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Topic Archive: Politics
Did Lu Parker go along, as she implied she would in that first public glimpsing of the couple at Chevalier's bookstore a month ago? Mayoral spokesman Matt Szabo isn't saying....
Posted July 2, 2009 11:29 PM
An elected San Francisco supervisor has been agitating up there for details on the cost of Mayor Gavin Newsom's security detail, without much luck. Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, however, easily tracked...
Posted July 1, 2009 4:55 PM
Steve Hymon, who covered the City Hall beat (and later transportation as the Bottleneck blogger) for the Los Angeles Times, is back again, at least virtually. This time, he's doing...
Posted July 1, 2009 4:22 PM
Emanuel Pleitez is the 26-year-old who may have played a bit of a spoiler role in the 32nd congressional district by taking votes from Gil Cedillo in the Democratic primary...
Posted July 1, 2009 2:37 PM
Channel 5 reporter Eric Spillman posted the photo on Twitter of his KTLA colleague, the mayor's girlfriend, in the invited crowd at Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's pre-swearing-in church gathering this morning....
Posted July 1, 2009 9:43 AM
Homies Unidos director Alex Sanchez was denied bail even though former Senator Tom Hayden offered his home as security and support at the hearing included a deputy to City...
Posted July 1, 2009 9:30 AM
One day before she would have left elective office, Governing magazine features former Los Angeles City Controller Laura Chick on its July cover. She stepped down early, of course, to...
Posted July 1, 2009 12:54 AM
LAUSD chief Ramon Cortines said he was taking "appropriate personnel action" against the principal and athletic director of Birmingham High School for letting Sacha Baron Cohen (as gay character "Bruno")...
Posted June 30, 2009 10:52 PM
Just passing this along, but the source — Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo — isn't known to go off half-cocked. Marshall posts tonight that Rep. Henry Waxman was taken...
Posted June 30, 2009 9:38 PM
Assembly Democrats passed a budget package Sunday night without Republican votes. A veto by the governor is expected. LAT, Bee, Register Decisions by the U.S. 9th Circuit were overturned...
Posted June 29, 2009 8:58 AM
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge James K. Hahn — yes, the former mayor — did the honors yesterday as his younger sister, Janice Hahn, took the oath of office for...
Posted June 28, 2009 5:50 PM
Levin was a familiar sight around the Westside signing up voters — which Bob Pool at the Times says she did six days a week for 36 years. Levin's son...
Posted June 27, 2009 6:34 PM
Well, let's call it partly politics and partly law enforcement, with some union advocacy for seasoning. It's the new blog of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, which posts today...
Posted June 26, 2009 3:13 PM
Today's Michael Jackson mourners in Hollywood are able to get to his actual Walk of Fame star instead of radio host Jackson's star, where they gathered yesterday. Gatherings also...
Posted June 26, 2009 9:26 AM
Anish Mahajan, 34, a member of the Mid City West Community Council, was selected for the 2009-10 class of White House fellows. He's the only Indian American in the group....
Posted June 25, 2009 10:23 PM
Wave columnist Betty Pleasant writes there was a dust-up at the Lakers victory parade when star Kobe Bryant refused to ride with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. She says: The cause of...
Posted June 25, 2009 12:10 PM
State budget talks go nowhere again, so the state may soon have to issue IOUs instead of checks to the people it owes. Rough & Tumble roundup, Which Way,...
Posted June 25, 2009 9:19 AM
The Democrats' latest budget plan in Sacramento appears to be dead on arrival. Rough & Tumble Kudos to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa for having the guts to enter...
Posted June 24, 2009 8:52 AM
Take a look at more Steve Greenberg cartoons in the LA Sketchbook archive. Click on any cartoon to view it bigger....
Posted June 23, 2009 11:31 PM
A judge has ruled that the Los Angeles city controller does not have the powers to conduct performance audits of the other elected city officials, siding with City Attorney Rocky...
Posted June 23, 2009 6:45 PM
A few minutes ago, at 6:30, Mayor Villaraigosa's Twitter feed came alive: villaraigosa Today I announced that I will not be running for gov of CA. LA needs a leader...
Posted June 22, 2009 6:43 PM
Steve Lopez had a column ready for the LAT website on Mayor Villaraigosa giving up his dreams of living in the governor's suburban estate. Of course L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa...
Posted June 22, 2009 5:06 PM
The mayor of San Francisco would very much like to have the endorsement of the mayor of Los Angeles. Newsom sends out this reaction to Villaraigosa dropping out: As a...
Posted June 22, 2009 2:19 PM
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa blows off locals and goes to CNN's Wolf Blitzer for his announcement a minute ago that he will not run for governor. Good call, though it makes...
Posted June 22, 2009 1:16 PM
Steve Greenberg was inspired by today's Los Angeles Times Poll story showing higher approval ratings for the LAPD. See more by Greenberg in LA Sketchbook....
Posted June 22, 2009 10:57 AM
Per Rick Orlov, City Council candidate Christine Essel will go with John Shallman as consultant, Tom Berman as campaign manager and John Fairbank and Jonathan Brown of Fairbank Maslin Maullin...
Posted June 22, 2009 10:32 AM
Mayor Villaraigosa plans to appear on CNN's "The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer" at 1 p.m. PDT and make some kind of statement about his plans on running for...
Posted June 22, 2009 9:34 AM
Authorities in Iran "acknowledged that the number of votes cast in 50 cities exceeded the actual number of voters, state television reported Monday following assertions by the country’s supreme leader...
Posted June 21, 2009 11:56 PM
LAUSD Supt. Ramon Cortines spoke to friends of Los Angeles Magazine at breakfast this morning and called out the teachers union, which had plans to demonstrate at his home this...
Posted June 18, 2009 11:31 PM
The mess in Sacramento is so bad that Steve Greenberg helps them finish their sentences. See more of LA Sketchbook by Greenberg in the archive. Click the cartoon to...
Posted June 18, 2009 9:30 AM
Staples Center owner Phil Anschutz's Clarity Media Group closed the deal to buy the conservative mag from Rupert Murdoch. Here's a report in Anschutz's Washington Examiner, via Romemesko....
Posted June 17, 2009 2:45 PM
Big political giver Jerry Perenchio, Casey Wasserman and other donors as yet undisclosed have answered Mayor Villaraigosa's call to help pay for the city's share of the Lakers parade costs....
Posted June 16, 2009 12:12 PM
Here's the Trutanich transition's roster of working groups that will look into the operations of the City Attorney's office. TrutanichTeam.pdf...
Posted June 16, 2009 9:19 AM
The City Council cancelled its Wednesday session to allow members to attend the Lakers parade. City Clerk L.A., area designers took some big honors at last night's Council of...
Posted June 16, 2009 9:10 AM
Los Angeles City Council members Dennis Zine and Jan Perry and City Attorney-elect Carmen Trutanich riding in Sunday's L.A. Pride Parade. Below, San Francisco's Gavin Newsom and Antonio Villaraigosa...
Posted June 14, 2009 9:32 PM
Local Iranian-Americans demonstrated today against the election results and ensuing violence in Tehran, in the usual spot outside the federal building on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood. Jonathan Alcorn has...
Posted June 14, 2009 4:44 PM
Due to a snafu in the new Post- 9/11 GI Bill, California veterans won't get the aid for private colleges that vets in other states do. That's because, officially, the...
Posted June 13, 2009 4:33 PM
The Sacramento home owned by Rep. Laura Richardson of Long Beach gets her more ink than anything she has done in Congress. This time, the L.A. Times revisits the situation...
Posted June 12, 2009 8:32 AM
The L.A. Times was forced to run a correction because Michael Douglas forgot that he hosted a 1991 event honoring his father, Kirk Douglas. The anonymous blogger known as...
Posted June 11, 2009 5:26 PM
The state Coastal Commission reportedly just turned down the City of Los Angeles application to create permit parking districts near the beach in Venice. The vote was 9 - 1...
Posted June 11, 2009 3:00 PM
Just a month after Donald Trump ruled that Carrie Prejean could keep her title despite giving her views on same-sex marriage, she's been dethroned as Miss California after all. The...
Posted June 10, 2009 2:50 PM
Phil Anschutz is said to be close to a deal with News Corp. to buy the conservative Weekly Standard. LAT Numero Uno grocery magnate George Torres was released from...
Posted June 10, 2009 9:18 AM
Click on cartoon to see bigger. More LA Sketchbooks by Steve Greenberg...
Posted June 8, 2009 2:45 PM
All of Rocky Delgadillo's senior aides have been placed on tenure tracks that will make it hard for incoming city attorney Carmen Trutanich to replace them. Among the aides...
Posted June 8, 2009 9:20 AM
You remember Cadiz — that was the venture to bank water beneath the distant Mojave Desert, then pipe it into urban Southern California, envisioned by Friend-of-Antonio (and many other Democrats)...
Posted June 5, 2009 5:28 PM
Call me crazy, but I'm thinking that Steve Greenberg isn't persuaded that all the marijuana dispensaries around town are medically necessary. Catch more Greenberg cartoons in the LA Sketchbook...
Posted June 5, 2009 3:15 PM
State assemblyman Paul Krekorian, whose district centers on Burbank, is renting an apartment in the 2nd Los Angeles city council district while he ponders whether to run for the open...
Posted June 5, 2009 9:06 AM
Westside city councilman Bill Rosendahl admits that he is actively considering a run for the U.S. Senate if Dianne Feinstein steps down in 2012. This even though, as the LA...
Posted June 4, 2009 12:09 PM
An editorial in the Daily News says the prospect of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa running for governor with the city in deep financial crisis is a no-win situation. He should not...
Posted June 4, 2009 9:34 AM
Cardinal Mahony wagers a case of wine on the Lakers, a councilman resigns in disgrace, David Carradine is found hanged and more, including the local gay Asian-American mayor. Mark Lacter's...
Posted June 4, 2009 9:25 AM
Can't call it a debunking exactly, but Rick Orlov gets denials all around on the Jack Weiss to get $200,000 as homeland security deputy for the mayor meme. Same on...
Posted June 3, 2009 4:08 PM
Mayor Villaraigosa put forth Cindy Miscikowski, the former City Council member from Brentwood, for the port commission spot vacated by S. David Freeman. Release after the jump. Also at City...
Posted June 3, 2009 3:59 PM
Schwarzenegger's plea, the Lu Parker/Villaraigosa talk continues, those Chinese are still at LAX, books by Barbara Streisand and Choire Sicha, a journalist gets a job and more. Mark Lacter's LA...
Posted June 3, 2009 9:12 AM
At last Friday's LA Observed rooftop party at the Formosa in Hollywood, city attorney-elect Carmen Trutanich stuck around for some fairly extended conversations with revelers. Celeste Fremon reports on hers,...
Posted June 2, 2009 1:33 PM
Steve Lopez thinks that Mayor Antonio Villaraiogsa's latest 30-something television news squeeze could learn something from the last one. Call her immediately, he advises. Heh heh: I don't know Parker,...
Posted June 2, 2009 12:34 PM
Phil Willon, who covers Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa for the L.A. Times, posted at L.A. Now that Channel 5 reporter-weekend anchor Lu Parker told KTLA officials that she and the mayor...
Posted June 1, 2009 5:23 PM
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa dropped in Saturday at the opening of actress Melissa Joan Hart's store Sweet Harts in Sherman Oaks. He's getting a hug from Valley restaurant and real...
Posted June 1, 2009 1:55 PM
Wow, it's June already. Today's Morning Buzz has much talk about Antonio Villaraigosa and his intentions, more questioning of the Los Angeles magazine failure cover, plus some other politics and...
Posted June 1, 2009 9:01 AM
The trickle of local Obama supporters receiving appointments as ambassadors is not quite a flood yet, but it's reached stream status. The latest is Munger, Tolles & Olson partner Vilma...
Posted May 29, 2009 9:40 AM
John McCain will do the deed at a Meg Whitman event today in Orange County. That will give her McCain, Mitt Romney and Pete Wilson in the early stages of...
Posted May 29, 2009 8:56 AM
Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky is adapting to the new media order by revamping his official website to be more newsy under the guidance of Joel Sappell, who used...
Posted May 28, 2009 9:15 PM
City Attorney-elect Carmen Trutanich announced that former Speaker Robert Hertzberg and former District Attorney Robert Philibosian will co-chair his transition team. Jane Usher, the former president of the city planning...
Posted May 28, 2009 8:33 PM
More by Steve Greenberg. Click on the cartoon to view it full-sized....
Posted May 28, 2009 1:36 PM
An investigative series in the Contra Costa Times up north says that an environmental program to benefit the delicate Sacramento-San Joaquin delta instead provided cash and cheap water for wealthy...
Posted May 28, 2009 9:31 AM
LA Observed editorial cartoonist Steve Greenberg responds to yesterday's Proposition 8 ruling, and the reactions to the decision. See more by Greenberg at the LA Sketchbook archive. Click on...
Posted May 27, 2009 9:28 AM
Former Occidental College classmate Lisa Jack's circa-1980 photos of Barack Obama will be at the M+B Gallery in West Hollywood starting Thursday night. "I'm sure Hillary would have paid a...
Posted May 27, 2009 9:21 AM
Gov. Schwarzenegger proposed cutting deeply into health and welfare, letting non-violent felons out of prison a year early and closing most state parks as a start on closing the...
Posted May 27, 2009 9:15 AM
Looks like the most action by Proposition 8 opponents will be at 6 pm Downtown at Pershing Square, 7 p.m. in West Hollywood at the corner of Santa Monica and...
Posted May 26, 2009 4:23 PM
Anthony Pacheco unexpectedly announced his resignation as of July 1, saying in a letter to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa that he needs to return full-time to his law firm job. Pacheco...
Posted May 26, 2009 1:53 PM
Vote of the electorate is upheld by the California Supreme Court on a 6-1 split, but the court ruled unanimously that existing same-sex marriages will also remain valid. Longtime Supreme...
Posted May 26, 2009 10:12 AM
See more by Steve Greenberg in his editorial cartoons archive at LA Observed. Click the cartoon to view bigger....
Posted May 26, 2009 8:51 AM
Federal court oversight of the LAPD that was agreed to in a consent decree nine years ago "has been a resounding success, and it should at last be allowed to...
Posted May 25, 2009 11:09 AM
Past Villaraigosa backer Eli Broad hasn't sounded very positive toward the mayor lately, and in today's L.A. Times he seems to include Antonio Villaraigosa among the leaders who need to...
Posted May 24, 2009 12:59 PM
Villaraigosa supporter and Occidental College professor Peter Dreier has some problems with the Los Angeles Magazine cover package that declared Mayor Villaraigosa a failure. (Whole story is online now.) Here's...
Posted May 22, 2009 9:56 AM
See more by Steve Greenberg in his editorial cartoons archive at LA Observed. Click cartoon to view bigger....
Posted May 22, 2009 9:42 AM
Steve Cooley, Carmen Trutanich and David Zahniser analyze what the election results mean for the mayor and City Hall. KCRW/WWLA, KPCC/Airtalk Raphael Sonenshein guesses that "this train wreck is...
Posted May 22, 2009 9:35 AM
The governor (or his ghost tweeter) is pretty busy on Twitter. Ironic, perhaps, that he takes refuge from the Sacramento budget storm at a community college, given how hard they...
Posted May 21, 2009 5:12 PM
Editorial cartoonist Steve Greenberg sees the new City Attorney-elect Carmen Trutanich as a potential man of steel at City Hall. See more by Greenberg. Click cartoon to view bigger....
Posted May 21, 2009 9:29 AM
More post-game election pondering: Deep cuts inevitable now, affecting services of many kinds. LAT, Bee, LAT (on schools), Rough & Tumble, DN, Which Way L.A.? Calls for a constitutional...
Posted May 21, 2009 9:16 AM
From the desk of Carmen Trutanich: The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Last night, the citizens of Los Angeles took a gigantic leap toward changing...
Posted May 20, 2009 4:37 PM
Top Carmen Trutanich adviser (and future City Hall East staffer?) Jane Usher sent a letter to the new City Attorney-elect's supporters thanking them and urging them to be patient with...
Posted May 20, 2009 12:46 PM
Election aftermath LAT, NYT, WSJ, Bee, CalBuzz Arguably the end of an era in California politics – the Schwarzenegger era. Anthony York/Capitol Weekly Carmen Trutanich's victory margin over Jack...
Posted May 20, 2009 9:05 AM
Gov. Schwarzenegger conceded defeat two hours after the polls closed, and said Democrats and Republicans must now work together to close a $21 billion budget deficit. The five budget propositions...
Posted May 19, 2009 11:40 PM
Next week's "Evening With President Obama" at the Beverly Hilton, the president's first major fundraiser since taking office, has added some name entertainment: Jennifer Hudson and Earth, Wind & Fire....
Posted May 19, 2009 2:50 PM
The former CNN correspondent who reinvented himself as a Los Angeles-based multimedia journalist for Yahoo was named one of 24 new Nieman Fellows at Harvard. He's the only one from...
Posted May 19, 2009 1:32 PM
More in LA Sketchbook by Steve Greenberg. Click on the cartoon to see it bigger. Steve Greenberg bio and email...
Posted May 19, 2009 12:11 PM
Rick Orlov notes that City Council president Eric Garcetti is now Lt. Garcetti in the Naval Reserve, up from ensign....
Posted May 19, 2009 11:26 AM
At the city council's meeting today on the impending budget cuts, council president Eric Garcetti apparently was noticeably pointed in defense of colleagues who felt roughly handled in comments last...
Posted May 18, 2009 5:30 PM
More in LA Sketchbook by Steve Greenberg. Click cartoons to see bigger. Steve Greenberg bio and email...
Posted May 18, 2009 8:43 AM
Former Speaker Willie Brown says Sacramento is in "total panic" believing the tax props will lose on Tuesday's ballot, and he blames years of bad decisions by the governor...
Posted May 18, 2009 8:35 AM
Los Angeles Magazine's cover package calling Antonio Villaraigosa a failure as mayor also includes suggestions from a dozen SoCal experts, observers and advocates of various ilk. Author D.J., Waldie, for...
Posted May 18, 2009 12:58 AM
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger returns to LA Sketchbook for a second day in a row. Tells you something about what's in the news. As always, click on the cartoon to...
Posted May 15, 2009 9:58 AM
Gov. Schwarzenegger threatens drastic cuts at the state level, in some cases even if the props pass on Tuesday. Rough & Tumble, WWLA, Airtalk Candidate for governor Meg Whitman...
Posted May 15, 2009 9:10 AM
On the right, how Los Angeles Magazine played Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on the cover in December 2006. My piece on the mayor was a mix of skepticism and marvel at...
Posted May 14, 2009 1:12 PM
Judy Chu's consultant Parke Skelton tells LA Observed that the reason Richard Ziman's name was belatedly taken off the invitations for this week's Chu fundraiser at Ziman's home is that...
Posted May 14, 2009 12:24 PM
Yesterday's news that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to auction off the historic Los Angeles Memorial Colisuem to help ease the state's budget mess caught Steve Greenberg's attention. As always,...
Posted May 14, 2009 12:10 PM
The June cover of Los Angeles Magazine, out in a few days, bears a portrait of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and one word blazoned in white ink across the page: Failure....
Posted May 14, 2009 12:48 AM
During Monday night's fundraiser for Judy Chu at the Daphna not Richard Ziman home, city airport commissioner Christine Essel was pitched to the crowd as a candidate to succeed Wendy...
Posted May 13, 2009 7:01 PM
The boiling bi-coastal scandal involving Wetherly Capital Group, a New York pol and some Villaraigosa commissioners is likely the reason that Monday night's Beverly Hills fundraiser for congressional candidate Judy...
Posted May 13, 2009 6:54 PM
Today's post is from an Angeleno whose Twitter profile describes him as a "digital marketing nerd and writer with a fondness for Hollywood, webseries, widgets and wine," retweeted by @LAWeekly:...
Posted May 13, 2009 5:02 PM
This cartoon was created by Steve Greenberg several weeks ago when the Los Angeles City Council was still debating whether to finish the elephant enclosure at the L.A. Zoo....
Posted May 13, 2009 10:51 AM
Channel 4 devoted ten minutes on its 5 p.m. newscast yesterday to saying goodbye to retired anchor Paul Moyer, despite the memo last month saying there would be "no...
Posted May 13, 2009 9:05 AM
An anonymous, no questions asked gun exchange program by the LAPD netted 40 assault-style weapons and a rifle with a grenade launcher among the 1,700 guns turned in. "We...
Posted May 12, 2009 9:10 AM
George Sanchez, hired just last fall to cover the LAUSD for the Daily News, stepped up to be bought out Friday. Cityside staff down to nine reporters and columnist...
Posted May 11, 2009 5:49 PM
Fix the basic unfairness of Proposition 13 that lets multi-million dollar mansions get away with lower property taxes than you or your neighbors pay and the state might not...
Posted May 11, 2009 2:18 PM
Steve Greenberg is the editorial cartoonist for LA Observed. There's an archive of his cartoons on the site, and a page with his his bio and email contact. Click...
Posted May 11, 2009 1:46 PM
An appeals court in Iran freed journalist Roxana Saberi from prison. CNN, NPR, LAT The Service Employees International Union was included on a conference call between the Obama Administration...
Posted May 11, 2009 8:52 AM
Former Los Angeles-area assemblyman Louis Caldera has had to resign as director of the White House military office over the controversy involving a flyover of New York for an Air...
Posted May 8, 2009 3:30 PM
Here are more editorial cartoons for LA Observed by Steve Greenberg, plus his bio and email contact. Click on the cartoon to see bigger....
Posted May 8, 2009 12:11 PM
Another angle to the now-controversial appointment of ex-Assemblyman Wally Knox to a $205k job at the Port of Los Angeles — an appointment blocked this week despite the mayor's desire...
Posted May 8, 2009 12:07 AM
Sean Harrigan, president of the Los Angeles Fire and Police Pensions board, resigned today a month after receiving a letter from the Securities and Exchange Commission asking him to identify...
Posted May 7, 2009 3:28 PM
The Carson city council spent a chunk of its meeting last night talking about Lyndon LaRouche's "Homeowners and Bank Protection Act of 2007." The item was on the agenda at...
Posted May 6, 2009 4:27 PM
Now this is interesting, given the perception held by some that Mayor Villaraigosa heads into his second term weaker than before. At today's City Council meeting, Councilwoman Janice Hahn raised...
Posted May 6, 2009 4:11 PM
Steve Greenberg is the editorial cartoonist for LA Observed. View his bio and cartoon archive. Click the cartoon to see it bigger....
Posted May 6, 2009 9:10 AM
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said yesterday that the time is right to debate legalizing marijuana for recreational use in California. SF Chronicle, Bee Rep. Jane Harman has toned down her...
Posted May 6, 2009 8:53 AM
The L.A. City Council voted today to extend the citywide moratorium on new digital billboards and supergraphics. It runs now until June 24, while the pols continue to ponder a...
Posted May 5, 2009 4:24 PM
A federal judge issued a TRO stopping the city of Los Angeles from taking action against unpermitted supergraphics erected on at least 18 buildings by Sky Tag. LAT The...
Posted May 5, 2009 9:12 AM
George Kieffer, partner at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips and former chair of the L.A. Chamber of Commerce, was appointed a University of California regent, according to Shane Goldmacher of...
Posted May 4, 2009 5:15 PM
NBC picked up four dramas and two comedies for its fall lineup but "left several questions unanswered until later this month." Variety, The Wrap, Finke Rep. Jane Harman went...
Posted May 4, 2009 9:01 AM
More by Steve Greenberg Click cartoon to see bigger...
Posted May 3, 2009 5:13 PM
That Long Beach State student and two other L.A. County residents are confirmed cases of the new H1N1 or swine flu. More local cases are expected, but the outbreak appears...
Posted May 3, 2009 2:40 AM
At least seven May Day marches are scheduled today around L.A., including four in Downtown. LAT, DN Only 14 percent of registered voters approve of the California Legislature's performance,...
Posted May 1, 2009 9:10 AM
Now that Shaq, Magic and the NRA have chosen up sides, City Attorney rivals Jack Weiss and Carmen Trutanich will take their gutter fight to tonight's Which Way, L.A.? on...
Posted April 30, 2009 3:40 PM
Here's today's editorial cartoon by Steve Greenberg. Click on it for full size; here's Steve's website....
Posted April 30, 2009 2:18 PM
Scientists studying the current swine flu virus say it doesn't look to be as fatal as past strains, and may be less dangerous than the usual flu. Meanwhile, a...
Posted April 30, 2009 9:22 AM
The commission that sets legislator salaries fell one vote short of approving a 10% pay cut for the California lawmakers who failed to pass a state budget for so many...
Posted April 29, 2009 11:48 PM
I'm pleased to say that Steve Greenberg will be contributing original editorial cartoons to LA Observed; this is his first. Steve is an editorial cartoonist, illustrator and graphic artist...
Posted April 29, 2009 9:41 PM
A Mexican child who died in Texas [fixed] is the first confirmed U.S. death from swine flu, and a Marine at Twentynine Palms may have swine flu and has...
Posted April 29, 2009 9:05 AM
Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman caused a stir Sunday night at Disney Hall by announcing from the stage it would be his last U.S. performance because of the nation's military...
Posted April 27, 2009 8:54 AM
Times staffers Jessica Garrison and Kim Christensen went big on Sunday's page one with an expose on oft-accused L.A. slumlord Frank McHugh. Money grafs: For more than 50 years, McHugh,...
Posted April 27, 2009 12:38 AM
"It was supposed to be the Valley's first public museum, our own Disney Hall," says a Daily News editorial. Instead, the plan to relocate the Children's Museum to Hansen Dam...
Posted April 26, 2009 11:05 PM
Deputy Mayor Arif Alikhan has been appointed Assistant Secretary for the Office of Policy Development in the Obama Administration's Department of Homeland Security. His current boss, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, has...
Posted April 24, 2009 4:27 PM
Mayor Vilaraigosa's office has put out a statement thanking the embattled Boks for his service. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa released the following statement today regarding the resignation of the Department of...
Posted April 24, 2009 12:21 PM
A commuter bus caught fire on the Ventura Freeway this morning, causing 30 passengers to be treated for smoke inhalation. AP The Republican leader in the Assembly also handed...
Posted April 23, 2009 9:25 AM
From Capitol Weekly: "Assembly Speaker Karen Bass abruptly rescinded 5 percent pay increases for dozens of rank-and-file members of the Assembly staff, citing concerns the pay raises might jeopardize the...
Posted April 22, 2009 3:56 PM
Rep. Jane Harman denied any wrongdoing in the quid pro quo allegations involving suspected Israeli spies, and in a letter to the AG called her wiretapping an abuse of...
Posted April 22, 2009 8:22 AM
In a meeting today with Times editors and reporters, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was asked if he could guarantee that his ally, Councilman Jack Weiss, would win the City Attorney runoff...
Posted April 21, 2009 10:59 PM
My post yesterday on NBC closing its bureau in Sacramento should have pointed out that ABC still maintains a fulltime presence in the state capital. Nannette Miranda, of course, has...
Posted April 21, 2009 9:21 PM
You know how state employees are being threatened with unpaid furloughs and salary cuts — and how Mayor Villaraigosa is asking city staffers to voluntarily give up some pay? And...
Posted April 21, 2009 9:16 PM
Rep. Jane Harman's wiretapped conversation was with an AIPAC supporter who said Haim Saban would withhold campaign funds from Speaker Nancy Pelosi to help Harman become chairman of the...
Posted April 21, 2009 9:12 AM
Congressional Quarterly columnist Jeff Stein wrote the piece getting a lot of play today about Rep. Jane Harman being snagged in a National Security Agency wiretap, apparently telling a suspected...
Posted April 20, 2009 6:07 PM
The NBC bureau in the state capital is shutting down. It fed stories to KNBC Channel 4 and the other California stations. Here's an email going around from reporter Mike...
Posted April 20, 2009 5:48 PM
The Numero Uno supermarket founder and president was convicted today on federal charges that include racketeering and solicitation of murder. Somewhat of a surprise to court watchers, apparently. Steven Mikulan...
Posted April 20, 2009 4:08 PM
Mayor Villaraigosa's budget to be unveiled at 11 a.m. will include plans to reduce salary costs 10%, some department mergers and privatizing, and cuts even in the police and...
Posted April 20, 2009 9:05 AM
The City Council approved shortage year water rates that will hit users with a hefty new charge if they don't reduce water consumption. Via release That federal indictment director...
