"Why aren't you talking about Michael Jackson more?"

The question, from a caller to Larry Mantle's KPCC-Pasadena public radio program "AirTalk," interrupted a discussion of the budget mess in Sacramento. Actually, it was more a wail than a question -- a crack about the Michael mania that had hijacked...

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.

"These commercials are boring, poor and annoying," Noor Sabah, an engineer in Fallujah, told the Washington Post's Ernesto Londono. Thanks...

Seconds after the networks say that it's Sotomayor, her Wikipedia entry is updated. My Encyclopedia Britannica can't do that; that's why it's boxed in my closet. The newspapers that hit my driveway a coupla minutes ago can't do that; that's why on-paper distribution is dying. TV can go wall-to-wall...

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...

It will be the playwrights and screenwriters, not the journalists and historians, who will some day 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,...

"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...

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...

Of all the arguments against stem cell research, the lamest has to be that "it would put us on a slippery slope." But since this case comes from the same precincts that gave us "gay marriage will lead to incest and man-on-dog sex," I suppose I shouldn't be...

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.

You know the knock on big labor. It's bleeding the...

They lost control of the message.

That's now become the universal diagnosis of Team Obama's mistake during the stimulus bill debate. From the commentariat to the White House chief of staff, the lesson to be learned from the last two weeks, we are told, is that the administration let...

Like religious zealots whose tiny parties hold Israeli governing coalitions hostage, three Republican senators have the Democratic Congress by the short hairs. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, along with Maine's two Senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, have improbably been empowered to kosher the stimulus bill - to decide which billions...

It's no contest. Former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich's corruption is way more entertaining than Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe's. A mother having in vitro octuplets on top of six prior in vitro kids is much more attention-grabbing than a massive famine and cholera epidemic half a world away. The $1.22 million...

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 evidence about kids and their parents isn't anecdotal; it's documented in a study just released by...

"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." His call to service, to find meaning in something greater than...

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?

When press accounts confirm your interpretation of events, they're fair, accurate and objective. When the upshot of a news story...

First I saw a young protester telling a CNN reporter in Trafalgar Square, "Every single day, as soon as we turn on the TV, we see children there die in the hospitals, adults dying, children dying on the floor. Why, why, why? Why do children have to die? Why...

I don't know about you, but I've had it up to here with once-in-a-lifetime events.

Katrina was once in a lifetime. The 2004 tsunami was once in a lifetime. This past year's wildfires were the worst blazes in living memory. Every other month seems to bring an epic rain or...

As the country went to the polls this past fall, the meme that America is a "center-right" country surged. Between the last week of October and the first week of November, the number of times that phrase appeared in the print and broadcast outlets...

"It doesn't matter if my parents have broadband or not -- they're just as clueless about a computer with a fast connection to the Internet as a slow one."

The words came from a musician in his 20s, a well-educated African American who works with artists...

Los Angeles Times owner Sam Zell didn't file for bankruptcy because the newspaper business is being battered by the recession or by online competition. He went into Chapter 11 because of the irresponsible and boneheaded deal he made to take over Tribune Co. in the first place.

Zell's own...