In an email to friends and supporters, soon-to-be-ex Times columnist Robert Scheer blames Publisher Jeffrey M. Johnson for his ouster from the op-ed page:

On Friday I was fired as a columnist by the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, where I have worked for thirty years. 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 sixty 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.

http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2005/11/scheer_responds.html

They got rid of Michael Ramirez, who I disliked. They got rid of their liberal and conservative.

They're trying to make the Times bland.

Let's see if Erin Aubrey Kaplan can undo their best-laid plans.

Here, I thought the LA times was moderating. getting rid of Scheer is great but not Ramirez.

It was kinda funny the excuses the Roosevelt administration used to not bomb the railways into the concentration camps.

To be honest, I've never been a Scheer fan. His hero worship of Bill Clinton, the corporate flunky who imposed Nafta on the country by recruiting Republicans to put it through Congress, killed hundreds of thousands of peopole with his sanctions on Iraq, and killed who knows how many more people with his cowardly cruise missle attacks upon third world countries, was sickening. And his long-winded defenses of Clinton on radio station KPFK during the Lewinsky farce surpassed Richard Nixon's Checkers Speech in sappiness. But at the same time the steady drift of the LA Times to the right is a very bad thing. It is very close to becoming a junior partner of the reactionary Chicago Tribune.