Each Sunday the Pasadena Sun, the Glendale News-Press, and the Burbank Leader (all local inserts in the Los Angeles Times) invite a group of local clergy to comment on different issues. They even include an athiest or two in the group. Last week, the three papers asked them to comment...

Eric Garcetti has enormous potential to be one of L.A.'s great mayors. He is young (just 42), full of energy, experienced in politics and government, passionate about L.A., brimming with policy ideas, compassionate toward the disadvantaged and a great communicator and explainer. I saw many of these traits up-close when...

Almost everyone in America knows the names of the two young terrorists allegedly responsible for the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings, but few can identify the owner of the fertilizer plant that exploded in West, Texas, two days later. Both are culpable of killing innocent people, but the media, along...

Last month, the Walton Family Foundation, led by heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune, announced an $8 million grant to StudentsFirst, headed by Michelle Rhee, the ousted chancellor of the Washington, D.C. school system. This grant came on top of the $3 million the foundation had already donated to the group...

At her Amherst College graduation in 1982, Madeline Janis wore an armband to protest the imprisonment of South Africa's anti-apartheid leader, Nelson Mandela. At the time, students at Amherst and other colleges were active in the movement against South Africa's apartheid government, urging their institutions to divest endowment funds from...

In the wake of several recent deadly factory disasters that killed more than 1,200 workers, the phrase "Made in Bangladesh" is now rightly associated with dangerous, unsafe workplaces, miserable below-poverty wages, and the absence of basic workers rights. Much of the credit for raising public awareness of these inhumane conditions...

In recent weeks, Congress has been looking into last year's outbreak of meningitis, which killed 53 people and injured more than 700 Americans in 20 states. The cause was a tainted steroid distributed by the New England Compounding Center (NECC), which is part of an obscure $2 billion-a-year...

On Wednesday, community activists and homeowner groups got some good news from Washington. President Obama announced that he was removing Ed DeMarco, the Bush-appointed acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA). FHFA regulates Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the bailed-out mortgage financiers that together own or guarantee 60...

Unlike the rest of the world's democracies, the United States doesn't use the metric system, doesn't require employers to provide workers with paid vacations, hasn't abolished the death penalty, and doesn't celebrate May Day as an official national holiday.

Outside the U.S., May 1 is international workers' day, observed with...

Progressive activists sometimes joke that if you put three lefties in the same room you'll soon have five different organizations. Personal egos, ideological splits, and competition for funding often lead to fissures, factions, and "family" disputes among people whose similarities usually outweigh their differences. This fragmentation of progressive forces weakens...

Last year an outbreak of meningitis killed 53 people in 20 states and sickened more than 720 nationwide. As many as 14,000 patients may have been exposed to the deadly drug.

This was not a natural disaster but a human-made and preventable tragedy. It was caused...

Should the states decide whether black Americans can marry white Americans?

Today that idea seems absurd. Most Americans believe that states shouldn't be allowed to trample the basic right of interracial couples to marry -- even if a majority of people in a state want to do so. It would...

Next Tuesday the Supreme Court will take up the issue of gay marriage. Major court decisions on controversial social issues are sometimes far behind their times and occasionally ahead of public opinion, as they were more than a half-century ago when they struck down laws banning interracial marriage.

Although no...

On Tuesday night, an exhausted Steve Zimmer celebrated his against-the-odds re-election victory for the Los Angeles Unified School District board against Kate Anderson, whom he defeated with 52 percent of the vote. The next morning he was at Occidental College, preparing to teach his popular course on education policy that...

Some of America's most powerful corporate plutocrats -- including Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Eli Broad, and the Walton family (heirs to the Walmart fortune) -- want to take over the Los Angeles school system and Steve Zimmer, a former teacher and feisty school board member, is in their...

For years, Los Angeles has been ground zero in an intense debate about how to improve our nation's education system. What's less known is who is shaping that debate. Many of the biggest contributors to the so-called "school choice" movement -- code words for privatizing our public education system --...

Was anybody else offended by the not-very-subtle onslaught of sexist, racist, homophobic, and anti-semitic "jokes" at the Oscar ceremony on Sunday night?

It seems as though the Oscar writers think that Hollywood is so liberal that it can get away with making offensive comments because everyone knows that they are...

Many Americans know that Barack Obama spent three years as a community organizer in Chicago, but hardly any Americans know about Fred Ross Sr., perhaps the most influential community organizer in American history.

A diverse coalition of activists, clergy, and public officials are now trying to remedy that situation...

As soon as President Barack Obama called on Congress to raise the minimum wage to $9 an hour in his State of the Union address last week, you could see Speaker John Boehner, seated behind the president, uttering his religious mantra: "Job killer." And even if you couldn't read his...

Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique -- published 50 years ago this week, on February 19, 1963 -- catalyzed the modern feminist movement, helped forever change Americans' attitudes about women's role in society, and catapulted its author into becoming an influential and controversial public figure. The book identified the "problem that...