Urging on Chick

On the news and opinion website American Reporter, San Pedro correspondent and activist Robert Gelfand gives Controller Laura Chick and the Times credit for putting pressure on the Hahn Administration. He writes:

In exposing a government scandal, it sure helps when a zealous public official and a big-city newspaper manage to find each other. Such is now the case in Los Angeles, where the Los Angeles Times and City Controller Laura Chick have been playing tag-team against Mayor James Hahn.

When Hahn took office as mayor of Los Angeles in 2001, it seemed like his term would be clean, even if a bit pedestrian. Now, questions about the mayor and several of his current and former appointees are beginning to build, and as they build, they are beginning to sting.

It has taken a while to come out. For the past year things have been as murky as the opening shots in a 1930s detective movie. We have witnessed the resignation of a vice-mayor, a grand jury investigation that somehow involves the Airport and the Harbor Department and the resignation of two politically-connected Airport Commission members.

The picture is beginning to become clear. It all seems to come down to that oldest story in politics, the use of influence by incumbents for the purpose of fundraising and their abuse of power in order to get reelected.

Earlier, Gelfand examined the KFI crusade to make a "political human sacrifice" of Republican congressman David Dreier and pronounced it all a big "so what."