LOS ANGELES

EASTSIDER-When Wendy Carrillo ran against Jimmy Gomez to replace Xavier Becerra in 34^th Congressional District primary, she ran a distant sixth, with something like 5% of the votes. In the Assembly District 51 primary last week, she came in first with over 22%. Wanna know why?

ALPERN AT LARGE--I can't say "no" to gallows humor, but I can say "no" to bigots and bullies. 

VOICE OF THE STATUS QUO--Progressives are gearing up to challenge Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) after the long-time senator announced this week that she will run for re-election next year.

CAL MATTERS--So California has declared itself to be a sanctuary for those who have entered the nation illegally.

JUST SAYIN’-Last week I wrote about the proposed "Drunk Tank" that was uncovered by West LA/ Sawtelle Neighborhood Council and the secrets and lies perpetrated on this community by the LA County Board of Supervisors. 

THE COHEN COLUMN-- “When comparing criminal indictments of those serving in the executive branch of presidential administrations it's so lopsided as to be ridiculous. Yet all I ever hear is how corrupt the Democrats are. So why don't we break it down by president and the numbers.

THE KRAMER FILE--The Trump administration is continuing its mission to unravel President Obama’s legacy, this time, rolling back the ACA mandate that employer-provided health insurance policies cover birth control at no cost to women. (President Trump shakes hands with a nun from Little Sisters of the Poor.) 

CAL MATTERS-It seems like a simple solution. Raise what you pay doctors for treating low-income patients, and they’ll treat more of them. 

VIEW FROM THE CENTER-Platitudes, platitudes everywhere abound on guns. They're becoming as "Americlique" as apple pie. Here's a quick couple from the Right: "All they want to do is take away our guns!" 

DEEGAN ON LA-One man’s lawn may be another man’s landmark. That seems to be the proposition being advanced concerning Koreatown’s Liberty Park, a large 2.5-acre swath of green separating Wilshire Boulevard from the 1967-built Beneficial Plaza building, an 11-story Late Modern office building that was set back 315 feet from the roadway to create the green open space. 

CONNECTING CALIFORNIA--I’m so disappointed in myself.

I really should be 100 percent supportive of the effort to establish a single-payer health system in California. Because all the best Californians are for it.

ANIMAL WATCH-PETA supporters dressed as a cat and a dog demonstrated their dismay on Oct. 3 over the failure of Mayor Eric Garcetti and Los Angeles Animal Services' General Manager Brenda Barnette to fix a phone system that continuously fails LA callers needing help for animals. 

EDUCATION POLITICS--In the never-ending saga of LAUSD absurdity, last week, my wife and I received a robo- call from Superintendent Michelle King informing us that a music teacher who was not a District employee may have contaminated recorders with semen and given them to students. Any parent concerned that their child might have been affected was instructed to call their office. 

NEW GEOGRAPHY--America’s seemingly unceasing culture wars are not good for business, particularly for a region like Southern California. As we see Hollywood movie stars, professional athletes and the mainstream media types line up along uniform ideological lines, a substantial portion of the American ticket and TV watching population are turning them off, sometimes taking hundreds of millions of dollars from the bottom line.

When white women are violated, America responds and the response is immediate.

GELFAND’S WORLD--We've now completed the first weekend of the San Pedro International Film Festival, aka Spiff.  The fun part of a film festival, certainly this one, is the chance to see a lot of short films -- both documentaries and fictions -- by young and unknown artists. The abundance of decent quality short films raises an interesting question: In the absence of a movie theater circuit that shows these films, how does a mass audience experience them? It turns out that there are a couple of answers to this question, neither of them being entirely satisfying. There are a lot of well-made stories that deserve to be seen on the big screen by a live audience. 

@THE GUSS REPORT-How soon Los Angeles City Councilmember David Ryu forgets about a rash of burglaries and mail thefts that he and the LAPD ignored this year, all caught on video, in the Sherman Oaks area he represents. 

THE EPPERHART EXPRESS-The cover of Life magazine on August 12, 1966 featured a bullet hole in a store window caused by Charles Whitman, whom they dubbed, “The Texas Sniper.” The 25-year-old Whitman was an All-American boy who was an Eagle Scout and Marine Corps veteran. On August 1, 51 years ago, he carried a footlocker containing a shotgun, three rifles and two pistols up to the 29th floor observation deck of the University of Texas administration building in Austin and started shooting. 

EASTSIDER-Back in June, I wrote an article in CityWatch about the PLUM Committee’s hearings on Airbnb called, “Airbnb and the PLUM Committee - Houston We Have a Problem.”

ALIENATING THE LEFT AND RIGHT-Our nation’s ruling tech oligarchs may be geniuses in making money through software, but they are showing themselves to be not so adept in the less quantifiable world of politics. Once the toast of the political world, the ever more economically dominant tech elite now face growing political opposition, both domestically and around the world. 

EDUCATION POLITICS--When Bernie Sanders, and then Hillary Clinton, made debt-free higher education a byword of the 2016 presidential race, University of California graduates like retired Los Angeles anesthesiologist Steve Auer unexpectedly found themselves the poster children for a time when free college tuition was the norm in California, rather than the radical proposition it seems today.