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President Obama has been out of office only a few months. But he might have both a street and an L.A. freeway named after him soon.

Los Angeles City Council President Herb Wesson has proposed renaming Rodeo Road in southwest L.A. Obama Boulevard in honor of the president. Wesson noted that Obama held a campaign rally at Rancho Cienega Park on Rodeo Road when running for president and that the area already has streets named after presidents (Washington, Jefferson, Adams).

In May, a plan to name a stretch of the 134 Freeway after Obama moved forward with approval from the state Senate. The freeway is not far from Occidental College in Eagle Rock, which Obama attended.

In California alone, several schools have been named after Obama. And in the Monterey Bay town of Seaside, city leaders designated a key street Obama Way.

Rodeo Road is a major street that runs from near the Culver City border east to Mid-City. Its sometimes confused by newcomers with the more upscale Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.

Rodeo Road is not far from Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. That used to be Santa Barbara Avenue until the city changed the name three decades ago.

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Los Angeles considers renaming Rodeo Road in southwest LA 'Obama Boulevard' - Los Angeles Times

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) is not backing down from partially blaming former President Barack ObamaBarack ObamaIce Cube: Black community not high on Trump's priorities list Lawmakers unveil bill to set 355-ship Navy Defense bill would limit implementation of nuclear arms treaty with Russia MORE for theattack on Republican lawmakers at baseball practice last week.

The answer is no, King toldCNNonThursday whenasked if he regretted his comments.

King last weeklinked Obama to the shooting, saying he deepened the countrys political divisions by emphasizing "differences rather than our things that unify us." He said political division is what led someone to open fire on the Republican lawmakers.

King told CNN that he had made similar comments about Obama before, not just in the aftermath of the shooting.

He said Obama was elected in 2008 in a perfect position to heal the divisions in this country, but he failed in that regard.

We have to speak about these things accurately, King added. What I said on that ball field about that politically motivated shooting is exactly on target, and most of the public agrees with me on it.

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GOP rep: No regrets for partly blaming Obama for lawmaker shooting - The Hill (blog)

I'm Davan Maharaj, editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Times. Here are some story lines I don't want you to miss today.

TOP STORIES

No Drama Obama

By August, the FBI had evidence that Russian-backed hackers had targeted electoral systems in 21 American states, officials confirmed Wednesday. So why did the Obama administration wait until Oct. 7 to reveal the cyberattack on the U.S. elections process? Former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, testifying before the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, said Obama administration officials feared they would be blamed for trying to influence the election. We were very concerned that we would not be perceived as taking sides in the election, injecting ourselves into a very heated campaign, he said.

Who Will be Ubers Next CEO?

With Uber co-founder and chief executive Travis Kalanicks resignation Tuesday, the ride-hailing company the worlds most valued start-up, with $6.5 billion in annual sales is searching for a new chief. Experts expect it will be an outsider, with an eye on improving company culture. The San Francisco company hopes to move past a trail of scandals, including allegations that complaints of sexual harassment were ignored and that the company used a program to dodge inquiries from public officials. Uber, valued at nearly $70 billion, is also looking to make other high-level hires, to replace executives who have departed. If the board doesnt act quickly and decisively, this executive merry-go-round can lead to a crisis of confidence, said Joseph Daniel McCool of the McCool Group, which advises companies on recruitment and succession planning.

Searching for a Bone-Marrow Match

Matthew Medina is a 40-year-old Los Angeles police officer with a rare blood disease. Doctors tell him he will likely die without a bone marrow transplant, but his chances of finding a donor are less than 50%. Medina, who is being kept alive by blood transfusions, is Filipino, and most registered donors are white. Few Filipinos have signed up as potential donors. Medina, who has aplastic anemia and is quarantined at his Bellflower home with his wife and two young daughters, needs a transplant soon, because his weakened immune system means exposure to a common virus can kill him.

