Many attempts have been made by movie writers/directors/producers to tell the truth about the tragic, unnecessary Iraq War while making it a financial box office success. Making significant dollars means large numbers will see the movies and hear the important truth messages. The two latest, Oscar winning The Hurt Locker and the just released Green [...]
Time to turn the clocks, not redemptively back, but assaultively forward. Just when the light started making my alarm clock irrelevant for the first time in months. Admittedly, I always thought it was neat that 4th of July fireworks didn’t start until the decadent hour of 10pm, but that was before Old Age came along. [...]
In Jessica Mitford’s hilarious memoir of her time in the Communist Party, “A Fine Old Conflict,” she outlines the indignities great and small suffered by Americans who, for one reason or another, were “premature anti-fascists,” and thus subject to the long arm of the law for decades thereafter. A product of an eccentric and famous [...]
Some longtime friends and clients of mine in North Portland, as we were in the design phase of putting a second story addition on their house, found a place a couple of blocks away, right on the bluff, and got a great deal on it in the aftermath of the boom. Literally, they would have [...]
When I was growing up, we always laughed at the relentlessly upbeat statements that came from the old Soviet Union, where even disasters were turned into triumphs, and leaders, statues, and the names of places themselves switched magically as fashion and leadership required, which usually worked out better for the places renamed than the people [...]
You know, you really have to hand it to the Republicans. They started out with a plan that was seemingly so audacious and unlikely to succeed that Democrats never saw it coming, much less moved to counter it. Selling plutocracy to the rubes, via a systematically concentrated media, has turned out to be like taking [...]
When my Dad was practicing criminal law in Portland in the 1960′s, he exposed my innocent, Holy Names educated mother to a lot of street smarts and lingo that stuck with her forever, and every so often she would unexpectedly astonish me with some expression or term more suited to a jaded beat cop than [...]
UPDATED BELOW: Wolf Blitzer apologizes, sort of. Outside of Wolf Blitzer’s pathetic show, Liz Cheney’s McCarthy Palooza against the Obama DOJ isn’t going quite as planned, despite the enthusiastic boost it received from the LA Times. Numerous prominent conservatives have branded Cheney’s insultingly ignorant fear-mongering as reminiscent of or worse than McCarthy, and even Condi [...]
Having found such a gold mine of authoritarian propaganda in the “news” pages of the poor Los Angeles Times over these last two days, I couldn’t help dropping in again for a look-see this afternoon. Would there be yet another journalistic equivalent of an overturned dump truck in the Cahuenga Pass? So enamored am I [...]
Yesterday LA Times crack reporter Rick Serrano published a story that was straight off the Republican Noise Machine, willfully deceptive about the nature of our legal system, and, well, old. To do so and make it plausible, he “interviewed” such heavyweights as Sen. Jeff Sessions, a bunch of anonymous Republicans, and carefully pored over a [...]