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It’s been a year-long slog on the campaign trail for the nine presidential aspirants seeking the Republican nomination. It seems even longer for those who are not addicted to the insipid and the preening, yet could not avoid taking an occasional peek at what is in store for America in the event of a regime change.
The time, the money and the distraction seem hardly worth the paltry handful of convention votes that Iowa offers. Anything but representative of the country at large, the Hawkeye state should have only a marginal role in determining who the GOP standard bearer and possible winner in November will be. True — if we were a mature polity with a sober sense of responsibility for managing the country’s governmental affairs.
But we are

A senior White House official has confirmed that Vice President Joe Biden will take the lead on the administration’s next phase China policy.While the Departments of State and Treasury have held important functional roles in conducting the China-US Strategic and Economic Dialogue meetings, raising the bilateral status of US-China relations with ongoing meetings between two senior US Executive Branch officials with two of China’s most senior leaders, Vice Premier Li Keqiang and State Councillor Dai Bingguo, there has been a general sense that neither Timothy Geithner nor Hillary Clinton and her team were comprehensively driving US-China policy. The White House official made clear that the coming shift in the locus of US-China policy management was not a critique of either Clinton or Geithner’s management of the China portfolio — but rather, the rise of Hu Jintao heir apparent and current Vice Premier Xi Jinping as the likely next President of China created certain practical challenges in dealing with him on a same-status level throughout much of 2012 until Xi’s accession to the presidency is formalized.The view of some of the administration’s China-handlers is that management of US-China policy has become so central to a vast array of other policy challenges that the administration’s approach needs to be both broad and managed with “a deep and senior bench.” The evolution of many functional offices at the Department of State and Treasury tasked with various line items in the China-US Strategic and Economic Dialogue has helped stabilize many aspects of the relationship and has helped to benchmark meeting to meeting progress on core concerns. National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon has essentially been holding the China policy portfolio himself since September 2010 when in the early part of that month he and then Obama national economic advisor Lawrence Summers went to Beijing to attempt a reset in a quickly deteriorating US-China economic and military relationship. For the most part, currency politics aside, Donilon’s mission has succeeded — and he has since preempted either Clinton’s China hands, particularly Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, or Geithner’s team from taking primacy over US-China

Dieting and weight control are really pretty simple. We gain weight and have trouble losing it because we eat too much and move too little. If we can switch that around, most of us should be able to maintain a sensible weight without resorting to unhealthy gimmicks.
But that’s just the biology of weight control. What about the psychology? Why do we habitually take in too many calories, even when we know those calories are a ticket to obesity and all sorts of chronic diseases?
There are two major reasons for unhealthy weight, according to

Casey Luskin recently published a post titled “It’s Time for Some Folks to Get Over Dover” at Evolution News and Views. It is a rehashing of some perceived problems with Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, the 2005 case in which Intelligent Design (ID) was declared a form of creationism and therefore unsuitable for the science classroom. In his post Luskin declared, “Rumors of ID’s death are greatly exaggerated.”
This remark seems to be aimed at bloggers like Jason Rosenhouse, who, in a Science Blogs post in November, declared ID dead:
Rosenhouse is

By Kamren Curiel
I don’t know how she does it. For real, Favianna Rodriguez does it all.The self-described nomadic artist and organizer is a printmaker, digital artist, activist, speaker and writer.Peep her blog, it’s dope.
She co-founded Tumi’s Design, Oakland’s only bilingual design studio dedicated to human rights projects, the Eastside Arts Alliance and a political screen-printing collective called Taller Tupac Amaru. She weaves the world’s grassroots struggles together using a color palette you want to wear; her portfolio reading like a pictorial history book on social justice.
Raised by strict parents who immigrated to the U.S. from Lima, Peru, Favianna, 33, graduated from high school with honors and went on to

Having been seen to twitch – ever so slightly – in the 2011 tidal wave of global protests, the vampire squid is stirring in its evil lair. Reports of sucking noises and new tentacles sprouting in every direction tell us that the global financial monster is poised to steal yet more wealth and resources from the public in the coming year. Top economic thinkers have shared their forecasts, and the focus is clear: 2012 will be a year of continued – and escalating – predation by financiers. Their influence over political, financial, and economic activity is likely to grow – along with potential for harm.

It is likely that 2012 will be long remembered as a watershed year in America politics. It certainly needs to be. Neither the country nor the world can afford much longer the gridlock that is presently immobilizing Washington. We all know

Many of your comments to the first edition of “The Lost Audience” had to do with the pros and cons of musical nostalgia. While I’m not one to confuse nostalgia with neuralgia, musical growth is important to me – I want to hear new stuff that challenges and delights. So, that brings up a question: If you missed it the first time around, is it nostalgic?
One of my Saturday favorites is a shot of nostalgia for music I often didn’t catch the first time around. On the Rhythm Revue, Felix Hernandez plays old Parliaments b-sides and songs that reached the high numbers of the R&B/Soul charts, obscurities and rarities, funky hits and even funkier ought-to-have-been

