Marc Cooper

No good deed goes unpunished. Just ask City Councilman and mayoral hopeful Antonio Villaraigosa. I saw him the other night at the second mayoral debate, and he was still pretty steamed over the way his biggest former political allies had royally screwed him. Just the week before, the County Federation......

Photo by Larry Dalton First the L.A. Times helped kill off Gary Webb’s career. Then, eight years later, after Webb committed suicide this past weekend, the Times decided to give his corpse another kick or two, in a scandalous, self-serving and ultimately shameful obituary. It was the culmination of the......

I can’t remember the last time I so thoroughly enjoyed reading a series of articles in the L.A. Times as this week’s Pulitzer-class five-parter on the horrors of King/Drew hospital. As early as midnight, I start peeking at the Times’ Web site, hoping that the next morning’s installment will already......

Never mind that George W. Bush won re-election by 4 million votes. Or that Democrats lost in 28 out of 50 states. Or that more than a third of Latino votes went to the Republicans. And that something like 40 percent of union votes went Republican. Don’t worry — be......

IT'S NOT JUST SQUISHY LIBERALS and ACLU lawyers anymore who cast a wary eye toward the future of our civil liberties. Just as the White House last week was announcing the replacement of Attorney General John Ashcroft by Alberto Gonzales, I was having lunch with the former Republican attorney general......

Whatever slim hope that Democrats might have of extracting something positive from this week’s resounding defeat depends entirely on how much authentic introspection they are willing to inflict on themselves. To the degree that they look outward — instead of inward — to identify the causes of the 2004 debacle,......

GORE VIDAL THOUGHT IT WAS a challenging exercise. How do you give an interview about this week’s election five days before it happens, knowing it will appear a day after? Kerry would certainly be better than Bush, he argued. But the systemic problems confronted by modern America require attention far......

in the privacy of the voting booth, it’s likely I will — for the first time since 1972 — vote for the Democratic candidate, John Kerry. I will do so bereft of any illusions. In voting, I will not be “taking back America,” or even “taking back my democracy.” Nor......

The third and final presidential debate will be over by the time this column appears in print, so my apologies if it is overtaken by events. If so, it would be a fitting metaphor for what has become of the final stretch of this presidential race. For this is not......

We can debate whether or not John Edwards beat Dick Cheney in the vice-presidential debate. What is certain, however, is that as a debater Edwards beat the hell out of- John Kerry. And, for that matter, cranky old Cheney did better than his junior partner, George W. Bush. So maybe......