♦ Former West Basin Municipal Water District board member R. Keith McDonald, convicted on ten felony counts of corruption, has asked to delay prison so he can care for his ailing mother. Why do we care? His mother is Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald, who is running for reelection to Congress. The Wave's Betty Pleasant asks: "If she’s so sick that her felonious son can defer punishment to take care of her, then the obvious question is: How sick is she?" With the court files sealed, and the congresswoman's staff playing dumb, she's getting no answers despite a lede you have to admire about candidates "dropping dead, dropping out and dropping bombshells."

♦ Caitlin Flanagan, whose pieces from Los Angeles for The New Yorker and occasionally The Atlantic tend to rile some people up, is profiled in the latest Elle magazine.

♦ Somehow Mickey Kaus reads today's Times follow on the latest gang murder in lower Santa Monica as validation of his Halloween tale about a rumble (presumably between the Sharks and the Jets) two zip codes away at 26th and San Vicente. It's still Mickey's source against everybody else—cops, reporters and neighbors for starters—on that one.

♦ Stephen Colbert focused on the Valley and its 27th congressional district—and gives a porn name to Rep. Brad Sherman—in the sixteenth installment of "Better Know a District" on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report." Brit Hume on the Fox News Channel called Sherman "a good sport" for playing along.

♦ In an interview with the Hotline's Blogometer, Matt Welch hints at some blog activity to be coming soon out of his new job as assistant editorial page editor at the Los Angeles Times.

♦ Former mayor Richard Riordan, Sheriff Lee Baca and Rep. Xavier Becerra jumped on the Mónica García school board juggernaut in the East Side district.

♦  Marc Haefele of the L.A. Alternative also remembers Gilbert Lindsay's LANCER project, "the most famous waste burner never built."