street-hassle

2012-02-13T06:47:00.001-08:00

All I know is that this should stop here, with this post. I reserve the right to add more, of course.

But I have felt like giving up writing about city politics for a while--and now I am doing so. It's not that I've spent myself. Are you kidding? I usually write 1,000 words before coffee, and I know how good they are. But there are many good reasons for stopping this nonsense...

At the top, I turned 55 last week and at this stupendous age I don't need the aggravation of dealing with the kinds of people I have been obliged to deal with anymore. Another is, I simply don't feel like sharing much of what I feel anymore, either--no matter how well you craft an opinion around a truth, there are whole machines out there devoted to crushing it with lies lies lies, and these despicable machines make the truth a lot more permeable than it needs to be. A third reason--very important, this one--is that following LA politics presently is like being assigned to a bad baseball team that finds a way to lose three times out of five, yet plays endless four-hour games every night anyway. It's just not fun.

And certainly a key reason to stop writing about local politics is that media around town who also do so often lift from this site wholesale. I am always glad to help, but also always circumspect of those who help themselves without asking, especially those who don't even have the grace to send me a holiday card or occasional thank you. Reading other media, in fact, mostly makes me sick. This is not a secret.

It's been bad around town for a long time. But the kind of stories we've seen locally of late--they're complete contamination narratives, and the city is only further contaminating itself by failing to deal with them directly. Both bad redistricting and pedophilia scandals indeed lead to contamination of all kinds, now and in the future. Poor us--already so messed up politically, only heading for a trainwreck, and nobody in media cares, they're too busy punching clocks and penning advertorials.

Over the past year, by simple proximity, I've cultivated the kind of contempt for our politicians and our media that is simply unhealthy to live with for extended periods. So get ready for a tack to meet a thirty-degree windshift. I'll be not writing much here anymore about city politics--thank the gods for that. I'll be writing about arts and culture, maybe here and certainly elsewhere, and perchance a little more sporadically. I simply need to cut away from they awful political life of the city. You probably do too. Let's stay vigilant--even snide--but not beat our heads against a wall either.

° ° ° ° °

And thanks to CityWatch for reprinting this piece of mine from the weekend, on LA's vapid political responses to the LAUSD molestation scandals. It is in this scandal most of all in which we have learned that LA has, quite literally, been tricked senseless by its irresponsible overlords and would-be overlords.

° ° ° ° °

Another UPDATE: thank you to a few people who were hopeful that I might write about the City more. It turns out I will--I will still write occasional columns for CityWatch LA, where my "Mailander's musings" column has been running for over a year now. It will continue to run there. That online magazine is the City's most dependable and comprehensive opinion journal, period. I've always been very thankful to have been esteemed by that publication in particular, and this new arrangement will enable me to devote more space and time to arts and culture and nightlife here.

City of Cowards

2012-02-13T01:30:00.000-08:00

Last week, something terrible happened to the City I have called home for so long. In fact, it was so terrible that something in me fairly died with contempt, with disgust to watch it.

For last week, I saw almost all of our so-called "leaders"--including the five who want to be our next Mayor, and one who wants to be our next District Atttorney--go absolutely voiceless in the face of the greatest public school catastrophe of a decade, anywhere.

At Penn State, they were willing to dismiss ancient, ailing icon Joe Paterno on very short order. In LA, nobody's willing to dismiss a superintendent, a board member, a principal, or even a janitor without labored discussions.

It doesn't matter that some of this happened, technically, outside the city limits, or that the politicians, technically, have no direct jurisdiction over the City of LA's LAUSD schools. This is a catastrophe of public schooling that directly affects 600,000 voiceless children do who reside within the City of Los Angeles, as well as all their parents. The shocking result of fifteen years of Riordan-Broad-Villaraigosa educational reform is that the school district certainly doesn't have the courage, nor even the competence, to protect children. These are children who not only face certain emotional damage for years, if not life, but who very likely have even be put at a public health risk by sexual predators, even while the District failed to shut schools down long after public health was threatened by predatory acts.

And confronted with the problems, the district just washed its hands and handed all the important decisions over to law enforcement--who are no more qualified to handle public health problems, nor emotional health problems, than cowardly politicians are. (Of course, our lying, self-aggrandizing, City Attorney, now hoping to raft his own incompetence into higher office still, has washed his hands too.)

Do yo know why those five Mayoral candidates in particular have been voiceless throughout this crisis? Because they've been afraid of alienating billionaire Broad, multimillionaire Riordan, Mayor Villaraigosa's ailing political machine, a few various unions and contractors, and all the others who have manipulated our schools to this outcome for the past fifteen years.

Garcetti, Greuel, Beutner, James, and Perry are all afraid of getting in the way of the "reform" efforts of those corporate clowns and order-taking political machines, none of whom have ever had a moment's classroom experience in education themselves. (UPDATE/Note: James's statement on "Unspeakable crimes, an outraged community" is here; his office tells me this statement is from February 7, immediately after the scandal broke). They are afraid of those who brought us the likes of those who control the District today--and who also, if they all stick their heads in the sand long enough, might assist one or more of their own campaigns.

These people should be calling--loudly--for the immediate resignation of Superintendent John Deasy, Board of Trustees President Monica Garcia, Board member Nury Martinez, and every other Board member and principal who declared themselves content to be following the orders of law enforcement rather than take measures to protect children at our schools.

Of the five mayoral candidates--not one of them deserves to be Mayor. Not one of the five. There was no courage on display anywhere in this city last week, only cowardice. That's what made me sick by last Friday, and it didn't get any better this weekend.

EARLIER: Order-taking: the top problem at LAUSD

"The CRA as we know it is dead"

2012-02-12T12:03:00.000-08:00

Don't watch it--it's dull and not journalism--it's an infomercial. Nothing on the two largest issues presently facing LA: redistricting and the molestation scandals at LAUSD schools. It mostly sounds like the Councilmembers got to script the interview. Still...

Here's KABC roundtable on Los Angeles, led by Adrienne Alpert, with the new top team in Council: Wesson, Reyes and LaBonge. Short notes: budget is top priority. Reyes, clean-shaven, wants to shave the deficit too. "The City is a City of great neighborhoods," LaBonge says. He wants a public-private partnership over the Zoo.

Adrienne asks about the CRA, wonders about liability to development. "At this point it's important for us to recognize that the CRA as we know it is dead," Wesson pronounces. Reyes says that we need to challenge our State officials about public housing and economic development. LaBonge disagrees with Yaroslavsky that CRA's "got greedy." He uses downtown as an exemplar and says he's "sad it's gone."

City budget, 6-12% cuts coming to departments. Wesson says that the CAO will announce soon that the deficit is not as bad as we thought, and that we've cut everything we can. "We really need to re-invent city government and the way that we deliver services." "One of the reasons we've survived up to this point is that they [the unions] have been allies, not adversaries," Wesson adds.

Dr. Pickel as ratepayer advocate will not look at the present DWP adjustment, and Wesson offers a tortured explanation. "Water and power helped build this city," LaBonge adds gratuitously.

The Zoo comes up. "We need the money for the public safety," LaBonge, the man who spent $47 million to house one elephant, now says he's for public-private partnerships. "In the country, there's 356 Zoos--most all of them have public-private partnerships," he insists. Wesson is circumspect, anticipating "one of the best conversations" that we've had in the city.

Advertising in city parks? "I'm a yes," Wesson says. "I'm a no," LaBonge says. This passes for controversial debate.

Coffee and notes

2012-02-11T07:55:00.000-08:00

To-day, I can take a bit of a break, but in the morning I'll sit down again with Kevin James, the candidate for Mayor whom the former fishwrap of record doesn't seem to esteem very well. But what an exhausting week it's been. (I also hear that John Shallman is, predictably, mucking up the Wendy Greuel campaign, even as he's long glommed onto talentless moneybags DA candidate Carmen Trutanich too--a candidate so talentless they had to hold him out of the election cycle as long as they possibly could). Our Mayor Villaraigosa has been bolstering the national cause for immigrant rights even as his house is on fire at home as three more molestation stories came up out of his LAUSD and redistricting complaints are widespread. Meanwhile, Patt Morrison picked up some threads heard here long ago and asked Michelle Rhee, presently on tour with the Mayor too, if she's a teacher-basher. (Last year, Rhee was supposed to lead an editorial panel at a national scholastic journalism press conference--when she suddenly backed out, they tapped yours truly, I'm pleased to say). Riordan, Broad, and Villaraigosa, in fact, having made such a botch of things locally, were nowhere to be found as their own blown-up laboratory the LAUSD went up in all-consuming flames last week. Nor was Villaraigosa called on the carpet by any mainstream media for assembling the kind of local redistricting efforts that will preserve the dwindling power base of the local Latino pol machine. It will be fun, I predict, to talk to James about redistricting especially.

Order-taking: the top problem at LAUSD.

2012-02-10T14:16:00.000-08:00

"The future of Latino politics in the Valley"--Honor PAC, 10/23/11

Perhaps more than anything else, the most recent statement of LAUSD Board member Nury Martinez demonstrates what's wrong with the District, and why it's beleaguered now by so many child abuse complaints. Martinez says in a presser today:

When the complaints against this teacher were lodged in the Spring of last year, the case was immediately referred to the Los Angeles Police Department who initiated an investigation. The teacher was removed from Telfair in April. At that time, LAUSD was ordered by LAPD to not go forward with any internal investigation and to not release any information concerning the case. I am informed that each of this teacher's former students was interviewed by LAPD. Paul William Chapel was arrested and stripped of his teaching credential in October of last year. He is currently incarcerated and is awaiting trial for the last four months.

Well. Red bold is hers. But Nury should know that the reason that the LAPD wants to dictate the terms of any investigation is because they want to investigate things to death before they make any arrests. And that doesn't help children who are at risk presently.

If we had school administrators who actually knew what they were doing, they would turn around and say this:

LAPD, are you nuts? We have the lives of children at stake. We're taking action right now, and investigating the whole school right now, even if you feel you can't. We're talking to parents right now. Sorry about your own investigation, but we can't take any chances. We can't afford to wait for you.

