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In blind retaliation, we wreaked havoc on Iraq and continue to slaughter peasants in Afghanistan. What if eight years ago the World Trade Center had been leveled by a small nuclear bomb that took out most of lower Manhattan, as well? How many millions of innocent civilians would we have killed in retaliation? Would we still be a free society, or would then-Vice President Dick Cheney have attained the power of a demented king, having moved on from snooping on our phone calls and outing honest CIA agents to destroying the last vestiges of the rule of law? As assaults...

This is not change we can believe in. Not if Robert Rubin or his protégé, Lawrence Summers, get to call the shots on the economy in President-elect Barack Obama's incoming administration. Both Clinton-era treasury secretaries deserve a great deal of the blame for the radical deregulation of the financial industry that has derailed the world economy. They both should, along with former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan, perform rites of contrition and be kept at a safe distance from the leadership of our nation. Yet Rubin and Summers are highly visible in the Obama transition team, with Summers widely touted...

I am not a conventionally religious man, or even a very superstitious one, but I do wish George W. Bush would stop asking God to bless America. Every time he does, we seem to be visited with another plague, suggesting divine wrath over our president's evil ways. How else to explain the persistent calamity that has marked this administration: a pointless but very costly war over nonexistent Iraqi WMD, the destruction by flood of New Orleans, the betrayal of the nation by the moneychangers - from Enron to Goldman Sachs - who Bush welcomed into the temple of the White...

Bush is such a liar. Or is he just out to lunch on the most important issue that he faces? In October, he charged that Iran's nuclear weapons program was bringing the world to the precipice of WWIII, even though the White House had been informed at least a month earlier that Iran had no such program and had stopped efforts to develop one back in 2003.

Chuck Hagel for president By ROBERT SCHEER Published Sunday, January 21, 2007 Chuck Hagel for president! If it ever narrows down to a choice between him and some Democratic hack who hasn’t the guts to fundamentally challenge the president on Iraq, then the conservative Republican from Nebraska will have my vote. Yes, the war is that important, and the fact that Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, the leading Democratic candidate, still can’t or won’t take a clear stand on the occupation is insulting to the vast majority of voters who have. Hagel is a decorated Vietnam War vet who...

YOU WOULD think that a consensus report from all 16 U.S. intelligence services concluding that he has blown the "war on terror" would be a really big deal to the president. But that assumes that George W. Bush values intelligence. Clearly, he does not. So the news that a 2006 National Intelligence Estimate concludes the threat of terror against the United States has increased since 9/11, largely thanks to his irrational invasion of Iraq, has not disturbed Bush's branded "what, me worry'' countenance. Instead, predictably, the administration's response to the leaked conclusions of the shared assessments of both civilian and...

Robert Scheer: Top Spy’s Story on Prewar Intel Is Finally Told http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060425_prewar_intel_iraq_iran/ Posted on Apr. 25, 2006 By Robert Scheer “The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy.” —Tyler Drumheller, formerly CIA’s top spy in Europe Confession time: In fall 2004, during a crucial presidential election campaign, I made the mistake of playing by corporate media rules that amount to self-censorship. Specifically, I joined other journalists in denying the public the right to learn of a definitive investigative report by CBS’ “60 Minutes” on President Bush’s disregard...

Bad news tonight for Tribune Company shareholders: Shares in Tribune Co. tumbled Thursday after the media company reported a 6.1% drop in revenue last month on declines in both its newspaper and television businesses. Tribune, whose holdings include 26 television stations, 11 urban U.S. dailies and Spanish-language Hoy, said December revenue fell to $539 million from $574 million a year earlier. The company's stock fell $1.01, or 3.2%, to $30.80 in afternoon trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Tribune shares sank 28% in 2005. Advertising revenue in the publishing division fell 4.5%to $333 million, down from $349 million. The...

