One thing I won’t miss about my formerly frequent visits to Los Angeles is the disheartening experience of reading its sad and depleted newspaper, the Times, to which I used to look forward so much when I lived there briefly in the early 90′s. The final death knell came in 2003 , when they got [...]
It’s difficult to pinpoint when the Right figured out that lying was the path to victory, but in the years since Watergate, it’s become not just an expedient stalling tactic for difficult situations, but a way of life. Lying was still considered somewhat distasteful back then, as was the case when, inundated with a wave [...]
I have often groused dyspeptically about the tawdry circus acts that have replaced political discourse in this country, and the insulting way in which our media stars never fail eat it up, like slow children gazing in slack-jawed amazement at an unusually bad magician. Such misguided adulation then trickles down to the dumber members of [...]
It’s gotten rather difficult for me lately to muster up any great surprise over the startlingly racist bile spewing out of the right, since the frequency and proud frankness is enough to make anyone’s already dizzy head spin. Listening to a Republican on TV lately is not unlike listening to my Grandmother, Etta, back in [...]
Free Speech, that curiously American phenomenon, has been reinterpreted in such ways that it’s become, well, not exactly free. You see, the kind of speech that still revels in and enjoys its freedom has an awful lot of paid sponsors, while the kind that just pops out without any corporate backing tends to be retaliated [...]
UPDATE BELOW: A petition is apparently circulating among the tumbleweeds in the dusty, long since evacuated newsroom of the Los Angeles Times, saying to no one that the paper’s decision to run an Onion-like (minus the funny, natch) fake news story that was really an ad for a new NBC series on the front page [...]