But nobody elected to LAUSD school board has enough knowledge, competence, or guts to do that--as they didn't at Miramonte. No, the top administrators at the District are too used to taking orders from the Charter school proponents to issue any orders of their own. In fact, thanks to Riordan, Broad, and Villaraigosa, we have a district of order-takers, rather than of real educational administrators. These accusations are only going to get worse.

Latino Mayor, Polyglot Pueblo

2012-02-09T11:49:00.000-08:00


Antonio Villaraigosa got an award in Washington DC yesterday from his top La Raza redistricter, even while stumping for the Obama Administration on immigration reform. The "national organization" plotting LA's political future operates out of an Avon building next to an auto tech shop. By Antonio's award givers' statistical reckoning, Rita Hayworth and Raquel Welch count as Latino too.

"The lines of tribe shall soon dissolve," President Barack Obama said in his promising inaugural. He seemed to transcend race, if only for the moment, and most of us thought he meant it.

But the lines of tribe were far from dissolving in DC yesterday, where our local La Raza redistricters were putting on a full show for the benefit of national media. Our player Mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, was in Washington dutifully making a speech on immigration handed to him by the Obama administration, and also grabbing a doorprize from a national Latino organization of elected officials on the same day.

And what a coincidence it was: the "national" Latino organization from which the Mayor grabbed his award is very the same organization from which he grabbed his president for LA's redistricting commission: Arturo Vargas of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.

The fact that our Mayor had to go to DC to receive his prize while performing his patriotic duty is rather ironic in itself, because Vargas's gifting org is headquartered right here in LA, in the shadow of the downtown mesh of 10 and 110. In fact, this "national headquarters" is in an Avon office building on Washington near the freeway, right next to an auto tech service building. That's it in the photo above, behind the trees and the empty parking lot with the truck in the front.

° ° ° ° °

Meanwhile, back in our own pueblo, Zacatecas-born Councilman Jose Huizar, not likely to self-deport anytime soon as Mitt Romney might hope, squared off against Councilmember Jan Perry over whether or not Huizar's district should be able to annex the big enchilada that is Perry's downtown.

In his last election, Huizar was a sound choice over casa-flipper Rudy Martinez early last year. At minimum, Huizar knows how the City works. But Huizar also has a long string of failure in his own district involving precisely the kind of development issues that challenge Perry's downtown all the time.

Huizar had big plans for his district when he came to Council. Almost none have panned out. He failed to develop a Biotech center in East LA. He failed to bring a Clean Tech site to his side of the arts district. He failed to develop the old Sears property. He had not worked well with the CRA prior to the agency's de-chartering. He has failed in five years even to identify starting and ending points for his pet project, the Broadway Trolley. To think of him lording this kind of unproductive insouciance over Bunker Hill is more than unsettling.

But Huizar listened to the Mayor on the redistricting commission and nominated another tough demographer / La Raza Latino to the City's redistricting commission: Antonio Sanchez. Most Anglo Councilmembers did not think to nominate people who actually knew what they were doing when drawing maps--the two Paul Ks, for instance, rewarded people who don't have any special demographic background, and newbie Councilmember Englander did the same. But all the Latino members of Council nominated accomplished demographers.

In fact, much of the explosive growth in Latino census figures over the past decade derives from new categorizations of who might be considered Latino--which is, of course, a whole lot of us. It is so many, in fact, that the category may be meaningless to all except Univision marketers trying to sell advertising, and redistricters trying to rationalize the inclusion of non-Hispanic whites into Hispanic-dominated districts.

° ° ° ° °

For its statistical purposes, Vargas's organization identifies anyone with any Latino-Iberian heritage, say, a Portugese or Spanish parent on either side, or even a single Dominican grandparent, as Latino. (For example, by Vargas's way of counting lines of tribe, not only are Cameron Diaz and Martin Sheen Latinos, but Rita Hayworth, Karen Valentine and Raquel Welch all are as well). Not even the US Census itself recognizes such inclusions.

And for the purposes of carving up the future LA, the more formidable you can make Latino headcounts--whether they're Jose Huizar Latinos or Rita Hayworth Latinos--the better.

While the Obama administration turns to Mayor Villaraigosa to draw distinctions between Republicans and Democrats on immigration issues, the La Raza redistricting land grabs in various Council Districts around town are devoted to two purposes: to consolidate Latino power in Los Angeles (and thereby keep alive an increasingly failing political machine); and to annex key business corridors in order to build better cases for spending more city tax dollars in lower-middle-class districts.

The irony is--especially should LA continue to gentrify through the decade--the strategy puts more bona fide Latino interests themselves at considerable peril. It is possible, for instance, that by annexing downtown, Jose Huizar's district could become an non-Hispanic white dominated district. And there is certainly the possibility that by annexing Sunland-Tujunga, which has a strong identity, into Alarcon's district, which is donut-shaped and has no center, that the influence of the new annex may shift the balance of the district from Latino west to Anglo east in a decade's time.

Carmen Trutanich, "I am a liar" campaigns launch simultaneously

2012-02-09T10:30:00.000-08:00

Carmen Trutanich is in the race for District Attorney, and the Alan Jackson campaign gets a leg up immediately:

In response to Carmen Trutanich’s announcement that he is abandoning his responsibilities as City Attorney and promise not to seek higher office, the Jackson campaign has designed and submitted a full page newspaper advertisement for placement in every major daily newspaper in Los Angeles as per the terms of Trutanich’s signed and sworn “Pledge to Serve.” Trutanich’s announcement comes on the heels of being caught by the LA Times lying about his support from the law enforcement community.

The order was submitted and requested that the bill be mailed to Carmen Trutanich.

The pledge stipulates that the advertisement must be a full page, have a picture of Trutanich, a copy of the pledge and use large print with the words “I AM A LIAR.”

“Even though he broke his word to the people of Los Angeles, I’m sure Trutanich plans to honor his sworn and signed pledge by purchasing the ads but we thought, ‘why not make this easy for him,’” said Jackson’s strategist, John S. Thomas.

Thomas continued, “Don’t worry, we won’t charge Trutanich for the design and placement of the ad. It’s on the house.”

The Times reports the "I am a liar" meme too...for free. Other than that, not much happening today.

Sunset Cycle Crochet

2012-02-08T20:05:00.000-08:00

So I turned 55 and I have been doing all these things to indicate to myself that I am not really 55 but rather as young as you are. One of these things has been to use my Jurassic Derailleur as local transportation rather than occasional recreation. I took it down Griffith Park Boulevard this morning to meet the nice woman from REDCAT at Cafe Casbah and here is where I parked just like the people half my age do it. Look closely and you'll note that someone has left some crocheted fittings around the bicycle rack tube so that your bicycle doesn't get scratched and nicked when you lock it up. It doesn't matter with the Jurassic Derailleur but it might matter with your newest most favored frame. ("I'm cracking frames," Stephen Box once told me, and he's in his fifties too.) I don't want to crack frames or anything, and Griffith Park Boulevard is one of the most gentle of rides on this gentle breeze of a day or any day when the sun is so Apollonian. Bike lanes up and down from Sunset and on up past Hyperion. Griffith Park Boulevard and the Jurassic Derailleur--a good ride, even without taped handlebars.

Cascando Redux

2012-02-08T02:39:00.000-08:00

1

why bother with these people
all over;

why not be anonymous.
didn't know that hyperion bridge
could be so long and empty even afterthe super bowl, the fried chicken
and tattoos, it was father mark's birthday too
at club tee gee, where the bartender
wasn't feeling very well after limping over
from the roost where he worked three years

2

so
anyway
locked away in your everything box
are probably some cards i sent you
maybe even a painting, you
can't bear to look, you
can't bear to write, you
like the control of never

so
tell me how terrifying it is
when they don't love you
everybody is terrified, terrified of that
the busblog too, probably
kerouac, terrified,
beckett, terrified,
proust, terrified,
and all the angels and saints
and people on facebook and the twitter
and even gisele

3

unless they love you

Splice the Mainbrace

2012-02-07T21:10:00.000-08:00

"It's not a yacht, it's a boat," the Mayor says. It's worth a million and it's costing almost that again to keep shipshape. Who's on board? Oh, people like Rusty Millar, of Eric Garcetti's pet neighborhood council--you know, the same people who helped kill Sunset Junction over a chunk of change that couldn't keep a boat afloat for three months. Also the Jonathan Club, UCLA, Morongo tribalists, and...of course...the Mayor's interns. Watch the hilarious KCBS expose.

The Audacity of La Raza Redistricting

2012-02-07T13:13:00.000-08:00

Exemplary Echo Park census tract from data compiled by LA Eastsider.

"The participation of the Los Angeles Latino community in the process of redistricting has been extremely low," this editorial at La Opinion says--with a straight face.

Indeed, Latino community participation has been low--because as the drafts have been drawn, Latinos have nothing to complain about.

In fact, the people who draw the lines have drawn them all in such a way that Latino districts absorb more gringos without threatening their existing demographic tilt at all.

From Sunland-Tujunga to Hollywood to Downtown, small but sizable communities that skew more Anglo than Latino have been annexed into Latino-dominated districts. It's the same kind of La Raza redistricting that has given Latinos an over-representation in the State Assembly.

There's good reason for the pro-Latino bias in redistricting: the Mayor's nominee to head the commission, Arturo Vargas. Vargas is Executive Director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO). But there's far more to the story than that.

Many Anglo Councilmembers, such as Paul Krekorian and Paul Koretz, appointed weak commission members who were much absorbed with other things--Krekorian's, in fact, barely knew the district at all, and Koretz's, David Roberti, has spent his entire political career involved with State-level rather than City-level politics. Conversely, Latino Councilmembers appointed Latino-centric sharks like Mike Trujillo (by Alarcon) and Jose Cornejo (by Cardenas), longtime Villaraigosa order-takers who still believe in the Eastside Latino Machine, despite its recent failures.

How did we get here, when LA's population isn't really changing all that much?

The interests of balanced, affinity-based representation no longer carve up the City of Los Angeles, the County of Los Angeles, or the State of California after a census. This ProPublica piece, published in late December, proves as much.