Let the Finger-Pointing Begin

Tens of millions of dollars could not propel political neophyte Jon Ossoff to victory in Georgias traditionally Republican 6th district. Now comes the teeth-gnashing and finger-pointing. Who blew it? House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi? The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee? The cautious millennial candidate himself, who avoided attacking Trump, did not live in the district, and seemed less a Georgian than a Washingtonian? The president himself weighed in with some thoughts.

Trump Took a Personal Interest in the Otto Warmbier Case

President Trump rarely raises human rights concerns as part of his foreign policy, and his secretary of State says that advocating for them creates obstacles in advancing American interests abroad. But the president has shown interest in cases of individual Americans imprisoned overseas, as with Otto Warmbier, the university student who was arrested as a tourist in North Korea last year and died Monday. What are we doing for that kid in North Korea? Trump asked his briefers, according to a U.S. official. The president approved a risky operation to demand his release.

MUST-WATCH VIDEO

-- Roger Waters talks about his first solo album in decades, and his new tour.

-- Artist Kam Redlawsk describes how her rare genetic disorder has informed her perspective.

-- At Griffith Park, a summer solstice celebration.

CALIFORNIA

-- Immigration officials pointed to a pair of decades-old misdemeanor convictions as the basis for arresting Romulo Avelica-Gonzalez, a Mexican citizen and longtime resident of the United States. He was arrested in Highland Park after dropping his 12-year-old daughter off at school, and has been detained for nearly four months. Now that Avelica-Gonzalez, 49, has resolved those misdemeanors, his lawyers hope to stop his threatened deportation.

-- A proposed salary package, backed by L.A.s mayor and headed to the city council, would give six raises in five years to thousands of employees at the Department of Water and Power. It is expected to embolden other city employees and their unions to push similar deals. Every time you give a pay raise to Water and Power employees, you know youre going to get a knock on your door from the city employees, saying, Us too, said Zev Yaroslavsky, who has served on the city council and the county Board of Supervisors.

-- Oaklands mayor and its former police chief mishandled a sexual misconduct scandal in the city police department, according to a report filed Wednesday by a court-appointed investigator. The scandal stems from a teenagers claims that she had sex with as many as two dozen officers, starting at age 16.

-- As a heat wave continues to roll across California, the National Weather Service says the Southland should prepare for an increased fire risk.

HOLLYWOOD AND THE ARTS

--- Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the playful directors behind The Lego Movie, have been removed from the Han Solo Star Wars spinoff four months into production over creative differences. The details are still ambiguous, but their departure raises questions about how independent Hollywood really wants its directors to be in the franchise era.

-- A child development expert is suing Walt Disney Co. over the 2015 Pixar hit Inside Out. The claim? That the plaintiff had repeatedly pitched an idea to the studio years earlier about animated characters who embodied a childs different moods.

-- At 73, Roger Waters is one of rocks senior statesman and an enduring provocateur. The English rocker from Pink Floyd has produced his first solo album in decades, and his latest tour tackles themes of political polarization. There is a whack at Trump in a couple of the songs, he says. He doesnt shy from controversy, though his prior activism has reportedly exacted a financial toll, as when he weighed in on the Middle East.

-- Critic Robert Lloyd calls Spikes adaptation of Stephen Kings The Mist a well-made creep show, but lacking in comic relief.

CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD

Some Like It Hot. Ninotchka. Double Indemnity. The Lost Weekend. Sunset Boulevard. These and so many other classic films were the work of writer and director Billy Wilder, who fled Germany for Hollywood after Adolf Hitler came to power. He was born on this date in 1906 and died March 7, 2002.

NATION-WORLD

--Crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, 31, is the new public face of Saudi Arabia.

--Iraqi officials say Islamic State destroyed a historic mosque in Mosul.

BUSINESS

-- L.A. Countys median home price has surged to $560,500, passing the historic high it reached in 2007 (just before the great crash).

-- Crude oil stock dived Wednesday to its lowest point since last summer, though healthcare and tech stocks made gains.

SPORTS

-- What do you do on the eve of the NBA draft? If youre Lonzo Ball you chill in a Manhattan hotel room with some chicken nuggets and sports news on the TV. Will the Lakers take the hometown phenom with the second pick? We find out today.

