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Summertime, and the living is easy. So just shorts today, but check the tail end for updates.
• Controller Laura Chick released a highly critical follow-up audit that says overseers of the Port of L.A. show "open disdain for good government." In response, the president of Hahn's harbor commission fired back in unusually strong language. Said Nick Tonsich: "Only someone as unqualified and politically motivated as Laura Chick could claim that the largest, most profitable port in the U.S...is being mismanaged." More quotes in the stories. LAT, DN, Breeze, LABJ
• It's not pretty when Venice tries to celebrate its 100th birthday.
• Teresa Strasser ponders in the cover story in today's Jewish Journal on the death of her stepmother: "What do you do when you lose someone...you really hated?" Also, film producer Tom Teicholz has a website of his Tommywood columns for the JJ.
• Janice Hahn not mellowing, David Zahniser reports in the Daily Breeze.
• CityBeat names L.A.'s twelve oddest restaurant locations, starting with La Bella Cucina adjacent to the car wash at Olympic and Figueroa. Also, Pinot Hollywood closed June 10.
• Roger Ebert became the first film critic to get his name enshrined on a filthy Hollywood sidewalk.
• The L.A. Independent profiles school board president and 14th district candidate Jose Huizar as "proof that the U.S. remains a country of promise and immigrant hopes."
• Publishers Weekly calls Andrew Gumbel's Steal This Vote: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America "sure to be controversial...that's all for the good, for the issues Gumbel so winningly addresses are crucial to the future of democracy." He is L.A. correspondent for The Independent.
• Donna Barstow's cartoons are at, naturally enough, DonnaBarstow.com.