I'm on semi-vacation for the next handful of days so I'm
inclined to do more linking than writing. Below find a couple of items that caught my attention this morning.
First up is another episode in the Great Ward Churchill
soap-opera. I've been chided by some for spending too much time on this
"issue."� So sue me why don't you? [...]

No, this is not a joke about missionaries being offered a choice of boling in a pot or playing "wiki-wiki."
A friend of mine wrote to tell me he found an entry for me on Wikipedia.
I read it with some trepidation. The fears eventually eased when I found the posted info to be about 99% [...]

I found it difficult to get through listening to all of
President Bush's speech Tuesday night. The whole thing had an air of unreality
to it. Mr. Bush just doesn't have any credibility left on the issue of Iraq. As
my friend, Tim Frasca, put it in an email to me:

"It's like listening to an autistic child [...]

If you're not somewhere on the political Left, you should
probably tune out this posting. If, instead, you understand that there is
little hope for serious political change without the re-emergence of an effective labor movement then"� feel free to read on.

As you probably know, the American union movement is on the
verge of an historic split.  [...]

Lots of buzzing, especially here in LA-LALand, about the new Paul Haggis film, Crash. I thought I really wanted to see this flick until I started hearing more about it. The more I heard, the more I began to wince. It started to sound like a heavy-handed, didactic mish-mosh of stereotypes with one single goal: [...]

I don't really give a whit whether or not Karl Rove resigns
as a result of his truly vile remarks about the non-Republican response to
September 11.

I'm certainly not going to waste any of my time calling for
his resignation.

What difference would it make either way? He would merely be
replaced by some other equivalent slime ball. [...]

Vice-President
Dick Cheney:
"I think the level of activity that we see today,
from a military standpoint, I think will clearly decline. I think they're in
the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."
The Central Intelligence
Agency:
The
Iraq insurgency poses an international threat and may produce better-trained
Islamic terrorists than the 1980s Afghanistan war that gave rise to Osama bin
Laden and [...]

I'm midway through a two day conference and here at midnight I'm watching the Charlie Rose show on the hotel TV. He's got the New York Times' Baghdad correspondent John Burns on live by satellite and his report is thoroughly depressing.
Burns, who is no dove, is describing a thoroughly pessimistic scenario: deepening conflict; insufficient U.S. [...]

The podcast of my latest weekly Radio Nation show is now available for downloading.
Paste this URL --> http://feeds.feedburner.com/RadionationPodcast into your RSS reader.
Or you can listen direct online by clicking here.
On this edition:
I talk with New York Times columnist Bob Herbert about his new
book "Promises Betrayed," with Arianna Huffington, with former Justice Department whistleblower Jesselyn
Radak [...]

Light  blogging the early part of this week as I'm busy moderating some seminars and webcasts.
Question of the day: is there really a dramatic turn-around in public opinion against the war? Talk amongst yourselves.

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank might have ventured a bridge
too far in his acerbic assault on 
on Congressman John Conyer's hearing on the Downing Street Memos.
But the
column is funny. And as I argued last week on this blog, his central point
about the Democrats engaging in political simulacra should be taken seriously:
In
the Capitol basement yesterday, long-suffering [...]

Quote of the Day: "Shrum sees history on the Democrats'
side."� 

You know, Bob Shrum. That Great Democrat Visionary and
Professional Consultant whose current presidential win/loss record is now a
stunning 0-8.

Never mind the stats. Scummy Shrummy shows up as the lead
voice in the major national politics piece just written by the new Washington Correspondent
of Salon.com, [...]

At about 2:00 this afternoon, I was just sitting down to write a
piece I owe to The Atlantic when the third earthquake in recent days
hit California.
Today's 5.3 shaker hit about 70 miles east of
L.A. (and 100 miles from me) near the desert community of Yucaipa. I
felt the quake as a moderate rolling sensation, not terribly [...]

Here's a little piffle I published this week about local surf fishing spots in So Cal. Even if you live outside Kollyfornia it might be worth a quick read.
Meanwhile, over the past weekend I made a flash trip to Ensenada, Baja California and spent a morning on the water with my trusty fish-hunting Captain Jorge [...]

This is my latest L.A. Weekly column:
As I watched the governor give the commencement address at Santa Monica
College, I started to wonder if Arnold, and his political handlers, have completely
lost touch with reality.  I emphasize the word "watched"� instead of listened because the
jeering and hissing and booing and chanting were so overwhelming that
neither I nor the [...]

The latest podcast of my weekly Radio Nation show is now posted. Enter http://feeds.feedburner.com/RadionationPodcast into the RSS reader of your choice for automatic download.
Or click here to listen online.
On this week's show I talk with Betsy Leondar-Wright about her new book,
"Class Matters," with journalist Suzanne Gordon about America's acute
nursing shortage, and with Nation legal [...]

Best sum-up of the Michael Jackson story comes in four lines from MaxSpeak:
JACKO CUT SLACKO GOES BACKO TO SHACKO WITH FLACKOS FOR SNACKO; HACKOS LACKO
BLACKO ON WHOM TO CRACKO LEFT TO QUACKO
and this is my last wisecracko.

[My own closing thought on this story: Rather revealing, it was, that the Reverend Jesse Jackson -- fresh from [...]

The Downing Street Memo. You know, the supposed smoking gun that proves a) that the Bush administration
always intended to go make war against Iraq and B) that the "intelligence and
facts were being fixed"� to justify that policy.
The memo is the hottest topic on
the anti-war left since New Gingrich was discovered cheating on his wife. There's [...]

I couldn't help but
take a moment out of the weekend to lament this story: celebrated Latino
writer, Richard Rodriguez was pressured into canceling  his commencement address at Cal State East
Bay scheduled for today after threats from graduating students that they would boycott or protest
his appearance.
Rodriguez, a gay essayist, certainly fits smoothly into the
traditional of liberalish public [...]

Marshall Grossman became an instant celebrity today, at
least in Los Angeles.
His name was on the tip of everyone's tongue as they
clacked about his role in using bulldozers to wipe out a local beach that he —
and another 107 super-rich"�households have to share with plain, old, butt-ugly
ordinary people (scroll down one post to see the [...]