You heard it first here: back in May I wrote that the only way to fix California is to break it up into smaller states.  Yesterday that idea got a small boost from the Riverside County Board of Supervisors,which will convene a meeting on the subject of “South California” in the fall.  Apparently Los Angeles […]

“Al Gore is definitely back,” chirps Bryan Walsh at Time. Everyone watch out, the global head of the green movement really has a strategy this time. He released an iPhone app.He rebranded his campaign, from Alliance for Climate Protection to the Climate Reality Project. And best of all, he’s preparing “a brand new 30 minute multimedia presentation,” a […]

The election of the first African-American president was widely hailed as a giant step forward for American racial politics.  The future, however, may remember this administration as a giant step back for Black America during a period of  deepening alienation, anger and despair in America’s inner cities. Not since the 1960s, when scores of American […]

American drug policy may be on the verge of big changes, but the results won’t be the Stoner Utopia drug activists dream of — and the changes may not do very much for the inner city. I’ve been posting about the inner cities lately and there is one subject that can’t be avoided in dealing […]

In my last post, I argued that we need to stop thinking about our inner city problems so heavily in terms of race.  Racial problems in the US contributed to the particular history of the urban underclass and race can never be totally ignored in this country, but the inner city today is haunted by […]

President Lyndon Johnson and the “best and the brightest” who staffed his administration led this country into three quagmires.  By far the most famous, but perhaps not the most expensive and dangerous resulted from LBJ’s escalation of the Vietnam War.  More than 50,000 Americans and many more Vietnamese died as a result of that policy; […]

Some readers are wondering why I am spending so much time analyzing the political problems of a former vice president.  It is not out of any personal animus toward Mr. Gore.  Though I’m not expecting any invitations to any of Mr. Gore’s lovely homes, the doors to the stately Mead manor in glamorous Queens are […]

That Al Gore’s definitive statement on the crisis of the climate change movement appeared in the back pages of Rolling Stone magazine rather than in a more prominent and prestigious location is one sign of the decline in his reputation.  At the peak of the climate movement, such an essay might have appeared in Foreign […]

It must be as perplexing to his many admirers as it is frustrating to himself that a man of Vice President Gore’s many talents, great skills and strong beliefs is one of the most consistent losers in American politics. “All political careers end in failure,” said Enoch Powell; Gore has not won an election on […]

Don’t anybody tell Louis Farrakhan, whose video calling President Obama a murderer is oozing through the web this week, but race is slowly and surely fading away. The problem of the twentieth century may have been, as W. E. B. Du Bois put it so eloquently, the color line; the twenty-first century is on course […]