David Horsey
LA Times cartoonist David Horsey comments on the news in pictures and words.
Congress, the tea party and the IRS: Sentence first, then the trial
On Wednesday, President Barack Obama fired the head of the Internal Revenue Service, the first sacrificial lamb brought down after the alleged "targeting" of conservative political groups by the IRS. Mr. Obama declared, "Americans are right to be angry about it." Call me out of step, but I am angrier that the president is joining the rush to judgment. more...
Breathless over Benghazi: Republicans can't help overplaying their hand
Republicans could make an easy hit on the Obama administration by highlighting the State Department's apparent bureaucratic blundering during and after the deadly terrorist attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, last fall, but they refuse to settle for such a small political prize. Instead, they have got themselves all steamed up and snarling about heinous, impeachable offenses that are figments of their imaginations. more...
Obama's red line on Syria gets squiggly
The hawks are squawking. Congressional conservatives and the right-wing media are blasting President Barack Obama for going soft on the Syrians. The president insists there is a "game-changing" red line the Syrian government will have crossed if it is found to have used chemical weapons against its people, but he has bent the red line so far, the hawks say, that not only the Syrians, but the Iranians and North Koreans will conclude Mr. Obama is a man with a marshmallow spine whose warnings can be flouted with impunity. more...
Who says the Republicans are doomed?
Since Mitt Romney lost to President Obama on Nov. 6, the conventional wisdom has been that the Republican Party is in trouble. The less conventional truth is that it is the Democrats whose chances may be more bleak. more...
What happened to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev?
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger of the two brothers accused of perpetrating the Boston Marathon bombing, is the baffling mystery man in this crime. more...
Kim Jong Un tries out for a 'Dr. Strangelove' sequel
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un seems like a fictional character out of a satirical doomsday movie -- maybe a sequel to "Dr. Strangelove." That fact that this immature brat and his gaggle of grim, aging generals actually rule a country and have the capacity to disturb the international order seems absurd in an era of global interdependence. more...
Will Obama's brain initiative unlock the mysteries of the Republican mind?
President Barack Obama wants to invest an initial $110 billion in a study of the human brain that could have benefits as great as those achieved by the Human Genome Project. Maybe the first study should be done on the one-track minds of tea party Republicans who will undoubtedly oppose funding for the study because their brains are fixated on the single idea that government can do nothing right. more...
Bad luck for Mitch McConnell: Ashley Judd bows out
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will not be facing a challenge from actress Ashley Judd when he runs for re-election next year. Though he may be happy to have avoided the physical comparison -- she, after all, played Marilyn Monroe in a movie, while he looks like an ancient sea turtle dressed in a $1,000 suit -- the Kentucky Republican may miss having such an attractive target for his attack machine. more...
NBC cans Leno again -- do they really mean it this time?
Jay Leno had to know the head honchos at NBC were gunning for him when he told the following joke last Monday night: "You know the whole legend of St. Patrick, right?" he asked the audience in his opening monologue. "St. Patrick drove all the snakes out of Ireland -- and then they came to the United States and became NBC executives." more...
Pope Francis: New salesman, same old product
For the first time in history, the Roman Catholic Church has a pope from the New World, but liberal American Catholics should not expect Pope Francis to stray far from the old theology. Some things are excitingly different about this new pontiff. On matters of birth control, abortion, homosexuality, celibate priests and the role of women in the church, however, he is no revolutionary. more...
Twelve steaks and an arugula salad: Obama takes the GOP to dinner
President Barack Obama had a dinner date last week with a dozen of his worst enemies, thus proving that the governmental stalemate in Washington, D.C., is driving him to unusual acts of political creativity -- or desperation. more...
What Scalia really has against the Voting Rights Act
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is alleged to be one of the great intellects of conservative jurisprudence, but his comments during oral arguments over a challenge to the 1965 Voting Rights Act displayed all the mental acuity of a third-tier talk radio bozo. more...
Argo, Lincoln and the politics of Hollywood
The Oscar for best picture was won by "Argo," the true tale of a secret rescue mission in Iran during the Carter administration. It beat out "Lincoln," the story of how black Americans were rescued from slavery. Does this mean Jimmy Carter's stock is on the rise? Nope, but Ben Affleck has certainly become a blue chip player in Hollywood. more...
