GELFAND’S WORLD - My television set is full of ads supporting or opposing the dueling gambling initiatives on the ballot, known as Propositions 26 and 27.
ACCORDING TO LIZ - First it was the Twin Tunnels and then it was the California WaterFix, and now it’s the Delta Conveyance Project.
RANTZ and RAVEZ - Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman’s office fails to act and replace a worn and frayed American Flag at a park in her district after being notified by a Valley resident on September 19, 2022.
UNHOUSED - The homelessness crisis in Los Angeles just didn’t happen out of nowhere.
RACIAL RECKONINGS - California’s task force on reparations has begun putting dollar figures to potential compensation for the various forms of racial discrimination, generational pain and suffering Black Americans experienced in the state.
GUEST COMMENTARY - In just over a month every voter in the State of California will be having their ballot mailed to them.
ERIC PREVEN’S NOTEBOOK - As was pointed out at the dinner the first part of celebrating the new year is to do a careful accounting of how things have been going.
DEEGAN ON LA— Much has been made about the leftward tilt in Los Angeles politics that now runs the scale from centrist to moderate to progressive to radical.
ITALIAN POLITICS - The rise of far-right politician Giorgia Meloni has left many outside Italy asking how her brand of what many argue is fascism can achieve such prominence in a country that has experienced life under the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini.
ANIMAL WATCH - There is undoubtedly more than one Pit Bull-attack victim who won’t applaud the recent announcement that-a new Ohio Pit Bull “Dog Friendly” license plate has been issued on September 9 and that Best Friends Animal Society sees this as “a step in the right direction.”
MEDI-CAL HEALTH WATCH - More than 1.7 million Medi-Cal patients may get a new insurance provider in the coming months as a result of the state’s first-ever competitive bidding process, but critics and some providers fear the change will cause major disruptions to care.
COLLEGE DEBT - President Joe Biden recently instituted a program to forgive some of the student debt that plagues approximately 45 million Americans.
GUEST COMMENTARY - As much of the world watched with alarm as the fascist Fratelli d'Italia party led a far-right coalition to victory in Italy on Sunday, Republican lawmakers in the United States had a much different reaction: Open glee.
PRONOUNS & POLITICS - In southern Oregon this week, a battle over pronouns spilled from social media into a school board meeting where parents and other “concerned citizens” demanded the ouster of a nonbinary first-grade teacher.
GUEST COMMENTARY - Republicans in the Senate yesterday killed legislation passed through the House that would require “dark money” to be publicly disclosed: not a single Republican voted for it, although every Democrat in attendance did.
THE VIEW FROM HERE - During the debate on September 21, 2022, Sheriff Alex Villanueva showed that he is out of step with Los Angeles.
RUSSIAN DRAFT - The head of a military draft office in the Russian town of Ust-Ilimsk was being treated for injuries on Monday after being shot by a gunman who—like more than 1,000 people who have been arrested for protesting in recent days—was reportedly angry over President Vladimir Putin's recent military conscription announcement.
GUEST COMMENTARY - America’s narrow escape last week from a major rail-worker strike brought home an important truth: people who make and ship real things – let’s call them material workers – now hold the whip hand over our supposedly ‘post-industrial’ economy.
RISING EXTREMISM - Energy and food bills are soaring. Under the onslaught of inflation and prolonged wage stagnation, wages are in free fall.
WAR WATCH - On 2 December 1943, 105 German bombers made a surprise air raid on Bari in southern Italy, where they sank 27 Allied cargo and transport ships.
THE DOCTOR IS IN - The time really MUST sooner or later arrive when we can speak truth to power...and I don't mean those who think that fossil fuels will be our only way out of the stone age for the indefinite future.
GUEST COMMENTARY - In a world haunted by the specter of nuclear war, needlessly aggressive competition among nations could lead to an apocalyptic catastrophe.
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Somebody Please Think of the Children, Who Are 44, 40 and 38-Year-Old Crooks
- Details
- Written by Abby Zimet
SAY WHAT? - As always, the competition was stiff. But this week's Head-Spinning Right-Wing Hypocrisy Award goes to former A.G., longtime fan of mass incarceration, and egregious, serial abuser of the prosecutorial power of office as a political weapon Bill Barr, who went on the T.V. - Fox, duh - to whine that New York A.G. Letitia James suing the Trump Mafia was an "abuse of office" and "political hit job" that "grossly overreaches when she tries to drag the children into this." Whew. There are so many layers of irony, fraudulence, hilarity and out-and-out dickishness here - where to begin? James' 220-page lawsuit, the result of years of exhaustive investigation, found that for decades Trump committed even more "staggering" criminal fraud than everyone thought, issuing annual financial statements packed with lies that wildly inflated the worth of almost all his crappy properties - for example, tagging the gaudy Mar-A-Lago as worth $739 million when its actual worth was maybe $75 million - to get loans, while simultaneously deflating them to avoid paying taxes.