Posted April 17, 2009 5:12 PM
The mayor is bringing S. David Freeman, the former head of DWP, back from the harbor commission to be his deputy on environmental issues, says David Zahniser. LAT Lt....
Posted April 17, 2009 9:21 AM
Massie Ritsch, the former L.A. Times politics desk writer and editor who has been Communications Director at the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, is heading for the Department of...
Posted April 16, 2009 4:47 PM
Coverage of the local tea parties. LAT, DN, Breeze, KPCC News, Patt Morrison audio, Pajamas Media The campuses overseen by Mayor Villaraigosa would be especially hard hit under the...
Posted April 16, 2009 9:25 AM
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger took his campaign for state propositions 1A through 1F to the Los Angeles Times building tonight, telling an invited crowd of opinion shapers and readers that "the...
Posted April 15, 2009 11:05 PM
While director John McTiernan awaits a new indictment over his use of wiretapper Anthony Pellicano in a divorce case, he's pushing a new documentary that alleges the Pellicano prosecution was...
Posted April 15, 2009 5:05 PM
Rob Wilcox, director of communications for City Controller Laura Chick, will be the chief of staff in her new office in Sacramento. Gov. Schwarzenegger named Chick to be the state's...
Posted April 15, 2009 2:28 PM
Fox News' hyping of today's anti-tax tea parties is a "team effort" that includes the news anchors and has been "building up to the protests with Super Bowl-style intensity."...
Posted April 15, 2009 8:58 AM
Mayor Villaraigosa had a busy TV day, appearing at boxer Oscar De La Hoya's retirement announcement and delivering his fourth State of the City speech down in Harbor City. The...
Posted April 14, 2009 5:05 PM
A full-page ad on Page 9 of today's L.A. Times takes Councilman Jack Weiss to task for a proposed development near Cedars-Sinai. It's signed by Cary Brazeman as president of...
Posted April 14, 2009 4:14 PM
Times columnist Hector Tobar picks up on the paper's look at state Sen. Gil Cedillo's lavish spending on restaurants, hotels and gifts and says "it's never been a better time...
Posted April 14, 2009 8:59 AM
On-location film shooting in the Los Angeles area has fallen to the lowest level on record, due to labor troubles, the economy and runaway production. But off-site TV shooting...
Posted April 14, 2009 8:51 AM
Jerry Gillam covered California government and politics for 40 years, most of that time in the Sacramento bureau of the Los Angeles Times. He left the Times in 1995. Gillam...
Posted April 13, 2009 8:30 PM
Now that State Sen. Gil Cedillo is running for Congress, his campaign expense reports get more attention. What popped out to the LAT's Michael Finnegan was the expensive meals at...
Posted April 12, 2009 9:47 PM
Los Angeles planning commissioner Ricardo Lara has to live in the city to be on the commission. He's also raising money to run in the 50th assembly district, which is...
Posted April 10, 2009 9:07 AM
In this case, Mary Anne Ostrom of the San Jose Mercury News is "Silicon Valley's top political writer," says Capitol Alert's Peter Hecht. Ostrom is joining the gubernatorial campaign of...
Posted April 9, 2009 12:59 PM
Yes, the headline is intentional. The City Council voted 14-zip today to reject a drought surcharge on water bills for now. The vote had as much to do with the...
Posted April 8, 2009 11:17 PM
A "California doctor" and others who speak out against gay marriage in a TV spot have been busted as actors. A gay rights group got hold of the audition video...
Posted April 8, 2009 10:49 PM
A student worker in the Hall of Administration no longer has to peel the labels off Arrowhead water bottles and paste on generic county labels. The Board of Supervisors has...
Posted April 8, 2009 9:21 PM
Wally Knox is stepping down from the city's DWP board to take the newly created position of deputy executive director of external relations at the Port of Los Angeles....
Posted April 8, 2009 9:35 AM
Mayor Villaraigosa told city unions that to avoid layoffs, workers need to defer raises, cut work hours and pay more for retirement benefits. The Times editorialized for the plan....
Posted April 7, 2009 9:31 AM
Right-of-center blogs that used Pajamas Media as their advertising service are back on their own. The L.A-based PJM is dropping its blog ads network and will focus on PJTV, its...
Posted April 6, 2009 11:24 AM
Mayor Villaraigosa has called an 11 a.m. news conference to announce steps to avert thousands of city layoffs. "The City currently faces a Fiscal Year 2009-10 deficit of $530...
Posted April 6, 2009 8:26 AM
Los Angeles city officials are considering the immediate layoffs of 400 workers and eliminating an additional 2,800 positions in the months ahead, according to union officials. LAT A 30-year-old...
Posted April 3, 2009 6:24 PM
City Controller Laura Chick will be leaving her job a little sooner than scheduled. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is naming her the state's inspector general, overseeing the billions of dollars in...
Posted April 3, 2009 3:18 PM
The troubled museum-in-waiting near Hansen Dam in Lake View Terrace has taken steps to file for Chapter 7 protection, at least partly due to the impact of a scam, per...
Posted April 2, 2009 4:35 PM
A local journo wonders in email if the new Yvonne Brathwaite Burke Park in Marina del Rey, near where the retired county Supervisor used to claim she lived, will have...
Posted April 1, 2009 9:15 AM
More than 400 judges in Los Angeles County make more than the chief justice of the U.S. AP Bob Hertzberg is back in Sacramento reinvented as a government reformer,...
Posted April 1, 2009 9:05 AM
The party itself was probably pretty loud — a black-tie bash for old pol Willie Brown's 75th birthday, at Mayor Villaraigosa's official residence in Windsor Square. What was quiet about...
Posted March 31, 2009 2:56 PM
County Supervisors pay a student worker to peel the labels off bottles of water and replace them with a customized county label so that Arrowhead won't get free publicity...
Posted March 31, 2009 8:58 AM
That is, if it ever really existed. From Martin Zimmerman at Up to Speed, the LAT's auto blog: The California Air Resources Board said...it has no plans “at this timeâ€...
Posted March 30, 2009 10:39 PM
A. Jerrold "Jerry" Perenchio, the former chair of Univision, has donated $1.5 million to back two of the May special election measures being pushed by the governor. It's the...
Posted March 30, 2009 10:23 PM
David Zahniser takes a post-Measure B look at Brian D'Arcy, who runs the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 18 at the DWP. LAT Three high-level managers forced out...
Posted March 30, 2009 8:55 AM
Author and Slate blogger Mickey Kaus has several friends at the Los Angeles Times, but for years he has been advocating the demise of the paper — partly in the...
Posted March 28, 2009 9:58 PM
Essentially nobody voted anywhere in this week's special election to pick Mark Ridley-Thomas's successor in the 26th state Senate district. But in the precinct that covers the USC campus, the...
Posted March 26, 2009 10:54 PM
Chief Bratton endorses another candidate — this time in New York City. L.A. Now KPFK suspends "anti-Semitic hatefest" show "La Causa" for six weeks; its followers blame the Jews....
Posted March 26, 2009 5:44 PM
Mayor Villaraigosa named attorney, philanthropist and former city commissioner David Fleming to the board of the Metropolitan Water District. (This gets Fleming off the MTA board, opening up a second...
Posted March 25, 2009 5:31 PM
Times film columnist and blogger Patrick Goldstein responds to Variety's weekend package on bloggers and says of Peter Bart: "He's launched his own blog, which you'd have to call...
Posted March 23, 2009 5:49 PM
The Roundup picks up that reporter Jordan Rau is leaving the L.A. Times Sacramento bureau, apparently not as part of today's layoffs. Presuming that Rau won't be replaced, the Sacto...
Posted March 23, 2009 4:34 PM
Times media columnist James Rainey wrote over the weekend about how political pros love one unintended consequence of the wane of mainstream news outlets and the rise of blogs —...
Posted March 22, 2009 11:43 PM
Rick Orlov offers the L.A. politics obituary for City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo: "Could be remembered as the loneliest guy in City Hall." DN The 151 pages of sign regulations...
Posted March 22, 2009 10:46 PM
Former Los Angeles members of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense got together at the Lucy Florence Coffeehouse and Cultural Center in Leimert Park for a screening of "41st...
Posted March 22, 2009 8:35 PM
The deficit-facing city council has made noise recently about halting its practice of waiving the fees levied on community events — but for sci-fi writer and Scientology founder L. Ron...
Posted March 20, 2009 7:43 AM
Tina Daunt says in the Times that President Obama bedded down at the Century Plaza. The Beverly Hills Courier, however, reports that he was at the Beverly Hilton and has...
Posted March 19, 2009 11:58 PM
It was a squeaker, but here's the final breakdown on Measure B, the solar energy jobs program pushed by the mayor, city council and the DWP union in the March...
Posted March 19, 2009 8:51 PM
President Obama stayed at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza [or not; see below] on this trip into L.A. rather than bed down in one of the mansions around town, and...
Posted March 19, 2009 5:13 PM
LA Observed's TJ Sullivan was credentialed into President Obama's town hall this afternoon in Costa Mesa and sent along some photos. He'll have more later at his website. In the...
Posted March 18, 2009 7:55 PM
Sen. Alan Cranston's 1986 reelection campaign was the first one I covered where Hollywood celebrities rode along on just about every bus trip across California. They would be introduced at...
Posted March 18, 2009 9:35 AM
There's about to be a fresh news outlet covering politics. Would you believe AOL? The Wrap reports that the service has hired Melinda Henneberger of Slate, and formerly of the...
Posted March 17, 2009 5:32 PM
In addition to the previously reported round of media events on Wednesday and Thursday, the White House has added what it's calling a "town hall" with President Obama at the...
Posted March 16, 2009 3:10 PM
The Occidental College alum will be here Wednesday for the first time as president — in Long Beach, Costa Mesa in OC and Pomona. He's also going to tape a...
Posted March 16, 2009 9:10 AM
The Getty plans to slash its operating budget nearly 25% for the coming fiscal year, "an emergency response to investment losses that have totaled $1.5 billion since July and...
Posted March 16, 2009 8:58 AM
President Obama has appointed a Maryland state official to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, meaning that Villaraigosa adviser Thomas Saenz didn't get the job. The Daily Journal reported...
Posted March 14, 2009 5:49 PM
The newcomers include John Kim, co-director of the Advancement Project and director of the Healthy City Project, appointed to the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners. He's from Highland Park. Release after...
Posted March 13, 2009 10:49 AM
When Alex Comisar of NeonTommy, the USC news website that recently launched, was rebuffed in an interview request of Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, he took it public and confronted Yaroslavsky in...
Posted March 12, 2009 11:38 PM
Mark Lacter at LA Biz Observed has been following today's jailing of Bernard Madoff in New York, the New York Times story on Rep. Maxine Waters' questionable involvement with OneUnited...
Posted March 12, 2009 5:21 PM
A tentative agreement between the county and UC would reopen the emergency room and other inpatient services at Martin Luther King-Harbor Medical Center near Watts by 2012. The hospital would...
Posted March 11, 2009 5:15 PM
Former Assembly Speaker and Los Angeles mayoral candidate Robert Hertzberg is becoming the Democrats' half of the bipartisan co-chair arrangement at the head of California Forward, which supports reform of...
Posted March 11, 2009 5:03 PM
A coalition of groups including California Common Cause, the Center for Media Justice, the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College and the LA Alliance for a New Economy...
Posted March 10, 2009 10:48 PM
The KFI talk hosts helped draw an estimated 8,000 people to a tax revolt rally in Orange County on Saturday. (Here's the Register story, and the Orange Juice blog.) The...
Posted March 10, 2009 12:15 AM
Mark Arax, the former Los Angeles Times reporter based in Fresno, is joining the staff of the state's Senate Select Committee on Air Quality, a new committee headed by Sen....
Posted March 9, 2009 9:58 PM
Controller Laura Chick, in a statement this morning, said she has been asked a lot about running for the 2nd district seat that will be vacated by Councilwoman Wendy Greuel,...
Posted March 4, 2009 10:29 AM
With one 9th district precinct left to count, plus whatever else is left over, the solar and jobs measure trails by 1,322 votes. If that holds up, it's a stunning...
Posted March 4, 2009 7:40 AM
In the 1 a.m. bulletin from the City Clerk, a bit over 89% of the precincts have been counted and nearly all of the mail-in ballots. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is...
Posted March 4, 2009 12:22 AM
Aurelio Rojas, a reporter for the Sacramento Bee, is the new communications director for L.A. County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas. An item at Capitol Morning Report says that Rojas used to...
Posted March 3, 2009 12:49 PM
KPFK's weekly news review "Deadline L.A." is airing a special on the city election today at 2 p.m. with guests Marial Garza, Daily News editorial page editor, and Robert Greene,...
Posted March 2, 2009 12:39 PM
While you haven't been watching your politicians at work in Sacramento, they have added some unrelated charges to the cost of a ticket. Here's the breakdown of the tab for...
Posted March 2, 2009 9:47 AM
Sara Catania hasn't been running fulltime to get ready for her first marathon — though she certainly has been running plenty (see Run On), and recently completed the first race...
Posted March 1, 2009 10:10 PM
The Daily News grits its teeth and endorses Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa again this time, just as it did four years ago (saying then "Villaraigosa...represents the future.") This time, there's less...
Posted March 1, 2009 12:50 PM
Lame-duck Controller Laura Chick elaborates in The Planning Report on her opposition to the solar measure on Tuesday's city ballot. From the interview: It’s egregious to put something on the...
Posted March 1, 2009 10:14 AM
From a David Zahniser story buried on page B9 in today's L.A. Times: Of the 363 lobbyists who worked the corridors of Los Angeles City Hall last year, no one...
Posted March 1, 2009 9:57 AM
The city of Los Angeles could face nearly a $1 billion — that's with a B — shortfall in the 2010 budget year because of a "mammoth bailout needed...
Posted February 27, 2009 5:24 PM
Officers from the LAPD met mayoral candidate David "Zuma Dogg" Saltsburg at tonight's campaign forum, took him to the Wilshire station and questioned him about an accusation that he directed...
Posted February 26, 2009 10:26 PM
Soto, who left office last year after missing significant amounts of time in Sacramento due to illness, apparently died today. She was at least 82. A statement from Speaker Karen...
Posted February 26, 2009 5:58 PM
In a follow to her audit of City Hall gang programs a year ago, Controller Laura Chick says there is still a long ways to go. ReportUnlike in L.A., next...
Posted February 26, 2009 5:38 PM
The L.A. Times editorial board, in a slap to the mayor and City Council, recommends a no vote on Measure B: Set aside, for a moment, the secretive and rushed...
Posted February 26, 2009 8:56 AM
Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the actress who married San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, made "The Trouble With Romance" before they met. It has been out since Feb. 1 on Netflix and...
Posted February 25, 2009 11:25 PM
Is this an anybody but Jack Weiss for city attorney statement? Only Rep. Maxine Waters knows for sure, but the press release quotes her saying, in part: "Carmen Trutanich grew...
Posted February 24, 2009 3:45 PM
Rep. Hilda Solis is the new U.S. Secretary of Labor, so there will be an election out east to replace her. The vote was 80-17 after Republican leadership in the...
Posted February 24, 2009 3:11 PM
Thomas A. Saenz, the in-house counsel to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, has been selected to head the U.S. Department of Justice's civil rights division, the Los Angeles Daily Journal reports today...
Posted February 24, 2009 9:42 AM
Fox News shouter John Gibson did not compare Attorney General Eric Holder to a monkey with a bright blue scrotum, and thus the Huffington Post regrets the error. Live by...
Posted February 23, 2009 5:25 PM
City Attorney candidate Jack Weiss scheduled a press conference this morning to announce the backing of some local enviros, including Ed Begley Jr. and Heal the Bay's Mark Gold. But...
Posted February 23, 2009 4:13 PM
The editorial page at the Daily News came out against both Measure B, the solar energy and jobs program, and Measure E, which is billed as a way to give...
Posted February 23, 2009 12:27 AM
Former city Controller Rick Tuttle had considered running in the open race to replace Jack Weiss on the City Council. He opted against, and now has thrown his backing to...
Posted February 19, 2009 5:34 PM
I'm told now that the pending wave of departures from the Los Angeles Times newsroom will be split into two phases: with voluntary departures and a relatively small number of...
Posted February 19, 2009 8:58 AM
CityBeat this week brings out-of-work classical music critic Alan Rich back into print, at the expense of freelance critic Donna Perlmutter, who wrote for CityBeat for five years (and was...
Posted February 19, 2009 8:35 AM
Republican state Senator Abel Maldonado of Santa Maria crossed over in a vote held about dawn, and lawmakers finally passed last year's budget with California on the brink of financial...
Posted February 19, 2009 8:12 AM
Freshman Republican Curt Hagman from Chino Hills tells Capitol Weekly that he was at home in Sacramento last night when he heard a crash. Outside he found a man and...
Posted February 17, 2009 10:57 AM
The Los Angeles Times editorial board delivered a slap to the mayor's pick, Jack Weiss, and endorsed Carmen Trutanich for City Attorney. Voters could assemble a fairly good city attorney...
Posted February 15, 2009 10:44 PM
On Saturday, Father Daniel Berrigan's Vietnam-era protest drama, "The Trial of the Catonsville Nine," opens at The Actors' Gang in Culver City. And on Wednesday, L.A. Theatre Works begins a...
Posted February 13, 2009 5:19 PM
Tonight on Which Way, L.A.?, Warren Olney gets Controller Laura Chick (con) and former DWP general manager David Freeman (pro) into a spirited back and forth over the merits of...
Posted February 12, 2009 3:45 PM
The Los Angeles Times editorial pages don't get as much use out of their website as I expected — the blogroll would have been light in 2006, for instance —...
Posted February 12, 2009 1:54 PM
Former planning commission chair Jane Usher is co-hosting a Feb. 18 fundraiser in Hancock Park for city attorney candidate Carmen Trutanich. "Trutanich lacks the staunchly Democratic, Westside, Ivy League credentials...
Posted February 11, 2009 2:07 PM
Eight candidates have filed papers to run in the March 24 special election to fill the vacancy in the 24th Senate district created when Ridley-Thomas was elected to the Board...
Posted February 10, 2009 9:55 PM
Mayor Villaraigosa was on Which Way, L.A.? tonight talking up his water restrictions to the KCRW audience, Patt Morrison continued her daily run through the challengers on KPCC with Zuma...
Posted February 10, 2009 9:20 PM
The Jewish Journal is streaming video of Israeli consul general Jacob Dayan giving minute-by-minute analysis of election returns from Tel Aviv, with an audience of journalists and Israelis on hand....
Posted February 10, 2009 12:38 PM
Former EBay Chief Executive Meg Whitman, who is 52, announced today that she'll be a Republican candidate for governor next year. Former Gov. Pete Wilson will be her campaign chairman....
Posted February 9, 2009 12:27 PM
Marc Haefele's comparison of Thursday's Drew Street demolition to something out of the Middle Ages struck a nerve in the City Attorney's office, which sent over a response: The February...
Posted February 7, 2009 5:56 PM
Journalist Marc Haefele found this week's media event at the demolition of the former Avenues gang home in Northeast Los Angeles more than a little unsettling. A bunch of pols...
Posted February 6, 2009 11:19 AM
Sam Sayyad, the husband of Rep. Hilda Solis, paid $6,400 this week to settle small Los Angeles County tax liens against his auto business dating to 1993, USA Today reported....
Posted February 5, 2009 8:40 PM
County supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky just sent a letter to Los Angeles Times publisher Eddy Hartenstein urging him to reconsider his decision to fold local news into the A section and...
Posted February 2, 2009 4:43 PM
City Controller candidates Nick Patsaouras and Wendy Greuel have picked an odd issue to bicker over: who attended Mayor Villaraigosa's recent birthday party at the Santa Monica home of certified...
Posted February 2, 2009 12:10 PM
The City Council voted 11-4 to go ahead with plans to build the elephant enclosure at the Los Angeles Zoo, despite the presence of some low-grade celebrities arguing against it....
Posted January 28, 2009 1:08 PM
Along with their invitations for a Jan. 31 fundraiser in the Hollywood Hills for Council President Eric Garcetti, potential contributors got a personal note from Obama fundraising chief Yolanda Parker....
Posted January 26, 2009 11:45 AM
Newly powerful Reps. Henry Waxman and Howard Berman are the key draws at a Sunday gathering at USC of the Jewish Federation's New Leaders Project. They will be honored along...
Posted January 23, 2009 12:07 AM
City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo's final term has five months and change to run, so today comes word that he has filed papers to let him raise money for a second...
Posted January 22, 2009 12:24 PM
Syndicated columnist Robert Scheer has been dropped from the San Francisco Chronicle Op-Ed page. The editor told him his take on world affairs and politics had become "predictable," to which...
Posted January 21, 2009 5:33 PM
Journalist Joe Mathews has become the latest advocate of a narrow SoCal position to argue that taking his side is somehow a test of whether President Barack Obama truly means...
Posted January 20, 2009 6:13 PM
The website switched over right about 9 a.m. PST....
Posted January 20, 2009 9:42 AM
The big day is here. Barack Obama becomes the 44th U.S. president a few ticks before 9 a.m. Pacific time. Most TV networks will be live from Washington, D.C. at...
Posted January 20, 2009 1:23 AM
KNBC plans to air Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's State of the State speech live at 10 a.m. The station's Mekahlo Medina says they will post text messages from viewers on the...
Posted January 15, 2009 9:49 AM
Democratic and Republican consultants with a lot of experience in Los Angeles — and in California more generally — have formed a new firm to work on ballot measures. LFM...
Posted January 14, 2009 5:34 PM
Anti-Zionist protesters blocking the entrance to the Israeli consulate on Wilshire Boulevard today broke up after LAPD chief William Bratton showed up and intervened. The Jewish Journal posted video and...
Posted January 14, 2009 3:22 PM
State Sen. Gloria Romero has dropped her interest in running for the Hilda Solis seat in Congress. Romero said today she will run as planned for Superintendent of Public Instruction...
Posted January 8, 2009 5:02 PM
Looks like the former K-Mart store on Foothill Boulevard will stay empty. Home Depot has given up trying to get approval — over concerted neighborhood opposition — to open a...
Posted January 7, 2009 6:26 PM
Aron Miller, who recently served a stint as interim city editor at the Daily News, has given notice that he's leaving the paper and journalism. He's been on the Woodland...
Posted January 6, 2009 3:21 PM
Whether or not City Hall actually wants to take control of billboards is open to interpretation, but today the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals tossed out a challenge to...
Posted January 6, 2009 2:58 PM
City Council President Eric Garcetti and Amy Elaine Wakeland, his longtime partner, were married Sunday at a small ceremony attended by the couple's parents and close friends, his office announced...
Posted January 6, 2009 12:46 PM
The latest web venture from Drudge Report West Coast man Andrew Breitbart goes live Tuesday. Big Hollywood, he says, "is not a 'celebrity' gabfest or a gossip outpost - it...
Posted January 5, 2009 7:53 PM
Henry Casas, deputy chief of staff for Councilman Jose Huizar, has been arrested on suspicion of felony domestic violence. Casas, 40, was booked in Van Nuys on New Year's Eve...
Posted January 5, 2009 5:33 PM
"I always keep my options open." — LAPD Chief William Bratton, dismissing speculation he was a candidate for London police chief "Barack's better half not only has stature but...
Posted January 4, 2009 2:38 PM
D.J. Waldie picks up on my post on Jane Ellison Usher's resignation as chair of the city planning commission and runs with it at his KCET blog. He starts with...
Posted December 29, 2008 1:52 AM
In Sunday's New York Times Style section, Rep. Linda Sánchez recounts leaking the news of her unmarried pregnancy to the LAT's Patt Morrison — "I thought, we need to sort...
Posted December 29, 2008 1:15 AM
Camille Johnston, who left as the Dodgers' director of communications in 2007, lands with the Obama Administration as Special Assistant to the President and Director of Communications for the...
Posted December 24, 2008 2:09 PM
Contributors to the Obama inauguration fund are being wooed with the promise of hard-to-score tickets to the Washington events around the January 20 festivities. New cheaper packages have been added...
Posted December 22, 2008 12:24 PM
Should a new public school in Carson be named for Cesar Chavez or slain LAPD officer Randal Simmons, as originally proposed? Daily Breeze Add Sen. Gil Cedillo and the...
Posted December 21, 2008 11:54 PM
Ron Kaye, the former Daily News editor who is reinventing himself as a political activist, at the end of a long blog rant about the city's solar energy boondoggle: "I...
Posted December 21, 2008 11:20 PM
State Sen. Gloria Romero says to count her in on the derby to replace Hilda Solis in Congress. Solis will be Barack Obama's labor secretary. Other names being tossed around...
Posted December 19, 2008 1:07 AM
Google News still returns just one hit for coverage of Sen. Barbara Boxer's presser yesterday in Culver City (see Morning Buzz.) But there was also a report by Kitty Felde...
Posted December 18, 2008 1:55 PM
Looks like there will be an opening in the ranks of local Latino Congress people after all. Word out of Washington is that Rep. Hilda Solis will be nominated as...
Posted December 18, 2008 11:32 AM
Heavy snow (by SoCal standards) has closed highways in and out of the Antelope Valley, San Gabriel Mountains and San Bernardino Mountains and of course over the Grapevine on...
Posted December 17, 2008 4:57 PM
Roger Snoble announced today that he will leave soon after seven years as CEO of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Release after the jump....
Posted December 17, 2008 1:09 PM
Pilar Marrero at La Opinión reports that Rep. Xavier Becerra pulled his name from consideration as U.S. trade representative. Column en español. (And now in English, partially, at Politico.) So...
Posted December 16, 2008 4:35 PM
Mayor Villaraigosa has appointed investor and former Warner Bros VP (and Clinton Admninistration staffer) Sean Burton to the citywide planning commission. Also: Attorney Justin Sanders to the Community Redevelopment Agency...
Posted December 12, 2008 2:40 PM
From the Daily News: An editorial in Tuesday's paper, "Turf war costly," incorrectly reported that the City Attorney's Office hired an outside law firm to sue the city controller in...
Posted December 12, 2008 9:22 AM
Planning commission president Jane Usher resigned, confirming gossip that swept offices this week, saying she needs a job and offering the mayor some advice in her exit letter. LAT,...
Posted December 11, 2008 6:35 PM
South El Monte mayor Blanca Figueroa has been given an 11 p.m. curfew. She's been known to stay in her office at city hall deep into the pre-dawn hours, but...
Posted December 10, 2008 5:58 PM
This morning the City Clerk held the random drawing to determine the order that names will appear on the March ballot in Los Angeles. Names starting with Z will lead...
Posted December 10, 2008 3:16 PM
Claude Brodesser-Akner, host of The Business on Mondays on KCRW, took a stand on the show against the resignation of Rich Raddon from the L.A. Film Festival over his support...
Posted December 10, 2008 9:01 AM
The Los Angeles Unified school board approved 5-2 a buy out of Supt. David Brewer's contract, clearing the way for Ramon Cortines, who had been the mayor's chief education adviser,...
Posted December 9, 2008 2:30 PM
The Loyola Marymount exit polling showed a 61% approval rating for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, 58% in the Valley. Voters who were asked their choice in the mayoral election next year...
Posted December 9, 2008 12:53 PM
LAUSD chief David Brewer emerged this afternoon to say he wants the school board to exercise the buy out clause of his contract, but he apparently declined to answer media...
Posted December 8, 2008 3:07 PM
Christopher Lisotta at Frontiers magazine says that Marjorie Christoffersen, the manager at El Coyote who threw a few bucks to the yes of Proposition 8 campaign through her church, has...
Posted December 8, 2008 12:07 PM
Supt. David Brewer plans to make a 2 p.m. statement, media reports say. The Daily Breeze reports that Brewer will step down as head of the Los Angeles Unified School...
Posted December 8, 2008 11:42 AM
The Atlantic author Caitlin Flanagan and Benjamin Schwarz, the magazine's national and literary editor, weigh in on the post-Proposition 8 debate on today's New York Times Op-Ed page. In particular,...
Posted December 7, 2008 8:37 PM
Tying Barack Obama's appointment of Xavier Becerra and Eric Holder to the Carlos Vignali commutation controversy from the Clinton years. LAT Times editorial calls Becerra a bad choice, describing...
Posted December 5, 2008 8:53 AM
Embattled LAUSD Supt. David Brewer is scheduled to be on KPCC with Patt Morrison at about 1:30 p.m....
