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 […]
Category: LA Weekly
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 […]
Big John’s Mouth
Nearly three years ago, a city ordinance was proposed that would have limited what people could say to the City Council. This bill ran into so much opposition that it withered away.What did pass was a rule that restrained public comment to five minutes per side for a given agenda item. This theoretically means that […]
The Real World Organization
Something important was missing from the Seattle anti-WTO demonstrations. Oh yes, there were, in some proportion, all the just causes I’d ever marched for in the past: balanced ecology, fair wages, equal representation; everything, it seemed, but Vietnam. To pre-boomer sometime activists like me, certainly, there is nothing more assuring than watching subsequent generations marching […]
Health Care for Saints
Now the state must find money to pay for health plans for people who care for the elderly and disabledRichard Devylder knows firsthand the importance of home health-care workers: They feed, bathe, dress, change catheters and take people to the doctor.All the embarrassing little details of our everyday lives which we all hope we can […]
Farewell but Not Good Riddance
Photo by Slobodan DimitrovAll last week they said goodbye to the Richard Alatorre who should have been. Pioneer political role model to the Latinos, lover of family and children. Feminist and forerunner, benefactor of the worker. And, in Assemblyman Gil Cedillo’s words, “the people’s champion.” But as most of those present must have known, by […]
Role Reversal
The last time I looked in, the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission was functioning rather well as the city government’s traffic officer. Not its highway patrolman nor its robbery-homicide detective: It’s not there to handle wild chases or major felony cases. That’s what the D.A.’s Office and the FBI are there for — supposedly.But the […]