National Opinion

The Clintons and race: What goes around ...
As the Barack and Hillary Show extended its tour to such off-off-off Broadway primary states as Indiana and North Carolina (coming soon to Puerto Rico!), it was inevitable that both sides would dust off the "playing the race card" script.

1:03 a.m. PT May 8, 2008 | more »

The U.S. war on journalists
Sami al-Haj is a free man today, after having been imprisoned by the U.S. military for more than six years. His crime: journalism.

1:04 a.m. PT May 8, 2008 | more »

Anti-American H1-B visas getting a critical look
At long last, there now appears to be at least some chance that egregious abuse of H1-B immigration visas by large corporations might be stopped and American workers given an equal shake with foreign competitors.

9:22 p.m. PT May 4, 2008 | more »

The half-won, half-lost war goes on
The gloomy election-year refrain is that America is mired in Iraq, took its eye off Afghanistan, empowered Iran and is losing the war on terror. But how accurate is that pessimistic diagnosis?

12:48 a.m. PT May 2, 2008 | more »

Right thinking infects the body politic
One of the main themes of my new book, "Right Is Wrong," is the role the media have played in allowing the lunatic fringe now in control of the Republican Party - the people who believe in torture but don't believe in evolution - to hijack our democracy.

12:20 a.m. PT Apr 25, 2008 | more »

Just how neo are the neocons?
In the play "Embedded," Tim Robbins' 2003 satire about the Iraq invasion, a thinly veiled Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz shout with Nazi-like gusto, "Hail, Leo Strauss!" and get sexually aroused at the prospect of international conquest.
12:16 a.m. PT Apr 24, 2008 | more »

Campaign casualties are everywhere
It is only four months into 2008, but the presidential campaign - already too long and nasty - is still a long way from over. And the casualties are mounting.

11:21 p.m. PT Apr 17, 2008 | more »

Barack Obama, the yuppie candidate
Barack Obama is finally coming into focus. For a while now, the Obamaphiles have insisted that their candidate represents a profound break with the past. No more culture wars. No more "re-litigating the 1960s," in Obama's own words.

10:04 p.m. PT Apr 16, 2008 | more »

Remember the Orangeburg Massacre victims
Sen. Barack Obama is clearly a bad bowler. The networks rolled the video clip of his gutter ball endlessly across our TV screens. It was an Internet favorite. The media served it, and the public ate it up.
10:18 p.m. PT Apr 16, 2008 | more »

Jerry Brown the early favorite for next governor
While all political eyes are still on this year's presidential race and properly will be until after November, it won't be long before people start looking at the impending race to succeed Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

10:25 p.m. PT Apr 13, 2008 | more »

The genocide loophole
Last week, Russia's lower house of parliament passed a resolution insisting that Josef Stalin's man-made 1932-33 famine - called the Holodomor in Ukrainian - wasn't genocide.

12:22 a.m. PT Apr 10, 2008 | more »

The real anti-torture candidate
Imagine, a candidate for president who, a year or so ago, no one would have considered electable. Now the person is the front-runner, with a groundswell of grass-roots support, threatening the sense of inevitability of the establishment candidates.

12:23 a.m. PT Apr 10, 2008 | more »