I've never been much of a fan of her music, but I always have thought that Barbra Streisand is a good person. Recent events have shown how good of a person she can be.

Ms. Streisand has made the news by cancelling her subscription to the Los Angeles Times, in response to the firing of liberal, anti-war columnist Robert Scheer. As previously discussed here, the firing was the result of Times publisher Jack Johnson's ire over Scheer's columns criticizing Bush's war in Iraq.

She points out that Scheer's replacement, Jonah Goldberg, cannot “be trusted to provide me with accurate, unbiased news and forthright opinions.” As readers of this rightist columnist know, his pieces generally involve disjointed regurgitations of GOP talking points. It would be difficult to know what, if anything, Goldberg really stands for, given his utter lack of originality.

This would be a good time to remind people to Contact the L.A. Times and demand that Robert Scheer be rehired.

The Los Angeles Times seems determined to join the rest of the corporate media as a right-wing activist endeavor. They have pretty much dropped doing investigative reporting on the GOP, despite how massively corrupt Bush, the Republican Congress, and Schwarzenegger are.

Now, the paper has canned Bob Scheer, the most talented columnist the LA Times has ever produced. Scheer's work appeared in the paper for 30 years, starting as a reporter. Publisher Jeff Johnson is widely known to be angry about Scheer's columns criticizing the quagmire in Iraq and calling for withdrawal of US troops. It's a shame that the Times has fired its best columnist merely because he is patriotic enough to oppose Bush's unAmerican and illegal war in Iraq.

The paper even tried to enhance its GOP credentials through the required mendacity, in this case by lying about the number of readers who protested Scheer's firing. I remember when the LA Times was a great paper. It has devolved into a propaganda rag for the GOP without any integrity or journalistic standards whatsoever. In other words, it has joined almost all of the corporate media here in the U.S.

Contact the Los Angeles Times and demand that Scheer be reinstated and that the Times reinstitute journalistic standards rather than acting as a mouthpiece for the GOP.