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Kerry says Israelis, Palestinians must make tough decisions
Israeli and Palestinian leaders must decide soon on whether to revive long-dormant peace negotiations to end their decades-old conflict, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Friday.
Industry is best bet for peace, Israeli billionaire says
On a new industrial park in Israel's largest Arab town, a software plant belonging to a multibillion-dollar U.S.-listed firm sits cheek-by-jowl with two small Arab-owned businesses: a metal factory and one producing tools for brain surgery.
Adelsons donate $40 million to Birthright
Casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, donated $40 million to the Birthright Israel Foundation.
- HOLLYWOOD
Billy Crystal to star in Larry Charles’ FX series
Looks like FX is going to be injecting some humor into their lineup. Not a bad idea, we think, after many seasons of the awesome yet dark series “Justified” or…
Civility replaces violence in ‘Last White Night’
In June 1965, during the most violent days of the civil rights movement, 21-year-old Paul Saltzman drove from Toronto to Mississippi to become a freedom fighter with the Student Nonviolent…
Spielberg to produce ‘Halo’ television series, plus other news from the Xbox One announcement
Microsoft Corp gave the world a first look at its new Xbox One on Tuesday, announcing that its first gaming console in eight years will come with exclusive video and…
- LIFE & CULTURE
A talent agent turns yogurt maven
Amy Salko Robertson — producer of such films as “The Oh in Ohio,” “Lab Rats” and “When Do We Eat?” a comedy set at a Passover seder —realized that she…
Maccabi Tel Aviv back on top but coach future uncertain
Champions Maccabi Tel Aviv have reasserted their dominance of Israeli soccer but media reports on Tuesday suggested they might have to continue their revival without coach Oscar Garcia.
Angelina’s breast cancer victory isn’t for celebrities only
Actress Angelina Jolie just announced that she underwent a preventive double mastectomy after learning that she was genetically predisposed to cancer. Her disclosure was a powerful show of solidarity with…
- BLOGS
Propaganda lies in a disguise
Muhammad al-Durrah, the little boy who became the symbol of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, is returning to the headlines after a decade. A photo of him, crying, leaning against a wall…
Male Eating Disorders: A Real Thing
Recently, People Magazine came out with an article about Ashley Hamilton talking openly about his struggles with an eating disorder. I applaud Ashley for coming out about having an eating…
Religion at the End of The Big C
Last night, Showtime’s The Big C aired its final episode. After three seasons of half-hour installments, this comedy returned for a shortened final season consisting of four hour-long episodes. Subtitled…
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Marty Kaplan
The day the Earth stood stupid
Say goodnight, Earthlings. That message — plus the slimmest of shots at an eleventh-hour reprieve — was announced to the people of the world last week.
Can’t we all just not get along?
Maybe the problem with Washington isn’t that there’s too little comity – there’s too much.
An apple for the Apple
I ain’t letting no computer grade this column. No way.
Daddy’s Been Arrested
The final inch of the story turned me into an emotional puddle.
The bartender who rescued America
Prouty, we learned last week, is the 38-year old bartender who videotaped the $50,000-a-plate Boca Raton fundraiser where Mitt Romney wrote off 47 percent of the country as victims.
Supermarkets say: Please don’t buy the dreck we sell
I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was in a Minneapolis branch of Byerly’s, an upscale grocery chain in Minnesota. Scanning the aisles for a small extravagance for my dinner hosts, I noticed that the shelf labels included not just the price-per-unit, which I’m used to, but little blue and white linked hexagons marked on a scale of 1 to 100 – a “NuVal” score.
How to avoid meteors
NASA scientists say that meteor explosions like the one last week injuring 1,200 people in Chelyabinsk, Siberia, are 100-year events. The last time a big meteor crashed into our planet, incinerating 80 million trees in the Tunguska region of Siberia, was in 1908. So if you’re feeling a bit panicky after Chelyabinsk, relax. Odds are it’ll be a century before something like that happens again – though it’s understandable if you decide to cross the Trans-Siberian railroad off your bucket list.
Being American is bad for your health
“Americans are sicker and die younger than people in other wealthy nations.”
Opinion: The Post-Kumbaya President
Four years ago, while Democrats danced at inaugural balls, Reps. Cantor and Ryan dined at The Caucus Room, a Capitol Hill steakhouse, along with other top Republicans, including Rep. Kevin McCarthy, and Sens. Jim DeMint, John Kyl and Tom Coburn.