But the truth is that affinity-based representation hasn't been a part of the view of most our best-known politicians for some time. Instead, the interests of a peculiar kind of redistricting not found elsewhere in America--call it La Raza Redistricting--dominates the local redistricting zeitgeist at State and City level within the bailiwick of Los Angeles. The practitioners, drawing mostly from partisan, agenda-driven materials provided to them by MALDEF and the William C. Velasquez Institute, are by no means exclusively Latino; but they do use shopworn, outmoded Latino political and demographic myths to advance their cause, which is closely wed to Democratic Party gaming of the process in the City and the State.

The myths the La Raza Redistricters use to advance their cause are two: they insist that the City of Los Angeles is growing, and they insist that as it grows, it is becoming more Latino-multicultural all the time.

Neither premise is true at our civic level. The City is not growing in any appreciable way whatsoever, in fact; it is more like a kaleidoscope, shifting patterns but not colors, and generally displacing low rentals for pricey ones, while giving lip-service to affordable housing efforts that are more of a lottery for the remaining poor than a policy for all. The City's ethnic saturation point has long ago been reached--likely around 2003 and 2004. But the La Raza Redistricters at MALDEF and WCVI who ply and play the redistricting appointments at both the City and State level pretend these things are true for the sake of extending Latino-tilting Democratic power.

LAUSD Enrollments by year

How far off base are these myths, so readily swallowed as conventional wisdom even by Valley Republicans?

Consider this: even with more Mexicans here than any city outside of Mexico City, with more Salvadorans here than in any city outside of El Salvador, &c., Los Angeles still didn't appreciably grow in population in any way over the past decade. Two and six-tenths percent growth over the past decade is almost exactly a quarter of one percent a year. Of course, had the Mayor not pushed the census count up so aggressively with a big PR campaign in 2009--which was, in fact, cheating--LA would have actually shown population loss from 2000 to 2010.

And the institution that most widely services all these people who are not arriving--the LAUSD--has been shrinking in enrollment numbers since 2003--this year dropping to 1999 levels--despite building 160 new schools over the past decade.

So where's all this Latino growth in this pueblo? If the City isn't growing in population--and if the local public school district is shrinking in size--where are all these booming Latino communities?

Despite all this, top Democratic Party officials and the La Raza Redistricters continue to dominate the process of drawing our lines, as they did in 2001 with tools provided them by WCVI and MALDEF in hand. They're able to do this in part because every other Democratic group from Labor to local chambers of commerce hopes to meld the Latinos into whatever they're selling themselves, and hand them half the keys to their own shrinking pueblos for the sake of hanging onto majority party power.

This doesn't work, is not working, hasn't worked, will not work for the city, as now people of all cultures leave Los Angeles in parallel numbers. Not only that, the maps generate the kind of representation that prioritizes government services over job creation--hurting us all.

At the heart of the sleight-of-hand is the fuzziness surrounding the definition of "Latino" itself. All the studies WCVI and MALDEF issue suggest that Latino populations are exploding everywhere. It's good for Democrats and it's good for Univision--but is it true?

Defining what constitutes a "Latino" or a "Hispanic" is not even reliably done by the U.S. Census--and there is no other measure.

The 2010 Census lists "Persons of Hispanic or Latino origin" and "White persons" and "White persons not Hispanic" categories. Simply trying to identify the "difference" between ethnicities (Filipino? German-Mexican? Mestizo-American?) let alone track reliable numbers in a city that offers sanctuary to immigrants is all but impossible.

But our hardcore myth panderers continue to herd people by their likelihood to vote for people with diacritical marks in their surnames rather than the affinities found in their neighborhoods.

As a consequence, we're not even losing white-flight Anglo talent to Seattle and Portland and Irvine anymore; those middle managers have mostly long gone pursuing their opportunities elsewhere. With a crop of legislators more interested in baseline services than securing better jobs, now we're losing top Latino talent too--to Colorado, North Carolina and Massachusetts--even as La Raza Redistricters continue to promote the false case that Latinos form a consistent, amorphous, ever-growing underclass here.

La Raza Redistricters do not only include the Mayor, his cousin John Perez, Richard Alarcon, Maria Elena Durazo, Monica Garcia, Jose Huizar, &c. They include Nancy Pelosi, Eric Garcetti, Madeline Janis, Julie Butcher, Janice Hahn.

These redistricters are, in short, devoting all of LA's potentially transformational redistricting energy to planning for a more Latino-dominated, more multicultural future--a future that gives no demographic evidence of ever arriving.

NOTE: A significant part of this post originally appeared here.

Reform itself has corrupted LAUSD

2012-02-07T05:26:00.000-08:00

None of the State's top education "reformers" knew anything about education when they began tinkering with it to suit the purposes of a handful of billionaires.

"If you're a molester, you go where you perceive the lowest-hanging fruit to be," a confessed child molester chillingly tells the camera in a Catholic-produced film from five years ago. He encourages administrations to look for people like himself: unmarried adults who were always looking for excuses to be alone with children.

That's the composite, and that's who LAUSD should have been looking at when the first LAUSD employee went to jail on molestation charges.

Now there is a third molestation charge in the LAUSD, and it also turns out that there was a violator at Miramonte seven years ago.

A priest once told me, in the middle of the Catholic church's own crisis years, that men who never felt called to be priests at all began showing up as priesthood candidates in the 1970s. They did so because they knew that once the church was afraid of diminishing vocations after the sexual revolution--and indeed, it was vastly diminished--it began to become more and more thinly stretched with regards to policing itself.

What we now have is something similar--a group (who knows how large) who began to show up at the LAUSD when Mayor Riordan--a man who learned everything he knows about education from billionaires--began to "reform" the district by bashing teachers and district alike in the early 1990s. Mayor Hahn, conversely, knew that the Mayor's role was not school oversight, but Mayor Villaraigosa gladly took up Riordan's billionaire "cause," and has continued to stretch the district to its elastic limit.

It must have made most staff and even some of the reformers cringe to read the Board's statement about the scandal yesterday, in which it said "The District takes each and every reported act of criminal and administrative misconduct seriously, and we will continue to work with law enforcement to ensure the safety and security of our students and campuses." (This CNN report certainly speaks otherwise--assaults on students, restraining orders, and the District did nothing).

Ever since Riordan's manipulations, and certainly all through Villaraigosa's mayoralty, the nation's largest school district has become more and more thinly stretched when it comes to personnel. (There has been abundant money available for physical plant as the educational charlatans duped the people with bonds passed in the name of education but that really went to contractors and developers outside of the district, indeed outside of the city). Everybody has been focusing on a new agenda, and nobody was really focused on protecting children--often pushing the concerns of actual educators aside, or dismissing them as insufficiently consistent with a corporate-minded reform. All players--as I have said before--have been interested only in stretching the resources of the district to make it bend to their will, and few have ever had the interests of children in mind. It's showing now, and I suspect now that this terrifying thing is very far from over.

EARLIER: Riordan, Broad, the Eastside Latino Machine, and the Legacy of District 5

More miscommunications from Shallman Communications

2012-02-06T12:30:00.000-08:00

Weren't we just talking about how John Shallman's home office GeoCities-in-beta site Shallman Communications looked more like a place for miscommunications than for communications? Well, we were. And the communications breakdowns didn't stop last week for the beleaguered political consultant with the pricey per-vote totals.

City Attorney Carmen the Clown Trutanich's District Attorney campaign-that-isn't-a-campaign (although it's clipped hopeful elbow-rubbers for over a million in campaign donations to date) made a huge error on Carmen's behalf late last week, claiming endorsements that weren't really earned yet. A "miscommunication," Shallman calls it, according to the former fishwrap of record--proving both are still good for something. Shallman further blamed rogue Nuch volunteers, and the fishwrap apparently took the man at his word without asking for names.

Hyperion

2012-02-06T06:40:00.000-08:00

Hyperion is largely a street that connects other streets, and as quickly as possible--it starts out life as Fountain, serves as the demarcation between Silver Lake and Los Feliz, spills over the river and the freeway, and culminates ignominiously at a tense fusion with Glendale Boulevard, which itself turns into Brand even while a tributary jots out towards Forest Lawn and the old four corners point of some Spanish ranchos. Nobody dreams of putting speed bumps on Hyperion, or slowing it down, even though the street is very rough on cyclists, pedestrians, and even motorists.

The lofts recently built on Rowena off of Griffith Park Boulevard make lots of sense--they are on a street that it already dense but also controlled by adequate parking, and never seems to clog up. On another Pleasant Valley Sunday the sandwich boards come out. And there are stabs at street art in this neighborhood, especially editorializing on consumer culture, which in Los Feliz is a little more modest than elsewhere. South of the Griffith Park there are faux-empty storefronts--bottom is the weird weathered-plywood side of Barbarella--which has to my taste one of the best tuna tartare appetizers in the city.

Night out

2012-02-03T12:34:00.000-08:00

"New York's alright if you like saxophones," quoth Christian to me last night, more than a little maliciously, between Camels, between two recognizably LA sets. D'accord. His beta records, vurrry indie, lusciously LA in the old Reprise/PIP Building on Highland, Sinatra gold in the necessary room, tossed a party last night at the Home Office for a few of their artists. Some are on their way to the alt/indie side of SxSW (yes, there's still an alt/indie side there, molto vibrato, in fact) and some are on their way via EMI and some are simply on their way. Ruby Friedman Orchestra slammed home her set with Shooting Stars, a proto-Firework swordfishtrombone-and-synthesized power anthem that incidentally honors all the venue's legacies from nightclub jazz to progressive present. Mom was proud in the crowd. And who's that in the parking lot strutting past the failing Firestone sign? Didn't get a name.

Grandstanding clown sues Northern Trust

2012-02-02T13:06:00.000-08:00

Maybe our grandstanding City Attorney didn't get enough bang for his buck when he haplessly sued Deutsche Bank. Or maybe he felt he was taking too much heat for applying excessive bail against the downtown Occupiers that Eric Garcetti had promised could "stay as long as you need to." But now Carmen Trutanich has decided to bring suit against Northern Trust--a stuffy trust bank not known for assembling flighty products or mishandling money--for "mishandling" City pension assets.

