WHY PEOPLE ARE CANCELLING THEIR SUBSCRIPTIONS TO THE L.A. TIMES TODAY

I got 3 e-mails today from friends telling me they were canceling their subscriptions to the L.A. TIMES. I didn't have to ask why. Earlier I had gotten an e-mail from Bob Scheer:

"On Friday I was fired as a columnist by the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, where I have worked for thirty years. The publisher Jeff Johnson, who has offered not a word of explanation to me, has privately told people that he hated every word that I wrote.  I assume that mostly refers to my exposing the lies used by President Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq.  Fortunately sixty percent of Americans now get the point but only after tens of thousand of Americans and Iraqis have been killed and maimed as the carnage spirals out of control. My only regret is that my pen was not sharper and my words tougher."

The TIMES has a piece about it today. My first recollection of Scheer, who is roughly my age, was when American students were starting the battle to end the war against VietNam. I was on the East Coast and Scheer was the most articulate and passionate and well-reasoned student writer in America, at Berkeley. Today he is "Left" on KCRW's "Left, Right and Center" and he teaches at USC. His consistently brilliant and incisive columns were pretty much the only reason to bother with the L.A. TIMES.

My guess is that you'll be able to read regular columns from Scheer at ALTERNET and , hopefully, not having to write for the TIMES will spur him to write more books.


AFTERNOON UPDATE

Nancy Hollander is brilliant and cultured. She reminds us all of a poem by Bertoldt Brecht which should offer Scheer some comfort in this situation, "The Bookburning" (Die Bücherverbrennung)

When the regime ordered
Books with dangerous knowledge
To be burned in public and everywhere
Oxen were forced to pull, carts with books
to the bonfires, one of the persecuted poets
discovered one of the best
studying the list of the burned
disconcerted, that his books were forgotten.
He rushed to his desk, flying on wings of rage
and wrote a letter to the authorities.
Burn me! he wrote with a quick stroke
Burn me! don't do this to me! Do not spare me!
Have I not always reported the truth in my books?
Yet now you treat me as were I a liar!
I command you: Burn me! "
-Bertolt BRECHT


THE EVENING UPDATE

It's as though the L.A. TIMES editors said, "Let's get rid of the best columnist we have, one of historical importance and consistent brilliance, and see if we can find a really pathetic hack who will make anyone who bothers to read his garbage puke. OK, best writer we have... ah... fire Scheer. Now how do we find someone really awful, like the real bottom of the barrel-- someone as bad as Ann Coulter but who actually writes their own material. How about the really stupid one who wrote LIBERAL FASCISM? You know, the guy who thinks McCarthy was right on... What's his name? You know... a real sensationalist. He'll drive everyone in L.A. who still reads our crappy paper away. Oh, yeah... Jonah Goldberg. We'll never find anyone worse." They did find him though.