Posted December 3, 2008 1:18 PM
The attempted putsch of LAUSD Supt. David Brewer was put on hold because Marguerite Poindexter LaMotte, the lone black member, did not attend the board's closed session. LAT, DN...
Posted December 3, 2008 9:14 AM
Esteban Armando Nuñez, the 19-year-old son of the former Assembly Speaker, was arrested Tuesday in connection with the stabbing death of a 22-year-old college student at a party in San...
Posted December 3, 2008 1:45 AM
Media and politics tidbits from around the greater Los Angeles universe. Controller Laura Chick is quoted on the CBS Evening News in a story about the impact of car dealers...
Posted December 2, 2008 4:52 PM
Actually, KPCC's Frank Stoltze did take note of the quiet milestone that District Attorney Steve Cooley began his third term yesterday. Cooley is the first DA in 70 years to...
Posted December 2, 2008 10:34 AM
SF Weekly writer Benjamin Wachs is trying to watch all 7.5 hours of State of the City videos posted by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom on his new YouTube channel....
Posted December 2, 2008 9:28 AM
In the contest to become the mayor more likely to lose to Jerry Brown in the 2010 Democratic primary for governor, Gavin Newsom gets a leg up by releasing...
Posted December 1, 2008 4:27 PM
Politics, media and assorted news briefs from the greater Los Angeles universe. Heavy fog in Sacramento aborted Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's flight from Santa Monica, so he made his fiscal emergency...
Posted December 1, 2008 4:14 PM
Columnist Bill Boyarsky argues that the Dodgers should help pay the cost of the city's shuttle bus to Dodger Stadium from Union Station. It could cost the city $350,000 next...
Posted December 1, 2008 8:34 AM
Torie Osborn, former executive director of Liberty Hill and adviser to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa — as well as a campaign leader against the LaRouche initiative in 1986 — has been...
Posted November 28, 2008 9:24 PM
The former king of the gay Los Angeles political strategists (a key campaign adviser to the late Mayor Tom Bradley) is now blogging on the Obama election and Proposition 8...
Posted November 28, 2008 7:53 PM
Two pieces in the current Jewish Journal — by Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky and LA Observed columnist Bill Boyarsky — frame the Proposition 8 battle and the ascent of Rep. Henry...
Posted November 28, 2008 7:04 PM
Evan Halper succeeds Virginia Ellis as chief of the Los Angeles Times bureau in Sacramento. Here's the memo sent to the troops about 5 p.m.: To: The Staff From: David...
Posted November 26, 2008 7:16 PM
Former Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, about to be termed out of the legislative high life, will join Mercury Public Affairs, LLC, as partner and co-chair. The Los Angeles Democrat will...
Posted November 26, 2008 2:39 PM
SEIU President Andy Stern announced today that Tyrone Freeman, the politically connected head of the union's United Long-Term Care Workers local, would be banned for life and asked to repay...
Posted November 26, 2008 2:15 PM
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger named unwilling mayoral candidate Rick Caruso to the joint agency that oversees the Memorial Coliseum. Rick Orlov at the Sausage Factory says there's no word yet which...
Posted November 26, 2008 11:56 AM
Capitol Weekly has put together capsule summaries of what there is to know about the newly elected Los Angeles-area politicos who will be swarming into Sacramento on Dec. 1. Here's...
Posted November 26, 2008 11:44 AM
Kevin Fry, the president of Scenic America, was interviewed in The Planning Report about the Los Angeles billboard situation. Excerpt: The city of Los Angeles has surrendered its built environment...
Posted November 25, 2008 8:22 PM
Termed-out L.A. state Senator Sheila Kuehl hasn't lined up that next political gig yet so today she was appointed to a $132,178 per year post on the state's Integrated Waste...
Posted November 25, 2008 6:59 PM
Hendrik Hertzberg, senior editor of The New Yorker, calls Proposition 8 "a fight that should have been won" and credits some in the gay community with rightly self-critiquing what went...
Posted November 23, 2008 10:39 PM
The New York Times dedicates five staffers to covering the Obama White House, including for the first time a video journalist. Former LAT reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg remains on the...
Posted November 21, 2008 12:58 PM
Sergeant Paul M. Weber takes over as president of the LAPD officers' union. He has been a VP and replaces Tim Sands, who will retire from the department next month...
Posted November 21, 2008 12:46 PM
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and City Council President Eric Garcetti have summoned the media for a 1:30 pm "major announcement regarding the financial status of the City."...
Posted November 21, 2008 10:55 AM
Politico's Jeffrey Ressner compiled short bios on the seven insiders who he calls Barack Obama's real friends in Hollywood. "Obama’s tightly knit circle is mostly Chicago-based, but there is a...
Posted November 20, 2008 6:08 PM
The Obama inauguration committee is offering a cool package of tix — and it only works out to $12,500 per person! From: "Yolanda " Cookie " Parker" Date: Thu, 20...
Posted November 20, 2008 2:58 PM
The Los Angeles Times, which never had trouble making gobs of money until very recently, is loving the Obama phenomenon so far. The paper's hawking of front pages and other...
Posted November 20, 2008 1:52 PM
The news, according to Patt Morrison, is that it's not news that Sanchez isn't married to the father. Morrison writes on the LAT Op-Ed page: You're practically the first to...
Posted November 20, 2008 11:23 AM
Retired USC Annenberg professor and CBS News correspondent Murray Fromson writes at the Huffington Post that Sam Zell has gotten off too easy for destroying the Los Angeles Times Washington...
Posted November 20, 2008 10:23 AM
Tomorrow's Daily Journal will report that the City Council did not approve the proposed settlement of legal claims for victims of the LAPD's misbehavior in MacArthur Park last year. The...
Posted November 19, 2008 7:44 PM
The Supreme Court in San Francisco announced today it will hear arguments in March on the validity of Proposition 8, and asked the litigants to include in their written submissions...
Posted November 19, 2008 3:58 PM
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa today appointed Stephanie M. Rodriguez to the city Board of Transportation Commissioners. Rodriguez, director of public affairs at KCAL/KCBS, fills the unexpired term of Paul Kim. Also...
Posted November 19, 2008 12:10 PM
Now that she's the lamest of political ducks, the DA's office has decided not to prosecute Supervisor Yvonne Burke for allegedly living in Brentwood — outside her district — while...
Posted November 18, 2008 10:16 PM
And now, some stuff I missed because I was actually working. Let's start here at LAO: Today's biz headlines (Japan is in recession) and an answer (hah) to the subprime...
Posted November 17, 2008 2:24 PM
Why am I blogging on a Saturday night? Because PCH to Santa Monica, where I was supposed to meet friends for dinner and a movie, is a parking lot. An...
Posted November 15, 2008 6:22 PM
First more than a thousand anti-Prop 8 protesters gathered at the Mormon temple in Westwood. Now, after employees reported receiving an envelope filled with white powder, the temple has been...
Posted November 13, 2008 5:17 PM
Here's another body blow for our hometown paper -- Virginia Ellis, the Times' Sacramento bureau chief, is retiring. She'd been planning to leave last year but, when asked to please...
Posted November 13, 2008 3:37 PM
Did anyone really think the same-sex marriage issue in California was over? According to a new story in Capitol Weekly, the move to repeal Prop 8 is already taking aim...
Posted November 13, 2008 10:38 AM
The El Coyote manager who donated to Proposition 8 through her church probably should not have been invited to the press conference....
Posted November 12, 2008 4:35 PM
Anger — and the resulting finger pointing — continues apace over the passage of Proposition 8, which appears to have added a ban on same-sex marriage to the California Constitution....
Posted November 12, 2008 10:13 AM
Back from the holiday...here are some news notes. The Supreme Court rules that the Navy's interest in conducting sonar tests whenever it wants trumps concerns about the damage to sea...
Posted November 12, 2008 9:20 AM
Congrats to former City Controller Rick Tuttle, who was married tonight to Rebecca Rona. I'm told the festivities at UCLA's Faculty Center attracted, among others, Reps. Howard Berman and Brad...
Posted November 9, 2008 11:39 PM
Noon on Saturday was the deadline for candidates to file their declarations of intent to run in the March 3, 2009 primary election in the city of Los Angeles. No...
Posted November 9, 2008 9:45 AM
Developer Rick Caruso has been saying for a while that his running for mayor is only a question of when, not if. Well, it won't be this time, he announced...
Posted November 7, 2008 8:27 AM
TJ Sullivan roamed among the anti-Proposition 8 demonstrators who gathered at the Mormon Temple on Santa Monica Boulevard, a couple of days too late to sway the election. Photos over...
Posted November 6, 2008 11:51 PM
Demonstrators upset by the passage of Proposition 8 began at the Mormon temple on Santa Monica Boulevard and have moved to Wilshire and Westwood boulevards, closing both streets. They're targeting...
Posted November 6, 2008 4:44 PM
Former Los Angeles mayor James Hahn was appointed a Superior Court judge today by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. So were 16 other lawyers, six of them deputy district attorneys. Here's an...
Posted November 5, 2008 4:41 PM
Here are some photos and videos from last night in Leimert Plaza, center of the largely African American neighborhood where Barack Obama's election was a cause for a public celebration....
Posted November 5, 2008 3:45 PM
Californians who voted: For Barack Obama: 6,194,012 Against parental notification before teen abortion: 5,071,449 To retain same-sex marriage: 4,806,595 Proposition 8 to define marriage as only between a man and...
Posted November 5, 2008 12:24 PM
The Hyatt Century Plaza was rocking with so many Barack Obama supporters last night that long lines formed outside, before the polls closed, just to get in the hotel. Those...
Posted November 5, 2008 9:44 AM
TJ Sullivan is checking out polling places and found this line outside the Cheviot Hills Recreation Center. More locales at Native Intelligence....
Posted November 4, 2008 1:25 PM
Word from Sacramento is that Bill Stall, the Los Angeles Times' Pulitzer-winning editorial writer, died today after suffering from emphysema. The Times is working on an obituary, and colleague Karin...
Posted November 2, 2008 5:22 PM
The Los Angeles Times Washington bureau, one of the last pre-Tribune strengths of the paper still mostly intact, has been told that Chicago will announce this Friday that the bureau...
Posted November 2, 2008 12:58 PM
Sam Zell's contributions in this election cycle include $20,000 to the McCain Victory Committee on May 6 and another $20,000 to McCain-Palin Victory 2008 on Sept. 16. Previously, all we...
Posted October 31, 2008 5:09 PM
Just when you were hoping the campaign ads would stop already on TV, the Los Angeles City Clerk puts out word that filing opens Monday for candidates in the city...
Posted October 31, 2008 9:16 AM
Barack Obama and John McCain? Feh. How about Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas. The L.A. Theatre Works production of "The Rivalry" by Norman Corwin, starring David Strathairn and Paul...
Posted October 30, 2008 11:50 PM
Board of Supes candidate Mark Ridley-Thomas doesn't wait until election day to vote with his family. He votes early with his family....
Posted October 30, 2008 11:16 PM
Longtime L.A. Unified school board member Julie Korenstein announced today she won't seek reelection, just days after her colleague Marlene Canter said the same thing. That's two open seats in...
Posted October 30, 2008 3:07 PM
Who better to talk about Obama's infomercial than Ron Popeil, the king of the informercial? NPR's "All Things Considered" put some questions to the master. Audio...
Posted October 29, 2008 8:23 PM
From the LA Observed video archive, Sen. Barack Obama came to Los Angeles in February 2007 and drew an excited crowd long before he pulled ahead of Sen. Hillary Clinton....
Posted October 29, 2008 10:39 AM
Variety managing editor and politics writer Ted Johnson blogged about his marriage to Stewart Scott, presided over by West Hollywood City Councilman John Duran, in the context of Proposition 8....
Posted October 28, 2008 10:52 AM
Department of Water and Power commissioner Nick Patsaouras told activist Ron Kaye that he will run for City Controller next year against current city council member Wendy Greuel. It's an...
Posted October 27, 2008 6:31 PM
LAPD chief William Bratton's phone message for Barack Obama "challenged Republican John McCain's 'record on policing issues and extolled Obama's,'" he told the L.A. Times. Bratton said he got involved...
Posted October 23, 2008 10:45 PM
I caught up with Rick Caruso tonight at The Grove — not by accident — and asked if he intends to go for it and challenge Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's reelection...
Posted October 22, 2008 8:21 PM
LAPD chief William Bratton co-authored an Op-Ed piece in the New York Daily News that posits Osama Bin Laden wants to influence the Nov. 4 election: "If history is any...
Posted October 22, 2008 4:18 PM
Jacob Soboroff, who produced and appeared in more than a dozen LA Observed videos, is now executive director of the voting reform group Why Tuesday. He and new best pal...
Posted October 22, 2008 11:48 AM
Controller Laura Chick calls her audit finding a backlog of 7,000 unprocessed rape evidence kits "one of the most startling and important audits " since she was elected seven years...
Posted October 20, 2008 4:30 PM
In a long blog post at Opinion L.A., editorial page editor Jim Newton says the paper's editorial supporting Barack Obama has gotten a near-record response and was written wholly without...
Posted October 20, 2008 8:59 AM
Los Angeles bureau chief for the New York Times Jennifer Steinhauer and L.A.-based staff photographer Monica Almeida have completed one of those cross-country road trips to gauge voter sentiment. It's...
Posted October 19, 2008 11:58 PM
Does this editorial seem a tad bleak? The world of America as we know it in the first decade of the 21st century is a dark, money-in-the-mattress place of foreclosed...
Posted October 19, 2008 11:06 PM
Nelson Rising, who ran Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley's campaign for governor in 1982, sounds pretty certain that Barack Obama won't suffer any "Bradley effect" backlash from white voters misleading...
Posted October 19, 2008 10:54 PM
For the first time since backing Richard Nixon in 1972, the Los Angeles Times editorial board has publicly endorsed a candidate for president. It's also the first time ever that...
Posted October 17, 2008 6:00 PM
This time only Sacramento was worse than Los Angeles, among the 56 Metro areas that Nielsen meters. But then, the Dodgers were on and, as usual, the debate did not...
Posted October 16, 2008 9:23 AM
Both The New Yorker and Los Angeles have pieces on Arianna Huffington in their current issues. The New Yorker profile by Lauren Collins (with the photo here by Jonathan Becker)...
Posted October 14, 2008 12:54 PM
"I entered politics because the America of my dreams includes everyone, not just a few," Antonio Villaraigosa wrote with his check to the campaign fighting the state ballot initiative that...
Posted October 14, 2008 10:48 AM
Heal the Bay founder Dorothy Green has passed away, according to a release from Mayor Antonio Villarigosa's office. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa issued the following statement today on the passing of...
Posted October 13, 2008 1:48 PM
I'm told the Los Angeles Times mailroom opened a hand-scrawled letter today that read "death to Obama" and contained a white powder that triggered a call to the FBI and...
Posted October 10, 2008 10:54 PM
The former City Hall power broker and commissioner was sentenced today to state prison in connection with the pay-to-play scandal during the Jim Hahn years. In particular, Wong carried water...
Posted October 10, 2008 4:31 PM
If you've been following the saga of the former Miramar resort beside the 101 freeway in Montecito, there's been actual movement you might be interested in. The Montecito planning commission...
Posted October 9, 2008 11:28 AM
Charles Gerencser says he is leaving Southland Publishing, where he oversaw LA CityBeat and New Angeles Monthly, on Oct. 17 to join the Barack Obama campaign as a fundraiser and...
Posted October 8, 2008 4:30 PM
The Women's Conference created by Maria Shriver and hubby returns to Long Beach on Oct. 22. The program includes MSNBC’s Chris Matthews moderating a conversation on leadership and the economy...
Posted October 8, 2008 3:14 PM
"Carne asada is not a crime," attorney Phil Greenwald said again, perhaps for the last time, after DA Steve Cooley's office said Friday that it would not appeal a judge's...
Posted October 5, 2008 11:23 AM
Nielsen says that last night's Biden-Palin debate drew a much larger television audience — 45% of households in the 55 biggest metered metro areas — than the earlier McCain-Obama debate....
Posted October 3, 2008 11:03 AM
Our columnist Bill Boyarsky has been on the national campaign trail this year for Truthdig, and as he used do to for the Times as a columnist and political reporter,...
Posted October 2, 2008 11:12 PM
The top grossing release at LATimes.com for the month of September was Gloria Steinem's Op-Ed piece called Palin: wrong woman, wrong message. The latest monthly update from website executive editor...
Posted October 2, 2008 2:30 PM
Valley congressman Brad Sherman's office sent out a seven-page analysis explaining in some detail why he still opposes the financial package being voted on soon in Congress. Sherman has gotten...
Posted October 1, 2008 2:34 PM
Today's L.A. Daily News letters page published this overtly political note from Richard B. Scudder, chairman of the board of MediaNews Corp., the company that owns the paper. Patriotic ideals...
Posted October 1, 2008 2:15 PM
With John McCain staying in Washington for the Senate vote on the bailout measure, Cindy McCain and Todd Palin will fill in at tonight's Century City fundraiser. Kelsey Grammer and...
Posted October 1, 2008 11:30 AM
The perking up of Downtown has reached the point that Sen. Hillary Clinton is scheduled to appear at an Obama fundraiser at the hipster bar The Edison on Oct. 4....
Posted October 1, 2008 9:32 AM
Garrett Therolf gets a partner in the Times' big but lonely office tucked away in the Hall of Administration on Temple Street. Molly Hennessy-Fiske has worked in Washington, Baghdad and...
Posted September 30, 2008 11:16 AM
The city council of Bell Gardens has hired itself a new city manager — and it's Steve Simonian, the former chief of investigations for District Attorney Steve Cooley. What's intriguing...
Posted September 29, 2008 9:07 PM
No felony charge for Kanye West in that scuffle with a photographer at LAX. Reuters New editor assignments on the L.A. Times city desk — involving Nita Lelyveld and...
Posted September 26, 2008 10:40 PM
A state appeals court says the ballot measure that extended the term limits for Los Angeles City Council members will stand. Five incumbent council members are running for reelection based...
Posted September 25, 2008 2:52 PM
Heal the Bay is out with a new beach report card today saying that California's beaches were much improved this summer due to a monitoring program — but that Gov....
Posted September 25, 2008 1:36 AM
In a personal reflection on his county website, Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky writes about going to the scene of the Metrolink crash in Chatsworth and talking with the relatives of victims....
Posted September 24, 2008 10:05 AM
Mitchell Schwartz, a veteran of Bill Clinton, Barbara Boxer, Gray Davis and Antonio Villaraigosa campaigns, is state director of the Barack Obama campaign. Schwartz is also president of the Los...
Posted September 22, 2008 4:55 PM
Tina Fey won Emmy awards for acting, writing and being one of the executive producers on "30 Rock," which got the trophy for outstanding comedy series. Fey then took a...
Posted September 22, 2008 12:59 AM
Los Angeles police commissioner Robert Saltzman was married on Saturday night to Edward Pierce, who retired as the general counsel and vice president for legal affairs of GeoCities. In addition...
Posted September 21, 2008 11:16 PM
City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo put up an entry this morning at the Huffington Post titled "Protecting families from McCain's broken health care plan." Sample: In the name of "choice," the...
Posted September 18, 2008 1:30 AM
The son of Councilman Herb Wesson has left the building at the Bernard Parks for Supervisor campaign, where he was field director or campaign manager, depending on who's talking. And...
Posted September 18, 2008 12:52 AM
Brad Pitt announced today that he will donate $100,000 to oppose Proposition 8, the November initiative that seeks to re-eliminate same-sex marriage in California. "Because no one has the right...
Posted September 17, 2008 2:45 PM
Steve Lopez visits in today's column with Dorothy Green, the longtime water activist and founder of Heal the Bay who is in hospice care for metastasized cancer. She is 79,...
Posted September 17, 2008 9:40 AM
OK, here's a last report (I think) from Tuesday night's Obama funder in Beverly Hills. On his way in to the event, former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan — a...
Posted September 17, 2008 1:02 AM
Here's what the pool reporters filed from Beverly Hills for the traveling national media and the locals. Pool Report – No. 1 Sept. 16, 2008 Beverly Hills, Calif. No News....
Posted September 17, 2008 12:20 AM
An LA Observed source who is at tonight's Barack Obama fundraiser (the cheaper one at the Beverly Wilshire, not the $28,500 shindig at the Greystone Mansion) messaged that it was...
Posted September 16, 2008 9:47 PM
State Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner made official Monday what's been expected for months: He's formally exploring a run for governor in 2010. From the Sacramento Bee: The state's only Republican...
Posted September 15, 2008 1:36 PM
Atlantic magazine and its writer Jeffrey Goldberg are unhappy that Los Angeles photographer Jill Greenberg turned in manipulated photos of John McCain for a story, then announced that she had...
Posted September 15, 2008 8:34 AM
Labor unions that already put up more $4.5 million to elect Mark Ridley-Thomas to the county Board of Supervisors plan to spend millions more, says Garrett Therolf in the Times....
Posted September 15, 2008 8:11 AM
Here's the most interesting blog post I read all day. Political scientists at UCLA who asked students to rate the faces of hundreds of American candidates found that Alaska Gov....
Posted September 11, 2008 10:42 PM
Potential attendees at Barack Obama funders next week at the Greystone estate in Beverly Hills and the Beverly Wilshire are being enticed with the prospect of Barbra. Friends: Great news!...
Posted September 9, 2008 9:13 AM
Western intelligence sources think that Californian-turned-al Qaeda propogandist Adam Gadahn may have died in CIA-directed attacks by unmanned predator aircraft on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, says a writer...
Posted September 7, 2008 8:02 PM
Quick update from an item this morning: Principal Donna Tobin posts at the Walter Reed Middle School website that "permission to use the front of our school for the Republican...
Posted September 5, 2008 1:54 PM
Sen. John McCain "has been relatively aggressive when it comes to tapping into the pool of Hollywood donors who, like their counterparts on the Democratic side, often give over concerns...
Posted September 5, 2008 9:25 AM
The backdrop photo chosen to illustrate John McCain's speech last night sure appears to be Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood. No one has said why a school in...
Posted September 5, 2008 8:49 AM
It's a long way from Beverly Hills High for disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff. LAT story. Previously: Backhanded compliment...
Posted September 4, 2008 5:15 PM
Los Angeles-based Republican consultant Mike Murphy calls the choice of Sarah Palin "cynical" and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan says the neophyte's pick means the race is "over." They had...
Posted September 3, 2008 5:13 PM
Top of the Ticket has reached #85 on the Technorati hit parade, LATimes.com executive editor Meredith Artley says in her wrap-up for August. More highlights: Total traffic to the Times...
Posted September 3, 2008 4:54 PM
Today's New York Times story says right up high in the fourth graf that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin announced her daughter Bristol's pregnancy "after a swirl of rumors by liberal...
Posted September 1, 2008 11:30 PM
Amy Goodman, the host of Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now, was arrested Monday during a demonstration near the Republican National Convention. She was apparently trying to discuss with cops the...
Posted September 1, 2008 10:31 PM
Bill Boyarsky, posting dispatches from the Democratic gathering at Truthdig.com, concluded that this convention marked a welcome end to big media dominance of political reporting. This from a media veteran...
Posted August 30, 2008 10:35 AM
La Opinión columnist Pilar Marrero relaunched her politics blog in Spanish for the Democratic convention, and it sounds like she will keep it going on the La Opinión site and...
Posted August 30, 2008 10:26 AM
New York Times calls the choice of the anti-abortion, conservative Christian with less than two years in office (she is 44) a "roll of the dice, a gamble that an...
Posted August 29, 2008 8:08 AM
Scott Martelle has been busily covering the presidential election for the Los Angeles Times, including many posts to the Top of the Ticket blog. But he was tapped on the...
Posted August 29, 2008 7:56 AM
Variety Managing Editor Ted Johnson blogs at Wilshire and Washington that one of the men arrested in what was first thought to be a plot against Barack Obama was staying...
Posted August 27, 2008 2:14 PM
Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has been making the rounds and got some face time on MSNBC this afternoon — outside of prime time — but City Controller Laura Chick...
Posted August 26, 2008 10:54 PM
KCRW's convention package includes online video shot by producers for Warren Olney's show in Denver. They have found an Obama lookalike, protesters and "dancing Democrats," plus an interview with Charlie...
Posted August 26, 2008 1:21 PM
Bil Boyarsky is covering the Democratic convention scene for Truthdig and his featured story today is about the abortion issue at the Interfaith Gathering held in Denver by religious leaders,...
Posted August 26, 2008 9:13 AM
Barack Obama will announce Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware as his running mate in a few hours, the New York Times, L.A. Times and Washington Post all agree....
Posted August 22, 2008 11:34 PM
With Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, City Council President Eric Garcetti and assistant president Wendy Greuel headed to Denver for the Barack Obama investiture, Councilwoman Jan Perry is in charge. The Downtown...
Posted August 22, 2008 5:49 PM
Only one problem with that: Tyron Freeman's union contributions on behalf of Board of Supervisors candidate Mark Ridley-Thomas are mostly so-called independent expenditures. So the money officially never got into...
Posted August 22, 2008 9:55 AM
Orange County-based Kevin Drum moved his Calpundit blog persona over to Washington Monthly as Political Animal and began getting paid for his politics blogging four years ago. Now he's been...
Posted August 21, 2008 3:25 PM
The head of the United Long-Term Care Workers, an SEIU local that is the largest in California, takes a leave in the aftermath of Times stories showing how the union...
Posted August 21, 2008 12:31 AM
The Central City Association, which presses Downtown interests at City Hall and worked hard to get into Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's good graces after backing Jim Hahn big in 2005, announced...
Posted August 20, 2008 4:45 PM
The FBI's investigation of City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo seems to center on his wife Michelle's businesses and income, the Times reports. It's clear the Times had been digging on the...
Posted August 20, 2008 1:10 AM
Patrick O'Connor, the Daily News' editorial cartoonist, has some fun with the upcoming change of venue to Denver for City Hall electeds attending the Democratic convention. See it big...
Posted August 19, 2008 9:21 AM
Today's San Francisco Chronicle reports that "FBI agents have begun a criminal investigation of Los Angeles City Attorney Rockard 'Rocky' Delgadillo, a one-time rising star of California politics whose career...
Posted August 19, 2008 7:44 AM
The South L.A. activist pleaded guilty to attempting to bribe a witness in a criminal case involving his daughter, Jasmin Eskew. Ali's sentence was enhanced because of a 1992 robbery...
Posted August 18, 2008 9:46 PM
Zach Behrens at LAist test-drives the city's new website for searching and keeping tabs on City Council files, motions and votes....
Posted August 14, 2008 4:09 PM
At the urging of the City Council, City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo agreed to suspend his lawsuit against Controller Laura Chick and she agreed to suspend her review of his office...
Posted August 13, 2008 10:06 AM
The city Ethics Commission did go ahead this morning and levy almost $15,000 in penalties against Councilman Jose Huizar for misusing his campaign accounts, partly to do opposition research on...
Posted August 12, 2008 12:08 PM
Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo today filed a civil court challenge to block Controller Laura Chick from asserting the power to audit his office, and she called in the...
Posted August 11, 2008 10:27 PM
The Times' Paul Pringle weighed in Saturday with an investigative piece saying that the SEIU-affiliated United Long-Term Care Workers local headed by Tyrone Freeman, and a related charity, have been...
Posted August 10, 2008 11:48 PM
Echo Park author Sarah Miller has an amusing piece in the Times opinion pages Sunday about John Edwards' former extra-marital squeeze, who rented the room Miller had vacated in a...
Posted August 10, 2008 11:35 PM
Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky has posted a personal piece at his county website explaining why he pushed to require fast-food stores to list the calories of their fare on menus. Yaroslavsky...
Posted August 8, 2008 12:56 PM
ABC News has an interview between Bob Woodruff and the former (and not future) VP candidate, confirming the affair with videographer Rielle Hunter. Edwards says he doesn't love her, that...
Posted August 8, 2008 12:45 PM
In the face of political and media criticism over the DWP board spicing up the future pension of COO Raman Raj, CEO David Nahai just released a statement saying never...
Posted August 7, 2008 9:55 AM
Supervisor Gloria Molina joined the two Republicans on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to reject placing a sales tax increase question on the November ballot, citing friction between...
Posted August 5, 2008 1:23 PM
Top of the Ticket finished atop the blog rankings at the L.A. Times again this past month, with the celebrity driven stuff just behind. Peter Viles' L.A. Land continues to...
