Lawmakers appear to have settled what had been a bitter split over the payroll tax bill with neither brinkmanship nor acrimony. This development is so unlike the events of the last year, it might lead you to think that some comity -- and sanity -- had finally taken hold on dysfunctional Capitol Hill.

Don't kid yourself.

They may fight practically to their last breaths on everything else, but Democrats and Republicans have shown a willingness to strike deals on taxes when both sides are looking to cut them. Witness the blockbuster agreement in December 2010, when President Obama agreed to extend the entire package of Bush-era tax cuts in exchange for additional tax breaks for businesses and individuals. That measure, which reduced the payroll tax by 2 percentage points for 12 months, increased the projected federal deficits by trillions of dollars over the coming decade.

The only surprise about the payroll tax deal is that it took them this long to abandon the notion of paying for the tax cut. Not that it's a good outcome -- as The Times' editorial board observed Wednesday, "This week's move simply means that lawmakers face even tougher decisions in December, when the Bush-era tax cuts, the payroll tax reduction and a host of other temporary measures come up for renewal. At some point, lawmakers have to decide when to start filling the hole they're digging."

Granted, Republicans and Democrats still had to agree on how to pay for two other costly items in the payroll tax bill: continuing to provide extended federal aid to those who exhaust their state unemployment benefits, and canceling a scheduled cut in the fees paid to Medicare doctors. With the $100-billion payroll tax extension out of the picture, though, lawmakers were able to cover the rest of the cost with fairly noncontroversial spending reductions and one widely supported revenue raiser, the auctioning of more spectrum.

It would be nice to discover that lawmakers were becoming more pragmatic and less ideological as public esteem for Congress dropped to new lows. Republicans in particular threaten the party's top goal -- ousting Obama -- by enabling him to campaign against a "do-nothing Congress." Yes, there are two parties in the do-nothing Congress, and yes, I've heard the House GOP lament that the Democrat-controlled Senate is the problem. But blaming Democrats in the Senate isn't persuasive when a) Senate Republicans are waging a near-constant filibuster, and b) the House keeps passing bills that, after you get past their smiley happy titles, seem like little more than favors for corporate lobbyists. I mean, is the EPA's response to a massive coal-ash spill in Tennessee really one of the top 15 threats to the economy?

But I doubt that pragmatism is going to be the highlight of this election-year session. On the contrary, the proposed payroll tax cut deal happened because the two camps finally recognized that their ideologies were aligned. Republicans like to cut taxes, and Democrats like to portray themselves as the champions of working families. If the issue were whether to cut the tax on estates or investment income, the outcome would probably have been quite different.

The ideological split between much of the House GOP and most Senate Democrats over governing in general is likely to make the rest of the session feel as contentious and unproductive as last year's. A good example is the pending surface transportation bill. The House version is animated by the GOP argument that Problem No. 1 is the deficit and Problem No. 2 is excessive federal regulation (in this case, on domestic energy production). The bipartisan Senate version reflects two very different priorities: putting as many people to work and spending as much on infrastructure as possible.

In ordinary times, a highway bill is one of the least partisan pieces of legislation to hit the floor. That's true in part because of the hundreds of earmarks included to cement lawmakers' support. But these are not ordinary times, and there are no earmarks to paper over the differences in governing philosophy. That's why we'll probably end up with another stopgap extension of the program rather than a deal for a full-blown reauthorization.

If not, then maybe the corrosiveness and tension of last year's session has drained lawmakers' will to resist even the slightest compromise until the last possible minute. They might even agree to do something meaningful about the sluggish economy. But then, that would require them to agree on the source of the problem, so that's probably too much to hope for.

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Photo: House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) discusses the GOP's position on the payroll tax bill as the third-ranking House Republican, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield), looks on. Credit: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

If you want keen observations on Campaign 2012, you'll want to read the columns by my colleague Doyle McManus.

For example, in Sunday's column, McManus pointed out that the drawn-out and increasingly negative Republican presidential race will take its toll on Mitt Romney among independent voters.

Lo and behold, on Monday The Times reported on new poll results:

President Obama for the first time has opened a sizable lead over his most likely Republican opponents, thanks to growing support among independent voters, according to a new Pew Research Center poll….

