I'll leave any comment on the voting in France and Lebanon,
the revoltin' Bolton, and the war in Iraq for after Monday.
I continue in
holiday mode and reserve the right to be frivolous. Anyway, this weekend is the
precise 19th anniversary of the drunkest I ever got. The story even
has a celebrity news hook. Because the drunkest [...]

Over this Memorial Day break, allow me to direct you to one
down-and-dirty purse-swinging, albeit, grossly uneven, online duel bloodying up
the front page of The Huffington Post.
In one corner, Max Blumenthal, a featherweight tyro and designated puncher for
enraged but impotent Democrats. In the
other, heavyweight contrarian pummeler Christopher Hitchens known for his newly
developed right hook.
(There's some [...]

With the Bolton
debate sucking up all the oxygen on Capitol Hill, it went almost un-noticed
that a Senate judiciary subcommittee opened hearings this past week on comprehensive
immigration reform.
For the first time since 9/11, some definitive rewriting of
the totally broken immigration/border policy is now inching toward reality. The
bad news is that so much attention this year [...]

My latest L.A. Weekly column:
I confess to a certain disappointment that the Senate didn't get all the
way to DEFCON 1 this week and let loose that damned nuclear option. Listening
to the esteemed colleagues on C-SPAN radio all day Monday, I got so steamed up
and anxious for Dear Leader Frist to finally push the big button [...]

The newest podcast of my weekly Radio Nation show has now been posted at:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/RadionationPodcast
You can simply copy the above URL into your RSS reader for automatic download of this and coming Radio Nation programs (or you can go to www.thenation.com, scroll down to Radio Nation and listen over the web in mp3 format).
On this week's [...]

As temperatures in the Arizona desert spiked into triple digits, this year's "season of death" along the U.S-Mexican border got off to a rip-roaring start: Twelve dead and a record number of rescues in just the past three days.
More "unintended consequences" of a U.S. border and immigration policy that has failed from every perspective and [...]

Having visited and reported from Cuba maybe a dozen times
over the years, I find the news coming out of Havana this past weekend to be no less than
remarkable.
For the first time in the 46 years since Fidel Castro has been in
power, a coalition of opposition dissidents were allowed to assemble publicly
for two days without disruption [...]

Here's a thought I've been mulling tonight. It now costs
about $600 a year to subscribe to home delivery of The New York Times, at least
if you live in Southern California.

Recently, the base line price of a laptop
computer dropped below $600 (and most of them last a lot longer than a year).
This quirky juxtaposition was [...]

Ever wonder why Americans hate politics? The answer was all
over C-Span today as the U.S. Senate bloviated for its second day over Judge Priscilla Owens"¦ and as both parties scrambled for position
in the fight over filibusters?
That's right, filibusters"¦ our new pressing national
crisis. The make-or-break matter that's on the lips of every working America.
Not the [...]

The latest podcast of my weekly Radio Nation show is now posted at:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/RadionationPodcast
You can simply copy the above URL into ur RSS reader for automatic download of this and coming Radio Nation programs.
On this edition I speak with with Peter Kornbluh about Luis Posada, architect Peter Eisenmann on the Berlin Holocaust Museum, Ian Williams on [...]

Did anyone accurately predict L.A. Mayor-elect Antonio
Villaraigosa's 18 point landslide he achieved Tuesday night?
Most pre-election analysts
were giving Antonio no more than a 3-7 point edge.
Yet, veteran Republican
consultant Allan Hoffenblum (publisher of the non-partisan
California Target Book)
nailed it perfectly a week before election day.
Back on May 9, Hoffenblum heard
that Villaraigosa campaign strategist Parke Skelton had told someone [...]

Antonio Villaraigosa pummeled L.A.'s incumbent Mayor Jimmy Hahn out of office Tuesday night by
what appears to be a rather spectacular 17 or 18 point margin.
The landslide election of a Spanish-speaking liberal Latino
to preside over America's second largest city carries huge political symbolism
especially at a time when the national immigration debate is simmering. And
before Villaraigosa [...]

Quote of the day month year.
Referring to Newsweek's
retraction of
its Koran-down-the crapper story:
"People lost their lives, people are dead and that's
unfortunate"¦People need to be very careful about what they say, just as they
need to be careful about what they do."
                                            [...]

I got a phone call from L.A. Mayor Jimmy Hahn today. Or at
least from one of his surrogates — a well-spoken woman with a perky voice. I'm not surprised by the personal call.
After all, I live in an upper middle-class burb of Los Angeles in the West San Fernando Valley, among the few
areas in which [...]

My first entry on the Huffington Post:  Las Vegas turns a saucy 100 yrs. old this weekend.

Now it can finally be told"¦ an anecdote I've kept secret for the
last half year. It's about one of my
real heroes, Chilean Judge Juan Guzman who, after a three decades-long career,
retired last week.

Judge Guzman changed Chilean history in 2001 when he charged
former dictator Augusto Pinochet with murder and kidnapping. He was the first
judge [...]

I sat at dinner tonight and stared for a while at the news
in front of me trying to fully absorb it: More than 70 people killed in five separate car bomb attacks in Iraq
yesterday.

Sixty-seven suicide bombings in the past month.
A death toll in the last two weeks of 400.
Four hundred in fourteen [...]

The latest podcast of my weekly Radio Nation show has just been posted. Or you can listen over the web by heading to The Nation website, scrolling down to the Radio Nation section and clicking on the mp3 file.

Last nite I batted around L.A. Weekly colleague Nikki Finke for her jagged-edge hatchet job on Arianna Huffington. You can view what I wrote by scrolling to the bottom of the post immediately below this one.
Well, Nikki can sure dish it out but she can't take it back very well, it seems. After the Huffington [...]

Little mice tell me that Arianna's Huffington Post (to which I am so far still a theoretical contributor)
got something like 8 million hits during its inaugural 24 hour debut. Eight million here, eight million there —
soon you're talking about some real traffic.

A river of blogosphere reviews has also been pouring
forward. Among the best and [...]