LASD insiders say that, for years, Undersheriff Paul Tanaka—not Lee Baca—has ruled the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department though a system built of favoritism, pay-to-play campaign donations, and loyalty rewarded over competence—and the jails scandal is one of the results…
December 13th, 2011 | Comments (15)
Mark Ames appeared on MSNBC’s The Dylan Ratigan Show to talk about the Tea Party slave mentality, how Ames and Levine scooped their journalism peers on the billionaire Koch brothers’ furtive sponsorship of the Tea Party campaign, and how America’s…
October 20th, 2010 | Comments (37)
This article was first published at Alternet. The hero of this story is the $100 bill — or rather, the wad of $100 bills. My first meeting with those lovely $100 bills came at the end of my interview for…
October 11th, 2010 | Comments (96)
Will Wilkinson: Libertard With Sadditude Ever since Yasha and I first broke the story about the Koch brothers financing the Tea Party Campaign in February of 2009, I’ve been wondering: Have all those billions that the Brothers Koch invested into their…
October 3rd, 2010 | Comments (69)
This article was first published in The eXile on March 6, 2008. In this post-Russian presidential election issue, while the righteous American editorialists wag their fingers at Russia’s farcical elections, we want to hold up a giant mirror (with loudspeaker…
March 5th, 2010 | Comments (41)
This article was first published by Vice magazine. We do not live in a democracy because America is all about serving the haves and the have-mores: a capitalocracy, where money talks and broke nobodies like you and me walk. Many…
October 1st, 2009 | Comments (22)
There’s a reason why the Chinese are ascendant while America is in decline. Because the Chinese walk upright and aren’t afraid to apply justice to the pigs who are ruining their country; while at the same time, Americans bow and…
August 7th, 2009 | Comments (23)
Listen to the Radio War Nerd podcast [subscribe here] with guest Gunnar Hrafn Jonsson of Iceland Public Radio on the massacre in Orlando and how online Islamic State jihadis are dealing with battlefield defeats and the shrinking caliphate. Subscribe to Radio War Nerd through the show’s Patreon page.
The political establishment’s racist, authoritarian reaction to the 1992 LA riots—blaming broken black families, massing cops and troops, and Ron Paul’s advice to his family on how to kill black “animals” and get away with it…
You’re gonna have to give me the weekend off. I moved yesterday. To a new town, new job. Trusted Google Maps to get me there. Don’t ever do that. That’s what I think must have happened to that famous lost…
Something’s been going on in Syria for a while now. I’ve already written about the Deraa protests as an example of the big role guerrilla funerals play in irregular war, but it’s time to look at the more general prospects…
Years ago I got an angry email from somebody claiming to be in one of the Baltic militaries. Whoever he was, he wrote in grammatically perfect English so he just had to be from Northern Europe. We can’t talk English…
Before I confess how wrong I was about a big issue, I’ll give myself a little pat on the head for being right about a much smaller deal, the Afghan jailbreak I talked about two days ago.
There are times when you look back and wish you’d had the courage to say what you were thinking. With me it’s a spotty record: Sometimes I do, but more often I wimp out. I wish now I’d said the…
You can’t keep a good Talib down. Or in jail, apparently.
Last Sunday I was grumbling about how there are so many great books about war and not that many great war movies. That got a lot of readers lobbing in their suggestions for good war movies. One reminded me that…