Obama led [Rick] Santorum by 10 points among registered voters nationwide (53%-43%) and led [Mitt] Romney by 8 points (52%-44%). Obama’s lead over Newt Gingrich, who has faded in the GOP race, was 18 points (57%-39%). In previous polls in November and January, Romney and Obama were roughly tied. Obama has moved up because of support from independent voters, 51% of whom now back him against Romney, a gain of 11 points since last month.

Now, had you read McManus, you would have already had that information, gleaned from an insider: 

"The long primary fight is driving independent voters away from Romney," the Obama campaign's senior strategist, David Axelrod, told me last week.

The question, though, is why?

I mean, it's strange, really, how an entire party can be driven to political suicide by a small number of fervent "true believers."

Democrats saw it many years ago with George McGovern. Republicans went through it before with Barry Goldwater.

And here we are again. The Republican Party of today appears increasingly tone deaf when it comes to appealing to independent voters, much less swaying any Democrats.

Take this statement from House Speaker John A. Boeher on Monday, regarding the Republicans’ acceptance of the Democrats' goal of extending the payroll tax cut for middle-class Americans:

"This is not our first choice," said Boehner and his leadership team, including Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), in a joint statement. "But in the face of the Democrats’ stonewalling and obstructionism, we are prepared to act to protect small businesses and our economy from the consequences of Washington Democrats’ political games."

Sorry, John, you lost me at "not our first choice." 

Now, I'm sure many Americans will appreciate the Republicans' efforts on behalf of small businesses -- whatever that means -- and they'll also appreciate how hard it must be to put up with those stonewalling Democrats, who have the nerve to want to keep a tax break for regular working folks.

And I'm also sure that Sarah Palin and Santorum and the other tea partyers who live in what is apparently a parallel universe will vote Republican in November, even if that means voting for Romney.

But the race is won in the middle, where the independents hang out, and nothing the Republicans are doing right now has much appeal to those folks.

But don't take my word for it.

Just read Doyle McManus.

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Photo: Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney campaigns in Portland, Maine. Credit: Robert F. Bukaty / Associated Press

What do Ben Bernanke and Punxsutawney Phil have in common?

Simple:  Both are forecasters, paid to see the future.

OK, maybe that's a bit too simple. As Fed chairman, Bernanke is paid not only to see the future but to shape that future. While Punxsutawney Phil, the famous groundhog (or woodchuck, if you prefer), is paid just to tell us how much longer winter will last (and to draw tourists to Punxsutawney, Pa., but let's not be cynical on such a nice day).

So, recapping Thursday's events for the overstressed news consumer:

Punxsutawney Phil came out (OK, was lifted out by handlers) and saw his shadow, presaging six more weeks of winter. Or, in the colorful language of one of the Inner Circle of handlers:

After casting an appreciative glance to the thousands of faithful followers in attendance, Phil proclaimed, "As I look at the crowd on Gobbler's Knob, many shadows do I see. Six more weeks of winter it must be."

Naturally, there were some boo birds in the crowd.

Bernanke came to a different knob -- Capitol Hill -- (presumably on his own, though given the Republican sentiment in Congress, perhaps he too was dragged there by handlers) and told the House Budget Committee that the economic recovery is "frustratingly slow" and that there are  "significant head winds" facing consumers and the broader economy.

Not exactly "six more weeks of winter," but we get the picture.

No booing was reported, though.

By this time, Bernanke must be starting to feel another kind of kinship with Punxsutawney Phil: the movie "Groundhog Day." Just as Bill Murray's character in the movie is forced to relive Groundhog Day day after day, Bernanke must periodically go before Congress and say pretty much the same things.

As The Times reported:

Bernanke repeated that it was important for policymakers not to make spending and tax policies that would hurt the current economic recovery. And he urged lawmakers to get past the political divisions to solve the long-term debt problems.

"I realize politics is a tough game," he said, but it's important to show "cooperation and collaboration" in addressing the nation's large debts.

So, in the spirit of the day, here's a little forecast of my own: That will happen -- when hell freezes over.

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Photo: Handler Ron Ploucha holds Punxsutawney Phil on Gobbler's Knob in Punxsutawney, Pa. Credit: Gene J. Puskar / Associated Press

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, meet Boston Bruins goalie Tim Thomas.  

