Biography
Tim Ruttens career as a journalist spans more than 30 years at The Times.
Prior to becoming a columnist for the Calendar section in 2002, ...
Tim Rutten
Senate inquiry into Ft. Hood misplaced
November 21, 2009
Sen. Joe Lieberman insists on pushing ahead with a Senate inquiry into the mass murder at Ft. Hood, despite White House and Pentagon anxieties that the probe could compromise the prosecution of alleged killer Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan.
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UC regents face a moral imperative on King hospital partnership
November 18, 2009
The University of California system is one of America's greatest public institutions. There is virtually no significant branch of human knowledge that has not benefited from its scholarship. It is, at once, a great engine of this state's long-term prosperity and a continuing affirmation of our common belief that equality of opportunity is more than just an altruistic impulse.
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Lift the cloud over JPL
November 14, 2009
When Neil Armstrong stepped on the lunar surface and announced, "We came in peace for all mankind," it marked a fundamental break with the long history of human exploration.
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Army must be on guard for extremism
November 11, 2009
There is a profound difference between watchfulness and a witch hunt.
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Putting California back to work
November 7, 2009
The great military historian John Keegan reminds readers of the old axiom that a general's worst fault "is to take counsel of his fears." On the other hand, while politics lends itself to martial metaphor, an elected official can fail when he does not make voters' anxieties his own.
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Chief attributes
November 4, 2009
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's selection of Charlie Beck as Los Angeles' new police chief sends a powerful signal that City Hall remains committed to the innovative policing strategies and reform agenda that William J. Bratton so successfully employed during his seven-year tenure.
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Villaraigosa's partner against crime
October 31, 2009
Compared with selecting a new Los Angeles police chief, electing the U.N.'s secretary-general -- or, for that matter, a pope -- is a streamlined exercise in political minimalism.
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Prop. 8 cuts both ways
October 27, 2009
California is America's incubator, the place where transforming trends in culture, clothing, commerce and -- unfortunately -- politics often begin. Proposition 13 ignited a national anti-tax fervor; Proposition 187 inflamed anti- immigrant sentiment. Most recently, the state has spawned the tea-party movement's inchoate anger.
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Obama's misguided Fox hunt
October 23, 2009
One of the lessons most people carry away from the schoolyard is that picking an avoidable quarrel with somebody who really likes to fight generally is a losing proposition.
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One-of-a-kind NFL stadium
October 21, 2009
Sometime this week or next, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is expected to sign a bill allowing construction of a new, privately financed professional football stadium in the east San Gabriel Valley's City of Industry.
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Chief Bratton's too-brash exit
October 17, 2009
William J. Bratton, who will step down two weeks from today, deserves to go down in history alongside William H. Parker as a reforming Los Angeles police chief whose administration marked a decisive and consequential break with the past.
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California's democratic dilemma
October 14, 2009
When three of the state's leading academic centers for governmental studies host a conference in Sacramento today on how to reform California's Constitution, one of the questions they will ask is: What's to be learned from the sweeping reform agenda enacted in 1911 by Gov. Hiram Johnson and his Progressive legislative majorities? Those changes included not only women's suffrage, the direct election of U.S. senators, the recall, and a minimum wage for women and children, but an aspect of our public life that many see at the root of our current problems: the initiative.
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For his noble words, Obama deserves the prize
October 9, 2009
Within hours of Friday's announcement that President Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize, commentators and politicians all over the map were denouncing the award as "absurd."
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L.A.'s NFL stadium bargain
October 7, 2009
Sometime in the next week or so, the California Senate will decide whether to grant a one-time exemption from provisions of the California Environmental Quality Act to billionaire developer Ed Roski Jr. so that he can proceed with plans to build a new professional football stadium in the City of Industry. Although such a grant would be unprecedented -- and not entirely without risk -- it's something the Senate needs to do.
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Obama's pink slips for garment workers
October 3, 2009
This week, unemployment among American workers climbed to its highest level in a quarter of a century. In parts of Los Angeles, joblessness has reached levels unmatched since the Depression. In many predominantly African American and Latino neighborhoods, nearly one in four people is out of work.
