GEORGE HODEL AND ELIZABETH SHORT Sixty-five years ago today, a 22-year-old beauty by the name of Elizabeth Short was found brutally slain in a vacant lot at 39th and Norton streets in Los Angeles. Her body was cut in half at the waist with surgical precision, her face and breasts slit, and there was a large gash where her vulva should have been. She had been drained of fluids as if prepared for an embalming and she was left in a garish pose, her head turned to the side and one arm above her body. The...

I have just watched When Mitt Romney Came to Town and it is, in a word, devastating. The 28-minute film from Newt Gingrich’s Super PAC, a series of interviews with ordinary folk whose lives were never the same after Romney’s Bain Capital bought and took down local companies, is a double condemnation — both of his private equity work and the business model he used to get filthy rich. The interviews are with families from four businesses that Bain looted: Some of their comments: “I...

While I could care less, one of the frustrating things about the Republican presidential race for pundits is that after repeatedly anointing Mitt Romney as the man who will take on President Obama, he keeps failing to beat expectations that were fairly low to begin with. And is failing to pull away from a field that even minus Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain looks like it would be right at home in the locked ward in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The reason that this is easy to suss out:...

There surely will be a statue of Sarah Palin when the Temple of Political Chutzpah is erected. The former half-term governor and failed candidate, who never came clean about anything, says that Mitt Romney has brought his Bain Capital problems on himself by not being transparent and offering no documentation for the claim that he created 100,000 net jobs and refusing to release his tax returns. For the record, Palin was never transparent, never offered documentation for anything unless subpoenaed,...

That grinding sound you hear are the tectonic plates of Republican presidential politics shifting. In what direction and how far they shift may determine whether Mitt Romney has a chance of beating Barack Obama in November. That is if he can survive brutal attacks from some of his opponents. Although it was not noticeable, the shift began with the burst of Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, first in New York and then in many other cities, beginning in September. Republicans, including Tea Partiers,...

Mitt Romney wouldn’t have caught Bin Laden. He would have bought Al Qaeda and fired him. ~ Commenters at DAILY KOS The clashes over class warfare that have bubbled to the surface as the Republican Party scrambles to anoint a challenger to President Obama is a healthy sign that addressing real issues is not completely dead, although the warfare happens to be for the wrong reasons. To find the right reasons, you have to turn to the guy who is likely to have his lease on the Oval Office extended. This...

REID BIGLAND, PRESIDENT OF DODGE, WITH THE NEW DART As the North American International Auto Show gets underway this week in Detroit, the Big Two and a Half automakers have reason to be ebullient. With 12.8 million vehicles sold in the U.S. in 2011, it was the industry’s highest-volume sales year since 2008. Detroit automakers each finished in the black for the full year — the first time that has happened since 2004. Meanwhile, each gained market share for the first time since forever. The...

The idea of replacing Joe Biden with Hillary Clinton on the 2012 Democratic ticket is preposterous, an idea that won’t go away and one that is growing on me. Bill Keller offers the most compelling argument for an Obama-Clinton ticket in The New York Times, and while I have known Biden since we were in our teens and I deeply admire him, my own views track closely to his. I was disgusted with Clinton by the end of the 2008 primary season because of her refusal to rise above the fray and instead...

I will not be watching this evening’s national championship game between LSU and Alabama. I have no interest in either team and have spent little time watching college football in general. This is because with every passing year, the game becomes less an athletic spectacle and more the tip of an immense money-making iceberg. The Rose Bowl was always my favorite post-season game because it followed the marvelous Tournament of Roses parade and pitted the best of the Big Ten against the best...

ROMNEY CAMPAIGNS IN SOUTH CAROLINA Coming off of his razor-thin victory in the Iowa caucuses, tomorrow’s New Hampshire primary is Mitt Romney’s for the taking, but it is South Carolina’s January 21 primary that will determine whether a man who a year ago appeared to be the inevitable Republican nominee can finally leave the competition in the dust. This is because if Romney wins South Carolina, it is all over bar the shouting, which of course there will be a fair amount of. The...

