Presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney's "Day One" ads, whose second installment was launched this week, do manage to grab its audience by the guts: By focusing on the deficit, unfair Chinese trading practices and job-killing federal regulations (three topics that no doubt ranked high in internal polls of Americans' top economic concerns), Romney aims to solidify his position as the candidate who knows and cares most about economic issues. It's too bad he has so little to say about them. On our relevancy meter, this one is Debatable.

"What would a Romney presidency be like?" the narrator intones in this week's ad. "Day One, President Romney announces deficit reductions, ending the Obama era of big government, helping secure our kids' futures." That's a magic trick worthy of Harry Potter. Congress controls the federal budget; presidents can make spending recommendations, but Romney can't end the era of big government with a wave of Dumbledore's wand. His high points for relevance are...

Dolores Huerta is the co-founder of the United Farm Workers and an committed feminist who now heads her own foundation.

For her, even a shoe-shopping expedition can be laden with socio-politics.

For Mother’s Day, her son said he was buying her new shoes. "We go to the store," she told me, "and there’s nobody to help you. When I was young, there was always somebody who could help you. [Now] it’s like our time isn’t valuable, so we have to look to find the things we need.

"And I thought, what if all women one day said, we’re not going to shop until all these stores put people in the stores to help us? Women’s time is valuable. We shouldn’t have to waste 15 or 20 minutes or a half-hour because they won’t hire clerks. It’s like we’re not important any more. And yet if it wasn’t for us, they couldn’t make any money."

Shod in new shoes or old ones, Dolores Huerta joins the company of Toni Morrison and John Glennand Bob...

Can POM Wonderful really save prostates? Prevent impotence? Protect from heart disease? According to a judge’s ruling on Monday, not so much.

"It has long been clear that the most wonderful thing about Pom Wonderful pomegranate juice is the spectacular marketing skill that persuades consumers to fork over their hard-earned cash for a liquid that sells for five to six times the price of, oh, cranberry juice," Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik wroteon Monday after a cease-and-desist order was issued to the makers of POM. The verdict: false and misleading advertising. "The 335-page decision found that Pom's health claims weren't backed by competent and reliable scientific evidence, as they needed to be,” Hiltzik wrote. “As a result, they violated federal law."

For the next five years, POM’s advertising and marketing materials, as well as consumer comments and complaints, must be submitted to the Federal Trade Commission for review, according to the New York...

It didn't take long for the major broadcast networks to sue Dish Network over its ballyhooed commercial-skipping DVR, the Hopper. But to win, they may have to persuade a federal judge to roll back the precedent the Supreme Court set in 1984 when it declared Sony's Betamax video recorder to be a legal product.

Fox, CBS and NBCUniversal filed separate lawsuits in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Thursday, and they take pains to distinguish what Dish was offering from what Sony put on the market three decades ago. The allegations include:

• Dish, not its customers, is doing the copying because the Hopper can be set to record all prime-time shows from the four networks automatically. That's a direct infringement, the networks say.
• Dish encourages and enables its customers to infringe by skipping over commercials in the recording.
• Dish encourages and enables its customers to infringe by recording TV shows, or by keeping copies of TV shows on the Hopper for a long period of time.
• Dish violates...

Over at Politics Now, our David Lauter has a fascinating deconstruction of a Gallup poll showing that the share of Americans who call themselves “pro-choice” on abortion has hit a record low of 41% while 50% now call themselves “pro-life.” Lauter explains why that factoid (resultoid?) is not a sure guide to Americans' views about whether abortion should be legal in certain circumstances:

"On the issue of when abortions should be legal, Americans’ views have moved very little, Gallup’s numbers show. The share of Americans who believe that women should be able to legally obtain an abortion under at least some circumstances now is 77%. That figure has bounced more or less randomly between 76% and 84% over the past 12 years. Similarly, the percentage who believe abortion should be illegal in all circumstances has fluctuated between 15% and 22% in Gallup polls since 2001. It now stands at 20%."

Now for the next question: Should people continue to refer to...

As Mel Brooks once said: "It's good to be the king."

