Meg

Although Democratic front-runner Jerry Brown has not yet declared himself a candidate for governor, his backers have unveiled plans to start spending millions of dollars attacking wealthy GOP hopeful Meg Whitman in an attempt to curb her momentum. With Whitman gaining on Brown in the polls, even though the two would not go head-to-head until November, Democratic operatives have created independent campaign committees aiming to raise as much as $40 million for the effort from rich liberals, unions and other special interests.

When Meg Whitman ran for California governor as a Republican three years ago, she said marriage was "between a man and woman" and voiced her support for Proposition 8. But after what she called "a period of careful review and reflection," Whitman has joined the legal fight to overturn the gay marriage ban approved by California voters in 2008. She is one of dozens of Republicans who have signed a legal filing making a conservative case for Supreme Court justices to strike down the law. The court is scheduled to hear the case next month.

Republican Meg Whitman spent $27 million on her campaign for governor in the first 11 weeks of the year, setting a record-shattering pace with a prime-time television ad blitz to introduce herself to voters and attack her GOP opponent, according to a disclosure statement she filed Monday. Whitman, the billionaire ex-chief of EBay, has spent $46 million since joining the race early last year, seven times more than either of her main rivals. Steve Poizner, the Republican state insurance commissioner, has been punished incessantly by Whitman's "Can't Trust Steve" ads on shows such as "American Idol," and lagged nearly 50 points behind her in last week's Field Poll.

“Being newly single in middle age.... It's like opening one of those child's toys where the snake pops out of the can.” So goes “The Snake Can” at the Odyssey Theatre. Kathryn Graf's wry, insightful dramedy about three longtime girlfriends and their internecine midlife crises surmounts some post-larval structural blips with pertinence, humor and heart. Meet fetching, successful Meg (Sharon Sharth, funny and convincing), a twice-divorced New Yorker unable to sustain even casual relationships, and her party posse.

A day after squaring off with her Republican rival, Meg Whitman focused her front-running campaign for governor on the likely Democratic nominee, Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown. In a campaign stop at the Leisure World retirement community in Seal Beach, Whitman all but ignored Steve Poizner, the state insurance commissioner, whom she debated the night before. Whitman's aides played an edited video of Brown's campaign announcement this month, using it as a prop for her to call him a hypocrite for promising an end to platitudes but failing to unveil specific proposals yet. "We've had nothing but platitudes and no real definition of a plan that he wants to put together for Californians," Whitman said.

Republican Meg Whitman's unprecedented spending spree in the race for governor has rocketed her into a narrow lead against Democrat Jerry Brown, while incumbent U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D) is holding her own as a trio of little-known GOP candidates vies to challenge her, a new Los Angeles Times/USC poll has found. Whitman, who gave her campaign a record-breaking $39 million to finance a blistering pace of recent television advertising, carried 44% of voters to Brown's 41%. The campaign by Brown, the former governor and current attorney general, has been the antithesis of Whitman's, operating under the radar except for a brief burst of publicity in early March when he announced his intention to run. In her first bid for elective office, Whitman was easily outdistancing her fellow Republican, Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, with a 40-point lead in the poll as they move toward the June primary.

Proposition 13 made its return to electoral politics last week, proving anew the continued political heft of the 32-year-old measure. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., named for the long-deceased champion of the property tax-limiting proposition, gave its imprimatur to Meg Whitman's campaign for governor. Though not necessarily surprising, the news dealt another blow to Whitman's opponent in the race for the Republican nomination, Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, who has been grasping for momentum for weeks as Whitman has filled the airwaves with advertisements.

“Being newly single in middle age.... It's like opening one of those child's toys where the snake pops out of the can.” So goes “The Snake Can” at the Odyssey Theatre. Kathryn Graf's wry, insightful dramedy about three longtime girlfriends and their internecine midlife crises surmounts some post-larval structural blips with pertinence, humor and heart. Meet fetching, successful Meg (Sharon Sharth, funny and convincing), a twice-divorced New Yorker unable to sustain even casual relationships, and her party posse.

While Jack White is touring in support of his latest indie group the Dead Weather, it was announced this week that the band that shot him to fame, the White Stripes, will release a concert film in the fall. Directed by Emmett Malloy, "Under Great White Northern Lights" follows Jack and Meg White across Canada, where they went out of their way to play unconventional venues such as a city bus and a bowling alley. It premieres at the Toronto Film Festival on Sept. 19. -- Scott T. Sterling

Billionaire GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman has invested her vast wealth in firms that sought to profit from the country's credit crisis, in venture capital and hedge funds open only to the wealthy, and in oil, gas, healthcare and other concerns seeking to influence state policy. The first public glimpse into the financial portfolio of the former EBay chief came Thursday, when she filed an economic-interest disclosure required of candidates. The holdings present potential conflicts of interest for a governor.

