FOR A WHILE LAST YEAR, I SEEMED TO RUN into former District Attorney Gil Garcetti every week. He was hyperactive in his son Eric’s successful campaign for the City Council, and wherever Eric, a dogged campaigner, turned up, so did Gil, his top adviser. On one of those occasions, I asked the elder Garcetti what […]
Category: LA Weekly
Imperial Times
Has our freshly Chicagoized L.A. Times really forgotten which new century we‘re in? In June and July, columnists James Ricci and Steve Lopez cascaded blame for all California’s problems upon the immigrant population. Suddenly, we found ourselves back in the foreigner-bashing, night-riding days of the early 1900s.Then last Thursday, our Times sought to raise the […]
Cruel Priorities
LAST WEEK NOT ONLY DID THE COUNTY of Los Angeles resolve to close 11 public and four school clinics belonging to its Department of Health Services, reduce beds in one hospital and cut immunizations for more than 80,000 children. It also decided, on grounds that it was improving the urban health environment, to spend DHS […]
Call Rewrite!
THE HEADWATERS OF MOST LOS ANGELES COUNTY police reporting is a very small pond known as the Norman “Jake” Jacoby Press Room. Named for a legendary City News Service police reporter who retired a decade ago, it sits to the rear of the first floor of Parker Center, the 40-year-old, six-story LAPD “Glass House” headquarters […]
Autumn Follies
CITY GOVERNMENT SANK INTO TROPICAL lassitude during the council’s recent summer recess. But in one critical area, things actually sped up: Would-be council candidates were scurrying to roust signatures for their initial filings for the 2003 election. The new haste is because next year’s city primary comes in March instead of April. So now the […]
Still Kicking
SO EX-CHIEF BERNARD PARKS IS thinking of running for the City Council instead of suing it. Although he doesn’t appear to live there at the moment, Parks certainly has a better-than-even chance next year of winning the 8th District seat that Mark Ridley-Thomas will vacate this December when he wins election to the state Assembly. […]
Reporter’s Notebook
The families of the defendants are elated as the LAPD quartet go free. My boss at the Metropolitan News-Enterprise, Lowell Forte, who was once a small-town prosecutor, makes a lawyer joke about the legal strategy of Sergeant Stacey Koon, the senior LAPD officer at the beating scene. Koon tried to distance himself from the men […]
Senseless Steve
Someone shut down a newspaper last week. His name was Steve Cooley, and he’s the district attorney most voters — including me — chose two years ago because we thought he was the best man in the race.Now it looks like we were wrong.In shutting the Metropolitan News-Enterprise, Cooley violated one of the cardinal principles […]
The Old Ball Game
Summer is nearly upon us, and, in what has become almost a biennial rite, so is L.A.’s professional football season. What, you say we have no pro football team in L.A.?Exactly, folks; the game is about getting a team.Because seemingly every two or three years a bunch of guys with a bunch of bucks gets […]
Power From the People
There are no checks and balances in our county government. If you don’t believe me, just look at the closed-meeting-law dispute of the past few weeks. There‘s a simple reason for this lack of oversight. The Los Angeles County supervisors own the franchise. They ordain the spending. They direct the money. They cut the checks: […]