Marc Cooper

Indian Givers

Marc Cooper
It was one of those surreal moments that often punctuate a reporter’s life. I was in Palm Springs in a union organizing office last week doing some research on an Indian gambling story when news broke that Governor Schwarzenegger had reached a compromise with five casino tribes. Under the new......

Reagan Without Tears

Marc Cooper
Illustration by Robbie Conal If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a......

Reagan Without Tears

Marc Cooper
If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so......

Who’s on First?

Marc Cooper
Stunning is the only way to describe what seems to be the precipitous collapse of the Pentagon’s political power in Iraq. Donald Rumsfeld might still have 138,000 troops on the ground, but after the sacking of Ahmad Chalabi last week and the embarrassing tussle over who will head Baghdad’s transitional......

Our Exit Strategy

Marc Cooper
We finally got some good news from George W. Bush. We haven’t had very much since he stood on an aircraft carrier a year ago and declared the war in Iraq was over. Now, we learn, the occupation, which turned out to be bloodier than the war, is also shutting......

Let It Be John McCain

Marc Cooper
The Abu Ghraib prison scandal threatens to become another Watergate. George W. Bush’s approval ratings are nosediving. A huge majority thinks America is on the “wrong track,” and an almost equal number think the war’s being mismanaged. But John Kerry continues to elicit about as much excitement as a Snickers......
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Musclin’ and Guzzlin’

Marc Cooper
Gonna save all my money and buy a GTO Get a helmet and a roll bar and I’ll be ready to go Take it out to Pomona and let ’em know, yeah-yeah That I’m the coolest thing around Little buddy, gonna shut you down When I turn it on, wind......

Dirty Pictures, Dirty War

Marc Cooper
Campaigning in Michigan this week, President Bush revealed that American culture is moving away from “if it feels good, just go ahead and do it . . . to a culture in which each of us understands we are responsible for the decisions we make in life.” A comfy thought......

Bury My Heart at Agua Caliente

Marc Cooper
Don’t get the wrong idea about the quaint-sounding Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians. They do a whole lot more than nostalgically recite the legend of the Cahuilla Maiden while giving guided tours of two picturesque canyons on their vast tribal lands in the Coachella Valley. They also own two......

Making Sense

Marc Cooper
It’s easy to understand how filmmaker Jonathan Demme (Stop Making Sense, The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia) was captivated by the theatrical buoyancy of Jean Dominique, one of Haiti’s most prominent human-rights fighters and that bedeviled country’s most combative radio journalist. Though Dominique — slim, wiry, a pipe stuck in......