California's severe drought exposes civilization's thin veneer

The severe drought in California and much of the West is a reminder that civilized life is a paper-thin veneer that overlays the deep upheavals of nature. Humans carry on blithely, holding fast to the illusion that the natural world can be tamed and exploited with no unavoidable consequences. Then we get slammed by a hurricane, a flood, a tornado, a wildfire, a drought or a freezing polar vortex that lets us know how wrong we are. 

Super Bowl and legal marijuana: A strange mix for smug Seattle

How odd is it that the two contenders in the Super Bowl -- the Seattle Seahawks and the Denver Broncos -- hail from the two states in the Union that have legalized sale and use of marijuana? Are there two activities more different than the amped-up aggression of professional football and the laid-back mellowness of smoking a joint?

Wacko birds censure McCain, endanger GOP chance to win Senate

When John McCain gets censured by members of his own party – McCain, the 2008 GOP presidential nominee who has one of the most conservative voting records in the Senate – it is clear that the biggest problem facing Republicans is the looniness in their own ranks.

State of the Union: Congress will stall Obama's 'year of action'

In his sixth State of the Union address, President Obama called for a “year of action,” but 2014 is more likely to be a year in which voters ratify gridlock. 

Putin's Sochi Olympics will open in the shadow of terrorism

Vladimir Putin wanted to bring the Olympics to Russia, and he wanted them to take place in his favorite Black Sea resort town, Sochi, even though it is not a locale that sees much, if any, snow and is situated dangerously close to a region roiling with rebels and terrorists who hate Putin.

Income inequality is not a concern of Wall Street's money addicts

The richest 1% of Earth’s citizens own 46% of global wealth. That news comes to us from the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Even more dramatic is this statistic: The planet’s 85 wealthiest people have wealth equal to that held by the poorest half of all humans. 

With Benghazi bullet dodged, Democrats' fate rests with Hillary

The Senate Intelligence Committee has delivered a damning report about the catastrophe at the American mission in Benghazi, Libya, casting the blame widely -- at the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department and even at one of the victims of the attack, U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens. But despite an addendum tacked on by Republican members of the committee that took a hard swipe at Hillary Rodham Clinton, not much damage was done to the former secretary of State’s prospects as a presidential candidate. 

Florida theater killing proves guys with guns are primed to shoot

Guns don’t kill people, popcorn kills people. Or maybe it’s texting. Or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time with some fool who thinks he needs to take a gun to the movies.

Chris Christie is desperate to escape his image as a bully

Gov. Chris Christie is in extreme damage-control mode, apologizing to constituents and asking forgiveness for the dunderheaded shenanigans of some of his closest staffers. He is desperate to evade a growing reputation as a political bully that could scuttle his chance to become the Republican nominee for president in 2016.

After Hawaii holiday, Obama returns to polar vortex of politics

President Obama must feel as though his Hawaiian Christmas holiday was way too brief. He has now left the palm trees of his birthplace far behind and is back in Washington, with a polar vortex chilling most of the country and Republicans still frozen in contrarian disagreement with everything he does and says -- some even disputing the location of his birth.

Duck man Phil Robertson's Bible cannot limit American liberty

I confess my intent is to be provocative by dragging Phil Robertson into another cartoon at a moment when the “Duck Dynasty” controversy seems to have simmered down. But, after all, provocation is the whole point of political cartoons and, now that I’ve got everyone’s attention, I want to share some thoughts about cartoons, religion and free speech.

I was gifted a book for Christmas that has made me question the way I’ve used my time on this planet – Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and the Golden Age of Journalism.” 

The proliferation of college football bowls with goofy corporate names must be making at least a few players and coaches cringe. Doesn’t it feel like a dubious honor to be the winner of the Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl?

When the calendar flips from an old year to a new one, we have a sense of being given a new start and new possibilities. Of course, the reality is that days and months and years are human constructs that merely mark the progress of the Earth around the sun. The world we live in on Jan. 1 is pretty much the same as the world we experienced on Dec. 31. This is especially true when it comes to Congress.

Tomorrow and the day after that and all the days beyond, we can worry and gripe and argue about guns and greenhouse gases; tea party politics and the gap between rich and poor; Obamacare and immigration. On Christmas Day, though, we all deserve a break.

I'm a big fan of Christmas, but I'm not inclined to join Sarah Palin's pro-Christmas crusade. Her new book, "Good Tidings, Great Joy: Protecting the Heart of Christmas," lays out the case that Christmas is under attack by stringing together a litany of slights against the holiday -- real, imagined and exaggerated -- that do not add up to much more than her usual chip-on-the-shoulder complaint against anyone outside her narrow definition of "real Americans."

