Yet another installment in our semi-regular series. I am building what is quickly becoming an impressive collection of examples of the Los Angeles Dog Trainer (aka Los Angeles Times) using its back pages to hide things it doesn’t want you to see. For other examples, see here, here, here, here, and here.

Here is the latest example. It’s a story no paper could possibly ignore: Democrats in Sacramento, in what they believed was a private meeting, were discussing what a great idea it would be for them to be inflexible during the current budget negotiations, because precipitating a budget crisis now is good politics for Democrats.

I am not making this up. There are some great quotes in the article from nutty Democrats, most of them Los Angeles-based politicians. Take Los Angeles Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg. (Please!) “Since this is going to be a crisis, the crisis could be this year,” Goldberg said, according to a transcript. “No one’s running [for reelection].” Another guy from L.A., Fabian Nunez, chimed in: “If you don’t have a budget, it helps Democrats.”

So how do we know about this? Our old friend the open mike. Yep, that’s right: the supposedly private meeting was being broadcast (and tape-recorded) all over the State Capitol. At some point, a staff member came in and said: “Excuse me, guys, you can be heard outside.” To which Jackie Goldberg replied: “Oh [expletive], [expletive].”

Heh.

Of course, the Dog Trainer has been pushing the line that the budget standoff is almost completely the Republicans’ fault, as I explained in this post from over a month ago. Once you read these quotes, it’s pretty danged hard to believe that line.

If you read the quotes, that is. Don’t forget the title of this post. You see, the most amazing thing about this story is that all of the fun, juicy quotes I just gave you were on the back pages, which (as the Times editors know) hardly anybody reads.

Well, you say, there’s only so much they can put on the front page. To which I reply: hahahahahahaha! If only I could show you the front page of the actual paper edition of the newspaper, so you could see the tiny little box they had to put the story in, so as to push all the quotes onto the unknown regions of page A19. (By way of comparison, this story gets less front-page space than this story about the “personal locator beacon” — a device that allows lost hikers to be found more easily. Miracle invention? Or spoiler of outdoor adventure? No need to turn to the back pages to see such issues discussed — they are thoroughly explored right there on page A1.)

Since I obviously can’t show you the hard-copy version, I’ll have to show you where the jump is on the internet version. If you go to the link I have provided, you can see that the quotes start right there in the fifth paragraph. On the internet, that looks pretty high up in the story. Sorry, not high enough. The jump is in the middle of the fourth paragraph.

What liberal media?