Harold Meyerson

In the eyes of the world, Stanley Fleishman was either the pre-eminent First Amendment lawyer of the past half-century (if you were a civil-liberties buff) or that guy who defended dirty pictures and books (if you were a habitue of the right-wing talk-show circuit he would occasionally subject himself to......

On Wednesday, September 29 — one day after he unveiled his far-reaching health-care proposal at Los Angeles Valley College — former senator and current presidential candidate Bill Bradley talked with the Weekly’s Harold Meyerson at St. John’s Well Child Center, on the south edge of downtown. Bradley had just spent......

Photo by Michael Powers It took John Sweeney calling in all his favors, but Al Gore has finally had himself a good day. The AFL-CIO’s decision at its national convention here this week to endorse Gore’s presidential bid comes as a huge boost to the vice president’s floundering campaign. In......

Photo by Slobodan Dimitrov This Saturday morning, Mayor Richard Riordan and other civic pooh-bahs will repair to the Harbor Freeway downtown to unveil a new name for one of the most hallowed of all L.A. institutions — a freeway off-ramp. Henceforth, the Ninth Street exit off the 110 will be......

I. Your Mission I have here an invite from the Southern California chapter of Americans for Democratic Action, the venerable liberal organization, that says you’ll be the main speaker at their annual dinner next Wednesday night at the Beverly Hilton. It‘s going to be your first major public pronouncement since......

Photo by Slobodan Dimitrov Sometime around the middle of last week — the state Legislature’s final (and invariably busiest) week of the year — I realized that I was actually picking up the Times each morning wondering what had happened in Sacramento the day before. I also realized that I......

My friend Jan Breidenbach, who heads the Southern California Association for Non-Profit Housing, figures she’s putting in an extra 10 hours a week lately to work on a statewide affordable-housing bond measure that is moving -- haltingly -- through the Legislature. State Senate capo John Burton, meanwhile, is lining up......

Photo by Ted SoquiI. THE GAME'S AFOOT IT WAS A PERFECT CAMPAIGN TABLEAU. ON A SPARKLING Friday morning in July, Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa stood behind a makeshift podium on the end of Pier 82 in the L.A. Harbor, flags snapping in the wind, the water glistening in the sunlight,......

Now there will be squad cars outside the community centers, armed guards at the summer camps, a cop at every synagogue. Could be worse. In my grandparents’ day, when the cops — they were called Cossacks then — surrounded your place, it was to deploy the mob that burned your......

Photo by Slobodan Dimitrov If, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, the real test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time and not be paralyzed by the standoff, what then are we to make of Gray Davis — who seems unable to......