City JournalBarbra’s DictionaryWhat’s a lefty celebrity to do?!Stefan Kanfer 3 January 2006 Poor Barbra Streisand. In her long career, she has sung on Broadway and in films, recorded hit albums, made gazillions. She even has her own website, where she kind of blogs from time to time. But has all this brought happiness? She wanted Gray Davis to be governor, for example, and that awful Arnold won. Then there was the two-part miniseries about Ronald Reagan, disavowed by CBS after the network underwrote it—just because of a storm of protest from conservative radio programs and outraged bloggers. All that...

NEW YORK A delegation of progressive Los Angeles Times readers angry with last month's firing of columnist Robert Scheer met Dec. 13 with Times editors -- and have devised an "inside-outside" protest strategy. That's according to an LAObserved.com report linked Tuesday on Jim Romenesko's media blog at Poynter.org. The delegation -- which said it met for 90 minutes with Times Editorial Page Editor Andres Martinez and Op-Ed Editor Nicholas Goldberg -- wants more liberal voices in the Times to balance conservative columnists such as Max Boot and the Tribune Media Services-syndicated Jonah Goldberg. Martinez and Goldberg said the Times does...

Anatomy of a left-wing cause Last week a delegation of progressives met with the top opinion editors at the L.A. Times to complain about the axing of Robert Scheer's column and push for more anti-war voices on the op-ed page. In a report to their supporters, the delegation recounts details of the meeting, claims some success and describes an "inside/outside strategy" to pressure the paper that includes subscribing for three months as a "contingency subscriber" and pestering editors: Commit to writing at least one letter a month, affirming or challenging LA Times content, paying special attention to columnists such as...

Streisand Cancels LA Times Subscription 2 hours, 52 minutes ago LOS ANGELES - Barbra Streisand has canceled her subscription to the Los Angeles Times over the firing of the paper's liberal columnist. The newspaper dropped Robert Scheer and several other columnists last month; Scheer speculated he was let go because the Times had tired of his politics. Perhaps the most liberal voice on the paper's opinion pages, Scheer had been a Times columnist for 12 years. He was a reporter for the newspaper for 17 years before that. "Robert Scheer's column, with its often singular voice of dissent and groundbreaking...

Ms Streisand is dropping her subscription to the Los Angeles Times, out of loyalty to Robert Scheer and revulsion at Jonah Goldberg. You can’t make this stuff up...

This is the original letter I wrote to the LA Times regarding their firing of Robert Scheer: November 18, 2005 Andres Martinez Editorial Page Editor Los Angeles Times 202 W. 1st St. Los Angeles, CA 90012 Dear Mr. Martinez, This letter is to inform you that I am canceling my subscription to the LA Times, and here is the reason why: The greater Southern California community is one that not only proudly embraces its diversity but demands it. Your publisher's decision to fire Robert Scheer is a great disservice to the spirit of our community. I'm almost embarrassed for you...

<p>LOS ANGELES (AP) - The Los Angeles Times is changing the look and content of its opinion-editorial pages, a plan that includes dropping Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Michael Ramirez and longtime columnist Robert Scheer.</p> <p>The changes come three months after former political commentator and columnist Michael Kinsley resigned as the paper's editorial and opinion editor. Kinsley spent 15 months at the Times and was replaced by Martinez.</p>

By J. Michael Kennedy and Rong-Gong Lin II Times Staff Writers November 11, 2005 In a major shake-up of its editorial pages, the Los Angeles Times announced Thursday that it was discontinuing one of its most liberal columnists as well as its conservative editorial cartoonist. Editorial Page Editor Andrés Martinez said that Robert Scheer, a Times reporter for 17 years before he began writing a column on the Op-Ed pages in 1993, will be dropped. Cartoonist Michael Ramirez, The Times' cartoonist since 1997, will leave the paper at the end of the year and will not be replaced. Martinez, who...

New York, May. 25, 2005 (CNA) - Los Angeles Times op-ed writer Robert Scheer has distorted the truth about the Catholic Church and homosexuals, says Catholic League president William Donohue.In his recent column, Scheer says the Catholic Church is “one of the most sexually repressed institutions in human history” that is responsible for a “horrific drumbeat of child molestation revelations” led by a new Pope who is “a longtime leader of vicious church attacks on ‘evil’ gays.” Scheer also accuses Pope Benedict XVI of scapegoating the media. “Scheer is wrong on all counts,” says Donohue.“It is not the Catholic Church’s...

