My blogfather and all-around Good Guy, Micah Sifry, has written a smart response to a WaPo posting on an emerging effort to field a bi-partisan “unity” ticket in the 2008 presidential elections. “Unity 08,” as it calls, itself aims at using the Web to channel voter disgruntlement into drafting a presidential ticket made up of [...]

A new spate of armed attacks and car bombs have killed dozens throughout Iraq, including two reporters for CBS News. The murderous outburst only further serves to question the pablum spooned out last week by Bush and Blair about the milestone progress supposedly being made in the war. Will the first reader who can actually [...]

Some random notes I’ve collected over this holiday weekend: The Jefferson Case: Is it just me? Or do you also find it rather odd that a bi-partisan consensus on Capitol Hill is willing to make the FBI raid on Congressman Jefferson’s office but not General Hayden’s NSA phone spying scheme a constitutional crisis? Even within [...]

That was kind of fast, wasn’t it? NSA chief General Mike Hayden was confirmed as CIA Director by the Senate today by a 78-15 vote. Imagine what the vote would have looked like if he weren’t so controversial! We couldn’t afford another week or two to look into his program of sorting through everyone’s phone [...]

The immigration reform bill finally passed by the Senate, even with its flaws, moves the ball on this issue significantly forward. Somewhere around our own 40 yard line is where I’d make the call. The advance is significant because for two entire decades, all forward movement had been stalled. During the 1990′s, the Clinton Administration fumbled [...]

I’m still on semi-hiatus (i.e. working) but wanted to draw your attention to my just-published longish feature story on the California gubernatorial primary, less than two weeks from now. A few postings from earlier in the month touched on this subject of the Angelides-Westly match, but the above story is a more definitive and detailed [...]

I’m currently spending a few days in a remote, undisclosed location trying to catch up wih some writing I owe. So, I’m running a half-day or so behind the Official News Cycle. It wasn’t until Tuesday evening, then, that I finally got around to reading the NYTimes front pager on the Clinton marriage. Some folks [...]

What a great and cynical shell game we are watching now in Iraq. We are to celebrate the formation of a new government in Baghdad as one of those rare moments of “good news” for the White House. Yet, the new Iraqi government which faces insurgency and war has neither a Minister of Interior nor of Defense.  [...]

This is a point I’ve been trying to repeatedly make for the two years I’ve been blogging. Glad to see there’s some growing recognition of what seems to be an obvious truth. Though with his chief client now down to a 29% approval rating and with his party split and on the verge of losing [...]

Last year I bashed linguist and amateur political analyst George Lakoff for his absurd suggestion that “progressives” should concentrate on what he called “framing” of the issues. I thought it staggering that Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean and a slew of other Dems were flying this guy in and out of Washington to repeatedly listen to what, I [...]

It’s a rare occasion when I find myself so wholeheartedly agreeing with what are the standard sort of “blazing straddle” nostrums that pass for unsigned editorials in the New York Times. But I have to say, I can’t disagree with a single line in this one: May 21, 2006 Editorial An Immigration Bottom Line This [...]

I tuned in just long enough to catch this beaut of a line from NSA boss General Hayden’s Senate confirmation hearings Thursday as new CIA chief: “The math was pretty straightforward,” Hayden said. “I could not not do this.” I almost burst out laughing to hear the General use this phrase to describe his decision in [...]

OK, OK, I know. I’ve been pretty tough on Venezuelan President and international lefty heart-throb Hugo Chavez. So, in a once-in-a-lifetime, albeit minor, concession to my critics, I’m posting this more sympathetic piece on Chavez from lefty Brit journo Johann Hari. Note, I say it is a minor gesture on my part as Hari also [...]

It’s now impossible to escape the sensation that, so far, we’ve only seen the tiny tip of the iceberg when it comes to the government’s phone-spying activities. Those who claim that the NSA’s scanning of numbers –supposedly disconnected from names and ID’s– is harmless and non-intrusive take the cake for disingenuousness. Anyone web-literate enough to find and read this blog [...]

The gifted writer Ian Buruma had an excellent piece in last Sunday’s London Times scratching away furiously at one of my favorite little rashes: those angst and guilt-ridden “intellectuals” and “artists” of the West who are always ready to worship tin-pot authoritarians (as long as they are anti-American). Move over Cynthia Plaster-Caster and make room [...]

One of the more amusing (and sometimes equally depressing) aspects of the current immigration debate is to watch so many grand-children and great grand-children of immigrants beat their chests and self-righteously proclaim that their families were “legal” rather than “illegals.”  There are, you see, the worthy immigrants (those already ceritified as being here) and the unworthy, those [...]

Let’s get a couple of things straight about the immigration speech President George W. Bush unreeled Monday night from the Oval Office. His address had nothing to do with actual border policy and everything to do with domestic electoral politics. The real mission of the 6,000 National Guard troops he has called out is to [...]

After George W. Bush makes his first major nationwide prime time TV broadcast in five years Monday night, there’s going to be a lot of blood on the floor to mop up. While simultaneously trying to appease his own Right and pushing a comprehensive reform program right over their heads, Bush is going to tear that immigration baby right into two. While the [...]

Roll over, Jack Webb. The LAPD has started a blog. What a great idea. From the pleistocene era to the new world in just about a decade. The blog’s only a few days old and still a bit stiff. A message from Chief Bill Bratton and even some responses to recent editorials in the local [...]

I’m still waiting to see that much-predicted but still hard-to-see backlash against the recent upsurge of the pro-immigrant movement.  Yeah, a couple of hundred Minutemen are putting on bullet-proof vests and getting inordinate amount of  publicity for their tiny numbers… Meanwhile, word comes that the U.S. Senate has reached an agreement to pass a compromise, [...]