Harold Meyerson

If anything was strikingly clear from President Bush’s de facto declaration of war this week, it was that the war is anything but pre-emptive. Pre-emption presupposes an imminent threat, and if Iraq actually posed an imminent threat, our government would hardly be giving Saddam & Sons a 48-hour advance notice......

The plans are laid, the troops are in place. All that America lacks as it stands on the brink of war are allies, international sanction and a plausible rationale for why we’re going to war in the first place. Listening to the president justify the war he is about to......

Photo by Debra DiPaolo I SUPPOSE YOU COULD CALL IT a desperate measure for a desperate time. After all, the resolution that the City Council passed and Jim Hahn signed last Friday, putting the city on record against a unilateral war in Iraq, will cause no phones to ring at......

IN CASE YOU HAVEN'T NOTICED— and noticing a nullity isn’t easy — Los Angeles city government is becalmed. Jim Hahn and the rest of the civic establishment have smote the dread secession dragon, and only now, months after their victory, is it clear that none of them has a to-do......

ACCORDING TO A RECENT ENTRY in Tim Rutten’s ongoing Los Angeles Times coverage of the government’s apparently looming antitrust action against Village Voice Media (VVM) and New Times, the case is moving beyond economic questions and into areas that can only be called political. At issue is the deal that......

Gore is gone, and the race for the Democratic nomination in 2004 is so wide open, says one Democratic pollster, that “the plausibility of ’why-not-me‘ candidacies has just exploded.” This isn’t 1992, when Mario Cuomo‘s decision not to run failed to prompt any prominent national Democrats who’d been holding back......

WHAT I WANT TO KNOW IS, WHO makes the administration's economic policy? It's sure not the secretary of the Treasury or the head of the Economic Policy Council. The recently sacked Paul O'Neill and Lawrence Lindsey, who respectively held those two positions, were canned because they weren't good communicators, and......

“Democrats, for some strange reason, didn’t go out and vote in the force that we thought they would,” said Garry South, Gray Davis‘ political consigliere and maid-of-all-work, on the morning after his boss’ squeaker of a re-election. In the chill sun of hindsight, of course, things look clearer and bleaker......

THE DWINDLING OF THE DEMOCRATIC base in Tuesday’s election had a lamentable effect on two local ballot measures. In Santa Monica, the beachfront hotels managed to defeat a living-wage ordinance that would have applied to the low-income workers of large employers in the city’s coastal zone. After waging a multimillion-dollar......

It is the first sign of trouble in a play about nothing but trouble. Asked by her father in the first scene what she can say to demonstrate her love for him, Cordelia says, “Nothing.” To which Lear responds, “Nothing will come of nothing.” Which is a pretty fair summation......