You two have something in common -- a visible dislike of President Obama.

On Wednesday, Brewer met Obama on the tarmac in Phoenix as he got off Air Force One, and the two had a brief but animated conversation, including at one point some finger-pointing by the governor.  Pool reporters said Obama walked away mid-sentence.

From Times reporter Christi Parsons' story: 

Brewer told pool reporter Carrie Budoff Brown of Politico that the president seemed upset about her book, "Scorpions for Breakfast," in which she criticizes Obama for opposing her [immigration] law….

A White House official offered this take on the encounter: "The governor handed the president a letter and said she was inviting him to meet with her. The president said he'd be glad to meet with her again, but did note that after their last meeting, a cordial discussion in the Oval Office, the governor inaccurately described the meeting in her book."

The Arizona dustup came two days after goalie Thomas declined to join his Stanley Cup champion teammates who met with the president at the White House for one of those sports photo-ops.

In a posting on his Facebook page the next day, the Bruins star explained his absence:

I believe the Federal government has grown out of control, threatening the Rights, Liberties, and Property of the People.

This is being done at the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial level. This is in direct opposition to the Constitution and the Founding Fathers vision for the Federal government.

Because I believe this, today I exercised my right as a Free Citizen, and did not visit the White House. This was not about politics or party, as in my opinion both parties are responsible for the situation we are in as a country. This was about a choice I had to make as an INDIVIDUAL.

This is the only public statement I will be making on this topic. TT

OK, I think it's safe to say that neither Brewer nor Thomas will be invited to a state dinner soon.

But were their actions over the top? Were they disrespectful to the president? Was what they did exactly what's wrong with the country?

Not really. All they did was act like, well, Americans.

We don't have a king. We have a president. We respect the office -- but we are free to disagree with its occupant.

Don't like his policies? Then don't show up for a silly photo-op.

Don't like his policies? Then tell him so, in a civil but forceful way, to his face.

And if he doesn't like what you're saying? Then he can tell you so, in a civil but forceful way, to your face -- and even walk away.

Honestly, we'll know we're in trouble as a country when people can't do what Thomas -- and Brewer and Obama -- did this week.

And frankly, I like that a lot better than hearing John A. Boehner introduce Obama before the State of the Union address with the traditional House speaker's line -- "Members of the Congress, I have the high privilege and the distinct honor of presenting to you the president of the United States" -- when that same House speaker has already bashed the president’s proposals as "pathetic"  and then, after the address, labels it "just another campaign speech." 

Yes, our leaders need to work together. And sure, it wouldn't hurt for everyone to step back and just take a deep breath now and again.

But presidents are people, and there's no harm in letting them -- and those who disagree with them -- act like it more often.

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Photo: Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer and President Obama in an animated exchange at the airport in Phoenix on Wednesday. Credit: Haraz N. Ghanbari / Associated Press

The debate over "foreign rogue websites" is far from over, but the lobbying battle between tech companies and Hollywood definitely shifted in the geeks' favor this week. Oddly enough, it's because opponents of PIPA and SOPA -- the Protect IP Act in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House -- found a more compelling story to tell than Hollywood did.

As is typical with anti-piracy matters, advocates of the bills talked mainly about the damage that copyright and trademark infringement is causing to the entertainment industry, manufacturers and, potentially, consumers (in the form of counterfeit drugs, for example). And as usual, opponents responded by talking about the threat the bills posed to the Internet -- in particular, to Web startups and user-generated content sites.

The difference this time was that opponents put a story that was easier to grasp in front of more people than the bills' advocates did. The anti-PIPA/SOPA meme was that big companies wanted to censor the Net, a far scarier notion to an increasingly Net-reliant population than the thought of overseas websites eating into studios' profits.

Naturally, the debate has inspired more than a little hyperbole. But thanks to poor bill drafting, the original versions of PIPA and SOPA really would have given copyright and trademark owners the power to attack more than just foreign sites that were clearly dedicated to piracy. The lead sponsors have promised to correct some of the worst flaws, but those promises aren't necessarily reflected yet in the copies of the bills available online.

