One thing noteworthy about the recent county gun-show debates was the vital role the Internet played on both sides of the dialogue.Staffers in the offices of the liberal county supervisors — who opposed the continuation of the shows on county property — bolstered their arguments off the countless Web sites of state and federal legislators. […]
Month: July 2018
Money for a Whistle Blower
A $300,000 settlement has been reached in the federal suit of a former official who said the MTA fired him because he objected to a $65 million subway-construction contract that, he said, was linked to an MTA board member‘s kickback.Last month’s out-of-court settlement between Leroy H. Graw, the MTA and former top MTA executives was […]
Parks’ Department
I had forgotten the nature of British daily papers until I was forced to depend on them during my recent vacation. Critics usually distinguish between the sexy, broad-circulation English tabloids and the prestigious, large-format versions. The first present stuff like “Horror! Frenchman’s Ghastly Sex Threat Against Local Nurse! Shock!” (the Frenchman was relieving himself in […]
Beats Chocolate
No matter how they shake the box, the pieces just won’t fall together. At least not in any way that suggests that Tedjitou Dessalegn, a senior assistant to departed county children’s-services department head Pete Digre, actually colluded with the man who gave her $25,000 to buy a new luxury car, plus another $5,000 on the […]
Acting Out
Any decision is better than no decision. The Los Angeles Unified board, calmed for a decisionless decade in its cultural Sargasso Sea, finally got decisive two weeks ago when it voted to unseat Superintendent Ruben Zacarias.So did its appointed special commission on the oft-imprecated Belmont Learning Center a week later, when it recommended, 4-3, completion […]
Dialogue of Slurs
Rhetoric has no taste. Once you’re down with the great cause, assailing malfeasant demons, in or out of public office, why hold back? Why throttle your invective short of what libel rulings allow?What‘s newly remarkable about this abusive verbal assault, however, isn’t so much how thoughtless and extreme it gets, but how suddenly it can […]
Departmentally Disturbed
Why can‘t the LAPD be more like the Sheriff’s Department? By which I mean, why is it so resistant to meritorious criticism, and prone to cloak its operations as if it were some arcane sect?Put it another way. Why can‘t Los Angeles junk its demonstrably futile system of police governance and come up with something […]
Leave the Woman Alone
The most pathetic continuing character in mystery fiction was created by the late, great Georges Simenon. She was Mme. Maigret, the virtually invisible wife of the great Parisian sleuth, Inspector Maigret of the French gendarmerie.And she was always getting those late phone calls from the great inspector telling her he‘d miss dinner because he had […]
Leave the Woman Alone
The most pathetic continuing character in mystery fiction was created by the late, great Georges Simenon. She was Mme. Maigret, the virtually invisible wife of the great Parisian sleuth, Inspector Maigret of the French gendarmerie.And she was always getting those late phone calls from the great inspector telling her he‘d miss dinner because he had […]
Never Too Early To Run
Let‘s see, last time we had us a real mayor’s election in Los Angeles it was 1993. Indeed, the eventual winner didn‘t enter the race, officially, until the fall of 1992.Certainly, you could not say the last mayor’s race began in 1991. By then, we‘d just started wondering whether the great Tom Bradley would ever […]