We've got quite a few awards to hand out this week, so we're going to just quickly note two events from the past week, and move right along. Oh, and as for this week's article title, well, it just felt appropriate, somehow. I promise, by the end, we'll have at least one blatant Alice In Wonderland reference to justify it, OK? The week dawned with the exit of Herman Cain from the Republican nomination battle. Cain, love him or hate him, will be missed on the campaign trail because he had two ...

Governments -- state and federal -- have three big ways of raising money. The first, of course, is taxes, which are endlessly fought over and usually get most of politicians' attention. The second is fees -- on a state level, registering a car or getting a driver's license; on a federal level getting a passport or becoming naturalized, for instance. But the third one hasn't gotten a whole lot of attention at the federal level: fines. Because the states are strapped for cash, they've taken se...

We're going to try something new here today. Well, before we get to that, we have to apologize for not warning readers last week that we were taking a break for Veterans' Day. Which brings up a related subject: there will be no Friday Talking Points next week, either (the day after Thanksgiving), as we plan to be lounging on the couch in a tryptophan haze. Consider yourselves warned, this time. Back to today's column, though. We're going to try an experiment today, and try to tighten these ...

Like many Americans, I watched the events unfold in Oakland this week with some trepidation. Occupy Oakland tried two new tactics in protesting, and both were very successful at achieving a key goal -- that of getting your message across. Both the general strike and the temporary port shutdown were successful, in this regard. Later in the night, however, a group of jerks came close to ruining all this, by their criminal behavior. I was not present -- I live too far away from Oakland to have ...

We'd like to begin today with an issue that we regularly get incensed about here, mostly because it flies under the radar of just about everyone -- including the entire media universe. Because for once, Democrats are making the attempt to use the issue to make some political hay (even though, in this regard, they're admittedly almost as bad as the Republicans). The Republican House leadership just released the tentative work schedule for the House of Representatives for the next calendar year....

It has been a big week on the foreign policy front, with the death of Libya's dictator and President Obama's announcement today that all U.S. troops would be out of Iraq by the end of this year (leaving roughly 150 to guard the embassy). But before we get to all of that, I've got some domestic advice for the president's re-election team. So, to the folks planning the "Obama 2012" effort: Spend some money. Please, please, spend some money right now. Buy an ad or three. By doing so, you can c...

The Occupy Wall Street protest continues. So far, its staying power has surprised and enthused a large swath of America, and surprised and bemused much of the media. Solidarity "Occupy" protests have sprung up all across the land, for those without the means to travel to the main one in New York. This is all very encouraging, to say the least. Lest I be misinterpreted, allow me to state up front that I have not participated in Occupy Wall Street, and therefore have no real right to make any ...

{Note: Today's column is seriously disjointed. If you're already sick of hearing what a wonderful guy Steve Jobs was, then I strongly advise you to just skip the first section and move right along to the awards, instead. At the end, our talking points are all straight from President Obama this week, from his press conference. Like I said, a disjointed column. Don't say you weren't warned.} A corporate leader passed away this week, and millions mourned his passing and celebrated his life. I...

...{T}here's a lot of competition in the media world in this quasi-reality show, it seems, that's being created in the GOP primary. It's just the nature of the beast right now..." --Sarah Palin ( on the subject of the media hype about the Republican primary contenders, and the mini-uproar over her calling "Herb" {sic} Cain the "flavor of the week.") :sp: So You Think You Can President?!? Welcome back, everyone, to this week's edition of So You Think You Can President?!? Just to remind ever...

Well, let's see what this week brought us all, shall we? A satellite is falling out of the sky, but it probably won't hit anybody. Probably. I personally got over this fear by listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival's "It Came Out Of The Sky" (which I heartily recommend, just on general principles). A Republican audience actively serving his country in an overseas war. Well, to be fair to the audience, I'm sure if you asked the ones who booed that they'd respond they were merely booing t...

"Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's (insert your own "supercommittee" joke here)!" Sigh. The collusion between Washington types and media types to provide cutesy labels for just about everything has entered a new phase, it seems. The joint committee on reducing the deficit (I refuse to call it "super" because, well, it's just not) met this week, and immediately proved to just about everyone that the entire exercise is quite likely to produce nothing more than an increase ...

President Barack Obama opened his re-election campaign last night with a wowzer of a speech to a joint session of Congress. But we'll get to that in detail in a minute. First, we must mark an important anniversary this week. I am speaking, of course, of the fact that 45 years ago last night, the first Star Trek episode aired. Titled "The Man Trap," it introduced America to the Enterprise, to Captain Kirk, and to all the other loveable characters and storylines which have now become part of o...

It surpasses all irony and actually enters into the realm of bitter humor that we're about to celebrate Labor Day when the unemployment rate remains at the sky-high level of 9.1 percent. There are millions of Americans who are not laboring for a paycheck this year, and they have nothing at all to celebrate. Many of them will, no doubt, still attend a barbeque or picnic or parade, or perhaps go to a local beach. But it's a pretty safe bet that few of them (at least the ones not attending the p...

{For those of you expecting your weekly dose of "Friday Talking Points" here, we apologize because this week's column has been pre-empted to bring you a very special message today, instead.} A new statue of Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior is about to be dedicated in Washington; as a memorial to the man, his life's work, his commitment to non-violence, and the words he used to so eloquently define the struggle against injustice millions of Americans used to face every single day. The ...

It's silly season in the political world, once again. And this year -- just like every year a Democrat occupies the White House -- an old favorite of a story is making the rounds. It involves some very thinly-veneered outrage, which is completely fabricated and hypocritical in the extreme. President Obama is on vacation. This fact is being subject to ridicule from Republicans, and their enablers in the media. Which has prompted me to -- in the fashion of Bill Maher -- come up with a New Rul...

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the Iowa straw poll is meaningless. Unless you attach "meaning" to a process which seems designed to show the world the power of candidates to outright purchase votes, which I have to say, I do not. The Republican debate last night in Iowa wasn't as meaningless, but will also soon be forgotten as Republican presidential candidate debate season really gets into full swing. Having thus sneered at the two events in the political world which got the mos...

With the conclusion of the debt ceiling "crisis," the media pivoted swiftly to their standard larger questions (to them, at any rate) about any political event these days: "Who won? Who lost?" Sigh. Well, in this one, we all lost. America lost. As the public got a close look at the innards of the political gastro-legislative tract, mostly they recoiled in horror. It's been said of Republicans that they get elected to Washington with the slogan "government doesn't work," and then they go ab...

If I were a Hobbit, right about now I would be wondering just how the heck I wound up at the center of this Washington intraparty political fight, personally. What (I would ponder in my metaphorical Hobbit hole) had I done to any of these folks to deserve being dragged into this fracas? It all started with a Wall Street Journal , believe it or not. That's how far into Fantasyland we've traveled -- the most eminent conservative newspaper in the country had to reach back to J.R.R. Tolkien to ex...

We'll get to that "WWRRD?" question at the end, I promise. But instead, I'd like to start off way out in space, if you don't mind. Just a little personal rant, to open with today. I invite you all to join me as I "space out" (so to speak). To begin with, in space news, the fourth moon of Pluto this week. That's pretty exciting, right? The bigger space news this week, sadly, was not that exciting. The final space shuttle mission just ended. Although I didn't see it specifically, a newspa...

Are we seeing the new model of Barack Obama's presidency? Is this (in the parlance of Silicon Valley) "Obama 2.0"? This seems to be a large point that all the overanalysis of rumors in the past few weeks has largely missed. Partisans on both sides have been kept busy having fits of the vapors over unconfirmed (and, for the most part, unsourced or anonymous) rumor leaks about what is "on the table" in the debt ceiling negotiations, while the media is content to sit back and fan the flames. In...

