Greetings from Seattle where Tuesday I will be attending the AFL-CIO Town Hall with John Edwards.
Meanwhile, in numerous cities across the country there will be marches and demonstrations marking the first anniversary of the great wave of pro-immigrant rallies that shook the political establishment.
It's anybody's guess how big or small they will be. My guess [...]

I'm in transit Monday and won't be blogging until late Monday night. I'm heading up to Seattle to watch John Edwards appear at an AFL-CIO town hall. Stay tuned.

What a non-event the first Democratic Presidential Debate turned out to be.
Nothing happened. Little was said. Fringe candidate Mike Gravel stole the show. It was like a poker hand in which the other 7 players listlessly checked the flop and the one guy who you'd never seen before sitting on the button took down [...]

With virtually no debate, and certainly with no public debate, the California state senate have fast-track approval to the largest legalized gambling expansion in recent history. There'll still be a fight over the expansion in the state assembly. But it's amazing what a couple of million dollars in campaign contributions will buy you... the best [...]

"Deliberate and calculated lies" is how U.S. Army Ranger Pat Tilman's brother described what the Bush admistration said about the former football star's death in Afghanistan.
Also a former Army Ranger, Kevin Tilman told a House committee on Tuesday that the Pentagon version of his brother's death was "utter fiction" -- a crude attempt at jingoistic [...]

Some short notes on current news:
Bye-Bye Boris Yeltsin. And good riddance, as well.  One of the most over-rated world leaders of modern times passes into the great yonder. Celebrated now as a great democrat and dis-assembler of the Soviet Union, the frequently pickled former Russian President was a non-stop disaster. Yes, he dismantled the Soviet [...]

Not a few observers have noted the Democratic silence on gun control issues in the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre. I saw Montana's Dem Governor Brian Schweitzer on Bill Maher's show over the weekend and he frankly made an ass of himself on the subject. All he could do was stammer about the [...]

With an epidemic of public apologies sweeping the nation -- Alberto Gonzales and Don Imus apologizing for themselves, CBS and NBC apologizing for Imus, and now NBC apologizing for running the Cho videos-- let's hope that Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid doesn't decide to retract what he said earlier today.
That the war in Iraq is [...]

Over at USC, which is one of the places I work, my friends at the Knight New Media Center are holding a four day conference on the Internet strategies of the '08 political campaigns. As Knight director Vikki Porter says of the moment:
"With more than 18 months until Election Day 2008, it is already the [...]

Back tonight.

When I got up this morning and switched on CNN (as part of my daily ritual to make sure the market hasn't crashed) I saw the news about Virginia Tech and hid back under the covers.
This sort of barbaric massacre makes me cringe to be a human being.
The numbers are very difficult to assimilate. They [...]

This administration had produced a truly extraordinary cast of brigands and bullies. From the snarling, elusive and non-responsive Vice-President, to the thieving former majority leader Tom DeLay, to the horrible John Bolton, the intransigent and failed Don Rumsfeld, and now an encore performance from the execrable Paul Wolfowitz.
I'd like to know from just where these [...]

As some of you have figured out, I'm now writing an occasional series of pieces on Las Vegas gambling for the L.A. Times. Here's my latest in this Sunday's edition:
I wasn't three minutes into one of the slot tournaments that can be found throughout this city when I swear that the woman competing next [...]

I saw columnist Jason Whitlock on TV Thursday night and loved the way he cut through all of the pious Imus trashing.
So I looked up his latest column on the matter and I loved it. So, fire me...

The Don Imus saga has now become a national farce. We will now all sup on his flesh and feel oh so very satisfied about ourselves. He is bad. We are good.
Imus has been fired by NBC and CBS who still employ, nationwide, a brigade of local talk radio racists, homophobes and nativists.
The members [...]

No, of course not. No way the Bush administration policies are stretching thin the U.S. military. The Pentagon is adding three months to the basic year-long combat deployment for active duty G.I.'s because...because? Certainly not by popular demand of the troops or their families. But because this is the only way to maintain the current [...]

Though I plinked yesterday at CBS/NBC's hypocrisy in the Don Imus affair, I spent all of Tuesday rather conflicted about the whole mess.  While I think that Imus is a horse's ass for what he said, I didn't figure on him being converted into the mass national expiation figure he has become overnight.
I mean just [...]

It would be uplifting if the Democrats were as decisive about pulling us out of Iraq as they are about withdrawing from a debate on Fox News.
As I'm still in physical recovery mode and the doctor has told me to keep my blood pressure down, I really had to think twice, three times about posting [...]

So CBS Radio and NBC News have slapped Don Imus with a two week suspension from the air for his calling the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos."
Lucky for Imus that he didn't call them "big-strappin' coons" because here in the joint CBS-NBC Book of Standards I see that particular phrase carries a three-week penalty. [...]

One of the more intriguing sub-plots I'm following this political season is the ongoing crash of one John McCain.
As Dick Cavett asked the other day about the Arizona senator and GOP presidential candidate, "What was he thinking?"
Immediately after Sunday evening's wonderful debut of the first of the last nine episodes of The Sopranos on HBO, [...]