The trick’s as old as the five-day workweek. Dump your worst news on Friday afternoon after 5. It’ll end up in Saturday’s papers (the lowest readership of the week) and will get brief mention on the network newscasts (which have few viewers on Fridays — especially in the summer). Sadly the “we’re gonna change the way Washington works” Obama Administration knows the game too well.
And so at 5:18 Friday afternoon the Washington Post broke the story: The White House will decree by executive fiat that the President may hold terrorism suspects. …

There are two somewhat competing storylines that have been floating around the edges of the news coming out of Iran and both demonstrate how little we learn from history — and how little we know about Iran.
Several prominent analysts have argued that the vote in Iran was NOT substantially rigged and that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the choice of the majority of Iranians voting last weekend. Their arguments come down to this: Westerners viewed this election through a narrow lens that fails to capture the ethnic and cultural dynamics of …

There’s big news about Tom Golisano.
The formerly upstate billionaire (he’s still got the money but he moved to Florida) is dating former tennis star Monica Seles. So reports Page Six. Oh, and the three-time candidate for New York Governor  just loves the circus. How else to explain his recent quarterbacking of the quasi-Republican coup in Albany?
Golisano has always been an odd bird in New York politics. In his three runs for Governor as an independent (94, 98, 02) he always seemed to have it out for Republican George Pataki (who …

 
It’s damn tough to be a Republican in New York these days. 
First the party lost a slew of Congressional seats in 2006. Then they surrendered control of the State Senate for the first time in two generations. This past winter they failed to regain the “most Republican” House seat in the state. And now this: President Obama has picked one of New York’s last three Republican Congressmen to be Secretary of the Army.
John McHugh has represented much of the northern third of the state since 1992 but has accepted Obama’s …

 
The king has been brought to his knees. General Motors is officially bankrupt. Hindsight is 20/20.
 
So far this has been a year of hand-wringing among economic pontificators who have variously proclaimed that the wreckage around us proves capitalism’s fatal flaws or it’s remarkable resilience. What is not often discussed is the way capitalism — true, pure capitalism — is colored by conservative ideology. GM is a case in point.
When General Motors and the United Auto Workers (as well as the rest of the auto industry at the time) entered into a …

Barack Obama may be, above all else, a savvier politician than even Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton. Why? With his nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court Obama has set a defining trap for Republicans: If they take the bait they will dig themselves deeper into the pit of electoral despair that will take a generation to climb out of.
There are two fundamental things to remember about America and voting: Women vote in bigger percentages than men (plus there are more of them to begin with) and Hispanics are …

 
So Florida Governor Charlie Crist is going to run for Senate. That should be good news for the GOP since the seat he’s running for is being vacated by another Republican (the hapless Mel Martinez) and Crist is very popular in the Sunshine State. The announcement, expected Tuesday, has gotten plenty of coverage but almost all of it avoided the (pink) elephant in the room: Crist is gay gay gay.
The rumors and reports have been well documented for years but a new documentary out this month called “Outrage” outs closeted public …

 
I love reports. Especially reports with neat charts and cool maps. I’m a report geek. So imagine my glee when I came across a new report by two “scholars” who claim to have rigorously measured the level of freedom in each and every state. Whee!
The report, entitled Freedom in the 50 States, concludes that residents of New Hampshire, Colorado, and South Dakota are the freest (doesn’t that word look cool?) while the poor indentured servants of New York and New Jersey are the least free. Now before we go any …

 
Is there an echo in Pennsylvania? You better you bet.
Republicans and especially hard-core conservatives are foaming at the mouth over the defection of Pennsylvania Republican Senator Arlen Specter, decrying him as another Benedict Arnold. One of the most fevered cries is that Specter put politics ahead of principle. Whether you believe that or not (if the principle Specter is upholding is to win then I guess he’s being principled…) it has brought the battle for the soul of the GOP to the forefront. And the front page of the New …

It’s really hard to see the political logic in Governor David Paterson’s unveiling of a same-sex marriage bill for New York on Thursday. But maybe that’s the beauty of it. Honestly, Paterson has no where to go but up.
Paterson’s poll numbers are in the toilet. His handling of the Kennedy-Gillibrand-Clinton thing was a fiasco. He had his lunch handed to him on the budget. He can’t get a handful of gangster Senators from his own party to grow up and back a plan to rescue the MTA (and their own …