Los Angeles burning. We’re covering it at our USC-based Neon Tommy.

I woke up yesterday morning with quite a start. Some automatic timer or another had clicked on my TV and I opened my eyes to see the horror of a  C-SPAN  rebroadcast of a Virginia town hall on health care featuring Democratic Rep. Jim Moran and Howard Dean.  And… a roomful of shouting screwballs. Let [...]

I’ve been casually watching the wall-to-wall coverage of Ted Kennedy’s demise and his legacy and one thought keeps occurring to me: Just how small, petty and sad most of the rest of our esteemed Senate looks compared to him. I make no illusions about Kennedy’s well-known human frailities. A boozer, a skirt-chaser, and someone who [...]

Not much I can say about the late Teddy Kennedy that you won’t read or hear somewhere else in the next few hours or days.  But I can add a few reflections based on having been with him on the campaign trail several times.

Here’s my half-hour on-air interview with Rep. Henry Waxman, the powerful chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee about what should and what might actually be in any final health care bill.  We also talk about torture prosecution and his preference for something more akin to a truth commission.

A great series. Can’t wait for it to return next year.  The daughter writes about it here.

Ah, so this is what it has come down to… threatening suspects with electric drills, guns to their heads, raping of their wives and murdering their children. Cue up the Lee Greenwood music and put your hand over your heart.  It’s all official now and very much on the record. And yet, watching the news [...]

Defying all conventional wisdom and general expectations, it certainly seems that the appointment of a special prosecutor to probe CIA torture cases is almost now a certainty. What would come of such an investigation, of course, remains anyone’s guess. But a confluence of factors makes the probe itself as much as inevitable.

Glenn Greenwald gleefully leads the evisceration of The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder over the dramatic revelations released today in advance copy of Tom Ridge’s book. Ambinder’s piece is a monumental piece of foolishness — the sort that should be clipped, laminated and mounted in some hall of shame. Anyway, Ridge hardly tells the rest of us [...]

A few days ago I was openly speculating as to whether or not Obama was outfoxing the Repubs or capitulating to them on health care. I confessed that during the campaign last year, every time I felt he wasn’t pushing hard enough, Obma proved me wrong by standing steady and stable and cool. I also [...]

My post  a few days ago on Pacifica Radio’s plunging audience numbers stirred the usual hornet’s nest. Except that these hornets don’t carry very much of a sting.  I was peppered with objections to my piece from various Pacifica apparatchiks and national board members who –in private emails to me and among themselves– accused me [...]

(Photo courtesy of TalkingPointsMemo) A dozen people spotted outside the doors of an Obama event in Phoenix on Monday brazenly carrying firearms — including assault rifles? Sorry, folks. But calmly, cooly, and dispassionately as possible, I can’t find any words to describe these folks as anything other than “gun nuts.”  There is something seriously, seriously [...]

My daughter Natasha does some great front-line reporting and picture snapping at this past weekend’s rally for health care in Los Angeles for the new blog, The Awl. Well, not, exactly a rally. Just thousands of people lining up for free health and dental care, as if in Uganda, except  –of course– in our own [...]

During last year’s presidential campaign, both publicly and privately, I found myself second-guessing Barack Obama on how he should move ahead. Sometimes I kept my thoughts to myself. Sometimes I put it in print, laying out a playbook for him to follow, offering a counter-strategy to some grievous mistake I thought he was making.

Readers know that a couple of times a year I call out the collapsing institution known as Pacifica Radio. It’s that time again, now that new ratings numbers show that local affiliate KPFK has reached an historic low in listenership levels. The slow-motion demise of the five station “progressive” network is one of the primary [...]

Why newspapers didn’t get it from the beginning.  The link is what makes the Web what it is, linking people with each other and with information.

By the time you read this it will probably be official. John Edwards will have formally admitted what we already know. That’s he’s the father of that there baby that popped up in the middle of his campaign. Ok,  it’s sort of old news. But in these dog days of August when “the news” is [...]

We’ve come a long way since 1994 now that a diabetic  Harry and Louise are just about old enough to go up before a government-run death panel. Some of the same backers of the anti-Hillarycare movement are now spending MAJOR bucks in an ad campaign to support Obama’s health care reform. None other than Big [...]

This three-way is coming mostly from the Right. But for Soviet history buffs and self-identified Marxists, it’s worth a good listen. It’s not dumb.

My good friend Peter Dreier has a good piece on the great American labor civil war currenty underway and vastly under-reported. Check it out.