presidential nomination contest for several months now.  But at this point, it’s almost gotten too surreal for even a cynic like me. As of a week ago, most of the drama (or comedy) seemed to be over, as [...]

Recognizing that the general election campaign was indeed about to begin, however mind-numbingly early, both sides spent a good chunk of last week test-driving their respective spins–specifically, with regard to Romney’s corporate-vampire past.

If you begin to feel like your sense of the seasons is out of whack, it’s not just the mild winter weather across the country right now.  The frightening upshot of Mitt Romney’s clear path to the Republican nomination for the White House is that it might as well be the fall of 2012 right [...]

Today is the 83rd anniversary of the birth of blues/rock music legend Bo Diddley, who died in 2008. (He shares this birthday with LeBron James, Tiger Woods, Patti Smith, Rudyard Kipling… and Sean Hannity, which makes sense when you realize that after you account for the others, there wasn’t much talent left over to hand out.)

Seeing live music has been a longstanding passion of mine, and based on the good fortune of seeing Bo Diddley play perhaps 20 or more times in the last quarter-century of his life, I would call him probably the best live entertainer I ever saw.

Now, seven years later, with the American military finally gone, the same ruling alliance (which is still in power, despite some internal shifts) is clamping down to cement its rule? You don’t say. But please don’t try to tell me it’s any kind of sudden development.

For most of this year, Mitt Romney’s strategy seemed to be working beautifully.

With the Iowa caucuses only a few weeks away, though, there’s not much time left for Newt Gingrich — the latest standard-bearer for tea-party Republicans’ tangled fantasies and resentments — to self-destruct.

With 2012 just a month away, the president is clearly feeling the pressure from his Republican challengers… no, no, not to develop a more compelling policy agenda to win the American people’s support; don’t be ridiculous.

What I mean is that with all the media attention on the mind-boggling farce known as the GOP nomination contest, President Obama must want equal time in terms of folks making fun of him, too.