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A folk opera based on a day in the life of the teenage Bill Clinton makes its debut in New York this weekend.

The opera entitled Billy Blythe is the creation of Bonnie Montgomery, who worked on the show with her friend Britt Barber.

It is being performed by the Metropolis Opera Project at the Medicine Show Theatre on Sunday and Monday.

"It was very clear that it was an astonishingly beautiful piece," said Zach James, director of Metropolis.

The name of the show comes from the name of Mr Clinton's father, Bill Blythe, who died three months before the future US president was

For a second year, Tina Brown, Editor in Chief of Newsweek and The Daily Beast, presented the Women in the World: Stories and Solutions Summit. Many of those who where at the Hudson Theatre in New York City in 2010 — such as Christiane Amanpour and Barbara Walters — were back in the interviewer’s chair. Brown tied in her newly acquired magazine by featuring Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on the cover, and “150 Women Who Shake the World” on the inside pages. Featured in an introductory video was Clinton stating, “We must declare with one voice that women’s progress is human progress.”
There was an emphasis on making connections between those in the audience and the 13 organizations that were highlighted as part of the

There is always a gap between what a political system stands for and the reality of everyday life under that system. Ours is government that ostensibly stands for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. A government of, by, and for the people. Yet, when it comes to marijuana, democratic principles take a back seat to fear, ignorance, and political expediency.
Look at New York, Montana, and the federal government for recent examples of how governments ignore or actively subvert the will of the people.
In his first run for elected office, Mayor Michael Bloomberg admitted to smoking and enjoying

During the 1992 Presidential election, Bill Clinton’s campaign team hit on a slogan that was easy to pronounce and just as easy for people to understand: “It’s the economy, stupid!” By that time, the trickle-down economics of the Reagan era had proven to be a ridiculous theory. The fact that President George H.W. Bush had no idea what the price of milk was didn’t help matters, either.
As the Internet has grown and computers have taken on spectacular efficiencies in moving money, global economies have seen financial transactions increase in their speed and societal impact. Fraudulent practices like Bernie Madoff’s exclusive pyramid scheme for the wealthy — or the implosion of the real estate market due to wild gambling with credit default swaps — have caused the fortunes and financial security that many investors and homeowners took for granted to evaporate into thin air.
On December 5, 1996, Alan Greenspan (who was then Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board) asked an audience at the American Enterprise Institute: “How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?” Although Greenspan’s use of the term “irrational exuberance” has been referred to quite often since the global financial meltdown of 2008, if you really want to see what “irrational exuberance” looks like you should start with this clip from Busby Berkeley’s 1933 movie musical, 42nd Street (in which Ginger Rogers sings one verse of “We’re In The Money” in pig latin):
Need another example? How about Ethel Merman asking “Could You Use Any Money Today?” in Irving Berlin’s 1950 hit musical, Call Me Madam?
The past decade has produced numerous documentaries about the perils of the new global

There was once was a fellow named Newt
Who gave his first two wives the boot
He spoke for the House
While he lied to his spouse
Seems he just couldn’t keep on his suit
Claimed “this country” has caused him to stray
(Though his sweetheart was not Fannie Mae)
‘Twas his love for our nation!!
(Newt, try masturbation)
Boehner’s thrilled that at least he’s not gay
No Georgian would call him a peach
(Pair of marital contracts in breach)
Against Clinton he railed
Contempt blatant, not veiled
He don’t practice what he likes to preach
To the White House he’d like to ascend
Crude behavior he’ll have to amend
He caused a kerfuffle
He’s got to reshuffle
Has affairs to which he must attend
His committee will start to explore
(Were he female, they’d call him a whore)
He sure likes to play
And now he will pray
For a taste of the sweet days of yore
“I worked far too hard!!” he has said
Guess his job was to use his (small) head
His wife suffered from cancer
Divorce was his answer
With his mistress he frolicked in bed
But said mistress (soon wife number two)
Was just one in a very long queue
Good ol’ boy didn’t stay
Yet again went astray
As he slipped out, he bid her “Adieu!”
Deftly moved on to wife number three
(Over two decades younger than he)
Begged God to forgive
Let’s live and let live!
Making proud the gang down on Street “C”
So what, finally, are we to do
(Betcha Bill Maher just might have a clue)
With a guy who’s a pig
Wants the President’s gig
And gets hot for the Red, White, and Blue!

