Los Angeles Master Chorale

Marty Kaplan

November 16, 2009

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.

Featured

Monday, November 2, 2009

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.

Monday, October 19, 2009

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.”

Latest

Monday, October 5, 2009

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?

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

I Want to Know What Happens Next

Something’s going to happen next week, or next year, that will completely change the story.

Monday, September 14, 2009

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.

Monday, August 24, 2009

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.

Monday, August 10, 2009

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.

Thursday, July 30, 2009

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.

Monday, July 27, 2009

My Daughter, the Best-Selling Novelist

By the way, have I mentioned that my 19-year-old daughter’s novel is a bestseller?

Monday, July 13, 2009

Cheney Meant Well

Monday, July 6, 2009

The Importance of Being Michael

“Why aren’t you talking about Michael Jackson more?”

Monday, June 8, 2009

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.

Monday, May 18, 2009

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.

Monday, May 4, 2009

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.”

Monday, April 20, 2009

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.

Saturday, April 4, 2009

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.

Monday, March 23, 2009

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.

Monday, March 9, 2009

The Stem Cell Slippery Slope Fallacy

Monday, February 23, 2009

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.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

The Media Are the Message

Monday, February 9, 2009

Patriotic Extortion

Monday, February 2, 2009

Compassion Fatigue

Monday, January 26, 2009

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.

Barack Obama takes the Oath of Office as the 44th President of the United States. Photo by Jim Young/ReutersTuesday, January 20, 2009

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.”

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

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?

Cartoon from the collection at
www.adl.org/Anti_semitism/gaza_cartoons.aspMonday, January 5, 2009

Eyeless in Gaza

Where were all the people of Gaza rising up in outrage when Hamas used them as human shields?

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Opinion Section

11/18
Rob Eshman: The Prophet
11/17
David Suissa: Peace in Arabic

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11/22/09 7:30 am
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11/20 4:30pm