In a heightened display of saber rattling, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have been saying nasty things about Iran's "unelected mullahs." This is apparently so we'll be able to tell the difference between the theocracy in place in Tehran and the one coalescing in Baghdad. Although things are looking slightly brighter for Iraq after its debut election, it is still not clear why the United States has spent incalculable fortunes in human life, taxpayer money and international goodwill to break Iraq and then remake it in the image of our avowed "axis of...

So what is Robert Scheer’s DUmmie screen name? I have to ask because I came upon this DUmmie THREAD titled, “Is Al Qaeda Just a Bush Boogeyman?” I thought it was just another kooky DUmmie conspiracy theory until I found out that it is the title of Scheer’s recent Los Angeles Times ARTICLE and the DUmmies were merely reciting from Scheer’s talking points. So let us lead off with excerpts from the Scheer article followed by the echos from his fellow DUmmies. As usual, the tinfoil hat DUmmie theories are in Bolshevik Red while the commentary of your humble...

Is it conceivable that Al Qaeda, as defined by President Bush as the center of a vast and well-organized international terrorist conspiracy, does not exist? < snip > Yet a brilliant new BBC film produced by one of Britain's leading documentary filmmakers systematically challenges this and many other accepted articles of faith in the so-called war on terror. "The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear," a three-hour historical film by Adam Curtis recently aired by the British Broadcasting Corp., argues coherently that much of what we have been told about the threat of international terrorism "is...

Mocked and reviled by Americans, the world body has been quietly getting it right on Iraq again and again. November 2, 2004 – I want to cast my vote in favor of the United Nations. Some Americans like to talk as if the U.N. exists merely for the convenience of the Third World, forgetting that it was the United States that fought to create an inclusive international forum to help restrain mankind's new ability to destroy itself. With the radioactive dust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still in the air, it was shock over our own human barbarism that led this...

I was at the Westlake Village Barnes & Noble yesterday and true to form, the store was packed with anti-Bush books galore. I felt like I was walking into the DNC, not a bookstore. They didn't have Unfit for Command and they didn't know when any additional stock would arrive. Anyway, they had a display about Current Affairs/Politics on the first floor next to the Information Desk that had every conceivable "Bush is evil" book on the table. There was also a note about an appearance on August 23rd by Robert Scheer, co-author of The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told...

Thread of Abuse Runs to the Oval Office Phony justifications for war led to brutal intelligence-gathering. Someone's lying — big-time — and neither Congress nor the media have begun to scratch the surface. Clearly we now know enough to stipulate that the several low-ranking alleged sadists charged in the Iraq torture scandal did not control the wing of the prison in which they openly and proudly did the devil's work. That power was in the hands of high-ranking U.S. military intelligence officers who established abusive conditions that were condemned by the Red Cross in a complaint to U.S. authorities well...

Here we go again. Only now it's the "Iraqification" rather than the "Vietnamization" of a quagmire war in another distant and increasingly hostile land. Washington's puppets are once again said to be on the verge of getting their act together, and the American people are daily assured that we are about to turn the corner. Soon we will be able to give Iraq back to the Iraqis, and some distant day the United States will get out. In the meantime, U.S. troops must continue in a "support role" while being maimed and killed with increasing frequency. Sorry to appear so...

By Robert Scheer Published March 13, 2001 in the Los Angeles Times Arnold Schwarzenegger for governor! Well, why not? I hadn't thought of putting in a plug for the actor's political career until Gov. Gray Davis' top political operative, Garry South, conducted one of the meanest political smear jobs in recent memory. South took the lowest of the low roads when he personally made sure that an article in Premiere magazine got into the hands of a host of reporters as well as potential Republican backers of a possible Schwarzenegger gubernatorial campaign. Not content with attacking Schwarzenegger as a womanizer,...