You know--in other words, the City agreed to invest in investments that went down, and now feels a need to blame someone else. Nearly every institution in America that pursued too aggressive funds management strategies would like someone else to blame too, but not everyone else in America has an idle and capricious phalanx of slavish attorneys available to them. Carmen Trutanich feels that there must certainly be some malfeasance involved on the banking side, rather than the investor side.

Thus far, the only two news hounds I've seen aggregating the City Attorney's presser are Kevin Roderick and Rick Orlov, who have dutifully obliged Carmen the Clown with today's fifteen minutes without comment from critics. Thank you guys--I appreciate knowing about it. But I doubt anyone else will touch this story as straight "news", as by now people mostly know that the whole point of any Trutanich suit accompanied by a presser seems to be to grab a day's headlines and keep the Clown's name in print. Not much chance for this suit landing LA any cash either.

UPDATE: The City Maven links to a fuller description of the suit at Bloomberg, in which losses were attributed to investment in instruments "whose revenue was based upon mortgage-origination, or subprime mortgage loans, or the housing market itself." Northern Trust says “The city attorney’s suit, brought years after the losses were incurred, is based solely on hindsight and is premised on the legally deficient claim that Northern Trust should have predicted these unprecedented events even though the markets as a whole had not.”

The statute of limitations on a breach of fiduciary duty in California is ordinarily four years. If the breach is not based on a specific statute, the limitations runs in two years.

How badly has school reform failed our children?

2012-02-02T10:43:00.000-08:00

These three educational "reformers" had absolutely no training in education before they started meddling with our schools.

It turns out that the teacher who is alleged of committing twenty-three felonies involving child abuse had been accused of molestation charges once before, in 1994.

Think of all of our fraudulent school "reformers" and their distracting efforts over the past two decades--namely Riordan, Broad, and Villaraigosa--and how not one of them took a single step towards ensuring, even while molestation cases were running rampant at Catholic schools, that our administrators could take some simple measures partnering with law enforcement to make sure that this kind of behavior could not take place at a public school.

No answers, only questions:

Why couldn't the Sheriff's Department share such important information with the LAUSD?

What happened to school nurses as watchdogs for such criminal activities on campus?

Why aren't all the school reformers of the past two decades talking about what they've done to protect the children from the kind of degradation to which they were allegedly subjected in the monster's classroom?

And most chillingly:

Are there any guarantees in place that such activity isn't still being conducted at other LAUSD schools?

EARLIER:

The Failure is Catastrophic--and across the Board

Riordan, Broad, the Eastside Latino Machine, and the Legacy of District 5
A new round of teacher bashing at the LA Times
Pravda on Spring Street (Researchers fault LA Times teacher-ranking methods)

And The MediaBistro is where, exactly?

2012-02-02T06:07:00.000-08:00


Actual writer, with fawning admirer.

My my, such a snarky public face that The MediaBistro thing puts forth here in LA--and yet here in LA, nobody is even around to own it.

There was a MediaBistro/FishbowlLA party last night at the vastly underutilized space known as The Falcon on Sunset. This was a very odd party: in fact, the hosts weren't even there. Nor was any kind of ordinary media party gratuity; I saw but one puny pizza dispersed to a ravished group of kappa kappas the whole time as nervous would-be scribes wondered who was buying drinks for whom.

Would-be, yes. Now, at FishBowlLA parties of five and six years ago, you used to see a lot of writers. I mean, actual, decrepit, bankrupt, insouciant, mugs-away writers.

I hadn't been for a while, but I went last night. And now you see a lot of...er, future writers.

It was very dark in the foyer at The Falcon--a fireplace and fairy lights provided some vague ambient lighting--in fact, it was so dark that you couldn't take photographs unless you were rocking a flash, and who wants to do that--who, I mean, other than Ed Padgett?

Oh yes, Ed Padgett, a man who won't say no when it comes to operating machinery, was the de facto photographer, because the actual one didn't show up either. I wanted to get a photo of an actual writer too, but stranded without a flash, I had to go out on the curb to do it.

Governor takes next step in tidying up CRA

2012-02-01T17:47:00.001-08:00

This has been in the works not for months, but for years. Governor Brown has appointed a three-person successor agency to tidy up the CRA's outstanding business. The members of the august board are:

Timothy McOsker, a partner at Mayer Brown who was chief of staff for former Mayor James Hahn;
Nelson Rising, former chairman of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and longstanding downtown clever boots; and
Mee Semcken, a former city council liaison for the Los Angeles redevelopment agency, and wife of (Roski) Majestic Realty agent provocateur John Semcken.

The situation on the ground for developers whose projects involve entitlements remains untidy, but land sharks are at the ready.

Print media burying LAUSD lewd teacher story

2012-02-01T11:44:00.000-08:00

A host of oddities on the front page of the former fishwrap of record's above-the-fold front page today--and never mind the ad wrapper. The lead story is a humdrum cash payment story that's three weeks old--that's oddity one. In fact, the LA Weekly had that as a second-tier news blog item twenty-two days ago. (I found it such a trite item, in fact, I mentioned it at the time).

The story that did the most brisk business last night--and the one that certainly has the most chilling ramifications--the LAUSD lewd teacher story--is above the fold, mercifully, but precisely situated in such a way that you can't even see it from most quick views on the street.

These things don't matter so much anymore--except that they are very telling with regards to how editors view stories. In today's case, an already old, utterly untroubling story about the Coliseum and cash money is esteemed as more important to our lives than a story that has the capacity to take down the whole present administrative organization of the nation's largest school district.

At minimum, the LAUSD lewd teacher story certainly has the power to sell papers--the already stale Coliseum story, not at all. So we really see the true colors of the paper in this bizarre editorial decision. These decisions are ultimately the new editor's, former news schlub Davan Maharaj. This is only a guess, but I suspect that he too, like Russ Stanton before him, is only too eager to please the ugly jackal pack of pols and corporate hoodlums who worked so hard to manipulate public opinion against schools to best suit their own corporate purposes. Now that these hoodlums have pretty much accomplished all they wanted to, they are obliged to control the damage they've done to the District as best they can, and newspapers are still in compliance mode.

Worst of all--how is it that the reformer's voices have suddenly gone mute in the wake of this new scandal, which vastly outshines all of their concerns about LAUSD to-date? These days, school reform means kicking the present administration out, and the present administration is already the obliging handmaiden of Eli Broad, Dick Riordan, Antonio Villaraigosa, and all the other fraudulent educators who tinkered with education even though they weren't educators themselves. To cause too much of a fuss over the abuse of a few dozen impoverished Latino students would upset the apple cart these "reformers" have worked so hard to install over the past decade. That's why this hard-to-hide story is being soft-pedaled today, despite the public's acute interest in it.

EARLIER:

The Failure is Catastrophic--and across the Board

Riordan, Broad, the Eastside Latino Machine, and the Legacy of District 5
A new round of teacher bashing at the LA Times
As Roma Burns
Pravda on Spring Street (Researchers fault LA Times teacher-ranking methods)
When life gives you lemons
Lopez jumps on "Scapegoat the Teacher" bandwagon

February

2012-02-01T04:30:00.000-08:00

Ordinary, Januarys commence with extraordinary promise, but this past one early on was beyond extraordinary. We gained all the relief of purging a dismal civic year, LA 2011, even by the end of the first week. The weather remained joyous, sometimes even summery.

But things got tricky, trickier...and bad times swelled. Some grizzly murders again begged to open questions regarding the competence of the LAPD's homicide unit. The Redistricting Commission weighed in and mostly surrendered entrenched communities to districts dominated by anonymity. The new Council President took to his job by throwing his weight around in the most petty, least responsible way possible, marginalizing enemies and stroking anyone who would stroke him. Then there was this horrific story out of LAUSD at the end of the month, capsizing absolutely everything. By last night, again, it was obvious we were living in the same old awful city with the same old problems and the same awful, awful people in charge.

One thing that our civic leaders have persistently demonstrated throughout this squandering of early-year promise is that they really don't give a damn what people want. They are mostly interested in manipulating civic opinion rather than serving it, and when they are not manipulating opinion as best they can, they are interested in their in the next office, the next office, the next office.

The media? Oh, dear. They report mostly the perfectly banal: how much money a candidate raised, and typically give the more powerful side of a conflict the greatest ear. They now print advertorials all over their papers, not only on their opinion pages.

There is something enormously, endemically flawed about Antonio Villaraigosa's Los Angeles, where so few can, and so few are encouraged, to rise above the fray and do the right thing. I'm not sure anyone of our current players has the courage to fix any part of it. It is increasingly difficult merely to write about it.

The failure is catastrophic--and across the board

2012-01-31T13:43:00.000-08:00

The state's top three education meddlers of the past decade. None of these men had any education in education when they began their tinkering.

UPDATE: Twelve hours after the story broke, it still isn't the lead story at any major newspaper.

UPDATE II: Thirteen hours after the story broke, not one mayoral candidate has issued a condemnation, or any kind of statement whatsoever.

UPDATE III: Fourteen hours after story broke, it is top read story at all local media, but not top slotted story anywhere.

How could it happen? How could it be that there are so many reprehensible allegations against the same man over the course of a few years, and yet there is not even one public record of a single complaint against him?

The allegations coming out of the Mark Berndt case today--some of which the LAUSD has had in pocket since last March, when he was fired--are not for the squeamish. In fact, they are barely palatable to hardened detectives. But how--how could it be that there isn't a comprehensive paper trail of parent complaint available? How could not a single child express concern to a single parent, and not a single parent express concern to the failed LAUSD? "There was no student who ever came forward," Deasy insists.

Beyond that, we are only told that the parents of the children are "mostly poor Latinos." The tipoff that Berndt may have committed crimes came from outside of the system--too late for dozens of families.

The people who dared to tinker with the education system over the past decade--from the Mayor to the billionaires to the board members to the Superintendent to the perpetually sparring groups who say they're all there for the children--the people who have created the climate of perpetual scapegoating, perpetual finger-wagging, perpetual conflict--these are the people who have given us the kind of system, after so many decades, that produces a result like today's.

John Deasy and Monica Garcia should resign their posts immediately. The Mayor should point a finger at himself, for six years of "reforms" that have stressed the District to the point of criminal omission. The UTLA leadership should join him in owning a most grave mea culpa. Education charlatans Eli Broad and Dick Riordan should as well, and should never be allowed to touch education again. Together, these various player-bandits have all failed the children, creating the possibility of this most shameful, most infamous day in the history of public education in Los Angeles, and the nation's worst school day since Columbine.