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Why is it that going to war is the only issue politicians can agree on?
Yet again, our leaders think they’ve got a calling to save a country in the Middle East.
You would think with the bang-up job we’ve done saving Iraq and Afghanistan (not to mention Kuwait and Saudi Arabia) we could call it a day, wouldn’t you? But no.
Now there’s a bipartisan effort to save Libya from Muammar Gaddafi, the creep who runs it. Why is it that going to war is the only issue politicians can agree on?
Senator after senator — John Kerry, John McCain, Joe Lieberman — as well as former President Bill Clinton have come before the microphones to suggest it might be time to stop the carnage being visited on the Libyan people by their leader.
“We have to try and help those who are offering an alternative future to Libya,” Lieberman said. “We cannot allow them to be stifled or stopped by brutal actions of the Libyan government.”
He doesn’t want us to invade Libya, thereby completing the hat trick of three simultaneous Middle East wars. None of them

My friend Anne-Marie Slaughter, former Director of Policy Planning at the State Department and now back teaching at Princeton University, has written a compelling, passionate call for the US to immediately push for a UN Resolution to impose a no-fly zone over Libya. She outlines the reasons some are reticent about a no-fly zone, but in her response to critics, she doesn’t solve the core problem that a no-fly zone doesn’t help the Libyan opposition prevail.
While Slaughter doesn’t refer to me specifically, her arguments tick through many of the issues I raised in this video commentary as well as from my essay on the BBC’s site. Here too is a clip outlining some of these thoughts on Al Jazeera. I think she did a good job of listing the points that the no-fly zone opponents have been making.
Let me go quickly through and respond point by

Come on now: Let’s take a breath and put this NPR fracas into perspective.
Just as public radio struggles against yet another assault from the its long-time nemesis — the right-wing machine that would thrill if our sole sources of information were Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and ads paid for by the Koch Brothers — it walks into a trap perpetrated by one of the sleaziest operatives ever to climb out of a sewer.
First, in the interest of full disclosure: While not presently committing journalism on public television, the two of us have been colleagues on PBS for almost 40 years (although never for NPR). We’ve lived through every one of the fierce and often unscrupulous efforts by the right to shut down both public television and radio. Our work has sometimes been the explicit bull’s eye on the dartboard, as conservative ideologues sought to extinguish the independent reporting and analysis they find so threatening to their phobic worldview.
We have come to believe, as so many others have, that only the creation of a substantial trust fund for public media will free it from the whims and biases of the politicians, including Democratic politicians (yes, after one of our documentaries tracking President Clinton’s scandalous fund-raising in the mid-90s, the knives were sharpened on the other side of the aisle).
Richard Nixon was the first who tried to shut down public broadcasting, strangling and diverting funding, attacking alleged bias and even placing public broadcasters Sander Vanocur and Robert MacNeil on his legendary enemies list. Nixon didn’t succeed, and ironically his downfall was brought about, in part, by public television’s nighttime rebroadcasts of the Senate Watergate hearings, exposing his crimes and misdemeanors to a wider, primetime audience.
Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich tried to gut public broadcasting, too, and the George

The Obama administration has encouraged something of a lovefest between President Obama and Ronald Reagan. Gauzy stories about how highly our current president esteems the 40th — along with equally gauzy commentary about how these two share a talent for appealing to a wide swath of the American public — have been all over the news.
Time Magazine put a ribbon on the meme with its “Why Obama Loves Reagan” cover package about the Obama/Reagan “bromance,” with no less an eminence than presidential historian Douglas Brinkley proclaiming that Obama is “approaching the job in a Reaganesque fashion.”
Obama’s praise of Reagan leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of those who thought Reagan’s geniality was largely an act that masked eight years of making the rich richer and the poor poorer, including wasting untold billions on a crony-rewarding military spending binge.
But Obama seems to have overlooked Reagan’s greatest gift and most effective tactic: the ability to declare that virtually any triumph that happened while he was president, and even after, was his own; and that whatever went wrong was the fault of big government liberals.
The Romans called this post hoc ergo propter hoc — literally, “after the fact, therefore because of the fact.” When I was in college, my logic professor called this the Rooster Fallacy: The rooster crows when the sun comes up, so the rooster thinks he made the sun come up.
That was Ronald

Politicians lose favor for many reasons. Sometimes it’s a buildup of things so overwhelming that even the under-informed get it: Sarah Palin’s increasing perception as a mean-spirited, no-nothing, money-grubbing quitter. Mitt Romney’s almost farcical flip-flopping. Or Newt Gingrich’s hypocrisy, fueled by the discovery of his own affair with a younger staffer while he was constantly chastising President Clinton about Monica

Monday night, watching “President of the World,” the Chris Matthews documentary on the post-presidency of Bill Clinton, one sensed a man in a race against time. One day Bill Clinton’s in Northern Ireland, the next in Malawi, then it’s off to Kosovo. He’s sharing a stage with Bill Gates, he’s holding hands with Nelson Mandela, he’s wowing Mick Jagger. The adulatory film barely mentioned the underside to Clinton’s globe-trotting, high-powered philanthropy: his globe-trotting, high-powered personal

