I have broken a lot of stories.

And new people come in, and it doesn’t go along with their politics, and they fire me, end the column, silence a voice in Los Angeles. They can’t silence it nationally, but they are able to do it there.

At least 3% of the signers of the Constitution must have been gay, since that’s the low estimate for any population sample. It was probably higher, given that they were a pretty talented bunch and wore wigs.

It had run as a column – I had worked at the paper since 1976, but the column had been running for 13 years, and I think it was a strong column, criticizing the war when the paper was supporting it.

I teach at USC, and it’s obvious to anyone who teaches college students that they don’t cover much modern history and certainly not the modern presidency.

The journalist’s job is to get the story by breaking into their offices, by bribing, by seducing people, by lying, by anything else to break through the palace guard.

We talk about a free press. These people hide, they make a lot of money off the media. They hide behind the slogans of free press, and then they can come out with crap like that. It’s just garbage. It’s insulting to the readers.

What passes for investigative journalism is finding somebody with their pants down – literally or otherwise.

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 60 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 fact is ... that when totalitarian nations like China and Saudi Arabia play ball with U.S. business interests, we like them just fine. But when Venezuela's freely elected president threatens powerful corporate interests, the Bush administration treats him as an enemy.