Communications breakdown

2012-01-31T06:25:00.000-08:00

Meet...Carmen.

Yesterday, I found a little broken clown. I took him home and hope to clean the little guy's act up and ultimately put him next to my Mexican office mini-diorama in the basement. I even named him....

For some reason, I also was reminded to take a look at the Downtown News, where there is a scathing editorial encouraging Carmen Trutanich to declare his intentions for District Attorney. Now's enough, the editorial declares. But Nuch's not talking.

Maybe there's some news at his campaign manager's website?

If you thought Nuch's top advisor John Shallman wasn't much interested in online politics before, I encourage you to visit "Shallman Communications"--the Nuch consultant's own website. The man now exhibits such disdain for the online world that he's had who-knows-who put up this website that looks as though it was built at GeoCities circa 1995. Except it has less functionality and less content.

If this is communications, I'd hate to see miscommunication. You would think that a man who has been spending around $250 a vote lately could maybe spare himself reaching two voters and spend $500 on a site that says something. Anyway, who are we to give one of LA's top political names advice?

Echo Park haircut

2012-01-30T14:24:00.000-08:00

Svengali Smith strikes again

2012-01-30T08:23:00.000-08:00

Switching mounts: Ace Smith left another wealthy venture capitalist in the last race for mayor of San Francisco--then rode the favorite to victory.

The San Franciscan with the chip on his shoulder who has won the past two LA mayor's races is up to tinkering with LA politics once again. Because it's Ace Smith, this time ditching Austin Beutner, not a lot of scribes around town want to remind you that Smith jilted another wealthy venture capitalist candidate for Mayor early in another race too: Joanna Rees, in the last San Francisco race. And after a little while thereafter, he hooked up with someone else in the race--someone named Edwin Lee, the once and present Mayor. So even though I hate to do these things on behalf of your alleged local political media, I am obliged to remind you myself.

Joanna, Jilted - street-hassle, August 9, 2011

But nearly everything involving Ace Smith causes me confusion--mostly, why local scribes are so in awe of him. Is it that nickname--Ace?

I am also obliged to remind you that the former fishwrap of record simply went to sleep on the last Mayor's race the moment Smith compared Walter Moore to Lyndon LaRouche. Shame on the media for taking Smith's word for it, and for even reporting that remark as "news." They obviously didn't do their own due diligence on Smith's opinion: for instance, Moore ultimately fetched 26% of the vote, and LaRouche never garnered more than 0.05% in an election.

When he ultimately hooked up with then interim-Mayor Lee, Rees finally cut loose on him:

If anything, the ethically questionable sideshow that brought us to today’s announcement serves as a stark reminder of the widening disconnect between insider power struggles at city hall, and neighborhoods concerned about creating jobs, strengthening schools, and ending the cycle of deficits that puts vital city services at risk.

Yep, it sure does. And Smith's second candidate, Mayor Lee, won the election going away, and Rees ended up with less than 2% of the vote.

When I interviewed Beutner in August for this profile, I asked him directly about the possibility that Smith might get inside his head and then ditch him, as he did Rees. He told me he wasn't worried about the possibility. That was, in part, why I wrote that Beutner seemed naive to me.

I do know that Smith and Clegg have the audacity to hook up with anyone else in the LA mayor's race--of course they do--but I don't know that they in fact will. If they do, I hope local media rips their candidate to shreds--sure, even if it's Zev--instead of writing the fawning, deferential types of freebie advertorials on behalf of their firm that we have seen from MSM in recent years, in which the scribes take everything these two puppeteers' say at their word.

Then again, by 2013 local media will have roughly half the impact that it had in 2005 and 2009--so if media again fail to state the obvious about Svengali Smith and crew, it may not even matter much.

Night out

2012-01-29T08:26:00.000-08:00

It was my good fortune to see copious amounts of loft jazz in New York in the 1970s. If you had asked me, "Where's it going to be, what's it going to be like in thirty-seven years, man?" I couldn't have told you, but now that thirty-seven years have passed, I can say, "It is going to be like a new club in LA's Little Tokyo where they aren't afraid to go postdigital but aren't interested in treating improvisation like it belongs in a museum or at a university either." We made it down to Blue Whale last night (no talking during sets strictly enforced by a credibly-sized enforcer) to see Simplexity, a group of honor-bound yet mirth-driven contemporary jazz and studio ringers who have taken their own inventiveness and added some scattered echoes to produce satisfying ambling sets of fully-absorbing pleasure. (And those scattered echoes are vurrry scattered--I heard a little of the street-side of William Ørbit, right next to some of Miles' late water-color-like broodings synthesized, and the hard, hard bop snare-slamming wakeup-calls of Elvin Jones). In ensemble they flesh out new music that sounds exactly like where you might end up in forty years after turning 19 at Studio Rivbea and wondering what life might be like two generations hence. Top photo, bassist/cool-cat/backbone John von Seggern exchanges time with Steve Tavagione. Sample here if you like. Bottom left: when you beach yourself after a set and an Amber Ale at Blue Whale, up on the third floor of Weller Court off of Onizuka, you walk out into a stunning framing of a building I can't seem to ever get away from, much as I try. Bottom right: you can bet my crew, jealous of my trip to Tommy's after the Shepard Fairey thing a week ago, wanted me to make it up to them--and so we stumble on a rare Saturday night moment: Tommy's, midnight, no line.

Drawn by committee

2012-01-27T19:03:00.000-08:00

LA Zoo, 2007.

Surely you know the old joke that a camel is a horse drawn by committee. In that spirit, then, let me opine that the new LA Council committee assignments are mostly sensible, often political, and occasionally frightening. Here, then, are quick hits on new city of Los Angeles committee assignments. Assignments as listed at The City Maven:

Arts, Parks, Health and Aging
One of the tightest. Alarcon has the best demographic mind on Council, which is essential to health and aging matters, and LaBonge is, like it or not, the top parks stakeholder. Reyes is also very concerned about public health and is a great fit.

Audits and Government Efficiency
The man who wants to be Controller, Dennis Zine, gets a boost on his 2013 aspirations by taking the chair that feeds into the Controller's Office. I wouldn't call Rosendahl and LaBonge especially talented in this field, however.

Budget and Finance
This has got to please Paul Krekorian immensely, to chair this, the city's most important committee, the one Zev owned way back when. Englander fancies himself a budget guy--thus far, we've seen nothing indicating as much other than bluster, but it will be good for him with regards to rounding out career aspirations. Cardenas, Koretz, and Rosendahl get to hang out.

Education and Neighborhoods
Better than nothing, but Parks deserved a better chair than this limited committee. Perry's the vice chair, and she's undistinguished in these two fields. Zine? Really?

Energy and Environment
Jose Huizar has had a few bumps on the road towards being the most environmental guy on Council. He wasn't able to develop a Clean Tech campus downtown and let's not talk about the CLAARTS fund. Zine is not a logical fit, but the two Paul Ks are.

Housing, Community and Economic Development
This is the city's top slush funding committee, home of the 1818 projects and affordable housing boondoggles, so Cardenas gets the chair. Reyes might keep it honest--and maybe Alarcon too--even if Perry and Wesson aren't inclined to.

Information Tech and General Services
Jan Perry gets to chair the city's most dismal committee, of course. Buscaino has to go somewhere, so he goes here, and Cardenas rounds out this highly unspecialized committee.

Jobs and Business Development
Garcetti? Frightening. He wants it, I'm sure, to be able to say during the Mayor's race that he was doing this, but I don't see him as a quality job creator, only as a retail jobs and SEIU jobs creator. You might as well give it to Madeline Janis. Parks and LaBonge are fiscally conservative but neither is particularly imaginative, so it looks like you're on your own, Eric.

Personnel and Animal Welfare
I'd like to see what Daniel Guss et al. think of this one. Koretz had one bright shining moment in animal activism as the anti-declawing guy. Zine is a natural for personnel matters; I can see that. Alarcon? He also had a top animal welfare moment when he was saddled with the new animal center in his district, and tried to block it.

Planning and Land Use Management
Ed Reyes is the natural for this. Mitch Englander's view of land use is irregular and untested--he appears to be for enterprise zones, for instance. He loves big development in general in other parts of town. Huizar has an urban planning degree, but hasn't delivered much on it.

Public Safety
Unrepentantly Republican, Mitch Englander lives and breathes for it and even is traumatized by it. At least he understands most issues. Perry is not especially distinguished in this area. Neither is Krekorian, but certainly Dennis Zine is, and newbie Buscaino gets to roll along.

Public Works
I'm most surprised at this. Things could go really wrong here, and I expected one of the two Paul K's, sober hands, to chair. Buscaino gets it, somehow--this is a big committee with a lot of responsibility and a lot of things can go wrong. Babysitting Buscaino, maybe grooming him, will be Garcetti and Krekorian.

Rules and Elections
Wesson, LaBonge, and Huizar. No comment, other than it could be like the end of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. For voters too.

Trade, Commerce and Tourism
Nobody knows where LaBonge really is at any time, so I suppose this figures. Rosendahl, Garcetti, Wesson and Buscaino round it out. Garcetti, who killed tourist-and commerce-fetching Sunset Junction, is not a logical choice, but Buscaino is. I would have made him vice chair of this one, and not let him chair Public Works right away.

Transportation
So Rosendahl can get as mean as he wants to be on Wilshire Boulevard transpo. Interesting. Koretz too, and Parks, LaBonge and Huizar, two of three who like failed trolleys, shuttle buses, &c., round it out. This will be one of the most ambitious committees.

You can do the ad hocs.

Wearing Television

2012-01-27T07:36:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth Drew is a fossil, and, predictably, her view of American Democracy is fossilized. She is about to become another one of these people who have hung on too long. Now she is concerned about democracy, and money as speech these days. She is very concerned about positive ID voting and SuperPACs. It sounds like a Democratic whine. And it's so wrong it's almost upside-down. How could a woman who's spent her life in politics come to this?