"With the help of his children and senior executives at the Trump Organization," James said after the lawsuit was filed, "Donald Trump falsely inflated his net worth by billions of dollars to unjustly enrich himself and cheat the system." Of course his "children" - endangered animal-killer Don Jr., 44, fashion grifter and icky daddy's girl Ivanka, 40, doofus Eric who stole money from a kids' cancer charity and took the 5th over 500 times in a deposition for the suit though "only the Mob takes the 5th," 38 - are almost middle-aged executives of a multi-million company they helped manage while raking in millions from it, and oh yeah one was a "senior presidential adviser." Still, Barr argued in laughably patronizing fashion, none had the smarts to understand things like loans or contracts or financial statements: "The children aren't going to know the details of that, nor are they expected in the real world to do their own due diligence." And besides, Hunter Biden.
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RACIAL RECKONINGS - California’s task force on reparations has begun putting dollar figures to potential compensation for the various forms of racial discrimination, generational pain and suffering Black Americans experienced in the state.
GUEST COMMENTARY - As much of the world watched with alarm as the fascist Fratelli d'Italia party led a far-right coalition to victory in Italy on Sunday, Republican lawmakers in the United States had a much different reaction: Open glee.
GUEST COMMENTARY - Republicans in the Senate yesterday killed legislation passed through the House that would require “dark money” to be publicly disclosed: not a single Republican voted for it, although every Democrat in attendance did.
RUSSIAN DRAFT - The head of a military draft office in the Russian town of Ust-Ilimsk was being treated for injuries on Monday after being shot by a gunman who—like more than 1,000 people who have been arrested for protesting in recent days—was reportedly angry over President Vladimir Putin's recent military conscription announcement.
WAR WATCH - On 2 December 1943, 105 German bombers made a surprise air raid on Bari in southern Italy, where they sank 27 Allied cargo and transport ships.
RISING EXTREMISM - Energy and food bills are soaring. Under the onslaught of inflation and prolonged wage stagnation, wages are in free fall.
CANNABIS WATCH - California is significantly overhauling its cannabis tax structure, including entirely eliminating a tax on growers, in an effort to boost a struggling legal industry begging for relief.
420 FILE - Working regular overnight shifts has distorted Samantha Kadera’s sleep schedule, so the emergency room doctor smokes cannabis a few times a week to relax before bed.
POT WATCH - Since legalization and the light shining on cannabis and its benefits, the cannabis industry has grown rapidly in a short space of time.
MEDI-CAL HEALTH WATCH - More than 1.7 million Medi-Cal patients may get a new insurance provider in the coming months as a result of the state’s first-ever competitive bidding process, but critics and some providers fear the change will cause major disruptions to care.
WELLNESS - Former grad school classmates Kelsey McQuaid-Craig and Chelsea Oruche have recently bonded over a similar struggle — trying to place loved ones in assisted living.
YOUR HEALTH - Due to hazardous amounts of N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA) discovered in it, the well-known heartburn medication Zantac, also known as ranitidine, was banned at the end of last year.
It might be challenging for a novice to get their bearings at a real casino if they want to play that way.
GUEST COMMENTARY - I keep hearing the refrain from Evita– the song made popular by Madonna – “Don’t cry for me Argentina”
POLITICAL WATCH - It’s The Ronald Reagan Memorial Competition: which Republican can make the rich richer and the poor poorer the fastest?
DC DISPATCH – (This interview was conducted in 2020 before the untimely death of my husband Anthony Schinella, aka Spooky.
You may be counting the hours and minutes until August 31, 2021, but a word of caution in what you wish for.
VOICES-In response to an October 29, 2020 CityWatch opinion piece about DxE, counsel of DxE informed us of the following: No grooming allegations have ever been made against DxE or anyone in its leadership, neither in the Berkeleyside article referenced in CityWatchLA’s piece nor anywhere else, apart from a single, not credible allegation by what is termed as a ‘high-profile accuser.’
