This is like when Rep. Joe Barton started gushing in public about his love for BP. Everybody got on his case simply for telling the truth. Heck, when you spend so much time in bed with a partner don’t you sorta owe him or her some expression of loyalty? Now we see chief See-BS foreign [...]

Is right here.

Though the official publication date is still 3 weeks off, my daughter Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s book is now off the presses and ready to go.  It can at least be pre-ordered and shipped very soon. Here’s where you can order it. Here’s her Mad Men website which you should bookmark. Here’s her new Mad Men Unbuttoned [...]

Pure and simple. Frank Rich gets it 1oo percent correct on the McChrsytal-Rolling Stone melee.  A perfect understanding of what went on and its implications for a self-neutered Fourth Estate: There were few laughs in the 36 hours of tumult, but Jon Stewart captured them with a montage of cable-news talking heads expressing repeated shock [...]

Things have gotten pretty hot in sleepy Toronto, with more than 500 arrests stemming from violent protests at the G-20 summit. The Guardian reports that most of the fireworks were set off by a small group of black-clad “anarchists” – sort of the fringe Left’s answer to right-wing militias.  Here’s a pretty great photo gallery [...]

Well, all of us, especially elected officials, commit youthful indiscretions. And some of us continue to do so well into middle-age and beyond.  Almost five years ago, I fell for a line of BS and collaborated (for a short time) with the PajamasMedia start-up. I knew its center of gravity was going to lean somewhat [...]

As the song says, you want to go to heaven but you don’t want to die to get there. Likewise, the ink-stained dinos who run the Washington Post want to be all cool and New Media-ish but they don’t want to abandon their Jurassic “standards” — something that media theorist Jay Rosen calls “the view [...]

There are a lot of things I like about The Huffington Post, where I had the privilege to help coordinate its massive citizen journalism project during Campaign ’08.  And Arianna is a long time friend of mine. But there’s a lot I don’t like about it, which I will mostly keep to myself. One little [...]

One of the more irritating memes of Tuesday’s explosive news cycle was how many gasbags, chattering heads, bloviating military affairs “experts,” and overtly jealous reporters insisted that one damning tell of the recklessness of General McChrystal was how he spilled the beans to a reporter from ROLLING STONE! Rolling Fucking Stone! I didn’t bother to [...]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it ALL today about General Stanley McMcMouth McChrystal.  So maybe Obama will fire him.  Maybe he won’t (Odds are he will. My instinct is he won’t).  The most salient point about the motor mouth general is being lost in the speculation over his future. For all I care, keep McChrystal. [...]

I had a marvelous Father’s Day weekend in company of my daughter in a secret, undisclosed location.  All this in spite of some pretty sour world events and some pretty depressing reading. But none of that was able to spoil precious time well spent with Natasha — and giving her some last minute help in [...]

I can’t tell you I know THAT much about Thursday’s congressional grilling of BP chief Tony Hayward. You see, I was out of the loop. I wasn’t in the chain of command. I can’t recall. I fear I wasn’t informed. Oh, wait. Those were Hayward’s lines! This guy is right out of Central Casting as [...]

Pleasure before business.  I LOVE this story. Chris Simcox, founder of the Minutemen and feature attraction at the 2005 media circus that launched his non-movement, is now on the lamb. He’s running from being served by a restraining order after threatening his wife. And the bounty hunter on his trail is none other than a [...]

I am usually a pretty big fan of Barack Obama’s speech-making. Not tonight. I found his first-ever Oval Office address oddly off-key. OK, I actually found it insignificant.  The one concrete measure he announced — the establishment of an independently-run BP escrow fund– is absolutely essential. A great measure, four or five weeks too late. [...]

We needn’t look much further than two side by side pieces on the front page of The New York Times early Tuesday morn to measure just what sort of a fix we are in. Ahh, but with what nostalgia we pine for those Good Old Days when the national body politic was dominated by the [...]

This is so stupid, I am not going to bother to translate this little ditty from Hugo Chavez. The gist of it is that he expresses sorrow for all of the poor people condemned to live in the U.S. and then he sings a song about how he doesn’t love Hillary Clinton.  It’s  Chavez’ right [...]

Harold Meyerson gets right to the point on why the candidacies of Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina are doomed.  They rode the bumpy third rail of California politics, one that is an expressway to political oblivion: they pandered openly to the anti-immigration xenophobes. You don’t get a second chance in California. Ask President Pete Wilson.

California Republican Senatorial Nominee Carly Fiorina’s Incredibly Asinine Demon Sheep Ad Well, the election results are in here in California and I guess it’s time to once again trot out the old trope that until we find something better, democracy will have to do. California election results are usually irrational and full of contradictions and [...]

Welcome to the most expensive election in California history. Thanks to one of our finest student reporters from Neon Tommy, Paresh Dave, for producing the above infographic. Paresh has also prepared a handy chart on where the various candidates stand (other than on piles of cash). Here’s where I stand: The only item on the [...]

I find this article in The New York Times on Tuesday’s Democratic primary run-off in Arkansas rather amusing.  It focuses on allegations from “left-wing” political consultant Lara Bergthold that Arkansas Lt. Governor Bill Halter isn’t really much of a progressive and thereby shouldn’t become “a darling” of those backing him to unseat the undeniably conservative [...]