If you don't know the name--and it's possible if you're under 40 that you don't--Elizabeth Drew was for many years The New Yorker's top political correspondent. (She may still be--I don't read the magazine anymore). She was also a more-than-occasional talking head on McNeil-Lehrer (she may still be--I don't watch the Lehrer News Hour anymore). Those who actually know her work know it on fossilized media.

Elizabeth Drew also happens to think a lot like Parke Skelton, John Shallman, and the occasional if perpetually entertaining LA dabbler Ace Smith. Who also may be thinking upside-down these days. All three, like Elizabeth Drew, keep trying to sell to the narrow slices of media with whom they interact that money matters more than it actually does today--because what, after all, can money buy? Money buys, most notably, TV and direct mail--the things that pay the consultant's bills most of all. But by 2013, those two ways of selling candidates to the public should be equally fossilized as Elizabeth Drew.

In recent years in Los Angeles, we have seen candidates applying the Villaraigosa 2005 formula ("it doesn't matter unless it's on TV") to increasingly dismal results. We have seen candidates spending ungodly amounts on TV and direct mail smear politics getting jujitsued by people who know how to take their message to the public for a song.

In 2013, TV is going to matter so little to the Mayor's race as to be a second-tier media consideration, as newspaper endorsements have become. TV somewhat mattered in 2009 only because local media was only interested in candidates who could afford to buy television time--but even since 2009 the Times's influence has fallen off.

The fossils vote, too, in higher numbers than the rest of us. But the problem for the long-standing, big-swinging consultants and their candidates even with this constituency is that the people who watch television are increasingly among the crankiest of the cranky, and they distrust career politicians--the kind of people who have been on TV a lot--most of all. Candidates who have calculated their whole campaign around as much free television publicity as possible (Wendy Greuel and Eric Garcetti in particular) are going to be stunned to learn that this is only likely to backfire on them: by the time they get to 2013, they will be wearing the hirsute identity of "television politician" like a Planet of the Apes costume, only looking repulsive for their overexposure. (Already people are complaining to me about Greuel's ceaseless Controller-controlled one-minute TV grabs). When the candidate starts actually buying ads, they'll ironically be seen by the only people who watch television--and if you wonder who those are, just look at the other kinds of advertising on TV--not as a steady hand, but as part of the problem.

Today's successful political consultant is not gruff, as yesterday's was indeed gruff. Today's successful political consultant is friendly, sunny, and not necessarily a big spender but certainly a big thinker, one who knows how to turn TV exposure inside-out.

It took Joe Trippi a long time to get it right, but he got it right in the Jerry Brown campaign: he turned Whitman's own ability to buy media against her, making her appear like she had already been around for too long. That is the new formula: mainstream media, television in particular, belongs to the opponent, not to you.

Council preens for cameras on symbolic anti-corporate issue as city finances erode

2012-01-26T06:17:00.000-08:00

In December, City Council followed KPFK's lead and took action to oppose the "corporate personhood" Supreme Court decision, Citizens United.
In December and January, a spike in capricious city billing has been reported all around town.

Three is a trend, and I have now heard three anecdotes of capricious billing or citation in Los Angeles. They would be funny were they not so anxiety-inducing for the victims, and were the city not, on other fronts, trying so hard to demonstrate that it is citizen-friendly and anti-corporate.

One is narrated by Stephen Box. This is of course in Eric Garcetti's district, the one with the bicycle fetish, where homeowners are very few and far between. A resident receives an unwarranted bill for $10,000, and is told at a "hearing"--conducted through bullet-proof glass--to pay or else. Two months later, the bill drops out of the cycle, with no conformation or follow up from the city. After two anxious months, the resident calls the city and hears from a clerk--nothing on paper--certainly no apology--that he now has a balance of zero.

In the second one, a Building and Safety inspector cites a homeowner in Ed Reyes' district. The citation is for an inadequately painted garage door jamb--of which there must be 7,500 in Reyes' district. The homeowner tries to explain that the garage door is being repaired as quickly as the workers become available, and some of the repair work, which is being undertaken expeditiously, is responsible for the flaking. No matter to the city; it's going to keep the citation on track and keep inspecting, even as the homeowner documents the progress on the work.

In a third in Tom LaBonge's district, a homeowner reports to me that he typically pays a DWP bill of about $500 every two months. He gets a bill three months ago for $1500 and protests that usage has not gone up. The DWP sticks by its guns. In the next billing cycle--the most recent one--the DWP sends him a bill--for $28,000.

The city, in short, through its ever-hopeful, capricious finance departments, is becoming the most ruthless corporation of all. And what has City Council done in response to this disturbing trend, in which LA cites and charges its own?

It most recently passed an empty, symbolic, lofty back-scratching declaration, becoming the first City in the nation to advocate the overturning of the Citizen's United decision and to declare that corporations aren't people.

It is, in short, taking a stand in an entirely symbolic battle that will take a minimum of five years (and perhaps a Constitutional Amendment) to overturn--while preening for cameras and explaining why their action was more than "symbolic."

It was symbolic indeed. It was symbolic of every Councilmember's desire to get cheaply-bought camera time.

This is Villaraigosa's Los Angeles: the city of KPFK politics on the public side and kleptocracy and failure on the private side. It is a city in which Council preens for the camera while civic life erodes and citizens are thought of increasingly as suckers with money. It is a city in which its own employees are only here to insult, dupe, and shake down its residents today even as the elected officials ally themselves with tomorrow's revolutionaries.

Everyone seems to know now that the Mayor is politically mortally wounded and his mayoralty is universally acknowledge as the worst in their lifetimes. Last year was the year that finally broke the Mayor's political machine.

But nearly every seated Councilmember is also guilty of the malfeasance of Villaraigosa--and seem only too willing to follow his fraudulent example. Now, nearly all of them, as the mayor did, prefer camera time to real action. Now nearly all of them support the "smart growth" policies that have, ironically, brought more car-drivers to transit hubs, congesting the city. Now, nearly all of them have supported various stripes of costly affordable housing projects that add rentals to a city that doesn't need anymore. Now, nearly all of them have enabled the absentee-landlord planning culture to such a degree that they are surprised to find that people actually own property and live in the city as well. And now, certainly all of them have received complaints from residents about capricious billing from Finance departments, from the DWP, and citations from renegade inspectors at Building and Safety--an agency at which we could see many criminal convictions soon--and turned their backs on the problems they heard, pleading that their hands were tied. All the while they have tinkered with symbols for the sake of garnering cheaply-bought camera time.

The hands have not been too tied to advocate for a new Constitutional Amendment. But they have been too tied to take care of local billing and citation matters.

Next time you have a complaint that the city is billing you in error, I would recommend you complain not only to your Councilmember, but also to the people who lead him around by the nose--at KPFK.

Council District Maps, Council District Problems

2012-01-25T15:59:00.000-08:00

The old lines, left; the proposed new ones, right.

"They didn't listen," a resident of Sunland-Tujunga tells me, as her community gets slammed into CD 7 in a draft of the redistricting commission's new map for LA, made public today. "Not happy with today's map release." They in this case is mostly Craig Miller, who probably knows CD 5 a little better than CD 2--but that's who Paul Krekorian appointed to represent his district, CD 2, on the city's Redistricting Commission. The lines for CD's 2 and 7 approximate their old lines in the 1970's. Miller was unavailable for comment.

The new CD 7, which likely will host a provocative battle between Felipe Fuentes and Andrea Alarcon in 2013 when Alarcon's father is termed out, absorbs most of Sunland-Tujunga, and will remain one of the top homeowner-centric districts in Los Angeles. Jan Perry has already scheduled a news conference for tomorrow, as she's losing downtown north of Olympic and wants some of it back. Tom LaBonge's CD 4 would lose Hancock Park and pick up Vals galore clustered along the southern, tony end of the 405. The new CD 2 would threaten to become a very different place, a kind of Burbank-lite. CD's 3, 11, 12, and 15 all stand fairly pat, with 11 ceding some territory around Mar Vista to CD 8. CD 5 extends more into Hollywood where Paul Koretz can keep the skyscraper "dream" alive.

Drive til you qualify to be a "mini-philanthropist"

2012-01-24T14:43:00.000-08:00

The plan was to have some local Starbucks to distribute gift cards worth $10 simply for buying something at one of the coffee houses. (And look at the free advertising Starbucks gets from lamestream media for this "generosity"!) Then the recipient could designate the gift card to any LAUSD school of their choice.

The problem is, Starbucks chose all the locations at which you could grab a gift card. And for some schools in the LAUSD, notably in the West Valley, there isn't a participating SBUX within 15 miles.

Tamar Galatzan, the former Council District 2 hopeful who represents the West Valley on the LAUSD Board who once encouraged her district to make "lemonade" of the lemon-like situations in her region, thinks this is a pretty cool arrangement. In fact, she's completely down with the fact that her own district residents have to drive far til they qualify for a donor card.

Of the SBUX situation, Galatzan said the following on her Facebook page this morning:

We talked to those in charge here at LAUSD & it turns out the Starbucks/ Wasserman / DonorsChoose campaign is separate from the LAUSD/DonorsChoose/ Wasserman campaign. The campaign that kicks off Monday is Starbucks’ effort to give back to the teachers, parents & communities of the entire LA region. Starbucks is trying to encourage everyday citizens to be mini-philanthropists at their schools.

[Before we analyze the statement--don't you just love that lead-in? "We talked to those in charge here at LAUSD..." Never has there been a more naked admission that when you vote for an LAUSD Board member, you aren't really voting for someone in charge of the district.]

But back here on earth--to recap, here's what Tamar says the problem is....

She says--and forgive us for not quite catching this the first time around--that the...

Starbucks/Wasserman/DonorsChoose campaign

is separate from the

LAUSD/DonorsChoose/Wasserman campaign.

Which all of us who had never heard of either campaign before were just dying to know. All in all, a delicious red herring meant to throw mommies far off the blame track and to feel bad that poor Tamar as a Board member doesn't get more say over these kinds of things.

In fact, those of us who watch such things suspect that the LAUSD campaign is the bogus campaign to which District people can point when parents and citizens express curiosity about the Starbucks campaign--the real campaign, whose top purpose is to get people into business-hopeful Starbucks of Starbucks' own choosing, has already been declared a success on TV, and that's all that matters.

