My latest L.A. Weekly column is now posted.

I don't possess nearly enough talent to say much useful about the devastation left by Hurricane Katrina.
The pictures and reports coming out of the Gulf Coast are no less than horrifying. I can only imagine the terror felt by the 30,000 people now more or less trapped inside the Superdome. Or those eeking it out [...]

An intriguing factoid has come my way via a piece by Todd Gitlin this week. Back when the war in Vietnam was becoming really unpopular, so did the peace
movement:

"...Here's the rub about 1969:  As the war became less popular, so did
the anti-war movement.  It was hated, in fact"�by the end of the
decade, the most [...]

This summer of our discontent over Iraq will be long remembered. The peace movement belives it has reached a "tipping point" in popular opposition to the war.
Perhaps.
But it seems to overlap ignition of an expanded civil war in Iraq, possibly a wider regional war. One that "intefaith healing circles" will hardly deter.
Far from [...]

File these notes under Better Mouse Traps. Local L.A. political
operative and blogger Matt Szabo  has come
up with two absolutely brilliant suggestions for two completely different
problems.

First, those massive traffic jams caused by southerners
evacuating Katrina?  Um... Matt wants to know if these cracker governors have ever
heard of something called "reversible lanes?!?!?"� Apparently, not. Check out
the pix [...]

If you live anywhere near Hollywood, as I do, and you spend
any time among its screen nobility, as I do (for work reasons) it's not long
before you discover that the universal lowest common denominator among these
folks is uncontrollable ego. Period.

Take Jane Fonda (please). Now that she's toured the country
pitching her really bad book in [...]

The most recent podcast of my weekly Radio Nation show is now posted.
Please copy this address into your RSS feeder or Itunes 4.9 :
http://feeds.feedburner.com/RadionationPodcast
If you want to listen over the web, go to the above address and click on the "Listen" button.

On this week's show I spend the hour speaking with the U.S.-based correspondent of [...]

When people start sucking their lips into their mouths,
they're probably lying or bluffing. That's what I was taught this past weekend in a poker boot camp by
former FBI counter-intelligence officer Joe Navarro.

Joe was offering us campers a seminar on how to read body language.
When it came to the lesson on lip-sucking, he emphasized the above [...]

George W. Bush's answer to when U.S. troops will leave Iraq is: "As
the Iraqis stand up — we will stand down."� To achieve this goal, we have been told by various administration
officials, the U.S. is "training up"� Iraqi forces to eventually take over the
fighting.

Unfortunately, this is gibberish. Not that Iraqi soldiers
are incapable of fighting [...]

Now that the dam of public opinion is bursting on the Bush
Iraq policy, we opponents of the war have a greater burden than ever to
pose viable — I repeat, viable - alternatives.

When there was still a strong majority support for the war, I suppose
it was enough for some to just say they were against [...]

This post is really about the Democrats... But first:
Totally by coincidence, but quite fortuitously, I find myself in Dr. Gonzo's old haunting grounds in Las Vegas just as Hunter S. Thompson is to be shot into eternity.
Indeed, I spent most of Friday inside the historic Binion's Casino participating in a No Limit Texas Hold-Em Poker [...]

It's going to be light posting through the weekend as starting Thursday I'm on assignment covering this monumental event (hey, somebody's gotta do it :).
Meanwhile, my latest L.A. Weekly column is now available online.
And the most recent podcast of my weekly Radio Nation show is also now avaialble.
Please feed this http://feeds.feedburner.com/RadionationPodcast address into your RSS [...]

Just when I thought I might be hallucinating when it comes to Cindy Sheehan, I found at least one other person who is having similar symptoms (see my self-diagnosis in the post below this one).
Stand-alone journalist Chris Nolan at Politics From Left to Right yearns for the good old days when media circuses were run [...]

I have been silent on the Cindy Sheehan story for the past ten days because it has been very difficult for me to sort it out.
The conclusion I have reached is -- to paraphrase Military Genius Don Rumsfeld-- you have to go with the anti-war movement you've got, not the one you'd like to have.
Sheehan's [...]

Quick, somebody get Scotland Yard on the phone. The British probe into the Islamo-fascist subway bombings of this summer are all on the wrong track. 
The attacks were really our responisbility. It was all about American racism and about the failure of U.S. and British societies to be sufficiently multi-cultural!
I learned all this from reading [...]

I spent the last week of July in California's Central Valley reporting on the lives of farm workers. While I was there two workers died from heat exposure. A third had expired a few days before I arrived.
That's all included in my feature-length report which has just been posted
at L.A. Weekly. Please take the [...]

Great news from Chile:
SANTIAGO, Chile (Reuters) -- The wife
and youngest son of former dictator Augusto Pinochet were detained
Wednesday after a Chilean judge charged them as accomplices in a tax
fraud case, court sources and a family member said.
Pinochet's
wife, Lucia Hiriart, was being held in a military hospital in Santiago.
His son, Marco Antonio Pinochet, was being held [...]

Catching up on some of my reading I came across another good
piece written last weekend by British journo Nick
Cohen, a worthy exponent of the pro-war Left. Cohen can ably argue for himself
so I am not going to recap the piece — you can read it through the above link.
One graf that jumped out at [...]

Still recovering from jet lag so I'm inclined to a bit more
linking than writing. I do want to point you to an excellent piece of reporting
from my long-time compadre, John Dinges.

I know John from the old Chile days of the 70's. After the
Pinochet coup, John stayed behind in Santiago and later would bravely lend [...]

From Marc:
I'm back, I'm ready to blog. And I'm grumpy. The warm and fuzzy sheen I acquired from 8 days of Hostaria crawling in Rome that I hoped would last at least four or five days after my return was rudely sheared off when Delta Airlines figured out a way to make it take 36 [...]