Mayor Villaraigosa should resign, too

Women today are supposed to be “liberated” and “equal” to men. But why is it that, when scandal strikes, they get hurt but the men go free?

The latest example is Mirthala Salinas, who no longer will be reporting for Telemundo because she had an affair with L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Of course, you can’t have journalists sleeping with their sources.

But neither should we allow politicians to keep their jobs after sleeping with reporters. Villaraigosa should resign, or be recalled. Why aren’t women’s liberation groups going after him? Where is NOW when you need it?

Something similar happened, of course, to poor Monica Lewinsky. Her life was ruined. But Bill Clinton will be back in the White House on Jan. 20, 2009. At the time of the scandal almost a decade ago, feminists acted like battered girlfriends in denial and defended him, not her.

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Cardinal Mahony should sell the “Raj Mahal” to pay for abuse settlements

The biggest eyesore in Los Angeles is the Cathedral of Our Lady of Angeles, a modernist monstrosity of the worst sort. It cost $200 million to build and often is called the “Raj Mahal,” after the grandiose designs of Cardinal Roger Mahony. (Although the Taj Mahal, the one in India, at least is exquisitely beautiful.)

Mahony has agreed to pay out $660 million in the abuse settlement case — of which the diocese actually will have to pay only $250 million from its own funds. The cathedral cost about $200 million by the time it was opened in 2002. With real estate prices rising since then, it could be sold for a lot more than that now.

After the sale, Mahony could make a large parish his cathedral until he retires in a few years. After that, his successor — whom one hopes will have better artistic taste — could build a new cathedral on a more modest scale.

L.A. Times is crashing

Things are so bad at the L.A. Times that they’re going to run front-page ads, long a taboo in the newspaper business:

In a memo to employees, Publisher David Hiller said the ads would raise several million dollars at a time when revenue is down sharply, the newspaper reported on its Web site.

Overall revenue dropped 10 percent and cash flow plunged 27 percent in the second quarter, making it “one of the worst quarters ever experienced,” Hiller said. Ad revenue has declined 8 percent this year, he said.

I guess liberalism isn’t selling to a shrinking “Anglo” population. And the burgeoning Latino population picks up their own, Spanish-language newspapers, such as La Opinion.

And everybody’s going online. You’re there.

 

L.A. Times Media analyst misinterprets Web numbers for Clinton and the first Bush

You have to be careful about Web popularity. Sometimes it means something, and sometimes it doesn’t.

A good example of how not to do it is provided today by Tim Rutten, the L.A. Times’ media analyst, who should know better. He points out that people are a lot more interested in ex-President Bill Clinton than in ex-President George H.W. Bush (the current president’s father). No doubt that’s true. And Rutten notes that more books have been written on Clinton than Bush. But Rutten continues:

If you type Bill Clinton’s name into the popular Google Internet search engine, it reports 37,100,000 entries. By contrast, the man Clinton first defeated to win the White House, George H.W. Bush, gets just 1,910,000.

There are couple of problems here. One is that a lot of Web sites on Bush the Elder go under “George Bush.” I did a quick Google search of: “George Bush” -“George W. Bush”. Note the minus sign in there, which, in Google’s calculations, removes any references to that name. It gave me another 7,840,000 entries. No doubt some of those entries are for the son. But the ones at the top are for the father. And those result would exclude many sites about both the father and the son.

Another factor is that Clinton’s presidency progressed as the Internet blossomed, with 1994 being the year of the beginning of mass Internet popularity. After that, meaning the last six years of Clinton’s presidency, everything he did was parsed by numerous Internet sites. The first President Bush was president when only a few tech geeks were on the Net.

It’s another example of the innumeracy of most journalists, your humble blogger excepted, constant blog reader.

One must be careful with such numbers, something a media analyst should know in 2007.

L.A. Times schizo on “smart growth”

Even as people pour into Los Angeles, the L.A. Times can’t make up its mind on what to do on where the people should go.

An editorial begins like a Daily Worker 1930s editorial paean to Soviet central planning:

SMART GROWTH, we want so badly to believe in you. You were centrally planned by the greatest minds of our time, conceived in an atmosphere of collective purpose and self-criticism, built to the greenest specifications and fired by a bold vision: victory over the individual will and the creation of a new citizenry for a new century.

“Smart growth” essentially coerces less housing development and forces people into mass transit. But then the editorial adds:

If only you would work.

Well, why say that about something that can’t work? It’s like wishing you could get blitzed every day without getting a hangover and blowing out your liver.

