Opinion: Patt Morrison asks

The first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, once assured a reporter: “The press has no better friend than I am — no one who is more ready to acknowledge … its tremendous power for both good and evil.”

In June 2015, a few days before Donald Trump declared that he was running for president, the news cycle was dominated by a different person: Rachel Dolezal.

The idea of Los Angeles that sold the middle-class and the Midwesterner on this place well over a century ago is still deep in our brains: the R-1 home with its lawn, its 3 bedroom-2 bath and garage.

Longtime Democratic congressman Xavier Becerra has come home to California — and to a battle, one at least as big as any he’s fought in Washington, D.C.

Not all tweets are deleted equally. Politicians’ trashed tweets can have a second life.

The White House press room evidently won’t be in the White House any more, but in a building next door.

The National Film Registry of the Library of Congress is a kind of hall of fame, a Cooperstown for important American films of every genre.

Logic, science and common sense have blazed the trail to humankind’s triumphs.

By this time next week, another woman will occupy the desk in the U.S.

“Santa Baby” is a Christmas song.

Measure M – M as in money, M as in moving around – passed handily with Los Angeles County voters, meaning that over the next 40 years, tens of billions of dollars in new sales tax money will make its way to rail lines and buses, to streets and freeways, to students and seniors — all to build a better way of getting around L.A.

One reason Californians will be voting, again, about the death penalty, next month, is because of a man named Caryl Chessman.

New Yorkers are moving to Los Angeles by the platoon. It is sweet revenge for the mockery of yore.

Happy 235th birthday, Los Angeles [Sept. 4 — definitely a Virgo]!

As students settle in for the new school year, perhaps changing to different schools in this era of charters and magnets, a Stanford University linguistics professor has found that for some African American kids, a new ZIP Code may also change the way they speak.

For the next couple of weeks, we’re being treated to the biggest show this side of the Atlantic -- the national presidential nominating conventions, our two-week, two-party festivals of red-meat speechifying and hats pimped out like parade floats.

It’s happening this summer, it’s groundbreaking, it’s controversial, it’s a milestone for women — and it’s not Hillary Clinton’s run for president.

Within living memory, the Los Angeles River has been pretty much a sump, a dump and a joke, its long life as a real river deep-sixed and paved over.

Don’t bother checking your calendar – it isn’t April 1, and there is such a thing as the Liberal Gun Club.

On the nation’s festive calendar, Father’s Day arrived late -- more than 50 years after Mother’s Day got a presidential blessing.

Barbara Boxer has had a title in front of her name for four decades — first, Marin County supervisor, then member of Congress, and now United States senator.

He is the grand sachem of Republican campaigns in California -- the man who pioneered modern campaign management, steering Ronald Reagan to the governor’s chair in Sacramento and advising him well into the White House.

Jorge Ramos has sat in an anchorman’s chair longer than Walter Cronkite – about 30 years at Univision’s flagship nightly news program.

As wonderful as Jane Austen’s most famous novels are, she left a tantalizing store of other works, and director Whit Stillman is partnering one of them around the dance floor.

The announcement, on a Sunday night five years ago, from President Obama: “Tonight, I can report to American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, leader of Al Qaeda, and the terrorist responsible for the murders of thousands of innocent men, women and children.”

He’s not just the most famous writer in human history – out of all 100 billion of us ever to live on this planet, he’s one of the most famous people.

Movies and novels about scientists tend to trade on the socially inept genius who can win a Nobel Prize but not the girl, and on science itself being inscrutable and mysterious.

That T.S. Eliot bit about April as the cruelest month? Forget it.

A young Winston Churchill once wrote that “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”

The ancient Greeks and the Romans had gods of laughter. So does the Shinto religion.

“Fascist.”

On a March night 25 years ago, the helicopter and sirens woke up a Los Angeles plumber named George Holliday.

As the #Oscarsowhite hashtag gets another workout this year, television can be faster off the mark on social matters if it chooses to – and Fox Television chose to take on the burgeoning Latino demographic with the animated sitcom “Bordertown.”

It bears repeating that the beleaguered Los Angeles Unified School District – the nation’s second largest, with two-thirds of a million school-kids – is on its ninth change of superintendent in 20 years [one man served three different times].

Vince Lombardi coached the first Super Bowl-winning football team, the Green Bay Packers.

Charlie Beck is chief of the LAPD, entering his seventh year as chief, and it’s always a pleasure to have you across from me at a microphone at a table.