Opinion / Forum
While Komen’s controversial V.P. resigned, it won’t be the last we hear from her.
Karen Handel spent the week before her resignation as the vice president of public policy of the Susan G. Komen foundation at the epicenter of the controversy around Komen’s decision to withdraw support for Planned ...
Extending the Fort Ord Reuse Authority’s lifespan could mean more jobs, better development and cooperation in the region.
Fort Ord has been a critical part of our region’s economy, politics and environment since 1917, and we all know the challenges and opportunities that the base’s 1994 closure posed to our communities. That year, ...
If only they didn’t stand a chance at becoming president, this could be fun to watch.
What a satisfying, if self-indulgent, pleasure it has lately become to read the conservative press. As Newt Gingrich whacks Mitt Romney with brickbats furnished by Occupy Wall Street, the voices of the Republican establishment are ...
Falling into the Bin Laden trap: One down, one to go.
In October, 2001, just after 9/11, I wrote the following: “The regimes in [Pakistan and Saudi Arabia] are based on a coalition of support from pro-Western modernizing elites and an extremely conservative, popularly-based Islamic establishment. ...
NAACP President Ben Jealous decries national addiction to incarceration over education.
MCWeekly: Who are some of your local heroes in the Civil Rights struggle? And why? Ben Jealous: It was a whole family of people active in the NAACP. They had faith in me, got me ...
The entertainment industry has failed to explain why the U.S. economy collapsed.
As protesters continue to provoke fresh real-life confrontations with our financial oligarchy, the American culture industry has followed its own instinctive path, forging heroic narratives about the nation’s financial woes that gravitate into a Neverland ...
The federal prison system includes units where inmates can be rarely seen or heard.
When the Abu-Baker family arrived to visit their father, Shukri Abu-Baker, at the secretive federal prison known as a Communications Management Unit (CMU) in Indiana this past fall, they were forced to sit in silence ...
A dangerous bill heading toward the president would gut our rights.
You know these are interesting times when Glenn Beck, Dianne Feinstein, Rand Paul and the ACLU all agree on an issue. The issue in question is Subtitle D of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), ...
While the world slept, the poor were demonized and the middle class collapsed.
Class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from ...
If scandal helps elevate Gingrich while finishing off Herman Cain, the country should be declared insane.
Sex is almost always the loser in a scandal. Heaped with scorn, muddied and defiled, it sinks to the basement of our collective imagination – its vain cries, “I am not an animal; I am ...
Then the president and Congress just aren’t that into you.
Forget now-defunct GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain’s rallying cry of 9-9-9. The battle cry for every American ought to be 7-7-7. 7-7-7: for the $7.7 trillion the Bush and Obama Administrations secretly funneled to the ...
How Higher Education and the Security State Intermingle
Two shocking scandals. Two esteemed universities. Two disgraced university leaders. One stunning connection. Over the last month, we’ve seen Penn State University President Graham Spanier dismissed from his duties and UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi ...
Keep your expectations for it low, based on a possible court decision.
How would you feel if the government could freely use satellite technology and computers to secretly turn your property into an invisible surveillance device and track your every public move 24/7? The Obama administration recently ...
Idyllic Happy Valley built on the suffering of children.
These things should be simple: 1. When, as an adult, you come come across another adult raping a small child, you should a) do everything in your power to rescue that child from the rapist, ...
A defender of the condemned finds commonalities with a cop who worked Death Row protests.
We met at a gay wedding. I’ll call him David. His wife was the matron of honor for one bride, my wife the matron of honor for the other. We were at the rehearsal dinner ...
The Apple co-founder was lionized in death, but his legacy includes Chinese sweatshops.
No one knows the lure of Apple products better than Mike Daisey. He is, in geek parlance, an Apple fanboy: “I belong to the Cult of Mac. I have been to the House of Jobs. ...
The Republican darling might want to back away from an all-out border war.
Pizza mogul Herman Cain has had a good few weeks. He’s vacuuming up Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s former supporters, rising in the polls and turning the GOP nominating contest on its heels. It’s a testament ...
