Opinion Daily columns by Matt Welch

October 3, 2007

OPINION DAILY

Once I took the railroad...

In the beginning, I backed my words with shoe leather. Honest.

September 25, 2007

Opinion Daily

No lipstick for the Dodger pig

Of all the lowliest (and most punishing) forms of journalism there are in our marvelous culture of media plenty, post-game baseball call-in shows possibly rank in the lowest quintile. And I say that as someone who probably spends more man-hours per annum listening to "Angel Talk" than reading The New Yorker and The Atlantic combined.

September 18, 2007

Opinion Daily

'Fess up, Chancellor Drake

So, all's well that ends well, right? Not so fast.

September 11, 2007

Opinion Daily

Iraq forever

Last Friday morning, I found myself cornered by a Republican Iraq war vet from the National Guard who sincerely wanted me to understand that when the news media or congressional Democrats talk about drawing down troops, or withdrawing altogether, they are, explicitly, siding with the enemy. "It's either victory or defeat," he said, and if U.S. troops leave Iraq, that means unequivocal defeat.

August 21, 2007

Opinion Daily

Land of the Less-Free

What kind of America-hating ghoul would be against Strengthening Our Borders or going after Deadbeat Dads? After all, the terrorists are busy plotting another 9/11, and the children continue to suffer.

August 7, 2007

Opinion Daily

Death of a neighborhood

With a lack of fanfare that could only be described as typical, the Los Angeles Unified School District last week finally details 50 Echo Park homes that had the bad manners to be standing where LAUSD planners want to build a perhaps-unnecessary elementary school.

May 15, 2007

Opinion Daily

You're on fire, L.A.!

The Mission manzanita, a hardy native shrub whose berries the Chumash used to make into juice, is one of many California chapparal plants that, in the words of the Catalina Conservancy, "require fire for optimal seed germination." When drought browns the hills, and the Santa Anas come tearing through the sky five months early, it's boom-time for our fire-dependent flora. "These plants," the Conservancy notes, "have very hard seed coats that are scarified by fire and thereby 'activated.'"

April 24, 2007

Opinion Daily

The diplomat who cracked

John Marshall Evans, a career U.S. diplomat with extensive experience in Central and Eastern Europe, was sworn in as ambassador to Armenia in August 2004. In February 2005, Evans made a trip to California, the capital state of the Armenian diaspora. At three different meetings with Armenian-American groups, when asked about Washington's lack of official recognition of the 1915-23 Armenian genocide as a "genocide," Evans said some variation of the following: "I will today call it the Armenian Genocide."

April 17, 2007

Opinion Daily

Gorbachev’s heir

One year ago this month I found myself in the unusual position of hosting lunch for Mikhail Gorbachev. It was a work meeting at the L.A. Times, not some kind of rubber-chicken tribute (the former Soviet president was in town to talk up his Green Cross environmental initiatives), but there was something personally chilling about staring into the eyes of a man whose military shot and bludgeoned to death 13 peaceful Lithuanian protesters a full 14 months after the Berlin Wall fell, at a time when I was living in a country (Czechoslovakia) still occupied by tens of thousands of Red Army troops.

April 3, 2007

Opinion Daily

Throw the bums out!

It's baseball season, finally, so you know what that means—a hard-fought, months-long competition to see who can win the title of Most Grandstanding Politician, ready to butt the federal government's nose into places it has no business sniffing.

March 20, 2007

Opinion Daily

Contract killing

Which of the following news stories do you find most heinous?

February 20, 2007

Opinion Daily

Illegal gringos

I have long been an avid consumer of that scrappiest, most off-center species of newspaper—the English-language expatriate rag. From the two predecessors of the International Herald-Tribune, to the Gringo Gazette, to the two papers I worked for in Central Europe, there is something almost universally charming in their combination of high ambition, less-high execution, and unintentionally revealing preoccupations, usually centered around where best to get a good drink.