So there goes Tamar Galatzan, explaining to her sub-district--which only has 105,000 students--why there are so few Starbucks sites in her own district participating in this program, even if "mini-philanthropists" can spend $20 on gas getting to a Starbucks to make a $10 donation.

At some point it may be important to remember that if you pay property taxes around here--even if you don't have children--you already are a "mini-philanthropist®" to the Los Angeles Unified School District. On the average LA home, thanks to Prop K and other school bond measures that we've passed over the past dozen years, you pay $555 extra every year on your property taxes--that's beyond what you pay the state--to LAUSD for the sake of educating the kids down the block. Other districts don't get this; but you voted yourself this philanthropy which other districts don't seem to require.

And believe it or not, you'll continue to pay that $555 each year through 2044--all for school buildings and athletic fields, and not a penny of it goes to either teachers, or books, or other tools of learning. It all goes to marble, concrete, electricians, astroturf, bleacher seats, and plumbers, most of whom don't even live anywhere nearby.

The Deasy Regime at the LAUSD has been more than anxious to take some more from you. Deasy's a corporate guy, so he likes to partner with corporations. In this one, however, some boundaries should have been drawn--literally and figuratively, and very differently, both ways.

The Clown is in--or wasting time--and other civic snips

2012-01-24T07:43:00.000-08:00

He still hasn't officially declared his candidacy, but Carmen Trutanich is appearing this evening before the LA Association of Deputy District Attorneys as a candidate for DA, according to the anti-Trutanich site LA Dragnet.

Jim Newton scribbles a rather banal exploration of what it might mean that Herb Wesson is now Council president. Short answers: alienated blacks, more mayoral accord. He didn't even ask him what Wesson thinks the top problem facing the city is. He also calls the City Council a "notoriously difficult to manage body" (?!) Newton doesn't like to talk to elected officials about actual issues--that much is clear.

I never knew that Tim Rutten ever got off a line this good: he said that Bill Boyarsky, when he was hoping to raise hell while on the City's Ethics Commission, was merely "treated like the drunken uncle at a Seder.” It's not only the commission's reluctance to face reform that makes that line funny.

The two Austin Beutners--or, Who's sleepy, really?

2012-01-23T12:30:00.000-08:00

I had a chance to read something cogent about Austin Beutner's candidacy for Mayor, at the Downtown News. Jon Regardie sits down and interviews the candidate before he makes a Town Hall speech last week. I think he's sat down with the candidate once before.

That's coverage.

Then, elsewhere, I read--and kept reading, still elsewhere--about how Richard Riordan nodded off during Austin Beutner's talk. With a link to the canned speech.

That's coverage?

You know who's really sleeping in this scenario, of course. The lazy scribes who would rather report on a doddering member of an audience of a canned speech than sit down and try to discuss the issues that face LA with a mayoral candidate.

Street-hassle and many others have had the "Doddering Dick Riordan is an idiotic, drooling, doddering old man" story in pocket for a long time.

This Riordan-is-sleeping angle is precisely the kind of pointlessly snide journalism that enables the the Weekly to manage political access far less well even than most unpaid bloggers, let alone far savvier scribes at weeklies across town.

I would guess that most consultants are already consigning the LA Weekly to the untouchable margins now for the mayor's race too, as most have for a long time now in nearly all other local political matters.

° ° ° ° °

For what it's worth, the Weekly whiffed on the biggest story out of downtown last week too: the eviction of the Latino Theater Center by the City of Los Angeles after a scant four years on a twenty-year lease.

This was an enormous hit for the Mayor, who pulled strings to insert the LTC into the vaunted if troubled space.

It took some actual reporting--by Ryan Vaillancourt--to get to the bottom of the story--a story on which the Weekly whiffed entirely.

But you can't say Weekly wasn't put on alert for the possibility, even two years ago:

By everyone's admission, the last time the Department of Cultural Affairs allowed its own real estate to be managed by an outside arts organization, it made a mess of it.

In 2006, after a long and intensely political battle, the city department awarded its prized downtown facility, the long-struggling Los Angeles Theatre Center on Spring Street, to the Latino Theater Company, which now holds a 20-year lease to operate the venue. The choice of the Latino Theater Company was openly supported by Villaraigosa over the equally prestigious Will & Company, a performance group devoted to bringing Shakespeare to underprivileged audiences nationwide.

Some local observers thought that Latino politicians, in the words of one newspaper editor at the time, "played the race card behind the scenes" to give an advantage to the Latino group over the nationally noted Shakespeare company. The mayor himself said, on the occasion of the award to Latino Theater Company instead of Will & Company: "Some argued, 'Oh, this is too ethnic.' I say, 'Why not?' "

I think Council satisfactorily followed up with the answer to the Mayor's question last week. They had already killed Sunset Junction, after all. They trotted out the Mayor's killjoy once again for Downtown Art Walk. And someone thought that Council was also going to let the Mayor's pet cultural project, LTC, skate? Not hardly.

The Year of the Water Dragon

2012-01-22T23:30:00.000-08:00

For those of you born after 1952, this will likely be your only Year of the Water Dragon. I am told it is the peak creative year of all the sixty years of the Chinese zodiac. That doesn't surprise me, as Los Angeles in 2012 reminds me of New York in the late seventies--the city is such a political and economic monstrosity that the masses are simply tuning it all out to create.

I'm sure most readers of this site know by now that I don't much like the city at a political level (and, it follows, at an economic one) but I do like its culture. Even here, however, things can go either way. And I detect it is like this in many other cities across America--the local politics are simply too corrupt to devote much attention to, and the local topline culture only mimics the politics. A scant two years ago, for instance, the Ring cycle that LA Opera produced ran to farce for many--and nearly broke the twenty-five year old company to boot--but now things are on an even keel again, maybe even better than ever. I also have to admit I'm not fussy for the whole idea of the soon wrapping Pacific Daylight Time extravaganza--these shows have largely touted the whimsical and the static in a time when fine arts need more gravitas and kinetic expression--of which there is plenty, but it doesn't have marketing machines behind it. And let's not talk about Hollywood's output in recent years--but even here, the indie scene is the only scene.

The most historically grating thing about LA culture, however, and yet now also the most promising as well, at least for me, is linked the perilous state of New York commercial publishing. For a long time--decades--commercial editors in New York have not brought to light the best of LA, but rather the books that best describe their own hackneyed vision of the place: gritty detectives, vapid landscape, surfer boys. Now, thanks to Kindle (left coast, that) and the Espresso Book machine, LA has far more elbow room in fiction and fine letters. I expect we'll see a flourishing as local authors simply elect to bypass the New York mills should they continue to move at less than real time, and in less than good faith, on their manuscripts.

We don't need to get into the gangsta wars in any arts, even hip hop, to put our best creative self out to the world. The plain truth is that economic crisis when conflated with economic support makes for the kind of unstructured time essential to creativity. When you meet the Water Dragon this year, engage, embrace.

Peace and boat drinks,

Joseph Mailander

Culture clashing

2012-01-22T22:12:00.000-08:00

To me, Native Americans dancing on a sidewalk in front of a farmer's market in a Wells Fargo parking lot in Atwater gains something and loses something. But it was colorful. Below left, my writer's group downtown, spreading out, making no demands, making no noise at all, on a fourth floor rooftop at 11th and Hope. Below right, a rock at FIDM downtown--I checked another rock and discovered that the poems were by a CRA arts administrator I knew from way back, Mickey Gustin, who died four years ago. There were about a dozen such poems on rocks--I thought this was the best one.

2012-01-22T22:05:00.001-08:00

"South Carolina conservatives pull the lever for Obama"

2012-01-21T20:30:00.000-08:00

When it comes to watching Republican news, I believe I have the best Twitter feed of all--but I'm sure so do you. My own first place: Matt Welch (as usual); second, Nate Silver (Silver gets the silver), third SE Cupp (always great). Single most interesting chrip: John Carney, with rumor about Party trying to reel Newt in before he made his speech. And honorable mention this time around to David Axelrod--drill all the way down for that single-stroke masterpiece.

° ° ° ° °

David_Gergen David Gergen

Striking that in age of Internet, this GOP race is turning so heavily on an old technology: television.

JoeTrippi Joe Trippi

There has to be a room full of adults in the GOP sitting around somewhere tonight asking "now what do we do?"

mleewelch Matt Welch

Here is a possibly relevant 2005 piece I wrote about "The Gingrich Legacy." is.gd/oLzuiv Talk-radio demagoguery vs. cutting gubmint.

fivethirtyeight Nate Silver

Intrade Sees Romney as 60/40 Favorite in Florida nyti.ms/xRXo04

mleewelch Matt Welch

Swear to God, Wolf Blitzer just described Newt's speech as "taking the high road."

1 hour ago

mleewelch Matt Welch

Yeah, you really wouldn't want the American government to be secular. Wait, what?

mleewelch Matt Welch

I think if Newt Gingrich won the GOP nomination -- which he won't -- he would lose to Obama by double digits.

daveweigel daveweigel

Strategically located next to the best Newt hype man ever, who has yelled about Bill Ayers like five times #SCprimary

petersuderman Peter Suderman

More people were added to food stamps under Bush, who expanded eligibility in 2002, than Obama. usat.ly/An5lhJ

mleewelch Matt Welch

Always timely: @JacobSullum's "No Newt": is.gd/m8qHaW

mleewelch Matt Welch

When a would-be president talks about "eliminating dictatorial religious bigots," meaning judges, it makes you wonder about his supporters.

jim_newell Jim Newell

"blargh blargh blarhrhrhhg," the loyal Gingrichians chant

mleewelch Matt Welch

"Just think how radical he could be in a second term." He'll have less and less support from Congress, media, and public.

mleewelch Matt Welch

Very hard for that crowd to clap about Dr. Ron Paul.

mleewelch Matt Welch

It is true, I am constantly trying to force people to become non-American.

fivethirtyeight Nate Silver

Obama Campaign Needling Romney nyti.ms/yyk6K5

mleewelch Matt Welch

"Elites in Washington and New York"! DRINK!

fivethirtyeight Nate Silver

Gingrich, Romney Close in Popular Votes after 3 States nyti.ms/wAcAEd

1 hour ago

GarryShandling Garry Shandling

Getting my hair cut like Calista, tomorrow!!

mleewelch Matt Welch

I wish my knives were as sharp as wife #3's haircut.

