As separately reported on LBReport.com, during the July 12 city management budget preview, Mayor Beverly O'Neill told an anectode about CNN's recent use of a short excerpt of her in a story on state and local government budget woes.

"CNN wanted to talk with me and come down with a camera to talk about the state budget and the city budget," the Mayor said. "I talked with this gentleman [a reporter], he was asking me questions for about twenty minutes. Tuesday [July 8] it was on the Lou Dobbs show. And I had my family waiting, you know to look, we're going to be on CNN...and...they came to the problems in California, and they took once sentence, and the sentence was "We have three year plan in the city of Long Beach and the state doesn't have a plan." And that was all they took. [Laughter, applause]

Well, that's basically accurate...but if the transcript posted on cnn.com is correct, Her Honor's CNN sound bite was actually a little longer and may have included a Freudian political slip.

At the very least, we think it's worth a chuckle:

"We have a three- year plan and it's going to be hard to do. But at least we have a plan. I don't feel the state governor -- government has a plan to get out of their crisis except looking at the cities."