LA Times

Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich, who's served on the five-member county board since 1980, is trying to persuade his colleagues to put a measure on November's ballot that would extend the number of four-year terms a supervisor can serve from three to five. L.A. County voters established supervisorial term limits by initiative in 2002. They weren't retroactive, so Antonovich's clock began to tick when he was reelected in 2004. Now, with time's winged chariot threatening to run him down in 2016, he wants voters to let him serve longer.

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The reporting and commentary on the bankruptcies of California cities over the last month haven't been journalism's finest hour. From reading the voluminous accounts of the fiscal woes of Stockton and San Bernardino, you'd think that municipal unions and feckless city officials are primarily what led these cities down the path to fiscal ruin.

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Have you ever heard anyone — anyone — rave about their phone carrier's service? Say, "Wow, that customer service rep solved my problem in no time flat"?

If you haven't, there's a reason: The companies don't compete on service. Indeed, their service contracts are designed to keep you from jumping to other carriers unless you pony up several hundred bucks.

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Are political centrists in America without a political home? Do we need a third-party presidential candidate to represent those socially progressive, fiscally austere voters who find our two parties too extreme?

There's no disputing that the Republican Party continues to move rightward at warp speed. Virtually every GOP elected official who's been in office for more than a couple of years has had to repudiate previously mainstream Republican positions (such as creating a health insurance system with an individual mandate, an idea cooked up by a right-wing think tank) to keep today's more rabid Republican activists from challenging them in party primaries or caucuses. Such longtime conservative stalwarts as Sens. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Richard Lugar of Indiana could lose their party's renomination this spring from just such challenges.

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Californians seem to have had it with the underfunding of their schools. With tuition rising every semester to close the gap created by legislative budget cuts, the state's fabled higher education system — the University of California, the California State University and the community colleges — is pricing out tens of thousands of middle-class students. At the K-12 level, the Golden State ranks 42nd among the states in per-pupil spending, and is almost certain to fall even lower if, as seems likely, an additional $10 billion is whacked from state spending.

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Even as Occupy Wall Street protests have turned America's attention to the economic inequality that has soared as banks have come to dominate our economy, those banks have been quietly working to cut themselves still one more sweet deal. Whether they get away with it may ultimately depend on California Atty. Gen. Kamala D. Harris.

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