After years of mismanagement, the Tribune Company newspapers — including the Chicago Tribune and L.A. Times – are up for sale. And one of the potential buyers? The Koch brothers. And wow are people outraged!

Rupert Murdoch is looking to buy the Los Angeles Times. Should the FCC let him?

Cardinal Roger Mahony, the Roman Catholic Archbishop Emeritus of LA, seems to agree with at least part of what I said yesterday about the actions of current LA Archbishop José H. Gomez. Mahony certainly confirmed that Gomez didn’t suddenly learn of how Mahony handled things in the last few weeks, and that as the two of them collaborated closely on the transition from one to the other, “Not once over these past years did you ever raise any questions about our policies, practices, or procedures in dealing with the problem of clergy sexual misconduct involving minors.”

Reading Mahony’s letter today only reinforces my suspicions that Gomez’s recent actions against Mahony were not driven by any sense of outrage, but rather are aimed at deflecting criticism of the archdiocese onto his predecessor. But insofar as Gomez kept silence until the courts forced disclosure — as Mahony says that Gomez has done — Gomez is as complicit as Mahony, and the actions to restrict Mahony’s public ministry are more window dressing for the public and less the product of disgust at Mahony’s conduct.

I look forward to hearing Archbishop Gomez’s reply.

Unlike for his first Inauguration, Obama has chosen to allow unlimited corporate contributions to fill the fund-raising coffers of the entity legally known as the Presidential Inaugural Committee. Last time around the block, Obama refused corporate contributions for the Inauguration Ceremony as “a commitment to change business as usual in Washington.”

A huge report was published on Oct. 10 by Los Angeles County that’ll likely open the floodgates for hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) for unconventional oil and gas in the Monterey Shale basin. The report, as it turns out, was done by LA County in name only.

As the Los Angeles Times explained, the study found “no harm from the method” of fracking as it pertains to extracting shale gas and oil from the Inglewood Oil Field, which the Times explains is “the largest urban oil field in the country.”

With the total failure of the drug war causing many Latin American political leaders to publicly question the wisdom of prohibition, President Obama was forced to repeatedly address the issue this weekend at the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia. Unfortunately, Obama did his best to quickly dismiss the topic with incoherent excuses.

Today’s banksters are direct spiritual descendants of the mentality that gave us the Great Depression.

So here we are, the week between Christmas and New Years. This is a slow news time (as David Dayen noted here), yet it is a classic time for “take out the trash” type news dumps.

The op-ed “Obamacare to the Rescue” in the LA Times by Spike Dolomite Ward has been making the rounds among Democratic bloggers. Ms. Ward was an uninsured, disappointed Obama supporter until she got cancer. Luckily, Ward was one of a few thousand Americans able to find, qualify for and afford the Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plan created by the new health care law. But millions were left out for now.

In the past few decades it has become much rarer for the poor to move themselves out of poverty. Low economic mobility and high income inequality are hallmarks of feudal societies run by landed gentry, not nations founded on fairness and equal opportunity.