On the Day After Father’s Day
Last evening when we had just returned home from a late afternoon movie, I was buzzing the garage door shut when I heard a voice calling out. Immediately, I reopened the door, and there was Barbara, our next-door neighbor.
“Did you hear from your sons today?” she asked. “Better than that,” I said. “We had breakfast together.”
Six weeks into their opening terms on the City Council, Chris Armenta, Andy Weissman and Mehaul O’Leary, for dissimilar reasons, have exceeded the expectations of their long-bearded critics.
It never will be clear whether these three trumped a field of nine questionably qualified candidates because the voters were startlingly prescient or because they closed their eyes and threw a ball of gooey wax at their ballots.
During her training days at the Daily News in the 1980s, I thought that smarmy Robin Abcarian learned better how to be a professional journalist than she showed in her ham-handed story on the front page of this morning’s Los Angeles Times that should serve as her job application for the Obama White House. Driving from the Valley into the city, she must have developed an intellectual flat tire and forgotten how to practice subtlety, an art out of favor at the blatantly partisan Old Times.
Didn’t Karen Bass’s friends promise that she would be different?
She is not.
Whoopee, the high-pitched, low-thinking lightweight ladies up and down the state giggled last month when Ms. Bass — through a system of greasy manipulations — became the first black and the second woman to rise to the Speakership of the California Assembly.
When we went to the movies on Saturday night, I had to chuckle, briefly, at the sticker
on a car in the parking lot:
“I am even against the next war.”
Problem was, the driver did not intend for me to laugh, even with irony. A cute punch-line does not a philosophy of life make.
I was trying to imagine the teachers in my old school telling us kids to go pound sand for an hour while they marched outside, like good little union robots, and pounded the pavement to attract universal attention to their supposedly impoverished plight.
David Mielke, the longtime President of the Teachers Union in Culver City, far from the latest protest, just shook his head this morning when I asked him about today’s planned walkout by LAUSD’s permanently put-upon teachers.
When I start a school for budding politicians, Mark Ridley-Thomas is going to be my first hire.
If he were advising the Obama campaign, I would tell John McCain to go home for the next 5 months, peek out on Election Day, issue a brief concession speech and then go back to whatever he was doing before.
Except for my 93-year-old father and his fast-vanishing cronies, hardly anyone is alive who remembers New York Gov. Al Smith’s run for the Presidency 80 years ago this summer.
When it came to religion and church-going, Mr. Smith was no model for altar boys, no threat to upstage the Pope of the day, or maybe even find the nearest Catholic church.
It does a body good — especially a sensible Republican — to get out on the hustings, and I had a terrific time last evening at Mark Ridley Thomas’s Get Out the Vote Rally at his campaign headquarters at the intersection of Jefferson and Arlington.
A cross between an oldtime revival and a Sunday afternoon church picnic, the cheerleading would have revived a corpse.
When Pop celebrated a rather remarkable birthday yesterday, he practically guaranteed it will not be his final one because he has not yet achieved an elusive objective. “Ninety-three years old, and I still am not the boss,” he laughed over the telephone.
If you think Pop was just being modest, you never have met my stepmother. She would strike fear into the quaking hearts of Louis, Schmeling, Tunney, Marciano and Patterson — and not just because they are all dead.