Republicans wouldn’t dare, unless it helped kill Planned Parenthood.
First they came for abortion, but I didn’t care because abortion was for sluts. Then they came for sex ed, but I didn’t care because the kids can learn all they need to know at ...
The system will ignore the wrath of young, debt-ridden and disenfranchised voters at its own peril.
Enraged young people, The New York Times worries aloud, are kicking off the dust of phony democracy, in which “the job of a citizen was limited to occasional trips to the polling places to vote” ...
A Central Coast attorney’s killing helps shine a light on the hidden tragedy of domestic violence.
What is the leading cause of injury to women in the United States? If you guessed car accidents, you would be wrong. In fact, more women are hurt by their partners than by any other ...
Changing the food system won’t come from Congress, but from educated eaters
In the forty years since the publication of Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet, a movement dedicated to the reform of the food system has taken root in America. Lappé’s groundbreaking book connected ...
An Iraq War vet suggests: Stop relying on empty symbolism and choose leaders wisely.
A patriot, as defined by the dictionary, is someone who defends popular liberty and zealously safeguards his or her country’s welfare. Certain things come to mind: defending your nation, paying your taxes and making sacrifices ...
The Kochs are at it again, this time promoting ultra-restrictive voter identification laws.
V oter fraud is virtually nonexistent in America, but this imaginary crime still serves to justify a wave of new voter registration laws—often requiring a state-issued photo ID—that Republican legislators have rapidly spread across the ...
Veteran combat doc turned author finds death isn’t the only measure of risk on the battlefield.
The human costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are high – and hidden, due to advances in combat medicine, and this masks the ferocity of these conflicts. In Broken Bodies, Shattered Minds: A ...
The Iowa Straw Poll, a pricey test of organizing capacity, has a strange influence on American politics.
A day after Saturday’s Iowa Straw Poll results came in – Michele Bachmann edged out Ron Paul, with Tim Pawlenty a distant third, just ahead of Rick Santorum and Herman Cain – Pawlenty pulled the ...
Time for Real Liberals to stand up and kick Team Dem to the curb.
The U.S. might as well have defaulted. Regardless of where you stand politically, the deal to raise the federal debt limit came too late for the U.S. to achieve its main objective, avoiding the downgrading ...
Has Roger Ailes tapped American phones on behalf of Fox News?
“H as Roger Ailes been keeping tabs on your phone calls?” That’s how Portfolio.com began a post back in 2008, when a former Fox News producer charged that Ailes had outfitted a highly secured “brain ...
Balanced budget amendment will require radical shifts in government, a fact nobody seems to get.
This week, as the federal debt ceiling battle churns closer to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s Aug. 2 deadline, there’s increasing talk about an amendment to the Constitution that would require balanced budgets. Senate Minority Leader ...
The great Republican obsession: women’s bodies and killing Planned Parenthood.
I suppose that conservatives aren’t going to be happy until they kill off Planned Parenthood. Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin just signed a two-year, $66 billion budget stripping the organization’s health clinics of their state ...
With constant conflict, searching for peace becomes an abstraction.
In times of war, U.S. presidents have often talked about yearning for peace. But the last decade has brought a shift in the rhetorical zeitgeist while a tacit assumption has taken hold – war must ...
Obama’s security troika runs headfirst into another conflict.
So Obama’s women wanted war against Libya. We’d like to think that women in power would somehow be less pro-war, but in the Obama administration it appears that the bellicosity is worst among Hillary Clinton, ...
U.S. nuclear hubris mixes technological arrogance with profit motive.
Tshe “impossible” is underway in Japan. A 9.0 magnitude earthquake has badly shaken up several “indestructible” nuclear plants. Reactor No. 1 at the quake-damaged Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station is in partial meltdown, and reactor ...
No jobs a-boomin’ in environmental sector, but losses in traditional areas abound.
