Elan Carr’s road to Washington, D.C., leads through Torrance. And while that South Bay city is mostly topographically flat, for Republican Carr, the path will likely be steep and rocky.
Nothing illustrates the immensity of the tasks facing the soon-to-be-elected Los Angeles County supervisors more than the county’s challenges in caring for abused and neglected children and in finding foster homes for those kids.
Walking away from a debate featuring the candidates for Los Angeles County supervisor last week, I was mad. Why would four smart candidates skate around the county’s terrible problems of homelessness, mental illness and an out-of-control sheriff’s department?
When I asked Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky whether his Judaism has influenced his work as a supervisor, which involves helping some of society’s sickest and poorest people, his answer was as complicated as the man himself.
For those of us who follow the careers of Jewish ballplayers — a small, eccentric niche of fandom — checking the Jewish Baseball News Web site is an essential part of our sports routine.
One of the most interesting findings of the respected Pew Research Center’s poll of American Jews was the continuing theme of Jewish liberalism and approval of Barack Obama’s performance — a vote of confidence in the president exceeded only by that of African-American Protestants and Hispanic Catholics.
When Frances Browner, then 21, announced she was joining the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) during World War II, her mother and most of the rest of her family were appalled. They thought that this wasn’t something a Jewish girl should do.
Controller Ron Galperin is City Hall’s new numbers guy, hoping to bring the era of Big Data to the creaking bureaucracy. His plan is to use computers to analyze huge amounts of information as is now done by police departments, baseball teams, other businesses and, infamously, the National Security Agency.
James Coley and Robert Warfield, case workers for the Integrated Recovery Network, walked into the Twin Towers Correctional Facility with purpose and confidence, exactly the qualities needed for talking to some of the approximately 2,500 mentally ill inmates confined in the downtown Los Angeles jail.
The small turnout at the Los Angeles polls for the mayoral election on May 21 is cited as evidence that most Angelenos don’t care whether City Hall is open, closed or simply blown away.
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