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Obama's tough choices
September 30, 2009
It's easy to see why President Obama is so eager to fly off to Copenhagen to boost Chicago's chances of winning the Olympic Games. After all, if there's one thing at which he's already shown himself to be a master, it's selling.
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An NFL stadium for L.A.
September 26, 2009
In Southern California, property development is a full-contact sport, and nobody plays the game with quite the brio of Industry-based Majestic Realty Co.
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The poetry, and wisdom, of Seamus Heaney
April 15, 2009
Seamus Heaney, the greatest living English-language poet, turned 70 this week.
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Leave Chief Parker behind
April 11, 2009
As if traffic or the yawning deficit in the city's budget weren't enough, City Hall has a new preoccupation.
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An arts school for all of L.A.
April 8, 2009
If somebody told you that a public agency had spent years constructing one of the most expensive secondary schools in the world without any precise idea of what would be taught there or who the students would be, you'd say, "Don't be ridiculous."
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Unemployment, and CEO pay, on the rise
April 4, 2009
If you pay even cursory attention to the financial commentators these days, you've probably heard a lot of muttering about "populist anger" that could push Washington into "overreacting" to the nation's financial and economic crisis.
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L.A. is blase about the Big Three
April 1, 2009
Given that Los Angeles is the modern city most shaped by the automobile, it's remarkable that the impending economic implosion of at least two of the nation's Big Three carmakers has had so little local resonance.
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Obama and Notre Dame
March 28, 2009
These days, protests over college commencement speakers herald spring's arrival as surely as longer days and greening leaves.
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Is an Italian rail company taking L.A. for a ride?
March 25, 2009
Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa hopes this week to persuade the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's board to disregard the recommendations of its professional staff and executive director and give an Italian firm a new shot at building cars for the system's light-rail lines.
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A stop sign for L.A. billboards
March 21, 2009
Next week, the Los Angeles Planning Commission will try once again to agree on a new set of billboard regulations it can send to the City Council for approval.
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The real 'outrage' behind AIG's bonuses
March 18, 2009
President Obama and his administration have made a complete shambles of the AIG bailout, and the failure won't be papered over by the chief executive's populist campaign rhetoric.
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Rep. Waters' troubling ties
March 14, 2009
Rep. Maxine Waters, the Democratic congresswoman who has represented a swath of South Los Angeles and surrounding communities such as Inglewood and Hawthorne for nearly 20 years, is one of Southern California's toughest and most influential lawmakers.
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L.A.'s animal terrorists
March 11, 2009
On monday in Washington, President Obama heralded the return of what he terms "sound science" to the administration of federal policy.
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Bringing back L.A. voters
March 7, 2009
The municipal elections in Los Angeles this week were another in a long series of democratic catastrophes.
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Bush's executive tyranny
March 4, 2009
Just how close to the brink of executive tyranny did the United States come in the panic that swept George W. Bush's administration after 9/11? The answer, it now seems clear, is that we came far closer than even staunch critics of the White House believed.
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The war we gave Mexico
February 28, 2009
Early in the last century, near the end of his 34 bloody years in power, the aging Mexican strongman Porfirio Diaz mused that his country's great misfortune was to be located "so far from God and so near the United States."
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Cardinal Mahony's message
February 25, 2009
However effective the federal stimulus package -- or, for that matter, the messages of optimism and hope Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and President Obama delivered Tuesday -- it seems clear that Southern California is about to be swamped by a tsunami of want.
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The law and terrorists
February 21, 2009
In the remarks he made at Thursday's ceremony to swear in Leon Panetta as the 19th director of Central Intelligence, Vice President Joe Biden made it clear just how fundamentally this administration rejects its predecessor's violent break with traditional American views of human rights and the rule of law.
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America can handle the coffins
February 18, 2009
Last week, President Obama said he was weighing whether to lift the 18-year ban on photo and video coverage at Dover Air Force Base, the Delaware facility where the bodies of America's military dead are received back into the United States.
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Antonio Villaraigosa's campaign within a campaign
February 14, 2009
Barring a truly unforeseen event -- something on the order of alien abduction, perhaps -- Antonio Villaraigosa will be reelected mayor of Los Angeles.
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The excesses of Nadya Suleman
February 11, 2009
These are somber and sobering times, but they may offer us the opportunity to reexamine not only the material extravagance that has characterized so much of our recent life, but also some of its emotional excesses.
