The City of Los Angeles is so deep in red ink, they are flagrantly violating state law in an effort to generate revenue, and have been for 12 years.

As I reported in an earlier column, officers from the Parking Violations Bureau (PVB) are still videotaping cars parked in 15-minute or loading zones around elementary schools.  This videotaping occurs during school drop-off and pick-up hours, as kids start their days to learn, or leave to be reunited with their parents – parents who will receive tickets by mail in a few days.

This is an illegal method under California law by which parking tickets may be delivered.   The 2010 California Vehicle Code, Division 17, Article 3.5, Sec. 40202(a,b,d) explicitly states that the ticket must be placed on the vehicle, and may only be delivered through the mail if the car is driven away while it is being ticketed.

The MSM is nowhere to be found regarding this issue.  Instead, citizens must rely on the superior consumer protection reporting of local news stations to fuel their outrage.  These stations, along with the LA Weekly, have taken on the City of Los Angeles where the MSM has abandoned its responsibility.

So has BigJournalism.com, and your intrepid reporter. (more…)

Michael R. Blood, AP Political Writer, files this report:

LOS ANGELES (AP) – Andrew Breitbart strips off his blazer, windmills it over his head and lets it fly to the stage with a matador’s flourish. He booms into a microphone, sneering, taunting. Breath sprints to keep up with words.

A Breitbart boil is under way, before a cheering throng of tea partiers on a moonlike strip of Nevada desert back in March.

A finger stabs overhead as the conservative online publisher declares Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., a racist. An arm lances outward as he decries Republican leaders as apologists. Voice rising, Breitbart pledges $10,000, then $20,000, then $100,000 for the United Negro College Fund if proof is found to corroborate claims of racial name-calling during tea party protests on Capitol Hill.

“They decided to play lowball, hardball tactics,” Breitbart seethes. “Well, we’re going to have to play it right back at them.”

You could argue he has done just that. (more…)

It is said that you can’t debate the insane. That must have been Hallmark’s strategy.

After three years on the market, the greeting card giant Hallmark quickly pulled a graduation card after half-baked claims were made by the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP that the card is racist.

Starring the Hallmark-designed characters Hoops and Yoyo, the controversial card contains a small speaker from which the cartoon cat and rabbit exclaim: “This graduate is going to run the world, run the universe and run everything after that. Yeah, whatever that is. And you black holes? You’re so ominous.” A few seconds later, they add: “And you planets? Watch your back.”

Apart from the audio, the card reads: “You’re graduating? Well then, it’s time to let the world know what’s coming. But not only the world. NOOOO! We’re talking the entire Solar System.” It additionally boasts: “Watch out, Saturn, this grad is going to run rings around you.”

Despite all the astronomical references, the NAACP members insist Hoops and Yoyo are advocating violence against “black whores,” not “black holes.” That’s what they claim the card says.

(more…)

I had the honor of meeting the owner of Border Invasion Pics after being tipped off that a Phoenix CBS affiliate had not only used some of his video of illegals entering Arizona, but also gave the impression they planted the video cameras along trails and branded the video with the KPHO logo.

A Vietnam veteran (who will remain anonymous as he’s received threats) surely must have better things to do with his time than planting cameras out in the Arizona sun, dodging illegal migrants and/or drug runners, and documenting the failure of the United States government to properly police our border.

I had to ask him, why create Border Invasion Pics?

BIP: When I began to have Border Patrol foot chases across my property I became more interested in the issue of illegal immigration. As I became more knowledgeable I realized that very few people around the country were aware of the massive numbers. I decided the best way to inform people was to show them. Having a lifetime of outdoor experience and skills, I began looking for alien trails to place cameras on.

(more…)

The timing of this poll is quite suspect given the Arizona anti-illegal immigration law, and Mexican president Felipe Calderon’s America-scolding. But who are the real discriminators here?

An Associated Press-Univision Poll found that 61% of people overall said Latinos faced significant discrimination, compared with 52% who said blacks did and 50% who said women.

If you get a chance, watch some Univision or Telemundo. See any dark-skinned Latinos on their shows who aren’t buffoons, bad guys or maids?

The AP-Univision Poll compiled the views of 901 Latinos, which were compared with the results of a separate AP-GfK survey of the general population.

Did the Associated Press and Univision ask who they thought was doing the discriminating? As someone who lived in Los Angeles for over a decade, I’d be willing to bet a significant amount of people would say that Latinos were doing as much discriminating as anyone else. (more…)

Sad but true: Bill Moyers Journal has shuffled off the air and into the archives of PBS and the Paley Center for Media. From a story in the Columbia Journalism Review:

In 1948, when he was fourteen years old, Bill Moyers heard Lyndon Johnson give a rousing speech at a courthouse in Marshall, Texas. Without a megaphone or a loudspeaker, LBJ mesmerized the crowd. “I remember the sheer presence of the man,” Moyers has recalled. “And I thought, ‘That’s what power is. And this man is reaching this audience. And he’s got this audience. And he’s telling this audience something that’s very important.’ ” Years later, through a different medium—television—Moyers would achieve a similar kind of power, and he has yet to abuse it. Moyers’s conversational ease, his earnest delivery, his fierce intelligence—all of it has transformed him into our leading television intellectual, and a worthy successor to Edward R. Murrow.

