Howard Blume

Gray Davis finally won one last week: The outgoing governor scored in a court case that could affect hundreds of thousands of California schoolchildren for years to come. But it’s not the kind of victory that many would cheer. A Superior Court judge has concluded that the state is not......

Anti-tax guru Grover Norquist would be nearly the last person you’d expect to share a stage with traditional liberals. Unless, of course, the forum was the Jerry Springer show and fisticuffs were supposed to erupt before the first commercial break. Norquist, after all, is often credited as the predominant Capitol......

Richard Riordan already sounded a lot like the incoming state education secretary more than two weeks before Governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger made it official. Speaking before an adoring audience in Highland Park last month, Riordan talked of a “God-given right to a quality education,” adding that “In Sacramento, we will work......

It turns out that the San Diego County sheriff may have spoken too fast when he blamed victims of the wild fires for their own deaths. “The majority of these deaths are caused by people trying to escape this fire and not following directions they are given,” said Sheriff Bill......

Photo by Ted Soqui Call Joe Molina a believer: If he built it, he thought, they would come. So he and fellow Highland Park dreamers started a Little League, even though they had no regular field to play on. And then, on the site of an abandoned reservoir, with the......

Somehow, the Biltmore honchos knew the jig was up for Gray Davis. Last week, when the media and the governor’s staff assembled for an election-night-planning walk-through, the hotel’s grand Crystal Ballroom was off-limits. Can’t come in, they were told. The room was being used by arts educators. Arts educators? The......

Call it the most electric scandal yet to circulate about the governor-elect. As the story goes, Arnold Schwarzenegger conspired with energy barons in May 2001 to help them keep $9 billion in ill-got gains amassed by manipulating the California energy market. The evil plan? Recall Gray Davis — that well-known......

With one post-debate poll showing 63 percent of voters favoring the recall of Governor Gray Davis and giving Arnold Schwarzenegger a 15-point lead, it’s time to consider the kind of governor Schwarzenegger would be. Absent all the spin. Minus Schwarzenegger’s platitudes and scripted one-liners. Looking past his utter lack of......

Forget the competing “clean money” voter initiatives proposed by gubernatorial candidates Arianna Huffington and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Now stepping up to save the state is pornographer and recall candidate Larry Flynt, with what some would call, in comparison, a dirty-money initiative. Flynt wants the state’s voters to authorize slot machines in......

A school, a park and some family-sized apartments are just what the overcrowded Westlake neighborhood has needed. And that was the goal of a first-of-its-kind collaboration with the L.A. school district. Well, as the song goes, two out of three ain’t bad. This area, just west of downtown, will get......