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LAPD gets reform right
February 7, 2009
This week, the City Council unanimously approved nearly $13 million in payments to settle claims growing out of the May Day police riot at MacArthur Park, during which officers attacked pro-immigration demonstrators who purportedly failed to disperse. Additional suits filed by journalists, who were assaulted while covering the 2007 event, are pending in federal court, so the civic tab is likely to grow.
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Newspapers need an antitrust exemption
February 4, 2009
In this winter of our discontent, it probably was inevitable that talk of some sort of government bailout for newspapers would begin to find an audience. These days, after all, newspaper companies seem to vie with automakers for the dubious distinction of being the American economy's most pitiable basket cases.
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L.A. has more serious things to worry about than Billy and the cardinal
January 31, 2009
What do Billy the elephant and Cardinal Roger M. Mahony have in common? Both are the subject of frivolous, pointlessly distracting governmental deliberations at a time of actual civic crisis.
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Change has come to the LAPD too
January 21, 2009
With so much of the nation's attention understandably focused on President Obama's inauguration, it was inevitable that a local event of great significance, the Los Angeles Police Department's First Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Breakfast, went all but overlooked Monday. It deserves to be noted, though, because such a celebration of the civil rights leader's birthday would have been unthinkable on several counts just a few years ago.
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Oakland murder mystery
January 17, 2009
The late Johnnie Cochran used to say that "the most powerful single person in the entire criminal justice system is the cop on the street."
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Villaraigosa's support of Israel is on the mark
January 14, 2009
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has come in for more than a little criticism for publicly supporting Israel's military action against the Hamas militants who dominate the Gaza Strip.
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The failure of our 401(k)s
January 10, 2009
As President-elect Barack Obama and lawmakers attempt to reach agreement on what sort of stimulus package has the best chance of arresting America's economic free fall, the enormity of the immediate crisis naturally pushes any issue that can be deferred to the margin.
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A vote for Panetta as CIA chief
January 7, 2009
When it comes to selecting the country's head spook, our presidents have a pretty hit-and-miss history.
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Robert Graham, L.A.'s masterful sculptor
January 3, 2009
Though every artist's death diminishes us, Robert Graham's loss impoverishes Los Angeles in a deep and particular way.
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Chip Saltsman's 'Magic Negro' mistake
December 31, 2008
Given the current state of affairs, the Republican Party's next national chairman probably will need a sense of humor. A little judgment wouldn't hurt either -- unless, of course, the GOP elders think it's a good idea to further refine their party into a pure aggregation of fervently religious heterosexual white people who hate taxes.
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Surviving hard times
December 27, 2008
No matter how tenuous your connection to any particular tradition, this inevitably is a season of introspection and reflection.
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Dueling legacies on church and state
December 20, 2008
Two of the English-speaking world's most influential political intellectuals died late this week. Their legacies, however, are as contradictory as they are relevant, which makes their respective lives worth a few moments of reflection.
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Homeboy Industries' money crunch
December 13, 2008
Father Gregory Boyle, the Jesuit priest who has heroically labored for more than 20 years on behalf of the young men and women Los Angeles would most like to forget, likes to say that "nothing stops a bullet like a job."
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Obama's Gitmo problem
December 10, 2008
Call it the otherother mess Barack Obama will inherit from George W. Bush.
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What MOCA really needs
December 6, 2008
The Museum of Contemporary Art is more than a civic cultural treasure. Along with its Grand Avenue neighbor -- the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the brilliant Esa-Pekka Salonen -- it has become one of the essential windows on the restless, searching, cosmopolitan creativity of this city's 21st century spirit.
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LAPD redeployment is the right move
December 3, 2008
It once was said of the Bourbons that in 300 years of ruling France, they learned nothing and forgot nothing.
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An idea lost on fanatics
November 29, 2008
There are many facts remaining to be discovered about the atrocities in Mumbai this week, but we already know what we really need to know.
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Solar plan risks scorching L.A.'s political future
November 26, 2008
If you like the way your state government in Sacramento works, you'll love what the Green Energy and Good Jobs for Los Angeles Act will do for local politics.
