Donald Trump has taken Mitt Romney into his oily embrace, and let’s hope it makes Romney’s skin crawl because, if it turns out he actually does like hanging out with The Donald, we should fear for our country. Can you say “Vice President Donald J. Trump?” Kind of burns in the throat, doesn’t it?

To Trump’s list of identities -- real estate shark, casino owner, reality TV star, serial monogamist and grandly self-impressed comb-over king – we can add his stint as the weirdly entertaining clown who refuses to quit the 2012 election circus. After pumping up speculation that he might, himself, become a candidate for president, he now is styling himself as Romney’s chief surrogate while, at the same time, being the loudest voice among the kooks questioning the president’s eligibility to be president.

Earlier this year, Trump hosted Romney and his wife, Ann, at his hotel on the Las Vegas Strip so he could publicly bestow his endorsement in a...

“What’s black and white and read all over?” That is the setup for what used to be the first joke learned by most every American kid. These days, delivering the punch line would leave the kids bewildered. They might just say, “What’s a newspaper?”

In our new media age, that is not a question with an obvious answer. Ask the people in New Orleans who just found out their venerable Times-Picayune will no longer be available in print every day. Based in a city and state with a perennially high level of corruption and dysfunction, the Times-Picayune has been a powerful and admired community watchdog. The question is, will it be as effective with a smaller staff and just three days of print publication a week? And there is a bigger question, one that applies to the newspaper industry as a whole: Can printless watchdogs still have teeth? 

Newspapers are different from most other businesses because one of their paramount functions is to provide a public service...

While a horde of lobbyists representing big banks and financiers fights every modest effort of the Obama administration to set limits on their clients’ buccaneering ways, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley have shown, once again, how these pirates of finance cannot be trusted with the power they have over the economic security of the American middle class.

A couple of weeks ago, JPMorgan Chase & Co. revealed losses on risky investments that, thus far, total more than $2 billion. It seems that, even after the near-death experience of the 2008 global financial meltdown, hotshot investment bankers at JPMorgan were rolling the dice and betting enormous amounts of other people’s money on high-risk ventures.

Then, after Facebook’s first public stock offering fell far short of expectations, it was revealed that Morgan Stanley, the bank that managed the IPO, had quietly warned big investors that buying into Facebook might not be such a great idea. More modest investors, as...

There’s a reason George W. Bush called Karl Rove “Boy Genius.” When it comes to attack ads, no one is smarter. 

Bush also had another nickname for his chief political guru, “Turd Blossom.” Given the high level of B.S. in Rove’s ads, that moniker is well earned. Then again, truth is never the point in any political ad; effectiveness is everything.

There has probably never been a completely honest advertisement done for any candidate. Way back in the presidential campaign of 1840, William Henry Harrison was sold to the public as a humble frontiersman. The log cabin and hard cider were his campaign symbols. In reality, he was born into a wealthy, slave-owning, plantation family in Virginia.

If creating positive spin about a candidate has been around for a long time, negative campaigning has been part of the political process for just as long. The presidential election of 1800 between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson remains one of the nastiest on record....

America’s conservative Catholic bishops are so worried that some woman in their employ will get access to birth control that they have filed 12 lawsuits against the federal government. What they are failing to see is a much bigger challenge that should have them truly worried: the independence of Catholic women.

At issue in the lawsuits is the Obama administration’s pending regulation that would require church-run institutions, like universities and hospitals, to provide coverage for contraceptives as part of any employee healthcare package. The Roman Catholic Church, of course, condemns birth control and equates some contraceptive methods with abortion. This dispute erupted in February and spilled over into the Republican presidential primaries, onto the floor of Congress and, notoriously, into a three day Rush Limbaugh rant in which he labeled a pro-contraceptive woman a slut.

When Republicans saw that siding with the bishops was causing them to rapidly lose ground with...

Congratulations to Mark Zuckerberg on his surprise wedding last Saturday. I certainly hope his marriage gets off to a better start than Friday’s initial public offering of shares in his social networking colossus, Facebook. 

Wall Street analysts are now saying the opening share price of $38 was too high for investors wary of buying into a business that delivers millions of messages and photos from college drinking parties but produces a comparatively modest revenue stream. As a result, at the close of trading on Tuesday, Facebook's estimated market value had dropped to $85 billion from the $104-billion value set by the IPO.