On Wednesday the studios tried to demonize the sites that were protesting the bills, but that seemed tin-eared to me. If they turn the fate of the legislation into a popularity contest between Google or Wikipedia and the Motion Picture Assn. of America, they lose.

MPAA chief Christopher Dodd, for example, accused the protesting sites of punishing the public and lawmakers, turning users into "corporate pawns" and committing an abuse of power by offering users their spin on PIPA and SOPA. And Mike Nugent of Creative America -- an advocacy group for studios and film  and TV industry labor groups -- accused sites such as Wikipedia that blacked themselves out in protest of "censoring the Internet themselves."

Note to Nugent: A company that voluntarily takes down its website in protest is engaged in political speech, not censorship. When a court orders Internet service providers and websites to block access to a site because a portion of the site is infringing, that's censorship.

Advocates of the bills argue that censorship is a bogus issue. There's no free-speech right to bootlegged movies or cheap Prada knockoffs. And with the bills' authors backing away from domain name blocking, there's no longer the threat that whole sites would be knocked offline because of infringing links or content on just a few of their pages.

Nevertheless, some tech companies argue that the bills would still enable courts to order search engines (as in the House bill) or any site with an "information location tool" (as in the Senate bill) to remove or disable links to an offending foreign-based domain. That raises the possibility that legitimate content will be rendered invisible -- censored, if you will -- if it's in a domain targeted by a court order.

Is that an improbable scenario? Maybe. But just judging from the takedown notices sent by rights holders under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, tech companies have grounds to be worried. Although the vast majority of those takedown notices have targeted illegal downloads and streams, some have forced the removal of non-infringing goods, including parodies, fair uses of copyrighted excerpts and material authorized or uploaded by the copyright owners themselves.

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Photo: Nadine Wolf demonstrates against the Stop Online Piracy Act in New York on Wednesday. Credit: Mario Tama / Getty Images

Maybe it's because the wreck of the Costa Concordia off Italy's coast is a reminder that, well, stuff happens.

Which is why it's good news that the Obama administration has decided against issuing a permit for the Keystone project just yet.

Like it or not, pipelines -- like cruise ships and nuclear reactors and the things people make, or operate -- aren't foolproof. Stuff happens.

I'm against building the Keystone. But if we are going to go ahead with it, we'd better make sure we've done everything we can to make it as safe as possible.

And that means not rushing the permit process.

Sadly, President Obama's Republican opponents never miss an opportunity to make political points, even when it's their voters -– such as the ones in Nebraska -– who are also objecting to the project. As The Times reported Wednesday:

"President Obama is about to destroy tens of thousands of American jobs and sell American energy security to the Chinese," said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner. "The president won't stand up to his political base even to create American jobs. This is not the end of this fight."

Which is utter nonsense. The pipeline's oil would go into the global pool. U.S. refiners would probably continue the growing trend of selling their products to foreign markets. And the number of jobs created would be a relative handful -– 20,000 according to proponents, 6,000 according to the State Department and others.

All for what? So we can put at risk a precious aquifer in the nation's breadbasket?

And then there's the questionable strategy of our dependence on oil in the first place. Go read 350.org founder Bill McKibben's Op-Ed article in Wednesday's Times, "Burning America's future," for a chilling analysis of where that path will lead the planet.

If you don't have the time, here's his kicker:

It may not be aerosol cheese or cryogenics, but can't we all agree that burning every molecule of fossil fuel we can find is a spectacularly bad idea?

We're stuck with oil, and gas, and coal, and, yes, nuclear for now. But we don't have to stay stuck. 

And we certainly don't have to take giant risks for the small return that the Keystone XL pipeline would bring.

After all, the Costa Concordia wreck will probably prove to be a job creator too. 

For cleanup workers.

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Photo: Protesters march against the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline during a demonstration in Washington in November. Credit: Daniel Lippman / MCT

House and Senate bills to combat "foreign rogue websites" remain on track for important votes in the coming weeks, but opposition to the measures is extending across the partisan spectrum. Today's example: Heritage Action, a nonprofit advocacy group aligned with the conservative Heritage Foundation, announced its opposition to the Protect IP Act, or PIPA, and the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, and said it would include any votes on those issues on its election-year scorecards.