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Clinton, Obama and Israel
November 22, 2008
Some years ago, the Irish politician and writer Conor Cruise O'Brien proposed this taxonomy of intractable international conflicts. They could be divided, he said, into "problems," which have solutions, and "situations," which can only have outcomes.
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A grateful nation needs to do more
November 19, 2008
There seems to be little energy these days for anything but anxiety and finger-pointing about the economy. Still, it's sobering -- even shocking -- that Monday's final report by the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses failed to find a place on the front page of a single major newspaper.
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Both sides in the same-sex marriage controversy need to cool down
November 15, 2008
The electoral contest over Proposition 8 was a low, dishonest affair -- the deception made worse by the fact that so much of it was financed by religious organizations, like the Mormon church and the Catholic Knights of Columbus. Still, if cooler heads on both sides of the question don't exert themselves, things may soon get even nastier.
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L.A.'s Latinos are a sign of things to come
November 12, 2008
America has long scouted Los Angeles for cultural signposts to the new. The results of last week's election may have put the city on the country's political cutting edge as well.
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L.A.'s shade of blue
November 8, 2008
In national terms, California is about as indelibly blue as the political process permits, but an unusually comprehensive exit poll of voters in Tuesday's presidential election confirms that Los Angeles is perhaps the bluest of the blue; it is now more liberal and Democratic than the state as a whole.
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Bringing change to America
November 5, 2008
What is perhaps most remarkable about the changed America to which we woke this morning is how the president-elect's race seems, in most ways, the least remarkable thing about him.
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The end of the Catholic vote
October 29, 2008
It's an article of faith in U.S. politics that, when it comes to the popular vote at least, Catholics determine the winners in our presidential contests.
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Greenspan's blind spot
October 25, 2008
Alan Greenspan is surprised ... by human nature.
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L.A.'s rape kit betrayal
October 22, 2008
We now know that the Los Angeles Police Department's crime lab is a virtually perfect engine of injustice.
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LAPD flunks fingerprinting
October 18, 2008
Our criminal justice system essentially grades on the pass-fail system, and, as anybody who watched O.J. Simpson's first trial will recall, the Los Angeles Police Department has a history of flunking science.
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L.A., land of fire -- always
October 15, 2008
Eight thousand years ago, the Tongva and Tataviam peoples, who made their homes in what we now call the Los Angeles Basin and the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys, did exactly what many of us have been doing for the last few days: They inhaled the bone-dry air of a wind-scoured fall afternoon and watched the hillsides above them burn.
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What we've lost
October 11, 2008
The U.S. is no stranger to financial panics. The destructive convulsion through which we now are passing is the ninth since 1819, but it may be the first in which the public's loss of faith in banking and finance was exacerbated by a simultaneous collapse of confidence in both government and the news media.
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Beware the bully pulpit
September 27, 2008
Every act of civil disobedience is, by its very nature, a provocation. The trick is to distinguish between those acts that genuinely express the unjustly ignored conscience of the provocateur and those that merely are provocative.
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Metrolink's dismal safety record
September 20, 2008
Metrolink, Southern California's beleaguered commuter rail service, likes to bill itself as one of America's fastest-growing public transit agencies. These days, its charter might just as well be called the tort lawyers' full employment act.
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From moose whacker to McCain's meal ticket
September 17, 2008
If you want to gauge just how integral Sarah Palin has become to John McCain's hopes of winning the presidency, consider this: On Tuesday, when the Republican nominee went before the cameras to address what, at that moment, looked like financial Armageddon, he repeatedly referred to how much better off people would be under "a McCain-Palin administration."
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An Afghan 'October surprise'?
September 13, 2008
Friday, The Times' Greg Miller and Julian E. Barnes reported that the United States has escalated its war against Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies by "deploying Predator aircraft equipped with sophisticated new surveillance systems that were instrumental in crippling the insurgency in Iraq."
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A Palin double standard
September 10, 2008
Connoisseurs of campaign tactics tend to be a pretty cynical bunch, so they'll doubtless find much to admire in the adroit way Sen. John McCain's camp has handled Sarah Palin since she came aboard the ticket. Voters, who tend to nourish an inconvenient hunger for information, may be less impressed. One suspects that sooner rather than later, some will begin to wonder why the GOP is insisting that Palin is entitled to be treated according to a double standard.
