“Let them east cake,” she said. And they will. When former hedge fund trader Chelsea Clinton weds current hedge fund trader Marc Mezvinsky at their wedding tomorrow, the guests better damn well eat that cake. Latest estimates are that the wedding cake will cost between $12,000 and $20,000 (two years worth of  tuition at the [...]

Here’s my long feature piece in The Nation about John McCain’s fight to win renomination to the Senate.  Here’s the lede: Rob Haney’s got a big problem. After a stint in the Air Force and a thirty-year career with IBM, Haney is now a full-time political activist. And he can’t decide who he viscerally hates [...]

Courage deserves support. We don’t know what role if any Manning played in the current Wikileak strategy.  Meanwhile, the Obama administration has launched a full-scale shakedown aimed at hunting down the leakers. This is really disgraceful and a classic case of wanting to kill the messenger. NOBODY has been able to point to how a [...]

Thanks to the six year archive of secret documents on the war in Afghanistan released by Wikileaks and amalgamated by three newspapers, we now know what a hopeless mess we are mired in (if we didn’t know that before). NO question this is the modern equivalent to The Pentagon Papers.  This time around the information [...]

(Natasha is the one on the left. She doesn’t like hats.) I warned you all that I would be spending this week shamelessly promoting my daughter Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s Mad Men Unbuttoned book. I’m holding to my word. A father’s prerogative. First of all, thanks to all those who participated in our giveaway contest. I said [...]

Excuse me for being a bit preoccupied, but today is publication day for my daughter Natasha’s book. It’s getting great reviews and sales are brisk. And this is where I am unabashedly putting all my energies for the next week. I want to make my readers an offer they can’t possibly refuse: The first fifteen [...]

How comforting it is to read the spectacular Washington Post series on America’s sprawling spy and intelligence network. We learn, among many other things: * Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States. * An estimated 854,000 [...]

B0y, I am sure glad we have so many forward looking Democrats dominating California politics.  Otherwise, who knows? If the Republicans were in charge they might try to undercut that common sense proposition on the ballot to legalize and tax marijuana. Oh, wait…. that’s exactly what the Democrats just did! That’s really smart. By not [...]

Question: Whose house is this? Answer is HERE. Who has the best two line commentary?

Continuing with the theme of yesterday’s post — tweaking the L.A. Times’ non-partisan right-wing partisan politics blogger Andrew Malcolm….. He’s really come up with a doozie today. Flash! According to Malcolm, Americans are cooling to Al Gore (!) while warming to Dick Cheney (!!). Sorry to interrupt this intriguing narrative (and you’re hearing this from [...]

There is some really, really strange stuff going on over at the suffering Los Angeles Times. I don’t just mean the financial hell and staff butchery imposed by owner and shredder Sam Zell. Nor do I mean the recent dive-into-the-gutter move to sell warp-around advertising that mimics the paper’s front news page. Now we can [...]

There are lots of things that confound me about the political moment. Way too many to list. But what really drives me nuts is the lack of response — both from ordinary Americans and from the Obama administration– to the ongoing Republican blockade of extending unemployment insurance.  As we blow billions in the hopeless causes [...]

The Cuban government and its apologists claim there are no political prisoners on the island But under international pressure the same Cuban government has agreed to release more than fifty of these non existent political prisoners from jail. The release is in itself an admission that these dissidents were jailed for political reasons only. If [...]

Let me make sure I have got this right. CNN promoted overt and racist demagogue Lou Dobbs for years.  It catapulted the blood-thirsty and radically biased Nancy Grace to stardom. It scooped the execrable dry drunk  Glenn Beck out of obscurity and gave him his own show for years.  It employs as an anchor the [...]

I remember like yesterday that night in 1976 when this knuckle dragger seized power, installed a murderous dictatorship and declared “if I had not done this on my own, God and The Fatherland would have demanded it of me.” Turns out that both Jesus and Argentina now demand this octogenarian sit in a small cell [...]

Oliver Stone is too smart and too talented to keep on making his new sort of “non-fiction” agit-prop love letters to Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. That’s my advice to him in this piece.

I guess I’m old fashioned. If I saw the editor of the NYTimes quoted like he is here, I would simply fire him.