Tea Partiers claim to support smaller government but are most enthusiastic about Rick Santorum, who hearts earmarks and right-wing nanny state paternalism, and Newt Gingrich, who would use big government to finance colonies on the moon. How to explain this contradiction? First of all, I suspect that many Tea Partiers really don’t know what they stand for other than identity politics. Secondly, I suspect as do some other pundits, that many Tea Partiers who gave Santorum a big bump in Iowa...

Back in October, I reviewed Susan Winters Cook’s newly published Nozuko’s Story: The Story of an African Family. The final chapter has now been written. Photograph copyright Susan Winters Cook

Barack Obama’s Achilles heel has been the recession he inherited from George Bush, and without the economy showing real signs of growth — as in new jobs being created — the president will remain vulnerable. But there is (fingers crossed) at long last good news. The December job report released this morning by the Labor Department shows that non-farm employment rose by a robust 200,000 jobs with private employers adding 212,000 of those jobs, while the unemployment rate dipped...

A FRACKING-RELATED OPERATION IN DOWNTOWN YOUNGSTOWN To say that fracking has had unintended consequences would be a misnomer. There have been warnings from the outset of the scramble to extract natural gas from shale formations using environmentally unsafe methods, but the case of Youngstown, Ohio is special. On New Years Eve, the central Ohio city had its 11th earthquake since St. Patrick’s Day — a magnitude 4.0 on the Richter Scale, the highest to date. That would not be unusual...

Experienced Iraq war veterans will decide the fate of Marine Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich, who is charged with voluntary manslaughter and related charges in the massacre of two dozen civilians in the Iraqi village of Haditha in November 2005. The pool of potential jurors being questioned today at Camp Pendleton, California include a colonel, two lieutenant colonels, a major, a captain and six enlisted men. All served at least one combat tour in Iraq and nearly all participated in so-called house...

SANTORUM AFTER HIS 2006 DEFEAT It matters not that Rick Santorum, who is the right-wing Republican flavor of the moment, doesn’t stand a chance of becoming the GOP presidential nominee let alone beating Barack Obama. What matter is that Santorum has never gotten the kind of scrutiny that he deserves with the exception of one reporter working for one newspaper. That reporter is my good friend Will Bunch and the newspaper is the Philadelphia Daily News. Bunch, among the most savvy political...

Take a look at this photograph taken by Thomas Hoepker from the Brooklyn waterfront on the morning of September 11, 2001. Take a really good look. What are the people saying and thinking as they look away from the burning World Trade Center towers? That it’s a lovely morning to go bike riding? That they’ll be inconvenienced because they’ll have to cancel their dinner reservations in Greenwich Village? That flying two passenger jetliners into twin 110-story buildings is no big deal? When...

DETAIL OF “MIGRANT MOTHER” Years of lugging around cameras and lenses has convinced me that luck has a central role in outstanding photojournalism. This is because lucks results from years of practice. That is the story behind pioneering photojournalist Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother,” perhaps the best known rural photograph from the Great Depression of the 1930s. The woman was Florence Thompson, a refugee from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, mother of 11 children and, along...

Homecomings for returning combat veterans have never been easy no matter the war, but the flood of Iraq war veterans who will be mustered out in the coming months, as well as a fair number from the Afghan war, pose a huge challenge. This is because gratitude, and Americans certainly are grateful, will not pay the bill. That bill is formidable: * About 800,000 veterans are jobless and many newly discharged veterans worked in depressed industries like manufacturing and construction prior to enlisting. *...

The three top finishers in the Iowa caucuses tell you all you need to know about the Republican Party in 2012: Mitt Romney, who disavows his greatest accomplishment; Rick Santorum, whose compassionate conservatism does not allow room for anyone not sharing his extreme right-wing views; and Ron Paul, whose sensible ideas keep getting trampled on by wacky ideas tinged with racism. At first glance, Romney’s hair’s breadth 8-vote win over Santorum is a surprise considering the fact that...