Free Republic

With Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa visiting the Capitol today in an attempt to salvage his ambitious plan to take over and reform the historically troubled L.A. Unified School District, the Democrat has emerged as an unusual factor in this year’s unusual governor’s race. The former Assembly speaker, a rising Democratic superstar, is still officially neutral in the race between moderate Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his Democratic challenger, Treasurer Phil Angelides. Villaraigosa, a darling of LA progressives when he first ran for mayor in 2001 -- the LA Weekly, for one, devoted issue after issue to extolling his various...

Commission makes San Antonio's sweet deal even sweeter By T.A. BADGER Associated Press Writer SAN ANTONIO — Things looked sweet for San Antonio under the Pentagon's proposed base-closure plan. This week's voting made it even sweeter. While the nine-member Base Closure and Realignment Commission voted Thursday to end the military's presence at Brooks City-Base, it overrode the Defense Department's recommendations by keeping one of Brooks' key medical research missions and some 300 jobs in San Antonio. That vote came a day after the commission opted to keep the 800-job Cryptologic Systems Group, which services communications equipment for federal intelligence agencies,...

Los Angeles Mayor-elect Antonio Villaraigosa got rock-star treatment Wednesday on his first trip to the nation's capital since his stunning election victory. In between standing ovations and signing autographs at a series of speeches, the city's first Hispanic mayor in more than a century told a liberal organization that Democrats are not succeeding nationally because their ranks are too homogeneous. "We need to look long and hard within our movement. You look around this room, and you don't see the kind of diversity we need," Villaraigosa told a mostly white audience at a Campaign for America's Future event. In his...

As he begins to put together his administration, Mayor-elect Antonio Villaraigosa has a broad mandate from his landslide victory and surprisingly few commitments to City Hall's insiders and major power players. Mayor James Hahn had worked hard over the past four years to cultivate business, labor and civic leaders -- many of them former Villaraigosa backers -- and had gone into the campaign with most of the city's power brokers on his team. But as Hahn appeared headed for defeat in the campaign's closing weeks, many of those same people reached out to the challenger. And since Villaraigosa's election Tuesday,...