Yes, the former press secretary to one of the most reviled presidents of the 20th century — reviled especially by the left — has become one of the icons of the very same left that once chanted, “Hey, hey, LBJ. How many kids did you kill today?”

Moyers somehow escaped being tarnished with the disaster that was the Johnson Administration and went on to a career as a staple on PBS, playing the role of the Guilty White Southerner (he was born in Oklahoma, but raised in Texas); it’s a wonder he didn’t end up editing the New York Times.  With his trademark combination of folksy unctuousness and schoolmarmish hectoring, he became the go-to guy for people who wanted to feel good about their best and most noble liberal impulses. (more…)

On Friday, reporter Jessica Yellin got a chance to sit in as host of CNN’s show, Campbell Brown.  Yellin wasted no time in bringing her partisan political views front and center for the CNN audience to witness firsthand as she brought on for a one-on-one interview the man running for Governor of California – Jerry Brown.

In a live performance from the California Democratic Convention in Yellin’s hometown of Los Angeles, Yellin shockingly interviewed Brown and never once told the viewers that Jerry Brown is running for Governor of her home state or that he was sitting at the California Democratic Convention in the town where she grew up.

In a cozy chat, Yellin introduced Brown to CNN as “California’s top law enforcement official” — immediately positioning him as someone more interested in issues than politics even though Brown is in the middle of a hot campaign for Governor.  Yellin threw Brown multiple softball questions, with not a single follow-up question to Brown’s long diatribes and no interruptions to Brown’s soliloquies.  Yellin, who is known for her liberal political views, even trumpeted the Brown campaign’s messages about his presumed Republican opponent, Meg Whitman. (more…)

During an interview with MSNBC’s Joy Behar on Feb. 21, MSNBC’s Donny Deutsch let his bigot flag fly.  While fulminating against the tea-party movement in general and in particular against the candidate known as “the tea-party candidate,” who gave the rousing opening speech at CPAC, Deutsch blurted:  “You almost need that blank piece of paper. That’s the new model. Like, you know, this coconut (Marco) Rubio down in Florida.”

In settings like MSNBC (but usually backstage) the term coconut (brown on the outside white on the inside) is generally used to castigate “Hispanics” who ignore marching orders barked by Democratic/MSM drill sergeants—same as “Oreo” for similarly uppity blacks.

Never mind that the Cuban-American Marco Rubio is probably more purely Caucasian than Elvis Presley, Hank Williams, Oral Roberts, Johnny Depp among many other southerners who boast Choctaw/Cherokee heritage. We’ll deal with Deutsch’s stupidity in another article. This one’s about Deutsch’s bigotry, a derivative of his stupidity.

Exit polls show that Cuban-Americans voted against Obama by the highest margins—and by far!—of any U.S. ethnic group, including “anglos.” So we’re fair-game for ethnic slurs—and have been for decades. In fact, Deutsch has as much reason to fulminate against Cuban-Americans as the most virulent nativist.  Regarding the U.S. political mainstream, Cuban-Americans obstinately refuse to assimilate. To wit: (more…)

Should the National Enquirer get the Pulitzer Prize for its multi-year investigation of the John Edwards affair, scandal and cover-up? That’s a question that’s been asked lately: in some cases, at the same Mainstream Media papers which participated in the news blackout of the Enquirer’s Edwards’ coverage.

Edwards, who had been Sen. John Kerry’s running mate in 2004, was one of the front-runners at the time the Enquirer broke the second installment of the story on December 18, 2007.

The Enquirer released an abundance of easily-verifiable information at that time: Rielle Hunter, a former Edwards campaign worker, was pregnant with what the Enquirer reported was Edwards’ love child; she had been moved within five miles of the Edwards campaign headquarters in Chapel Hill, NC; Hunter was living an exclusive gated community, a few houses down the street from Edwards’ former Director of Finance, Andrew Young; and, she was driving around in a BMW registered to Young.  Add all this to the fact that information about Hunter had disappeared from the Internet and other publicly-searchable databases and the MSM was handed a great story. (more…)

Hope springs eternal for the future of the journalism whenever I eat at Tomboy’s Burgers. It’s not only the gloriously greasy burgers and hearty, artery-clogging breakfasts that draw me to Manhattan Beach a couple of weekends a month.  It’s the Los Angeles Times and the off chance that those who produce it will wake up and give what should be a great paper new life.

Only a matter of time now

I only read the Times at Tomboy’s, and I can only do so because there is usually a forlorn copy of it lying between the hot sauce and utensils.  My subscription lapsed years ago–I’m a casualty of the Times’s limp writing and consistent lefty spin–but something inside me still hopes to one day open up that paper and once again find something worth reading.  That did not happen on New Year’s Day.  Not by a longshot.

On New Year’s Day, the Times’s lead editorial was its annual 40 or so “Wishes for the New Year.” It was truly thought provoking, except the thought that was provoked was, “who the hell writes this stuff?” (more…)