Editor\'s Essays Articles

Having been annoyed a few times in my life, I am bemused when angry people sputter and vent in public places. They often embarrass themselves because they argue with their hearts instead of their minds.

A kingsized example landed in the middle of Council Chambers last night:

As speaker after speaker trooped to the microphone in the City Council hearings to protest the planned but not yet official Entrada Office Tower project, many speakers expressed two rock-solid, inflammatory and absolutely unverifiable convictions:

Tough call to make on the outcome of the vote on the proposed Entrada Office Tower at tonight’s monster City Council meeting.

The more people I talk to, the wobblier a prediction looks.

I stand here poised, with a bucket of water. But I am not sure which side’s enthusiasm to dampen.

Can the will of City Hall be thwarted? Yes, it can.

The most innovative idea I have heard for cushioning the bruising fallout from state budget cuts in the School District was to assess — perhaps a gentler word was used — families $40 for each day their children are absent from classes.

I was reminded of this merely-explored Culver City scheme the other day when I learned about a much more ambitious strategy in Palos Verdes.

This morning’s surprising news downtown at the mordant County Board of Supervisors — or the Marx Brothers Cemetery, as it sometimes is called — is that Bernie Parks is almost 2 to1 ahead of the Man With Three Names in fundraising as they race for Yvonne Brathwaite Burke’s seat.

Given Mark Ridley-Thomas’s ties to union thugs and their patented underhanded methods of separating working slaves from their money, how do you figure the state senator is so far behind?

In the significant Cash on Hand category, Mr. Parks is holding onto more than twice as much money, $387,000 to $171,000.

In the news columns of the newspaper earlier this month, two veteran members of the Police Dept. charged that corruption is rife within the often insular colony of officers and their leaders.

They will seek to further document their accusations in future stories.

They said corruption started and flowered under former Chief Ted Cooke. They said it has continued, without interruption, through a couple of temporary chiefs, the next so-called permanent Chief, John Montanio, who evaporated within 20 months, and then into the regime of the present Chief, Don Pedersen, who has completed 22 months.

Observing liberals navigating their bumpy way across the political universe is like watching your 2-year-old putting a hand over each eye and thinking, “Aha, now they can’t see me.”

Every afternoon at 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 o’clock, when liberals decide to flash their biases, they light a match to 10 sticks of dynamite. They are as unsubtle as a drugged-out grizzly bear on roller skates at the top of a hill. But since they are in iron control of the media, few voices are left to tattle on them.

The Mayor of Detroit, surely the only Kwame Kilpatrick in America, was whacked over the head this morning with a charge of perjury and a barrel of other accusations, stemming from a disputed relationship with his former chief of staff.

One reason I am curiosified by Barack Obama’s badly misjudged “I Have an Evasion” speech last Tuesday is that there are notable parallels between Fibber and my oldest son, both children of black and white parents.

Side by handsome side, they could be happily mistaken for brothers, down to their low-key, easy-going personalities.

Both young men —I can say that because my son is a decade younger — were raised by their single mothers, white in Mr. Obama’s case, black in mine. (Never mind that Mr. Obama’s mother seems to have wished she were black, and to underscore that, she regarded herself as honorarily black.)

We had the birth of our third grandchild in 21 months tidily strategized.

When Gabriel was born a year ago last June in Northern California, the drill went so smoothly that a Swiss timepiece would have been embarrassed by how slickly we planned out even extraneous details.

When Maya Nechama was born a month later near Jerusalem, our martial precision made Gen. Patton click his heels and smile down on us from Military Heaven.

Every night before I go to bed, I pray to God to magically change me into a liberal before I awake.

Well, some nights I do.

Okay, in my first year of college, I promised Mom that I would recite the prayer at least one night before I died. So far, my health is robust.

Liberals hold such tantalizingly vague beliefs that a liberal could simultaneously be a practicing Jew, a practicing Pentecostal and a practicing Presbyterian without ever leaving his favorite church pew.

Sketching the background on why Geraldine Ferraro, the Queen Victoria of the Age of Prune, is being vilified for telling the truth about Barack Obama the other day to the Daily Breeze:

The boys and girls you went to school with, who grew up to be Democrats, probably would have been happier as deaf mutes. Pronouncing certain words during public discourse, you see, terrifies them.

Oops. Can’t say “terrifies.” That reminds them of “terrorists,” which reminds them of Arabs, whom they don’t want to offend because everybody from Culver City to Boston knows that Arab terrorists will kill them if they do.