No critical commodity moves as much on rhetoric, as on supply and demand fundamentals, as does crude oil. Over the years few news services, perceived as being disinterested purveyors of news and information has lent its imprimatur more to the upward distortion of oil prices than the New York Times.
In keeping with what now has become a sorry tradition, the New York Times on Thursday gave the oil patch and its allied interests good reason to pop champagne corks two days early, in celebration of the New Year. Assuming a mantle of authority, conveying to us as received wisdom from on high, The New York Times presented to is readership, packaged in the babble of well honed oil industry mantra, illuminations the likes of which a well oiled oil industry flack would have been embarrassed to disseminate. We were to be instructed by the good scribes of the Times, in their lead story in the Business Section, that “Oil Prices Predicted to Stay Above $100 a Barrel Through Next Year.”
The article ends “Consumers have this belief that prices will either go up or they will remain at elevated levels.” The reportage fills three quarters of a New York Times page in regaling us with reasons that at the very least “elevated levels” will remain, with the subtext that we should celebrate such an outcome, as prices might very well go

North Korea’s death extravaganza is over. “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il has been commemorated with all the official pomp and popular wailing due a monarch. His son, Kim Jong-un, has been proclaimed the new demi-god. The king is dead, long live the king.
Before Kim Jong-il’s death, the Obama administration was apparently prepared to restart food aid for the impoverished totalitarian

Source:Associated Press
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DENVER — Kobe Bryant reached another career milestone in a mostly forgettable performance by the Los Angeles Lakers star.Danilo Gallinari scored 20 points, Ty Lawson had 17 points and 10 assists and the Denver Nuggets beat the Lakers 99-90 on Sunday night.The Nuggets scored the final 11 points and avenged a three-point loss to the Lakers in Los Angeles less than 24 hours earlier.Bryant scored 16 points to become the sixth player in NBA history to score 28,000 career points. He is first among active players and is 584 points behind former teammate Shaquille O’Neal.Reaching the benchmark came on a night when Bryant was 6 of 28 from the field and 1 of 8 from 3-point range.”We were trying to be aggressive on him and trying to make him take some bad shots,” said Gallinari, who spent much of the game defending Bryant. “When you play defense against him he can make some tough shots. But we did a pretty good job.”Bryant came into Sunday needing just four points short of 28,000 but he didn’t get it until he hit a free throw with 10:43 left in the third quarter.He had a rough start to the night and it never got better. Bryant missed his first five shots and committed two offensive fouls before sitting in the final minute of the first quarter. He returned midway through the second, hit a 3-pointer but missed his next four.”We’ve got tough defenders,” Lawson said. “Kobe’s a great player, he probably had an off-night tonight, but, still, we played great defense.”"He looked tired. I’m glad we were putting pressure on him and making him take tough shots,” he said.After a seesaw battle for most of the final period, the Nuggets closed strong to win it.Gallinari had two fast-break layups to give Denver a two-point lead with 2:07 left. After Pau Gasol missed a short turnaround jumper, Lawson’s layup gave the Nuggets a 94-90 lead with 1:20 left.”It was big,” Lawson said. “Getting easy layups, making free throws and getting stops. We needed that, especially after the last game.”The Lakers could have used a strong night from Bryant to complement the play of the Lakers’ post players. Gasol had 20 points and 11 rebounds and Andrew Bynum had 18 points and 16 rebounds, but it wasn’t enough against Denver.”I think fatigue had a lot to do with this loss because we weren’t playing very smart,” Bynum said.Bryant missed a 3-pointer from the top of the circle near the end and Al Harrington hit a 12-foot jumper to make it 96-90 with 49 seconds left.The Lakers took a 90-88 lead on Bryant’s layup with 2:47 left and didn’t score again.”He’s got to continue to find his stroke,” Lakers coach Mike Brown said of Bryant. “I told the entire team that we shot too many jump shots. We’ve got to drive the ball or get the ball inside, one of the two. We didn’t do a good job with either today.”The Nuggets held a 26-5 edge in fast-break points.”I feel they have size at every position on the court and I feel we have speed at every position on the court,” Nuggets coach George Karl said. “The only way I know to incorporate it into a strategy is try to play fast and quick.”Trailing by 11 at halftime, the Lakers came out strong in the third quarter. Bynum scored seven points in the first four minutes, including a three-point play that tied it at 50.Denver didn’t hit its first field goal of the second half until Lawson’s drive gave the Nuggets the lead back with 7:03 left. Gallinari followed with Denver’s first 3-pointer of the game to make it 55-50.Game notes Denver was 2 for 18 from 3-point range. … The Lakers have played six games in the first eight days of the season, including three in three nights to open the schedule. … Lawson has scored in double figures in four of Denver’s first five games. … Denver came into Sunday second in scoring in the NBA but 24th in 3-point shooting.
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This is the first installment of a three-part series.
We’ve survived Harold Camping. We survived Y2K, albeit with less distress than our ancestors survived Y1K. The world has survived end-time predictors as diverse as Billy Graham, William Miller and Jonathan Edwards. Now we face the purported final year of the Mayan

