Antonio Villaraigosa

Customers hoping to savor challah at their Shabbat dinners know that the line often trails out the door of Delice Bakery on West Pico Boulevard. The purveyor of French kosher breads and pastries sells hundreds of its creations every Friday.

They have become a time-honored perk at Los Angeles City Hall -- hundreds of city-issued cars doled out to elected leaders and their top deputies. Now Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa wants to eliminate most of the 229 vehicles in the city's executive motor pool, as well as cars from other fleets, to help close a $155-million shortfall.

Los Angeles, I've always got your back, don't I? So here's how I see this election going down for us: Say that Hillary Clinton does get the Democratic nomination -- and, with the Iraq war stalling and the economy free falling, she wins the election. Boom, she's got a Cabinet to fill. And who's her California main man? Who was there for her way back, before Obamamania, bringing in Latino votes in sheaves? Antonio Villaraigosa. Mr. Future Secretary of Education or Labor or HHS Villaraigosa.

The 95-year-old Spurgeon clock tower, built by Santa Ana's founder and depicted on the city's seal, is being brought back to life. The clock began malfunctioning four years ago; four months ago, it stopped. In stepped Santa Ana resident, history buff and clock connoisseur Tim Rush. He called City Hall. He called fellow members of the Santa Ana Historical Society. He reached out to anyone he thought might help restore the clock. "It is an icon in the city," Rush said.

Even as Los Angeles leaders pledge to combat gang violence, a dysfunctional city bureaucracy is spending millions of dollars on unproven programs and is failing to coordinate with schools, law enforcement and social agencies, according to a report set for release today. Produced by City Controller Laura Chick, the report assails the city for taking a hodgepodge approach to youth and gang services.

In his quest to balance the city's books, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is gearing up to sell city-owned properties in some of the Westside's most sought-after neighborhoods. But Villaraigosa's budget-saving strategy is running up against one of his biggest campaign pledges: to expand affordable housing.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa informed a national television audience this week that he intended to seek a second term in the city's top post while giving some of his most personal remarks to date about the political fallout from his extramarital affair. But Villaraigosa, who informally has discussed his reelection intentions off and on for a couple of months, did not say directly whether he would run for governor in 2010, one year after the mayoral election.

For more than 2 1/2 years, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has been the public face of Los Angeles, appearing in one neighborhood after the next and often leading the nightly news. But over the last two months, he has devoted noticeable time and energy to a cause outside the city. By today, the mayor will have spent 18 of the last 65 days on the road for presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.

Los Angeles had a stay-at-home kind of mayor and didn't much like it, so the city dumped James K. Hahn and voted in a player. Antonio Villaraigosa told voters they lived in a big city, one worthy of a big-city mayor who could hold his own not just with high-profile mayors from New York or Chicago but with presidents. He said he would go to Sacramento, Washington or anywhere else to put L.A. at the top of the national political agenda. On this point, he was as good as his word.

Former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan named an influential group of civic leaders 15 years ago to streamline what was said to be a tortuous city permitting process that made Los Angeles seem almost hostile to business. Many of the 83 proposals, however, ended up on a shelf collecting dust. Now, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has pledged to fix the same problems and dozens of others believed to impede investment.