For 12 years, America’s national security apparatus has grown like kudzu on steroids, but, finally, President Obama may soon start trimming it back to preserve at least a small space for personal privacy in the United States. 

After four years of bitter, poisoned, polarized politics of a kind not seen since pre-Civil War days, cooler heads in Congress finally prevailed long enough to get a federal budget passed. It is a budget no one actually likes, but it is better than another government shutdown.

Rush Limbaugh is freaked out by Pope Francis’ sharp critique of capitalism and consumerism. Rush says it sounds like “pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the pope.” 

Setting new lows for accomplishment in its first year, the 113th Congress is on track to wrest the title of Worst Congress Ever from the horrid 112th Congress. House Speaker John A. Boehner bears a great deal of blame for this dismal record, but he can be commended for finally calling out the conservative activist organizations that have been cheering on the congressional drive toward ignominy.

At the memorial for Nelson Mandela, President Obama gave those who pander to right-wing outrage two great opportunities to rattle the cage of Obama haters. The first was his handshake with Cuban leader Raul Castro; the second was the "selfie" he posed for with Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt and British Prime Minister David Cameron.

In a speech last week, President Obama declared that income inequality is the “defining challenge of our time.” Conservatives, however, seem to think talk about the gap between the super rich and everyone else is nothing more than the whining of society’s losers.

I met Nelson Mandela not long after he stepped down as president of South Africa. He was visiting the Gates Foundation in Seattle, and I was part of a group of journalists lucky enough to get the chance to interview him for an hour.

Jeff Bezos’ announcement that Amazon hopes to eventually deliver packages to customers using little flying drones has caused a mini-uproar. From journalists to members of Congress, people are telling Bezos, "Wait just a gosh darn minute, mister!"

Before noon Monday 375,000 Americans logged on to HealthCare.gov and discovered that, though the federal website is working far better than at its launch in October, it still runs into problems when demand gets too high. That is both the good news and the bad news for Republicans who are hoping to use Obamacare as their prime attack point in the 2014 congressional elections. 

The Pilgrims did not debate abortion and gay marriage and the right to die at the first Thanksgiving. Nor did they talk with the Native Americans at the table about private property, the environment or the rights of minorities. 

The six-month nuclear deal with Iran is causing much gnashing of teeth in the cloistered offices of neoconservative think tanks. The hawkish intellectuals who spin the geopolitical theories that lead to young Americans being sent to war cannot abide President Obama’s penchant for talking with adversaries and avoiding conflict. 

I am one of those who can easily answer the most singular question of my generation: “Where were you when John F. Kennedy was assassinated?”

The 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy also marks 50 years of conspiracy theorists trying to sell an array of alternative explanations for JFK’s murder. Over all the long years since Nov. 22, 1963, conspiracy theorists have fingered more than 40 different groups, 80 different assassins and in excess of 200 co-conspirators. 

Toronto’s bombastic, bulbous, booze-swilling, crack-smoking Mayor Rob Ford is a national embarrassment to many Canadians, but the man might be doing his country a small favor.

In the long run, Obamacare is likely to be as popular and permanent as Medicare, but, in the short term, it is turning into the worst political crisis of Barack Obama’s presidency.

Typhoon Haiyan, the monster storm that set a Hiroshima-level standard for natural devastation when it hit the Philippines on Friday, was so big that its spiral image laid over a map of the United States stretches nearly from sea to shining sea. With winds hitting sustained peaks of 195 mph and gusts up to 235 mph, it may well be the most powerful storm ever recorded.

If a bunch of men with guns showed up outside a restaurant, it might make anyone inside a wee bit nervous. If you happened to be one of four members of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense who had gathered for lunch at that restaurant and you looked out the window and saw a group of 40 rifle-toting people staring back at you, you could be forgiven for freaking out.

President Obama’s hollow promise that Americans who liked their own healthcare plans would not have to give them up under Obamacare may prove to be another tempest in a tea party teapot, but it might also balloon into a political gale that blows away the highest hopes for his second term in the White House. 

Gov. Chris Christie’s big reelection win in New Jersey has unsettled many Democrats who now see him as the most formidable possible Republican candidate for president in 2016. But nervousness on the left is nothing compared with the apoplexy on the right.

