Had a good dinner tonite with two very wise friends. One is a veteran journo and author who did a good stint in Vietnam (as a reporter and wrote a fab book about it). And the other is a former CIA agent turned author and reporter. The meal was great (as one would expect at [...]

I had a good pal call me this afternoon and as soon as I answered he said: "Apocalyspe? Or just end of the world?"
Took me a few seconds to catch the uptake as I had been locke up in meetings all day and had fortunately missed the non-stop hype over the Swine Flu Pandemic.
At least, [...]

Gonna save all my money and buy a GTO
Get a helmet and a roll bar and I’ll be ready to go
Take it out to Pomona and let ’em know, yeah-yeah
That I’m the coolest thing around
Little buddy, gonna shut you down
When I turn it on, wind it up, blow it out, GTO
Yeah-yeah, Little GTO —Ronnie [...]

The last, great thing about the L.A. Times is happening again this weekend. More than 100,000 people will come to UCLA for the Times-sponsored Festival of Books.
It's always great and this year should be no different.
I'll be appearing Sunday at 2 p.m. in Broad Hall 2160 on the following panel:
Media: Where Do We Go From [...]

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The Obama administration, fortunately, has lost control of the torture issue.  The presisdent, for obvious political reasons, tried to walk the fine line between holding the Bush admin publicly accountable for its institutionalization of torture and going as far as polarizing prosecutions.
Obama did the right thing in releasing the so-called "torture memos." But he was [...]

Tied up at National Assoc of Broadcasters annual meet in Las Vegas.
Back mid-week.

About that big web hub-bub over the handcuffing and expulsion of sometimes Talk Radio shouter John Ziegler from the USC campus the other day... I was there and have my own reaction. But, first, here's the video:

Okay, okay I know this abuse is on the scale of a new Darfur. And the place I work, [...]

Yes, we do. No further comment necessary.

Who knew? The piece I published Wednesday in the L.A. Times bagging on the teabaggers hit a raw nerve and wound up being the most-emailed and most-viewed piece on the entire LATimes.com web site.
Full credit should go to a network of right-wing bloggers who turned their guns on me and provided a bouquet of inbound [...]

Here's my version of the deep meaning of teabagging as it appears in today's L.A. Times.
I have little doubt this will be more or less like the Minutemen Redux... more reporters than protestors.
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I'm quite proud to have Lt. Sunil Dutta of the LAPD as my friend. Any guy who outfishes me, as he easily did up in the Sierras a few years ago, can only be a good man (though I have to say it was a pretty pathetic showing all around. I got skunked and Sunil [...]

No-Drama-Obama quietly and gently has begun to reverse a full fifty years of errant U.S. policy toward Cuba.
The set of executive orders issued Monday lifts all travel restrictions by Cuban-Americans back home.
They also erase the $1200 a year limit imposed by G.W. Bush on the amount of money American residents can send to family member [...]

In the post immediately below this one, I refer to this week's coming anti-Obama tea parties as a form of collective delusion on the par with the The Great Terri Schiavo Revival and The Bill Clinton Is A Serial Killer movements.
My bad. Looks like I left out a fourth collective affliction. Call it The Great [...]

There's a  nifty little web page teaching you how to organize one of those protest tea parties set for Tax Day this week. I suppose that out of respect to net protocol I will provide the link.  But I can also summarize it for you more succinctly. Here's the recipe:
Go to the hardware store.
Buy 1lb. [...]

I spent this past weekend at a journalism conference hosted at Arizona State University -- specifically at the downtown Phoenix campus at the Cronkite School. It's a sparkling, $71 million building crammed with fetching gadgets, computers, digital newsrooms and studios. The J-School also has some truly outstanding faculty and programs.
Too bad it's all being squandered [...]

Don't think for a minute that all the Big Money is just over on the Republican side of the aisle. Plenty of it is, for sure. But ProPublica todqy has published the financial disclosures of Obama's White House staff and these folks aren't exactly "the little guys."
Take a full gander for yourself at the full [...]

The good news: The Obama administration appears to be authentically committed to shutting down "the dark side" strategies of torture, illegal detention and invasive wiretapping. I like that.
The really, really, really bad news: Recent filings by the DOJ demonstrate an equally vigorous will by the White House to prevent casting any probing light on those [...]

Sorry, but my BS Meter went to full tilt when I read this "clarification" from Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times. When he said that saving the Times was a cause similar to saving Darfur, you see, he didn't really mean that saving the Times was like saving Darfur.
He merely meant that [...]

On days like this, when North Korea is fooling around with missiles and some Republican fringies are advocating virtual nuclear war and others are urging armed revolution against a Nazi/Obama regime, I wax very nostalgic for the good old circus-like days of last year's presidential campaign.  It's much. much safer for the world to have [...]