Last month, the Los Angeles Times sat down with Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett-Packard, to discuss her first 15 months on the job. The story from that interview ran earlier this month . The interview came just a few weeks after HP announced that it had uncovered a massive accounting fraud at Autonomy, the British software company it acquired in 2011. When the Autonomy acquisition was announced in August 2011, Leo Apotheker was still CEO and Whitman was on the HP board. The controversy over that deal and its hefty price tag, coupled with an announcement that HP was thinking about selling its PC business (known as the Personal Systems Group, or PSG)

SAN FRANCISCO - Had things gone differently, Meg Whitman might today be governor of California, fighting to turn around one of the country's most financially troubled state governments. Instead, having lost her bid for that office in November 2010, she finds herself head of Hewlett-Packard Co., struggling to fix one of the high-tech industry's most troubled giants. Save HP or California. It's hard to say which is the tougher job. It sometimes seems as if just about everything that could go wrong at HP has gone wrong in recent years.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - She may have lost her bid for California governor in epic fashion, blowing a record fortune and growing increasingly less popular as the campaign wore on. The company she's now running just reported a loss of $8.86 billion, a quarterly record, and earlier this year announced plans to lay off 27,000 people. But the sun still shines brightly on Meg Whitman as far as Mitt Romney, her friend and business mentor, is concerned. In a pre-convention interview with Politico, the GOP nominee-to-be said his Cabinet would be chock full of private-sector experience, "citing Meg Whitman of Hewlett-Packard as a model for female leaders he would like to surround himself with.

Meg Gill strides across the floor of the pub at Golden Road Brewing with easygoing authority. She wears colorful rubber cowboy boots, a pink shirt and very short black shorts - her wavy blond hair cascades down her back. Customers stare at her over pint glasses filled with frothy Point the Way IPA. At 27 years old, Gill is reportedly the youngest female brewery owner in the world, having co-founded Golden Road with Mohawk Bend owner Tony Yanow nine months ago. Golden Road is already the biggest craft brewery in Los Angeles County and among the fastest-growing start-ups in craft beer history.

SAN JOSE — Hewlett-Packard Co.'s storied yet faltering business is expected to take nearly half a decade to turn around, but a looming question is whether investors will give the company and its new chief executive, Meg Whitman, that much time. Its investors have reason to be restless. Many of them have watched the Silicon Valley leviathan struggle to find its way amid heightened competition complicated by a succession of management missteps and purges. And to keep shareholders from jumping ship or demanding the heads of more executives, some analysts say, HP needs to start showing marked advances sooner rather than later.

Actress Meg Ryan, known for her leading-lady roles in romantic films, has been having an on-again, off-again relationship with her Bel-Air home since she first listed it in 2008 for $19.5 million. Now it's on the market again, this time for $11.4 million. The listing describes the classic Spanish-style house, built in 1931, as having undergone a "museum-quality restoration. " The two-story home features such period details as stenciled beam ceilings, arched doorways and ironwork.

Gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman stumbled out of the gate this week with the campaign's first TV commercial fudging how long the Republican candidate has lived in the state. "The state is in the worst shape that I've seen in the 30 years that I have lived in California," Whitman says in the ad. One problem: Though the former EBay chief first moved to California nearly 30 years ago, in 1981, she hasn't continuously lived here since then. Whitman was out of the state from roughly 1992 to March 1998.

Like an out-of-town gambler trying to elbow his way into the big game, Steve Poizner announced last week that he'd ante up $15 million of his own money for his campaign to become California's next governor. He's hoping that money changes everything. Or at least something. If the insurance commissioner makes good on his pledge by the end of the year, as promised, his total donations will hit $19 million, identical to what Meg Whitman has already given to her campaign. In the year before the 2010 Republican primary, in other words, two candidates will have put in almost $40 million, nearly what the sitting governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, raised and spent for his primary and general election campaigns combined in 2006.

A lot has been made of organic cotton and other eco-friendly fabrics made from Tencel, hemp and bamboo as fashion rides the mega-trend of environmentalism. But recycled clothes purchased at thrift and consignment stores, as well as upcycled items reworked from out-of-date castoffs, may be an even greener choice. Almost half of the climate impact of clothing occurs before it reaches consumers. It was this idea I embraced when I hired a wardrobe consultant for a desperately needed eco fashion makeover.