I love a parade. And that is exactly what marched through the Los Angeles City Council last Wednesday. It was the Unified Charter Parade, and everyone else who was there seemed to love it too.If the parade lacked brass bands and fire engines, it had speeches and celebrations: There was Erwin Chemerinsky at his most […]
Category: LA Weekly
Out and No Wonder
The City Hall system worked last month. That itself is news. Events showed that the city’s substandard general managers can actually be ushered out the door without undue resort to violence.This certainly runs against the dogma according to Mayor Richard Riordan, who has long been snorting that he ought to have the power unilaterally to […]
The Eastside’s Prague Spring
All that’s changed now; there’s been a local Velvet Revolution. The posters are for Victor Griego, Armando Hernandez, Cathy T. Molina, Juan Marcos Tirado, Alvin Parra, Juan J. Gutierrez. Who are all these people? And while we’re at it, where have all the Richard Alatorre posters gone?Yes, King Richard has finally abdicated. Now all of […]
The Grand Finale?
Comrie had an interesting role in the charter endgame. City CAO since the early ’80s, he had been disempowered by the Riordan administration when, early on, it grabbed most of his budgetary responsibilities. Over the past year, Comrie appeared to be clinging to his increasingly symbolic city job simply to ensure — without any detectable […]
Credibility Chasm
It is the normal policy of this newspaper that its contributors not respond at length to critical letters to the editor. In the case of a letter from a taxpayer-salaried top city official denying his own demonstrated incompetence, however, such response is seriously warranted.J. Paul Brownridge is, at the moment, still the six-figure-salaried treasurer of […]
The Wreck of the Business Tax
That was the last time I’d seen such disaster-torn earnestness — until last Friday at City Hall, after the legislative train wreck in the Council Chamber that left the mayor’s long-planned city-business-tax proposal lying on its side with its wheels spinning. It seemed a tremendous derailment of the mayor’s all-time favorite cause.But there are those, […]
The Short List
MARTIN AMIS IS ONE OF THE WORLD’S BEST-KNOWN writers. Martin Amis’ work sometimes mimics classic science fiction. That the first fact is better known than the second gives Amis a bit more reputation for originality than he deserves.Imitation science-fantasy makes up nearly half of the collection Heavy Water and Other Stories. The results are mixed: […]
The Arroyo Special
Six p.m. on the northbound Pasadena Freeway and nothing is moving but time. Red taillights as far as you can see, with hundreds more feeding into the narrowing traffic stream near the four-level. This is high-tech travel at three miles per hour.This is also a prolonged, interactive commercial for the construction of the Pasadena Blue […]
Nine Out of Ten Doctors
So just the idea of a doctors union was worth a laugh. Yet it was probably the elevated prestige and prevailing remuneration levels that eventually helped to chip away at the American physician’s social and economic pedestal. Craving wealth and prestige, hordes of young people trained to be doctors, just as drugs and research were […]
CRA, Change Your Way
What’s left to say about the CRA? Downtown Los Angeles is the graveyard of its mistakes. Over its 50-year history, the Community Redevelopment Agency became the favored scapegoat of anti-government critics from left to right. Now, sapped by its obligations for its many failed projects, the CRA’s been laying off staff and lying low. No […]