In his State of the Union speech last month, President Barack Obama planned to “win the future” by, among many other things, having the federal government invest in “clean energy technology – an investment that ...
Consumer marketing makes little girls older much faster.
In November, the U.S. Senate, by a vote of 58 to 41, rejected the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill that would have remedied pay disparities between men and women. What better time to examine the ...
The tiny house movement still comes with a sizeable pricetag.
In the same way that America’s fast food purveyors pack their menus with cheap, empty calories, America’s home builders pack their houses with cheap, empty space. On a cost per square foot basis, the typical ...
Voters want the country to innovate, president wants to get us there.
As President Obama addressed the nation during his recent State of the Union speech, I was in a dark, crowded room peering through one-way glass at a group of voters from the real America – ...
Antidepressant residue chills fish out, and damages their innate drive to survive.
Back in the 1990s, Theo Colborn, then-senior scientist with the World Wildlife Fund, sounded the first alarms about endocrine disrupters. In the book Our Stolen Future (Plume) Colborn describes her early findings that connected these ...
When marketing copy passes as medical writing, someone wins.
After the FDA approves a new drug, it rarely faces follow-up studies that might reveal serious and possibly fatal side effects. Some dangers remain hidden for years until an accumulation of disasters sparks lawsuits. Faced ...
Cult of thinness battles fat acceptance movement and kids still lose.
As President Obama signs the new federal child nutrition bill, flanked by anti-childhood-obesity crusader Michelle Obama, the culture wars have devolved into a food fight – literally. Yet it is a battle in which the ...
Can we disconnect from online media long enough to live our lives?
The blog of a friend kept showing up in my inbox. I felt guilty not reading it each week, and couldn’t get it to go into my junk mail. Then I saw the unsubscribe button. ...
America’s drug policy a failed experiment in social engineering.
America’s drug policy aims to reduce illicit drug use by arresting and incarcerating dealers and, to a lesser extent, users. Whatever its merits (and there are some), the policy is deeply flawed because it is ...
Vertical farming imagines a utopian future, but can it price out?
Now that there are hardly any farmers left to migrate from the cornfields to the city, farms themselves are poised to make the big move. This, at least, is the premise of Dickson Despommier’s The ...
Palin is no nature lover – she just plays one on TV.
If the first episode was any indication, Sarah Palin’s Alaska will be as cloying as expected, with family conflict rendered in its most anodyne form, giving Palin ample opportunity to burnish her image as a ...
Gore abounds, with Shakespearean underpinnings.
With its putrid zombie horde, The Walking Dead is the ultimate gift for fans of gore: There are splattered heads, swarming flies and enough tattered, rotting flesh to make most watch through splayed fingers. But ...
Dems’ future lies in Latinos – and Obama’s ability to close his credibility gap with them.
In 2008, Barack Obama won the national Latino vote 67-31. Given the rapid growth of this key demographic, those results augured well not just for Obama’s re-election chances, but for the Democratic Party’s future. It ...
How women style their hair down there connotes class.
Once upon a time, it was risque rather than nostalgic to feature pubic hair in a softcore magazine. Bob Guccione, the founder of Penthouse, changed all that, revealing to millions of readers the physical details ...
SEIU backs Prop. 19 and courts a hip sector of workers.
The debate over the legalization of marijuana has burned for decades, but has largely been waged between the political establishment and a grassroots movement trying to get the government off its back. But as the ...
A look at what insiders are saying as the Giants open the World Series in San Francisco.
Turns out the blogosphere is particularly well-suited to spread the lore of the San Francisco Giants. What follows is a compilation of local and national posts from smarty-pants of all stripes in advance of the ...
The NFL’s breast cancer blitz shows it is as fragile as Brett Favre’s reputation.
You may have noticed an abundance of pink in the National Football League this month. Between the pink sneakers, pink mouth guards, and pink wristbands, one would be excused for wondering how the machismo-drenched league ...
People are at their smartest when they blend their brains with machines.