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Extra help for California's Prop. 8
September 6, 2008
The McCain-Palin ticket's decision to renew hostilities in the culture wars seems likely to increase the already considerable national profile of a hotly contested California proposition dealing with same-sex marriage.
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Palin's privacy versus her public stance
September 3, 2008
How sensitive is Sen. John McCain's campaign about his presumptive running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin?
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The perils of Palin
August 30, 2008
John McCain's selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his Republican running mate is likely to push social issues back into prominence in a presidential campaign dominated so far by the economy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Obama's VP strategy
August 23, 2008
The swirl of frenetic attention on Barack Obama's selection of a running mate is good political entertainment, but keep in mind that it's mostly a media event rather than a campaign milestone.
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Is the FBI investigating L.A.'s Rocky Delgadillo?
August 20, 2008
At this point in his amazing shrinking career, you probably could fill most of Staples Center with local politicians who've got it in for Los Angeles City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo. Now the question is: Do we need a row of seats for the FBI?
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The extreme-right way to make a buck
August 16, 2008
The fact that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson's famous friendship recovered from the acrimonious presidential campaigns of 1796 and 1800 is a monument to 18th century detachment and the mysterious power of genuine human fellowship.
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Transit tax tussle
August 13, 2008
If you've been having a hard time following the murky political melodramas over the proposed half-cent county sales tax increase to fund more public transportation, you shouldn't blame yourself. You've probably been making the naive citizen's basic mistake of considering the question on its merits.
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Old media dethroned
August 9, 2008
When John Edwards admitted Friday that he lied about his affair with filmmaker Rielle Hunter, a former employee of his campaign, he may have ended his public life but he certainly ratified an end to the era in which traditional media set the agenda for national political journalism.
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The lure of made-up memoirs
March 5, 2008
Tuesday's revelation that a critically acclaimed memoir of gang life in South Los Angeles was an elaborate hoax raises troubling questions about the economics of American publishing, about our collective deference to victims and about the paucity of real literature based on our most urgent urban experiences.
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Deciphering the Catholic 'swing vote'
March 1, 2008
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and her advisors have referred to next week's Texas and Ohio primaries as her campaign's "firewall" against Sen. Barack Obama's surging popularity. In both states, the New York senator's barrier is built on the same foundation -- the Catholic vote, and that fact has intriguing implications well beyond the primaries.
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Who'll stop the gangs?
February 27, 2008
Gang violence is to Los Angeles politics as the weather is to conversation: Everybody talks about it, and nobody ever does anything about it.
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Shoddy story, brilliant politics
February 23, 2008
This week's New York Times expose on Sen. John McCain's alleged relationship with a telecommunications lobbyist nearly a decade ago was a shabby piece of journalism.
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'Prayers' just won't do
February 16, 2008
It's been a particularly grim and bloody month on one of the world's great killing fields -- the United States of America.
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The clowns at LAUSD
February 13, 2008
There's an old "Far Side" cartoon that shows a lecture hall filled with seated dinosaurs. Diagrams fill the blackboard, and a huge reptile is speaking into the microphone at the podium. "The picture's pretty bleak, gentlemen," he says. "The world's climates are changing, the mammals are taking over, and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut." It's an image of doomed and clueless gigantism that will resonate with anyone who read Times staff writer Joel Rubin's recent reconstruction of the sprawling Los Angeles Unified School District's great payroll fiasco.
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Bush's message for McCain
February 9, 2008
If you're one of the people who couldn't quite follow all the steps in the intricate little folk dance the Bush administration performed around the torture issue this week, don't feel left out.
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Baseball's shame is our shame too
December 15, 2007
THE historian Jacques Barzun once remarked, "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game."
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CNN: Corrupt News Network
December 1, 2007
THE United States is at war in the Middle East and Central Asia, the economy is writhing like a snake with a broken back, oil prices are relentlessly climbing toward $100 a barrel and an increasing number of Americans just can't afford to be sick with anything that won't be treated with aspirin and bed rest.
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Let's be honest about cartoons
February 11, 2006
The editor of the Los Angeles Times does not think you need to see any of the cartoons that have triggered deadly riots across the Muslim world.
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