Gavin Newsom is out.  That was fast. And merciful. Cancel the election.

L.A. loses its greatest police chief in generations this week. Goodbye to Bill Bratton who should and has been honored for turning around one of the most notoriously and dangerous police outfits in the U.S.  He will be sorely, sorely missed.  His successor will be chosen from among three fine candidates. But hard to imagine [...]

Read here.

It’s easy to complain that too many Americans are apolitical, apathetic or downright cynical about political change. It’s even easier to understand why they are.

In case anybody cares, and you shouldn’t, I am now officially agnostic on just how important if at all the “public option” is in supporting the eventual health care bill.  I have just heard too many good arguments on all sides of the question to be able to persuasively argue one or the other. I [...]

I’m going to agree with Josh Marshall on this one. I have no problem with the White House stepping aside from the fiction that Fox News is just some regular old news network and is not, in fact, a blatantly partisan and blatantly anti-Obama propaganda machine. Let me be clear also in saying that Fox [...]

I have to say I learned a lot from this piece by Dr. Aaron Carroll who is NOT a right-winger but is, in fact, a supporter of single-payer i.e. total government-run  health care.

Well, after all the town hall hystrionoics of this past summer, after a tea-marinated series of accusations of creeping socialism, the rise of Birthers and Beck and the suggestion that the Presisdent of the United States is an illegal alien, the results are now in.

Om Monday, the Obama administration Justice Department is announcing a clearer policy on handling medical marijuana sellers and users. It will no longer arrest or prosecute those who are in compliance with state laws. There are currently more than a dozen states where “medical marijuana” sales are legal. The Bush administration, for the most part, [...]

What a shock and horror. The balloon boy show was exactly that – a hoax. Who could ever guessed that? Leaving aside CNN, CBS, NBC etc. The wack job Dad in Colorado is now going to be arrested. Fine by me. Take the Mom with them, please.

If bloggers ran the world, they would crowd out the real news like this: God knows what they would do. Maybe something totally trivial like doing two hours live on national TV following a random uninsured American as he or she tries to get treatment for severe stomach pain in an over-crowded urban ER. What [...]

Well, here we are. Or are we? What does the evolution of health care legislation over the past months, including the passage of the Baucus bill by the Senate Finance Committee with a yes vote from Republican Olympia Snowe, really mean? Is this watered-down, half-arsed measure the basic outline for what an inevitable sell-out on [...]

I watched Michael Moore’s latest, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” and found pretty much what I expected.  My short review is that if Michael Moore could only take himself out of his own films, and maybe even stop directing them, they’d be pretty good.

Readers of this blog know that at the beginning of the year I wrote the autopsy on the eviscerated L.A. Weekly.  Some critics, however, thought I had prematurely performed last rites as in mid-August the not-so-smart corporate owners of the Village Voice Media chain made a decision that kinda sorta looked smart. A few weeks [...]

It all began woth GOP Party Leader Limbaugh wishing failure on the American presidency.  Yay! Then increasingly fringe conservatives applauded when Obama’s plea for Chicago as home to the Olympics was rebuffed. Huzzah! Now the Republican National Committee and its goofball leader calls the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to American President Obama “unfortunate. [...]

It’s either the flu or a bad cold but it’s got me out of commission.  So far no spouting of pointed ears nor a squiggly tail.  Tha-a-a-at’s all, folks.

Another great piece by Clay Shirky. I mean, if newspapers fail, who’s gonna be left to write the horoscope, get local high school football scores and write Granny’s column on apple cider and the month of May? The horror.

Don’t you just love it how the keyboard bombardiers and their cable TV echo chamber are outraged –just outraged– that Barack Obama has had General McChrystal’s report now for three whole weeks and STILL hasn’t decided how to move forward, or backward, in Afghanistan? My, my. It was OK for George W. Bush to precipitously [...]

I spent the last three days at the yearly convention of the Online News Association up in San Francisco and in between fits of impatience over a tad too much techno-babble, I could catch glimpses of the future i.e. about five minutes from now.  It is truly amazing to see how quickly and broadly tools [...]

I’m up at the Online News Assoc convention in San Francisco thru Sunday so talk amongst yourselves. No firearms, please.