Which are smarter, humans or machines? Back in 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer struck a blow for bots when it beat Garry Kasparov at chess. Deep Blue won because computers can perform endless lightning-fast calculations; ...
Domestic dad is more than just a hot piece of status.
People over the years have called me many things. My favorites include: wordsmith, Next in Line and, of course, Beaver – because it rhymes with my last name. If I don’t ease off the pizza ...
It’s class, not organizational issues, that are responsible for the failure of the education system.
With America’s public schools struggling to survive slashed budgets and unequal funding, school reform is back on the national agenda – but will the new model of market-based “reform” promote greater educational quality? Already, schools ...
Sending Snooki free Coach bags is a Jersey Shore thing – for designer competitors.
There is a wicked new marketing strategy currently sending shock waves through the high-stakes competitive world of luxury fashion. It’s devious, delightful and deliciously dirty. Here’s the deal: Remember how Snooki, drunk or sober, was ...
Downsizing can be a process of finding gain, not pain, as the recession continues.
As housing starts and sales continue to droop, you’ll find the best deals by walking around. Human-scale homes and communities feature amenities that you can walk, bike or take public transit to without getting in ...
“Irresponsible’’ revelations in Afghan leaks may hasten an end to the war.
“An appallingly irresponsible act.” That’s how General James Mattis, fresh at the helm of U.S. Central Command, characterizes the release of more than 76,000 classified Pentagon reports released by the website WikiLeaks. You may recall ...
Anti-feminist media hype is the “gift” that keeps on giving.
Want to sell a lot of magazines and generate a lot of buzz? Take a story about society’s ongoing negotiations over gender roles – important but not always sexy by magazine standards – and give ...
The winning entry from Steinbeck Festival’s Travels With Charley essay contest.
Beardog heard it first, as always. I was lost in a dream, chasing a fleeting strip of bacon through a swaying sea of corn silk. Good Bear and his own golden ears picked up on ...
How the gaming addiction feeds into the Tea Party movement.
The numbers are daunting. The Entertainment Software Association reports that in 2009, 68 percent of American households played video games. According to Grabstats, 41 percent of all video gaming involves mission/action/narrative and enacted violence, while ...
Never let facts get in the way of a good immigration scare.
Arizona, apparently, is a hellhole. Just listen to the state’s Republican governor, Jan Brewer: “Our law enforcement agencies have found bodies in the desert either buried or just lying out there that have been beheaded.” ...
Why Americans should stop whimpering, and start fighting back.
In 1967, animal researchers conducted an interesting experiment. Two sets of dogs were strapped into harnesses and subjected to a series of shocks. The dogs were placed in the same room. The first set of ...
Corporate greed should be punished, not rewarded, by our legal and political system.
“Ithink it’s part of this sort of blame-game society in the sense that it’s always got to be somebody’s fault instead of the fact that maybe sometimes accidents happen.” – Rand Paul, on Good Morning ...
Just in time for the U.S. Open - the great bottled-water scam.
We think of ourselves as shrewd and thrifty shoppers. Yet when it comes to bottled water, North Americans are conned to the tune of $15 billion and eight billion gallons annually, paying twice for a ...
Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination brings out cultural, as well as political, biases from the right.
The debate over Barack Obama’s nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court reveals just how powerfully identity politics has corrupted our political discourse. But like so much about the 1960s, what was originally a ...
Stop passing laws about texting while driving, and start driving less.
Texting while driving is a huge problem. We know it’s insanely dangerous. Studies have found that each time you write or read a text message, you take your eyes off the road for almost five ...
Kooky kaleidoscope of Tea Party supporters provide a window into political paranoia.
When Tea Party organizers chose the Washington Ellipse as the setting for their Tax Day protest, they were undoubtedly thinking of its theatrical potential. Behind looms the Washington Monument, an obelisk to the hero of ...
Christiane Amanpour has the chops to change the Sunday news script.
In choosing Christiane Amanpour to host This Week, ABC News has done something not only right but brave. Giving the show to a tireless reporter with an avowed commitment to “make foreign news less foreign ...
