Calling Michael Shane Ellis a good-for-nothing, drinking-and-driving, hitting-and-running, all-around no account member of the Long Beach school board is simply not right. Not anymore. Not the good-for-nothing part, anyway.
A month after the re-election of two school board incumbents supported by the Long Beach Area Chamber of Commerce, the organization’s CEO and president acknowledges that Ellis’s [...]

With 100 percent of the votes still not cast–and more to the point, not going to be–the results are official: Michael Shane Ellis, the so-called “worst school board member in Long Beach history,” has defeated Randy Gordon, the so-called “self-appointed mayor of Long Beach.”
The troubled Ellis will not face the recall election sought by the [...]

Long Beach Vice Mayor Bonnie Lowenthal was all smiles Saturday after receiving 67.3 percent of the vote at the Democratic Party’s Pre-Primary Endorsement Conference. But Councilwoman Tonia Reyes Uranga escaped as the short-term survivor by keeping Lowenthal from getting the 70 percent needed to qualify for the party’s official backing in their race for the [...]

TV’s Dr. Phil wants to hug it out with the Second District’s convicted sex offenders
Britney Spears: so yesterday! Dr. Phil McGraw–television’s Oprah-approved, magnolia-mouthed mother hen–has a new cause celebre: the convicted sex offenders who live in that vintage Streamline Moderne apartment complex in the 1100 block of East First Street.

This week a new Best Buy opens at Marina Pacifica Mall, and ground-breaking is celebrated for a new Residence Inn down by the Queen Mary. How good is that?  Not as good as it could–should–have been, and not as good as city officials are trying to make it seem. Not since the City Council voted to give away millions of [...]

We’d heard the rumors that State Senator Alan Lowenthal was considering a run for Long Beach Mayor in 2010. In fact, we’d passed them along [click here and check out the sixth paragraph] – complete with our own political musical-chairs scenario that had Second District City Councilwoman Suja Lowenthal running for her father-in-law’s senatorial seat and current Mayor Bob Foster running for [...]

Hopefully not to my neighborhood. Alamitos Beach residents feel the same way.
Took a trip to Illinois to visit the in-laws recently. My father-in-law, noodling around on his computer, decided that it would be interesting to see how many residents of his upscale retirement community were on the Megan’s Law watch list. A [...]

Suja Lowenthal is among three members of the Long Beach City Council — the others are Rae Gabelich and Patrick O’Donnell — who don’t have to campaign for re-election this year because no one filed to oppose them. Trying to hold these officials to some kind of public accounting, the Press-Telegram’s John Canalis submitted questions [...]

… BUT ALSO THE TRUTHS THE PAPER’S EDITORIAL WRITERS NEVER TOLD
Bill Pearl of LBReport.com breaks down, sentence by sentence, an editorial by the Press-Telegram that — depending on what you think of Long Beach’s once-great daily in these, its clearly diminished days — was either a pack of despicably calculated lies or a pathetic inability [...]

WHO DO YOU THINK WON THE NIGHT?
A row of men in very fine suits — representatives of the Port of Long Beach, including executive director Richard D. Steinke and Harbor Commissioners Mario Cordero, Dr. Mike Walter and Nick Sramek — sat shoulder-to-shoulder in the third row of the Long Beach City Council chambers last night.
They [...]