Looks like I’m not the only one around with a Christmas gripe against someone at The New York Times. That link in the previous sentence is extraordinary. Astounding even. But I humbly suggest that it’s vital to remember a lesson I learned while writing my penultimate book Rogues’ Gallery on The Metropolitan Museum of

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The Obama White House probably watched the Republican primary season with some dismay as a series of candidates including Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul, each more bizarre and unelectable than the others, briefly donned the mantle of front-runner before giving way to Mitt Romney. Romney, the likely Republican nominee, feels like a generic representative of his party from a generation ago. He was born to privilege, made a lot of money, is committed to making his rich friends richer, uncomfortable with the more radical social conservatives who constitute the Republican Party base, awkward when confronted with ordinary working Americans, but extremely comfortable with the financial and foreign policy power elite.
With Romney as the Republican nominee, Obama will have a serious opponent. Romney, like Obama, is not a perfect candidate, but he is good enough to muster a strong

With the final withdrawal of American forces from Iraq, I feel compelled to offer my thoughts about that nine-year war, based on two reporting trips there in 2005 and 2008. But so much has been written and said that I decided I didn’t have anything worthwhile to add.
Then I remembered the four young Marines and a Navy corpsman I met in Baghdad in March 2005 at Camp Victory, the sprawling headquarters of the U.S. military command. It was the day before Easter Sunday and they were in full combat gear, standing next to a Burger King and a PX that offered a 12-place setting of Saddam Hussein’s personal silver service for $5,000.
I had spent 10 days in Iraq and asked where they were headed as I took their

2011 was a year of loss but also renewal and new discovery in painting.
It was sad to see so many great painters pass away — from under-known artists Gabriel Laderman, Pat Passlof, Hedda Sterne, George Tooker, and John Hoyland to internationally renowned painters Cy Twombly, Lucian Freud, and Helen Frankenthaler. The work of these artists demonstrated the vitality and possibility of the medium, and we celebrated and rediscovered their work as we lamented their passing.
New exhibitions introduced audiences to younger painters such as Josephine Halvorson and re-introduced masters like Willem de Kooning, whose retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art remains on view until January 9. The 2011 exhibition season also highlighted the rich history of painting including the Metropolitan Museum’s current exhibitions Wonder of the Age: Master Painters of India, 1100-1900 and The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini (on view through January 8, 2012 and March 18, 2012,

Going into the 2012 elections people on the progressive end of the political spectrum need to ask the simple question: How will the first post-Citizens United presidential election affect the outcomes for those desperately seeking social change? The most likely result, unfortunately, is that after the mountains of anonymous campaign money come crashing down in a deafening avalanche of sophisticated negative ads aimed at Democratic politicians, Republicans are probably going to come out on top. Our current collection of post-”Hope and Change,” tepid, apologetic Democrats at the national level that President Barack Obama has come to personify could get throttled just like they did in 2010.
The reality is that in 2010 the Democrats suffered what President Obama conceded was a “shellacking.” Republicans swept the table winning 63 House seats and wiping out in a single election what took the Democrats two arduous election cycles to build. Republicans also made huge gains in governorships and state legislatures, including key states (some of them “swing states”) like Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, Michigan, and

Source:Associated Press
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MINNEAPOLIS — Kevin Love had 25 points and 17 rebounds and hit two huge 3s in the fourth quarter to help the Minnesota Timberwolves beat the Dallas Mavericks 99-82 on Sunday night, ending an 18-game losing streak dating to last season.The young Wolves closed the game with a 15-0 run and this win has been a long time coming. They lost the last 15 games of last season and the first three of this year, meaning it’s been 295 days since the franchise’s last victory.Ricky Rubio added 14 points and seven assists and Luke Ridnour scored 11 for the Timberwolves (1-3), who were winners for the first time under new coach Rick Adelman.Dirk Nowitzki scored 21 points, but the defending champions have looked slow and sloppy in starting the season 1-4.
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In the new film of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, weather sets the scene and provides the underlying emotional theme for the action. It snows and rains throughout the movie, symbolically appropriate since the story deals with the Cold War and spy activities between the Soviets and the British in the early 1960′s. Relations between the two nations are frigid. The characters spy upon one another, steal each others’ secrets, murder each other and drink a great deal, most probably to alleviate the leaden emotional weight of so much ill-natured

I no longer write as a pissed off veteran of the Iraq war. Nowadays, I observe the political spectrum from a different perspective. I’m a citizen who raises a child and works for a living. However, that does not mean that I am unaware of the fact that our current political system has been on an ominous path for quite some

The Obama White House probably watched the Republican primary season with some dismay as a series of candidates including Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul, each more bizarre and unelectable than the others, briefly donned the mantle of front-runner before giving way to Mitt Romney. Romney, the likely Republican nominee, feels like a generic representative of his party from a generation ago. He was born to privilege, made a lot of money, is committed to making his rich friends richer, uncomfortable with the more radical social conservatives who constitute the Republican Party base, awkward when confronted with ordinary working Americans, but extremely comfortable with the financial and foreign policy power elite.
With Romney as the Republican nominee, Obama will have a serious opponent. Romney, like Obama, is not a perfect candidate, but he is good enough to muster a strong