A Sunday Night Update Hope you all had a good Thanksgiving. I did. I made a concerted effort to Tune Out The World for four days. And I was quite successful, thank you very much. My wife and I had a first-rate dinner in a faux Tuscan restaurant overlooking a man-made lake near Las Vegas [...]

My kind of stuffing. See you in a couple of days.

The bloodshed in Mumbai continues to be horrific. One of my great grad students, Anant Goenka, hails from that part of the world and is blogging about it here. Check it out as he will stay on top of it.

I think Sean Penn is a great actor. He ought to stick to acting, though. Because he is to journalism what his ex-wife Madonna is to rocket science. There was SO much I was tempted to write about this horribly embarrassing “interview” with Raul Castro Penn has on the cover of The Nation magazine this [...]

Barack Obama’s economic team is now in place and it’s made up of centrists and Wall Street insiders. Nobody from ACORN or SDS made the inner circle. Likewise, with the gelling of his national security team. Hillary as SoS, Bob Gates probably staying on for a while, and Dennis Kucinich or even Howard Dean unlikely [...]

It’s a tad ironic to think that 20 years ago, the same tiny impoverished Central American nation of Nicaragua that dominated U.S. news headlines has now turned completely absent from our national conversation for more than the past decade? Nica-who? Two years ago, with only a minimalist flurry of headlines, Sandinista revolutionary leader Daniel Ortega [...]

The Three Dumbest Men in America Dana Milbank dismantles the three clunkers who have run the American auto industry into the ditch. This is not about a bail-out for corporate greed heads. This should be a discussion about immediate government intervention to save millions of American taxpayers their jobs and their livelihood. We begin by [...]

Below you will find a screenshot of the L.A. Times at about 10:00 p.m. Thursday night. The Attorney General of the United States collapses on stage and might be dead. American car companies and millions of American families teeter on the edge. The stock market fell more than 400 points and 5% with fears of [...]

Damn, I wish we could just yank the Clintons off the stage once and for all. My only slim hope is that they are few years older than I am so maybe I can actually survive them. As many have pointed out, the No-Drama-Obama operation is now bordering on public soap opera — thanks to [...]

OK, so the media has a new meta-narrative to keep itself occupied during the lull of the transition: is Barack Obama really Clinton III instead of Change?  First, John Podesta as transition chief. Then, Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff. Next, Eric Holder as AG. And maybe even Hillary as head of State. Conclusion: Obama [...]

I find it mostly a relief that the campaign is over and it’s been great to throttle down in consumption and processing of news. I almost feel normal again and have celebrated my more relaxed state of mind by adding a spiffy Samsung giant HDTV into the household. Here’s a few thoughts on some things [...]

For those of you who live either in the Chicago or Los Angeles area, I have a question for you. Have you ever seen Governor Sarah Palin and Tribune Company Innovation Guru Lee Abrams together in the same room at the same time? Come on, they’ve got to be the same person. Governor Gidget must [...]

I use weekends to post stories that are more important to me than to many others. Let me then celebrate the legal win achieved by my valued friend John L. Smith, prominent columnist for The Las Vegas Review-Journal. For three years it’s been a horrific David versus Goliath battle for him against a cockroach that [...]

Here’s a link not to my latest, but rather to my LAST column for L.A. Weekly.  I will have a lot more to say about this — probably over the weekend or early next week. As I have briefly mentioned before, this separation was inevitable since the New Times group took over the Weekly a [...]

Corporate Tool With all due respect to the skepticism of such revolutionaries as Judith Butler and others who disdain the corporate tool known as Barack Obama, there’s an entire new generation who went out and actually did the grinding work of defeating the Bush administration (and of at least cracking the door open to some [...]

Here’s some of the predictable bile from a so-called “unrepentant Marxist.” He’s very upset that Barack Obama has been elected and has succeeded in co-opting so many folks like me. It’s quite a thing when one is so virulently accused of being “decent.” I apologize. I did learn something from him, however. I hadn’t known [...]

Mostly, I’m going to take the next couple of days off from blogging.  I need a post-election breather, I have a lot of other work to do and I want to start thinking about redesigning and upgrading this blog.  So posting might be spotty for the rest of this week. One quick thought: Can’t tell [...]

My long-time friend Michael Balter has a stinging rebuke for those on the “Left” who are all worked up that Barack Obama has not appointed a “progressive” cabinet: he wasn’t elected by leftists. Shocking, isn’t it? A second shock, Barack Obama was the candidate of the Democratic Party. Not of the Peace and Freedom Party. [...]

There was a nice big protest Saturday night out in front of the L.A. Mormon Temple. Lots of people are upset by the way the good Christians of the LDS financially supported the successful campaign to strip California’s gays and lesbians of their rights to be married. Nice, little Christians. This seems just a tad [...]

Driving home from Las Vegas Wednesday eve I had the time to slowly mull over the electrifying events of the previous 24 hours and the significance of a President Obama. Here’s a few more conclusions I’ve reached. Looking forward… First, that absolutely, positively, definitively almost nobody has assimilated the full impact that will hit this [...]