Free Republic

The San Diego Chargers will file for relocation to Los Angeles when the NFL opens the application window in January, Mark Fabiani told The Mighty 1090 AM radio show. “At this point yes, because there's no sign that the other team or teams are not going to file,” said Fabiani, who serves as the Chargers’ special counsel. “Everyone assumes all three teams will file, and in that case we can't afford to lose our market in Los Angeles and Orange County.”

A taxpayer-funded commission headed by Hollywood producer Rob Reiner awarded media contracts totaling more than $77 million without sufficiently reviewing their costs and was lax in overseeing its deals, California's state auditor reported Tuesday. Poor oversight of its bills also led the California Children and Families Commission, or First 5, to pay $673,000 in fees and expenses that were prohibited under its own contract and make "questionable payments to contractors for items such as laptop computers valued at $10,000, food catering costs, and monthly parking fees," the report found. But the auditor concluded the commission did not violate state law...

Despite Prop. 82's loss, director-activist says he'll continue to back liberal causes. LOS ANGELES -- After shutting himself off from the public for nearly three months, movie director and actor Rob Reiner stepped back into the spotlight election night and declared he wasn't leaving the political stage. Voters had just handed a resounding defeat to Proposition 82, the universal preschool initiative he'd championed. Reiner had been forced to step down from the chairmanship of the First 5 California commission because of criticism about its $23 million taxpayer-financed preschool advertising campaign. He'd gone into a self-imposed exile from the media in...

In fall 1996, The New York Times Magazine asked me to look into the Clinton haters, and I called Chris, who overnighted me another copy of the report, bigger than ever. Then I went down to Washington to talk to him and his boss, Mark Fabiani. Mark was the opposite of Chris. He’d worked in California politics and wore designer suits, he had a handsome angular face and struck me as a lady’s man. He sat at a big desk next to the window overlooking the White House and spun a "Duke" on his fingertips, the official N.F.L. ball, then...