Howard Blume

Photo by Jack Gould Okay, so what if Los Angeles lacks the swing-voter clout of Davenport, Iowa? Last week, Southern California, too, got the same-day treatment from the candidates, which sparked a first-rate mano a mano between the faithful. While John Kerry appeared unchallenged at Cal State Dominguez Hills, zealots......

Photo by AP/Wideworld photos You have to hand it to President George W. Bush. The guy has chutzpah. He can claim Iraq has weapons of mass destruction when it doesn’t. He can justify a war for one reason, and then later insist he started it for another. Not to mention,......

Just in case 2,500 pages didn’t answer what would make our despised state government work better, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger put the question out to the public this week. “I want to hear directly from you,” said Schwarzenegger at a ceremony in Sacramento, where he formally received a massive blueprint to......

Photo courtesy of Kerry forPresident/Sharon Farmer So how are things in Ohio? With any luck for John Kerry, not too good. Nurse Pat Beane presents a near perfect crucible for the 2004 race for president. It starts with her location, in Ohio’s Stark County, where voters have correctly called the......

Photo by Ted Soqui John Edwards, the newly minted vice-presidential pick, was just barely too young for Vietnam. That imperfect war never became a liability or an asset in his later political life. Sure, he could’ve volunteered right out of high school, but few took issue with educational deferments. By......

The battle for the White House looks a lot like class war when union leaders call Bush an SOB, and the Bush administration lets corporate lobbyists rewrite the laws governing U.S.-style capitalism. But in an infrequent swing through California last week, impending Democratic nominee John F. Kerry called a truce......

Illustration by Miguel Valenzuela In the winter of the Clinton impeachment, Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine, was a pornographer on a mission — determined to dig up sex scandals on the Republicans who’d come after Clinton. It wasn’t that Flynt was suddenly against sex or even scandalous sex......

It’s impossible to untangle the demise of the city’s Jewish Community Centers without offending some of the richest and most powerful — and most generous — Jews in Los Angeles. There’s simply more shared responsibility to go around than the key players are willing to acknowledge. The JCCs’ parent organization......

In a 1999 rampage, white supremacist Buford Furrow poured 70 rounds of gunfire into the Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills, wounding five. But he didn’t shut down the bullet-riddled North Valley JCC. That unproud task fell to pillars of the Jewish community itself, which allowed North Valley and other......

Local smog fighters — battling desperately to clean our region’s unhealthy, besotted air — got slapped around good by the Supreme Court last week. They went too far, the court ruled, in restricting the purchase of diesel vehicles, even though diesel fumes are the region’s primary cause of cancers from......