It was only a matter of time. Once the uprisings spread from Tunisia to Egypt to protests of differing sizes everywhere from Libya, Bahrain, and Yemen to Syria and Jordan – and even Italy – some semi-delusional retreaded tyre was going to emerge from the shadows to proclaim President Bush was responsible for the sudden flowering of revolution and democratic potential across the Middle East.
Enter Elliot Abrams. Yes, the same Elliot Abrams that was convicted of unlawfully withholding information from the Congressional Investigation into the Iran-Contra affair.
Abrams, who you might think would be disqualified from publicly addressing all matters pertaining to “democracy-building” – after undermining the will of the representatives of the United States people with his involvement in arguably the biggest political scandal of President Reagan’s administration – took to the pages of the Washington Post to share his nostalgic blend of freedom-fries optimism and historical revisionism:
What mindset was that? The one that treated American freedoms in the manner that Dick Cheney does a hunting companion’s face? Or the one that Don Rumsfeld discusses in his new book that led the Bush Administration to gather plans to attack Iraq within two weeks of 9/11 – which has only already been corroborated by everyone from Clinton and Bush’s counter-terrorism czar, Richard Clarke, to former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill – even though there was no evidence they had anything to do with that act of barbarism – and still isn’t.
Maybe, just maybe, as we just passed Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday, we can remember how the conservative icon spoke of winning “hearts and minds” in the then-solidly communist Soviet bloc.

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If, on Presidents Day 2011, I had to rank the last twelve presidents since America became the world’s most powerful empire, in World War II, I’d put them in the following order:
1.Franklin D. Roosevelt: by far and away, in my view, the greatest of all our modern American Caesars — in wisdom, courage, determination, selflessness, judgment and vision.
In the second tier I would rank these three Caesars:
2.Harry S Truman , who truly stepped up to the plate in April 1945, and made the historic decisions that ended World War II and defined the post-war era:
The decision to use the atomic bomb to end the war with the Empire of Japan
The Marshall plan
The Berlin Airlift
The decision to fight back in Korea, tho’ failing to stop MacArthur from crossing the 38th Parallel.
3.Dwight D. Eisenhower, who brought the Korean War to an end, kept the U.S. strong but out of foreign wars (especially during the 1956 Suez Crisis) — and attempted to find a modus vivendi with the Russians (including the second maddest Soviet emperor, Nikita Khrushchev).
4.John

I’m ashamed. Late at night, in bed, with my laptop anchored snugly in my comforter, I watch YouTube clips of conservative pundits, usually ones with “ballistic,” “explodes” and “gets served a cold glass of shut up juice” in the title. It’s not that I’m trying to school myself in Republican talking points. There is nothing so noble about waking up to “Bill O’Reilly Discusses Lesbian Teens” branded across your Macbook screen.
These jaunts are more accurately likened to the colonial encounters of an Imperial

The Huffington Post’s Senior Political Editor Howard Fineman, along with Mother Jones’ David Corn, talked to Chris Matthews tonight on MSNBC’s “Hardball” about the looming possibility of a government shutdown.
Fineman said that President Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner are both getting prepared to blame each other if a shutdown does occur. “The President and the Speaker are sort of like the pilot and co-pilot preparing for a crash that hasn’t happened yet…blaming the other person for the catastrophe that might come about,” explained Fineman.
Speaking about the 1995 shutdown when Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House, Fineman stated, “Newt Gingrich as you recall vastly overplayed his hand….it was all about Newt.” Contrasting that to the current situation, Fineman explained, “the one good thing you can say about Boehner in playing this game out over the next couple weeks is that it doesn’t seem to be about him. That’s probably the big positive.

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“Would you rather be buried or cremated?” is a question some of us are asked more frequently than “Want to get it on?” so I’ve been reflecting on it. The problem was less about the how than the what. The truth is I want to stick around, which isn’t an option. The closest one gets is being the last one standing on “American Idol.”
In a recent special, Barbara Walters and other A-listers who’d had open heart surgery — David Letterman, Charlie Rose, Bill Clinton and Regis Philbin — admitted the experience had forced them to confront their mortality and recognize that the good table reserved for them will one day be on the other side, where Elaine Kaufman has probably edged out

As President Obama’s approval numbers begin to climb, there is one glaring failure that has taken a back seat to the Giffords shooting and the symbolic vote to repeal “Obamacare” by the House. This failure is one that I have spoken about in the past, ruffling the feathers of many progressives who seem to choose to point to Obama’s successes-a watered-down health care bill, a months-too-long repeal of DADT-rather than point out where he can improve.
This failure, of course, is Guantanamo Bay, the blemish of which America seems unable (or worse, unwilling) to rid itself. While Obama promised that Gitmo would be closed within a year of taking office, and signed an executive order to that end, it remains open and fully functional.
If this is not bad enough, Obama has now fully reversed his decision to close Guantanamo by embracing a Bush-era policy of holding military tribunals on the navy base in Cuba. A policy that Obama heavily criticized while running for office in

