LOS ANGELES (AP) – Hundreds of Occupy Los Angeles protesters showed no sign they planned to move Sunday ahead of a city-imposed midnight deadline to abandon their encampment, saying they would instead hold an “eviction block party.”

Although city officials have told demonstrators they must leave the weeks-old protest site and take their nearly 500 tents with them by 12:01 a.m. Monday, just a handful were seen packing up Sunday.

Instead, some passed out fliers containing the city seal and the words: “By order of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, this notice terminates your tenancy and requires you to attend the Occupy L.A. Eviction Block Party,” which the fliers’ said was scheduled for 12:01 a.m.

“The best way to keep a non-violent movement non-violent is to throw a party, and keep it festive and atmospheric,” said Brian Masterson as he helped a friend break down her tent. “And I’m going to be doing as much as I can to stop violence.”

He said he had turned his own tent into a “non-violent booby trap” by filling it with sandbags to make it tough to tear down.

“We can’t beat the LAPD, but we can make it difficult for them to do their job, and have fun while we’re doing it,” Masterson said. (more…)

Did you hear about Carmageddon? It turns out the apocalyptic shutdown of the nation’s busiest freeway, the 405, wasn’t apocalyptic at all.

Media hyped the billion dollar construction project for weeks, claiming it could “back up traffic as much as 64 miles,” and politicians blunted told constituents, “Stay the hell away from the 405.” But none of the predictions about a Carmageddon came true.

Instead we found politicians ready to sing the praises of the newly added carpool lane and tear down of the Mulholland Bridge. We also found Angelinos skeptical that the project would actually alleviate traffic.

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It should come as no surprise that on the campaign trail, President Obama refused to be interviewed about Saul Alinsky, the community organizing guru who wrote Rules for Radicals, a how-to guide for destroying American capitalism and democracy.

Presumably Obama, who taught courses on Alinsky’s brutal, sometimes violent organizing techniques, declined to speak to reporters about the late guru. He must have realized that such an interview would throw an unwanted spotlight on Alinsky’s radicalism, and by extension, his own. Such counterproductive publicity would also have undermined the candidate’s efforts to reinvent himself as a moderate. Alinsky’s adherents now dominate the modern Democratic Party establishment. Apart from President Obama himself, they include Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett, Federal Communications Commission diversity chief Mark Lloyd, Obama’s ex-green jobs czar Van Jones, former DNC trainer Heather Booth, Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros, and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to name just a few. “Who the hell isn’t [an Alinskyite] in this administration?” asks conservative author David Horowitz.

And President Obama hasn’t been the only longtime ACORN operative working in the White House. There’s also the low-profile Patrick Gaspard who, until recently, was White House political affairs director, one of the titles Karl Rove held in President Bush’s White House.

In a move that ought to disturb anyone who cares about the integrity of the democratic process, earlier this year Gaspard took over the reins of the Democratic National Committee as its executive director—just in time to begin initial preparations for President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.

Gaspard hails from the same world of radical left-wing community organizing that made Barack Obama who he is today. Gaspard is an expert in the harsh, street-smart organizing tactics taught by Alinsky. He’s the hatchet man Obama sent to New York over a year ago to strong-arm then-Gov. David Paterson into dropping his reelection campaign. As executive director running the DNC’s day-to-day operations, Gaspard will oversee Organizing for America, a project of the DNC supposedly modeled on Alinskyite organizing principles.

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I support the Los Angeles Police Department. I have friends on the job.  These men and women protect our city and we owe them a debt of gratitude.

So it’s an outrage that the City of Los Angeles uses these dedicated individuals as pawns in an effort to close the city’s enormous budget deficit.  Over the past year, I noticed an anecdotal increase in the number of traffic stops I witnessed on my daily slog through city traffic.  So whenever I ran into an LAPD officer, I asked for a candid, off-the-record answer to this question:

“Have you been directed to increase the number of traffic tickets issued, in either volume, or for offenses you previously might not stop a motorist for?”

The answer, unanimously, was “yes”.

Then I asked if they would rather be actively involved in preventing crime than issuing tickets.  The answer, again, was unanimous in the affirmative.

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Adam Carolla, host of the hugely popular Adam Carolla Show and author of the new book, In Fifty Years We’ll All Be Chicks, rages against cops, drug laws, tax hikes, traffic congestion, spendy politicians, Tim Robbins, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and more in this wide-ranging, uncensored interview with Reason.tv’s Ted Balaker.

The Ace Man calls for legalizing drugs and gambling, lowering taxes, and clearing our prisons of anyone incarcerated for victimless crimes. He discusses whether he just might be a libertarian and spells out what he would do if he replaced Antonio Villaraigosa as mayor of Los Angeles (hint: left turns on red lights and drag racing with Richard Branson!).