The editorial then explains that L.A.’s smart growth plans, which depend on mass transit, hardly have increased mass-transit ridership at all. It concludes with another lament, that “transit-oriented development” still has…

the potential to attract the kind of residents who seek a traditional walking-around urban experience. Reducing the rate of congestion growth will require a vast array of policy solutions and options for residents, and smart growth may be part of that.

We still want to believe.

“[R]educing the rate of congestion growth will require a vast array of policy solutions and options”??? What does that mean? Can’t these people write in plain Spanish? Their paper just ran a story about how the state’s population will increase from 37 million today to 60,000,000 in 2050. Where’s everybody supposed to live, Timesies? How about if they move into your mansions?

Their last sentence, “We still want to believe,” echoes the signature line from a product of the local entertainment industry, “The X-Files,” and meant believing in space aliens who are coming here to colonize and enslave humans.

Going by this editorial, it’s evidence the malevolent ET’s have taken over the Times.

(For more info on “smart growth” — really more dumb government controls — check out this column by my former colleague Steven Greenhut and his great book, “Abuse of Power: How the Government Misuses Eminent Domain.” And the Cato Institute just came out with a new study, “Debunking Portland: The City that Doesn’t Work,” ripping to shreds the supposed “benefits” of “smart growth” in its showcase city.)

The Judgment of Paris

Paris Hilton’s unjust ordeal ended up putting a spotlight on the man who put her in the klink: L.A. City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo. It turned out he used tax-paid employees for personal activities and his wife, like Paris, had outstanding warrants, yet only paid a fine. No jail.

Now Degadillo faces a recall:

Delgadillo has 14 days in which to respond to the papers, which were delivered to his office by Andrew Ahlering, a former county employee who is leading the effort.

He should have resigned, but a recall will do.

Do you think Paris and her friends will contribute to the recall?

Gore Vidal vs. the electric grid

Author Gore Vidal is hard to classify. He’s a supporter of the old Republic, meaning non-interventionism in foreign affairs and at least some controls on government. Yet he’s a big fan of FDR, who did more than anyone to turn the old, limited-government American Republic into an empire without limit.

Now he’s in an amusing battle to put on line solar panels in his home in Hollywood Hills. The city-run Los Angles Department of Water and Power shut down the solar panels because they’re not part of the electricity grid.

Which would seem to be the point of the panels, wouldn’t it? To get off the grid? Not to bureaucrats. Currently, TruthDig reports,

Vidal is still “on the grid,” unable to use solar until the system is fully re-inspected….Simply put, he tells Truthdig’s Associate Editor Kasia Anderson, “[utility companies] have no intention for anyone to use solar power so long as there’s a drop of oil anywhere in the world.”

Actually, the LADWP isn’t a private utility company, but calls itself “the nation’s largest municipal utility,” meaning it’s run by the government. And in California, the vast majority of electricity comes from nuclear power and natural gas, not oil. The LADWP even offers rebates to those with solar panels, so Vidal might get some money back.

But never mind. Vidal is feisty in his opposition to the bureaucrats. Why shouldn’t he be able to install and operate solar panels on his home? He says that he installed the solar panels because, a year ago, “for eight days we are without any power of any kind in the house, and some genius somewhere in the municipal divisions had managed to turn my telephone off.” He’s old and needs an elevator to get around his house, yet the elevator won’t work without power.

Maybe Vidal, whose family came from Tennessee (he’s related to Al Gore), will write a novel about how FDR’s Tennessee Valley Authority was a fascist imposition on a once-free country and should be privatized. (That’s FDR signing the TVA bill in 1933 in the picture.) The sequel could be on the privatization of the LADWP.

Why aren’t feminists going after Villaraigosa?

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa dumped his wife for Telemundo TV bimbo Mirthala Salinas, and she is placed on leave? Where are the feminist factions with their outrage? Why aren’t they demanding his resignation, as I did earlier?

Granted, Salinas broke up his home. But Villaraigosa is the one who dumped his wife, when he should have gone back to her, begging her on his knees in contrition. And it’s he who holds a public trust from the people who elected him.

Feminists need to go on the warpath, as their sister Carrie Nation (pictured at right) did against booze.

Feminists need to stop being A.W.O.L. and drive Villaraigosa from office.

Mayor Villaraigosa should resign

I know in these post-Clinton/Monica times the country’s standards have dropped pretty low. But it’s still sleazy when a man cheats on his wife. And if a man’s wife can’t trust him, why should we trust him with a public office?

Today L.A. Mayor Villaraigosa admitted he cheated on his wife. The other woman is Telemundo anchor bimbo Mirthala Salinas. (That’s her picture.)

“And I take full responsibility for my actions,” he said.

No he doesn’t. If he took full responsibility, he would resign his office, stop seeing Salinas, and beg his wife to take him back.