The future of technology: Fear of fun
Some day not all that far in the future, a new kind of entertainment is going to be perfected that will either be the coolest video game ever or the media equivalent of a lethal man-made super-virus.
Fear of fun
Some day not all that far in the future, a new kind of entertainment is going to be perfected that will either be the coolest video game ever, or the media equivalent of a lethal man-made super-virus.
Sandy Hook, Sandy and the politics of learned helplessness
"We have got to get Michelle to make this her priority."
Two, three, many Grover Norquists
So Grover Norquist turns out to be a colossus with feet of clay.
GOP smart on copyright for 24 hours
They threw Derek Khanna under the bus. On Friday afternoon, the Republican Study Committee – the House caucus that promulgates right-wing orthodoxy – posted on its website a startling policy brief about copyright law.
My Chris Christie hypocrisy
I was against Chris Christie before I was before him. If Obama wins, when all the exit polling gets sorted through, it’s those images of the Democratic president touring the hurricane damage arm-in-arm with the Republican governor that may turn out to have given him his advantage.
What do (suburban) women want?
If you watched any of the debates on CNN, you saw two worms at the bottom of your screen. Well, they looked to me like worms, or maybe caterpillars, scrunching and stretching throughout the 90 minutes.
How to lose the next debate
A couple of weeks ago, when I wrote a “Romney Wins First Debate” column, I didn’t think I was going out on a limb. Obama’s re-election was looking increasingly likely, but audiences don’t show up to watch paint dry.
Marty Kaplan: Romney wins first debate
If the media-industrial complex obeys its usual laws of supply and demand, the political headlines over the next four weeks are fairly predictable: Romney Wins First Debate. Ryan, Biden Debate to a Draw. Obama Wins Second Debate. It All Comes Down to the Last Debate.
Dreaming of a wave election
What just happened in American politics is not just that Charlotte mopped the floor with Tampa. It’s that Democrats connected with the country beyond their wildest dreams.
Romney/Ryan and the lullaby of lying
It shouldn't have taken Todd Akin's crackpot contraception comment to alert us that Paul Ryan thinks rape is just another "method of conception."
How to ignore the campaign
Congratulations. You’re about to prevent hundreds of hours of your life from going down the rat hole between now and Election Day.
Why Kim loves Disney
Until I saw 16 hot North Korean chicks singing “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” to Kim Jong-un, the strangest video that I’d ever seen of a head of state enjoying a performance was Pope Benedict XVI watching four ripped acrobats strip off their shirts and put on a show worthy of Channing Tatum and the “Magic Mike” boys.
Ambushed by optimism
Twice in the past few weeks, my train of thought has been hijacked by hope. I am not by nature pessimistic. But for a while now my mood about America’s prospects has been grim.
The end is nigh. Seriously.
In countless cartoons, there’s a guy in a robe and long beard who’s walking around carrying a sign saying The End Is Nigh. The joke is that he’s ridiculous – some loony who takes the Book of Revelation literally. But what if the joke’s on us?
God loves David Brooks
The trouble with kids these days, writes New York Times columnist David Brooks, is that they convert “moral... questions about how to be” into “analytic questions about what to do.”
The audacity of WTF
We’re getting used to what’s been going on during this campaign. That’s dangerous. We should be reminding ourselves just how strange it is.
Don't know much about history
The reason that our financial system isn’t going to crash and burn again, the reason that taxpayers won’t have to fork over another trillion dollars of no-strings-attached bailout money, is – well, I forget.
Opinion: Exorcising Orrin Hatch
It couldn't happen to a nicer guy. Because Senator Orrin Hatch couldn't eke out 60 percent of the votes at the Utah Republican Party's convention this past weekend, he'll face a primary challenge from former state senator Dan Liljenquist.
You don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got that swing
If you’re reading this, your vote for president won’t count. Don’t get me wrong. Everyone should vote; I think it should be compulsory, as it is in Australia, with fines for no-shows. Too much patriots’ blood has been spilled to protect our right to vote for America to be soft on civic deadbeats. Voting is the minimum price of admission to democracy.
