♦ Chief Bratton says he'd like to stay around for a second term, starting in 2007.

♦ City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo has accepted $16,600 in political contributions from "controversial apartment operators Lance Robbins and Stanley Treitel," the Times' Patrick McGreevy reports. Oh, and they got favorable treatment in a lawsuit settled by Delgadillo's office.

♦ You can start voting today for the Nov, 8 election—and maybe you should given the confusion that is expected from all the combined polling places.

♦ Gawker is taking bets on who will become the new editor of mediabistro now that Elizabeth Spiers has sold a novel and moved on. Whoever gets the job also oversees FishbowlLA.

♦ Entertainment Weekly's Chris Willman is out with his first book, Rednecks & Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music from The New Press.

♦ "Ex-Liberal in Hollywood" Clark Baker explains why conservatives are so smitten with the Liberty Film Festival, held here last weekend.

♦ The group anony-blog Independent Sources critiques the way Paul Magers is promoting the revamped CBS2 website. While they are it, they aren't too happy with Channel 2's late discovery of Scott Peterson wristbands.

♦ Kim Cooper, editrix of Scram and co-founder of the 1947Project, has launched a group blog. Subcrawl.net "aims to explore the most curious and intriguing online happenings before the rest of the web-surfing world spots them." Co-bloggers include novelist and Daily Candy contributor Darcy Cosper, Adrienne Crew of LAist.com and LA Brain Terrain, Margaret Griffis (Crash Landing, Lost in the Grooves), Phil Goldwhite (Plasticmuse.com), Eric Howard (Cacophony Society, Tertrameter.com) and new media consultant Richard Schave.

♦ A note regarding the L.A. Times' obituary of Edward Roybal. When I called it "canned" I didn't mean stale or out of date, but simply that the obit was written in advance. It's a common practice and a good one, since doing the research ahead allows some obituaries to take on the qualities of biography, especially of well-known figures. Would you like to write up the life of, say, Ronald Reagan in an hour? Me neither.

♦ The New Republic this week launched a staff-written politics blog, The Plank.

♦  Sheri Sadler Wolf, who did the media buys for Gov. Schwarzenegger during the recall campaign, has hung out her own shingle as Sadler Strategic Media. Said shingle hangs somewhere in the Valley.