Marc Cooper

Bob Hertzberg sure picked the right venue for his election-night party. The obscure AirTel Plaza Hotel, with its tiki-themed Clipper Club Lounge — situated across the street from the Van Nuys Airport — is a favorite nesting place for charter pilots and crews marooned by bouts of fog. It was......

I find it difficult to be at all critical of the unfortunate and brave Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena. After surviving her ordeal — being held prisoner by a group of insurgent beheaders and then getting shot by American troops on her way to the Baghdad airport — she has moral......

Quite a city we live in. At the last minute, Channel 2 decided to pre-empt the live broadcast of its own mayoral debate Monday to make room for Entertainment Tonight’s post-Oscar jabber fest. (Is Jeff Gannon now running KCBS News?) Not really much of a surprise given that the culmination......

"We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water......

We know what the Bush second-term domestic agenda looks like: privatizing, and cutting the benefits of, Social Security; making tax cuts permanent for the wealthy; coddling insurance companies and medical providers through “tort reform”; expanding standardized testing in public schools; and banning gay marriage across the country. The president wants......

Photo by Ted SoquiAbout midway through lunch at Art’s Deli in Studio City, Bob Hertzberg’s eyes begin to water and his usual courtroom-confident tone wavers. Asked to compare himself to his father, a constitutional lawyer who introduced him to politics, the 50-year-old former Assembly speaker and current mayoral contender cuts......

The Iraqi elections were surreal: The country was in lockdown, the borders sealed off, the candidates’ names still unknown, the reporters bottled up on hotel patios and on military bases and bedecked in flak jackets. Yet, I found the images of Iraqi men and women venturing out amid the threat......

Governor Schwarzenegger's act is no longer very amusing. I freely admit to chuckling over the way he booted the miserable Gray Davis from office. And I have smiled while he has charmed or bullied whoever stood in the way of his being taken seriously as the governor of the biggest......

Ordinary Democrats, defeated and disillusioned by last November’s whuppin’ by George W. Bush, may still be trying to figure out just exactly what went wrong. But at least one group of key party players have come up with an answer: Whatever the problem was, throw more money at it. Meeting......

Sorry to snicker over such a dire topic. But I had to laugh out loud this week reading an L.A. Times front-pager reminding us that while Iraq’s "landmark" elections are now less than a month away, the "nuts and bolts" of holding a credible vote are yet to be worked......