'Ask Her When She's Sober'
Until Marine Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach and her unborn child were murdered by Marine Cpl. Cesar Laurean and buried in his backyard, her congressman, Mike Turner, had a record like any other garden-variety Republican warrior on women. With his 100 percent perfect opposition to women’s freedom of choice over their reproductive systems, Turner’s Dayton, Ohio-area constituents had been represented by just the kind of disciplined hard-core conservative that John Boehner and Eric Cantor rely on.
Is luck dead?
The trouble with kids these days is that they think luck counts more than they should. That’s the diagnosis of America’s young people offered by a New York Times opinion piece this past weekend. Generation Y has moved back home and given up on gung-ho because in these recessionary times, they’re putting too little weight on the importance of effort and too much weight on the riskiness of risk.
Harvard, Santorum and the one-state solution
This coming weekend, Harvard’s Kennedy School will host a One State Conference” where some 20 speakers will be talking about “Israel/Palestine and the one-state solution.” Between the idea of a one-state solution, and the reaction to Harvard’s providing a venue for entertaining it, and the ongoing Republican assault on elites and universities, I don’t know whether to cry or to cry.
Political March Madness
Will Hillary be Obama’s running mate, with Biden going to State if they win? Will Romney wrap things up on Super Tuesday, or will there be a brokered Republican convention, with Ron Paul as kingmaker? Will Democrats take back the House but lose the Senate?
Don't be naked
Entertainment executives are fond of saying that no matter what happens with technology, what will always matter most is good storytelling. What they don’t say — but what they’ve begun to wonder — is whether those stories may be on the way to becoming loss leaders and if the content business is quietly being transformed into the data mining business.
Opinion: Tim Tebow Is Jewish
“Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?” That was the headline last week on a blog posted by New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane.
Opinion: Campaign colonics
What did I miss? For seven days I didn’t have salt, meat or CNN. My mornings began without “Morning Joe” or “Morning Edition”; I saw sunrise on a mountain hike, not with a clicker in my hand.
Marty Kaplan: Newt winked at me
Did you see how Newt Gingrich kept winking during the Dec. 10 Republican debate? I’ll bet you $10,000 I’m the one he was winking at.
Opinion: Warning -- Political ads make you stupid
This is the disclaimer that Britain’s Public Interest Research Centre recently proposed for inclusion on billboards:
Opinion: Keeping up with the Kandidates
"Are you not entertained?" That was Jon Stewart’s response to Rick Perry’s brain freeze. He said it twice, maniacally. “Are you not entertained?” Stewart’s right about what’s happening. America is on track for the most amusing apocalypse ever. Things may be going to hell, but the campaign narrative unfolding in real time couldn’t be any more fun. It’s all entertainment, just grist for the media mill, and apparently there’s no bummer bad enough to shock us back to our senses.
Opinion: Obama-Romney 2012
Forget the fantasy of Hillary Clinton taking Joe Biden’s place on the 2012 ballot. Not only because it is not going to happen. The theory that having Hillary on the ticket would galvanize the base and that coveted independent voters, especially women, would break toward Democrats, has no deeper roots in empirical reality than creationism or climate change denial. It’s just not the game-changer that Obama needs to hang on to the presidency, let alone give him a Congress that would be any less obstructionist than the one we have now.
Opinion: Occupy K Street
It’s premature to give the Nobel Peace Prize to those Occupy Wall Street kids. But it also may be too soon to blow them off as clueless hipsters “with nowhere to go,” as New York Times columnist Charles Blow did, calling the two weeks “a festival of frustrations, a collective venting session with little edge or urgency.”
Opinion: Letting animals vote
You look terrific. Have you lost weight? Are you working out? You’ve got this glow about you. I bet you’re in love. Wait -- you were promoted. That’s it, isn’t it? They finally recognized how talented you are. By the way, did you know that the average global surface temperature has gone up one degree over the last three decades? It’s true. Here, have a look at this chart.
Opinion: How did this happen to America?
It was while I was explaining to an Australian student that Rupert Murdoch was the reason America had gone batty that I realized how inadequate my answer to his question was.
What story is the Murdoch story?
Following several days of coaching by lawyers and PR experts, it must have been really rattling for Rupert and James Murdoch when show time arrived to learn that the parliamentary committee questioning them would not permit opening statements.