Posted August 5, 2008 12:17 PM
Actor George Clooney is the featured attraction for the Geneva event on Sept. 2. Here's the email sent to potential Barack Obama donors: Subject: A Reception with George Clooney in...
Posted August 5, 2008 11:32 AM
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa hired Miriam Long, now a senior deputy for Supervisor Yvonne Burke, to be his deputy mayor for education, youth and families. From the release: For 12 years,...
Posted August 5, 2008 12:12 AM
Bill Boyarsky, LA Observed's occasional politics columnist, is a finalist in nonfiction for the 2008 book award from the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association. It's for "Big Daddy: Jesse Unruh...
Posted August 4, 2008 8:55 PM
Lt. Gov. John Garamendi announced this morning that, as expected, he will run for governor in 2010. Bee...
Posted July 31, 2008 11:17 AM
This week's piece by Kelefa Sanneh starts out exploring TV and radio commentator Tavis Smiley's criticism of Barack Obama's candidacy and looks into Smiley's enterprises, which are based in Leimert...
Posted July 31, 2008 8:52 AM
Tom Hogen-Esch, associate professor of political science at Cal State Northridge and co-author of "Local Politics: A Practical Guide to Governing at the Grassroots," argued in La Opinión that the...
Posted July 30, 2008 12:27 AM
Rick Orlov's column today reports that State Sen. Sheila Kuehl denies through an aide that she is looking to move into the city of Los Angeles and run for the...
Posted July 28, 2008 8:11 AM
I received an email statement from Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa this morning that announced he would skip tonight's banquet in San Francisco for the Human Rights Campaign, a mainstream gay community...
Posted July 26, 2008 6:10 PM
Mickey Kaus has the email from Los Angeles Times blog editor Tony Pierce telling the paper's bloggers not to go there on the John Edwards-tryst-in-Beverly Hills story: Subject: john edwards...
Posted July 25, 2008 9:43 AM
Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke was named today by House Democrats to the independent panel that is supposed to review conduct by members of Congress. But as the...
Posted July 24, 2008 6:15 PM
The former City Hall power player was convicted on 14 counts of bribery, perjury and other charges stemming from influence peddling while he was a commissioner in the Jim Hahn...
Posted July 24, 2008 5:18 PM
A federal grand jury has been secretly probing whether attorney Pierce O'Donnell violated federal campaign laws by asking employees of his law firm to contribute to the 2004 presidential campaign...
Posted July 24, 2008 11:49 AM
Sharon Waxman, free of the New York Times label next to her name, blogs a question: how long can the mainstream media ignore the National Enquirer story saying that John...
Posted July 23, 2008 5:07 PM
A pretty contentious exchange this afternoon between "Which Way, L.A.?" host Warren Olney and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa began with the mayor quipping "long time, no interview." Olney then started peppering...
Posted July 16, 2008 10:45 PM
Brendan Huffman, president of the Valley Industry and Commerce Association since early 2006, said he plans to resign at the end of the year. "I'm just ready for something else,...
Posted July 15, 2008 5:30 PM
It's Don Pierro, a former public affairs fellow at Coro. Release after the jump....
Posted July 15, 2008 2:31 PM
Ron Kaye's first try at post-Daily News movement organizing drew more than 100 potential activists to the City Hall lawn on Monday. David Zahniser in the Times set the scene...
Posted July 15, 2008 12:33 AM
Councilman and Board of Supervisors candidate Bernard Parks scored some CNN time this morning during all the hot talk about that satirical New Yorker cover picturing Barack and Michelle Obama...
Posted July 14, 2008 11:56 AM
District Attorney Steve Cooley sent a letter to the chairman of the state Board of Parole Hearings strongly opposing the compassionate release from prison of Manson family killer Susan Atkins....
Posted July 14, 2008 11:10 AM
At the L.A. Times' Top of the Ticket blog, many of the reader comments posted about former Bush spokesman Tony Snow's death have been tasteless — to say the least....
Posted July 13, 2008 11:12 PM
City Council president Eric Garcetti, who represents Hollywood, said provisions added to the project will help alleviate concerns that the 16-story residential project next door will affect Capitol Records' underground...
Posted July 11, 2008 4:55 PM
Los Angeles County CEO William Fujioka has abruptly ended his weekly Monday media briefings, saying he'll now be available by phone. But when the Times' Garrett Therolf called Fujioka to...
Posted July 11, 2008 9:09 AM
Former deputy mayor (to Hahn) Troy Edwards testified under immunity yesterday at the Leland Wong trial and detailed the gift of sexual favors linked to Wong at a Bonaventure Hotel...
Posted July 11, 2008 8:55 AM
Catching up on this: Monday's Los Angeles Daily Journal cited sources saying that Councilman Jack Weiss has raised $1.1 million for next year's open race for City Attorney. Weiss has...
Posted July 10, 2008 11:43 PM
Ex-Daily News editor (and future candidate?) Ron Kaye is encouraging readers of his politics blog to bring their trash to City Hall on July 14. Bastille Day — get it?...
Posted July 10, 2008 11:35 PM
The subject is the Alexandria Hotel, the Rosslyn Lofts project and City Hall's support of an $8 million subsidy for alleged slumlord Ruben Islas. Tibby Rothman, in the LA Weekly,...
Posted July 10, 2008 10:27 PM
Why Villaraigosa held back data on trash fee When he raised the trash fee, Mayor Villaraigosa said "Every new dollar residents pay for trash pickup will be used to put...
Posted July 10, 2008 9:15 AM
Gene Maddaus reports in the Daily Breeze that ties to Supervisor Yvonne Burke led to the Peace & Joy battered women's shelter in Carson being allowed to operate despite filth,...
Posted July 8, 2008 6:20 PM
LA Observed columnist Bill Boyarsky recently completed a five-year term on the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission. He was appointed after writing Controller Laura Chick a letter suggesting that the...
Posted July 6, 2008 10:58 PM
The Sacramento Bee pulled together details on nine of the campaign fundraisers that Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa held between June 21 and July 1. Included are snippets giving LAT reporter David...
Posted July 2, 2008 6:25 PM
KCRW's popular Friday afternoon politics gabfest has added a blog. If you want to argue about Bob, Arianna, Matt and Tony or discuss things with Left, Right & Center producer...
Posted July 2, 2008 1:25 PM
City Hall's new water police won't have to look far for offenders of the rule against mid-day watering. Me and everyone else on the sidewalk during the noon hour just...
Posted July 2, 2008 1:20 PM
San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom filed papers for a campaign committee that lets him start gathering contributions for a possible run for governor in 2010. He's the first of the...
Posted July 1, 2008 10:17 PM
Don White, a longtime Los Angeles political, social and labor activist, died in his Los Angeles apartment and was discovered on June 20. White had been a Los Angeles Unified...
Posted July 1, 2008 12:07 AM
Six events at least, including a bunch involving contributors with business (or potentially so) pending at City Hall. David Zahniser touches on them at the Times' local blog, but for...
Posted June 30, 2008 4:14 PM
City Controller Laura Chick wants to audit the City Attorney’s Workers’ Compensation Program. City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo declined her request to turn over records, so she is using the subpoena...
Posted June 26, 2008 5:36 PM
A remarkable editorial in this morning's Daily News admits the paper got used in the news story earlier this week about DWP chief David Nahai offering up data on his...
Posted June 26, 2008 8:59 AM
You know that L.A. Times-Bloomberg Poll this morning that had Barack Obama up by 12 points? The Gallup tracking poll out today disagrees in a big way. It says the...
Posted June 25, 2008 3:27 PM
Alan Mittelsteadt blogs that the Daily News and reporter Beth Barrett — he calls her "the Queen of Spoon-Fed Journalism" — got snookered into running DWP chief David Nahai's planted...
Posted June 24, 2008 10:51 PM
From now until November, expect the presidential candidates to be a giant pain in L.A.'s butt. Motorcades shutting down entire freeways, etc. For Barack Obama's appearance Tuesday night at the...
Posted June 23, 2008 3:20 PM
Eric Lynxwiler and I will be the featured speakers in Westwood today at 4 pm at the inaugural literary salon of the Friends of the Westwood Library. It's a benefit...
Posted June 22, 2008 1:05 PM
Right after he got back from his week in Israel, Mayor Antonio Vllaraigosa took off for a Conference of Mayors gathering in Florida where he will work in a weekend...
Posted June 20, 2008 4:34 PM
Maria Elena Durazo, executive secretary of the County Labor Federation, will join Mayor Villaraigosa and his coterie of city employees and Jewish community leaders on the trip to Israel that...
Posted June 11, 2008 12:34 AM
Mayor Villaraigosa has appointed Alicia Maldonado to the Housing Authority, Margarita C. Garr to the Housing Authority, Marsha Hirano-Nakanishi to the Commission for Children, Youth and Their Families and Christopher...
Posted June 10, 2008 12:45 PM
The Ethics Commission today fined Los Angeles Councilman Herb Wesson $3,000 for taking campaign money above the limit and and Councilman Richard Alarcon $2,650 for various violations of the campaign...
Posted June 10, 2008 12:25 PM
Joel Sappell, who vented recently in the American Journalism Review about Sam Zell and other changes that led him to flee the Los Angeles Times, started today as Deputy for...
Posted June 9, 2008 6:46 PM
The Huffington Post blogger's decision to tape, and then post, Bill Clinton slamming Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdum is still being discussed and dissected all over the politics and mediasphere....
Posted June 9, 2008 9:07 AM
Jon Regardie at the Downtown News imagines an address by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in advance of this week's trip to Israel. Selected quips: Many people have asked why I am...
Posted June 9, 2008 9:04 AM
The saga of the Long Beach deadbeat continues. The Press-Telegram's Paul Eakins reports today that Rep. Laura Richardson didn't pay a $735 mechanic's bill on her 740iL BMW — didn't...
Posted June 7, 2008 4:50 PM
She's the Huffington Post Off the Bus blogger who recorded Bill Clinton's three-minute rant about Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdom — and who earlier captured Barack Obama's critique of "bitter"...
Posted June 6, 2008 2:58 PM
Former candidate for mayor Bob Hertzberg told a bunch of friends at lunch at The Palm that he won't be running for anything next year. David Zahniser blogged it. Previously...
Posted June 5, 2008 11:59 AM
Author and urban affairs expert William Fulton says a challenge to Mayor Villaraigosa "would be a haberdasher’s dream," but he doesn't buy that developer Rick Carsuo would go after a...
Posted June 4, 2008 1:25 PM
Department of Water and Power chief David Nahai has hired former Assemblywoman (and City Council candidate) Cindy Montañez to do whatever it is that pols do at the big-spending agency....
Posted June 4, 2008 9:40 AM
State Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas came out on top in the race for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, but fell way short of a majority. He and Councilman Bernard...
Posted June 4, 2008 9:25 AM
Tom Waldman is the chief of staff to Los Angeles school board member Tamar Galatzan (and he formerly was press secretary to Rep. Howard Berman.) He's also the author of...
Posted June 3, 2008 9:20 AM
Stripped across the bottom of today's front page is a paid ad banner for a candidate in the 27th congressional district. The day before the election. The paper could make...
Posted June 2, 2008 1:43 PM
Oh, let somebody win on Tuesday so it can all be over. KPCC's Frank Stoltze went out walking the district with the candidates for a long story during "Morning Edition"...
Posted June 2, 2008 8:58 AM
Bob Hertzberg is also sniffing around a challenge to Mayor Villaraigosa — or a run for city attorney against Jack Weiss — the former Villaraigosa friend and foe tells...
Posted May 30, 2008 5:30 PM
Yesterday it was a freelancer who argues that District Attorney Steve Cooley has gone easy on Jessica's Law. Today it's Doug Dowie, who worked with Kaye at the Daily News...
Posted May 30, 2008 12:22 PM
Shopping-mall mogul and former Jim Hahn commissioner Rick Caruso says he's considering a challenge to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa next year. He tells the Times' Tina Daunt, for her Cause Celebre...
Posted May 29, 2008 5:35 PM
Andrew Malcolm, the former New York Times correspondent and Laura Bush press secretary (as well as part-time Karl Rove assistant), talks about his conversion from L.A. Times editorial writer to...
Posted May 29, 2008 2:59 PM
Let's see, what's new: Cornel West, the author and Princeton professor of religion, will address campaign workers at the Ridley-Thomas headquarters at 6:30 pm. Both candidates replied to LAT questions...
Posted May 29, 2008 9:20 AM
After Tuesday's Los Angeles Times endorsement of Bernard Parks, a tip came in claiming that the members of the Times editorial board actually preferred Mark Ridley-Thomas in the race for...
Posted May 28, 2008 9:08 AM
Bad crash on Crenshaw Five people, including two children, died when a red-light runner sped through the intersection of Crenshaw and Florence. Two of the victims burned to death inside...
Posted May 27, 2008 12:25 AM
Business and tribal interests located far from the open Inglewood-Compton area Senate district have spent more than $715,000 in independent expenditures to elect ex-assemblyman Rod Wright over rival Mervyn Dymally,...
Posted May 23, 2008 9:20 AM
Linda Douglass, the former television reporter here who is now a contributor editor at National Journal, will join the Barack Obama presidential campaign as a senior strategist and "senior campaign...
Posted May 21, 2008 5:20 PM
Lots of people have gotten caught in the foreclosure vise — but Rep. Laura Richardson? The Democrat won last year's special election in the Long Beach-Compton area, loaning her campaign...
Posted May 20, 2008 10:14 PM
The former chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America — and target of the Napster generation's ire — was named political director and Washington editor-at-large for the...
Posted May 20, 2008 1:29 PM
California Supreme Court chief justice Ronald George gives a two-hour interview to the LAT's Maura Dolan and talks about the court's milestone same-sex marriage ruling: "I think there are...
Posted May 18, 2008 12:25 PM
Stories planted this morning in the Times, Daily News and Wall Street Journal unveil Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's billion-dollar agenda to re-invent Los Angeles' relationship to water. Villaraigosa and DWP chief...
Posted May 15, 2008 8:58 AM
Under fire for his ties to lobbyists Arnie Berghoff and Harvey Englander, former Villaraigosa deputy Marcus Allen withdrew his name from consideration for the job of city administrative officer. He...
Posted May 14, 2008 11:53 PM
Proposition 98 is sold to voters as an anti-eminent domain measure, "but really carries the long-standing agenda of interests that want to extinguish rent control and block water and air...
Posted May 12, 2008 8:19 AM
Councilwoman Hahn responds on her blog to the Fox 11 report that sided with two cops suing the city and tied Hahn to the mother of a Grape Street gang...
Posted May 9, 2008 5:25 PM
Regarding yesterday's item from the Daily Mail about LAPD Chief William Bratton advising the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, Bratton says there has been no contact between them: I have...
Posted May 9, 2008 1:37 AM
Looks like LAPD chief William Bratton could be traveling out of the city more than ever. The mayor of London just announced that he has signed Bratton to help advise...
Posted May 8, 2008 9:18 AM
BongHwan Kim moved up from assistant to become interim general manager of the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment after last November's death of Carol Baker Tharp. On Tuesday, Mayor Villaraigosa put...
Posted May 6, 2008 11:11 PM
The pundits pretty much agree that Sen. Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign has reached the realistic end, after she lost big today in North Carolina and perhaps won by only a...
Posted May 6, 2008 9:36 PM
For a campaign strategist, does Ace Smith get a lot of coverage or what? In the LAT over the weekend, the consultant for Antonio Villaraigosa's mayoral campaign — and before...
Posted May 5, 2008 6:13 PM
The May issue of W (with Cameron Diaz on the cover) proclaims Arianna Huffington more influential than ever, with her new book doing well and the Huffington Post "arguably the...
Posted May 5, 2008 12:55 AM
On Saturday, candidates Bernard Parks and Mark Ridley-Thomas squared off over what makes them different in the race to succeed Yvonne Burke on the county Board of Supervisors. Here's the...
Posted May 5, 2008 12:19 AM
The Times is moving California political writer Phil Willon onto the Los Angeles City Hall beat. The memo from California Editor David Lauter waxes on a bit about the importance...
Posted May 4, 2008 11:54 PM
There are four weeks weeks and change left until the June 3 primary showdown to decide who inherits the black seat on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. It's...
Posted May 1, 2008 2:35 PM
Louis Sahagun reports for the Times that "thousands of dockworkers at all 29 West Coast ports, including Los Angeles and Long Beach, took the day off work today in what...
Posted May 1, 2008 11:40 AM
Our blogger-columnist Bill Boyarsky covered a march Downtown on Friday by 700-1,000 janitors and renters of the slum housing around MacArthur Park. It got him thinking about the two (or...
Posted April 29, 2008 3:55 PM
The Los Angeles city clerk's automated email notification of upcoming City Council agendas just gave notice of a budget committee meeting that includes members Nick Pacheco and Cindy Miscikowski. Wait,...
Posted April 29, 2008 2:15 PM
Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alarcon will guest on Sunday's "KNBC News Conference," hosted by Laurel Erickson at 9:30 am on Channel 4. She wants to ask him about the...
Posted April 25, 2008 3:12 PM
The Miguel Contreras Learning Complex is one of LAUSD's newest, most gleaming schools — even if it did take Craigslist intervention to open the swimming pool to the public last...
Posted April 24, 2008 12:31 AM
The Home Depot project on Foothill Boulevard that ran into a mountain of community opposition is back on the agenda. The store applied to City Hall for a permit to...
Posted April 22, 2008 3:54 PM
Councilman Bernard Parks and State Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas, the candidates for county Supervisor in the June primary, are scheduled for their only televised debate on Thursday at 6:30 at the...
Posted April 21, 2008 10:50 PM
Erstwhile and future minor candidate for mayor Walter Moore proves a lightweight in an email exchange with L.A. Times editorial page editor Jim Newton, blogged by Ron Kaye. According to...
Posted April 21, 2008 1:00 PM
From ex-editor Ron Kaye's new blog: In my mind, it's time for people to make a stand for what they believe in, to act like the free people Americans are...
Posted April 17, 2008 11:24 PM
He was on this week talking about the Britney Spears-inspired anti-paparazzi law that LAPD chief William Bratton says is not needed. "Rob Riggle does a fine job of grilling the...
Posted April 17, 2008 9:28 AM
His business partner in the politics site is Henry Copeland, the founder of Blogads and a longtime friend of Layne's. Layne tells Tony Pierce of the LAT blog Web Scout...
Posted April 15, 2008 10:35 AM
Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, becoming the go-to voice raising questions about the urbanists' rush to let developers densify new areas of Los Angeles, took his cause to Sunday's LAT Opinion section....
Posted April 13, 2008 1:14 PM
The Rev. Eric Lee, head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in L.A., today sent an apology to Daphna Ziman, the philanthropist who stalked out of an African American awards...
Posted April 10, 2008 10:55 PM
PolitickerCA has a blind item saying that Doug Dowie, the former president of Fleishman-Hillard in L.A. whose conviction on wire fraud is on appeal, is doing some work for political...
Posted April 9, 2008 11:25 PM
Why do two separate City Hall items when they can merge into one? The City Council just voted 11-3 to approve the increases in Department of Water and Power rates....
Posted April 9, 2008 2:40 PM
Labor's Dave Sickler adds the CRA to his resume, which previously logged stops at the city's Board of Public Works and the executive suites at DWP. Esther Cepeda joins the...
Posted April 8, 2008 5:30 PM
This cartoon by Rob Tornoe runs today under the headline "Sam Zell must be very proud" at PolitickerCA. That is the relatively new local outlet of a national chain of...
Posted April 8, 2008 9:31 AM
Charlton Heston wrote a lot of letters to the editor. Today's L.A. Times excerpts some the paper received. Sample: Spike Lee's threat IN a fit of pique at the Cannes...
Posted April 8, 2008 1:18 AM
Monday was the state AG's birthday. The governor from 1974 to 1982 — before that a member of the original elected board of the Los Angeles Community College District, then...
Posted April 7, 2008 11:59 PM
Freshman state Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes — the ex-chief of staff to Alex Padilla in City Hall who dropped out of the 2007 race to succeed his boss on the City...
Posted April 4, 2008 5:18 PM
The L.A. County Business Federation, that new biz group that hopes to rival labor in political heft, made its first candidate endorsement today: Councilman Bernard Parks for county Supervisor. Not...
Posted April 4, 2008 10:16 AM
City ethics commissioner Bill Boyarsky heard from friends what the scene was like inside the exclusive, closed "VIP reception" before last week's political roast at the Century Plaza. He posts...
Posted April 3, 2008 11:30 PM
Sen. Hillary Clinton used her entrance on "The Tonight Show" (Channel 4, 11:35 pm) to defuse the mocking over her tale about dodging gunfire in Bosnia while First Lady. "I...
Posted April 3, 2008 9:08 PM
The Los Angeles City Council was asked yesterday to endorse a 40-hour moratorium on homicide over this coming weekend. After much discussion, they wouldn't call for the moratorium exactly but...
Posted April 2, 2008 8:55 AM
Voting rights advocate Paul H. Turner will be put forth to take Rob Saltzman's seat on the city ethics commission, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced. California Common Cause, where Turner used...
Posted April 1, 2008 3:13 PM
CityBeat's L.A. Sniper columnist Alan Mittelstaedt captures Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky's persuasive argument that the Times' cutback of local coverage through the years contributes to the city's bad traffic by letting...
Posted March 27, 2008 9:14 AM
Fabian Wesson, wife of City Councilman (and former Speaker) Herb Wesson, has opened a committee to explore running for the Assembly in 2010 when Speaker-elect Karen Bass is termed out,...
Posted March 26, 2008 12:34 PM
The City Council will wait a week to vote on the hike sought by the Department of Water and Power. Time for more politicking study. The Daily News, which has...
Posted March 25, 2008 11:53 PM
Newsom, one of the California mayors who might run for governor in 2010, said today in the state capital that it's "wildly premature" to consider running but added he "surely...
Posted March 25, 2008 11:36 PM
Chief administrative officer Karen Sisson is returning to her alma mater, Pomona College, to be vice president and treasurer. She has been CAO since December 2006 and before that was...
Posted March 25, 2008 4:43 PM
As we suggested yesterday in Payback time. Became official at 11 am....
Posted March 20, 2008 11:56 AM
Chief William Bratton has scheduled an 11 am press conference tomorrow with State Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas, the candidate for county Supervisor. They don't officially label it an endorsement event. But...
Posted March 19, 2008 3:32 PM
Well, just a new name. Jamie Court has abandoned the snooze-inducing Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights in favor of...ta dah...Consumer Watchdog.org. Broadcasters everywhere will no doubt applaud the switch....
Posted March 19, 2008 2:55 PM
The Los Angeles City Council voted 10-5 this morning to stop work on the annexation application of the heavily lobbied Las Lomas project in Newhall Pass. Rick Orlov and Kerry...
Posted March 19, 2008 1:06 PM
Chief Bratton gave his side of the SWAT report controversy, and talked about having women in the unit, this afternoon on "Patt Morrison" on KPCC. (Audio.) Mayor Villaraigosa was also...
Posted March 18, 2008 5:30 PM
New U.S. Attorney Thomas O’Brien redistributed the 17 lawyers in the public integrity unit in Los Angeles among the major fraud and organized crime sections, the Recorder reports. The San...
Posted March 17, 2008 3:16 PM
The Downtown News' Jon Regardie saw some news in Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa repeating to Charlie Rose the company line that will he run next year for a second term. In...
Posted March 17, 2008 12:38 AM
KNBC Channel 4 has tapped David Markland, a "city captain" at LA Metblogs, to write a couple of items a day under the California Faultline banner. He will focus on...
Posted March 16, 2008 5:40 PM
Oscar Medrano Jr., 47, was picked up by sheriff's deputies at his Gardena jewelry store on suspicion of molesting a 14-year-old girl. No charges filed as yet. Worth noting, I...
Posted March 13, 2008 3:56 PM
Elizabeth Hill announced Thursday she will retire from her "dream job" as Legislative Analyst at the end of the year. "It's time for a new chapter in my life," said...
Posted March 13, 2008 11:18 AM
Looks like it's down to Villaraigosa cousin and labor favorite John Perez. Arturo Chavez, an aide to Sen. Gil Cedillo, and Ricardo Lara, an aide to Speaker Fabian Núñez, have...
Posted March 12, 2008 6:12 PM
Here's a YouTube video of New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, at UCLA yesterday, declining to make an endorsement in the presidential race but saying nicer things about Barack Obama. Of...
Posted March 12, 2008 4:49 PM
Rep. Howard Berman, in his 13th term, today was officially named chairman of the House committee on foreign affairs, replacing the late Tom Lantos. Originally a supporter of the Iraq...
Posted March 11, 2008 7:19 PM
The latest entry on the Los Angeles Times politics blog comes from a new — but no longer unexpected — source. It's credited not to one of the Times' bloggers...
Posted March 10, 2008 6:08 PM
The best political contest of the year in Los Angeles, by far, is the showdown between Councilman Bernard Parks and State Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas to be anointed the next Los...
Posted March 10, 2008 11:28 AM
Jane Galbraith is leaving as director of communications for Councilman Tom LaBonge after six years to work in the public affairs group at the Department of Water and Power. She...
Posted March 10, 2008 11:22 AM
You've read about the story, now here's the invitation. Tomorrow night's event for City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo was put together, reports David Zahniser in the Times, by Ken Spiker and...
Posted March 6, 2008 10:59 PM
One is that Speaker Bass is related to State Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas, reports Shane Goldmacher of the Sacramento Bee. She also went to Hamilton High, same as Rep. Howard Berman,...
Posted March 5, 2008 1:16 PM
Harrison Sheppard is returning to the Woodland Hills office, where he will do a mix of editing and reporting, the Sacramento Bee's Capitol Alert says. Sheppard went up to Sacramento...
Posted March 5, 2008 1:02 PM
Mark Lacter and I were just on "Airtalk" talking with Larry Mantle about the buyouts at the Times and other local papers. You can hear it in the archives at...
Posted March 5, 2008 12:35 PM
Assemblywoman Nell Soto, the 81 year-old Democrat from the San Gabriel Valley, hasn't been in Sacramento since at least September. She has been out ill. She also hasn't filed the...
Posted March 4, 2008 4:54 PM
News and politics did well in the LATimes.com stats for February, so maybe there's hope yet. Politics blog Top of the Ticket led the pack of in-house blogs in February...
Posted March 3, 2008 3:07 PM
The former California insurance commissioner, who resigned in 2000 amid corruption allegations, is now a deputy sheriff in Florida. And he just shot somebody: a domestic violence suspect with a...
Posted February 29, 2008 3:05 PM
The eminent domain measure on the June ballot would also phase out some rent control laws, potentially resulting in a $15 million windfall for Sam Zell's Equity Lifestyle Properties Inc.,...
Posted February 28, 2008 12:40 AM
Los Angeles assemblywoman Karen Bass has the votes to become Speaker, the Sacramento Bee reports. Fiona Ma, the San Francisco Democrat who tried to get the job, conceded that Bass...
Posted February 27, 2008 7:06 PM
David Gershwin has been chief of staff to Council President Eric Garcetti since 2005. He is leaving to be a vice president of Cerrell and Associates. Ana Guerrero moves up...
Posted February 27, 2008 6:38 PM
Staff editor-blogger Don Frederick plays it a little coy but says the latest Times/Bloomberg national poll, due to post about 4 pm our time, will show "Obama has erased the...
Posted February 26, 2008 3:31 PM
Murray was in the Assembly for four terms, ran a slate mailer in South L.A. with Mervyn Dymally and spawned ex-legislator Kevin Murray. Willard's name figures prominently today in a...
Posted February 26, 2008 12:55 PM
Even poli sci professors, columnists and all-around political pundits are doing it. Raphael Sonenshein, who's all three and the author of books about Los Angeles politics, is writing the Jews...
Posted February 25, 2008 4:49 PM
Councilman Herb Wesson entertained a lunch crowd at the Current Affairs Forum the other day with some fairly open comments about his political decision making. He didn't run for the...
Posted February 24, 2008 12:48 PM
A day after stepping down from the Community Redevelopment Agency board, labor leader John Perez joined the crowded (for now) race to succeed termed-out Speaker Fabian Núñez. Perez's entry is...
Posted February 23, 2008 10:57 AM
The L.A. Police Protective League took umbrage at Times columnist Tim Rutten's chiding of Mayor Villaraigosa for injecting a bit of politics into his TV time at the funeral of...
Posted February 23, 2008 9:53 AM
Councilman Jose Huizar and his wife Ricchelle welcomed Simon Luis Huizar at 3:10 am. The baby was delivered at Arcadia Methodist Hospital weighing 7 pounds, 10 ounces and measuring 20...