Heritage Action's move is significant because conservative groups have traditionally been strong supporters of copyright and trademark protection. To them, intellectual property is property. But they have also been skeptical of government regulation, and the more libertarian-minded among them have been downright hostile to regulating the Internet. A good example of the latter is the Tech Liberation Front blog, which has long criticized PIPA, SOPA and their 2009 precursor, a Senate bill that went by the acronym COICA.

Heritage Action's blog expressed relief that the bills' sponsors have backed away from their proposal to require Internet providers to block offending sites' domain names. But it wasn't happy with other elements of the bills:

[T]he legislation would put a tremendous legal burden on websites accused of third-party copyright infringement and would cause them to be removed from search engines.  Opponents have compared the legislation to China's online censorship. Even if they made an honest mistake, they would be faced with litigation from the U.S. Attorney General. Fighting the accusations would cost so much time and money that smaller sites would likely go out of business fighting. Private lawsuits could also be brought against the websites. This would open up the potential for massive lawsuit abuse -– even though the vast majority of online piracy occurs through a small number of websites.

The emerging opposition from mainstream conservatives like Heritage Action complements the resistance that civil liberties groups, left-of-center activists, tech industry hotbeds on both coasts and venture capitalists have been putting up since the measures were introduced. Support for the bills is equally bipartisan, however, suggesting that this issue won't be decided by ideology. Instead, it's coming down to a lobbying battle between bill supporters (entertainment companies and trademark owners) and opponents over how best to respond to foreign sites that promote piracy.

Meanwhile, work on the bills continues. The bills' authors have promised to release new versions of the measures that address the complaints about domain name blocking and other issues. And the last time I checked, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was still planning to bring PIPA to the Senate floor for a cloture vote early next week, and Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said Tuesday that his committee will take up the bill again next month in an effort to move it to the House floor.

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Photo: Crowd-sourced online encyclopedia Wikipedia alerts users to its plan to go offline Jan. 18 to protest PIPA and SOPA. Credit: Karen Bleier / AFP/Getty Images

Warming up for a vote Wednesday on whether to raise the debt ceiling, Rep. Randy Hultgren (R-Ill.) declared that he would vote no in order to "send a clear message that we do not condone the president's wasteful fiscal policies of so-called stimulus, bailouts and ever-larger government."

That's a fine sentiment, but it also illustrates how badly lawmakers mischaracterize what this debate is all about. The justification that Hultgren offered for voting against the debt-ceiling increase is typical,  not just of Republicans nowadays but of Democrats who cast symbolic votes against increasing the debt ceiling during the George W. Bush administration.

Simply put, the federal government has to borrow more money because of what Congress has done lately. A wide majority of Republicans and Democrats in the House voted in November and December for spending bills that relied on a significant amount of borrowed money. That borrowing isn't affected by President Obama's 2009 stimulus bill or by "bailouts"; those dollars have already been spent. In other words, they're part of the accumulated debt, not new debt. And a congressman blaming Obama for ever-larger government is like a father blaming his son for having too large an allowance. Obama may be all for big government, but Congress has ultimate control over the federal purse strings.

To his credit, Hultgren voted against the omnibus spending bills in November and December that are helping to push the federal government past its credit limit. But he also voted in favor of the House GOP budget last year that called for increasing the debt ceiling by almost $9 trillion over the coming decade.

Discretionary spending is just part of the problem, of course. Entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security make up a larger part of the federal budget, and increasing healthcare costs are the single biggest factor in Washington's long-term fiscal problems. But neither Republicans nor Democrats have tried to move bills that would slow that growth. The House budget resolution included a far-reaching proposal to phase out Medicare in favor of subsidies for private insurance, but the political backlash persuaded the GOP-controlled House Ways and Means Committee not to translate that proposal into an actual bill.

Obama and congressional Democrats can certainly be blamed for being willing (even eager) to spill more red ink than their GOP colleagues. And Obama's stance has given House Republicans a Hobson's choice: They can agree to spend more than they want to, or they can shut down government until the Democrats agree to more cuts. Not only would the latter be ruinous politically, it would irresponsibly cut off vital services for their constituents.

