The people of Los Angeles would be up in arms if some out-of-town billionaires tried to buy the Dodgers and institute a rule that only right-handers could play on the team. Petitions would be signed, protests would be organized and politicians would rise up to condemn the sale. It would be nice if there were a similar outcry at the prospect of the Koch brothers buying the Los Angeles Times.

After all, as exciting as it may be for a city to have a major league sports team, a good newspaper is a far more valuable asset. Even in these tough days for the journalism business, newspapers remain the core providers of comprehensive news coverage in every town that still has one. Sure, there are local television stations. They are great if all you need to know about is crime, weather and traffic. There’s the Internet, if you are free to spend your day surfing for bits of information that may or may not be true. But the providers of America’s bedrock news reporting are still...

Like finding new friends on Facebook or a great deal on EBay, it is easy to locate fiery, radical Islamist imams on the Internet who will guide the willing toward the path of bomb making, random slaughter and martyrdom. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the accused Boston Marathon bomber who died in a shootout with police a week ago, seems to have connected with a number of these firebrand theologians in exactly that way.

Tsarnaev did not pick up his militant ideas at his local mosque. In fact, it is being reported that, on two occasions, Tsarnaev interrupted Friday prayer services at a mosque in Cambridge to criticize the speaker for being too liberal and accommodating. At a news conference Wednesday at that mosque, Yusufi Vali, executive director of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, said Tsarnaev’s outbursts did not reach a point that was disturbing enough that mosque leaders felt a need to contact police.

"We thankfully live in a country where freedom of speech is respected, so...

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 many be more bleak.

Yes, Republicans are currently engaged in a round of intraparty sniping between establishment conservatives and the militant, purist right-wingers who abound in the ranks of party activists. And, yes, the 2012 election exposed the GOP’s profound unpopularity among rising voting groups, especially Latinos. But one good presidential candidate and one comprehensive immigration bill could smooth over those problems.

The Republican base among older, rural, white voters may be shrinking with every new obituary, but the party has structural advantages that could forestall electoral disaster. 

In the 2010 midterm elections, Republicans won big in state legislative races, picking up 675 seats nationwide. Before that election, the GOP was in full control of 14 state...

Here is a political object lesson from the seamier, steamier end of the entertainment business: The new law in Los Angeles County requiring actors in pornographic films to wear condoms seems merely to have pushed the smutty movie industry into the quiet residential areas of unincorporated Ventura County. The lesson? Passing a law to banish unhealthy behavior does not necessarily solve a problem, it just kicks it to another place or directly into a courtroom.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has famously taken on several public health causes during his years in office. He banned smoking from public places, went after trans fats in food, outlawed super-sized servings of sugary soft drinks and now has come back around to smoking with a law forcing stores to keep cigarettes out of sight and a proposal to set 21 as the minimum legal age for buying cigarettes. 

People have protested the mayor's nanny-state obsessions, but he has made much of it stick. The soda restriction is on hold,...

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger of the two brothers accused of perpetrating the Boston Marathon bombing, is the baffling mystery man in this crime.

His older brother, Tamerlan, who died in a shootout with police in the dark early hours Friday morning, better fits the stereotype of a disaffected, nascent terrorist.

He was nearing adulthood when he came to this country from Russia’s predominantly Muslim central Asian region. He talked of having no American friends. He had openly disdained the immorality of American society and adopted a zealous brand of Islam. He had left school and was in a troubled marriage.

On social media, he had connected to sites touting extremist Muslim ideology. He had traveled back to Chechnya and Dagestan, where he conceivably could have met with and been trained by terrorist groups. The Russians had asked American authorities to check him out, prompting the FBI to question Tamerlan and his family in 2011. 

It’s not hard to concoct a scenario for...

Usually, it would be best to ignore conspiracy-mongers such as Alex Jones and not reward him and his angry gaggle of paranoiac followers with any sort of attention. But, in a week when thoughts of the dead and maimed victims of the Boston Marathon bombings weigh heavy on the hearts and minds of most Americans, it is worth pointing out what a worthless waste of skin and bones Jones and his minions happen to be. 