And if you can't be the king, it’s not so bad being a member of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Commission -- or, for that matter, Berkeley's police chief.

Just when you think public officials are starting to clue in that "the public" they’re supposed to serve is a little, shall we say, restive these days over their performance, you get stories with headlines like this one in The Times on Wednesday:

"Leaders of cash-strapped Coliseum complex claim luxury suite."

"The taxpayer-owned venue is in financial ruins, but four commissioners kept a private, catered area at the Sports Arena from public sale, so they had prime views of Bruce Springsteen singing about blue-collar struggles."

Yep, seems that L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, City Councilman Tom LaBonge, David Israel and William Chadwick, who run the property as members of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Commission, are fans of the Boss.

So they paid $100 a ticket...

Somebody may have been taking that phrase "Saint Ronnie" a little too literally.

Or he was taking "Reaganomics" too literally.

A glass vial purportedly containing residue of President Reagan’s type-O blood, from the March 1981 day when an assassin nearly killed him, was put up for sale by a British auction site about three weeks ago, and bidding had reached $30,000 before the seller took the item off the market and is donating it to the Reagan Presidential Foundation.

According to the auction house site, the seller of the vial had actually bought it at a U.S. auction in February, and the owner was reselling it. The auction website quotes the anonymous consigner as saying he bought the "important artifact" because he is "a serious collector of presidential memorabilia, and have donated to museums before, and thought from the provenance supplied at the auction where I purchased, that the Reagan Foundation had no interest in the item."

Again according to the auction house, it will now...

Up to 20% of personal income growth in California this year could be attributed to Facebook. What’s the other 80%? The anti-tax folks might wage a guess and say "moving companies."

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It seems that Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, couldn't pass up the opportunity to let his former classmates at Harvard College know just what he’s up to these days. Associated Press reported that in an alumni directory, Kaczynski lists his occupation as "prisoner" and under awards lists "eight life sentences."

He is indeed serving a life sentence at the supermax prison in Florence, Colo., for killing three people during his bombing spree in which he mailed bombs to universities around the nation. It took authorities more than a decade to capture him. He was arrested after his brother alerted the FBI.

A Harvard spokesman told AP that the university confirmed the information came from Kaczynski, who graduated from Harvard College in 1962, but doesn't say how he provided the information. Nor does it say whether his update will be included in the reports or "red books,"  provided to each reunion class, and which are filled with people's confessionals about their...

Attention, Los Angeles shoppers: Time to start stocking up on cheap canvas tote bags.

The City Council agreed Wednesday to require supermarkets to stop using plastic bags in 10 months (for large stores) to 16 months (for smaller shops). The ban, which The Times' editorial board supported, responds to complaints from environmental activists that the bags are polluting waterways and filling landfills.

I get that point. The sheer number of bags that the city's approximately 7,500 markets pump into the ecosystem daily is overwhelming. Anyone who doubts that should conduct this experiment: See how many bags your household collects over the course of a month.

Critics -- particularly the companies that make plastic bags -- argue that the ban will destroy jobs. There's also the chance that the council is simply trading one environmental threat for another, as stores shift en masse to paper bags (for which customers will be charged 10 cents apiece, starting in a year).

The thing about disposable...

In the road war between L.A. motorists and cyclists, I usually side with the two-wheelers -- not because I pedal much myself (I'm more of a scooter aficionado than a biker) but because a contest between a 4,000-pound metal behemoth and a Schwinn cruiser isn't a fair fight. When they collide, the biker is nearly always the one who is going to be hurt or killed. So I'm happy to see the Legislature is on the verge of passing a new law on passing, though I suspect many bikers will complain that it doesn't go far enough to protect them.

SB 1464, written by Sen. Alan Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) and backed by the city of Los Angeles, requires drivers to give bikers three feet of space when passing -- except, that is, when it doesn't.

One of the provisions of the state vehicle code that annoys bicyclists is that it says drivers must pass bikers at a "safe distance," but it doesn't define what that is. Neither motorists nor cops are going to carry yardsticks to practice or enforce the three-foot...