Marc B. Haefele

No Mercy

Marc B. Haefele
Homeless activist Bob Erlenbusch's usual eloquence ebbed slightly during his last attempt to get the Board of Supervisors to stay this month's General Relief termination, which would drop 7,000 people from the rolls. You saw him wondering just how many times he had to say, "They'll return to homelessness, to......

Stein-Hubbell affair

Marc B. Haefele
Big lies are perfect for people who can't handle the facts. Since they appeal to the lazy mind, big lies can go far. How easy it is to say that Steven Spielberg wants to build DreamWorks on endangered wetlands - it's not true, but it carries the validity of myth......

Los Angeles' Shuttered School Yards

Marc B. Haefele
The mayor of Los Angeles and I have this thing going. Well, maybe you could better call it a casual relationship. Richard Riordan keeps telling me (along with the rest of the world) that his top priority as mayor is to help the Los Angeles Unified School District. And I......

Rev. Callaghan runs wild

Marc B. Haefele
It's gone forever now, but once there was a residential complex as close to paradise as such a place could ever be. Not far from the ocean and adjoining undeveloped hillsides, it had great views, cheap rents, funky old wooden units, lots of trees and shrubs, and a cooperative spirit......

They're Off!

Marc B. Haefele
So. For the first time in 84 years, we've got a real Los Angeles County sheriff's race. Chief Lee Baca, with 32 percent of the votes cast, will face Sherman Block, whose 36 percent was probably the worst showing at the polls by an incumbent sheriff this century. The only......

Commissars in the 'Hood

Marc B. Haefele
How much power should neighborhood councils wield in an updated, more responsive city government? Division on that key issue has produced a rift between the two Los Angeles charter commissions and may also signal a break between two major factions of L.A. labor. Although last month the commissions seemed to......
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Crime Takes a Bite Out of Riordan

Marc B. Haefele
To read about it in the Times, the thing might have been the worst local catastrophe since the 1994 quake. On the front page of Saturday's Metro section, Dick Riordan publicist and occasional Times reporter Jim Newton called a federal decision not to hand the city some law-enforcement money "a......

Budgetary Beguilement

Marc B. Haefele
For nearly a decade, Los Angeles County’s major annual ritual was the week of daylong sessions that comprised the Hall of Administration budget hearings. We all had to plan our lives around them. And then this year, the unimaginable happened: This year, the hearings somehow slipped past almost unnoticed. It......
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Advertisements for Himself

Marc B. Haefele
THE TIME OF OUR TIMEBy NORMAN MAILERRandom House1,286 pages$40 hardcover Reading The Naked and the Dead was a 1950s rite of passage for bezitted teenage mankind. Without acrimony or indulgence, this book portrayed the future many of us suspected we would face as draftees: boredom, humiliation, paralyzing fright and misery;......

Cleaning Up Tujunga Wash

Marc B. Haefele
Driving up the 210 from the Eastside to Lakeview Terrace, you get that suddenly-I'm-lost anxiety. Just where am I? And just where is this place? The foothills between La Canada and Tujunga Wash seem as grand, vacant and imposing as any mountain range. Thanks to El Nino, they're still wearing......