Nevertheless, the best proposal House Republicans could come up with to rein in federal spending -- their fiscal 2012 budget proposal, which they could and did push through the House without Democratic votes -- still failed to halt the borrowing, and did so in a very big way. Without an actual plan to stop the borrowing, the stance of debt-ceiling deniers like Hultgren just seems like false piety.

(That's not to say there are no worthy plans for closing the budget gap -- see, for example, the work done by the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Bowles-Simpson commission, the "Gang of Six" and Bill Galston and Maya MacGuineas. All of these proposals are more sound than anything the White House or the House GOP has put forward.)

Here's another way to look at the issue. Imagine you told your spouse not to, but he or she went ahead and hired contractors to remodel your kitchen. You now face a choice: Do you borrow the money needed to pay for the work being done, or do you stiff the contractors? That's the position Congress finds itself in on the debt ceiling. Having committed the country to more borrowing, some lawmakers want to stiff the contractors.

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Photo: House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and other House Republicans speak to reporters during the first big fight over the debt ceiling last year. Credit: Brendan Smialowski / Getty Images

Fittingly enough, one of the Obama administration's last official acts of 2011 was to make sure lawmakers had another chance to show the financial markets that they're willing to default on newly minted obligations.

The deal struck last August to raise the debt ceiling did so in two increments: a $900-billion hike right away, and an additional $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion after the first allotment is largely exhausted. It also gives lawmakers the opportunity to vote against each of those increases. But Congress must cast its vote within 15 days after the president asks for the additional borrowing authority.

The federal government has, in fact, burned through much of the first $900 billion, and President Obama was poised to ask for the second debt-ceiling increase late in December. But doing so would have presented a dilemma for lawmakers: If they wanted to vote against the increase, they'd have to cut short their vacations district work periods and start the 2012 session ahead of schedule. So, to accommodate their desire not to return to the capital until late January, Obama has postponed asking for more borrowing authority until it's more convenient for Congress.

As I've argued several times in the past, the debt ceiling isn't a tool to enforce spending discipline. Voting against an increase in the debt ceiling is the same as voting to give the Treasury Department the authority to decide which creditors to stiff and, eventually, which bonds to default on.

Blah blah blah deficit blah blah blah tax …

Exactly how you expect members of Congress to sound, right?

You would be surprised how wrong that can be.

The Sunlight Foundation tracks word use on Capitol Hill, like how often legislators use the word "war" compared to "peace" (almost twice as much). The tally includes state-by-state breakdowns. And what does California's congressional delegation talk about?

The most common word you hear from California's elected officials is …

What's running through your mind right now? Whatever it is, it's probably wrong. Because the word you hear most often from Californians on Capitol Hill is …

"Fresno."

No kidding. See for yourself.

It's a nifty website that lets you search by states and their legislators too. You can play along at home!

Some of Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer's favorite words are "after school" and "Anbar" and "Inhofe" -- the latter her Republican foe from Oklahoma on climate change matters. Sen. Dianne Feinstein's faves are "ethanol," "intelligence" and "FISA," which, like Boxer's, reflect her committee assignments. Boxer chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee, and Feinstein is on the Select Committee on Intelligence.

After "Fresno," here are the California delegation's recent top 20 word choices:

Nuclear … roll call … patent … Republican … Medicare ... Republicans … intelligence … Israel … paragraph [!] … consumers … weapons … deal … saying … Democrats … debt … campaign … motion … Santa … Clinton.

Santa! Clinton! Gotta love the Big White Dome discourses.

Maybe this Fresno-first finding makes up for the satirical 1980s miniseries "Fresno," a send-up of the overwrought "Dallas" and "Falcon Crest" genre. This six-hour miniseries, starring Carol Burnett, opened with a Spanish conquistador taking a taste of a grape, making a face and spitting it out, declaring, "It tastes like fresno." Brief though it was, the miniseries about warring raisin barons generated hurt feelings, although, as my former colleague Steve Harvey pointed out at the time, the miniseries steered clear of jokes about the code for Fresno's airport, the Fresno Air Terminal -- FAT.

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Photo: Sen. Barbara Boxer is seen with Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa near the Sixth Street bridge at an Oct. 27 news conference. Credit: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images