Imagine yourself taking a job where, for the first year or two, you have to put up with verbal taunts and physical intimidation from your more senior co-workers; where you are expected to serve their every whim, submit to involuntary head shaving and pick up the tab for thousands of dollars worth of meals that those more senior workers consume. You probably would say, “Take this job and shove it.”

If we could get National Security Agency hackers to go to work on the Obamacare website, healthcare for every American would be delivered before Christmas.

In their quest to gut Obamacare, Republicans have been given a big boost by two groups that were supposed to provide the new healthcare exchange a proper rollout: the contractors who built healthcare.gov and the insurance companies who still dominate the American healthcare system.

After a 13-year study involving more than 1 million Americans, a multinational team claims to have identified the dominant personalities in each of 48 states. Apparently, every one of us can now assess whether we belong in a state such as Pennsylvania, filled with “temperamental and uninhibited” people, Nebraska, heartland of “friendly and conventional” folks, or California, land of the “relaxed and creative.”

President Obama has been busy this week taking calls from European leaders who seem really upset that the United States has been spying on them, perhaps to the point of tapping their cellphones.

Congressional Republicans could have saved the country a lot of stress – as well as about $24 billion – if they had skipped the government shutdown and just let inept computer programmers scuttle Obamacare. The rollout of the new healthcare exchanges – the heart of the Affordable Care Act – has been bungled so badly that one has to wonder whether the techies who put it together are secretly members of the tea party.

For the sake of the republic, it is time to say, “So long Texas; welcome England.”

At the last possible moment, the dysfunctional United States Congress voted to end the debilitating government shutdown and avoid a calamitous default on the government debt. It should have been a humiliating defeat for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and the other tea party Republicans who engineered this political debacle, but none of them are showing the slightest sign of remorse.

In a year when A-listers Will Smith, Matt Damon and Tom Cruise tried to rocket to the stars in big-budget science fiction movies, the actor who has achieved the most powerful liftoff is Sandra Bullock. Her film, “Gravity,” has been in sustained orbit as the top box office moneymaker for two weekends in a row.

Most Republican members of Congress claim to believe in Jesus Christ, but their votes against the food stamp program suggest they do not share their lord and savior’s love for the poor.

Ranchers in western South Dakota are busy with the grim work of gathering the carcasses of more than 75,000 cattle killed in a freak wind and snowstorm last week. They could use some help, but none is coming from a shut down federal government. 

The biggest threat facing the United States today may be the monumental ignorance of the tea party Republicans who have captured the once-great Republican Party. While economists and financial experts on Wall Street are uniformly warning that failure to raise the nation’s debt ceiling would be a catastrophe that would send world stock markets into a nose dive, members of the tea party caucus in Congress are insisting it would be no big deal at all. 

The government shutdown has revealed the impressive skill of tea party Republicans to say untrue things with sincerity so convincing that they almost sound as if they believe what they are saying. Michele Bachmann, with her toothy grin and startling wide-eyed stare, is especially adept at this.

Americans hate Obamacare but love the Affordable Care Act. That is the big story from one of America’s more reliable sources of information, Jimmy Kimmel.

Because the No. 1 priority of House Republicans is to cater to the fantasies of their tea party constituents, the federal government has been shut down. The loony legions that drive Republican primary elections now are driving the United States toward calamity.

By utilizing the dual threats of a government shutdown and a default on the debts owed by the United States, House Republicans have moved far beyond traditional political horsetrading and into the realm of government by extortion.

Ted Cruz may not have killed Obamacare with his 21-hour speech on the Senate floor this week. He may not have endeared himself to most of his Republican colleagues, who think his grandstanding wasted precious time. He may not have done anything good for the country, given that his extended harangue has made a government shutdown more likely. But he probably did something good for one person: Ted Cruz. 

Folks at the White House may have been just a bit too giddy about the prospect of a sudden thaw in relations with Iran. They angled for a face-to-face meeting between President Obama and the new Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, since both leaders were in New York City for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly this week.

Since the economic disaster of 2008 sent incomes spinning downward and the jobless rate shooting upward, at least one group of Americans has found a path back to prosperity: the top 1%. Over the last four years, the super-rich have been able to rake in 95% of all income gains. 

The way conservatives are reacting to President Obama’s deal to eliminate Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons, you’d think he just gave away Wyoming to the Russians.

The mass shooting at the Washington, D.C., Navy Yard should come as no surprise. Mass shootings are an increasingly recurrent manifestation of life in the United States of America. This one is merely the latest. 

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is getting attention this week for saying two stunningly ignorant things: that the Senate needs 100 members just like the late Sen. Jesse Helms, and that a government shutdown at the end of this month would be no big deal.