-- Yasiel Puig stayed hot at the plate in the Dodgers 8-2 win over the Mets. He's slugging .722. But Puig sure did take his time rounding the bags when he hit a homer in the fourth inning.

OPINION

-- Columnist Michael Hiltzik asks whether the resignation of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is good for the company. Yes, because it will allow the company to improve its reputation and recruit talent. No, because his departure will focus attention on what Hiltzik calls the fundamental unprofitability of its business model.

-- Its been nearly a decade since the public first got its hands on an iPhone. And boy has it changed us. Looking back, theres no doubt Steve Jobs knew he was making history.

WHAT OUR EDITORS ARE READING

--From The Atlantic: The Fall of a Foreign Affairs Reporter.

--From The New York Times: Audrey Tautous Very Private Self-Portraiture.

ONLY IN L.A.

It was a startling alert from the U.S. Geological Survey: A 6.8 magnitude quake had struck off the coast of Santa Barbara. The quake was real, the date was real, the year, however, was 92 years in the past. The error happened when a Caltech scientist tried to correct the exact location of the deadly Prohibition-era Santa Barbara earthquake.

Los Angeles Times archive

(Los Angeles Times archive)

Please send comments and ideas to Davan Maharaj.

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Today: No Drama Obama - Los Angeles Times

Pat Cunnane spent six years in the White House helping to promote Barack Obamas message. From the outside, he still does: On Tuesday, Cunnane became the latest Obama alumnus to land a contract for a book on his experiences.

While much of the world obsesses about the more impetuous musings of President Trump or perhaps in reaction to that obsession a new market for Obama nostalgia is manifest in the growing number of books, podcasts and TV and film treatments by or involving young veterans from the Obama stable.

Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, has signed on to publish Cunnanes recollections of his coming of age, starting at 22 years old, in the White House press office, a book tentatively called West Winging It: An Unpresidential Memoir.

"For six years, working in the Obama White House was all I knew. When that came to an end a few months ago, lets just say I didnt take it well, Cunnane said.

Writing proved cathartic. Retelling stories of the historic moments as well as the mundane and absurd ones helped stave off the sadness that I felt, Cunnane said.

Humor helped, too. Even before the news of Cunnanes Obama book, he gained a bit of fame for his Trump tweets, or, rather, his unique retweet. To make a serious and widely shared point that the current presidents tweets, however unpresidential, should be treated as official White House statements Cunnane did just that, putting his old White House skills to work in a tweet that took off.

All of Trumps Tweets should be mocked up in the correct Presidential statement format, he posted. Its telling.

To illustrate, Cunnane provided a mock-up of an official White House statement based on one of Trumps more undiplomatic tweets, about a London terrorist attack.

The Internet being the social medium it is, Cunnanes idea was quickly realized. A Web developer, Russel Neiss, created an automated feed, @realPressSecBot, that immediately tweets out Trumps 140-character posts as if they were formal White House statements. The account attracted more than 100,000 followers within a week.

Trumps remarks like those against the federal investigation he calls a witch hunt look all the more out of place when showcased in the official-looking way long reserved, through Republican and Democratic administrations, for sober presidential statements carefully scrutinized before publication by aides such as Cunnane.

Cunnane is now living in Los Angeles where he is part of the writing team for ABCs Designated Survivor, featuring Keifer Sutherland as another unexpected occupant of the Oval Office. The Mark Gordon Company, which produces Designated Survivor, also has plans to produce the book for television.

The deals reflect the burgeoning market for Obama-related works, beyond the Obamas own lucrative book contracts.

A memoir by Alyssa Mastromonaco, a close aide to Obama on his 2008 campaign and in the White House, was an unexpected bestseller this year and has been optioned for TV. David Litt, a former Obama speechwriter, began working on a book about his time in the administration last year, but, he said, it came into clearer focus after the election.

Once Trump won, it felt suddenly more urgent to document what happened, not because we did things perfectly we certainly didnt do things perfectly but because this idea that government could be animated by a sense of fundamental goodness and decency suddenly seemed like a relic from some ancient history, Litt said.