The “Obama’s brilliant strategy” theory
If you voted for Obama, here’s what you’re not supposed to be thinking:
Marty Kaplan: Pessimism is the last taboo
If you pay attention to the news, the prospects for the future look grim.
If Bachmann and Palin Weren’t Pretty
I wonder how much airtime Michele Bachmann (R.-Minn.) would get if she didn’t look the way she does. I wonder how much of Sara Palin’s political appeal arises from her physical appeal.
Don’t count on it
Please don’t run a countdown clock on the debt ceiling.
Our friend Pakistan and other mental pretzels
On the same day that Americans are test-driving the idea that Osama bin Laden lived on the outskirts of Pakistan’s West Point, undetected, for six years, Orly Taitz goes to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to prove that President Obama’s long-form birth certificate is a forgery. As they say in conspiracy-land, there are no coincidences.
The naked Nielsens
The metrics are wearing no clothes. How would you react if you found out that the basis of your business model was bogus? That’s the nightmare that the television industry is finally waking up to, and I bet that online media won’t be far behind.
The Naked Nielsens
The TV business is built on advertising. Except for premium cable, the money that networks get for selling audiences’ eyeballs to advertisers is the mother’s milk of the industry. Networks set the price of ads on their shows using demographic information about the age and sex of those shows’ viewers. And the company that pretty much has a monopoly on furnishing those metrics is Nielsen.
Moses, media piracy and the MPAA
If only people understood why they shouldn't do it, then they wouldn't do it.
The more you watch, the worse you feel
As if the triple whammy of the Japanese earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster weren’t enough to enthrall and terrify us, the war in Libya is now providing cable news viewers a fresh hell to follow 24/7.
Al Jazeera English vs. The Charlie Sheen Channel
“This is strictly a business decision,” a Comcast source told Rupert Murdoch’s Web site MarketWatch about whether Comcast, the biggest cable operator in the U.S., will offer Al Jazeera English to its 24 million subscribers. Not a decision about whether Al Jazeera English is anti-American, anti-Israeli, a tool of Al Qaeda, a propagandist for Palestinians. Or none of the above. Nope – it’s strictly dollars and cents.
The Monsters Are Due on Maple Streets
The power has gone out in a typical American town. Wait -- it’s not just the electricity. The phones don’t work, either. Portable radios are dead. Cars won’t start.
Mitt Romney’s “South Park” primary
Egypt makes Mitt Romney look good – at least compared to other Republican presidential hopefuls.
My favorite blowhard
I owe Keith Olbermann for enabling me to identify with Bill O’Reilly’s fans.
The vitriol vitriol
“Clarabelle Dopenik.” That’s what one wit on the popular conservative Web site freerepublic.com called Clarence Dupnik, the Pima County, Arizona sheriff who turns 75 this week. Elected continuously since 1980, he is the public face of the investigation into the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and 19 others. He is also, according to bloggers on that site, “an incompetent unhinged sonofabitch” and “a jerk” “using this tragedy for baseless, cheap political shots.”
The senators who dissed baby Jesus
What’s the right word for what Sen. John Kyl (R-Ariz.) was doing when he attacked Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) for “disrespecting one of the two holiest holidays for Christians” by keeping Congress in session in the week before Christmas? What do you call it when Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) blasted Democrats as “sacrilegious” for wanting the Senate to take up an arms control treaty and a spending bill “right before… the most sacred holiday for Christians”?
My declaration of independents
I think I’ve figured out how to get the White House to pay attention.
I take Israel personally
I also take Obama personally, and Jon Stewart, Paul Krugman and NPR. I take Trojan football personally. If I were more into baseball, I imagine I’d take the Dodgers personally, too.
Waiting for Sanityman: Can Jon Stewart save America?
The fate of our country won't be decided by a politician. It will be determined by a comedian. Not long before Jon Stewart announced his Rally to Restore Sanity, he told a New York magazine writer why he and his crew on "The Daily Show" would never do something like that. "We're not activists," he said. "Maybe the nice thing about being a comedian is never having full belief in yourself to know the answer. So you can say all this stuff, but underneath, you're going, 'But of course, I'm f---ing idiotic.' It's why we don't lead a lot of marches."
Waiting for Jewman
Jon Stewart did his show, business as usual, on Rosh Hashanah this year. That night, when his interview guest, Meghan McCain, daughter of Senator John McCain, greeted him with "Happy New Year," Stewart looked uncharacteristically nonplussed for a nanosecond, before replying, "What? Huh? See you in Times Square tonight."
