The New Yorker drops in on Costa Mesa

Tad Friend, the New Yorker's Brooklyn-based Letter from California writer, has a piece in today's issue (the one dated Sept. 5) on the budget fight in Orange County's eighth most-populous city. From the summary:

Costa Mesa has no apparent center: if there’s a there here, it’s unclear where. What served as a civic nucleus, until recently, was City Hall. The five-story glass-and-white-brick box is home to many of the municipality’s four hundred and ninety-seven employees. But City Hall is now under fire from the budget-slashing wing of the Republican establishment, in a war of words and pink slips reminiscent of an earlier anti-union era, when the Pinkertons battered the Wobblies with fists and clubs.