It became a lot easier to figure out what to write about and what to think about some of the experiences that we went through.

His books title, Thanks, Obama, borrows from the wry aside that Obama expropriated from critics and often used when describing positive developments for which he seemed to get no credit, at least as he and his supporters saw it.

People are approaching the book as escapist literature in a way I appreciate, but didn't expect, said Litt, who now leads the Washington office of Funny or Die, the comedy video website and production company.

Theres some precedent for the left finding solace in the arts. The West Wing debuted on television at the end of the Clinton administration, written in part by veterans of his tenure, but it flourished as a parallel reality during George W. Bushs administration.

The NBC drama has gotten something of a second life as liberals rediscover it on streaming platforms such as Netflix. When Hrishikesh Hirway launched a podcast in early 2016 reliving the series episode-by-episode, he expected each one might attract 25,000 downloads. The first episode was downloaded more than 600,000 times.

Hirway said the size of the audience hasnt changed since Trumps election, though some listeners told him they had to take a break from watching the show because the contrast between the portrayal of an idealistically liberal Bartlet administration and Trumps is too jarring. To the extent the show changed, it was in how the podcasters discussed events and issues depicted in the series to compare them to real life.

Suddenly those questions took on a greater urgency, Hirway said.

Cunnane views his book as something of West Wing meets Veep. It will draw on the range of experiences he had in the White House, from the less glamorous duties corralling reporters shadowing Obamas events to the heady ones, like helping the president prepare for interviews and public appearances. He claims that he debated Jerry Seinfeld about closing punchlines for Obamas appearance on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. He lost, of course.

"I had no idea what I was doing when I first started at the White House, Cunnane freely admits. He made an early poor impression by asking a co-worker: Whats a POTUS? Now, of course, that once insider-y shorthand for President of the United States is common knowledge certainly, at least, to any Twitter user.

michael.memoli@latimes.com

For more White House coverage, follow @mikememoli on Twitter.

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In the Trump era, Obama nostalgia is a booming industry - Los Angeles Times

Barack Obama could soon hear his name being uttered as part of Angelenos driving directions, with a Los Angeles city councilman proposing to name a street after him.

Obama Boulevard could prove a relatively more innocuous role for the 44th presidents name than Obamajam the oft-used term to refer to the anticipated congestion that accompanied his frequent fundraising trips to the Los Angeles area.

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City Council President Herb Wesson wants to rename a 3.4-mile segment of Rodeo Road, between Jefferson Boulevard and Arlington Avenue, after Obama because it would be a fitting addition to what is known in his district as presidents row. They are a succession of streets named for three of the countrys founding fathers George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

Wesson said the street also has a story to tell about the most recent former president.

Rancho Cienega Park on Rodeo Road was where Obama made one of his earliest presidential campaign stops while still a United States senator in 2008. His transportation then was a late-model minivan, according to Wesson. Obama later upgraded to a motorcade, with a specially designed black Cadillac limousine, nicknamed The Beast.

Despite bringing with him much less pomp, circumstance and security than in later years, Obamas visit still generated unprecedented buzz, Wesson said.

The crowd was crazy, and his security for the most part wound up being this big guy that used to work for me nicknamed Big John, who had to use his body and arms to hold people away from Obama, Wesson said.

It was overwhelming, he said. You didnt have crowds like this.

Wesson said his staffers are writing a letter to Obama letting him know about the plan to change the street name, which would require approval by the L.A. City Council and Mayor Eric Garcetti.

Wesson, who lives about four blocks away from Rodeo Rodeo, said that the street was where he and many others first met Obama.

So many good photos were taken at that rally that Wesson made a calendar with them, he said. Now, he is hoping to mark that moment in another way.

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It was history, he said. And who knows how people report history, but when they talk about his first official campaign stop in California, its going to be in an area thats off a street that we named after him. That will live on longer, after me and him.

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LA drivers could soon add Obama Boulevard to their commute - LA Daily News