This post is joint with Julie Walz
The surprise return of ousted dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier to Haiti has thrown more uncertainty into a country already struggling with political paralysis from the November election and a painful recovery from last year’s quake. Duvalier returned after nearly 25 years in exile and was arrested in Port au Prince for charges of corruption and embezzlement. The following day, a lawsuit was filed against him for torture and crimes against humanity. Duvalier is blamed, along with his father Francoise “Papa Doc” Duvalier, for the torture and rape of thousands — between 40,000 and 60,000 Haitians are thought to have died under their rule from 1957 –

The overstated celebrations and commemorations of the centennial of Ronald Reagan’s birth, with their razzle-dazzle of Super Bowl tributes and marathon deifying in Simi Valley, are fitting tributes to a president whose public relations guru, Michael Deaver, was a pioneer of this same kind of flim-flammery. But the Reagan Centennial’s flashy hagiography masks a far more complicated reality. He set the nation’s economic agenda, imitated by Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, which continues to this day.
“Reagan taught us deficits don’t matter,” Dick Cheney once

The past few days certainly suffered no lack of drama in Saudi Arabia as the nation witnessed, in amazing contrast, what could be a labelled as a modern-day ‘Tale of Two Cities’.
In Riyadh, the Kingdom’s booming capital and impeccably well-structured city, the organizers of the much acclaimed Global Competitiveness Forum (an annual Saudi version of the World Economic Forum which was established around the country’s determination to enhance its global competitiveness ranking) were celebrating the conclusion of this year’s event on the 25th of January. The GCF this year was attended by the likes of Former US President Bill Clinton and Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair as well as a large number of delegates which include local and international movers and well, Sheik-ers.
However, as delegates were still absorbing all the thoughts, facts and ideas which shared at the Forum, a disaster happened less than 24 hours later — one which certainly would disturb the positive image that most people who have attended previous GCF events have built over the years.
On the morning of January 26, residents of Jeddah, the Kingdom’s key commercial port on the Red Sea, woke up to heavy torrential rain and it wasn’t long before Saudi Arabia’s second largest city was completely crippled by the

In 2008, I remember hearing about it from one prominent D.C. pollster: The question (or set of questions) asked of voters was something like this: “Given the following choices, who would you be least likely to vote for — an African American, a Jew, or a Mormon?” The answer was clear: a Mormon.
I couldn’t help but wonder why this was the answer. If someone were asked a question like this, what would they be most comfortable saying out loud? Also, what I find so disconcerting is the vast discrepancy between the Mormons I know and the occasionally absurd news stories or a recently canceled HBO television show (Big Love): it is no wonder there appears to be at least some level of consternation about Mormons at-large. After all, media impression has strong power in this nation.
The truth is, however, America may in fact have another JFK moment in

Both Right and Left are playing a double game on trade in America today.
Republicans and conservatives (if they even admit we have a trade problem) want to hear that America’s trade problems are caused by unfair distortions of free markets by our trading partners. To some extent, of course, they are, but even genuine 100 percent free trade would not solve America’s problems. And our trading partners are mostly just ruthless players of the mercantilist game, as we used to

There is simply no understanding the prevalence of gun violence in America – as evidenced by the recent attempted assassination of a congresswoman during a mass shooting – without discussing the nefarious role played by the National Rifle Association (NRA).
Once an organisation primarily concerned with the education and training of sportsmen, in a coup that came to be known as the Cincinnati Revolt in 1977, hardliners took over the leadership and believed that any gun regulation would take us down a slippery slope to Khmer Rougism.
In the years since, unlike the US in the wake of the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy – or for that matter Australia after the Port Arthur Massacre – the response to senseless gun violence has been to discuss everything from the rhetoric on our airwaves to the weather outside.
But any public conversations regarding restricting who has access to guns has been considered verboten (although, thankfully, this time some cracks are beginning to show).
This is largely because the NRA’s duping its own members, which we’ll discuss below, and coming to the realisation that the real money was in actually protecting the rights of gun manufacturers, which we’ll discuss in Part II of this series.
If the NRA leadership is not radical, they certainly see the benefit in playing radicals on TV in order to enrich their financial benefactors who produce and sell the weaponry of death.
In the 1990s, in a climate of fear and paranoia that produced the Oklahoma City bombing, they were all too happy to refer to the government authority that tries to enforce gun laws, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco & Firearms (ATF), as “jack-booted thugs”. This led former president George

President Obama reaffirmed his economic philosophy in the State of the Union address — a government that works, invests, delivers opportunity, and that we can believe in. It is a lean government, not a big government. It is not a problem, but a problem-solver. The approach that Obama laid out for infrastructure and clean energy investment is