BY FROMA HARROP Ah, the great American West, where man can generally breathe free and also inhale – woman, too. Thank you, thank you, voters in Colorado and Washington state, for legalizing marijuana. But will Washington, DC, leave you alone? Attorney General Eric Holder said this week that the Justice Department will weigh its response […]

BY JOE CONASON Raising taxes on the rich alone won’t close the deficit or erase the national debt, as Republicans superciliously inform us over and over again. But in their negotiations with the White House to avert the so-called fiscal cliff, congressional Republicans seem obsessed with a change in Medicare eligibility whose budgetary impact [when […]

BY JIM HIGHTOWER Let us address the declining fortunes of today’s mainstream mass media. [Yes, I can hear your pained screams of “Nooooo … we don’t want to!” We really must, however, because it’s not about them, but us – about our ability to be at least quasi-informed about who’s-doing-what-to-whom-and-why, in order for us to […]

BY SUSAN ESTRICH Christmas in my home city of Santa Monica is different this year. It used to be that there were elaborate displays depicting the birth of Jesus in the big public park by the ocean. I’ve always believed that Christmas is a major religious holiday, and the display reflected that. According to people […]

BY SHARON MARTIN An article in the AARP Bulletin expressed outrage that people who earn a million dollars a year get unemployment benefits when they...