Political Literature

With days to go before Tuesday's election, the hot contest for the 2nd District seat on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is sending volleys of attack brochures to voters' mailboxes. Both main contenders in the nine-candidate field are experienced leaders. State Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas (D-Los Angeles) served on the L.A. City Council before being elected to the Legislature, and Councilman Bernard C. Parks was previously chief of the Los Angeles Police Department.

The campaign of an Orange County supervisorial candidate, whose slogan is "Honesty, Integrity and Leadership," has been caught doctoring a photo so that it places the politician close to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The photo into which Trung Nguyen was inserted appeared over the weekend in two Vietnamese-language daily newspapers, Vien Dong and Viet Bao Kinh Te. The papers are heavily circulated in Little Saigon, home to the largest Vietnamese community outside Southeast Asia.

Charges will not be filed against a former Orange County congressional candidate whose campaign mailed letters warning immigrants against voting, the state attorney general's office said Wednesday. "We looked closely at voter intimidation statutes but couldn't find any criminal intent," Gareth Lacy, a spokesman for the office, said of the letters sent by Republican Tan Nguyen's staff three weeks before November's election, in which he failed to unseat Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Santa Ana).

Two teenage girls and the mother of one of them will not be charged with vandalizing campaign signs after the district attorney's office decided not to file a complaint, officials said Thursday. The Police Department had referred the case to prosecutors, alleging that 18-year-olds Keleigh Marshall and Christina Giammalva put stickers on the political signs of Glendora elected leaders, including Councilman Gary Clifford.

Historian Michelle Nickerson still recalls with delight and awe the day she first visited a Pasadena house stuffed with a vast collection of political pamphlets, books and clippings documenting conservative and anti-communist causes since the 1940s. "My heart was jumping out of my chest. I could not believe it," said Nickerson, now an American history professor at the University of Texas in Dallas. "It was one of those moments that you only get a few of in the course of research.

SACRAMENTO -- Adding a green twist to an old political tactic, an environmental group sent a mailer to 50,000 Los Angeles County homes Thursday urging residents to vote by mail to eliminate the "carbon footprint" they would leave by driving to the polls on election day. The mailer is being derided by some, while others are questioning whether it is improperly trying to influence a state Senate election in the West L.A.

The political committee of the United Firefighters of Los Angeles has agreed to pay $1,500 in fines for failing to properly disclose three independent expenditures aimed at benefiting the 2001 campaign of City Councilman Tony Cardenas, according to an agreement released Thursday.

As each election nears, they fill California mailboxes: brightly colored cards with authoritative names recommending dozens of candidates for public office. The California Law Enforcement Voter Guide. Democratic Voters Choice. The Official Non-Partisan Voter Guide of California. These are some of the names behind one of the most idiosyncratic tools in California politics: slate mailers put out by independent consultants and publishers as profit-making enterprises.

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled Thursday that the title of a fall ballot measure to ease term limits for the L.A. City Council must be modified to better inform voters of the measure's intent. Ruling on a lawsuit brought by several residents, Judge Robert H. O'Brien said the title must say the measure would "lengthen" rather than merely "change" council members' term limits.

The state attorney general is investigating a Spanish-language letter warning some Orange County Latinos that they could be jailed or deported if they vote in the November election. The letter, which purports to be from a Huntington Beach-based group, also warns that the state has developed a tracking system that will allow the names of Latino voters to be handed over to anti-immigrant groups.