Let me lay my cards out on the discussion table right away: I think it’s a no-brainer to want the city to preserve Paul Conrad’s sculpture “Chain Reaction,” but a no-brainer from a possibly romantic […]

Pinpointing the prime cause of California’s slow recovery from recession is easy: Too little has been done about the crisis in housing construction, values, and foreclosures. While only one in 579 homes nationally is “under […]

With so many Internet-based companies headquartered in Santa Monica and so many content creators making their home in our city, I don’t think I’m off task if we take a moment to consider the recent […]

Consider for a moment what this winter season of Republican presidential candidates lambasting each other while they traversed the countryside of early primary states might have been had California been involved. Instead of watching the […]

Actually Al Franken was way ahead of me on this back in 2003 with his book “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.” At that time, the realization that FOX News offered a product […]

There is probably no more popular law in California today than term limits, the result of a 1990 ballot proposition limiting state legislators to six years in the Assembly and eight in the state Senate. […]

Our digital-age Santa Monica Mirror has a great new web page video feature called the Santa Monica Beat, and it will be refreshed every Monday morning. Maybe mentioning that constitutes product placement in my column, […]

Now that Jerry Brown has gone public with the second attempt of his latest turn as governor to deliver a balanced budget, it’s fair to speculate about how different things might be today if he’d […]

At a meeting of a neighborhood group just before the holidays, representatives of the Santa Monica Police Department reacted with grins when my question to them suggesting ‘stings’ to catch drivers texting or using mobile […]

The Civil Rights Movement captured the imagination of the country. It was 1965, the Rev. Martin Luther King, working to get voting rights for African-Americans, planned to lead a 50-mile march from Selma to Montgomery, […]