Insurance executives show a shocking disregard for the consequences of their actions.
Why was I shocked when I saw two women sitting in front of Congress the other day: Angela F. Braly, the chief executive of WellPoint and Cynthia Miller, the company’s chief actuary? Each had pixie ...
The debate over Israel walks a fine line between legitimate opinion and bigotry.
We recently commemorated the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The somber anniversary was marked by customary calls to combat anti-Semitism worldwide. Yet resisting bigotry is not as clear-cut as it might seem, at ...
Honoring J.D. Salinger’s legacy, with love, squalor and reverence.
At times it seemed like he was long dead, and the news that he had in fact passed away on Jan. 28, just past his 91st birthday, does not dispel the strange sensation of being ...
With a plethora of dead pets, it’s no wonder kiddies are traumatized by their learning literature.
The first book that ever made me cry told the story of an egg-sucking, ringwormy male with one ear chewed off. Did I mention he was yellow? And I was 6? Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller ...
The “Bo-Tax” factor in health care reform puts a new wrinkle on an old problem.
During the Senate’s debates over who should bear the cost of the nearly $900 billion health care bill, there emerged a surprising suggestion: plastic surgery patients. A proposed tax, dubbed the “Bo-Tax” after the wrinkle-reducing ...
Young people may not be as illiterate as you think – or as snobbish pundits like to maintain.
Pundits often fret about how kids today can’t write – and technology is to blame. Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into “bleak, bald, ...
Celebrity stalkers track Twitter and Facebook pages to plot burglaries.
In 1960s Los Angeles, Charlie Manson’s bloodthirsty hippies tried to start a revolution by slaughtering rich people. In 1980s Los Angeles, the cash-hungry yuppies of the Billionaire Boys Club turned to murder to bolster their ...
Fighting Stupak in the Senate.
“That’s the price of healthcare reform.” That’s what plenty of oh-so-well-meaning pundits have told those of us making a fuss over the Stupak amendment, the late-night attachment to the House healthcare reform bill that will ...
The Dow Jones return to 10,000 is a direct result of stimulus spending.
So how can the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit 10,000 when consumers, who make up 70 percent of the economy, have had to cut way back on buying because they have no money? Jobs continue ...
Getting presidents to pay attention.
If you’ve spent time in progressive circles these last nine months, you’ve certainly heard the “make me do it” story. The details bounce around, but the basic tale is this: The president is meeting in ...
Waist deep in the big muddy—again.
October 2009 has begun with the New York Times reporting that “the president, vice president and an array of cabinet secretaries, intelligence chiefs, generals, diplomats and advisers gathered in a windowless basement room of the ...
Where’s the power of online democracy now?
f you paid any attention to the Obama campaign in the 2008 election, you heard a lot about building a movement. To the ears of the politically cynical, calling the campaign a “movement” was just ...
To read, or not to read, that is the question.
Some feel the need to finish any book once started, that this is something “owed” to the author. Some folks also won’t walk out on a bad film just because it’s been paid for or ...
Is new journalism’s survival guide for members only?
Desperate to stay alive, beleaguered newspaper executives first tried to “monetize” their “content.” Now they’re desperately trying to “monetize” their “journalists.” And although the Washington Post recently stumbled badly in offering its pay-to-play sponsored “salons” ...
Anatomy lesson: the surprising rise of the male girdle.
Weary,perhaps, of trying to oppress fickle, headstrong teenage girls, the fashion industry has apparently moved on to an easier target: Dudes. In recent weeks, the New York Times, Time, ABC News, and various other media ...
An unhealthy debate on health care – protests are fine, but how about a fair fight?
One of the fascinating aspects of a political culture in which governmental control has flipped in a relatively short time, from right to left, is that each side now finds itself making arguments the other ...
An open letter to David Dilworth and the political bullies of P.G.
Are you kidding me? You are actually attempting to recall Mayor Dan Cort of Pacific Grove? How could you possibly think this is a worthwhile use of time, energy or money? Rather than fueling drama, ...