Posted February 23, 2008 9:37 AM
I listened to Sam Zell answer questions Thursday night at the Hammer Museum, then afterward shook his hand and chatted a bit about the Times and newspapers. First time I'd...
Posted February 21, 2008 10:06 PM
Slate editor Jacob Weisberg gave a little shout out to LA Observed in his remarks last night at a book party at Arianna Huffington's home. Actually, he noted that I...
Posted February 20, 2008 6:04 PM
Montorio says he was 'surprised' at firing New boss Russ Stanton walked in on Friday and summarily fired the Times managing editor for features. "It was really quite brief and...
Posted February 19, 2008 8:53 AM
The Republican National Committee convened its winter retreat for major donors this weekend at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, presenting Karl Rove and figure such as RNC chairman Robert Duncan —...
Posted February 18, 2008 9:20 PM
Holiday hours today so no Morning Buzz, but stuff has still been piling up on my desk. City Council members are lining up to object to Controller Laura Chick's move...
Posted February 18, 2008 11:40 AM
Joel Stein and his mother, Clinton supporter Rosalind Byrd-Leszczuk, were guests on today's "To the Point" episode examining the support for Barack Obama. Others talking with Warren Olney on KCRW...
Posted February 14, 2008 1:16 PM
President Felipe Calderón of Mexico was in Chicago and the Bay Area yesterday. Today he'll address the Legislature in Sacramento and visit the Napa Valley, then be greeted at LAX...
Posted February 13, 2008 12:36 AM
Inspectors from the state's Department of Health Services visited the busy emergency room on Feb. 1 and said they would issue a citation of "immediate jeopardy" due to overcrowding and...
Posted February 13, 2008 12:24 AM
Marc Cooper sinks the hooks on Speaker Fabian Núñez at the LA Weekly website: With great pride, I accepted the honor a few months back of being labeled 'the state's...
Posted February 12, 2008 10:46 PM
Two state lawmakers want to see what Sacramento can get for the land under the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. They say the proceeds could help out the state budget shortfall....
Posted February 11, 2008 1:30 PM
The Breeze mentioned yesterday that Michael Molina has moved from chief of staff for Councilwoman Janice Hahn to senior director of government affairs for Los Angeles World Airports. Hahn's communications...
Posted February 8, 2008 4:33 PM
City Councilman Richard Alarcon and his wife, Flora Alarcon, welcomed Camilla Isabella Alarcon into the world this morning. She was born at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills...
Posted February 8, 2008 9:33 AM
Democrats in the state Senate have agreed to make Darrell Steinberg of Sacramento the chamber's next leader. That means Alex Padilla, the former president of the Los Angeles City Council,...
Posted February 7, 2008 12:55 PM
There is no shortage of candidates looking to replace Speaker Fabian Nunez now that the voters have rejected the term limits modifications that would have kept him in the Assembly...
Posted February 6, 2008 9:15 PM
Doug Johnson at the Rose Institute's blog has an interesting twist on the usual California divide between the Democratic coast and the Republican interior (itself an update on the old...
Posted February 6, 2008 7:35 PM
In a pop-up window on the Downtown News website, the weekly says: County Supervisor Yvonne B. Burke will endorse Bernard Parks in the race to succeed her, Los Angeles Downtown...
Posted February 6, 2008 7:21 PM
Barack Obama and former president Bill Clinton both called in to El Cucuy de la Mañana's radio show this morning. A suspicious device ignited a fire at a home owned...
Posted February 5, 2008 3:32 PM
City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo stepped into the controversy over the unique-to-Los Angeles requirement that independent voters who want to be counted in the Democratic primary be sure to color in...
Posted February 5, 2008 2:42 PM
American Apparel's website and an email are urging people to vote for Obama and McCain, and give a list of reasons why not to vote for Clinton. But Politico's Ben...
Posted February 5, 2008 2:28 PM
A reader sends this photo of the sign hanging outside his poll location on South Genesee in the Pico-Fairfax neighborhood. He also observed a pirate flag hanging over the voting...
Posted February 5, 2008 11:22 AM
Polls are open from 7 am to 8 pm for those who still vote the old fashioned way. Close to half of all California votes will be cast absentee, sent...
Posted February 5, 2008 8:45 AM
It's a big get out the vote day all over town. Former president Bill Clinton will hit four churches in the morning: City of Refuge in Gardena at 8 am,...
Posted February 2, 2008 9:06 PM
Joe Mathews, who's covering the presidential campaign, will leave the Los Angeles Times sometime after Super Tuesday to join the New America Foundation as a California Fellow. Other ex-Timesmen already...
Posted February 2, 2008 9:03 PM
Soulvine columnist Betty Pleasant says that Councilman Bernard Parks and former mayor Richard Riordan are trying to stave off the closing of Daniel Murphy High School, Parks' alma mater. The...
Posted February 2, 2008 3:41 PM
This whole battle for the Latino vote between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama keeps getting more intriguing. Today, the state's biggest Spanish-language newspaper endorsed Obama, saying the historic moment he...
Posted February 2, 2008 10:10 AM
La Opinión confirmed the paper will endorse a Democratic and Republican candidate in tomorrow's edition, CandidatoUSA reports. The endorsement, first in the paper's history for a primary, will be posted...
Posted February 1, 2008 4:59 PM
First presidential endorsements by the LAT since Richard Nixon in 1972. On Barack Obama: "Either of the Democratic candidates would make a strong nominee. But just because the ballot features...
Posted February 1, 2008 1:45 PM
Prompted by the $25,000 spent by the LAPD to escort Britney Spears to the hospital, Councilman Dennis Zine said today he'll push for an ordinance that would create a "personal...
Posted February 1, 2008 12:59 PM
Recalled ex-Gov. Gray Davis, whose fumbling created Arnold Schwarzenegger as a (sort-of) Republican leader, received a standing ovation from the Democrats when he was introduced before last night's debate. We...
Posted February 1, 2008 12:45 PM
Torie Osborn, Mayor Villaraigosa's senior advisor on the homeless and poverty, left the City Hall staff at the end of January. Her departing email to colleagues says it's been nice...
Posted February 1, 2008 12:17 PM
The most popular radio host in Los Angeles — and probably the nation — gave Sen. Edward Kennedy the royal treatment this yesterday morning, before Kennedy's pro-Obama appearance in East...
Posted February 1, 2008 12:04 PM
Sometime LA Observed contributor Jacob Soboroff got Mayor Villaraigosa, Stevie Wonder and Diane Keaton on video talking to him about the media's role in increasing or decreasing voter participation. Soboroff...
Posted January 31, 2008 8:29 PM
Wolf Blitzer just took the stage and did the obvious sound check for the Kodak: "And the Oscar goes to...." Big laugh. 4:51 Blitzer tells the audience there are...
Posted January 31, 2008 4:52 PM
One of the benefits of scoring an assigned seat next to IN Los Angeles magazine's Karen Ocamb: free photos....
Posted January 31, 2008 4:48 PM
Invited debate attendees (and those who bought tickets on the free market) are filing in to the Kodak Theatre through boisterous crowds of supporters with Obama and Clinton signs...
Posted January 31, 2008 4:45 PM
From the roof of Hollywood and Highland a few minutes ago, compliments of Karen Ocamb at IN Los Angeles....
Posted January 31, 2008 2:12 PM
The Daily News' Beth Barrett has posted a story saying that Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has taken $10,500 in campaign funds from indicted Chicago entrepreneur Antoin Rezko and his relatives or...
Posted January 31, 2008 1:58 PM
The last surviving Republicans battered each other and invoked Reagan — without evoking him — last night in Simi Valley. Now it's Clinton and Obama's turn to whack away at...
Posted January 31, 2008 9:26 AM
Two weeks after making a pledge of neutrality in the Republican race, Gov. Schwarzenegger is expected to endorse John McCain tomorrow. LAT, William Bradley...
Posted January 30, 2008 5:49 PM
Irene Hirano will step down next year as president of the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo. But that's not her big news. She also become engaged to Sen....
Posted January 30, 2008 3:05 PM
Several dozen of the 500 news media and bloggers credentialed for Thursday night's CNN-Politico-L.A. Times Democratic debate did a walk-through this afternoon at the Kodak Theatre. David Bohrman, CNN's Washington...
Posted January 29, 2008 6:05 PM
Former Daily News publisher Tracy Rafter is chief executive of the new Los Angeles County Business Federation scheduled to be formally announced today with 44 member organizations representing more than...
Posted January 29, 2008 1:18 AM
The candidates will all be here this week, at least for Wednesday's Republican debate at the Reagan library in Simi Valley and the Democrats' face-off on Thursday evening at the...
Posted January 28, 2008 1:13 AM
How happy was the Barack Obama camp to get Maria Elena Durazo on board a couple of weeks back? Pretty happy, apparently. Today the executive secretary of the L.A. County...
Posted January 25, 2008 1:56 PM
Because it feels like a briefs kind of day. Departing eBay chief Meg Whitman is talking to Republicans about her running for Governor in 2010. LAT Small pet turtles are...
Posted January 24, 2008 6:08 PM
A tribute to retired City Hall powerhouse Ron Deaton last evening brought out "a who's who in the city of Los Angeles," in the words of City Council member Wendy...
Posted January 24, 2008 9:10 AM
29 LAPD officers may face May Day melee charges LAPD officials will submit a report naming 29 officers responsible for 72 different allegations to the District Attorney's Office and the...
Posted January 23, 2008 8:53 AM
Two legendary ex-Lakers are jostling for position over presidential endorsements. Nico Pitney at the Huffington Post: Unbeknownst to him, basketball legend-turned-author Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was pulled into the 2008 campaign fray...
Posted January 22, 2008 1:53 PM
You may remember awhile back (June 2006, actually) that the L.A. Times editorial page said it would resume making presidential candidate endorsements. Those plans survive the change in editors, publishers...
Posted January 22, 2008 1:15 PM
Council President Eric Garcetti cancelled this morning's meeting after using the internal City Hall squawk box to beseech members to show up. When a quroum of ten didn't appear, he...
Posted January 22, 2008 11:59 AM
It's Oscar nominations morning Witching hour is 5:30 am Hollywood time. Find out if you were nominated at the official site. For post-game analysis, take your pick of these or...
Posted January 22, 2008 12:50 AM
"I still have no memory of the trip to Costa Rica or anything that happened," Ron Deaton, once the most powerful figure in City Hall, tells Rick Orlov in the...
Posted January 21, 2008 10:20 PM
Although the Los Angeles Times is listed as one of the sponsors (along with CNN and Politico) of the presidential campaign debates behind held here Jan. 30 and 31, the...
Posted January 18, 2008 12:21 PM
Arnold admits his early positions were bogus He says inexperience and naivete were behind things like calling for mass elimination of state departments. (But it fooled enough voters to get...
Posted January 18, 2008 8:55 AM
Hillary Clinton campaigned today at Citizens of Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Compton and at Cal State Northridge — Andrew from Here in Van Nuys got some pics of everyone...
Posted January 17, 2008 10:24 PM
Democratic hopeful John Edwards is in town today. He'll drop in at SEIU Local 721, the public service workers, after noon and be endorsed by Councilman Richard Alarcon and SEIU...
Posted January 17, 2008 8:33 AM
Dubious media events most likely to make tonight's local news At 8 am, the media masses are invited to Burbank to observe the casting of actor statuettes for the SAG...
Posted January 17, 2008 1:03 AM
Media man-about-town Richard Rushfield is, these days, recognized mostly for his reviews of "American Idol" in the L.A. Times, where he's the website's entertainment editor. In his freelance life, Rushfield...
Posted January 17, 2008 12:56 AM
Barack Obama is stopping in at the Los Angeles Times this afternoon for a meeting with the editorial board. Tonight he has the big fundraiser in Rustic Canyon with the...
Posted January 16, 2008 3:15 PM
Riordan and Hahn veteran Diego Alvarez was appointed Deputy Mayor for Legislative and Intergovernmental Relations. This makes him Mayor Villaraigosa's chief liaison to federal, state and local governments and agencies....
Posted January 16, 2008 9:06 AM
City Council steps in on LAPD financial disclosure The Police Protective League gets through to council members with its protests over the rules for narcotics and gang cops. The Council...
Posted January 16, 2008 8:55 AM
Democratic contender Barack Obama has scheduled a "roundtable on economic opportunity" at a private home in Van Nuys tomorrow afternoon. He's also got a fundraiser Wednesday night at the Pacific...
Posted January 15, 2008 4:10 PM
This evening's CNN-Los Angeles Times-Politico poll shows California support for Sen. Hillary Clinton running strong — she beats Obama 47-31% in the state, with Edwards pulling 10%. Here are some...
Posted January 14, 2008 9:51 PM
The Center for Public Integrity has launched a website to keep track of the millions pouring into the presidential campaigns. Obama, they report, won the New Hampshire money primary. The...
Posted January 9, 2008 10:34 AM
Clinton defies the polls and the pundits and wins New Hampshire, 39% to Obama's 36%. McCain takes the Republican side, leaving Romney with the silver again. The Huckabee juggernaut stalled...
Posted January 8, 2008 11:31 PM
Safiya Jones, communications director for Councilman Bill Rosendahl, checks out. Her exit email: Dear All, It is with deep respect and gratitude that I say farewell to all of you....
Posted January 8, 2008 11:28 PM
Tina Daunt posits in her Cause Celebre column in today's Calendar that Hollywood's Hillary contingent is on the verge of buying tickets on the Barack Obama bus. On desks all...
Posted January 8, 2008 2:28 PM
Unhappy with the LAPD's new financial disclosure rules for drug and gang cops, the L.A. Police Protective League has bought radio time on KFWB and KABC for an ad that...
Posted January 3, 2008 8:17 PM
Democratic Rep. Tom Lantos announced today he has cancer of the esophagus and will leave Congress at the end of his term. Lantos, who represents the Bay Area, has been...
Posted January 2, 2008 1:44 PM
The Internet has spoken — no Los Angeles story came close to surpassing the interest in Antonio Villaraigosa and his affair with Telemundo rising star Mirthala Salinas. First came the...
Posted January 1, 2008 11:30 PM
Question: Where will Mayor Villaraigosa and Chief Bratton drag the media to announce the 2007 crime stats? AKA, a "historic reduction in homicides and violent crime." Presser is Wednesday at...
Posted January 1, 2008 2:59 PM
Let's face it, the fun place to be for a politics junkie right now is Iowa. Mayor Villaraigosa flew in Saturday (after skiing in Aspen with his kids, reportedly) to...
Posted December 31, 2007 12:32 PM
Remember when the City Council got around that whole referendum thing by, wink wink, making a few changes to its living wage policy for the LAX-area hotels? It worked. A...
Posted December 27, 2007 10:20 PM
A long story at Editor & Publisher.com on newspaper political blogs ledes with the veteran reporter who co-writes Top of the Ticket, the L.A. Times campaign blog. The story muses,...
Posted December 14, 2007 5:43 PM
The erstwhile LA Observed video maker pulled up to the Des Moines Register's Republican debate in Johnston, Iowa in a horse and buggy, trying to make a point about outdated...
Posted December 12, 2007 1:25 PM
No way the mayor's organizers could let this one slip away. Parents and teachers at six LAUSD campuses — including one of the high schools Mayor Villaraigosa attended, Roosevelt —...
Posted December 11, 2007 11:55 PM
Anonymous residents of Rancho Palos Verdes have demanded, through an attorney, that the city produce eleven years of public records — "all documents, communications, e-mail, memos, contracts and other writing...
Posted December 10, 2007 8:33 AM
Among them is director Oz E. Scott, appointed to the Cultural Heritage Commission. Release with bios follows....
Posted November 29, 2007 12:14 PM
Remember Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, the journalist who quit the L.A. Times in a huffy outburst and resurfaced as a successful novelist? (And who more recently mourned the death of Cathy Seipp.)...
Posted November 27, 2007 11:56 AM
Before a City Council committee voted yesterday to tentatively approve a controversial condo project in Van Nuys Valley Village, a planning staffer for the city called the developer and told...
Posted November 21, 2007 9:07 AM
In addition to his blog here at LA Observed, Bill Boyarsky is a regular columnist for Robert Scheer and Zuade Kaufman at Truthdig. They actually pay him, unlike here, and...
Posted November 19, 2007 10:25 PM
Ted Johnson, the Variety managing editor who writes the trade's politics blog, Wilshire & Washington, posts about Sen. Hillary Clinton's appearance Saturday at a local environmental gathering: At [a] global...
Posted November 18, 2007 2:40 PM
Michael Aguirre began "investigating" San Diego's PBS station after cancellation of a show where he was a frequent guest. As soon as light was cast on his stunt, he dropped...
Posted November 16, 2007 8:07 AM
Heidi Klum tries to appear charmed at the gift of pumpkin bread from Councilman Tom LaBonge, but most of the Victoria's Secret Angels seem — let's call it wary. Perhaps...
Posted November 14, 2007 10:11 PM
Events are starting up for Bill Boyarsky's major political history from University of California Press, Big Daddy: Jesse Unruh and the Art of Power Politics. Unruh, of course, was the...
Posted November 13, 2007 12:26 PM
USC's Norman Lear Center and pollster John Zogby tested for the link between political leaning and taste in entertainment. They conclude that 37% of the nation bleeds red, 39% fit...
Posted November 12, 2007 4:53 PM
During today's discussion of the expansion at Holy Cross hospital in the Northeast Valley, Councilman Richard Alarcon made City Hall reporters sit up in their chairs and look at each...
Posted November 7, 2007 11:40 PM
Another of Speaker Fabian Nuñez's legal dodges to squeeze money out of special interests has been uncovered. The LAT's Nancy Vogel and Evan Halper report that companies like AT&T, Verizon...
Posted November 2, 2007 9:08 AM
In January the Sacramento Bee baffled people by going against the trend and moving its online political coverage behind the pay wall — a high wall at $499 a year....
Posted November 1, 2007 10:54 PM
Pajamas Media's Ron Rosenbaum has got some chatter going with an item that hand-wrings about media gossip that the L.A. Times is sitting on an explosive story about sex and...
Posted October 31, 2007 12:20 PM
Hmm, guess it was all pre-arranged. Mayor Villaraigosa today will nominate H. David Nahai for the vacancy at the head of the Department of Water and Power. He quit the...
Posted October 29, 2007 8:12 AM
Ron Deaton made it official that he won't be returning to the top job at the Department of Water and Power. He either resigned (Times) or retired (Daily News) —...
Posted October 26, 2007 8:47 PM
State Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas has formed an exploratory committee to run for Supervisor Yvonne Burke's seat and filed his intent papers today. He told the Downtown News, "I am a...
Posted October 24, 2007 11:58 PM
Both the Times and Daily News have stories today on efforts to quietly reach a severance settlement with Gloria Jeff, the not very effective chief of the city Department of...
Posted October 12, 2007 8:35 AM
Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez has been taking a pounding in the Times for his extravagant spending with money stuffed in his pockets by the interests who grease lawmakers in this...
Posted October 11, 2007 10:34 PM
Lauritzen died today of a brain tumor, according to the Board of Education and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. He lost his reelection campaign for the board earlier this year. Lauritzen had...
Posted October 1, 2007 10:00 PM
Council President Eric Garcetti has been close to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa since the new administration took over in 2005, even though Garcetti actually endorsed then-Mayor Jim Hahn for reelection. Now...
Posted October 1, 2007 2:59 PM
With another of its occasional Sunday packages railing about city salaries, the Daily News posts online a database listing the name and salary of all 8,500 workers at the Department...
Posted September 30, 2007 11:04 PM
Mayor Villaraigosa has dumped Department of Transportation chief Gloria Jeff and replaced her with longtime City Hall hand Rita Robinson. Jeff lasted a year and a half, after being presented...
Posted September 28, 2007 4:19 PM
The Advocate, feeling pretty good after celebrating its 40th anniversary, is proud that news features editor Sean Kennedy scored an interview with Sen. Hillary Clinton at the recent Logo/Human Rights...
Posted September 25, 2007 10:47 PM
Tom Tugend in the Jewish Journal has more details on the incident where city building inspectors ordered an Orthodox shul to halt its services on the eve of Yom Kippur,...
Posted September 25, 2007 10:14 PM
Mayor Villaraigosa signs off on a deal brokered by Council President Eric Garcetti. It's less, obviously, than the $2.7 million Pierce and the City Council agreed to last year, but...
Posted September 21, 2007 6:55 PM
Marc Cooper is joining the Huffington Post as special correpondent and will direct coverage of the 2008 political campaigns for OfftheBus.net, a co-venture of the Huffington Post and NewAssignment.net, NYU...
Posted September 20, 2007 10:54 AM
Missed these in yesterday's flood of email — new appointees by Mayor Villaraigosa to the Cultural Heritage Commission and other city boards. Details after the jump....
Posted September 14, 2007 10:23 AM
Bill Boyarsky went back to the ethics commission yesterday for the first time since his fellow commissioners didn't elect him president. In fact, nobody seconded his nomination. They didn't let...
Posted September 12, 2007 1:55 PM
Constitutional law scholar and media quotemeister Erwin Chemerinsky was all set to be named dean of the new UC Irvine law school — he even signed the contract — but...
Posted September 12, 2007 12:54 PM
Remember when former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan was so perturbed at the L.A. Times that he dallied with starting his own rival paper? He even produced a prototype of...
Posted September 10, 2007 1:03 AM
After Ruby De Vera finished third in the 2005 City Council race that elected Jose Huizar, her boss — Councilman Ed Reyes — fired De Vera as his office manager....
Posted August 19, 2007 1:09 PM
The Times has a piece tomorrow saying that Mayor Villaraigosa and some other local electeds use more water at home than normal people — in some cases much more. OK,...
Posted August 9, 2007 11:34 PM
Controller Laura Chick says that "in our enthusiasm to put his expert abilities to work again for the city of Los Angeles, we lost sight of how this contract would...
Posted August 7, 2007 8:49 AM
Republicans in Los Angeles are being offered $15 to show up at an upcoming taping of the "Half Hour News Hour" on Fox. From the email: The Half Hour News...
Posted August 3, 2007 4:24 PM
Former Assemblyman Paul Koretz put himself in the running for the 5th council district race that will be fought the next two years over the seat to be vacated by...
Posted August 2, 2007 2:59 PM
Jonathan Diamond is leaving the City Attorney's press office after a bit more than two years. He had been assistant managing editor at the Los Angeles Business Journal, and plans...
Posted July 30, 2007 3:10 PM
Big weekend story in the LAT — a solid gotcha: L.A. official steered work to relatives Nearly $800,000 in contracts, often with inflated prices, went to family and firms with...
Posted July 29, 2007 11:40 PM
Dakota Communications political consultant Rick Taylor didn't like having his tactical memo exposed by the group fighting a Home Depot store in the Sunland area. So, in a not so...
Posted July 28, 2007 11:04 PM
A memo from political adviser Rick Taylor lays out Home Depot's plans to stack a City Council meeting next week with supporters of the store's desire to open a new...
Posted July 26, 2007 8:55 AM
Art Marroquin is leaving City News Service for the Daily Breeze, where he will take over the LAX and Port of Los Angeles beat. That's a major beat for the...
Posted July 17, 2007 5:14 PM
Lots of L.A. city council members are happy about this — a judge rejected a challenge to the ballot measure that extends their term limits. Voters in Los Angeles passed...
Posted July 17, 2007 4:06 PM
Invitations have gone out for a Sept. 8 Barack Obama fundraiser at Oprah Winfrey's home in the Santa Barbara area. The ante for entry is the usual $2,300, but those...
Posted July 17, 2007 9:25 AM
Fed up with delays in opening the filled-and-waiting swimming pool at the Miguel Contreras Learning Complex, activists have posted their own Craigslist ad to help the city hire the necessary...
Posted July 13, 2007 3:25 PM
Former Los Angeles city administrative officer William Fujioka, 55, was hired today by the Board of Supervisors as the county’s chief executive officer, at an annual salary of $310,000. He...
Posted July 10, 2007 6:19 PM
Department of Water and Power general manager Ron Deaton is in an intensive care unit in Costa Rica "with his family by his side" after suffering what a DWP statement...
Posted July 9, 2007 1:32 PM
Steven Maviglio, deputy chief of staff to Speaker Fabian Núñez, called the LA Weekly's Marc Cooper the state's worst political journalist on the state Democrats' website. Cooper calls it a...
Posted July 8, 2007 11:16 AM
The city council voted unanimously today to keep Eric Garcetti in the president's chair. Councilwoman Wendy Greuel also stays as pro tem. Garcetti re-appointed Jan Perry to the position of...
Posted July 3, 2007 12:32 PM
The Times editorial page calls Rocky Delgadillo "unfit" to be City Attorney and urges he do the right thing and resign. Under the headline "The honorable thing," the paper says:...
Posted July 3, 2007 8:36 AM
Two Southern California legislators, Sen. Edward Vincent and Assemblywoman Nell Soto, have been away from the Capitol injured or sick for six months of the 2007 legislative session — but...
Posted July 2, 2007 11:23 PM
Yesterday it was Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa giving a coveted spot on the full-time, paid Board of Public Works to labor attorney Julie Gutman. Today it's a bunch of commission appointments....
Posted June 26, 2007 8:35 AM
Now Michelle Delgadillo has business tax problems, but abruptly took care of them Friday in advance of a new round of stories. LAT, DN Popular progressive and previously faceless...
Posted June 23, 2007 12:46 PM
Now this should get interesting. LA Weekly political reporter David Zahniser, the hottest property on the City Hall beat, is jumping to the L.A. Times to cover Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa....
Posted June 21, 2007 11:29 PM
A panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that former Fleishman-Hillard executives Doug Dowie and John Stodder should remain free on bail while their cases are...
Posted June 20, 2007 11:24 PM
Word out of the Santa Monica courthouse is that Michelle Delgadillo came in this morning, pleaded no contest and received twelve months probation on top of paying fines. Stories forthcoming....
Posted June 20, 2007 2:38 PM
Michelle Delgadillo, wife of the city attorney, has an outstanding warrant for her arrest for failing to appear in court nearly nine years ago on charges of driving without insurance,...
Posted June 20, 2007 7:59 AM
Yes, the wife of City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo was driving the city-owned GMC Yukon when it hit a pole in 2004. Yes, he'll pay for the repairs — he wrote...
Posted June 18, 2007 5:20 PM
The Times editorial page launched a Rocky Watch box this morning that counts the days until City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo "comes clean" about who was driving his city-owned GMC Yukon...
Posted June 18, 2007 1:03 AM
The mogul's backing of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is called "the political equivalent of the Oscar" in the Cause Celebre column by Tina Daunt that plays on this morning's LAT...
Posted June 14, 2007 1:00 PM
It's amazing what basking in the Paris Hilton media glare can do for your profile. Even Radar Online is now covering Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, posting today about...
Posted June 12, 2007 10:38 AM
Today's New York Times reports on the rapprochement between LAPD chief William Bratton and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who "had not spoken to each other in 10 years....
Posted June 12, 2007 8:19 AM
Former editorial writer Andrew Malcolm handles the West Coast, Washington bureau editor Don Frederick the east for Top of the Ticket. What can one more blogger bring to the nation's...
Posted June 11, 2007 1:09 PM
Yes! Sometimes things just work that way. The DN editorial page staff has launched a new blog where editor Chris Weinkopf (from the right), editorial writer Mariel Garza (leftier) and...
Posted June 7, 2007 2:58 PM
State Assemblywoman Nell Soto, who is 80, has been out with a bad case of pneumonia since March — not that the political media has noticed. The San Gabriel Valley...
Posted June 5, 2007 11:14 PM
The Sacramento Bee's subscriber-only Capitol Alert reports today on a nasty fight between Valley assemblyman Lloyd Levine and his former chief of staff, Stuart Waldman. Levine fired the aide last...
Posted June 1, 2007 12:42 PM
The Times' Sacramento blogger Robert Salladay, who took the buyout, signed off this afternoon. Political Muscle will continue in some guise, he writes. From his farewell post: The Political Muscle...
Posted May 31, 2007 5:10 PM
The former city comissioner, already waiting trial on bribery and other charges, will be arraigned tomorrow on a new conflict of interest felony that stems from his time on the...
Posted May 31, 2007 4:21 PM
The L.A. Weekly's David Zahniser is out with a cluster of stories on one of the least talked-about big stories in Los Angeles: the push by planners, pols led by...