The scary staleness of truth telling
Why, an audience member asked National Public Radio’s Linda Wertheimer at a San Diego symposium this past weekend, wasn’t public radio correcting all the lies being told in the campaign?
In politics, two negatives don’t make a positive
A riddle: What piece of political wisdom is always wrong – but its opposite is also always wrong?
They have us over a barrel
It’s not the news that’s a downer – there’s always been misery and ugliness around. It’s our helplessness that’s depressing us, the feeling that they have us over a barrel.
Just Like the Internet You See in the Movies
No Web sites that choke your browser. No waiting for YouTube clips to buffer. No email attachments too big to send. No files that take forever to download. No “Loading – please wait” messages, or spinning beach balls, or slowwwwly lengthening bars meant to tame your mounting impatience.
The Best of All Possible Americas
Whenever I’m comforted by the genius of our Founders, the resilience of our institutions and the wisdom of the American people, I know my meds need adjusting.
Thank You, Robert Gibbs
If Robert Gibbs hadn’t said that Democrats may lose the House in November, then House Democrats might not have been so infuriated that the president himself had to
travel to Capitol Hill to let them vent.
Springtime for Schmucks
If I hadn’t seen the word plastered on a billboard on La Brea Avenue, I would never have remotely considered using it in print myself. But there it is, in a five-foot font, just a few miles from the West Hollywood club where Lenny Bruce was arrested for saying it in 1963. Soon, no doubt, promoting a movie that will open on July 30, it will be seen on buses and benches and 30-second television ads airing in family-friendly prime time, and on the robotic lips of Mr. Moviephone: “Please confirm your order! You have purchased TWO tickets for the 7:20 showing of DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS.”
The Real Shakedown to Apologize For
If Barack Obama’s extraction of $20 billion from BP was -- as Texas Republican Joe Barton called it – a “shakedown,” then what would Barton call the $14.4 million he has extracted during his career from oil and gas interests, electric utilities, the health sector, chemical manufacturers, finance and all the other industries forking over cash to him?
Tom Friedman Wants to Raise Your Taxes
There are basically two views of the American people.
What We “Need to Know” About PBS After Moyers
Ever since the right began crying “liberal media,” the challenge for the targets of those tantrums has been to figure out how to respond to the mewling. What PBS has done in the wake of Bill Moyers’ retirement is a case study in the futile effort of trying to appease the little brat.
The end of Hollywood as we know it
This is not a happy time to be an entertainment industry executive.
How dumb do they think (know) we are
I know some scary smart people who never graduated from high school, and I know some real doofuses with graduate degrees, so I understand that the number of years of formal education that someone has racked up is no guarantee of intelligence. But every once in a while, I see some poll numbers that pretty convincingly correlate believing idiotic things with having less education, and not believing idiotic things with having more education.
I Got the Broadcast Blues
Local TV news is the number one source of news for Americans. Seventy-eight percent of the country turns to it to find out what’s going on. The Internet may be growing as a news source, and some people still read the paper, but for most people, what’s on local TV news is pretty much what they know about where they live. If you care about the quality of democracy, you have to care about the quality of local TV news – even if you don’t watch it.
The Lies and Reconciliation Commission
If Democrats decide to use the procedural move that Congress calls “reconciliation” to pass health care reform, get ready for a war of words. It will be won not by the biggest guns, but the biggest mouths. What’s true won’t matter; what’s loudest, what’s catchiest, will. That’s democracy in the age of newsertainment.
Side Effects Include Denial
Why would Pfizer spend $100 million on two-minute TV ads that use a minute of that time admitting that their drug Chantix can cause “changes in behavior, hostility, agitation, depressed mood,” “weird, unusual or strange dreams,” and “suicidal thoughts or actions”?
Thank You, Norman Lear
It's just about perfect that the week that LA Gang Tours launches is also the tenth anniversary of the start of the Norman Lear Center.
Mercury Is Poison
Now that we’re about to entrust health reform to the tender mercies of the insurance industry, it’s sobering to see the skullduggery that one of California’s largest auto insurers is trying to pull on the state’s drivers.
Barack Obama Is a Traitor
Barack Obama is a traitor.
