The horses can sense the finish line in the race to be mayor, and the crowd's on its feet. With less than a week until Tuesday's culmination of all this frivolity, here's the latest media treatment.

• On the day that Sheriff Lee Baca endorsed Villaraigosa, Hahn unveiled a new TV spot accusing him of being soft on crime. Times, Daily News
• What Pierce O'Donnell did and when in 2001 he did it, according to the Times, using documents fed by the Villaraigosa campaign.
• Labor isn't happy about Villaraigosa's cozying up to the building management industry, says the LA Weekly's Robert Greene.
• The Weekly endorses Villaraigosa, but without the glee of 2001: "We kept waiting for Antonio Villaraigosa to turn it on in his second run for the mayor’s office...It’s as though he’s content with the abysmal 26 percent turnout in March and is doing all that he can to keep from awakening the hundreds of thousands of voters who sat out the primary for fear some of them might vote for Jim Hahn. Too bad. This is not the inspirational leader Los Angeles needs to fire us up. Nor is it the one Villaraigosa has shown he can be."
• Marc Cooper's remembrance of Miguel Contreras is more restrained ("he established an admirable record...but let’s not go overboard") than his Weekly colleague Harold Meyerson's.
• I talk about the race tonight with Val Zavala on KCET's Life and Times, 6:30 p.m.
• "Racism has always been a subtext of Los Angeles politics," Sherry Bebitch Jeffe says in an AP wrapup that is playing up and down the state under the unlikely headline of Drama in Hollywood. The term doesn't appear in the story, but in some outposts of the AP/newspaper culture, L.A. is somehow synonymous with Hollywood.
• The Daily News reports on the anti-Villaraigosa phone campaign financed by Hal Netkin, a leader of the "but he was in MEChA" fringe. Meanwhile, in today's La Opinión news story, Villaraigosa responds to a UCLA alumnus who has been mounting a campaign against him that, like most Chicano students of thirty years ago, he participated in MEChA but doesn't agree today with many of the group's principles. The quote in Spanish is, "No estoy de acuerdo con la mayoría de sus preceptos."

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