My latest L.A. Weekly column is now posted. It’s another basting of the Tribune Co. suits currently running the Los Angeles Times (into the ground).

Readers of this blog know that I’ve been pretty tough on National Review’s little Jonah Goldberg, the intellectual fly-weight the L.A. Times has acquired as an affirmative action hire to fill-its "right-wing pundit" quota.   It seems I have hurt his feelings and he was pouting about it today over on NRO’s Corner (scroll down [...]

Who knew? Much like Dick Nixon in the days of Vietnam, George W. Bush has apparently also had a Secret Plan to win the war. We just didn’t know about it. In preparing the public for Bush’s Annapolis address today on how we are going to win, the inimitable Scott McClellan told the press yesterday [...]

Pajamas Media is pooling together all of the info coming out of the L.A. Times bloodbath.I want to draw particular attention to the searing piece done by former Times Books Review Editor Steve Wasserman over at Truthdig.com (where I will soon be contributing a piece on Hugo Chavez). Says Wasserman of the uneasy relationship between [...]

There is something very, very depressing about this story of four peace activists being held hostage by hooded gangsters in Iraq.Of course, if these same hostage-takers were holding, say, four privately-contracted "security experts" from Blackwater, I wouldn’t be allowed to call them gangsters. I’d have to refer to them as "the resistance." The Christian Peacemakers [...]

In the recent past I’ve written rather harshly about former Attorney General Ramsey Clark who, once again, finds himself in Baghdad as part of Saddam Hussein’s defense team.  The right-wingers call him a traitor. Some intelligent leftist critics call him the best friend of war criminals. I, on the other hand, just think the poor [...]

Former L.A. Times reporter Ken Reich is doing some kick-butt posting on, well, the bloodbath at the L.A. Times. Look here and here. I’m also adding Ken to my blogroll.

Yet more indications that the Bush Administration plans to soon pull ground troops out of Iraq. This time from The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh.  Says America’s foremost investigative reporter:…A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. Quick, [...]

Even paranoids have real enemies.

Turkey-induced narcolepsy did not stop me from catching what I think to be the most important piece of news buried under this past weekend’s stuffing, potatoes and pie. As the Los Angeles Times reported on its front page, we can no longer say that the Bush administration doesn’t have a plan for Iraq. Looks like [...]

Astounding. Of the hundreds of newspapers in the United States, not a single one of them could bring itself to say an obvious truth: that the Governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson, LIED about having been a 1966 major league draft choice. A Nexis search I just ran shows not one of the scores of [...]

Shortly after 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan, lefty Brit writer Tariq Ali produced a book that posited a "Clash of Fundamentalisms:" a growing battle between Al Qaeda’s Islamic purists and George W. Bush’s Christian primitives.Ali’s was a nice gimmick. But it missed the broader point that is coming to define our own political debate [...]

Pity poor General Pinochet. Just as he was set to have a bunch of sycophants over for lunch today to celebrate his 90th, he gets arrested again. To be exact, the former Chilean dictator was arrested Thursday for the second time in 48 hours.

A departure from politics for Thanksgiving. And what better departure than with alcohol. I know many of you have been dying to know, so I have decided to go public and reveal my tastes in all things liquid. First, I don’t drink much at all – anymore. Never had a drinking problem; really I didn’t. [...]

One of my least favorite turkeys is getting mightily plucked today. Professional demagogue and con man George Galloway is getting skinned and stuffed by my good pal Douggie Ireland.You’ll remember that Galloway is the British M.P. who — because of his alliance with the Islamic Right– opposes the war in Iraq for all of the [...]

With the pre-Thanksgiving news void yawning before us like a gargantuan bowl of gelled gravy, why not take a few minutes to speculate about Election 2008? Great anticipation, as well as anxiety and angst roil the Democratic masses. With the Bush administration sinking into an LBJ-like quagmire of its own construction, the Democrat base can [...]

One might argue that Dick Cheney is a gutter-diving, conniving and amoral politician unworthy of the title of Vice-President of the United States, but I’m unwilling to say that.I mean that’s one conclusion I might have drawn after finally having had the time to go over Cheney’s speech yesterday at the American Enterprise Institute. But [...]

As usual, Fred Kaplan nails it.  Let the Bush administration pound the table and bark that it would never, ever, no way cut and run from Iraq. And let the Democrats simultaneously run from Jack Murtha as if he has the bird flu. Doesn’t matter. Because we’re leaving Iraq anyway. Kaplan makes two important points [...]

  Hold on to your hats, we’re having a Blog Carnival over at Pajamas/OSM.   A carnival  OF PRE-WAR INTELLIGENCE: WHAT WE KNEW, WHEN WE KNEW IT, AND WHAT WE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN GOING INTO THE IRAQ WAR.   On Friday, OSM extended an open-invitation to bloggers everywhere, requesting posts on the topic of pre-war intelligence.  Read on to [...]

Both Republicans and Democrats are rewriting the history of the run-up to the war in Iraq – though hardly in equal portions. Both sides, meanwhile, are avoiding a more central issue which I’ll get to after briefly examining each party’s mendacities. I don’t care to even get into the debate as to whether or not [...]