That’s what Dick Cheney said. Too bad Tiger Woods stepped on the story.
Bra Helps Fight Breast Cancer
Now that CNN has put Lou Dobbs out to pasture, you'd think that The Most Trusted Name in News would make the reporting of facts - you know, the practice formerly known as journalism - the hallmark of its brand. Dream on.
If You Liked Health Care, You’ll Love Afghanistan
If you’re depressed by the way the national debate about health care has been playing out, just wait until the rubber hits the road on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Israel. If you’re enraged by the way Wall Street’s rescue has made us hostages to their recklessness, get ready for how the oil and coal industries are going to game the energy and climate change decisions ahead. If you’re scared by the way the media can trivialize and polarize and make entertainment out of any topic in its crosshairs, imagine its toxic impact when we get around to dealing with education, immigration and trade.
Balloon Dad to Pose for Playgirl
It’s my own fault, I know, for watching “Showbiz Tonight” over the weekend, but I couldn’t find the news on any other channel, and I’d forgotten that HLN, better known as CNN’s Headline News, had turned its definition of journalism over to Nancy Grace, host of “television's only justice themed/interview/debate show, designed for those interested in the breaking crime news of the day”; to Robin Meade, author of “Morning Sunshine: How to Radiate Confidence and Feel It, Too”; to Jane Velez-Mitchell, author of “iWant: My Journey from Addiction and Overconsumption to a Simpler, Honest Life,” who has been “stand[ing] up for the powerless, and speak[ing] for those who don't have a voice” on HLN since Glenn Beck left it for Fox News. And, of course, to “Showbiz Tonight.”
How Would the Right Know It’s Wrong?
While the left despairs of Barack Obama’s capitulation to K Street and Wall Street, the right continues to insist that he’s a Marxist, socialist, communist enemy of capitalism. What could possibly convince the right that it’s wrong – about that, or anything else?
I Want to Know What Happens Next
Something’s going to happen next week, or next year, that will completely change the story.
The 60 Questions of Our Life
“Curiosity: The Questions of Our Life” is the name of a new 60-episode five-year “landmark” series just announced with much fanfare by the Discovery Channel.
Kumbaya, Not Kevorkian, Will Kill Granny
I don’t know which is more dispiriting: the New York Times’ failure to call Betsy McCaughey a liar, or Barack Obama’s failure to call Chuck Grassley a liar. It’s tempting to think of both failures as cowardice, a mortal fear of being branded “liberal.” But ironically it’s liberalism itself that makes them both mistake their cowardice for fair-mindedness.
The Marty Show
I keep hoping that the health care “debate” we’re having this summer will turn out to be just a plot point in the 2009 version of “The Truman Show,” the movie where Jim Carrey’s character, Truman Burbank, discovers that what he thought was reality is actually a reality television show.
The Best Speech I Ever Wrote
Elie Wiesel wagged a bony finger at me. "History will be watching you, young man," he warned. We were on the tarmac at Geneva International Airport, and yes, I was a young man, not yet 29, though after the week I'd just been through, I felt the age I am today, almost exactly 30 years later.
My Daughter, the Best-Selling Novelist
By the way, have I mentioned that my 19-year-old daughter’s novel is a bestseller?
Cheney Meant Well
The Importance of Being Michael
“Why aren’t you talking about Michael Jackson more?”
Health Care Scare
We’re about to find out whether Americans are as suspicious of the right’s anti-health care reform propaganda as Iraqis are dismissive of America’s lame hearts-and-minds campaign in Iraq.
It’s Tough Love Time for Obama
First I worried that Obama was foolhardy to put Goldman Sachs alumni and other Wall Street geniuses in charge of fixing the mess that they’d made in the first place. But then I bought the pragmatic argument that these masters of the universe were the only people with enough inside experience to understand the derivatives con game well enough to shut it down.
The Food Fight Online
If there's a metaphor for the way that Americans do politics online that's less apt than “a national conversation,” I can't think of one, except perhaps for “a great debate.”
Bye Bye Bybee
It will be the playwrights and screenwriters, not the journalists and historians, who will someday get the torture story right. It will be the poets and novelists, not the philosophers and clergy, who will take us to the heart of that darkness. It will be the artists and satirists, not the law and the lawyers, who will eventually haul this decade to the bar of justice.