Drone warfare becomes America's face to the world
It is certainly not be what he hoped or intended, but one of President Barack Obama's biggest legacies in foreign affairs may prove to be the proliferation of drones as tools of war, assassination and terror. more...
Secure the borders, but let's not lock the doors
Since the beginning of the republic, there has been a dynamic tension between constantly expanding diversity driven by immigration and the relentless homogenizing force of common American culture. And there's nothing like a long drive on an interstate highway to remind a person of that reality. more...
Hillary leaves office stronger than ever
When Hillary Clinton went to Capitol Hill last week, Republicans opened their bags of overly ripe conspiracy theories and moldering fruitcake ideas and tossed everything at her. Every shot missed. more...
Republicans will be last to admit it, but they won the fiscal cliff showdown
With all the moaning coming from the Tea Party Express and their loyalists in the House Republican Caucus, you would think conservatives had lost everything, including their virtue, in the fiscal cliff parlay with President Barack Obama because taxes are going up on the wealthy. However, if they could just get past their prudish sensibility about backroom compromises, they might recognize that their side actually did rather well in the dead-of-night deal making. more...
Lessons of 'Lincoln' and 'Hyde Park on Hudson': Politicians are imperfect, even the great ones
Two new movies, "Lincoln" and "Hyde Park on the Hudson," are intimate portraits of the two most consequential presidents of the United States. They are timely reminders that politics has never been pretty and our leaders have never been prefect human beings, but that, without Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, our country might have been lost to the disintegrating influence of lesser men. more...
Grover Norquist: Republican ayatollah
Ayatollahs seem to just appoint themselves and then start enforcing their own brand of orthodoxy. Grover Norquist has been doing that in the Republican Party for years. more...
What Twinkies teach us about labor relations
The Great American Twinkie Crisis illuminates what is wrong with the relationship between management and labor in this country. Hostess, the company that, since the 1930s, has provided our nation with snacks that are nearly indestructible, now threatens to go out of business and leave us bereft of Ding Dongs, Sno Balls, Ho Hos, CupCakes, Wonder Bread and a variety of other baked goods that are probably not good for us but, at least to a kid's palate, taste so good. more...
The great right wing freak-out of 2012
President Obama's re-election has caused right-wingers to become completely unhinged. They are purple-faced and apoplectic, convinced that an ignorant horde of government-dependent social leeches have destroyed traditional America and banished God from the country. more...
October surprise: Learning what Republicans really think about rape
Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock, the Tea Party usurper who took down Sen. Richard Lugar in the Republican primary, created the biggest political buzz last week by uttering the following sentence in a televised debate: "I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, it is something that God intended to happen." more...
Anti-Obama conspiracy theorists' creativity knows no bounds
In addition to the relentless onslaught of mostly negative ads from the Romney and Obama campaigns and their affiliated super PACs, the good people of Ohio are finding themselves targeted by a right-wing conspiracy maven who is dispensing a DVD that pushes beyond the birthers into a new level of paranoid fantasy. more...
Big Bird is more real than Romney's budget plans
Mitt Romney may have won the first presidential debate, but what stuck in many people's minds was his threat to fire Big Bird. Apparently, Mr. Romney thinks America's debt problem can be fixed by picking up pennies along Sesame Street. more...
Even West Coast liberals can't deny it: Romney cleaned Obama's clock
I watched the first presidential debate with a group of wine-sipping West Coast Obama fans who were stunned by the way Mitt Romney dominated the stage. more...
Romney's classic rich-guy mistake: Confusing wealth and virtue
It was a clear sign the campaign has gone on too long when I had a dream about Mitt Romney a couple of nights ago. Other than the fact that the Romney summoned from my unconscious was sitting at a breakfast table with me and was willingly answering questions, the dream was pretty realistic. The candidate was dressed in his ubiquitous Brooks Brothers checked shirt and relaxed-fit jeans. He seemed relaxed, too. But when I asked him a softball question about the personal strains of campaigning, he answered with a generic policy statement. more...