Still, Zuckerberg can lose a billion bucks on a stock deal and keep that boyish smile on his face. If I lose a few thousand from my pitiful portfolio because Greece is going rogue, I feel as if civilization is teetering near collapse.

The machinations of Wall Street always remind me of my grandfather, Andrew Herman Horsey, a working man who made a living...

The small gangs of destructive knuckleheads who style themselves as anarchists have been the bane of Occupy Wall Street protests this spring. On May Day, the brats in black smashed store windows, bashed cars and fought with police on the streets of Seattle, Oakland, Montreal and other cities. Their antics stole attention from the thousands of peaceful protesters who may have had serious things to say about the expanding divide between rich and poor. 

The same thing happened in Chicago over the last few days as a somewhat disjointed but largely peaceful protest outside the NATO summit meeting was upstaged by the arrests of five would-be anarchists on charges of domestic terrorism. Allegedly, the five planned to toss Molotov cocktails at Mayor Rahm Emanuel's house, President Obama's campaign offices and police and corporate targets. 

In the traditional parlance of anarchists, destroying property or attacking the homes and headquarters of authority figures is "propaganda of the deed,"...

Pudgy, pink Gerber babies are no longer the typical child being born in the United States. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, moms who are Latino, Asian, African American or mixed race are now giving birth to just over 50% of American babies.

Though the median age of Americans of European heritage is 42, the median age of Latinos is 28. The median for Asians and blacks falls somewhere around 33. You do not need a biologist or sociologist to tell you younger people make more babies, so this historic trend toward a more multiracial nation will continue.

When they grow up, all these little brown babies will be working hard to pay for the Medicare and Social Security benefits of a whole lot of old white people like me. It might be a good idea, then, for us all to pay more attention to the quality of K-12 education these youngsters will be getting and make sure they are ready and able to access higher education. We are not going to have a strong economy or a healthy society if we...

Americans like to believe they are masters of their own destiny. The ancient Greeks had a different understanding. They thought the fate of humanity was in the hands of temperamental gods. Modern Greeks are demonstrating how their ancestors, not Americans, were closer to the truth.

After years of profligate government spending that has brought the country to the edge of bankruptcy, Greece has had a strict austerity regime imposed on it by Germany and the European Central Bank. Sky-high unemployment, curtailed social benefits and a moribund economy have been the result. Not surprisingly, Greek citizens have rebelled. They blame politicians and bankers for getting them into this mess and resent outsiders telling them to feel guilty and suffer quietly.

Trying to take their fate into their own hands, the Greeks held an election a few days ago in which a wide spectrum of political parties -- from neo-Nazis to neo-Marxists -- got shares of the vote. But no one got enough seats in parliament to...

If it has accomplished nothing else, the tea party insurgency has made Republicans vastly more newsworthy than Democrats. While the party of the left plods along performing the boring old tasks of governing, the party of the right is engaged in high drama worthy of Shakespeare.

The latest plot twist comes from Nebraska, where three conservatives have been vying to be the GOP's nominee for the U.S. Senate. The "establishment" candidate, state Atty. Gen. Jon Bruning is, by traditional measures, a conservative. But apparently back in college he was a bit of a liberal and that youthful apostasy made him unacceptable to the hyper-conservative Club for Growth and the tea party. 

The official tea party favorite, state Treasurer Don Stenberg, was backed by a combined $2 million from the Club for Growth and from South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint's Senate Conservatives Fund. Stenberg is just the kind of uncompromising conservative DeMint is trying to pack into the Senate Republican caucus.

But when...

If money is the mother’s milk of politics, then America’s big corporations are Big Mama and Big Baby is the Republican Party suckling at the enormous bosom of business. Democrats, meanwhile, are abandoned brats scrounging for nourishment wherever they can find it.

During the long decades the Democrats held a solid majority in Congress, campaign donations from the corporate world were spread around among incumbents in both parties – not evenly, but at least the D's got their share. Since the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 1994, however, corporate dollars have increasingly flowed in one direction.

This happened, in part, because Republican leaders like Tom “The Hammer” DeLay instituted a program to punish corporate lobbyists who were too bipartisan with their donations. Even more significantly, the evolution of the GOP into a militantly anti-tax and anti-regulation party has made Republican policy goals and the political aims of big...