Entries for December 2007

Even bloggers should make New Year's resolutions. Here are mine for 2008:

1. I resolve to hammer President Bush a little less because he has already secured his place alongside Warren G. Harding.


2. I resolve to stay after Vice President Cheney and his neocon friends if he continues his bellicose views about regime change.


3. I resolve to continue to jump all over the National Rifle Association and its unwillingness to compromise on anything.


4. I resolve to mention political polls only if they are based on the issues and not on the horse race.


5. I resolve to follow action or inaction in Congress and be as tough on Democrats as on Republicans. It will be difficult.


6. I resolve to worry more about the state of newspapers in the country without getting maudlin about it.


7. I resolve to follow more closely innovations in the 50 states as Congress dawdles in partisan deadlock.


8. I resolve to blast Republicans who insist on more tax cuts without paying for the billions spent in Iraq and Afghanistan.


9. I resolve to mention a certain CNN commentator only by his initials—L.D.—if he continues with his so-called newscasts on immigration.


10. Finally, I wish all readers a happy and healthy New Year. For as my best pal, Chairman Bill Giles of the Philadelphia Phillies, often says: "Life is all about family and friends." He's right.

Every sincere and open-minded contributor to the National Rifle Association should read the op-ed piece in the December 16 edition of the Washington Post. The writer, Richard Feldman, who once worked for the NRA, explains how the organization is now more about money than hollering about Second Amendment rights.

Feldman accuses the NRA today of morphing from a reasonable lobby group to a money-making machine for its executives and well-placed friends.

There could have been a collective sigh of relief that the early presidential debates are over for the holidays. The voters in Iowa as well as the rest of us need a breather from these contests.

The final debates in Des Moines this week were noteworthy because the quarreling and sniping of earlier debates were absent.

Three weeks before voters in Iowa attend the caucuses, sewer politics is surfacing again. It will only get worse.

For example, Sen. Barack Obama is accused of being a closet Muslim perhaps intent on turning the nation into an Islamic state. Of course, he is a member of the United Church of Christ in Chicago.

Listening recently to former Presidents Bush and Clinton leads me to this conclusion: The nation needs a respite from the Bush-Clinton presidencies.

In Clinton's case, the former president is logically out stumping earnestly for his wife in the early caucus and primary states. However, he has already stumbled badly in an appearance in Iowa.

The former president talked about himself far more than his candidate and claimed he had opposed from the start the war in Iraq. Of course, he hadn't. There were TV clips to prove it.

Once again the Bush administration and the president himself have been trapped in an intelligence snafu of major proportions. And they are in total denial.

Bush must have taken a course—"Turning Defeat Into Victory"—at Yale or the Harvard Business School. Rather than admit that the Bush inner circle had erroneously tried to frighten citizens over Iran's nuclear program, the president said nothing had really changed.

Just when you thought Karl Rove would take a little vacation from his political outrages, he's at it again. Rove has no shame when it comes to smearing opponents or plain lying.

His latest public stunt was to tell a TV interviewer that it was Congress, not the Bush administration, that wanted to rush ahead with a war resolution on Iraq before the 2002 congressional election.

Talk about revising history.