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The City of Los Angeles – you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.  Slowly, ever since the departure of Mayor Richard Riordan in 2001, the parade of inept mayors and spineless city councils have dragged the city into a morass.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has always been an empty suit, a smirking, glad-handing fool of epic proportions with a history of questionable ethics.  Besides successfully lobbying President Clinton to commute the sentence of a convicted cocaine trafficker, Villaraigosa pulled a John Edwards by allegedly fooling around while his spouse was undergoing cancer treatment.  Add to this the L.A Times report that the Los Angeles Ethics Commission accused him of 31 violations of campaign finance and disclosure laws during his 2003 City Council campaign.  Toss in the report that Villaraigosa was a member of MECha, a Hispanic separatist organization, while at UCLA, and attended an unaccredited law school in Los Angeles that allegedly promoted illegal alien causes (He failed the bar exam four times).

This is the Mayor of Los Angeles, and Angelenos have gotten what they deserve.  They re-elected a man who has shown absolutely no leadership in times of crisis.  His inability to use the bully pulpit has contributed to the dismal record of the Los Angeles Unified School District.  LAUSD is falling apart, unable to manage its budget, unable to fire teachers due to outrageous union rules, and increasing class sizes.  This is not surprising.  A report by the LA Weekly, an alternative newspaper usually known for supporting left-wing causes, did some strong investigative work into Villaraigosa’s schedule.  During one period, the Mayor spent only 11% of his time working on city business.  He has refused to direct LAPD to repeal Special Order 40 – which does not permit officers from asking about someone’s immigration status.

So even in circumstances where an officer sees a KNOWN ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT that he himself helped deport following a prior arrest, he cannot report this individual to I.C.E.   This outrageous policy by the Mayor and City Council resulted in the shooting death of a young man named Jamiel Shaw.

However, the most egregious lack of leadership Villaraigosa demonstrates is occurring right now.

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Over at Reason, the great Matt Welch looks under the hood of America’s fiscal engine and finds, well, trouble:

The housing bubble, with its tax-generating wealth, was already bursting in 2007. Yet as recently as 2009, Montgomery County, Maryland, decided to make “phantom” cost-of-living increases to the pensions of government workers, linking contributions to salary increases that did not occur. This sweetheart deal, which added more than $7 million to the county’s annual budget (according to The Washington Post), tasted rather bitter at a time when the county’s revenue was falling short of projections by more than $24 million. Yet after one Montgomery County Council member proposed eliminating this sop to the public-sector unions, four of his colleagues joined a rally on the rooftop of the council’s parking garage, leading a crowd of 400 government employees in chants of “We’ve had enough!” and “No justice, no peace.”

In Los Angeles, former labor organizer and once-rising political star Antonio Villaraigosa, now a second-term mayor who has fallen so far that the local glossy city magazine made him a cover boy last year under the headline “Failure,” announced in April his intention to shut down “inessential” city services two days a week, after the city controller had declared that the municipality would “run out of money” by June 30. Villaraigosa’s deputy chief of staff, Matt Szabo, told The Wall Street Journalthe city’s public-sector unions “have priced themselves out of a job.”

Yet those unions received significant raises from the tough-sounding mayor as recently as 2007. The city’s labor force grew by more than 9 percent from 2000 to 2009, and annual pension contributions tripled, according to the Los Angeles Times. In a March interview with National Public Radio, Villaraigosa lamented that “California cities are constrained by various propositions which limit your ability to raise revenues” (though he managed to raise the city’s sales tax from 8.25 percent to 9.75 percent) and portrayed renegotiating union contracts as an unlikely last resort. “There aren’t a lot of options here,” he said. “We have contracts with our employees that we have to abide by. So unless they agree to sharing in the sacrifice in these tough times, I won’t have a lot of options.”

Even bankruptcy isn’t necessarily a harsh enough reality check.

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It’s hard to find a politician who isn’t eager to “do something” about high unemployment. Turns out California has found one way to save and create certain kinds of jobs—spend like mad and raise taxes.

That job-creation strategy has worked quite well for government-sector workers. Problem is the statewide unemployment rate is still among the highest in the nation, and many private-sector employers are heading to states like Texas, where taxes are lower and regulations are lighter.

“I would love to have companies calling me saying, ‘We’d like to move to California, can you help us with that relocation?’ I get none of those calls,” says business relocation coach Joe Vranich. “The calls I do get are, ‘Hello, we want to move out of California, can you help us do that?’”

Vranich says there’s no one reason why businesses leave. He calls it “death by a thousand cuts,” where job creators get fed up with everything from high taxes to traffic gridlock and legal hassles.

Take Rick and Jack Newcombe, the father-son team that runs Creators Syndicate.

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