Nearly as soon as I heard about the bombings on Monday, I was certain that somewhere in the nutty right-wing blogosphere someone was already concocting a storyline that would blame the crime on President Obama and the federal government. Alex Jones came through with impressive rapidity.

Jones runs a radio show from Austin, Texas. He describes himself as a libertarian and an “aggressive constitutionalist.” The Southern Poverty Law Center says he has stirred up racial animus “to appeal to the fears of the antigovernment Patriot movement.” He certainly...

Polls indicate that 80% to 90% of Americans support expanded background checks for firearms sales, but on Wednesday such a plan could not get 60 votes in the United States Senate. In the White House Rose Garden, surrounded by families of children gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School, President Obama called the Senate vote “shameful” and declared that this was “just Round 1” in the fight to get gun safety legislation adopted by Congress.

Somehow, it did not feel like Round 1; it felt like a knockout punch. If a limited proposal to require background checks at gun shows cannot hit the 60-vote threshold that would circumvent a filibuster in the Democrat-controlled Senate, it is a sure bet nothing close to that will see the light of day in the Republican-dominated House of Representatives.

The nation has just gone through two years of unusually awful slaughter that began with the near-fatal shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, continued on with the...

The terrorist bombing at the Boston Marathon is yet another cause for despair. It places the hometown of Paul Revere, Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty in company with Mumbai, Karachi and Baghdad, as well as Oklahoma City.

Hour after hour Monday, the same heart-wrenching images cycled through the nonstop television coverage: moms, dads, kids, amateur athletes shooting for a personal best, all suddenly engulfed in horror. As I write, the death toll is set at three; the number of reported injuries has climbed to 134. Those numbers will probably be revised upward.

One moment, happy people celebrating Boston’s Patriots' Day holiday stood cheering for friends and family at the marathon finish line; the next they were on the ground, bleeding, stunned, grievously wounded, pulverized by shrapnel, many legs blown off by the bomb blast. They were random victims of some person or group of people who did not have an ounce of empathy for them.

The central question now is, who is that person...

The Republican National Committee’s Spring gathering is taking place this week at Loews Hollywood. That is not Hollywood, Fla., or Hollywood, S.C., or Hollywood, Ala. – all real towns in really red states – but Hollywood, Calif., the place where Sean Penn, Ben Affleck, Alec Baldwin, Susan Sarandon, Barbra Streisand, Jane Fonda, Martin Sheen, George Clooney and the rest of the entertainment industry’s liberal horde earn their keep.

Like Nixon going to China, the Republicans have entered hostile territory. Ostensibly, this interesting choice of venue is part of RNC Chairman Reince Priebus’ outreach to communities that Republicans have long considered unreachable. But Priebus and his party have about as much chance picking up votes in Hollywood as they would in Harlem. 

The location is merely symbolic, akin to Barack Obama showing up at a National Rifle Assn. conclave just to prove he is man enough to do it. Assembling the party’s governing body in such...

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.

In the 21stcentury, humankind should have moved beyond this, but apparently we need a few more centuries of progress before all countries are led by comparatively rational, democratically elected leaders -– or at least by boring, one-party bureaucrats whose main goal is to preserve stability and promote economic growth.

Kim is a throwback to medieval times when young, cocky princes claimed a divine right to lord it over defenseless peasants. The only reason those princes could claim that power, in truth, was because they were surrounded by troops of big guys with swords, armor and horses with a license to kill any peasant who...

Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, says his party needs to be retooled. Republicans, he says, need to reach out to minorities, show a willingness to work with those who do not agree with them 100% and find a way to convince young people that the GOP does not stand for Goofy Old Paranoids. 

He is not the only Republican leader to worry about the future of the party. If a course correction is not made, they fear, there are many more lost elections to come.

But the Republicans who want to update their image have one very big obstacle: The most vocal, militant GOP voters do not agree there is a problem -- or, more precisely, they believe the problem is not that Republicans are out of touch, but that Republicans need to get more in touch with a whole different version of reality. 

If you want to know what that alternative reality is, take a few minutes and run through the posts at rightwingwatch.org, a project of People for the American Way.

The folks who run...