Posted May 31, 2007 8:56 AM
The Bush Administration has settled on Thomas O'Brien, chief of the criminal division for the U.S. attorney's office here and a former gang prosecutor in the district attorney's office, to...
Posted May 30, 2007 10:27 PM
The vote counters finally called it a day and proclaimed Georgia Mercer the winner in the March 15 runoff election for the L.A. Community College District. She edged challenger Roy...
Posted May 30, 2007 5:52 PM
Patrick McGreevy, a fixture at City Hall for the L.A. Times, is transferring to the buyout-impacted Sacramento bureau. Memo after the jump....
Posted May 25, 2007 2:11 PM
This time it's the city of Claremont getting all umbraged up about the Claremont Insider, recounted on the blog of San Garbriel Valley Tribune city editor Edward Barrera. Previous: Foothill...
Posted May 23, 2007 12:34 AM
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson won't announce Monday at the L.A. Press Club after all. His campaign sent out an urgent notice that the Millennium Biltmore downtown is where he'll...
Posted May 20, 2007 2:49 PM
That consulting contract we exposed on Tuesday that would have given newly elected state assemblyman Felipe Fuentes $20,000 in city funds for services to the 7th district, where he had...
Posted May 17, 2007 9:14 AM
Felipe Fuentes, the former chief of staff to 7th district councilman Alex Padilla, is on today's ballot running in the special election in the 39th assembly district to replace Richard...
Posted May 15, 2007 3:58 PM
Ace Smith, the strategist behind Antonio Villaraigosa's win in 2005, is now working on the presidential campaign of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. The weekend San Francisco Chronicle called him a...
Posted May 14, 2007 8:24 AM
Some stuff that caught my eye over the weekend... Chief Bratton is in treacherous waters trying to satisfy both the police union and the people of the city in the...
Posted May 13, 2007 11:45 PM
The anonymous Foothill Cities news and gossip blog pulled its recent posts on goings-on at Pomona city hall after receiving a cease-and-desist threat from the Pomona city attorney. The city...
Posted May 11, 2007 11:27 AM
Daniel Weintraub reports on the Sacramento Bee's Capitol Alert website that Robert Salladay, who writes the LAT's Political Muscle blog from Sacramento, plans to take the buyout. Here's the item,...
Posted May 11, 2007 9:05 AM
Since January, KMEX here has been blanketing its Spanish-language audience with encouragement for green card holders who are eligible to apply for U.S. citizenship. Now the project is going nationwide...
Posted May 10, 2007 11:21 AM
Valerie McDonald, daughter of the late Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald, added her name to the list of candidates in the 37th district special election and picked up the endorsement of Rep....
Posted May 10, 2007 8:54 AM
Mayor Villaraigosa, Chief William Bratton and police commission president John Mack have called a 3:30 news conference that the mayor's office bills as "to discuss changes in LAPD command staff"...
Posted May 7, 2007 1:11 PM
"I am not in prison! At least not yet, not for a few more weeks and hopefully never," John Stodder says in a Dear Friends email to city staffers, friends...
Posted May 4, 2007 8:57 AM
Three swastikas and an anti-Semitic message were found this morning on the front door of Councilman Jack Weiss' Sherman Oaks field office. The red-and-black Nazi symbols were printed on sheets...
Posted May 3, 2007 12:13 PM
Sen. Dianne Feinstein's opposition on behalf of neighbors posed too great an obstacle and the FBI will look for another location to build its new L.A.-area headquarters. The feds had...
Posted April 27, 2007 8:55 AM
The L.A. Times Sacramento bureau is looking to bring in a new body to help cover Gov. Schwarzenegger. Here's how the offer went out to the newsroom: From: Janet Clayton,...
Posted April 24, 2007 10:59 PM
Last week the staff of Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald put out the word that she would take a leave of absence to recuperate from an unstated form of cancer. Now AP...
Posted April 22, 2007 3:28 PM
The Center for Responsive Politics broke out the by-state contributions to the '08 presidential candidates: Sen. Hillary Clinton leads the way in mining California for bucks so far. Here are...
Posted April 18, 2007 3:05 PM
In the new W, former Variety scribe Gabriel Snyder explains the role of Hollywood political consultants and updates the roster of who works with whom. Noah Mamet, for instance, wrangled...
Posted April 18, 2007 9:11 AM
We posted a note when Dave Lesher opened a California office for the New America Foundation, so it's only right to observe that he's leaving. Lesher, the former editor of...
Posted April 17, 2007 10:59 PM
A three-judge panel of the state's 2nd District Court of Appeal unanimously kicked aside Mayor Villaraigosa's quest to rewrite democracy in Los Angeles and take power over the schools. They...
Posted April 17, 2007 12:15 PM
Assemblyman Lloyd Levine's office helpfully sends along the news that the boss just finished the Boston Marathon. His time was 3:10:03, good for a pace of 7:15 per mile. Levine...
Posted April 16, 2007 11:49 AM
Mayor Villaraigosa named Olga Garay as general manager of the Department of Cultural Affairs. She was Program Director for the Arts for eight years at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation...
Posted April 16, 2007 9:34 AM
The Daily News politics blog, mostly silent since March, has come back to life. Rick Orlov introduces himself from City Hall in today's Sausage Factory post. Excerpt: In my real...
Posted April 9, 2007 6:12 PM
President Bush has an evening fundraiser in Brentwood, there are accidents on both sides of the 405 near Wilshire, and the northbound Pasadena is backed up near I-5. Luckily, Bush...
Posted April 4, 2007 5:05 PM
Waiting to hear just when (or if, considering appeals) he goes to federal prison in the Fleishman-Hillard case, Doug Dowie is writing up a storm. In addition to the screenplays...
Posted April 4, 2007 11:46 AM
LAPD chief William Bratton did the deed today and requested a second term. "It's been an honor and a privilege to serve as Los Angeles' chief of police," he said...
Posted April 2, 2007 6:17 PM
The nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics ran the numbers on victorious Tribune suitor Sam Zell and calls him a political contributor who gives generously to both Democrats and Republicans. "Double-giving...
Posted April 2, 2007 10:06 AM
Student journalists at Occidental College dug through old literary magazines to find two poems that Sen. Barack Obama published in 1982. "What better than the poetry of a 19-year-old college...
Posted March 26, 2007 12:51 PM
President Bush gave Attorney General Alberto Gonzales a vote of confidence last night, but why let that ruin a good story? This morning's Daily Journal speculates on possible replacements for...
Posted March 21, 2007 8:14 AM
Technically, I guess it's the booboo of the week because it was in last Thursday's LA Weekly issue. But I just noticed: The article “Nasty Battle for Classroom Control” [March...
Posted March 20, 2007 10:50 PM
Mayor Villaraigosa is expected by many to eventually endorse Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for president, but for now he is saying nice things about several of the Democrats and being...
Posted March 16, 2007 8:37 AM
In this week's The Z Files, posted to the LA Weekly website more than a day early, David Zahniser reports on a recall move against 5th District councilman Jack Weiss...
Posted March 14, 2007 8:34 AM
Claudia McMahon joins the staff of Councilman Dennis Zine today as communications deputy. "She comes to us with a wealth of media experience including several years as a senior producer...
Posted March 12, 2007 1:32 PM
Mayor Villaraigosa's main photo op for Monday will be to announce that the only African and sole female elephant at the Los Angeles Zoo is being retired to the Performance...
Posted March 11, 2007 8:19 PM
Sacramento Bee reporter Aurelio Rojas visits with Doug Dowie (his former boss at UPI) in today's paper and says the story of the ex-editor and Fleishman-Hillard power broker "has parallels...
Posted March 11, 2007 12:39 PM
Assemblyman Richard Alarcon wins a seat on the City Council without a runoff, pulling 54.6% to Monica Rodriguez's 27.9%. (She was the one endorsed by all the newspapers.) Two precincts...
Posted March 7, 2007 7:55 AM
David Abel, publisher of The Planning Report and Metro Investment Report, now has a colloquium named after him. "Rethinking Governance in the Age of MySpace.com" will be held Thursday night...
Posted March 3, 2007 8:15 PM
The LA Weekly's David Zahniser asks how it is that Assemblyman Richard Alarcon spent more than $415,000 running for election when he didn't have an opponent. Zahniser's answer: "For starters,...
Posted March 1, 2007 11:52 PM
The dimensions of departing airports chief Lydia Kennard's deal to keep a hand in the pot at LAX are becoming clear. Nice deal, if you can get it. The Board...
Posted March 1, 2007 10:31 PM
Adolfo V. Nodal was general manager of the city's Cultural Affairs Department from 1988 until the Hahn Administration took over City Hall in 2001. (He left in January 2001, during...
Posted March 1, 2007 2:55 PM
Gov. Schwarzenegger took his vision of post-partisan love to the National Press Club in Washington and invoked the image of his cigar-sharing refuge back home in Sacramento: "In the courtyard...
Posted February 26, 2007 9:52 PM
The mayor today also nominated his new top people to run the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment. Carol Baker Tharp, the former executive director of Coro Southern California, gets the general...
Posted February 26, 2007 3:27 PM
David Zahniser in the LA Weekly ferrets out the story behind 4903 La Calandria Way, an El Sereno home where City Councilman Jose Huizar may or may not have lived...
Posted February 23, 2007 11:34 AM
When former Assemblywoman Cindy Montañez made like the good Democrat and dropped out of the race for City Council to make way for State Sen. Richard Alarcon, you just knew...
Posted February 21, 2007 2:42 PM
LA Observed's Jacob Soboroff took his video camera behind the scenes at today's crowded Barack Obama rally at Rancho Cienega Rec Center and chatted with Councilwoman Janice Hahn, Channel 4...
Posted February 20, 2007 10:55 PM
A memo just sent around the New York Times newsroom by executive editor Bill Keller announces a new political editor and greater attention to covering the 2008 campaign on the...
Posted February 20, 2007 3:27 PM
A 20-foot-long sign criticizing President Bush was purloined from a building facade on Abbot Kinney Sunday night. Venice Paper reports that "to steal the sign, thieves broke into [a] private...
Posted February 20, 2007 1:40 AM
The press release for this evening's Occidental College rally for former student Barack Obama uses the familiar nickname Oxy just like the locals do — but spells it Occi as...
Posted February 19, 2007 2:53 PM
National editor Suzanne Daley wishes the former L.A. staff correspondent well in a newsroom note posted at Romenesko: Charlie was part of the team that won the Pulitzer for the...
Posted February 14, 2007 12:33 PM
Hey, thanks. More than 75 caption ideas came in for the photo of Mayor Villaraigosa and Paris Hilton visiting at a Grammy party. Some cutlines were wittier than others, some...
Posted February 13, 2007 5:33 PM
The City Council vote was 13-0 for the new high-rise and shopping district to surround Disney Hall. "This is a historic day for Los Angeles," said Eli Broad, who has...
Posted February 13, 2007 1:30 PM
This YouTube video from Charlotte, North Carolina shows that we aren't alone in having regulars who amuse at city council sessions and other government meetings. He looks meek, but give...
Posted February 13, 2007 12:50 AM
First there was "Jack Dunphy" opining anonymously at the National Review Online. Now there is Sgt. Sunil Dutta writing in the latest issue of The Nation, under his real name,...
Posted February 12, 2007 1:38 AM
Thomas Mauk, the man who wouldn't be L.A. County CAO, wasn't the first to reject a deal with the Board of Supervisors. Dr. Joshua Perper, the Broward County (Fla.) Medical...
Posted February 12, 2007 1:25 AM
Politics in the small cities spread across Los Angeles County are often more colorful and vicious than those downtown. (Witness today's LA Weekly piece on threats against a citizen in...
Posted February 8, 2007 1:54 PM
Aaron Gross, the deputy chief of staff to Councilman Bill Rosendahl, is moving down to the third floor to be the City Council liaison for Mayor Villaraigosa. Taking Gross's place...
Posted February 7, 2007 4:25 PM
While debating the war at National Review Online two years ago, Times op-ed columnist from the right Jonah Goldberg offered the following wager: Let's make a bet. I predict that...
Posted February 7, 2007 9:41 AM
Ryan Knoll and Scott Schmidt, the Republican political and communication consultants behind RSC Partners, are the new landlords at LA Voice.org. Creator Mack Reed made it official tonight that he...
Posted February 6, 2007 11:55 PM
Convicted and sentenced former Fleishman-Hillard exec Doug Dowie has optioned a screenplay to Jonathan Sanger, a producer on The Elephant Man, The Producers and Vanilla Sky. "It's kind of an...
Posted February 6, 2007 10:55 PM
While the English-language media has largely given Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger a pass for his latest musings on ethnicity, Daniel Hernandez blogs that today's La Opinión went with a headline that...
Posted February 6, 2007 3:49 PM
City News Service has moved an advisory saying the Board of Supervisors rehired David Janssen, luring him out of retirement with a promise of new powers....
Posted February 6, 2007 3:28 PM
Considering that Controller Laura Chick billed Karen Sisson last night (and in a Jan. 16 press release) as the new City Administrative Officer, this announcement has a tinge of anti-climax...
Posted February 2, 2007 1:59 PM
Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald got some attention in today's Washington Post, but not the kind she orders her press aides to go get. The paper's Lois Romano says that Millender-McDonald, whose...
Posted February 2, 2007 10:27 AM
The City Elf blog went out to Controller Laura Chick's panel on "Women at the Top" last night and posted a report. On the panel were some of the highest-powered...
Posted February 2, 2007 1:39 AM
We told you yesterday afternoon that Rebecca Schoenkopf became the third exit in a week from the OC Weekly, and said her farewell "Commie Girl" column would run today. Well...
Posted February 1, 2007 5:19 PM
In San Francisco, that is. Mayor Gavin Newsom's former deputy chief of staff and current re-election campaign manager, Alex Tourk, resigned Wednesday after confronting his boss about an affair Newsom...
Posted February 1, 2007 9:44 AM
Bill Boyarsky directed the Times reporters covering the county Board of Supervisors for more than ten years. He doesn't blame Thomas Mauk for fleeing from the CAO job before he...
Posted January 31, 2007 3:41 PM
The City Council just voted 14-0 to rescind the living wage ordinance it imposed last year on LAX-area hotels. If the council had not caved, a referendum qualified by business...
Posted January 31, 2007 12:33 PM
FBI investigators have contacted current and former city officials in Monrovia and Fontana about Rep. Gary Miller's land sales, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune reported this morning. The Brea Republican,...
Posted January 30, 2007 8:17 PM
Doug Dowie insisted he was innocent in a three-minute speech to the court before sentencing. John Stodder gets 15 months. The Times web story doesn't say where they will serve...
Posted January 30, 2007 4:54 PM
KFWB and City News Service are reporting that Thomas Mauk, who the Board of Supervisors announced yesterday had accepted the job of chief administrative officer of Los Angeles County, has...
Posted January 30, 2007 3:34 PM
Catching up to a Rick Orlov story from the weekend (and Steve Hymon's in the Times), Controller Laura Chick says she is considering a return to the City Council when...
Posted January 29, 2007 1:26 PM
Thomas G. Mauk, the executive officer of Orange County since 2004, will start March 12 as chief administrative officer of Los Angeles County. The Board of Supervisors offered him the...
Posted January 29, 2007 10:33 AM
Mayor Villaraigosa gave the Democratic Party radio address this morning and said, with regard to the war in Iraq, "it's time for a new direction." Bipartisanship was the bigger theme,...
Posted January 27, 2007 3:11 PM
Cathy Warner, who is 63, announced her diagnosis at Tuesday's meeting of the Whittier City Council. "It's a responsibility as elected folks to make sure that our constituents know that...
Posted January 26, 2007 10:39 AM
Politico, the new politics website, has a nice early scoop. The site posted the full 140-page battle plan for the Rudy W. Giuliani presidential campaign that was reportedly lost in...
Posted January 24, 2007 11:35 PM
The Sacramento Bee today announced a big new risky online gamble: a premium politics website called CapitolAlert that costs a whopping $499 a year and gives subscribers early access to...
Posted January 24, 2007 10:16 AM
The PR industry anony-blog Strumpette is making fun today of Villaraigosa press deputy Matt Szabo. He came up in Steve Lopez's recent Los Angeles Times column on Hummer-driving transportation aide...
Posted January 23, 2007 1:46 PM
Martin had been chief of staff to Mayor Richard Riordan back in the day. A fellow Riordan Administration alum, City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, today named her general counsel for Los...
Posted January 18, 2007 4:48 PM
Rick Orlov gives a sneak peek at tomorrow's Tipoff column in the Daily News to LA Observed video blogger Jacob Soboroff — psst, there's a good item about City Attorney...
Posted January 14, 2007 7:51 PM
Judge Dzintra Janavs denied a motion by the mayor's lawyers to delay enforcement of her December ruling that AB 1381 is unconstitutional. The whole issue is headed to the state...
Posted January 11, 2007 2:57 PM
The Engineers and Architects Association at City Hall has voted to accept the recent contract deal negotiated with the city. Website....
Posted January 10, 2007 1:49 PM
Former Fleishman-Hillard executives Doug Dowie and John Stodder received a sentencing reprieve until January 30. They were convicted last May of federal charges in the overbilling of the city Department...
Posted January 8, 2007 3:41 PM
Can't remember the last time we posted so much on the weekend, including Mark Lacter's exclusive memo from LAT publisher David Hiller on rethinking the Times website. The menu for...
Posted January 8, 2007 1:16 AM
What a story. Two high-ranking city traffic engineers, Gabriel Murillo and Kartik Patel, were charged Friday with breaking into the city's automated traffic system and disabling the lights at four...
Posted January 6, 2007 9:32 AM
Now this is cool. The Jewish Journal has turned up and posted on its website an audio recording of the Rev. Martin Luther King giving a sermon on Feb. 26,...
Posted January 4, 2007 4:47 PM
There was yesterday's piece in the Christian Science Monitor (which prompted some email), now outgoing chief administrative officer David Janssen says Los Angeles County needs a powerful executive to make...
Posted January 4, 2007 1:11 AM
All that bravado about making the party scene on crutches is so last week. Gov. Schwarzenegger's office just announced that his broken femur will keep him away from tomorrow's inauguration...
Posted January 3, 2007 3:25 PM
Today's Christian Science Monitor takes up the question of whether Los Angeles County should have its own elected executive. Reporter Daniel Wood takes off from Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky's remarks at...
Posted January 3, 2007 10:37 AM
City news junkies will soon start hearing more about the "912 Commission." More formally called the Neighborhood Council Review Commission, it is required by the City Charter revamp that created...
Posted January 3, 2007 5:20 AM
We urged City Hall reporters to make the calls last week. Nobody got a story out of it, and now the news breaks on its own: Lydia Kennard is stepping...
Posted January 2, 2007 4:55 PM
You can't make this stuff up. Some gems from the archive: Antonio and the schools: Mayor Villaraigosa began the year talking tough about taking over LAUSD, compromised in the Legislature...
Posted January 1, 2007 1:38 PM
City ethics commissioner Bill Boyarsky took the on-line ethics course required of Los Angeles officials and found the exercise filled him with mixed emotions. "Campaign contributions -- the target of...
Posted December 29, 2006 12:25 PM
Judge Dzintra Janavs bitch slapped Mayor Villaraigosa over his LAUSD compromise, David Zahniser writes in the LA Weekly. Greg Stacy found out the hard way, after 600 weeks writing...
Posted December 28, 2006 6:02 PM
Former president Gerald Ford died today, Betty Ford announced. No location was given, but the Fords were residing in Rancho Mirage on the desert near Palm Springs. Ford lived to...
Posted December 26, 2006 10:58 PM
Print reporters who have to work the dead week between Christmas and New Year's are always scratching for news to fill the time and the papers, so here's a live...
Posted December 26, 2006 6:14 PM
Ex-mayor Richard Riordan already owns the Original Pantry downtown and Gladstone's 4 Fish on Pacific Coast Highway. Now he's close to closing a deal for the venerable Mort's Deli in...
Posted December 22, 2006 1:12 AM
A recent email reminded all the lawyers in City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo's criminal branch never to talk to reporters without clearance — and how they should recognize a newsworthy legal...
Posted December 22, 2006 12:35 AM
Superior Court Judge Dzintra I. Janavs this afternoon threw out AB 1381. The law that Mayor Villaraigosa and friends pushed through the Legislature would have given the mayor power over...
Posted December 21, 2006 4:51 PM
Not much of a hiatus today, it appears — but I promise to make up for it tomorrow. Peace in our time: the city and the Engineers and Architects Association...
Posted December 20, 2006 5:30 PM
Four in ten California voters (41.5%) cast their November ballots absentee. Los Angeles County voters not so much: just 26% of those who voted used the convenient absentee method. (Contrast...
Posted December 20, 2006 11:14 AM
In July, Ryan A. Jimenez left the staff of the Geffen Playhouse to become press secretary for Maria Shriver in Sacramento. He abruptly departed that job last week, says the...
Posted December 20, 2006 1:06 AM
Yeah, the former head of LAPD internal affairs cops to the affair with a sergeant under his command — but only for three years! Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally apologized (sort...
Posted December 19, 2006 5:55 PM
Nate Holden, the ex-city councilman and state legislator, bopped into the HMS Bounty on Wilshire Boulevard last night confident of two things. For 40 years the political consulting firm of...
Posted December 17, 2006 11:32 PM
The list of co-chairs for Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's inaugural includes leading California Democrats Pelosi, Feinstein, Boxer, Villaraigosa and Núñez — and even a few Republicans such as Pete Wilson...
Posted December 15, 2006 1:26 PM
When Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally got in trouble recently over issuing fake badges to friends and campaign contributors, he called the fellow Democrat who was assigned to investigate, Hector De La...
Posted December 15, 2006 12:12 PM
Both Felipe Fuentes and Cindy Montañez have been persuaded to drop out of the 7th council district special election and make way for Richard Alarcon. I assume Fuentes will now...
Posted December 12, 2006 12:29 AM
My cover story on Antonio Villaraigosa's first eighteen months as mayor has gone online at the still-in-transition Los Angeles magazine website. The piece delves into the roots of the mayor's...
Posted December 11, 2006 11:50 PM
School board incumbent David Tokofsky, a critic of the mayor's bill to dilute the board's powers, has filed papers with the City Clerk dropping his campaign for reelection, according to...
Posted December 9, 2006 9:20 PM
Jan Perry and her estranged husband, Douglas Galanter, blame him and his business problems for falling $270,000 behind on taxes and being late on mortgage payments. Legal separation papers and...
Posted December 9, 2006 2:46 PM
On January 1 Mayor Villaraigosa becomes responsible for three clusters of L.A. Unified schools — three high schools and the elementary and middle schools that feed students to them. It's...
Posted December 9, 2006 1:30 PM
There will be a new lineup of Los Angeles Times editors managing coverage of the next presidential race. The desk will be bicoastal: one editor in Washington, one here in...
Posted December 8, 2006 3:51 PM
Richard Bloom, the mayor from 2002 to 2004, is back again after the bi-annual dance of the slates on the Santa Monica City Council. You probably have to live there...
Posted December 7, 2006 12:21 PM
William Morris has sent along the press release on former Villaraigosa deputy Cecile Ablack, who we told you Friday was going Hollywood. The flackage — which notes that Chris Petrikin,...
Posted December 4, 2006 6:48 PM
Political Muscle, the Times' Sacramento politics blog, sees a certain resemblance between Borat Sagdiyev and newly elected state Assembly member (and ex-L.A. City Council member) Mike Feuer. Can you tell...
Posted December 4, 2006 2:19 PM
Political theater plays out: Mayor Villaraigosa accepted the fire chief's resignation this morning. Just now William Bamattre faced the cameras at a station in Panorama City, said the politics got...
Posted December 1, 2006 2:12 PM
Sure, the city promoted William Bamattre to fire chief eleven years ago hoping he would clean up the station house culture of abusing women and minorities that kept raising its...
Posted December 1, 2006 9:51 AM
If it seems as if State Sen. Richard Alarcon is always running for something, you aren't wrong. Last year he campaigned in the primary for mayor and lost, then immediately...
Posted November 30, 2006 11:05 AM
LAist redesigns wider with biggified headlines and pictures. For more on the dustup at USC's Daily Trojan, check out blogger Brendan Loy's rant-like dissection. The food blog Amuse-Biatch (just...
Posted November 29, 2006 5:30 PM
An email floating around Democratic circles suggests more turnover is in store for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's media operation. Press Secretary Joe Ramallo recently moved up 1st Street to run communications...
Posted November 28, 2006 2:17 AM
City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, through chief deputy Rich Llewellyn, has asked the City Council to waive its attorney-client privilege and divulge what it was told about the hazing case involving...
Posted November 21, 2006 3:39 PM
The Daily News' new columnist, writer of the weekend piece about Mayor Villaraigosa's childhood and personal exaggerations, has been around Los Angeles journalism since he landed a column at the...
Posted November 21, 2006 2:07 AM
Mayor Villaraigosa used his veto power for the first time and killed the $2.7 million payout to firefighter Tennie Pierce that was negotiated by City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo and approved...
Posted November 20, 2006 4:47 PM
After UC Irvine historian and controversial Los Angeles chronicler Mike Davis was called a "Marxist apocalypticist" by Gregory Rodriguez in the LAT's Current section on Sunday, he fired off an...
Posted November 20, 2006 4:28 PM
Mayor Villaraigosa wants to say something about the City Council's $2.7 million settlement with firefighter and hazing victim Tennie Pierce and has summoned the media at 4 pm. Talk radio...
Posted November 20, 2006 1:21 PM
Rupert Murdoch pulls the plug on the Judith Regan book and the Fox TV special. "We are sorry for any pain that his has caused the families of Ron Goldman...
Posted November 20, 2006 12:59 PM
Myths of Antonio: In a big blow-out on the Daily News front page, Tony Castro uses psychiatrists and psychologists to analyze Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's exaggerations about his past. Attempts to...
Posted November 19, 2006 3:48 PM
Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky says he's actively looking for support to put a county executive initiative on next year's ballot. Voters have rejected the idea of an elected county exec before,...
Posted November 17, 2006 5:00 PM
In 1999 contractor Dillingham-Ray Wilson filed a lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles for withholding payment for work done at the massive Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant on the coast...
Posted November 16, 2006 11:44 AM
New logo, typeface, departments and architecture to the magazine, which celebrates 45 years in December. It's the Power Issue, hitting newstands now with pieces by me on Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa,...
Posted November 15, 2006 2:15 PM
After today's Ethics Commission meeting, the panel's vice president writes, "Give me a cynical old pol who at least keeps his or her word...We voted 4-1 to send a public...
Posted November 14, 2006 3:53 PM
No challengers filed against City Council members Wendy Greuel, Tom LaBonge and Greig Smith by Saturday's deadline. Minor rivals tentatively filed their intentions to run against Herb Wesson, Bernard Parks...
Posted November 13, 2006 1:43 AM
Bill Boyarsky, the newest LA Observed contributor, used to be city editor of the Los Angeles Times, wrote a local column called "The Spin" for many years, and created the...
Posted November 12, 2006 4:59 PM
David Hiller, the new L.A. Times publisher who pushed out editor Dean Baquet last week, gave $1,000 to the Republican National Committee as recently as 2003. Since 2000, while an...
Posted November 12, 2006 12:37 PM
Ah, the rich cultural history, snow-capped mountains and sun-kissed beaches. Sounds lovely — too bad the Vernon link on Supervisor Gloria Molina's county website doesn't point to the strange little...
Posted November 8, 2006 2:31 AM
Up-to-the-minute results for selected races Click for the latest: Measure H (L.A. housing bond) — needed 2/3 to pass. Measure R (term limits/ethics) — surprise runaway. Rest of L.A....
Posted November 8, 2006 1:53 AM
The Downtown News steps out of character with an 1,100-word editorial defending the LA Weekly's decision to run a story reporting that labor leader Miguel Contreras died in a botanica...
Posted November 6, 2006 12:04 AM
Among all the election roundups and wrapups that will come your way before Tuesday, this one sounds different. Saturday's "Deadline L.A." on KPFK will extend to an hour and preview...
Posted November 3, 2006 12:59 PM
If you are queued up for a Guadalajara Dog at Pink's tonight about 8:15 and notice a faintly familiar, wonkish-looking man trying to cut the line, don't worry. It's just...
Posted November 3, 2006 11:38 AM
Yesterday's upheaval at the LA Weekly — first detailed here — sent observers of the paper and staffers buzzing into the night about what the future holds. At the afternoon...
