Editor\'s Essays Articles

Just as elected officials are obliged to recuse themselves when a conflict of interest looms, I confess I am prejudiced toward women. I was raised by two of the best, my mother and my grandmother.

Because the seven of us started life from a position that was different from our friends and neighbors, Mom and Grandma drilled Lesson No. 1 into us: We should strive to achieve only through merit, never sneaking by with the aid of a tilted field.

As a worthy principle of life, however, merit died out decades ago, giving way to manipulated gimmickry and a proliferation of sharply tilted fields.

Welcome to the last 9 days of the City Council candidates’ Registration Period — Albert Vera’s favorite time of the year.

It would be less prickly to embrace Mr. Vera as the self-ordained Icon of Culver City if, as my spies tell me, he weren’t seen tiptoeing through a park late one night every week, opening a fresh container of 99-Cent Store Idol Polish, and shining up his favorite self sculpture.

This being New Year’s Eve, whenever anyone at City Hall hearkens back to the wonderful moments of this year, I hope the names of Cool Harry, the Saez brothers, Patrick Vorceak, Les Surfas and Marc Chiat will spring to the fore first.

Three of them lost their bought-and-paid-for businesses in the last 12 months. With a foot to the tush, the Saez brothers were kicked out of town. By comparison, Mr. Surfas got off relatively easily. “All” that he lost was his warehouse.

Lifted from the biographical files of your Board of County Supervisors:

Zev Yaroslavsky proves that he flies higher who is not weighted down by the baggage of scruples. Last time I checked, Mr. Yaroslavsky held membership in two synagogues, one liberal, one traditional. Press 1 for Traditional Jew. Press 2 for Liberal Jew. This should niftily cover his entire Jewish constituency.

At the very moment 23 months ago that the City Council was anguishing over whether to invest a record $227,000 salary in Culver City’s incumbent chief executive, Jerry Fulwood, the profligate politicians in Santa Monica’s City Hall blithely were handing over the first installment in Eddie Edelman’s entirely legal $200,000 annual heist.

No two acts in recent memory better illustrate the million-mile chasm in cultural differences between Culver City and Santa Monica.

Technically, I suppose, a contract is not a scam when both parties enter into even a ludicrous agreement in a state of sobriety.

For two years I have had the creeping feeling that the nifty little arrangement between the often adventurous city of Santa Monica and an aging holdup man Ed Edelman, the supposedly retired County Supervisor, is a joke.

One of them should be sued for impersonating a responsible grownup.

In the Culver City Police Dept., we are told, officers of lieutenant rank and above are required to file full financial disclosure documents once a year.

Never mind that certain high-ranking officers of the recent past may have slipped through a crack that was a little broader than intended by the policy-setters. Wink, wink.

Our concern, today, however, is the prolonged, puerile foot-stomping, attention-chasing tantrum by Timmy Sands, the new president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League.

The most interesting story in the morning newspapers was the threat of 500 LAPD officers “to retire or change jobs” if the city forces them to make full personal financial disclosures as a condition of the federal consent decree that governs the department.

The consent decree was signed by Mayor Hahn just before the turn of the century because of a crooked cops scandal.

Proceed with caution, dear reader.

Remember where the focus of this potential scrutiny will be.

Maybe the City Council will not have a chance after all to bring two women together on the dais for the first time on Election Day next April 8.

One is in.

If the other is in, the place is called limbo.

Dr. Loni Anderson took out papers this afternoon at the City Clerk’s office for her first-time candidacy.

On my way to the office this morning a little before dawn, I became momentarily confused when I encountered a left-wing signal light.

Both the red and the green were furiously blinking, simultaneously.

On one side of the light, an officer was frantically waving mesmerized drivers through the intersection. On the other, a traffic cop desperately was trying to prevent cars from proceeding.