The Los Angeles city controller doesn't have any actual power over the modernization plans of Los Angeles World Airports or over whether a controversial new runway is built at Los Angeles International Airport. Nevertheless, LAWA and the runway have become an issue in the race between candidates Dennis Zine, a termed-out city councilman, and Ron Galperin, a Century City attorney.

The City Council endorsed a $4.76-billion modernization plan for LAX last month that includes an additional runway on the north side to better accommodate the new generation of supersized jets. Zine, who represents District 3 in the western San Fernando Valley, was one of four council members who voted against the plan. He says he supports "modernization and regionalization" at the airports but not the new runway project, which he said would cause gridlock around LAX and lead to an expansion that would encroach on neighboring Westchester.

Zine's stance infuriated members of the broad coalition of business and...

We applaud Times columnist Robin Abcarian for shining the light on the inequities in our healthcare system in response to Angelina Jolie’s recent announcement about her prophylactic mastectomy. When Jolie made her medical decision, she had at her disposal the resources to pay for the procedures and the best doctors; not everyone has the same ability.

At the Cancer Legal Resource Center (CLRC), our attorneys hear from individuals who experience great difficulty undergoing the same procedures as Jolie because they fear discrimination based on the results of genetic tests, and because their insurance won’t cover the care they need. Until these barriers are removed, many women of more modest means than an A-list actress will remain unable to take control of their medical decisions. 

Thankfully, women can take several steps to have the BRCA test (which Jolie underwent to determine her genetic predisposition to breast cancer) and other preventive treatments. Abcarian notes the...

Readers are talking a lot about a man who talks for a living: Vin Scully. Times data editor Doug Smith's Op-Ed article Tuesday musing on "the voice of L.A." closed with a question: "As far as I'm concerned, the voice of L.A. should be heard every day in some public place. So tell me, where would you want to hear Vin Scully?" 

More than 60 suggestions were sent to letters@latimes.com and to Smith directly. Perhaps as a reflection of mobile technology's imbededness in our lives, many of the suggestions relate to cellphones. Others said the comforting familiarity of Scully's speech would soften phrases normally used to deliver bad news (think a police car's loudspeaker telling you to pull over). Smith offered his own idea: "having Scully record that voice at LAX that tells you the white zone is only for unloading."

Here are many of the reader suggestions we received, organized loosely into several categories. Below those is a poll asking readers to pick the best idea from a list of five...

Meghan Daum’s Thursday column about the loss of her dog was a real tear-jerker. “If Rex could have talked, we'd have finished each other's sentences,” she wrote of their powerful bond.

I choked up at my desk as I read it, thinking about my own dog, just a little over 2 years old, and the unbearable idea of life without him. Every night when I get home from work and see him waiting in the window for me, my heart grows two sizes.

Surprisingly, Daum’s column was also a lightning rod for debate. Or maybe I shouldn’t have been shocked. I like to read the comments on our Op-Eds for the other side’s perspective, but I do sometimes find myself thinking that cranks will leave argumentative comments on anything.

“They say if you're lucky you'll get one really great dog in your life,” Daum wrote. “Other dogs may do their jobs in their own unique and perfectly wonderful ways, but there will always be that dog that no dog will replace, the dog...

The scandal surrounding the Internal Revenue Service's handling of applications for tax-exempt status by "tea party" groups and other right-leaning organizations took a sharp turn at the House Ways and Means Committee on Friday. In addition to decrying how those groups' applications were flagged for extra scrutiny, Republicans on the panel -- especially Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) -- argued that the Obama administration had covered up the problem for more than a year.

"Listening to the nightly news, this appears to be just the latest example of a culture of cover-ups -- and political intimidation -- in this administration," Camp said, according to my colleagues Melanie Mason and Jim Puzzanghera. "It seems like the truth is hidden from the American people just long enough to make it through an election."

For those who've been blissfully ignorant of the goings-on in Washington over the last six months, Camp was alluding to l'affaire Benghazi. There too the criticism has shifted from the...

The Times editorial board offended some liberal readers when it urged a no vote on Proposition C, which asks voters in the city of Los Angeles to “instruct” local members of Congress to support a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. One commenter asked: “Did the Koch Bros already buy the Times and I missed it?”

As our editorial noted, The Times was critical of Citizens United when it was handed down. But we raised several objections to Proposition C: It wouldn’t be binding; it was “vague and question-begging” and didn’t provide the actual text of a proposed constitutional amendment; and its sweeping assertion that corporations "do not have the constitutional rights of human beings” could be interpreted to say that corporations could be stripped of constitutional protections that have nothing to do with political speech – such as the right to be free from unreasonable searches...

The fatal attack on a woman walking in the Antelope Valley community of Littlerock by four pit bulls last week has prompted Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich to ask the  county Department of Animal Care and Control to look into ways to better deal with the problem of vicious dogs prowling the streets.

Roaming dogs in general are a problem in the Antelope Valley, where the landscape seems to invite careless or even cruel behavior.

“People go out there and abandon their dogs in the desert,” Marcia Mayeda, the director of Animal Care and Control, told me. “They abandon horses too. We find them — skin and bones.”

People also sometimes let their dogs run loose, thinking that’s fine in a rather rural area. It’s not. Dogs should never be allowed to roam off-leash in neighborhoods. A pack mentality can set in if multiple dogs start roaming together, says Mayeda.

In the case of the Littlerock woman, the dogs that attacked her got away...

Don’t know why, but Thursday turned into car crash day.

Perhaps it was because, in between reading about one White House scandal or another, I was distracted by this intriguing headline on The Times’ homepage: “Kim Kardashian's gate closes on Kanye West's $750K Lamborghini.”

Go ahead, click on it -- you know you want to, even though you’ll hate yourself in the morning. Partly it’s because of the perfect storm of names involved: Kim, Kanye, Lambo (if only Khloe had been driving!). But partly it’s because like moths to a flame, we can’t help ourselves: We are fascinated by car crashes. And we’re doubly fascinated when the sheet metal involved is very expensive sheet metal.

Why, there’s an entire website devoted to such nonsense: wreckedexotics.com. Because there’s nothing quite like viewing a flattened Ferrari or a junked Jag to make your day.

Seeing Kanye’s Lamborghini Aventador get munched by a driveway gate...

The state Senate has approved an anti-"swatting" bill. Swatting is the act of pranksters who make false 911 calls in the hope of prompting a heavily armed police response, typically to the home of a celebrity.

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Vin Scully is the true voice of Los Angeles

Follow Ted Rall on Twitter @TedRall

The scandal over the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status for special review claimed its first scalp Wednesday, when Treasury Secretary Jack Lew demanded and received the resignation of the agency's acting chief.

President Obama announced the resignation of Steven Miller on Wednesday afternoon. He also took the opportunity to repeat much of the statement he'd issued Tuesday, when he said the agency's actions were "intolerable and inexcusable." He also pledged, again, to put safeguards in place to make sure that sort of one-sided and improper scrutiny doesn't recur.

The firing won't, and shouldn't, derail the inquiries Congress plans into the episode. Among the unanswered questions are how IRS employees developed the process used to screen applications for extra review, why they sought records they didn't need and weren't entitled to obtain(including the identities of donors, the issues the applicant organizations were interested in and...