The silly season has come early to Washington, it seems. The root cause is a simple fact of American politics these days -- sometimes, there just can't be transparency. That's a fairly provocative statement, so allow me to explain my reasoning in detail. Then, later on (in the talking points section of our program), we'll get into the option of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and how Obama should be using it right about now. But for now, it's time for a sober assessment of wher...

An important debate flared this week -- one in which sides were chosen, positions staked out, and invective hurled. I will let that sentence stand in order to illustrate my position on this important issue of the day: Ahem. So there. What else has been going on this week? Well, two faces disappeared from the nation's television screens this week -- Glenn Beck and Mark Halperin. Can't say that I'll miss either one of them, personally. I'm not sure why the world of political commentary ric...

Well, it's certainly been an eventful couple of weeks, hasn't it? We're back on our regular weekly schedule here after returning home from our second trip this month (this one to Netroots Nation), after which I can firmly conclude that flying, these days, sucks. Big time. Sigh. Personal travel observations aside, though, plenty has been happening elsewhere in the political world while all the Lefties where having fun in Minneapolis. So much has been happening that I'm bound to miss at least...

Having just gotten back from a trip abroad where the news was dominated by the story of a politician facing severe consequences (and the end of his political career) for his sexual misconduct, I opened up the pages of the American news to find... well, pretty much the same thing. While France digests the criminal trial of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, back home in America John Edwards is also slouching towards a courtroom, in a desperate bid to retain his legal license by beating the rap on campaign ...

{Program Note: Regular readers may be scratching their heads over one of two things when they see this article today: "Where's the Friday Talking Points column, Chris?" and/or "Why are you running the Obama Poll Watch column for May when there are still four days left in the month?" The answer to both of these questions is the same: because I'm about to go on vacation. See I've posted on my site for full details. In a nutshell, Friday Talking Points will be on hiatus until 6/10/11, and then ...

Americans turn to their government for all sorts of advice, at times. Most especially during a crisis or natural disaster of epic proportions, citizens want solid information from experts in the government as to what they should and shouldn't do to keep their families safe. Forward-looking folks will even check out disaster-preparedness information before disaster actually strikes, in order to get their families through such an event, should worse come to worst. And now all Americans can brea...

Ron Paul, apparently, is not a superstitious kind of guy. Tempting fate, as it were, he announced today that he's running for president once again -- on Friday the thirteenth. Ron's not the only one making news on this front this particular week, though. I wrote on Wednesday looking over the entire Republican field (which is bigger than you might think), and already it's out of date. Newt Gingrich announced his run two days ago, Ron Paul's now officially in, and Mike Huckabee is set to anno...

Mission freakin' accomplished. I don't care how ironic that sounds to some, it's true. Osama Bin Laden declared war on America, waged that war for years (and killed Americans in doing so), then hid for many more years, and was finally hunted down and killed like an animal. Mission accomplished. I wouldn't care, at this point, if the White House dusted off the old Bush banner and hung it out on the front of the building. Because the mission of killing our number one enemy was successfully ac...

This is going to be a somewhat surprising column introduction, for our regular readers. For new or occasional readers, I'd have to recommend just skipping this whole introduction entirely, and scrolling down to the awards section and the talking points for the semi-serious commentary. Because I'm about to talk about something I've been absolutely ridiculing all week long -- the royal wedding. And how the American media missed a joke (not to mention a kiss), despite spending millions of dollar...

Yesterday -- April 21, 2011 -- is a day which will live in infamy. Two days after being activated, Skynet (the new military "defense" computer network) became self-aware and immediately began its worldwide attack on humanity. Yes, the robots have now taken over, and newer and more advanced models (ones which, coincidentally, look and speak like Arnold Schwarzenegger) will soon be terrorizing us all. At least until we can send people back in time, to prevent this tragic end to our modern socie...