This is a strange one. By now, the established pattern should be familiar enough. Councilmember Curren Price of the 9th district (South Central and environs) is, after all, only the seventh member or former member of council to meet such high profile scandal since the 2020 indictment of former 12th district representative Mitchell Englander. At a clip of roughly two per year, we should all be old hands by now.
She cannot be serious. It is impossible that the mayor of the country's second largest city - a city so blue it might well give off its own ultraviolet radiation - would put forth a series of "environment protection" commitments this unambitious. Would announce those commitments in a social media post that confirms the "reality" of climate change.
The silence stands out. City Controller Kenneth Mejia has said nothing about the sexual harassment allegations lodged against him, even as those allegations quickly grew from social media venting into an incipient crisis being followed eagerly by the Los Angeles Times. When her friend and fellow Mejia campaign alumnus Kyler Chin was fired from Mejia's…
When is a choice not a choice? In the chambers of LA City Council on Tuesday, the assembled councilmembers were given two options by the charter in the wake of former colleague Mark Ridley-Thomas's felony conviction: they could vote to hold an election to fill the newly vacant CD10 seat or they could vote to…
Introduction On Monday, the Ad Hoc Committee for City Governance Reform conducted its first meeting of the year. The committee was convened in the wake of last year's racism scandal on council, which centered around backroom dealings by the council's power bloc - namely, those allied with former Council President Nury Martinez - to interfere…
The Board of Supervisors has been making halting progress in a campaign to impose some limits on the authority of the sheriff for a decade or more. Los Angeles is the most populous county in the country, and the sheriff, with his jurisdiction over the local jail system and a police force the size of an army division under his command, is among the most powerful local elected officials anywhere. For a long time, that power has been associated with cultures of corruption and violence within the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. It is important to note that neither the reform process nor the appalling conduct of the Sheriff's Department have their roots in the current administration of Sheriff Villanueva (though he does typify the threat posed to the public when so much power is concentrated in the hands of one reckless individual).
The War on Drugs has always justified itself as a crusade to save children from moral evil, and yet it has been a failure, utter and without mitigation. Where the War on Drugs has succeeded is only in wreaking titanic moral evils of its own: grinding lives and entire communities into dust, sowing seeds of chaos in countries near and far. This may seem a small front in that war, but, as the question has been put to me (and all Californian voters), I cannot cosign the legislature's action.
Proposition 1 is a statewide measure and legislative constitutional amendment on the ballot for the 2022 General Election. It seeks to add a new subsection to Article I of the California Constitution, the Declaration of Rights; this section would explicitly add the "fundamental right to choose to have an abortion" and the "fundamental right to choose or refuse contraceptives" as enumerated rights inalienable by the government.
A Sunday: local news outlets hurry to print the story that would upend the prevailing, stable order in Los Angeles politics. The basic components of the reports (some recorded audio, a surreptitious meeting, and an unusually vivid racism) have gained in depth since that day, but were potent enough in the first hour to set events spinning quickly forward. The rate of progression here has been such that, while the Sunday in question feels some months distant, at the time of this writing, less than three weeks have passed since then.
Benny Wally... 