Hillary has named as her national campaign co-chair a man who was impeached for bribery.

I meant to post this last night, but we had a power outage and I just got back online tonight.

Assume that the entire comments section is one giant spoiler.

UPDATE: An excellent theory is articulated here. I won’t put it in the post, but it is a spoiler, sort of.

Ask an L.A. Times journalist why people read the L.A. Times (or any similar newspaper), and they are likely to say things like this: the top-notch political news coverage; the Pulitzer-prize winning investigative articles; or the insightful columnists.

Now ask someone at work why he or she reads the L.A. Times. If they do — and increasingly, they don’t — they’ll say things like this: the sports section; the comics; the crossword; the classifieds; or the horoscope (there’s a reason these oh-so-serious papers all carry a horoscope; it sells papers).

Until recently, journalists were able to kid themselves that people read their paper for the hard news and political coverage. And they had their delusions confirmed on a daily basis. After all, whenever they went to parties and dinners, they spoke with other journalists, who all read the paper for the hard news and political coverage. At one of these parties, if you asked someone: “Did you read that article or op-ed by so-and-so about such-and-such?” — why, the chances were good that the other journalist would say yes.

It was thus easy to believe that the hundreds of thousands of subscribers to the paper — or at least most of them — were similarly reading the paper, as they say about Playboy, for the articles.

And then came the Internet age.

Now newspapers can put traffic counters on their Web sites, and they can see at a glance exactly what’s bringing in the traffic. And it ain’t local homicides in South Los Angeles, or the latest Pulitzer-winning series of articles. It’s Paris Hilton and Kobe Bryant.

And, because these same newspapers are losing revenue at an alarming rate, more than ever they feel the pressure to write stories that bring in eyeballs. And now they know exactly what stories those are.

You get the crappy news coverage you ask for — nowadays, more than ever before.

P.S. To his credit, Tim Rutten made these exact points a while back, in this column. I’ll link it because I know you didn’t read it. That’s not why you get the paper.

[“Deport the Criminals First” is a recurring feature on this blog, highlighting crimes committed by illegal immigrants — with a special focus on repeat offenders. I argue that, instead of arresting illegal immigrants who work hard for a living, we should use our limited immigration enforcement resources to target illegal immigrants who commit crimes in this country — especially violent crimes.]

An essential part of my plan to Deport the Criminals First is border security. Deporting criminals isn’t going to do us any good if the illegal criminals can just sneak back into the country. Blogger Digger illustrates this principle well in a post from last year:

An illegal alien, Rafael Ramirez Perez, hit and killed Amy Kortlang, 22, after causing another accident that injured three others while driving drunk last week, then he fled on foot. Perez has 4 prior arrests in the US and was deported in March, 2006 only to sneak back into the country and kill a young woman while driving drunk. This easily could have been prevented if there was actual border security and if local law enforcement could have actually done something the first time this dirtbag was arrested in this country.

Amy Kortlang had just finished moving into her own place and was a cosmetologist. The accident occurred on State Route 67 when Rafael Ramirez Perez was seen driving at a high speed and passing cars in the southbound lane. He clipped a few vehicles with a company owned white 2000 Ford F-150 truck causing an accident that injured 3 before plowing head-on into Amy Kortlang’s red Honda Civic killing her. After fleeing on foot, police tracked Perez down by contacting the registered owner of the vehicle, an unnamed company. This unnamed company should be fined and prosecuted as well for employing Perez and thus enabling this incident to occur.

Go to Digger’s post for the full run-down on Ramirez’s criminal history. Bottom line: he picked up three DUIs before he was finally deported. But deporting Ramirez didn’t do us any good, because he just came back — and killed Amy Kortlang.

Having thrown Ramirez out of the country, our government owed all of us a duty to keep him out. Its failure to do so cost Amy Kortlang her life.