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. 

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

@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. 

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. 

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.") 

RESPONSIBILITY IS PERSONAL-“…I’m not the angry racist they see in that photo….” But if not you, then who? Because someone is.