No, not that Bill Bradley. Rather, this Bill Bradley, my pal and colleague who has finally arrived in the blogosphere with his long-awaited New West Notes. Make sure to bookmark it, now. If you’re a blogger, link to it as I have in my blogroll.Bill is the Sacramento-based political operative-turned-reporter who provides, quite simply, the very best insider analysis [...]

Some end of the year pointers:My expanded report on the booking of Pinochet is now posted on Bob Scheer’s Truthdig. Take a peek and leave your comments on it there, not here. (My longer piece on Hugo Chavez is also posted at Truthdig if you haven’t yet seen it).And as they say, on Monty Python… [...]

I always enjoy reading the local L.A. column written by my good pal Andrew Gumbel. Andrew is also a U.S.-based correspondent for The Independent of London.In his latest take, Andrew laments that while rigor mortis is already consuming the Bush Agenda, the rest of us, nevertheless, have to put up with the rotting carcass for the next three [...]

Excelente!We’ve been waiting quite a lonnngggg time for this one. After seven years of sloshing around in political hot water, former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was for the first time today formally fingerprinted and photographed for a mug shot.This comes after the Chilean Supreme Court refused to block his prosecution for the disappearance of political [...]

During the holiday season it’s not uncommon to take a moment –authentic or otherwise—to remember or honor those unjustly persecuted or imprisoned. But here’s a story I saw today with an upbeat twist and a personal connection. Opinionjournal recounts the saga of Cuban writer and novelist Jose Latour  who found a unique way to legally emigrate [...]

Joe Scott has redesigned his blog.I love Joe Scott. Go visit him. 

So even as a stone-cold atheist I was, nevertheless, graced with one nice Xams present this season (other than the irreplaceable company of my immediate family). Just before St. Nick was about to make his rounds I got, instead, a visit from the USPS. In a brown package were some sample copies of my latest [...]

Randy Paul has tossed me this ball currently rolling around the blogosphere. I’m taking ten minutes out of my Xmas break to answer it. And then I’m rolling it over to our readers to make their own lists in the comment section. Ok, GM Roper, I’ll turn it over to your blog as well. Four jobs [...]

I leave you with this reminder of ghosts of Xmas passed.

Update: One of the 11 judges on the FISA court has now resigned in protest of the President’s secret spying program…President Bush’s attempt to shut down public debate on illegal domestic spying by calling revelations about the secret program a “shameful act”  doesn’t seem to be paying off. Few, except the very partisan, are willing to [...]

Randy Paul delves deep to disentangle the Bush clairvoyant-legislative nexus.

I’m mostly on vacation this week, cramming in as many movies as possible. My semi- review of Brokeback Mountain, which I saw Monday night,  will be written and posted sometime in the next few days.Meanwhile, the Bush/NSA spying story continues to fascinate me. I’m not at all surprised by the facts. This sort of abuse [...]

Anyone who doubts that two decades’ worth of U.S. policy in Latin America is now in a shambles, need only review Sunday’s election results out of Bolivia. Radical Evo Morales is going to be the next president.  Here’s the news lead from Reuters:LA PAZ, Bolivia (Reuters) – Evo Morales, a leftist former coca leaf farmer [...]

No way to slice this cake other  than to say that the just-revealed military spying on domestic soil approved by the President is blatantly illegal and politically chilling. There can simply be no justification whatsoever for Bush issuing an executive order in 2002 – as we now find out—allowing the National Security Agency to snoop on phone [...]

Now here’s a headline. George W. Bush has “caved in” to the proposed ban on torture. Says the Friday Los Angeles Times: "After resisting for months, President Bush caved in to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Thursday and said he would accept a formal ban on the cruel or inhumane treatment of detainees in U.S. custody anywhere [...]

Here on one page is everything that’s dead wrong with the Sensenbrenner-King immigration enforcement bill now moving through House approval.I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen such a senseless, demagogic and counter-productive measure.The more you care about controlling the borders and rationalizing and regulating immigration, the more you should oppose this bill which will [...]

The most trafficked post on this blog this past month was our recent debate on free speech — on whether or not it was the right thing to do when some University of Connecticut students shouted down Ann Coulter. Thanks to a couple of  interesting reactions we’ve received from other bloggers, we’re going back for a [...]

Before we’re washed away in a tsunami of reporting and spin over the elections in Iraq, I thought I’d squeeze in one more post.It seems everyone on both sides of the war –pro and con — are now in confessional mode. First, there was the President’s big bang fourth in a series of  Four Big [...]

My full-length analytical excavation on Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is now posted on Truthdig.com, the new web magazine edited by Bob Scheer.Take a read of it and join the conversation.

When I think of the composition of the U.S. Senate, I think of a gobbling flock of five-score gaseous peacocks, all of whom get up every morning and see a future President in the mirror.As discomforting as that image might be, it’s a whole lot more re-assuring than visualizing the make-up of the House! The lower house [...]