The Virtue of Hate
“If he didn’t hear from her at night, he’d go frantic.” This is Carmen Bachan, speaking through tears about her husband James and her daughter Adrianna.
“That night he told her to be careful, and she was. She was crossing on a green light until that animal took her life and injured that beautiful young man.” That young man is Marcus Garfinkle, who was thrown onto the windshield of the car of the hit-and-run driver who killed Adrianna Bachan. He was carried 300 to 400 feet until the car stopped, and a passenger got out, dislodged him from the windshield, dumped him on the street with two broken legs and then sped away.
The Upside of Outrage
A big reason that the Iraq war never ignited nationwide outrage on the scale of Vietnam protests was the absence of conscription. As long as the volunteer army confined the consequences of George W. Bush’s Oedipal acting-out to one slice of America, taking it to the streets was just not how the country channeled its anger; telling it to the pollster was more like it.
The Stem Cell Slippery Slope Fallacy
Solidarity For Never
Since conservative orthodoxy has turned out to be voodoo economics after all, now would be an excellent time to unmask its demonization of labor unions as yet another con job that big business has pulled on the American people.
The Media Are the Message
Patriotic Extortion
Compassion Fatigue
Liberal Parents, Liberal Children
When it comes to politics, today’s college freshmen resemble their baby boomer parents of 40 years ago in all ways except two. One way makes perfect sense; the other is a puzzle.
The Science of Forty-Four
“We will restore science to its rightful place” — that’s the line I didn’t see coming. Anyone watching the backgrounders leading up to the inaugural knew that the incoming president would call for “a new era of responsibility.”
The CNN-NPR-NY Times Middle East Conspiracy
Have you noticed that when people complain about bias in the media, it's always bias against their own point of view and never bias in favor of their side?
Eyeless in Gaza
Where were all the people of Gaza rising up in outrage when Hamas used them as human shields?
Once in a lifetime
I don't know about you, but I've had it up to here with once-in-a-lifetime events.
Broadband: Not for kids only
The average broadband offering in Japan is 10 times faster than the average service available to U.S. consumers -- at half the cost. People in countries like Finland, France, Korea, Sweden and Italy also pay less to get more.
All’s well that ends Zell
The prospect of Zell's dumping Tribune assets at fire-sale prices has renewed speculation about the Los Angeles Times being returned to local ownership.
The Los Angeles Bagels
All the news that’s fit to neuter
When the obituary for American journalism is eventually written, a milestone in the journey to its death rattle will surely be the column that The New York Times' ombudsman, Clark Hoyt.
We felt so safe there
Maybe the only way you can put down roots in California is with the thought that every place has its own risks, its tornadoes and hurricanes and lightning, that driving on the freeway is even more dangerous than living on a fault line.
The kids are all right
As I drove across Los Angeles on election night, I saw clusters of teens and kids in their 20s celebrating on random street corners, high-fiving drivers at red lights. They may not have marched on the Pentagon to end the war in Iraq, but they have given the nation a new president who has pledged to do just that. For the first time since the springtime of the baby boomers, they have become not just consumers to be marketed to, but a political force to be reckoned with.
Let bygones (not) be bygones
So John McCain -- while claiming that not he's not impugning Barack Obama's patriotism -- impugns Barack Obama's patriotism, but we're supposed to understand that it doesn't really matter, because that's just what people do in campaigns.
Move over, Willie Horton
According to KDKA News Director John Verrilli, it was Pennsylvania McCain spokesman Peter Feldman, in the absence of any confirmed facts, who told the media that the mugger saw a McCain bumper sticker on Ashley Todd's car, and that the B stood for Barack.
R-E-S-P-E-C-T for Colin Powell
I couldn't help recalling that this was the same Colin Powell whose United Nations speech five years earlier had convinced me that invading Iraq was the right thing to do.
Alan shrugged
Wall Street's problem, in the president's mind, is not a systemic pathology, not an illness that comes on the same chromosome as the profit motive. Instead, it's the behavior of a frat boy on a bender, the reckless phase of a good-time Charlie rather than the symptom of profound disease.
Gotcha? You betcha!
But there's also a less benign explanation for the media's negligence, and it's captured by something President Andrew Jackson said nearly two centuries ago: "If the people only understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system, there would be a revolution before morning."
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Praying for change: Women of the Wall forces a historic decision on Israel
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