An amazing thing happened on the way to the California recall: Someone spoke the truth about the state's financial predicament. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett, ballyhooed as a top economic advisor to Arnold Schwarzenegger, told the Wall Street Journal that property taxes in California are ridiculously low. He's right. Thanks to Proposition 13 in 1978 — an initiative no less stupid than the current recall and also put on the ballot by Republican conservatives — the state lost its most reliable tax base. Voters capped annual property assessment increases at no more than 2%. The property is reassessed at market value...

In America, it is a civil institution, not a religious one. August 5, 2003 – I agree with the president and the pope: Marriage is a very serious endeavor, not to be trifled with. Just ask any of the tens of millions of divorced parents who are tied together for life in a precarious, often combative attempt to raise their kids well in separate households. Done right, marriage – or "civil unions" if the M-word is too loaded – can be a bridge to loyalty, sexual stability, shared financial responsibility and the more efficient rearing of children. All the more...

In his column last week, Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer, who created the myth that the Bush administration gave $43 million to the Taliban after misreading a New York Times story, spreads two more falsehoods now working their way through the media. First, Scheer addresses the report of the Congressional committee set up to investigate the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, focusing on the portion dealing with Saudi Arabia. He writes that while Saudi Arabia has close ties to terror, "The report finds no such connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda terrorists," making it appear that Congressional investigators sought evidence...

Does the president not read? Does his national security staff, led by Condoleezza Rice, keep him in the dark about the most pressing issues of the day? Or is this administration blatantly lying to the American people to secure its ideological ends? Those questions arise because of the White House admission that the charge that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger was excised from a speech by President George W. Bush in October 2002 after the CIA and Department of State insisted it was unfounded. Bizarrely, however, three months later without any additional evidence emerging that outrageous lie was...

The Republican fall guy in CaliforniaCalifornia Republicans should blame Bush, not Davis, for their state's economic woes. - - - - - - - - - - - -By Robert ScheerJuly 2, 2003  | The other day a woman asked me to sign a petition calling for the recall of California Gov. Gray Davis. Why, I asked. Because he bankrupted the state, she said. When I begged to differ that it was the Bush administration and its buddies at companies like Enron that had put the state into an economic tailspin, she said she was being paid according to the number...

Although quick to tout himself as a learned and pioneering "journalist", Scheer evidently has no sources besides other media.Heck, even I could do that.

What's the difference between a nutty, bile-filed columnist who mails in canard-and-conspiracy columns every week, and a left-of-center columnist who often gets the bottom line wrong but who gets some things right and who must be read? That's the difference between the Los Angeles Times' Robert Scheer and the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof. Scheer turned into the blogosphere's bongo-drum last week after peddling the nonsense that American special forces staged the Pvt. Lynch rescue using blanks. This lurch off the cliff of reality drew a lot of first-time attention to the Left Coast's number one conspiracy theorist, and the...

.Slandering the military? Posted: May 21, 20031:00 a.m. Eastern © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com Hard-left Los Angeles Times' columnist Robert Scheer's Tuesday column should not be missed. In "Saving Private Lynch: Take 2" Scheer asserts that the rescue of Jessica Lynch was a "fabrication" and a "caper." Scheer argues that the "manipulation of this saga really gets ugly" because of the "premeditated manufacture of the rescue itself, which stains those who have performed real acts of bravery, whether in war or peacetime." Scheer cites a BBC report, and ignores a Pentagon denial of the report. He rushed into print even as the BBC was...

Toogood Reports [Wednesday, March 19, 2003; 12:01 a.m. EST]URL: http://ToogoodReports.com/ Whom to Fight? The problem with fighting our Moslem enemies, as many observers have noted, is that the terrorists never identify themselves with any particular nation. Thus, each Moslem nation – excepting the Saudis – enjoys plausible deniability regarding its role in 911. What no one, to my knowledge, has noted, however, is that deniability cuts both ways. Just as Islam could not openly declare war on America, America cannot openly declare war on Islam. But we can fight Islamic nations, while denying that we are fighting Islam. Were America...