Meet some of the lazy, shiftless 47 percent: Cowboys
In the imaginary universe of Mitt Romney, the 47 percent of Americans who pay no income tax are loafers, shiftless bums and welfare queens who will all vote for Barack Obama in November. In the real world, that 47 percent includes the working poor, the newly unemployed, handicapped people, the elderly, veterans, 4,000 millionaries and the nation's greatest icon, the American cowboy. more...
A do-nothing Congress returns to Washington; don't expect much
A wild windstorm swept through the nation's capital on Saturday, tossing broken tree limbs, downing power lines and forcing thousands of suburbanites to eat dinner by candlelight. On Sunday, with the skies sunny and mostly clear, the oppressive heat that hung on all summer was finally gone and the cooler air of approaching autumn turned the city into a pleasant place. more...
Obama makes a gutsy bet on the wisdom and maturity of American voters
In his speech accepting the presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama neatly transformed the hope and change of 2008 that centered on him into a voter-centered hope and change for 2012. more...
Romney and Ryan build a bridge to the 20th century
The Republican team of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan is less about the future than it is about nostalgia for a past that many Americans imagine was better -- a time when businessmen were free of government meddling and all citizens, even the poor, old or handicapped, were expected to fend for themselves or scrape by on charity. more...
Mass shootings: Bad for America, good for the NRA
It is not too much of a stretch to say the National Rifle Association profits from mass killings like the slaughter at the theater in Aurora, Colo., and the killings at the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis. The NRA is, after all, a fundraising machine that runs on fear and a sense of crisis, even when the fear is false and the crisis manufactured. more...
Do the Koch brothers still not believe in climate change, or do they just not care?
Are two of the left's most useful villains, Charles and David Koch, not quite as unredeemable as liberals believe? Could it be they might change their minds about climate change and admit that it is real? more...
Sometimes, you almost want to feel sorry for Mitt Romney
I am starting to feel sorry for Mitt Romney. On an international tour to three countries, he made news in two of them by dissing the London Olympics and infuriating the Palestinians. The poor guy -- for months, people have complained that he never says what he really believes. Now, he's in trouble for too boldly saying what he actually thinks. more...
Mitt Romney, man of mystery
Mitt Romney's income tax returns may contain some surprises that he does not want the world to know about, but they are hardly his only secrets. His biggest secret, the question he has not answered through the entire campaign, the one that bothers conservatives even more than it irks liberals, is this: Does he believe in anything besides Mormonism and money? more...
Mitt Romney: Friend of the rich and selfish
Mitt Romney has a great deal of empathy for people like himself -- rich guys -- and he would serve them well as president. Of course, the wealthy have seldom not been served well by our commander-in-chief. Father and son Bush came from among the affluent, too, while Bill Clinton aspired to join their ranks and has defended Romney-style venture capitalism. Even Barack Obama bailed out Wall Street in 2009. more...
Close encounters with socialized medicine
In the mid-1980s when I was a graduate student in England, my parents came to visit and my mother ended up getting a first-hand look at socialized medicine. more...
Where do the anti-Obamacare Super PACs get their facts?
The Republican stance on health care is a strange mix of muddle and mendacity. The muddle comes from the GOP's presumptive nominee for president, Mitt Romney. The mendacity is the work of conservative super PACs that are spending millions on new attack ads built around a brazen lie. more...
Is John Roberts a Kenya-born socialist, too?
Word had barely come down that the Supreme Court majority was upholding the Affordable Care Act when incensed conservatives began printing up "Impeach Jon Roberts" t-shirts and a hacker had altered the chief justice's title on his Wikipedia page to "Chief Traitor of the United States." more...
Immigration dittoheads on the Supreme Court
The first day of a big week for the third branch of government brought a ruling on Arizona's immigration law that was less than satisfying for Justice Antonin Scalia and the Rush Limbaugh wing of the U.S. Supreme Court. more...
Fast and Furious: The Second Amendment conspiracy theory
The brouhaha over Attorney General Eric Holder and the contempt of Congress charge brought by U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa is providing new evidence that the lunatics are running the Republican asylum. more...
Immigration: Obama catches Romney on the wrong side of the border
Republicans seem befuddled by President Obama's decision to halt deportation of young people brought into the United States illegally by their undocumented parents. Mitt Romney is gobsmacked, Speaker of the House John Boehner is exasperated, and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is totally bummed out. more...
