Marc Cooper

DES MOINES, IOWA —This is one of the strangest columns I’ve ever had to write. I tap this out in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, a day before the dramatic first-in-the-country presidential caucuses. And yet, thanks to the peculiarities of the technology and mechanics of the publishing industry, most......

John Gomez Jr. parks his silver family van in the back row of one more anonymous strip mall off California’s Highway 79, an hour and a half southeast of Los Ang...

OKAY, WE ALL KNOW IT ain’t badminton. But does presidential-campaign politics necessarily have to be an all-out flop into the mud? Apparently so. Facebook-schmacebook, new media or not, it’s still the same old Reagan-era brick-and-mortar, sticks-and-stones strategies that desperate candidates revert to when times get tight. For this election cycle,......

Bill Clinton’s back, and it isn’t a pretty picture. In his post-heart-surgery incarnation, now shed of his Burger King baby fat, he’s as lean as he is mean. His more sharply chiseled face, his tighter jaw line, his taut neck, his thinning snow-white head of hair, his unusually long and......

HERE’S SOME NEWS YOU MIGHT USE about Barack Obama. Did you know he was, in reality, a government plant, a sort of Manchurian Candidate activated by Big Brother to confuse black people? That’s the political gospel according to the recently self-proclaimed Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney as she launched......

WITH HIS SIGNATURE now on the official ballot arguments in favor of four measures that would grant the largest Indian gambling expansion in recent history, Governor Schwarzenegger has formalized his greatest historic flip-flop. It’s been quite a sorry journey for the Guv: from 2003, when he first ran to replace......

NEW ORLEANS — Samuel Beckett’s frustratingly absurd play, Waiting for Godot, usually plays to small, elite, often university-centered audiences who are smugly satisfied by an evening of pondering the more obscure meanings, or meaninglessness, of life. But for the last couple of weeks, Beckett’s signature work has been drawing huge,......

SOMEONE APPARENTLY FAILED TO SEAL the coffin on one of the more ghastly proposed California ballot measures after it was seemingly safely buried a month ago. Like the walking dead, it’s ambling blindly but ominously back onto the political stage. Fat-cat Republican donors have resurrected an initiative that would alter......

Driving home from a weekend in the mountains on Sunday, listening to news radio, my wife suddenly asked what the term “waterboarding” means. I explained the gruesome details, which sounded familiar to her as a Chilean who fled the Pinochet dictatorship. “Oh, you mean torture,” she said. “Why do they......

WHERE I LIVE, ON THE EDGE of Topanga Canyon, our cars are dusted with ash and our nostrils tickled with the scent of charred wood. We’ve got one eye on a darkened skyline and the other on the tube, lest we be warned to get out, and get out now......