Harold Meyerson

It’s an exaggeration to say that liberals ever controlled the Democratic Party, but by any measure, holding them down to a single hour’s speechifying has to mar...

’TIS THE FINAL COLUMN, the last Powerlines, and I’d like to use it to think back and forward about the city I’ve reported on and marveled at and hectored and prodded for nearly two decades. My first gig at the Weekly, courtesy of founder Jay Levin and his then-new editor,......

For those of you who follow such things, the reports of my impending severance from and by the Weekly are not exaggerated. For readers who developed a chemical dependency on me during the past 17 years in which I’ve been writing this column for the Weekly, I do appear every......

PHIL ANGELIDES IS SO LEAN that it’s hard to find a physical description of the Democratic gubernatorial nominee that doesn’t include the word “gangly.” With just under seven weeks until Election Day, he seems to be made of lead, a dead weight threatening to drag down other worthy Democrats and......

ALL THE HOO-HA about immigration notwithstanding, America remains more a white working-class nation than anything else. Those white Americans may no longer be laboring on farms or in factories, and the national median skin color is clearly growing darker, but, as public-opinion analyst Ruy Teixeira and sociologist Joel Rogers have......

PERVERSE THOUGH IT MAY SOUND, the one thing that this year’s gubernatorial race has confirmed is that to become, or remain, governor of California, you have to come across as a Democrat. Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t a Democrat, of course, but he currently plays one on television, and, as in almost......

WHEN THE POSITION OF CHAIRMAN of the Los Angeles Communist Party came open in the late 1940s, the two obvious candidates were Dorothy Healey, then the party’s organizational secretary, and Ben Dobbs, the party’s labor secretary. Both were smart and affable and had charisma to burn. They were also the......

IF THE REPUBLICAN CONGRESS HAS a guiding principle, it must be that the government that governs least governs worst. By now, the modus operandi of this Congress is clearly established: First, ignore a national problem, either because doing something about it would annoy your betters (be they the president or......

LIKE ANY MAJOR METROPOLIS, Los Angeles has its normal sea of troubles, but there are two fundamental problems that really define the city and the challenges it confronts. The first, with which the Weekly has dealt extensively of late, is the quality of its air. The second, which may be......

HERE IN WASHINGTON, Democrats are engaged in a frenzy of rethinking. Two new magazines have been unveiled this week (in one of which — full disclosure here — I wrote a piece on the nonexistence of Democratic policy toward offshoring in the age of globalization). Major conferences abound. Think tanks......