Harold Meyerson

WITHIN THE ALL-TOO-SMALL WORLD of liberals and labor, there’s been no larger topic of discussion for the past couple of weeks than the Los Angeles Times’ four-part series on the United Farm Workers. Following the groundbreaking stories from the Bakersfield Californian and the Weekly’s own Marc Cooper, Times reporter Miriam......

IT WAS HARDLY A DISTINCTION HE SOUGHT, but at one point in his life, Frank Wilkinson was a one-man full-employment program for the FBI. When he and his attorneys were finally able to check out the Bureau’s file on him, they learned that the organization had employed up to eight......

They were the alpha and omega of Tom Bradley’s Los Angeles. No two players in Bradley’s coalition — a coalition that dominated the city in the 1970s and ’80s — were more different in politics and sensibility than Bill Robertson and Marvin Braude. Robertson headed the L.A. County Federation of......

Not content simply to defend the president’s war, Senator Joe Lieberman is now scolding those who criticize it. In times of war, he says, “politics should stop at the water’s edge.” Fortunately, that’s not been the experience of Lieberman’s country, where now and then leaders have stepped forward to defend......

Whatever its virtues, the United Nations isn’t the first place you’d turn to if you wanted to expose some nefarious internal practices of its more powerful member states. So it came as no small surprise when a U.N. investigator last week documented the “widespread” use of torture in China. Manfred......

They’re still counting. And with each successive updating of the results in this November’s special election, the magnitude of Arnold’s defeat only increases.With roughly 40 percent of California voters opting for absentee ballots, and about one-third of those handing their ballots in on Election Day, that means that one million......

The problem with socialism, the great socialist and wit Oscar Wilde once remarked, was that it took up too many evenings. Wilde was referring to democratic socialism, of course (he died before the Bolsheviks perverted the ideology), and what he meant was that subjecting all manner of decisions to democratic......

There was something fitting in the fact that it was Antonio Villaraigosa who announced the death of Ed Roybal last week, and it wasn’t simply that Roybal was the founding father of Latino politics in L.A. and Villaraigosa its most successful practitioner. The connection, actually, is a good deal deeper......

I'm not a lawyer — I don’t even play one on television. But after reading the 22-page indictment that Patrick Fitzgerald’s grand jury handed up against Scooter Libby last Friday, I have one piece of advice for the Scootster: Cop a plea.Fitzgerald’s indictment was clearly crafted with one goal ever......