Posted November 2, 2006 1:13 AM
News editor Alan Mittelstaedt is out and controversial columnist Jill Stewart is coming in to edit local news coverage. Mittelstaedt pushed the recent story on Miguel Contreras's death and has...
Posted November 1, 2006 5:40 PM
Rob Reiner's California Children and Families Commission, also known as the First 5 Commission, is the target of a stinging state audit. The commission "failed to properly award millions of...
Posted October 31, 2006 12:06 PM
Emilia Wright and Michael Wright, the daughter and son-in-law of Democratic Assembly member Karen Bass, died when their car went out of control on the southbound 405 freeway at La...
Posted October 30, 2006 1:10 PM
First, let me say that I want West magazine to flourish. I think it should be, and on some Sundays is, an important home for California-oriented journalism. Just today the...
Posted October 29, 2006 11:52 PM
Occidental College professor Peter Dreier, a leader of L.A.'s progressive political sphere, calls David Zahniser's story on the Miguel Contreras death cover-up "irresponsible, gutter, tabloid journalism, with no redeeming value"...
Posted October 27, 2006 12:25 AM
By popular demand, KCRW is moving the replay of Left, Right & Center back to Friday evenings at 7 pm. The politics talk show starring Matt Miller, Robert Scheer, Arianna...
Posted October 26, 2006 4:54 PM
City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo has made a bunch of senior personnel moves, including appointment of his first "special counsel to the City Council." That sensitive hand-holding job goes to Senior...
Posted October 26, 2006 1:15 PM
In most election years, the Los Angeles Times Poll would be out in the field this week with a final look at the governor's race and the other statewide offices...
Posted October 26, 2006 12:35 PM
LA Weekly news editor Alan Mittelstaedt was mentioned only obliquely in departed columnist Harold Meyerson's email blast last night. Mittelstaedt writes the new L.A. Sniper column, which Meyerson called a...
Posted October 26, 2006 10:24 AM
I didn't set out to post two Harold Meyerson items in a row, or three LA Weekly items. News is unpredictable, though, and they are all related. Meyerson, the newly...
Posted October 25, 2006 11:55 PM
Another David Zahniser headline grabber in tomorrow's LA Weekly: When labor leader Miguel Contreras collapsed of a heart attack last year, he wasn't in his car as the quasi-official line...
Posted October 25, 2006 9:42 PM
U.S. District Judge Terry Hatter ruled today that a ten-year-old legal agreement with the Bus Riders Union that prodded the MTA to spend $1.3 billion to improve service for the...
Posted October 25, 2006 3:27 PM
John Shallman, the campaign consultant for Measure R on the Los Angeles ballot, will soon be receiving a letter from City Controller Laura Chick, if he hasn't aready. She opposes...
Posted October 23, 2006 4:38 PM
New campaign ads for the billion-dollar housing bond on the Los Angeles ballot debut tomorrow, on cable and broadcast TV. Here's a sneak peek on YouTube. They were shot by...
Posted October 23, 2006 2:43 PM
Is La Opinión spinning its coverage of the scare letter sent to Orange County Latinos by Republican congressional candidate Tan Nguyen? Gustavo Arellano of the OC Weekly raises the question...
Posted October 23, 2006 2:33 AM
Daily News columnist Mariel Garza offers newly chosen L.A. Unified superintendent David L. Brewer some sage tips on how politics works in Los Angeles. Abridged: In L.A., it's all about...
Posted October 22, 2006 12:15 PM
Los Angeles magazine's RJ Smith takes notice of David Zahniser's run of noteworthy stories in the LA Weekly (and previously in the Daily Breeze) and pronounces him the top beat...
Posted October 20, 2006 1:05 AM
Today's San Francisco Chronicle editorial page wishes David Brewer luck but finds his selection to run L.A. Unified — and everything about the new governance here — rather curious. While...
Posted October 17, 2006 8:49 AM
Mayor Villaraigosa's office has issued a second statement on the selection of Vice Admiral Brewer to head the Los Angeles Unified School District. It's considerably more let's-get-along than yesterday's "deeply...
Posted October 13, 2006 1:56 PM
Admiral David Brewer, the newly designated superintendent of L.A. schools, will kick off this afternoon's Patt Morrison show at 2 pm on KPCC. He apparently will address working with Mayor...
Posted October 13, 2006 1:32 PM
Rep. Jane Harman isn't just wealthy, she is the most wealthy member of the House of Representatives, according to a database at the Center for Responsive Politics. Today's Daily Breeze...
Posted October 13, 2006 12:44 PM
While the mayor is away in China, the L.A. school board — in its last gasp as an important elected body? — today announced it will give the superintendent job...
Posted October 12, 2006 7:46 PM
The Board of Education was joined by Rep. Diane Watson (a former board member), the League of Women Voters, the California School Boards Association and the PTA in today's lawsuit...
Posted October 10, 2006 2:41 PM
Why yes, it is. On the cover of her new book, Democratic campaign steerer-turned-columnist and USC law professor Susan Estrich strikes an Ann Coulter pose. The pic, in fact, mimics...
Posted October 6, 2006 2:31 AM
NBC 4 was first to go with the story last night, but today's Times and Daily News have many more details on the Grand Jury testimony alleging sexual favors paid...
Posted October 4, 2006 2:25 AM
Channel 4 got pretty excited tonight about an Ana Garcia investigative report that Troy Edwards, a deputy mayor under Jim Hahn, ran up $18,000 in bills for massages and sex...
Posted October 3, 2006 10:23 PM
In today's story about Republican congressman Mark Foley's suggestive emails to congressional pages of the underage male variety, The Hollywood Reporter grabbed the wrong photo. After an urgent call for...
Posted October 2, 2006 2:09 PM
The mayor's office completed its appointments to the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment board and announced the new members of the East L.A. and South Valley planning commissions. Familiar names if...
Posted September 28, 2006 11:51 AM
The Orange County District Attorney's office is attacking the Times again, this time focusing on an investigative reporter working on a story about the office's chief spokeswoman, Susan Kang Schroeder,...
Posted September 27, 2006 8:29 AM
When the developer of controversial Runkle Canyon threw up new fences to keep out prying eyes, residents at the west end of Simi Valley upped the ante. They got hold...
Posted September 25, 2006 2:24 PM
The liberal Episcopal congregation in Pasadena won't turn over the emails and other documents requested by the IRS. The church's 26-member vestry voted unanimously to not cooperate in the government...
Posted September 21, 2006 1:36 PM
City Administrative Officer Bill Fujioka let it be known today that he will retire at the end of the year, giving the mayor another senior slot that he gets to...
Posted September 20, 2006 8:42 PM
Times columnist Steve Lopez met the former mayor at Yang Chow in Chinatown yesterday, and they talked about Hahn's new improved life out of the public eye: a steady lady...
Posted September 20, 2006 2:55 AM
Mayor Villaraigosa is taking the show on the road, heading first to London and Manchester next week at the request of Prime Minister Tony Blair to speak about global climate...
Posted September 20, 2006 12:31 AM
The California Clean Money Campaign emailed supporters last night that co-founder and chairman Ted Williams died yesterday morning.. Funeral services will be Thursday at Mt. Sinai. An excerpt of the...
Posted September 19, 2006 7:38 AM
Steve Sugerman, the first former Fleishman-Hillard executive to be sentenced for overbilling the city and other PR clients, today received three years probation and 250 hours of community service. Before...
Posted September 18, 2006 4:27 PM
The children's section of the Central Library downtown provided the setting for Gov. Schwarzenegger to sign the bill shifting some control of Los Angeles schools to Mayor Villaraigosa. "Today we...
Posted September 18, 2006 3:41 PM
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and State Sen. Gil Cedillo rode together as teenagers on the Eastside* and did battle arm-in-arm in the labor movement before teaming up when both got elected...
Posted September 14, 2006 4:14 PM
The anonymous blogger at Los Angeles City Nerd says that Councilman Bernard Parks hosted a Monday Night Football viewing party starting at 4 pm yesterday in the "media room" at...
Posted September 12, 2006 9:05 AM
The Wave reports that the civil rights attorney and former police commissioner died last night when her car plummeted down a slope near her home in the Hollywood Hills. Lomax...
Posted September 11, 2006 3:08 PM
The Los Angeles Times launched its California Politics website and blog today, four days after it was promised. There are links to today's LAT stories out of Sacramento, video of...
Posted September 11, 2006 9:37 AM
Once again a politician caught being himself in an unguarded moment says he has no idea how such words would ever come out of his mouth. Gov. Schwarzenegger apologized for...
Posted September 8, 2006 1:55 PM
The state's 2nd District Court of Appeals stayed a judge's order yesterday that the City Council's term limits measure should be taken off the November ballot. It stays on pending...
Posted September 8, 2006 1:55 PM
The governor of California, discussing the only Latina Republican in the state Legislature with chief of staff Susan Kennedy: "She seems to me like Cuban," Schwarzenegger says. "She's not Mexican,"...
Posted September 7, 2006 11:47 PM
Don't go looking for the new Los Angeles Times blog that was supposed to launch today as part of a new website, California Politics, per managing editor Doug Frantz's memo...
Posted September 7, 2006 3:36 PM
At yesterday's Angelides and Villaraigosa rally in South Los Angeles, I sat for a time with Pilar Marrero, the political columnist and Features Editor for La Opinión. In today's paper...
Posted September 6, 2006 1:20 PM
I haven't checked back to compare his past talk, but it feels like LAPD Chief William Bratton has been cranking up the rhetoric. In his latest monthly missive on the...
Posted September 6, 2006 11:42 AM
A New Republic piece critical of the County Human Relations Commission for honoring Maher Hathout of the Muslim Public Affairs Council has fueled opposition from the American Jewish Committee,...
Posted September 5, 2006 5:45 PM
Mayor Villaraigosa stumped for fading Democratic contender Phil Angelides today in San Francisco and in South Los Angeles, but it was the mayor's quick thinking this afternoon at Foshay Learning...
Posted September 5, 2006 4:49 PM
LAPD chief William Bratton could be headed for Scotland Yard or the mayor's office — of New York City. Or he could stick around Los Angeles for another five-year term....
Posted September 5, 2006 2:57 AM
Fear of the long knives from Chicago is rampant again in the Los Angeles Times newsroom at First and Spring streets downtown. You know people are skittish when a rumor...
Posted August 31, 2006 3:48 PM
SoCal talk radio host and blogger Hugh Hewitt's message and worldview can almost always be reduced to a simple statement: Republicans good, Democrats bad. On yesterday's nationally syndicated show, he...
Posted August 30, 2006 2:09 PM
At today's victory performance in South Los Angeles for his school reform measure, Mayor Villaraigosa and his aides pretty much stuck to the script: enthusiastic cheerings kids, lots of talk...
Posted August 30, 2006 1:32 PM
Democratic strategist Chris Lehane says Mayor Villaraigosa's school reform victory tonight in Sacramento show his political juice, but calls it "a very short-term win [and] an extraordinary long-term political gamble...
Posted August 29, 2006 10:41 PM
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's school bill got to 30 ayes in the Assembly before the voting was suspended about 5:20 pm. His side expects to get over the top before the...
Posted August 29, 2006 6:24 PM
The vote was 23-14. AB 1381, aka the Gloria Romero Educational Reform Act of 2006, now goes to the Assembly for a thumbs up in the education committee and a...
Posted August 28, 2006 1:33 PM
The blog of the Center for Asian Americans United for Self Empowerment disagrees with observers, I guess most notably DA Steve Cooley and the Daily News, who say that whether...
Posted August 28, 2006 3:09 AM
I just received an email from a local editor-in-chief which reads, "David Zahniser's piece in this week's LA Weekly .. is brilliant. I'm jealous." The subject of the rave is...
Posted August 23, 2006 6:42 PM
Pay to play is back in the news, in a big way. Former Hahn Administration power broker Leland Wong pleaded not guilty this morning to a twenty-count Grand Jury indictment...
Posted August 23, 2006 11:54 AM
NBC4 yesterday ran a half-hour special report on the political fight over the future of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Didn't see it, but the station's website has a...
Posted August 22, 2006 4:11 PM
Superior Court judge Dzintra Janavs (her again!) ordered about 200 "essential" city workers not to join the walkout called for tomorrow by the Engineers and Architects association at City Hall....
Posted August 21, 2006 3:40 PM
Blogger Zach Behrens (In the Oaks and LAist) is running for a seat on the Sherman Oaks Neighborhood Council. He's unopposed, so it looks like he should be addressed in...
Posted August 21, 2006 1:27 PM
Mayor Villaraigosa took his LAUSD campaign to UTLA's leaders on Sunday in La Quinta and got a good reaction, despite some catcalls at the start. Up north in San Francisco,...
Posted August 21, 2006 9:56 AM
In my Politics piece this month for Los Angeles magazine, while talking about South L.A. black politics post-Yvonne Burke I observe that reporters typically resist assignments at the county Hall...
Posted August 16, 2006 1:23 PM
Bob Sipchen went to Sacramento for the show today and says that Supt. Roy Romer and Board of Education president Marlene Canter have given up trying to substantially alter the...
Posted August 14, 2006 4:23 PM
They talked and talked first for going on three hours, but in the end the City Council fell into line behind Mayor Villaraigosa and voted unanimously to endorse his LAUSD...
Posted August 11, 2006 4:32 PM
The Central City Association, the lobbyists for downtown business interests, endorsed Mayor Villaraigosa's bill in the Legislature to put the Los Angeles schools partly under his control. We'll see in...
Posted August 11, 2006 11:38 AM
The Times has posted the full list of its anointed 100 most powerful Southern California players. After the first ten, which I gave you here this morning, they are in...
Posted August 10, 2006 12:47 PM
It's not as surprising as, say, usually reliable Hollywood Democrats Spielberg, Katzenberg and Saban endorsing Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, as they did last week. Mel Gibson has well-known religio-conservative leanings. Still,...
Posted August 8, 2006 6:14 PM
The City Council imposed new rules of decorum for public speakers at the thrice-weekly meetings: one minute instead of two, no addressing a specific council member (let's see them defend...
Posted August 1, 2006 5:41 PM
This all began back on July 21 when longtime ACLU member Joel Bellman released an open letter to Ramona Ripston, head of the Southern California ACLU, protesting an award to...
Posted August 1, 2006 5:23 PM
Mayor Villaraigosa's preferred course toward reform of the LAUSD — Assembly bill 1381 — came up for endorsement before the the City Council's Intergovernmental Relations committee this morning. When no...
Posted July 28, 2006 11:34 AM
News out of Mayor Villaraigosa's office is that Rafael López will serve as interim executive director for the Commission on Children, Youth, and Their Families, and Ken Simmons will do...
Posted July 27, 2006 5:01 PM
Rushmore Cervantes is general manager of El Pueblo, the City Department with responsibility for Olvera Street. He will come to City Hall East as Controller Laura Chick's chief deputy controller....
Posted July 27, 2006 4:29 PM
The Times editorial page today follows the Daily News in wagging the finger of shame at the politicos and local leaders who lined up to throw money at disgraced ex-councilman...
Posted July 25, 2006 1:36 PM
There's some chatter out there about today's Daily News editorial lambasting last week's Holmby Hills fundraiser for Martin Ludlow, the ex-councilman who had to give up his County Fed post...
Posted July 24, 2006 12:44 PM
Karen Constine, the former chief of staff to Laura Chick and director of the California Film Commission under Gov. Gray Davis, gets the mayor's nod. Details in the following press...
Posted July 21, 2006 3:44 PM
KCRW thought they had U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad all lined up to guest with Warren Olney on "To the Point" at 1 pm, but the station regrets to...
Posted July 21, 2006 12:08 PM
Longtime ACLU of Southern California supporter Joel Bellman yesterday circulated an open letter to executive director Ramona Ripston protesting the group's decision to honor Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the...
Posted July 21, 2006 9:32 AM
Supt. Roy Romer used today's "state of the schools" speech to stress that campuses are getting better under his watch and to blast Mayor Villaraigosa for deploying "propaganda" that undermines...
Posted July 20, 2006 6:31 PM
Back in April 2004, when he was under full attack for the Fleishman-Hillard deal with DWP that began under Dick Riordan, then-Mayor Jim Hahn banned PR contracts with city agencies....
Posted July 19, 2006 5:12 PM
LA Weekly's Steven Leigh Morris looks at how the Latino Theater Company, which had never run a theater and possessed few assets, was awarded control of the city-owned Los Angeles...
Posted July 19, 2006 12:56 PM
Things seem kind of cozy down in the second city. The newly elected mayor of Long Beach, Bob Foster, will be "officially sworn in" today by the columnist for the...
Posted July 18, 2006 9:26 AM
When I posted in the Morning Buzz about Rick Orlov's story on the relatively new Los Angeles Civic Alliance, the members' names had not yet been included on the Daily...
Posted July 17, 2006 2:32 PM
The Chronicle of Philanthropy has a new job posting of some importance to Mayor Villaraigosa and his Los Angeles Unified School District ambitions: Position: Superintendent of Schools Organization: Los Angeles...
Posted July 14, 2006 4:54 PM
Came across a nice shot of the council chambers at City Hall the way it (and the elected members) looked during President Franklin Roosevelt's first term. The caption info identifies...
Posted July 11, 2006 5:46 PM
CityWatch is out with an extra edition on the weekend election of downtown activist Brady Westwater as chair of the Neighborhood Council Congress. Westwater (right, with vice chair Jim Alger)...
Posted July 10, 2006 4:26 PM
Lawyer Helen Zukin is City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo's newest appointee to the City Ethics Commission. Zukin, a temporary judge in the Los Angeles County Superior Court system, previously chaired the...
Posted July 10, 2006 4:12 PM
• Protesters looked on as bulldozers began ripping out the South Los Angeles community garden where Mayor Villaraigosa couldn't broker a deal to mollify property owner Ralph Horowitz. • Convicted...
Posted July 5, 2006 12:30 PM
Los Angeles airport chief Lydia Kennard today described $1.2 billion worth of coming improvements to LAX: an expanded Bradley International Terminal, realignment of the southernmost runway to improve safety and...
Posted June 29, 2006 9:23 PM
Brad Friedman's Los Angeles-based liberal blog has been all over the vote irregularity issues in the Busby-Bilbray congressional race in San Diego County. Friedman is scheduled to appear tonight on...
Posted June 29, 2006 2:41 PM
Speaking of Animal Services, the department recently accepted an offer from Hooters to throw a benefit bikini contest. Hooters has done it for other animal causes, and for this one...
Posted June 27, 2006 5:38 PM
The Los Angeles Department of Animal Services—whose chief, Ed Boks, has a blog—has begun giving websites a little piece of code that will display a pitch to adopt specific pets...
Posted June 27, 2006 1:34 PM
Mayor Villaraigosa and the MTA unions will announce—and I quote—a "historic settlement" at the transit agency's office tower at 1:15 this afternoon. The mayor's office says it's historic because it's...
Posted June 27, 2006 9:52 AM
I haven't mentioned it much because it's frankly kind of lame, but for 111 days the Times has kept two goldfish in an aquarium supposedly living on water taken from...
Posted June 26, 2006 4:55 PM
As Mariel Garza notes in today's Daily News, Saturday will mark Antonio Villaraigosa's anniversary as mayor. With murmurs out of Sacramento that the mayor's school compromise may be no sure...
Posted June 25, 2006 11:54 PM
• Developer and big-time Villaraigosa contributor Richard Meruelo was banned from building on his land near Union Station for five years for tearing down some dilapidated structures without permits, as...
Posted June 25, 2006 8:32 PM
Antonio Villaraigosa added another first to his resume on Saturday. He became the only mayor to play in the annual Hollywood Stars softball game at Dodger Stadium. Along with Lou...
Posted June 25, 2006 12:50 AM
Civil rights attorney—and long-time thorn in the side of local law enforcement officials—Stephen Yagman has been indicted on nineteen counts of income tax evasion. The indictment dated June 1 was...
Posted June 23, 2006 12:25 PM
The Associated Press story out of Sacramento bills this morning's agreement (earlier post) on the LAUSD as a compromise in which Mayor Villaraigosa gets a little control over the schools,...
Posted June 21, 2006 2:02 PM
Hmm. This will incite more grumbles that the mayor's trip to Sacramento was at least partly a choreographed show. Villaraigosa, Democratic leaders in the Legislature and the teachers unions today...
Posted June 21, 2006 11:14 AM
I reported the other day on John Stodder's motions for a new trial or acquittal in the Fleishman-Hillard billing case. Doug Dowie, his former boss at Fleishman, also filed similar...
Posted June 21, 2006 4:16 AM
• Tribune chief Dennis J. FitzSimons vows to stand up to the big bad Chandlers. • A spill of cooking oil closed three lanes of the Long Beach Freeway this...
Posted June 20, 2006 5:28 PM
I didn't notice this anywhere else, but the Daily Breeze story on yesterday's dueling Sacramento dog-and-pony shows over LAUSD control mentions that Mayor Villaraigosa has retained KP Advocates to help...
Posted June 20, 2006 11:44 AM
The elections director in King County, Washington is coming here to take the job of chief deputy registrar of Los Angeles County. Dean Logan's tenure in Seattle has been anything...
Posted June 20, 2006 11:24 AM
John Stodder, the former Fleishman-Hillard executive convicted last month of wire fraud in the exaggerated-billings case, filed motions today seeking acquittal or a new trial, alleging the government failed to...
Posted June 19, 2006 11:22 PM
Today's Daily Journal carries an Erin Park story saying that the City Attorney's office spent $10 million on an outside law firm to defend the city against a lawsuit over...
Posted June 19, 2006 10:56 PM
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's commencement speech Friday at UCLA praised his mother Natalia for supporting him and addressed the news that African American enrollment is down. "I worry for the future....
Posted June 19, 2006 2:51 PM
Patrick O'Connor cartoon in the Daily News. Full uncropped version....
Posted June 18, 2006 8:47 PM
Well I lied; my desk is anything but clear. Here are some final news notes from the day though. Have a good weekend: • The Times replies to this morning's...
Posted June 16, 2006 3:53 PM
The New York Times looks from afar at Jerry Brown's quest to be attorney general of California—a quest that figures to take a big step forward with tomorrow's whuppin' of...
Posted June 5, 2006 3:05 AM
Convicted editor-turned-Fleishman-Hillard executive Doug Dowie called no defense witnesses in his trial, but he sat down at the Pacific Dining Car for an exclusive interview with two of his former...
Posted May 30, 2006 3:28 AM
♦ USC isn't thrilled about the mayor's (and others') plan to drastically alter the Coliseum's innards to entice the NFL. University prez Steven Sample's letter uses phrases like "athletic program...
Posted May 23, 2006 5:12 PM
Folks in Colorado have much more connection to Roy Romer than Angelenos do. Before he came down to Los Angeles to run the school district, the 77-year-old superintendent served three...
Posted May 22, 2006 2:28 AM
Sure we all know that Mayor Villaraigosa has spent a lot of time on the road—but this much? Dean Singleton, Zuma Dogg and Doug Dowie are also in the news....
Posted May 22, 2006 2:08 AM
Seems that City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo's resume, and his image, have been a tad inflated all this time. Patrick McGreevy in Saturday's LAT: In various speeches, campaign ads and written...
Posted May 21, 2006 6:17 PM
CJR Daily—"real-time media criticism from the Columbia Journalism Review"—has watered down its recent praise for the Los Angeles Times series about problems with the Kaiser Permanente kidney transplant problem. The...
Posted May 21, 2006 5:52 PM
Councilman Tom LaBonge's penchant for handing out loaves of pumpkin bread made by nuns at Hollywood's Monastery of the Angels makes the pages of this week's Los Angeles Independent. Notice...
Posted May 18, 2006 3:41 PM
It's not every day that a guy goes home from a bad day in federal court—conviction on twelve felonies—and blogs about life. Former Fleishman-Hillard VP John Stodder, of course, has...
Posted May 17, 2006 7:50 PM
Franklin Avenue caught Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's appearance on "American Idol" last night, telling finalist Katherine McPhee that she was to sing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." She's the first Angeleno to...
Posted May 17, 2006 1:06 PM
Fired Fleishman-Hillard boss Doug Dowie and his former deputy in the Los Angeles office, John Stodder, were found guilty today of cheating on billings to the city Department of Water...
Posted May 16, 2006 3:54 PM
It's hard enough campaigning for state Attorney General against Jerry Brown when no one in Northern California has heard of you or has an opinion. But when you are in...
Posted May 16, 2006 2:04 AM
It's always been a mystery why Highland Avenue through the heart of Hollywood is so poorly engineered—especially the lack of left-turn signals at Hollywood Boulevard, given the number of vehicles...
Posted May 15, 2006 11:55 AM
The Los Angeles Police Department launched its official blog with a burst of opinion (a rebuttal to an editorial in the Daily News) and a welcome message from Chief William...
Posted May 11, 2006 11:15 PM
♦ Answer: Mayor Villaraigosa, Sheriff Baca, Lakers owner Jerry Buss, Dodgers owner Frank McCourt, Magic Johnson, Natalie Cole, Johnny Grant and Councilman Tom LaBonge. Question: Who shows up when Channel...
Posted May 8, 2006 3:16 PM
One day after Alex Padilla showed his hand and announced the endorsement of City Council President Eric Garcetti and nine council colleagues, Cindy Montañez countered with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. The...
Posted May 6, 2006 10:53 PM
In case there was any uncertainty, yes Mayor Villaraigosa did depart from yesterday's march podium to fly to Dallas and join Gov. Schwarzenegger in pitching National Football League owners. Today...
Posted May 2, 2006 12:57 PM
No hug for Villaraigosa's school plan, social engineering at Hollywood and Vine, ten percent raise for cops, Fred Muir on the stand and journalists plan to meet tonight in Spanish....
Posted April 27, 2006 2:13 AM
Would you believe 200 luxury boxes and 24,000 fewer seats for most events, but with 15,000 of them designated as club seating? Those are some of the details of...
Posted April 25, 2006 6:48 PM
The May cover of Los Angeles pushes 52 Dream Weekends, but the talker story of the month is Jesse Katz's piece on the pets we kill and Ed Boks, newly...
Posted April 25, 2006 1:20 PM
You know the story going around today about threats against Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa over his immigration position? Jazmín Ortega had it April 14 as the lede in La Opinión, quoting...
Posted April 25, 2006 12:37 PM
Sunday's New York Times has a piece about the origin of the friendship between supermarket czar Ron Burkle and former President Bill Clinton. dating it to the aftermath of the...
Posted April 22, 2006 8:18 PM
City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo's quest to become the attorney general of California just isn't picking up much momentum. The Field Poll out today shows former governor Jerry Brown with a...
Posted April 20, 2006 11:11 PM
Bob Kholos was a KMPC and Radio News West radio reporter in Los Angeles who became the first press secretary for newly elected mayor Tom Bradley in 1973. At a...
Posted April 20, 2006 4:28 PM
Budget day for the mayor, bad news in the LAT for Cardinal Mahony, the LA Weekly profiles half of Los Angeles and Dean Singleton closes in on three Norcal newspapers....
Posted April 20, 2006 1:49 AM
Mayor Villaraigosa came up with some surprises in the school takeover details tucked into his State of the City rally speech this evening. He proposed a school board with diminished...
Posted April 18, 2006 6:12 PM
Speaking of mispronouncing City Hall names, I listened tonight to the audio stream of LAPD chief Bill Bratton taking calls on the "Ask the Chief" segment on this afternoon's Patt...
Posted April 17, 2006 10:35 PM
With every passing day it becomes less common to hear the mayor's name mangled as Veela-ga-rosa or Veeya-gree-osa. By the time he runs for president, everybody should have the pronunciation...
Posted April 17, 2006 5:22 PM
It's Pulitzer day in newsrooms, UTLA day on the school reform front, and rehearse for the big speech day in the mayor's office. Today's Morning Buzz also touches MediaNews Group,...
Posted April 17, 2006 1:47 AM
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa hasn't had a lot to say about immigration lately. It wasn't high on his agenda until 500,000 or more people marched through downtown. He did a media...
Posted April 16, 2006 11:02 AM
A light serving today since I'm driving back to L.A. from upstate, but you should turn the page anyway for some Devin Brown news, some media tidbits and a clutch...
Posted April 13, 2006 1:51 AM
Residential trash pickup in Los Angeles has been free (meaning taxpayer-supported) pretty much forever, but as of today the officially sanctioned term for that is "subsidized." Mayor Villaraigosa proposed to...