Vladimir Putin is no hero, but he has, nevertheless, provided a way for President Obama to sidestep a string of bad options for dealing with Bashar Assad and the Syrian government’s despicable use of chemical weapons against its own citizens. By offering to broker a deal that would put Syria’s chemical arsenal under control of international inspectors, the Russian president has forestalled a looming conflict and created a rare opportunity for international cooperation.

I’d love to be an invisible presence in the room the next time Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin sit down for a chat. The high stakes drama of the Cold War is gone, but the Russian president is the American president’s nemesis on everything from sarin gas attacks in Syria to gay rights in Russia. To see them spar would be enlightening entertainment.

There is a certain freedom in knowing that, no matter what you do, you will make someone mad. That is the situation in which President Obama finds himself regarding Syria: He has no good options, so he is free to simply choose the one he believes is right. 

Despite the fact that there have been many brilliant thinkers through the centuries who called themselves conservatives, it does seem that, when we look at things through the rearview mirror of American history, it is conservatives who are left stuck in the mud.

For the first time in the history of humanity, children can easily be exposed to the most extreme, misogynistic sex acts imaginable, thanks to the phenomenon of Internet porn.

When are America’s leaders going to step up and protect us from the most threatening terrorists, hedge fund managers?

The happy news is that the American economy is producing more jobs and the unemployment rate is continuing to fall. The less happy news is that, in the words of economist Gary Burtless, this is happening "at a heartbreakingly slow pace."

Because of the vicious, unending drug war within its borders, Mexico teeters between becoming a fully developed country and sliding into failed-state status. With a growing economy, more jobs and a once-out-of-control birthrate now brought to a First World level, Mexico has huge potential. But a nation with a government that cannot protect its citizens, defeat criminal gangs or root out corruption is a nation without control of its destiny.

A new climate-change report from the United Nations that was leaked to the media this week says sea levels could rise by more than 3 feet by the end of the 21st century and that there is a 95% likelihood that the global warming that is causing this rise is largely a result of human activity. You may now cue the deniers who say somebody is just making this stuff up.

The situation on the U.S. border with Mexico may be spinning out of control -- not because of Mexicans trying to cross illegally, but because of the army of Border Patrol agents that is being amassed at the cost of billions of tax dollars.

Just as the Affordable Care Act was the signature piece of legislation of President Obama’s first term, the top achievement of term two is supposed to be immigration reform. And, for a while, with Republicans freaked out by the ground they have lost among Latino voters, such legislation looked unstoppable. But now, not so much.

Pandering to the Russian Orthodox Church and to the homophobia of a huge share of the Russian people, President Vladimir Putin’s government has approved new laws that tighten the screws on gays and lesbians. Though this may gain him political points at home, Putin has further darkened the image of his country internationally -- at least in the parts of the world where human rights are valued.

During a quick trip to Maryland for a weekend wedding, I was in the nation’s capital long enough to discover who it is that has caught the town’s attention. It is not President Obama off on his golf vacation or any of the members of Congress scattered back to their home districts. No, the person of great interest is a Seattle billionaire named Jeff Bezos.

While normal human beings are spending sunny August days at the beach or the lake or on the road with the kids, tea party activists are crowding into town hall meetings with members of Congress and screeching at the top of their lungs about the imagined evils of Obamacare.

Edward Snowden has escaped the limbo of the transit lounge at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport and now, in the style of former Vice President Dick Cheney, the fugitive leaker is hunkered down in an undisclosed location somewhere in Russia.

All but a few macho holdouts among the let-men-be-men faction agree that Anthony Weiner is not worthy of becoming mayor of America’s biggest city, but there is a perennial threat to our democracy that is far larger than the turgid tweets of the former congressman from New York. That threat is the ongoing whoredom of members of Congress who remain in office.

From Saturn, nearly 900 million miles away, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has sent back images of Earth that show our planet as a tiny glowing dot in the dark expanse of space. That vast separation should inspire awe, but, instead, it brings up thoughts of the gaping distance between President Obama and the Republicans who control the House of Representatives.

If Anthony Weiner had been clever enough to use self-deprecating humor when his private sexting first became public, he might still be in Congress or have a better chance of becoming mayor of New York City. Instead, he’s become the joke.

The royal baby has arrived and the House of Windsor now has an heir, a spare and a son of a spare. The Britain’s monarchal lineup is pretty much locked in place for the next 100 years.

