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 [...]

Neon Tommy, the USC-based student-managed 24/7 online news and arts magazine I supervise has moved from a Facebook Group to a much more user-friendly Facebook Fan Page.  If you support a new generation of journalists, put your mouse where your mouth is and take one moment by clicking here to join our page. Don’t make [...]

I had the occasion to spend part of this evening with two veteran State Department career functionaries visiting L.A. and they displayed great skepticism that the Obama admin would, in the end, get even a poor health care bill through congress.  This is a conclusion at which I absolutely do not want to arrive. And [...]

Sort of hard to assimilate, but after only about six weeks after starting her blog MadMen Footnotes, the brilliant daughter has just inked a book deal.  We consider this to be Very Good News!

The prolonged fantasizing over the breadth and impact of the weekend tea-bag fest on the D.C. mall continues unabated. A  self-desrcibed “near-successful” screenwriter at Pajamas Media has now “scientifically” proven that at least 850,000 people showed up (not the 70,000 or so that credible news sources report). That would mean more people showed up to [...]

I wasn’t at the weekend Patriot/Tea Bag/FreedomWorks big rally on the D.C. mall. But the best I can piece together from all sources, is that there was something like 70,000 people there.  As Nate Silver puts it, not a giant rally, not a small rally, more like as business-as-usual rally.  I agree.  If the Malkinites [...]

As I said in the post below, I thought that Barack Obama’s speech tonight would be of significance. It was. Call me a sucker, but I thought the speech was great. Better than my expectations, frankly. Should it have come three months ago, instead of tonight? For sure. Could he have proposed a plan that [...]

OK, OK, Obama makes his speech to America’s impressionable youth later today and tomorrow night is his all his important speech to a joint session of Congress on health care. Before we tackle those deep subjects (later) and in the spirit of an extended Labor Day holiday mood, allow me to splash around for a [...]

For labor, this was supposed to be a much happier Labor Day. Instead, it feels like reckoning day. After eight years of Clintonite triangulation –marked by passage of free trade acts — and then after another two terms of an avidly anti-labor Bush White House, these promised to be the new salad days of organized [...]

Somehow I missed this news from earlier this week. Chilean judicial officials issued 129 arrest warrants for former agents of the Pinochet dictatorship for their role in kidnapping, torture and disappearance. As I’ve said umpteen times, this sort of stuff does NOT fade easily into time and inevitably comes back to bite its practioners — [...]

Or is it just Stupid Democrats? The last illusion that any Senate Republicans other than (maybe) the two ladies from Maine are going to cooperate on health care reform has now faded to black. The good news is that the nature of the Senate bill is now totally in Democratic hands. But the bad news [...]

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 [...]

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.During various Democratic primary campaigns over the years, in California, Nevada, New [...]

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.The New York Times [...]

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 [...]