FROM SUNDAY AUGUST 29 THROUGH SEPTEMBER 4 JOIN ME BY CLICKING ON THIS LINK.
You'll be taken to my special L.A. Weekly blog from the Republican National Convention.
That's where I'll be posting this week. But I will respond to comment threads already underway here.

Sadness. More sadness than anger is what overcame me when I read the latest Nation magazine column by Naomi Klein. I'll grant it has a catchy title: "From Najaf to New York."� But this column by Klein, who has earned the admiration of a new generation of dissidents with a notable intellectual keen-ness, unwittingly [...]

And maybe this time for good. After hiding for the last 3 years behind the excuse of being too frail of health to stand trial for his record of torture and murder, former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet is once again mighty close to finding himself in the dock thanks to a ruling just [...]

My latest L.A. Weekly column on the Swift Boat Wars has just been posted. Please read the entire column. Here's a piece of it:

...George Bush's Republicans have about as much intention of spurning support from the likes of SBVT than the Kerry Democrats do of shutting down MoveOn.org. Just because the two major parties engage [...]

From across the pond comes the sort of delicious debate in and around the Left that can rarely be heard on American shores. U.K.-based Harry's Place has been gathering comments and reactions to a recent piece in the New Statesman by Nick Cohen (subscription required) bluntly titled "It's Evident That The Left is Dead."� [...]

Yes, sad, but true. I will be heading out to New York on the weekend to do some reporting from the Republican National Convention.
As I get ready over the next few days, posting here will be light.
During the RNC I will be blogging daily on both the L.A. Weekly and The Nation [...]

Call this a Dog Days of August Saturday afternoon blogging. I swore I wouldn't come back to the distasteful subject of Hugo Chavez but here we are again.
The OAS and the Carter Center this afternoon have formally ratified last Sunday's vote in which Chavez soundly defeated a referendum to recall him. So lucky Venezuela gets [...]

I figured you could all debate the Great Swift Boat Story by yourselves and it was safe for me to take a day off. So late Thursday nite my friend Mark Schubb and I went down to San Diego and at 6am Friday morning we boarded the Point Loma all day sportfishing boat.
The captain [...]

Uh-oh. I'll admit that last week I publicly muttered that it was looking like John Kerry might actually have a good chance at winning in November. I should have added: "�that's if he can bail out from his sinking campaign boat."
Indeed, Swift Boat Captain Kerry seems to be steering straight for the rocks. He [...]

I was watching, by accident, the opening ceremonies of the Olympics the other night and was struck by the language used by the NBC network anchors. As the U.S. delegation came onto the field and was met with a thunderous ovation, the NBC guy said (paraphrasing closely): "The Greeks clearly distinguish between the American people [...]

If you don't mind I'll withold any applause for yesterday's electoral victory by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
I find nothing redeeming in the record of this former Army Colonel and former coup plotter who-- with the solidarity of comfortable cafe revolutionaries in London and New York-- now fancies himself the embodiment of Radical Democracy. [...]

Make sure you read our debate on Hugo Chavez in the next posting down on the blog.
Meanwhile, here's some more on Chavez in today's L.A. Times by policy wonk Michael Shifter . It's a calm and well-documented argument bereft of any illusions about Chavez or his opposition. It's subscription only, so here [...]

The worst kind of politics are those posited on the knee-jerk notion that the "enemy of my enemy is my friend."
And there's no more vivid symptom of this malaise then the muddle-headed support and "solidarity"� that too much of the Left is extending to the semi-literate thug who currently sits in the Presidential [...]

I'll be on the new, not very imaginatively named, Public Radio Weekend Show Saturday morning at what looks to be 10 am Pacific. I'm on for the full hour, apparently as some sort of kibbitzer.
(In the SoCal area it airs on KPCC 89.3 FM).
I think as a guest I'm asked to respond with the hosts [...]

Click here to read my just-published L.A. Weekly column on the deadly game on the southern border.
This has been the deadliest weekend in three years on the U.S.-Mexican border. The bodies of at least a dozen people have been found near the border just since Friday.
The spike in deaths come as the Dept. of [...]

Photo: From The Oregonian. A person identified as a 14-year-old boy sits blindfolded and restrained. The boy purportedly was among the prisoners found when Oregon National Guardsmen responded June 29 to reports of what appeared to be prisoner abuse at the Ministry of the Interior in Baghdad, Iraq.
The repulsive quality of state-sponsored torture and [...]

Not because I went to the DNC nor because I covered a Kerry rally in Arizona this weekend... but because of some pretty complicated dissection of polling data I heard from a Republican consultant, I'm beginning to think Kerry might actually win.
I apply that old standard of trying to think of three concrete things in [...]

Flagstaff, Arizona
Before heading back to L.A. I drove up to magnificent Flagstaff to intercept a Kerry campaign rally late Sunday nite Here's the good news for the pro-Kerry folks: it was a huge crowd for a town this size. Somewhere between 5-10,000 people. And most of them waited in line and then in place for [...]

Tucson, Arizona
Friday Nite
Had a great evening tonite drinking Pacificos and eating barbecue as dark rain clouds moved over the desert floor and the air smelled electric with lightning in the foothills.
Best of all, I was able to spend some quality time with two talented writers and friends from two different generations. Chuck Bowden tells some [...]

I'm heading out early Friday morning from Tucson to do some reporting on the U.S. Border Patrol's BORSTAR unit. This a dedicated search and rescue detachment whose task is to fish out migrants lost and at peril in the desert.
This Tucson sector of the border is the deadliest of all; it's the treacherous funnel into [...]