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: even for county departments run by separately elected officials — the sheriff, the assessor and, oh yes, the district attorney. Especially the district attorney.Yeah. It was none other than our district attorney, Steve Cooley — fresh from courageously shutting down a small daily paper last month — who was sprawled out in a full-faced, slobbering grovel before the board members. Here he was to assure them they’d done nothing wrong when they‘d voted in closed session to violate the Elections Code in order to scotch a health-care workers’ wage initiative and the next day, just as dubiously, “voted” in a handful of phone conversations to undo the action. The dirty trick‘s original objective was to incite the health-care union to sue.