Anthony Weiner, the former New York City congressman, and Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York, wrecked their political careers in spectacularly seamy ways, but, in the Big Apple, there is always the chance for a second act.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has made it to the cover of Rolling Stone and that has infuriated a whole lot of people who think the magazine is glamorizing the accused Boston Marathon bomber.

Let's take a break from politics today and dip into the fantastical world of the San Diego Comic-Con. The image above is a slice taken from my latest Horsey On Hollywood cartoon. You can jump to the full image by clicking here.

A string of misperceptions has driven the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman tragedy from the very beginning, including the public misperception that perfect justice can be found in a court of law.

Here is the so-called mystery: Americans are exercising more, but the national obesity rate keeps rising. How can that be?

In the battle of the technology business mega-monsters, Apple Inc. has lost a round to Amazon.com. On Wednesday, a federal judge in New York ruled that Apple “conspired to raise the retail price of e-books” with the aim of cutting into Amazon’s market share. The judge said Amazon may now seek damages from Apple.

There seems to be one thing that unites all the demonstrators in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, from the young secular liberals who are jubilant that Egypt’s military has deposed President Mohamed Morsi to the Islamic militants who demand that he be reinstated: they all are furious with President Barack Obama and the United States of America. 

On the final full day of my month in England, I was sitting in the sunshine having a chat with Sir Geoffrey Nice, the British barrister who led the international legal team that prosecuted former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes. We were not discussing anything quite so serious as genocide as we looked out across Nice’s garden and tennis court to the 300-year-old house across the street.

The Senate-approved comprehensive immigration reform bill could be the greatest legislative achievement of President Obama’s second term -- but only if Speaker of the House John Boehner allows it to be voted on. The chances of that? Pretty darn slim. 

Never has the power of an idea whose time has come been demonstrated more dramatically than in America’s rapid shift toward approval of same-sex marriage. The trickle turned to a steady stream and now, with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to open the way to gay marriage in California and strike down key provisions of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, it has become a flood.

On Monday morning, I strolled from the East India Club – my temporary address while working from London – and went to watch the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. Little did I know I would come away from the event with a novel insight into the controversial cyber-spying operations being run by British and American intelligence agencies.

The election of Hassan Rowhani as president of Iran is good news for Americans, except for the neoconservative hawks who brought us the war in Iraq and have been especially eager for another military adventure in Iran.

In the middle of the G-8 summit in Northern Ireland early this week, the host, British Prime Minister David Cameron, and his closest international partner, President Obama, were embarrassed by the latest revelations of secret spying sprung on them by elusive whistle-blower Edward Snowden. 

The National Security Agency's program of scooping up raw data on nearly every phone call placed in the United States should freak us all out – not so much because of what the agency is doing, but because it has the technological capability to do it.

In principle, the National Security Agency’s vast data collection operation is troubling, but, in the age of Google and Facebook, it feels like having just one more Big Brother in a growing family of Big Brothers.

At dinner a couple of days ago, my friend Janey Ireson said how disappointed she is that Barack Obama has been hemmed in by congressional Republicans and blocked from fulfilling the high expectations of those who supported his rise to the presidency. The next day at lunch, another friend, Colin Gray, expressed precisely the same sentiment.

If you are wondering what the cartoon above is all about, I confess it is a tease. To see the entire image -- my take on the HBO series, "Game of Thrones" -- you'll need to go to the blog, Company Town or wait to see it in our Sunday newspaper.

First Lady Michelle Obama has shown us all how to deal with the nastiness that has infected American politics: do not indulge it. 

The gang rape of a 30-year-old American woman in India on Tuesday is the latest horrific reminder that women travel in a more dangerous world than men.

Despite prognostications otherwise, it is not inevitable that the United States will cede its place as the world’s leading nation to China. But if the American political system remains as dysfunctional as it is today, China may rise above us by default.

My boyhood political hero was a guy named Dan Evans. The rare Republican candidate elected in the Democratic landslide of 1964, Evans served three terms as governor of Washington. Upon the death of Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson in 1983, Evans was appointed to the open Senate seat and then easily won a special election to complete Jackson’s term.

First, members of Congress set a trap that would bite hard if they failed to break the political gridlock and come up with a grand bargain on the budget. Then, having failed, they let the trap spring shut. And now, they continue to blunder and bluster as the country remains locked in the vise grip of the so-called sequester.

The American employment picture may finally be brightening a bit, but for the tens of thousands of young people being handed diplomas in the next few weeks at colleges and universities across the land, more gloom is in the forecast.