LA Times

On Tuesday, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or MALDEF, will hold its annual awards gala and fundraiser in downtown Los Angeles. The awardees include such indisputable worthies as Linda Ronstadt and former MALDEF leader Antonia Hernandez. The real awardee, though, should be MALDEF itself, whose decades of civil rights litigation have yielded significant gains for Latinos. I haven't always agreed with all of its actions, but I generally find myself cheering it on (as I do its current campaign to create a second Latino-majority district on the L.A. County Board of Supervisors).

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This week, the state Senate and Assembly may take up a legislative rarity: a bill that could actually strengthen democracy in California. The measure, championed by Senate Democratic leader Darrell Steinberg, would mandate that initiatives be voted on only in general elections, not in primaries.

Steinberg's brainchild has been condemned as just the latest partisan ploy from a Sacramento pol. Republicans complain that it seeks to move a ballot measure they support — barring unions from spending some of their members' dues on election campaigns — from next year's June primary to the November general election. Democrats counter that next year's primary is likely to have a disproportionately Republican electorate, as the GOP's presidential nomination contest may still be ongoing while Democrat Barack Obama will be running unopposed.

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Just when you thought the soap opera that is the Los Angeles Dodgers couldn't get more ridiculous, reports came Thursday that embattled owner Frank McCourt had received a $1.2-billion offer for the club from L.A. businessman Bill Burke, with some unspecified share of that $1.2 billion to come from "certain state-owned investment institutions of the People's Republic of China," according to the letter from Burke's group to McCourt.

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The Citizens Redistricting Commission has drawn its lines, and the latest redistricting, like all redistrictings, has lessons to teach us about California.

First Lesson (for Republicans): It's not the districts, it's you.

The initial Republican reaction to the districts that the commission unveiled was to protest their presumed partisan bias. "We are concerned that this appears to be a tilt towards Democrats," said Tom DelDeccaro, chairman of the California Republican Party. His predecessor as chairman, Ron Nehring, enumerated the GOP's grievances. "The commission created 40 districts where the Democrats are the largest party, and 13 where Republicans hold the plurality," he complained.

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Its leading companies are investing in the U.S. because they can do things here they would never think of doing at home.

The newest slumlord in Los Angeles is a pillar of German capitalism. Earlier this month, the city attorney's office filed suit against Deutsche Bank, the world's fourth-largest bank, for letting many of the more than 2,000 L.A. homes it has foreclosed on descend into squalor and decay.

A yearlong city investigation of the properties on which Deutsche Bank foreclosed turned up tenants compelled to live in crumbling apartments the bank would not fix, houses taken over by gangs, faucets from which water either wouldn't flow or wouldn't stop, and the occasional unidentified dead body. Nothing, in other words, that would be allowed to happen to bank holdings in Frankfurt, the neat-as-a-pin German city that is home to Deutsche Bank and much of the rest of German finance.

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In Wisconsin and other states, labor movements are on the defensive. Here, unions have gone on the offensive to help create jobs at decent pay.

American unions are waging epic battles today against the most serious assaults they've encountered in more than half a century, and they've had some major successes. No one could have predicted that union members and their supporters would flood state capitals in the way they have, or that polls would show Americans support collective bargaining rights for public employees by a 2-1 margin.

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