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Fri, Mar

Los Angeles:  Who Has the Right to Live in the City? 

GUEST WORDS—In 1950 my parents and grandmother were able to afford to buy a duplex for us to live in for $11,000 a mile north of the LaBrea tar pits here in Los Angeles. For two years I have watched the destruction of house after house in my neighborhood to build ugly McMansions selling for $4 million, and my block is a noisy construction pit to make developers rich.

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Spay and Neuter War Heads to Local Dog Parks

NEIGHBORHOOD POLITICS-There is a war going on in Long Beach, a war fought in the most unlikely of places: the dog park. It can be seen in the nervous sizing up of new dogs when they enter the metal gates, as their owners unlatch harnesses from bellies. It is a war often fought only with stickers, flyers and sharpened glares as pets are corralled into opposing corners of a dust-covered park. But on occasion, these hostilities bubble up into angry words that boil in the unrelenting sunlight: “Fix your dog!” 

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Corporate Greed: I’m Blacking You Out!

STAND UP AND BE COUNTED-What has regrettably become the sole motivation behind using technology to communicate with customers, is not what it should be – providing better service -- but rather to increase profit by reducing costs, which further degrades service. Corporations have as their sole raison d'etre the yearly increasing of profit (growth), no matter what the effect on their ability to fairly and morally supply goods and services to the customer. 

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Anti-Semitism: The Elephant On the Boardwalk

THIS IS WHAT I KNOW--Yesterday, I joined the ‘Alt Right is Not Alright’ March in Venice -- and knew I’d write an article about my experience. What I could not foretell was that the column I’d write would end up being quite different from what I had intended. 

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LA: Google’s Fail and Teacher Jail

PC POLITICS--Without going through another weedy analysis of James Damore’s firing from Google – Holman JenkinsGeorge Leef and Nick Gillespie have done a fine job of that – let’s just say the Silicon Valley engineer was canned for stating what most scientists and sensible people have known ever since Adam and Eve frolicked in Eden – that there are biological differences between men and women and also for suggesting that the tech giant has become an “ideological echo chamber.” So the politically correct, party line zealots at Google decided, 1984-like, to shove the thought-criminal out the door.

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Los Angeles: The Rodney King Riots from a Korean-American Perspective

LOS ANGELES--Though the beating of Rodney King that sparked the 1992 Los Angeles riots occurred in the Northwest Valley, the epicenter of the civil unrest that followed was South Central, a region southwest of downtown LA. In the 25 years since, South Central has proven to be a popular backdrop for movies that look at the implications of the riots: Straight Outta Compton and Menace II Society are both set in a tense post-Rodney King South Central, while documentaries including Rize and Burn Motherf*cker, Burn! focus, to some degree, on civil unrest in the area's neighborhoods. (Photo above: Gook star, writer, and director Justin Chon.)

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This Is One Cool Cat

DEEGAN ON LA-Move over Magic. Step aside CT3. Bono, go to the back of the room. All you one-name celebrities -- meet your match and more: P-22, LA's iconic Puma (also known as a Mountain Lion or Cougar), a popular “extreme survivor” who lives in the Griffith Park hills. He’s even been honored with his own official day by a Mayoral and City Council Decree -- October 22 is P-22 Day in LA. 

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The Presidential Primary System is  #$%&!! And LA’s Mayor Slips Into Campaign Mode

GELFAND’S WORLD--The 2020 presidential campaign has started and the stakes couldn't be higher. How do we know that we are officially in campaign season already? One clue is that Los Angeles will be without its mayor for the next two weeks. Eric Garcetti is leaving home to campaign in New Hampshire. Ostensibly, he will be campaigning for someone else, a person who is running to be the mayor of Manchester, a town that is 2568 miles from here and has a population of 110,000 people. I guess we're supposed to believe that the choice of who gets elected mayor of Manchester is a question of major importance to the people of Los Angeles. To dust off the phrase made popular by Jim Bouton, Yeah, Sure

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Trash Talk

JUST ASKIN’--Earlier this year the City entered into an Exclusive Franchise Trash Agreement, commonly called a Monopoly. 

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Why the 1st Amendment Needs a Warning Label

@THE GUSS REPORT-Trump and Nazis and Kaepernick, oh my! As deeply flawed and forever tarnished as Presidents Washington, Adams, Jefferson and many of their contemporaries were on the subject of slavery (Adams didn’t own slaves and was opposed to slavery, but worked to slow Abolition) they were brilliant on the five freedoms afforded us by the 1st Amendment, which are freedom of religion, speech, press, peaceful assembly and to petition the government without fear of punishment. 

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Will We Ever Get Serious about Infrastructure and Transportation?

GETTING THERE FROM HERE--For those of us who remember the movie "The Running Man" with Dustin Hoffman, the question of "Is it safe?" still has meaning.  Now it's time to ask that question about water, power, transportation, etc.  There are those who want division, who are outraged, or are both ... but for the issues that USUALLY unite us (transportation/infrastructure), is it safe to raise those issues again. 

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The LA Connection: What Exactly is Fake News?

MY TURN-It’s the question many of us are asking these days: what exactly is fake news? Is it news you disagree with? Or is it advertising that looks like news but isn’t -- as is the case with an “advertorial” in which an advertiser who wants to hype a new product pays for it to be written about as if it were a news story. (These types of articles should be identified as such and the Internet tries to make that distinction by calling them "sponsored.") 

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But Councilman Bonin, You Promised!

THE PREVEN REPORT--Just hours before releasing a YouTube video promising his constituents that he would “bring all perspectives to the table” before moving forward with any further “road diet” projects, LA City Council member Mike Bonin moved forward with another “road diet” project. Bonin introduced and got passed a motion appropriating $490,594 to expand environmental clearance work for the “Lincoln Boulevard Bridge Widening Project.”   

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California’s Kidless Future

NEW GEOGRAPHY-Images of California, particularly the southern coast, are embedded with those associated with youthfulness — surfers, actors, models, glamorous entrepreneurs. Yet, in reality, the state — and the region — are falling well behind in the growth of their youthful population, which carries significant implications for our future economic trajectory and the nature of our society. 

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Is it Vision Zero or Zero Vision?

RANTZ AND RAVEZ-I recently discussed the current living conditions in the City of Los Angeles with a 30-ish, married resident of the San Fernando Valley who works for the City of LA. He is quite upset with the current state-of-affairs here: traffic congestion, increasing crime, lack of affordable housing, the economy, the constantly expanding homeless population and a host of related topics. In addition to the direction in which the city is headed, we discussed the Mayor’s plan and vision for LA. 

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LA’s Housing Crisis: Much Worse than You Think

PLATKIN ON PLANNING-Driving through Skid Row, witnessing homeless encampments near luxury apartment complexes, encountering people living in their cars, hearing stories about long commutes to the Antelope Valley for cheaper housing, or reading the latest data of soaring housing prices and rents lets you know that LA is in the midst of a severe housing crisis.

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