Why are the historic black civil rights groups mostly MIA on the political mobilization of immigrants?
Earl Ofari Hutchinson paints the picture -- and it ain't pretty.

We do get email. Some of it is banal. Some of it is abusive. Some of it is truly extraordinary in its thoughtfulness. And a lot of it came my way as a result of the heated and extended discussions about immigration we've hand on this blog this past week.
One email I received out of [...]

My daughter took me and my wife last night to see "V Is For Vendetta" and as much as I didn't want to like the movie, I found myself standing up and cheering by the end of the flick.
I didn't want to like it because I had read that the story -- set in [...]

"I love Puerto Ricans and Negroes -- as long as they don't live next door, so love me, love me, I'm a liberal..." -- song fragment by Phil Ochs.
I've got a story to tell you about the illegal aliens in my own family. I'll do that in a moment. But first...
I was thinking about [...]

Can't remember the last time there was any good news from Congress. Finally, an exception.
As immigrant protests still rippled across the country Monday, a key Republican-dominated Senate panel has -- against all odds-- approved liberalized immigration reform. Racing against a deadline imposed by the Republican leadership, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 12-6 to approve the [...]

Updated material and a round-up of responses to this sizzling topic are to be found at the bottom of this post.
Saturday saw the largest political demonstration in the history of Los Angeles, and one of the biggest in recent American history.
A half-million people or more flooded two dozen blocks of downtown L.A. to give voice [...]

Randy Paul reminds us that this Friday the 24th is the 30th anniversary of the installation of the military dictatorship in Argentina (and of the nefarious role played at the time by a certain Dr. Strangelove Kissinger).
Randy's absolutely right in underlining that while the dictatorship in neighboring Chile was grabbing all the headlines, the level [...]

Thanks to the Democratic Left list-serve I have come across a stunningly intelligent posting from a previously unknown (to me) and mysterious blogger. Oso Raro over at Slaves of Academe is one smart gal -- though that's all she let's us know about her.
But what a thrillingly intelligent (and wonderfully long) essay she has penned about [...]

So, now Bush has formally passed the buck on the war in Iraq. Wonderful. Let someone else sort it out after he's retired and back out full-time on the golf links.
The other day I mentioned that Bush is behaving like an autistic. Now, I've written a column about it for my latest piece in L.A. Weekly:
For the [...]

I was part of a pretty good debate this morning on Bay Area radio about impeachment and censure.
I was up against Bob Fertik of Democrats.com who took the usual Internet Liberal line: The Republicans are "Nazis" and "war criminals," we're on the doorstep of fascism, the voting machines are rigged and, oh, yes, we demand [...]

I'm still sick, a bit under the (glorious Southern California) weather. So very light blogging today.
I'm also getting really tired of the President sounding like a broken record on Iraq. It was last year that my good friend Tim Frasca came up with the notion that Bush seems afflicted with a sort of autism. [...]

Lefty British writer Johann Hari has had enough. One of the more prominent liberals who supported the war in Iraq, he's now throwing in the towel. His website reproduces a column he wrote for The Independent of London declaring his "melancholic mea culpa." He was pushed over the edge, he says, but watching just how routine [...]

France may be headed for something that Americans wouldn’t recognize if it bit them in the butt: a good, old-fashioned, government-toppling general strike.
Students and labor unions have united to stare down a new measure that would allow French employers to hire young workers on a conditional two-year basis during which they could be fired [...]

This is the third anniversary of the tragic U.S. invasion of Iraq. I think the very best reporting on this sad subject is currently coming from the greatly under-appreciated Michael Ware of Time magazine. No single reporter has been more outspoken, more determined to challenge the official mythologies. 
I see no way out of Iraq in the short [...]

Lots of important news out there today... but I'm going to stick on the immigration reform story for the moment. It's a monumental story that is finally getting to the Senate floor and yet is being overshadowed in the news by the war, censure, and the general crisis of the Bush administration.
So I'm purposefully overcompensating [...]

A big thank you to Josh Marshall for so neatly expressing a thought I’ve been awkwardly tussling with for some weeks.
I’ve written here and elsewhere about my doubts over a Democratic strategy of impeachment or even censure. I’ve made my arguments, but I think Marshall makes them much better.
His latest column in The Hill [...]

** Update: Looks like as soon as today, Thursday, it quite literally might be now or never when it comes to immigration reform. The Senate Judiciary Committee, we learn, has chalked up a grand total of about 10 hours this month in its feeble attempt to fashion a meaningful immigration compromise. Most of the Republicans [...]

Bravo to Salon for publishing its new special package on the Abu Ghraib nightmare.  Collected now in one place are 279 chilling photographs and 19 horror videos direct from the files of Pentagon investigators documenting the barbaric torture we now all know about if not fully acknowledge.
Words alone fail to describe the inhumanity that took [...]

Can someone please organize a poker game for me with Pelosi and Reid? Please! My posting on this now up on The Nation group blog.
P.S. Also see this consideration by colleague Bill Greider.

Who knew that end-of-history-guy turned repentant-ex-neocon, Francis Fukuyama, was secretly such a swingin' party animal? An aficionado of Las Vegas?
I just stumbled upon  a great debate between Fukuyama and Bernard-Henri Levy where they mix it up over the deeper meaning of Vegas. And Fukuyama Rocks!
He chides BHL for scorning Vegas in his new book American Vertigo, [...]