The globe warms, America shrugs
If life were a movie, the president of the United States (probably played by Will Smith) would be leaping into action to save humankind from the calamity that a new scientific report says is about to befall Earth. more...
Billionaires' new hobby: Politics
Surrounded by dozens of supporters at an evening campaign rally in Madison on May 30, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, the Democratic candidate for governor in Wisconsin's tumultuous recall election, had something encouraging to tell the crowd: The fact his opponent, Republican Gov. Scott Walker, was outspending him by more than seven to one was no big deal. more...
A house divided: America's political opponents begin to act like enemies
Sunday morning, I was having breakfast at a funky cafe that prides itself on organic food and the languid preparation thereof. With time to observe the locals passing by, I came to an epiphany about why this green wedge of America feels so unique: Vermont is what the whole country would be like if the hippie ideals of the 1960s and '70s had matured and taken root everywhere. more...
Judging Mitt Romney by the company he keeps
Donald Trump has taken Mitt Romney into his oily embrace, and let's hope it makes Mr. Romney's skin crawl because, if it turns out he actually does like hanging out with The Donald, we should fear for our country. Can you say "Vice President Donald J. Trump?" Kind of burns in the throat, doesn't it? more...
Playing catchup with the minority birth rate
Pudgy, pink Gerber babies are no longer the typical children being born in the United States. According to theU.S. Census Bureau, moms who are Latino, Asian, African American or mixed race are now giving birth to just over 50 percent of American babies. more...
Tea party victories in Ind., Neb., are no boon to the Democrats
If it has accomplished nothing else, the tea party insurgency has made Republicans vastly more newsworthy than Democrats. While the party of the left plods along performing the boring old tasks of governing, the party of the right is engaged in high drama worthy of Shakespeare. more...
Attachment legislating: Corporate cash and the GOP
If money is the mother's milk of politics, then America's big corporations are Big Mama, and Big Baby is the Republican Party suckling at the enormous bosom of business. Democrats, meanwhile, are abandoned brats scrounging for nourishment wherever they can find it. more...
High school Romney vs. high school Obama
Sure, you may know which man -- Mitt Romney or Barack Obama -- you want to see running the country, but which one would you have wanted to know in high school? more...
Who's better on gay rights, Mitt Romney or Barry Goldwater?
Richard Grenell had the right resume to be Mitt Romney's spokesman on foreign policy -- a stint as communications director for four of the Bush administration's U.N. ambassadors; a degree from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government; his own international PR firm and frequent stints on TV as an expert on international issues. Too bad for him he has a boyfriend. more...
Obama's end zone dance
This week, Republicans have been criticizing President Barack Obama for his surprise trip to Afghanistan marking the one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden. By accusing the president of hyping the commemoration, they apparently hope to undercut the political potency of his biggest foreign policy coup. Instead, the GOP critics may merely make themselves look a bit silly. more...
A Super Economy (for some)
A political campaign is about the worst time to have a discussion about economic realities. The party that is out will speak of nothing but looming disaster, while the party that is in will be singing nothing but "Happy Days Are Here Again." And, since our current political system is in a permanent campaign mode, economics never escapes the warp of politics. more...
Romney's religion: Who are evangelicals to question Mormonism?
Jokes about polygamy and funny long underwear aside, Mitt Romney's Mormon faith has not been, and will not become, a factor in the presidential campaign of 2012. more...
Romney, Obama and the hobgoblins of democracy
The neck-and-neck race between President Barack Obama and the presumptive Republican nominee, Mitt Romney will be the most expensive campaign in American history. It will be a battle between two robust political organizations. And it is a good bet things are going to get really nasty. more...
Crossing the border -- in reverse
Just as the U.S. Supreme Courtbegins to hear arguments about Arizona's hard line immigration law, a study pops up that says illegal immigration from Mexico is a diminishing problem. more...
Secrets of the Service
We have learned a secret of the Secret Service: At least a few of those tight-lipped tough guys are not quite as straight-laced and serious as they appear to be. In fact, they apparently love to party like frat boys. more...
