Los Angeles' Shuttered School Yards

"They're scared; where do you think they are going?" someone shouted. But in quieter moments, when the protesters' delegates got to speak, you got the real point of the assembly. The guillotine approach to GR was going to cut off a lot of recipients in the middle of their dependency treatment programs. So the cutoff was going to abort their attempts to help themselves.

Molina vs. USC, pt. 12

Speaking of board antics. The previous week, the supervisors voted 3-1 to move forward with the construction of the long-planned, renovated 600-bed USC County Medical Center that serves the Eastside and much of the rest of Los Angeles.

Who voted no? None other than the supervisor whose district is directly served by the hospital. That's right, Gloria Molina, who refused to compromise last year with the other board members on her demand for a 750-bed facility, still would rather there were no new USC rather than the diminished one the other members wanted.

Pizza Man

It's been more than a week now since Ted Rohrlich, the Times reporter long assigned to the charter beat, fled the scene, muttering incomprehensibly (in his last lead paragraph) of assorted political mayhem and mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer. Well, it's a tough beat: Those weekend marathon meetings can sap anyone's sanity.

Now, however, the baton has been passed to former mayoral acolyte Jim Newton, whose maiden effort Saturday ignored his predecessor's sage conclusions that many problems remained in the way of charter reform. Instead, Newton proclaimed that all was pretty much well, give or take that convulsive disagreement on neighborhood councils.

One of Newton's sunny inferences reminded me of the reasoning of an American philosophical legend. Newton wrote that creating a larger council would make the entire council weaker by diluting each member's franchise. Wasn't it Yogi Berra who supposedly asked the counterman to slice the pizza four ways instead of six, "because I can't eat six pieces"?