The contaminant-disease connection needs to be explored more fully.
There’s been a lot of media attention about sea otters since a recent U.S. Geological Survey report that the population along the California coast has entered another decline, faster than any time since the late ...
The king is dead, long live the king.
F or many performers, top billing at the county fair is as good as the comeback trail ever gets. Michael Jackson had bigger ambitions. Two years ago, London’s Daily Mail reported that the singer was ...
Right wing unloads but comes up empty in anti-Sotomayor drive.
Just weeks into the GOP’s jihad against Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor, it’s clear that their assault is coming up empty. The campaign essentially consists of two main themes drawn from the Big Book ...
A new gender inequality for the new millennium – and two others.
Ihave often written that there is no more glass ceiling and no more salary gap. OK. So if the gender gaps are these feminist favorites, then are there gender gaps we should be concentrating on? ...
GOP looks for different “profile,’’ but has same old faces.
It was a curious story, straight out of the man-bites-dog files: “California Representative Kevin McCarthy, the chief recruiter for House Republicans, said he wants his party to select candidates based less on ideology and more ...
From Twilight to reality TV, the young’uns seem to have an unending appetite for tedium.
The waiting is the hardest part, pop philosopher Tom Petty once counseled, but that was in 1981, well before 24-hour banking, overnight shipping, and 30-minute pizza delivery had become mainstays of American life. Today, a ...
Fork In The Road
Neil Young takes the wheel for the green car cause.
A s the Big Three collapse from the collective weight of too many SUVs, it’s nice to know that the industry blames its troubles on factors beyond its control. That’s the gist of recent remarks ...
The Paper of Record blows it once again, naming a token neo-con.
Liberal blogger men are thrilled with the New York Times’ appointment of 29-year-old Atlantic blogger Ross Douthat to replace William Kristol on the op-ed page. Douthat is best known for his conservative Catholicism and for ...
Don’t we have bigger issues to worry about than droopy pants?
What else is the law but a metaphorical belt designed to uphold propriety and keep us from exposing our inherent baseness to each other? This is what an epidemic of legislative tailors seem to believe: ...
The great American ethanol scam
I ’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again here: corn-based ethanol is a loser, a subsidy for farm states and the politicians who represent them. According to David Pimentel, a Cornell University agricultural ...
Yes, I inhaled - and I’m not sorry.
Dear America, I take it back. I don’t apologize. Because you know what? It’s none of your goddamned business. I work my ass off 10 months a year. It’s that hard work that gave you ...
Jerry Brown’s decision to oppose Prop. 8 may hurt gay rights advocates more than it helps.
The California Supreme Court is weighing a challenge to Prop. 8, the constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. If the Court upholds Prop. 8, one of the people you can blame is Attorney General Jerry Brown. ...
Mutually assured destruction dominates Mideast “dialogue,’’ prevents peace.
A s another week of combat ends in the Gaza strip, it still isn’t clear what “winning” would entail. Unless Israel manages to eradicate Hamas entirely, the little war will end with both sides repositioning ...
Fiscal policy a disaster for former bodybuilder.
You can’t really argue with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s political success. In 2002 the California Republican Party, still suffering from the anti-immigrant fervor cooked up by former Gov. Pete Wilson, failed to win any statewide offices for ...
The limits of staying home-grown.
I had been cursing up and down the aisles at the grocery store for half an hour when I finally found a can of black beans claiming to be “100% USA family farm organically grown.” ...
How to offend - from Baghdad to Norway.
Thanks to shoe thrower Muntander Al-Zaidi, the world at large now knows exactly what to do next time someone gets our goat up in downtown Baghdad. Before the infamous incident with George W. Bush, few ...
Class war, chauvinism and the surrogacy debate.
Alex Kuczynski’s recent New York Times magazine cover story about hiring a surrogate to carry her biological child was frank to the point of inviting backlash. Some readers were offended by photos juxtaposing the style ...
