Wednesday’s Top Stories: McCain Comes Out of Closet: Announces Engagement to Bill Ayers Dow Hits 15,000: GM Acquires Credit Suisse Los Angeles Times Expands Editorial Staff: Paper Adds Afternoon Edition Osama Bin Laden Makes Dramatic Public Appearance: Attends Son’s Bar Mitzvah Gala Rush Limbaugh Quits Show: Talk Jock Donates His Time to Habitat for Humanity [...]

My daughter takes on John McCain’s daughter. What more could a father ask for? I guess it would be enough to just NOT be Bristol Palin’s dad. But getting to be Natasha’s pop is an extra treat.

Just how bad off were we with George W. Bush in the eyes of the American people?  Says the WaPo: The number of Americans who believe that the nation is headed in the right direction has roughly tripled since Barack Obama’s election, and the public overwhelmingly blames the excesses of the financial industry, rather than [...]

The number one top emailed story on the LATimes.com blog Sunday night is “How to Make A Good Resume.”  I didn’t know that many people still worked there.

John Yoo, Al Gonzalez, David Addington and a couple of the other Bush admin lawyers who helped devise policies of torture are now in legal jeopardy because of an investigation by the same Spanish magistrate who busted and jailed Augusto Pinochet. No European vacations or cross-Atlantic junkets for them this summer. Oh, Happy Day. Please [...]

Wonkette gets it right accrediting CNN’s Ed Henry with writing “the worst article in American history.” And I’ve got a few words to say about him — and pro-poverty crusader Chuck Todd– as well. ——————– + ———————- Please subscribe to my Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/marc_cooper Watch my regular Video Blogs by subscribing at http://www.youtube.com/McooperTube or [...]

“Poor Mexico. So far from God.  So Close to the United States,” as Porfirio Diaz was credited with saying. How close? Well, about $25 billion close — in revenue to Mexican narco gangs from sales of drugs to tens of millions of smokin’, poppin’, sniffin’ gringos. You think we’d be in trouble if the Chinese [...]

Obama held his second full-on press conference, reminding us starkly of the intelligence gap between himself and the goof he replaced. That alone was reassuring. Here’s my reaction:  the totality of his message was much greater than the sum of its parts. Not one thing in particular he said contained any major drama. But the [...]

I took the time yesterday — Sunday at lunch — to sit down and acutally read as much as I could of The Los Angeles Times. And then I finished my appetizer and ordered the main dish. I was famished. There was certainly some valuable reporting to be found. I repeat….some. I found the most [...]

Is Frank Rich overstating it when he says dealing with the economic deluge is Barack Obama’s “Katrina Moment?” Hardly. Please subscribe to my Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/marc_cooper Watch my regular Video Blogs by subscribing at http://www.youtube.com/McooperTube or at http://www.vimeo.com/channels/35484

Welcome to my first of what I hope will be a regular series of video blogs. In this premier edition I rap the knuckles of the L.A. Times media columnist who actually argues that only real-life newspaper reporters, not lazy bloggers, are immune to professional political spin. Judith Miller, anyone? Here’s the Jim Rainey piece [...]

Josh Marshall makes a great point about the whole, rotten AIG bonus mess. It’s not really about the money, in reality a drop in the bucket. It’s about who’s running the show. Us or them? The problem is what appears to be the president’s mortifying impotence in the face of bankers and financiers who created [...]

That $165 million affront to the American people committed by the bloated piggies over at AIG has quickly turned into a trillion dollar sand trap for thenObama administration. The righteous populist outrage threatens to undermine the future of needed government intervention to save us from a Great Depression 2.0.  But who’s gonna wanna give a [...]

Let’s see if I got this right. We are less safe than we were 56 days ago. Having abolished the use of torture makes us weak. A return to constitutional norms is dangerous. The Bush administration was a “wonderful success story.” “We have accomplished just about everything we set out to do” in Iraq. George [...]

The candidate of the former leftist FMLN guerrilla front was officially elected President of El Salvador Sunday night. The ascension to power of Maurico Funes, a fomer CNN commentator, is the final death rattle of the Cold War in Central America — and not a decade too soon. With Funes’ election, history has come full [...]

Hey, you old timer: Remember the FMLN, the Salvadoran Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front? The guerrilla group that was at the center of Ronald Reagan’s version of the Axis of the Evil? Well, come Sunday, the FMLN is favored to win the presidential elections in El Salvador. This would displace more than two decades of [...]

In the previous post you will find a ritualistic trashing of the Republicans. But the Democrats are no prize either.  Here’s a Politico story that follows up my post of the other night on how the Dems are likely to wuss out on EFCA. I wish it wasn’t so easy to predict this kind of [...]

What’s the over/under on just how much longer Michael Steele can remain as chair of the RNC? I haven’t set a betting line yet, but maybe one of you intrepid reader/risk takers will.  Matt Cooper does some digging and finds that the shortest term for an RNC Chair was 4 months, back in 1953. I [...]

The most important piece of labor legislation in more than seven decades was introduced today in both houses of Congress and we barely heard the other hand clapping. EFCA, the Employee Free Choice Act began to snake its way through Capitol Hill with little real action expected sometime in the summer. Called the “card-check” bill, [...]

It was with deeply mixed emotions that I listened to President Obama’s speech today as he signed the executive order lifting the restrictions on federally-funded embryonic stem cell research. There was pride in a president who, 50 days into his mandate, used a few strokes of the pen to erase one of the dumbest acts [...]