Posted April 12, 2006 11:36 PM
Antonio plans to impose a trash fee as the build-up to The Big Speech continues...Monique Moret names names in the Fleishman-Hillard trial: recognizable names...plus racism in the LAFD, black market...
Posted April 12, 2006 1:56 AM
Mayor Villaraigosa will unveil his master strategy for taking control of the Los Angeles Unified School District in a speech next Tuesday, while the teachers union plans to beat him...
Posted April 11, 2006 10:12 AM
Lots of City Hall tongues clucking about the news (published in the Daily Breeze) that Stacey Jones, the #2 exec at the Port of Los Angeles, is leaving after 25...
Posted April 7, 2006 3:27 PM
♦ Authorities released surveillance tape of suspects in the killing of Deputy Maria Rosa. ♦ Opening statements in Dowie-Stodder trial. ♦ Three ski patrol members at Mammoth Mountain died when...
Posted April 6, 2006 4:56 PM
Downtown's largest property owner gets his name in the media again—this time coming into the sights of LA Weekly investigative reporter Jeffrey Anderson for razing a new, possibly toxic purchase...
Posted April 6, 2006 12:18 PM
Left unsaid in today's LAT story on the mystery illness of Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald is that her son was in federal court in Pasadena yesterday appealing his conviction on corruption...
Posted April 6, 2006 10:44 AM
A jury in Orange County ruled that City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo improperly retaliated against a deputy in his office and ordered the city to pay $1.5 million to Lynn Magnandonovan....
Posted April 6, 2006 12:52 AM
For months the leadership of City Hall's Engineers and Architects Association has been chasing Mayor Villaraigosa around the city—literally. They show up to disrupt his events and media appearances. Today,...
Posted April 4, 2006 1:21 PM
♦ Deputy City Controller Ruben Gonzalez is leaving Laura Chick's staff after four years to be a vice president at Englander and Associates, the lobbying firm headed by Harvey Englander. Gonzalez...
Posted April 3, 2006 6:33 PM
♦ As expected, Mayor Villaraigosa did recommend Cecilia Estolano to be CEO of the Community Redvelopment Agency. Villaraigosa's CRA commissioners have to approve her, but they could just mail that in....
Posted March 31, 2006 5:47 PM
...you do things like this and send out press releases on it: Los Angeles City Councilmember Alex Padilla today announced that he has filed an amicus brief in support of...
Posted March 31, 2006 4:27 PM
Rick Jacobs, the Howard Dean campaign chair in California and regular chipper-in of thoughts at the Huffington Post, really didn't like the phone call he got from Los Angeles politics...
Posted March 31, 2006 2:21 PM
Scary talk about bird flu, a third deputy sheriff dies, Cecelia Estolano for CRA chief, Los Angeles lawyers breaking away and a little online dust-up between CBS and the Times'...
Posted March 31, 2006 2:43 AM
♦ Deputy Maria Cecilia Rosa's death was homicide, not an accident, with robbery the apparent motive. The Sheriff's Department says her gun had not been fired. ♦ About one hundred Westchester High...
Posted March 29, 2006 1:39 PM
News that Sharon Stone will guest star on the new Showtime series "Huff" as a larcenous "high-powered Los Angeles public relations executive" caused the PR industry blog Media Orchard to...
Posted March 29, 2006 2:25 AM
Everybody is vowing to get tough if students walk out again today, but we'll see how that goes...Villaraigosa's political squeeze...Bratton calls the freeway swarms "insanity" (and he's right)...That just might...
Posted March 29, 2006 2:14 AM
Mayor Villaraigosa is meeting about the immigration demonstrations this afternoon with LAPD Chief William Bratton, Sheriff Lee Baca, Los Angeles Unified Superintendent Roy Romer and the district's police chief Lawrence...
Posted March 28, 2006 2:18 PM
♦ 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...
Posted March 24, 2006 5:50 PM
From the City News Service wire: Eds: At 3:30 p.m., Andrew Ahlering, a candidate for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, will hold a news conference to discuss his...
Posted March 23, 2006 11:40 AM
Every Los Angeles political story has a backstory. At his blog, John Stodder takes off from the recent news about Sunshine Canyon landfill to reconstruct how, when he was the...
Posted March 22, 2006 11:18 AM
Gustavo Arellano at the OC Weekly's blog gets in the face of "Chicano yaktivists" (his term) who are attacking Daniel Hernandez of the sister LA Weekly for his hard-hitting story...
Posted March 22, 2006 1:23 AM
Turn the page for items on Dean Singleton's California strategy, Sheriff Baca's Compton strategy, a Saudi prince gets booed at Town Hall Los Angeles, celebrities at the fashion shows and...
Posted March 22, 2006 12:58 AM
Marco Firebaugh, a Democratic candidate for the state Senate in the 30th district of southeast Los Angeles County, died this morning or last night. Liver illness is reportedly the cause....
Posted March 21, 2006 10:32 AM
New York mayor Michael Bloomberg stepped before the cameras today at P.S. 282 in Brooklyn and introduced Antonio Villaraigosa as Alcalde Veea-ga-rosa, before correcting his pronunciation (and switching, mercifully, to...
Posted March 20, 2006 2:13 PM
The Valley Industry and Commerce Association, arguably the most influential advocacy group for the Valley, this morning named Brendan Huffman its new president. Huffman is currently the director of public...
Posted March 20, 2006 12:52 PM
Turn the page for Orlov's return...how Heidi Fleiss got bugged and screwed...a new lead Tinseltown Spywitness...Huffington's mea culpa...political theater downtown...and the return of Fashion Week. Those items and a lot...
Posted March 20, 2006 1:38 AM
♦ The Daily News talks up public financing of city election campaigns, but ethics commissioner Bill Boyarsky—who proposed it—writes in the LAT that he's getting tired of wasting his time: "I...
Posted March 19, 2006 1:01 PM
♦ Rep. Maxine Waters' and her husband's presence at the SEIU's endorsement interviews in January has candidates in an uproar and got the attention of the FBI, the Los Angeles Wave...
Posted March 17, 2006 3:31 PM
If you have Flash installed, you can click below to watch Council President Eric Garcetti's video about Mayor Villaraigosa from last night's Los Angeles Political Roast. (Earlier post.) If you...
Posted March 17, 2006 11:30 AM
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's political ambition, lust for the spotlight, desire to take control of the schools and supernaturally white teeth all came in for some playful ribbing at tonight's Los...
Posted March 16, 2006 11:55 PM
Because it feels like a notesy kind of day... The Cultural Heritage Commission will recommend to the City Council that the Derby in Los Feliz be declared a historic-cultural monument....
Posted March 16, 2006 3:15 PM
Dan Laidman, who became the new guy in the Daily News' City Hall bureau just last summer, is jumping to Copley News Service to fill the shoes of David Zahniser....
Posted March 16, 2006 12:11 PM
Seeing old friends in federal court...fining Pierce O'Donnell and Martin Ludlow...Giving Steve Cooley a pass...Arnold and Sirhan...Tear-downs in Century City...and Larry King gets no respect again. Those items and quite...
Posted March 15, 2006 2:20 AM
Media and blog coverage of the South Central Community Garden mostly celebrates a story line of plucky, poor South L.A. residents banding together in agrarian fellowship to stand up to...
Posted March 14, 2006 10:56 PM
Bad enough that the mayor and his wife can't go to the movies without being reported on, as we noted yesterday. Now someone else who claims to have been at...
Posted March 14, 2006 5:29 PM
Either L.A. County's Board of Supervisors stood up to the final lobbying swarm or all the deals for friends got written into the staff recommendations. But the Supes today OK'd...
Posted March 14, 2006 3:46 PM
Chris Arellano—the school board candidate without the degrees he claimed and with the criminal record he played down—has dropped out of the runoff campaign, the LA Weekly reports online. City...
Posted March 14, 2006 3:36 PM
Bob Hertzberg's moribund website BIGIdeas4LA.com has finally been taken off life support and allowed to pass into the Internet afterlife:...
Posted March 13, 2006 10:01 AM
Linking Brad Grey to Pellicano through Linda Doucett...two heads for Universal?...those stinking badges for friends of Lee Baca...seeing purple along Wilshire Boulevard...Robert Altman's new heart...your NCAA brackets...and borrowing a familiar...
Posted March 13, 2006 1:45 AM
Police chief William Bratton's unofficial bicoastal lifestyle makes the news again. Bratton released his travel records to the Los Angeles Times' Patrick McGreevy, who calculated that the chief was outside...
Posted March 11, 2006 2:40 PM
LAPD crime maps go interactive (left)...It's going to be cold and windy today...Praising Brokeback despite the Oscar upset...blocking traffic for the mayor...questions but few answers about Herb Wesson Jr....reviews of...
Posted March 10, 2006 2:34 AM
"It is clear from this initial review that there is a disturbing lack of transparency and accountability at LAUSD." Release after the jump....
Posted March 9, 2006 1:39 PM
The mayor today offered up Gloria Jeff to run the Department of Transportation, subject to City Council approval. Jeff resigned last month as director of the Michigan Department of Transportation,...
Posted March 9, 2006 1:24 PM
Laura Chick locks and loads to talk about schools...the mayor gets ready to name a transportation chief...Daniel Hernandez on secret talks to save the South L.A. farm...Ludlow pleads after being...
Posted March 9, 2006 1:49 AM
Just over ten percent of registered voters in the 2nd Board of Education district cast ballots in Tuesday's election—for a total of 13,561 votes. So much for the persuasion of...
Posted March 8, 2006 10:46 AM
Runoff for school board...more strangeness around the Ferrari Enzo crash...Rob Reiner's campaign chief steps out of the limelight...L.A.'s blogging pet czar blasts the Animal Defense League...while Cardinal Mahony seeks a...
Posted March 8, 2006 1:37 AM
First reviews of the Oscars and Jon Stewart: not good. Also, Arnie Berghoff's diabetes roast gets some scrutiny, the Times finds waste in the local bioterrorism budget, Villaraigosa promises to...
Posted March 6, 2006 1:54 AM
Maria Elena Durazo was chosen to head the County Federation of Labor, just ten months after her husband, Miguel Contreras, died while serving in the post. From the Times: Durazo,...
Posted March 4, 2006 1:13 AM
If nothing else, Christopher Arellano has found a way to deflect scrutiny from the $200,000 he has taken from UTLA. But the Times and Daily News miss a big chunk...
Posted March 2, 2006 11:52 PM
KPCC's Adolfo Guzman Lopez aired a late Thursday update reporting that Board of Education candidate Chris Arellano has fudged his campaign claims of multiple college degrees from USC and UCLA....
Posted March 2, 2006 11:27 PM
La Opinión reported today that Christopher Arellano, the labor candidate in the East Side school board race, was convicted of robbing a Pioneer Market in 1992, then had a second...
Posted March 2, 2006 2:05 PM
Villaraigosa warns of red ink and loves Crash...Jim Hahn gets $800 million to play with...Martin Ludlow and Octavia Butler are remembered in much different ways...big meeting today at Yahoo in...
Posted March 2, 2006 1:27 AM
Sam Lanni, the owner of Safari Sam's, has gone public with a rant about City Hall bleeding him dry before he can open his long-awaited club on Sunset Boulevard in...
Posted February 28, 2006 7:34 PM
Channel 5 is promoing up close and personal time with Corina Villaraigosa on tonight's Prime News at 10 pm. They call it the first prolonged TV interview she has given...
Posted February 27, 2006 9:03 AM
The war of words between the United Farm Workers union and the Los Angeles Times continues. To catch you up, the Times in January ran an investigative series on the...
Posted February 25, 2006 1:54 PM
Full plate for a Friday morning: Plaschke rips the silver from Sasha Cohen's neck, Steve Cooley's least favorite Mexican fugitive is nabbed, the Writers Guild invites Cheryl Rhoden to stay...
Posted February 24, 2006 1:45 AM
Maria Elena Durazo watch begins, the Z Man appears in the LA Weekly, "Ask a Mexican" cracks Column One, questions about Ed Boks—all this and an old murder in Alhambra...
Posted February 23, 2006 9:03 AM
Another near-miss at LAX, Vin Scully signs on for three more years (but that's probably it), chiding Erin Aubry Kaplan on race, the editor of the LAT's Home section moves...
Posted February 22, 2006 2:40 AM
After taking the weekend to ponder his future, County Fed executive secretary-treasurer Martin Ludlow quit today and says he is cooperating with the federal investigation into violations of campaign laws...
Posted February 21, 2006 2:04 PM
Would you believe Jackie Goldberg for school superintendent? Rampant talk of that, plus good press for Alan Rothenberg, the mystery ooze of Olive Street takes a toll, a fresh crop...
Posted February 21, 2006 1:47 AM
Murder sprees in Venice (maybe) and the gangland of Panorama City-North Hills...How Darry Sragow came to hire former Roy Romer advisor Glenn Gritzner at Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal is the...
Posted February 20, 2006 2:43 PM
I have a piece on Council President Eric Garcetti in the March issue of Los Angeles, out but not online. It talks about his rising national profile—from involvement in the...
Posted February 20, 2006 1:08 PM
* Newest shorts at the bottom... ⇒ More subplots in the Anthony Pellicano affair, a thirteenth defendant and Leslie Abramson joins the case. Also, the Times says anonymous witness 'Johnny...
Posted February 18, 2006 11:24 PM
Today's Daily Journal (no link) features a front-page piece on John Stodder, the indicted former Fleishman-Hillard executive turned blogger who I began telling you about last month. Erin Park reports:...
Posted February 17, 2006 12:47 PM
Rumors about Villaraigosa intimate Martin Ludlow swept California political circles all week and finally make it into print in Friday's LAT: Sources say the former city councilman may take a...
Posted February 17, 2006 1:27 AM
The February issue of TPR talks to Corbin Smith, project manager of the Getty Villa transformation, and also with Chief Legislative Analyst Gerry Miller and Playa Vista president Steve Soboroff....
Posted February 16, 2006 10:59 PM
Mayor Villaraigosa's press conference du jour was to announce the members of his newly created panel on homeland security. Councilman Jack Weiss co-chairs with Deputy Mayor for Homeland Security and...
Posted February 16, 2006 12:13 PM
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Speaker Fabian Núñez plan to campaign on the Eastside tomorrow for Mónica García, their anointed candidate for the open school board seat to replace José Huizar....
Posted February 16, 2006 11:25 AM
Today's front pagesNew York Times See/Read Washington Post See/ReadLA Times See/ReadDaily News See/ReadDaily Breeze See/ReadPress-Telegram See/Read Register See/ReadStar-News Read Variety ReadHwd Reporter ReadLa Opinión Read Slate: Today's Papers Terry Christensen wasn't...
Posted February 15, 2006 8:10 PM
Today's front pagesNew York Times See/Read Washington Post See/ReadLA Times See/ReadDaily News See/ReadDaily Breeze See/ReadPress-Telegram See/Read Register See/ReadStar-News Read Variety ReadHwd Reporter ReadLa Opinión Read Ovitz and Pellicano, ugly details...
Posted February 15, 2006 12:47 AM
Loyalty to Jill Murphy may have finally been Barry Munitz's undoing, the police commission waffles, going after Deaton, bomb on the 210 and another batch of morning media notes—all after...
Posted February 14, 2006 12:45 AM
At a news conference out in the Valley this afternoon, Mayor Villaraigosa said he made an offer yesterday to Sheriff Lee Baca to help out on the jail rioting mess....
Posted February 13, 2006 3:32 PM
Three lead items out of the largest local bureaucracy in the nation, none of them good news...plus Hiltzik lashes Keith Brackpool, no retraction for the UFW, the best and worst...
Posted February 13, 2006 2:20 AM
New ones are added to the tail end through the weekend.... ⇒ Robert Parry, who frequently contributed when LA Observed took comments, returned last month from Iraq duty as a...
Posted February 12, 2006 1:11 AM
LAUSD superintendent Roy Romer has told the school board that he wants to leave by September, nine months before his contract expires, the Jewish Journal just reported on its website....
Posted February 10, 2006 6:11 PM
An exclusive on the new boss at "California Connected," a $15 million payday for three LAPD cops, Rocky's legal memo to the police commission and more Barry Munitz farewells—plus the...
Posted February 10, 2006 1:20 AM
I had not heard of Willie Grace Campbell until Karen Wada profiled her in Los Angeles Magazine in 2004, writing that she "has changed American politics, one cup of tea...
Posted February 10, 2006 12:26 AM
Finger pointing aside, it sounds like President Bush's morning disclosure of more details about the four-year-old Al Qaeda plot to bomb Library Tower (he called it 'Liberty Tower') did catch...
Posted February 9, 2006 4:43 PM
The Breeze has a follow on the Metropolitan Water District not hiring Mayor Villaraigosa's preferred candidate, Richard Katz. The agency offered the top job to its attorney Jeffrey Kightlinger. Says...
Posted February 9, 2006 11:31 AM
Real Estate Journal has a free link to yesterday's WSJ story about developer Rick Caruso. * Also: I added the link I meant to include this morning to the LA...
Posted February 9, 2006 11:28 AM
Mayor Villaraigosa has filled out the city's Board of Transportation Commissioners with the daughter of State Sen. Richard Alarcon, a former deputy to Nate Holden and a former senior cop,...
Posted February 9, 2006 11:21 AM
Jack Weiss steps in on the police commission ruling, more jail riots, the gang war rages in Watts, girls behind bars, more left-turn arrows—it's a busy morning here at the...
Posted February 9, 2006 2:17 AM
The LA Weekly website posted a (perhaps final?) Rob Greene story saying that the multi-agency investigation of SEIU Local 99's help for Martin Ludlow's City Council campaign has uncovered widespread...
Posted February 8, 2006 7:08 PM
The LA Weekly editor has posted a defiant response to the United Farm Workers demand for a retraction of an earlier column he wrote lauding the Times series and chastising...
Posted February 8, 2006 2:15 PM
City Council members Herb Wesson and Bernard Parks want to rename 17th Street (between Norton and Bronson avenues) for the late attorney. The Board of Education OK'd Johnnie L. Cochran...
Posted February 8, 2006 12:02 PM
Richard Katz reportedly doesn't get the MWD gig, friends of Cesar Chavez turn their legal guns on Marc Cooper, everybody it seems is investigating the SEIU's outpouring for Martin Ludlow,...
Posted February 8, 2006 2:05 AM
Doug Dowie scores some points but not a knockdown, the police commission mums up, "Today" takes the Chino shooting story, a new Nina Zero review and paying tribute to the...
Posted February 7, 2006 11:42 AM
State Controller Steve Westly has hired Ed Sanders as his Director of Public Affairs in Southern California. Sanders used to be chief of staff for then-councilman Martin Ludlow. Westly also...
Posted February 6, 2006 2:55 PM
Mayor Villaraigosa is lobbying hard to install his campaign advisor and former Assembly colleague Richard Katz at the head of the Metropolitan Water District—and MWD board members feeling the pressure...
Posted February 6, 2006 9:52 AM
Eyewitness News goes hi-def, James Frey has a few words for the LAT, the Downtown News loses patience with Villaraigosa and a former mayor goes in for a tuneup—plus a...
Posted February 6, 2006 2:31 AM
Jack Weiss makes his ambition more or less official, Anthony Pellicano comes back to town, the Ambassador gets a proper send-off, Channel 13 News adds a comic, more bad news...
Posted February 3, 2006 8:56 AM
City Controller Laura Chick's latest audit dings the Department of Transportation for letting $5 million collected from developers as "traffic mitigation funds" go unused. "There is something very wrong with...
Posted February 2, 2006 3:57 PM
David Zahniser, the Copley News Service reporter in City Hall whose work appears mostly in the Daily Breeze, is jumping to the LA Weekly. He presumably fills the spot opened...
Posted February 2, 2006 12:41 PM
Prominent attorney Pierce O'Donnell admitted pleaded no contest to charges of laundering campaign funds to then-City Attorney Jim Hahn's first campaign for mayor in 2001. The Times originally reported that...
Posted February 2, 2006 11:23 AM
Looks like there's finally a new head of LACMA, Tom LaBonge finally makes it in Column One, County Health finally comes clean about the hepatitis A outbreak, Nikki Finke finally...
Posted February 2, 2006 2:32 AM
In the news this morning, the FBI looks at that videotaped shooting by a deputy in Chino...misreading Los Angeles...quitting James Frey...buying off Stuckey...and Hollywood's gay thing analyzed from a couple...
Posted February 1, 2006 2:21 AM
Mayor Villaraigosa's aides made available English and Korean translations of his Spanish-language response to the State of the Union address. To those who heard Villaraigosa during the campaign, he returned...
Posted January 31, 2006 11:37 PM
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa ordered flags at city buildings lowered to half-staff in honor of the civil rights leader and widow of Dr. Martin Luther King. She died at age 78...
Posted January 31, 2006 2:42 PM
Chief Bratton makes a finding in the Devin Brown killing, Guerdon Stuckey gets an offer, Richard Meruelo didn't lay a million on the Center for Law in the Public Interest,...
Posted January 31, 2006 2:15 AM
Expect something as soon as this week on the NFL-in-the-Coliseum front, the L.A. Business Journal says. Also, look what's in our drinking water, how's your algebra, Mike Piazza returns to...
Posted January 30, 2006 2:03 AM
State Sen. Gil Cedillo led a junket—er, fact-finding trip—to New York City this week to look into how that city has improved its homeless problem. If you wondered where City...
Posted January 27, 2006 9:23 PM
City Controller Laura Chick adds her name to the list of pols lining up behind Mónica García for the open seat on the L.A. school board. City Councilmembers Jose Huizar...
Posted January 27, 2006 3:42 PM
Scenes from Mayor Villaraigosa's media availability this morning in his third floor conference room at City Hall: ⇒ First words: "Why is it so dark in here?" The mayor steps...
Posted January 27, 2006 1:31 PM
Antonio maps out his war plan for conquering the school board, Rocky takes it on the chin (twice), gang war in Watts and every Oscar-eligible film of 2005—plus Byron Miranda,...
Posted January 27, 2006 2:54 AM
Controller Laura Chick, in releasing her latest city audit, said the Los Angeles Fire Department "lacked strong and decisive leadership, and a clear and understandable vision." She began the audit...
Posted January 26, 2006 11:12 PM
This won't help Mayor Villaraigosa convince people his desire to take over the LAUSD isn't at least partly a scheme about political power. In a report to the Joint Commission...
Posted January 26, 2006 10:54 AM
This is the anniversary of the Metrolink disaster near Glassell Park. Unrelated, we think, fictionating non-fictionist James Frey will guest on Oprah to address the literary hubbub he has created....
Posted January 26, 2006 1:36 AM
Mt. Vernon Middle School, in Mid-City near Venice and Crenshaw, will be renamed for the late attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. The LAUSD board made the decision last night. "This...
Posted January 25, 2006 9:06 AM
Antonio Villaraigosa will give part of the Democratic response to next Tuesday's speech—the part in Spanish. His remarks will be broadcast from the mayor's City Hall office over Spanish-language networks....
Posted January 25, 2006 8:54 AM
Meruelo rejected...AOL targets Beverly Hills...spotting old Three Stooges locations...the end of DVD Exclusive...plus some blogs observed, the front pages of eleven newspapers and more after the jump....
Posted January 25, 2006 1:44 AM
Joel Stein's going to get letters [finally?—ed.] for writing that its wussy to "support the troops" if you oppose the war. Also if you fly a yellow ribbon. And don't...
Posted January 24, 2006 2:25 AM
The new issue of The Planning Report has a Q-and-A with departing L.A. planning director Mark Winogrond, a discussion with planning commissioners Jane Usher and Robin Hughes, and urban critic...
Posted January 23, 2006 2:07 PM
A new week begins with happy birthday greetings to the mayor, a glitch at KPCC, the Defamer-in-chief in Vanity Fair and a dustup between Cathy Seipp and a New York...
Posted January 23, 2006 3:09 AM
Times coverage of the Civic Center figures to pick up in February. Editors today posted the lineup for the newly re-created unit that will cover local government and politics, and...
Posted January 20, 2006 11:06 PM
You can end the week with a Wall Street Journal look at Dave Dreier, a thousand Valleyites out of work, possible trouble for Ron Deaton at DWP, a new Times...
Posted January 20, 2006 1:59 AM
The mayor draws a crowd in Sherman Oaks, the UCLA controversy, bunch of reporter moves at the Times and Long Beach cops still can't find their shotguns...that and much more...
Posted January 19, 2006 4:21 AM
Councilman Bernard Parks didn't care for the Times' weekend story on the surplus city land in his district that he wants to sell to a developer, three years after the...
Posted January 18, 2006 1:28 PM
City Controller Laura Chick is profiled on tonight's Life & Times on KCET at 6:30. Longtime LAT pop music editor and critic Robert Hilburn, who is stepping down this month,...
Posted January 18, 2006 10:39 AM
In the morning news rodeo, op-ed newcomer Erin Aubry Kaplan dumps on Herb Wesson, what the Golden Globes could do to slow immigration, why you won't see many A380's at...
Posted January 18, 2006 1:32 AM
Smelly beaches in the South Bay, no new Wal-Mart in the Valley, horny females on Channel 2 and the winners of the Golden Globes—plus where Alex Padilla will eat breakfast...
Posted January 17, 2006 2:21 AM
The House that Jack Kent Cooke Built might be no more, air rights are hot again downtown (and so is Richard Meruelo), Tad Friend expounds on Los Angeles car chases...plus...
Posted January 16, 2006 3:43 AM
⇒ Port commission chief S. David Freeman is profiled by Deborah Schoch in the Times: "Freeman, the brash and innovative former head of the city's Department of Water and Power,...
Posted January 15, 2006 7:52 PM
Council president Eric Garcetti released his new committee assignments this afternoon. They follow after the jump. Included are new chairs for the Housing, Community and Economic Development committee (it used...
Posted January 13, 2006 2:22 PM
Saving the convention center (really Staples Center) hotel and the mountain yellow-legged frog, photo op of the day, missing shotguns at the Long Beach PD and a sell-out for the...
Posted January 13, 2006 3:18 AM
In today's morning roundup: Anthony Pellicano has a fool for a client, the City Council returns to life, counting the homeless, and saving the Convention Center hotel—plus Bert Blyleven moves...
Posted January 12, 2006 2:08 AM
Another Pellicano case guilty plea, Arnold's illegal problem, Patterico and Hiltzik go mainstream, DA Cooley wants to reform three strikes—plus the end of the UFW series, Michael Eisner, Mack Reed,...
Posted January 11, 2006 1:24 AM
The UFW urges emails to the editor of the L.A. Times, Chick and Romer cozy up, one less obstacle for New Times and a stalwart of the Los Angeles Rams...
Posted January 10, 2006 1:30 AM
Turn the page for the fill-in on Gov. Schwarzenegger's fat lip, the latest on the Times' UFW investigation, Eric Garcetti week at the city council, Sheriff Baca's defense of Compton,...
Posted January 9, 2006 2:11 AM
Gail Goldberg was the city planner of San Diego. Her hiring by Mayor Villaraigosa to run the show in Los Angeles was disclosed Saturday and will be formally announced Monday....
Posted January 8, 2006 12:57 PM
They filled up the council chambers this morning for Bill Roberston, the former head of the county Federation of Labor who died in December. Martin Ludlow, the fed's current chief,...
Posted January 7, 2006 1:25 PM
Today's LAT editorial page delivers on its Rose Bowl wager to say something nice about Texas: "Any state that gave us Lance Armstrong, Lyle Lovett and Larry McMurtry can't be...
Posted January 6, 2006 1:47 AM
The LAT was right on top of this local obituary. Saxophone-playing, small-government maverick Ernani Bernardi died yesterday. He served eight terms from his beloved Van Nuys before leaving the city...
Posted January 5, 2006 3:52 PM
Jennifer Forkish, the press deputy to Valley councilman Dennis Zine, starts Jan. 17 as Director of Local Government Relations for the California Grocers Association in Long Beach. And catching up...
Posted January 5, 2006 2:57 PM
Rob Greene, the LA Weekly's man at the Civic Center, suggests thirteen power grabs that Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa should add to his portfolio this year. A sampling: The Los Angeles...
Posted January 5, 2006 1:37 AM
We're number two! USC lost the Rose Bowl and the national championship to Texas 41-38. Thirty-two of those points came in the last quarter. Today's front pagesNew York Times See/Read...
Posted January 5, 2006 1:04 AM
Today's front pagesNew York Times See/Read Washington Post See/ReadLA Times