Marc Cooper

Better you don’t try out the lesser-of-two-evils argument on Van Jones. At least when it comes to the Gray Davis recall election. “We can’t afford another three years of these state budgets,” says the 35-year-old Yale Law School graduate and director of the Oakland-based Ella Baker Human Rights Center. “In......

Maybe the White House should start footnoting George W. Bush’s speeches so we know whom to turn to anytime we hear a lie fall from his lips. The preposterous assertion that tax cuts for millionaires grow the economy? Oh, you need to talk to Philips down there in the Budget......

Bill Simon Jr. really is a sorry excuse for a politician. I was reminded of this while sitting in as guest panelist last week on Bill Rosendahl’s always-wonderful Week in Review cable-TV talk show on Adelphia. Simon, the multimillionaire Clark Kent look-alike, also was on the show, less than a......

Westside City Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski doesn’t look much like Dana Carvey. Or does she? Y’better move over, Church Lady, because there’s a new Sex Sheriff in town, and it’s Cindy. Miscikowski, as chairwoman of the council’s Public Safety Committee, is fast-tracking a new measure — that might be law by......

Last week the L.A. Times’ Pooh-Bah in Chief, John Carroll, sent his section editors a sharply worded memo announcing his campaign to purge the paper of all political bias — though the only type he mentioned was “liberal.” In excoriating a front-page story by Scott Gold that detailed efforts by......

George W. Bush was right when he scoffed that the $350 billion tax cut passed last week by the Senate was “itsy-bitsy.” Or even “itty-bitty” as the president later revised his remarks. Dubya got it right not only because he is an expert in All Things Tiny. In a way......

An American friend of mine visiting from South America walked away from one of last month’s parties around the L.A. Times Books Festival rather shaken and bewildered. “I felt like I was in a loony bin,” he said as we emerged from a chic book-launch party in the Hollywood Hills......

Photo by Ted Soqui On a recent Thursday night, as U.S. tanks rolled toward Baghdad, Gary Hart, now 66 and clad in a black blazer and navy-blue turtleneck, strode to the microphone of Hollywood’s Knitting Factory and immediately lashed out at the war, which he compared to “kicking over a......

Illustration by Mitch Handsone Have you ever imagined what it would be like living in a society where, say, a John Ashcroft would be unrestrained by the niceties of constitutional law? Where draconian enforcement of a Patriot Act includes long prison terms for alleged thought crimes? Where, in the name......

One more Saturday soiree chez über-hosts Stanley Sheinbaum and Betty Warner and one more click on what is sure to be the long chain of White House 2004 fund-raisers. The one this past weekend celebrated one-time boy mayor of Cleveland and now Congressman Dennis Kucinich, the runaway presidential choice for......