No more than five minutes after I tweeted out the previous post about Israel did the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs tweet back two rebuttals, as seen in the above screen shot.  I would ordinarily be flattered if I thought the IsraeliMFA really gave a hoot what I said. But either the MFA is using [...]

A simple question: How many more recruits did Hamas gain from the killing of 19 civilians in international waters by the Israeli Defense Forces?

So, a picture, they say, is sometimes worth a thousand words. But what’s the value of a thousand or ten thousand pictures of the same thing over and over again? Often it is numbness, paralysis. My good pal Micah Sifry argues a corollary of this in a great new post about the unfolding catastrophe in [...]

Here’s my slideshow from Saturday’s Phoenix rally against SB1070 — the Papers, Please law. And below you can also find my brief text report on Neon Tommy. I guess I should also throw this in: a couple of self-proclaimed Nazi counter-demonstrators showed up armed with semi-automatic sidearms and one nut job with a short-barrelled shotgun. [...]

PHOENIX–  I come to Arizona a lot but it’s been a while since I have sensed such a strange and uneasy atmosphere. Saturday is the kick-off a “freedom summer” to protest the Papers Please anti-immigrant law. And while there are reportedly busloads of Californians heading this way, it’s anybody’s guess if the organizers can really [...]

What better way to spend Memorial Day Weekend than joining the protests against the asinine Papers Please immigration law? So, I’m heading to Phoenix and in between doing some more reporting on John McCain’s Last Stand, I plan to join the Saturday march against the onerous SB1070. Hope some of you can join me. Some [...]

Barack Obama maybe on the verge of drowning in the catastrophic oil spill.  BP created it. But Obama owns it. He ought to, at least, vigorously own the cresting public anger. It’s not the president’s responsibility, or fault, that the U.S. government does not possess the technology or know-how to plug the gushing pipe.  But, [...]

Congrats to Texas! The Longhorn State becomes the first in the nation to make a concerted effort to offer public school students the same education that informed and shaped the world view of the President of the United States.  Yes, it’s true. On Friday, the Republican-dominated State Board of Education voted to adopt a new [...]

Poor Rand Paul. He kept on digging himself deeper and deeper into a political hole with his asinine opinions on the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  But Rand Paul is NOT a racist. Nope. Like his pop, Ron Paul, he’s just an old fashioned goofball.  That doesn’t mean he’s not an intelligent man. He is. Just [...]

I’m not about to draw any major conclusions from Tuesday’s election results — other than the obvious: neither political party establishment has much credibility and high-profile endorsements have about as much value as wad of paper from Lehman Bros. The only real highlight for me is the defeat of the horrible Arlen Specter. Good, god-damn [...]

Oh, happy day! The great BP siphon suck-off is succeeding. The hose contraption that the oil giant has finally hooked up to its underwater gusher is now diverting 1,000 barrels a day into a tanker hold and might soon double that number.  That’s great. Great, if you believe BP’s CEO Doug Suttle’s that the broken [...]

L.A. Times columnist Tim Rutten has beaten me to the punch, morally whipping a city that can’t — or won’t– find a paltry $5 million to keep open its most successful gang rehab program: Homeboy Industries. Rutten rightfully praises the work of the amazing Father Greg Boyle and allows him to ruminate on the irony [...]

Friday will be a bittersweet day as the USC Annenberg Graduate Journalism Class of 2010 stages its commencement ceremony. Any professor who tells you that he or she does not form some sort of emotional attachment to his flock is either a liar or too self-absorbed to be a very effective teacher. So, tomorrow, at [...]

Los Angeles today joined Oakland, San Francisco and several smaller cities in endorsing a boycott of Arizona over its absurd ‘Papers, Please!’ immigration law.  It’s hard to say how much economic impact if any of these city-based boycotts will really have on the rogue Sunshine State. But here’s the real hard news for the Arizona [...]

What a totally uninspired, if not depressing, choice for the open SCOTUS seat. Elena Kagan is, as Glenn Greenwald pointedly asserts, “a blank slate, institution-loyal, seemingly principle-free careerist who spent the last 15 months as the Obama administration’s lawyer vigorously defending every one of his assertions of extremely broad executive authority.”  Greenwald is perhaps the most [...]

As this image from the killing of four students at Kent State in Ohio flashed on our TV screens the afternoon of May 4, 1970, our gaggle of anti-war activists at what was then called San Fernando Valley State College convened an emergency meeting in our apartment house (today our school has been renamed California [...]

Time for us to to grow up. No more believers in magical and mythical hocus pocus on the Supreme Court of the greatest secular democracy in the history of the world. My latest  editorial in The Los Angeles Times.

Los Angeles was home Saturday to the largest of a string of rallies and marches Saturday demanding immigrant rights and denouncing the “Papers, Please!” law in Arizona. Here’s an extensive slideshow of the event with some 80 photos. Here’s another slideshow and video, Here’s a liveblog from our USC-based team of Neon Tommy reporters. The [...]