1 hour ago

valleydoll Debbie Cortez Lopez

Haha. RT @jim_newell If this were a drop-out speech, I think we'd see a certain daughter crying

1 hour ago

carney John Carney

Source in S.C. tells me national GOP heavies trying to reach Gingrich and influence his speech. Unclear if Gingrich is listening.

Retweeted by mleewelch

GOP establishment is moving towards a "declaration of war" against Gingrich. A FL win would lead to huge "panic." - Steve Schmidt

POBPATOBRIEN Pat O'Brien

Can't wait to hear what Gingrich comes up with in a few minutes. Will it be one of those "I told you so" deals? Ugh..

jpodhoretz John Podhoretz

Romney guy Stuart Stevens: "We feel very very good about going on." Translation: Hello. I am the guy in Munch's "The Scream."

PhilJennerjahn Phil Jennerjahn

When Gingrich went on Greek cruise & his staffers quit, he was done. Tonight, he's destroying Romney in S.C. & now in drivers seat for nom.

1 hour ago

kimhub Kim Hubbard

@secupp It would 'almost' be worth having Newt win the nom to see him lose the general by 30 points.

Retweeted by secupp

mleewelch Matt Welch

"Tweaker" was Romney, @LenHarmon tells me. I don't think that word means what Alex Castellanos thinks it means.

2 hours ago

mleewelch Matt Welch

"He comes across as a tweaker" -- Alex Castellanos on CNN, talking about Gingrich (I think).

2 hours ago

secupp S.E. Cupp

I don't know if I can wait until Weds to file my @nydailynews column about the SC primary.

PatrickRuffini Patrick Ruffini

You know which state could potentially prove decisive in a long slog? Virginia.

2 hours ago

jpodhoretz John Podhoretz

I guess a candidate who believes in nothing really is challenged facing a candidate who believes in just about anything.

secupp S.E. Cupp

South Carolina conservatives pull the lever for Obama.

2 hours ago

secupp S.E. Cupp

Has anyone brought up the uncanny role Newt played in ousting of former Speaker Jim Wright? It's surreal. Wiki it

2 hours ago

mleewelch Matt Welch

Ron Paul is tired. "Thank you, Mitt," he signed off his (very interesting) interview w/ Wolf Blitzer et al.

davidaxelrod David Axelrod

@fivethirtyeight Nate, you're good with math. If you & SuperPac spend $4.7m, and get zero delegates, how much did you spend per delegate?

Night out

2012-01-20T12:34:00.000-08:00

Some nights, the city works, even for an hombre of mine own dotage. Past Mahler's First at the WDCH, then past the LAPD HQ, and stop to ask the four satellite trucks if they might be there for Austin Beutner's talk on the economy (no, they're there for a banal announcement on the Hollywood Hills parts-murder). And into One Eyed Gypsy (did this place used to be Bordello? Is this a soft wheeze on Gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello?) to Shepard Fairey's party for something or other--it doesn't seem to take much provocation for the top street artists to throw a party. Maker's Mark drinks, goofy photos, First Street Bridge at 2 a.m., and off to Tommy's at 2:30 a.m. Past an engagingly creepy mural on a commercial building on Hyperion, vurrry late, good night.

Inside baseball

2012-01-19T04:04:00.000-08:00

While Parke Skelton was far away from even a phone line last August, some local hatchet men were doing a Goodfellas-level job on Pat McOsker--who at that time seemed Skelton's candidate's most formidable opponent. Skelton must have gone on retreat and relaxed in earnest. The operatives who were doing their number on McOsker didn't identify themselves as being with the Joe Buscaino campaign, but some of them were. Skelton by this point knew his candidate was likely to finish in the runoff and so took his usual vacation unperturbed.

He might have missed a few things while away--like the whole Buscaino ground game--and August may have been when the race was truly decided.

The Buscaino people were like the mole in Tinker Tailor--the art of being Gerald, it is said in the novel if not the recent movie, is always being part of a crowd. They presented a phalanx of unfamiliar faces to beat reporters, and a swarm of more familiar ones (like Tom Lasorda, above) to the neighbor and donor crowd. If you were covering them, it seemed impossible that any one of them you were meeting with or talking to at any given time was actually the top boy.

They really won the race in the primary, when they locked into a first place finish that not only lent them media credibility--first place kinda does that--but also wound up opposing a candidate that refused to go negative, the hapless Warren Furutani, whose fate was sealed by drawing the wrong opponent.

As it happens, Joe Buscaino won by 20 points [UPDATE: a reader wants me to "get it right": 21.38 points, actually]--but as it also happened, three weeks ago the margin seemed more likely to be 30. In between, he only got good press--except for right here at street-hassle--and yet at the time of the election, he was underperforming--you really see this in the election day stand-alone results. Both Parke Skelton and John Shallman do not play the blogosphere--even while the people who are beating them play it like fiddles. I think it's Shallman and Skelton who are out of step. Direct mail, while still a top factor, is an increasingly unreliable path to victory in local races. The Buscaino team--whomever it really was--knows that well, all of them.

A "leading novelist"

2012-01-18T14:31:00.000-08:00

What is a "leading novelist"? To me, it's a novelist with whom I have a personal relationship. I read this perambulating piece in last Friday's NYT and encountered the suspect phrase at the end. The piece is really all about establishing a status and rank, and that's precisely where it fails; because these people don't rank at all to you or me, and they all have almost no status to most others. The novels you know, the novelists you know: that is what ranks, who has status. The New York commercial mills have seen to that, if inadvertently, through what they've missed, in trying to make their money. They're making less of the stuff every year--mercifully.

Lawrence Durrell once wrote that the purpose of fiction was to give an average chap a few clues about how to live. Even while acknowledging that to do so is presumptive--does an average chap need clues on how to live?--I concur and even think that that's the whole purpose of writing in general. But if it's so, where does the "leading" part come in? It comes in the way a reader walks away from a text transformed. I love Barthes too, but--does someone read academic hieroglyphs, i conversazioni, &c. (why "le"?) and become transformed, ready to live life with the new clues in pocket? I think not. They read others--people who offer captivating characters, challenging plots, all with admirable style--for that.

Salaries, Comparative Worth, &c.

2012-01-18T10:01:00.000-08:00

Left: The Honorable Dianne Feinstein, four-term United States Senator, - $174,000

Right: The Average Joe Buscaino, strutting a uniform in an alley in Pedro - $174,423

Sunland-Tujunga following Hollywood's lead on transient housing

2012-01-17T05:43:00.000-08:00

In 1988, Father Bruce Ritter's Covenant House, which had been described as a "shelter empire" for runaway teens, began servicing Hollywood as a street outreach program. Hollywood, both a company town and also a bedroom community but with a very high rental rate, had become saturated with teenage runaways, and the Covenant House ministry was one that serviced the young homeless population.

Ritter wanted to develop the Hollywood Covenant House ministry into a full facility. He schmoozed Councilman Michael Woo, himself very ambitious, who was there to help the project at every step of the way.

Along the way, Ritter's heavy handed formulas for developing teen shelters had attracted considerable attention; this LA Times news analysis piece from 1989 delineates most of the arguments for and against.

Covenant House opened its 100+ facility in Hollywood in 1996. Of course, it still operates today. By then, Woo had run for mayor--and lost, badly, the only Mayoral candidate since the Yorty days to lose an open race to a Republican. The memorable ads that Woo faced in the runoff at the hands of Richard Riordan included shots of shuttered, slummy Hollywood Boulevard. The ads demonstrated that there was no magic bullet cure for blight.

Twenty-four years after the first street services were launched in Hollywood, the neighborhood remains a haven for the homeless, even known as a destination for the homeless now. It is attracting still more runaway teens, some years in increasing numbers.

Ritter died in 1999, accused of inappropriate relations with some of the teens he serviced. His Times obituary included these lines:

One newspaper dubbed his program "McRunaway," and critics said Ritter merely gave homeless kids the food and bed rest they needed to go on living their dangerous lives. Even Ritter conceded that two-thirds of "his kids" wound up back on the streets.

Along the way also, the CRA and some noted land use consultants have also redeveloped Hollywood Boulevard. The redevelopment has come at a tremendous cost to the local residential community, which now encounters the added problems of density-driven congestion, and higher rents than ever before--and also has still not even begun to solve the problems of the community remaining a teen runaway magnet, even while facing ever-increasing stigma as such.

° ° ° ° °

According to census calculations, the bedroom community of Sunland-Tujunga, now facing its own surging homeless population, would ordinarily stand to add (by natural increase) about 90 housing units by 2015.

Its Councilman, Paul Krekorian, has quietly backed two projects that devote far more than that many housing units there--well over 100--to homeless and indigent populations alone.

In short, Sunland-Tujunga is being planned by the Council office as a way-station for the City's new increasing homeless and indigent populations, even as Krekorian, like Woo before him, nurtures his own ambitions for higher office, hoping to please the right people downtown before a prospective run for a citywide slot.

The Samoa Avenue Housing complex would bring 64 units of Section 8 affordable housing to Sunland-Tujunga. The Day Street Apartments, a 46-unit homeless outreach and living center to be developed by L.A. Family Housing, has been pitching to the community their center as a prospective panacea for homeless housing for nearly a year.

The latter organization has been pitching itself as a partial solution to homelessness in the community ever since Wendy Greuel's notorious former planning deputy Dale Thrush joined the august board of LA Family Housing, in December 2010.

° ° ° ° °

Dale Thrush during Greuel's time had also been interested to develop the Day Street site--as pricey condos. That was in the heady time before the economy went south. More lately, he is rumored to have already orchestrated the sale of the parcel to L.A. Family Housing with Krekorian's office's help and blessing, and even before a single plan had been drawn up.

Thrush has a mixed reputation in the community, and not much of it is favorable: one resident tells me he perpetually "represented downtown interests", often even playing bad cop to Wendy Greuel's too infrequent good cop; another appreciated the fact that he came to Neighborhood Council Land Use Committee meetings at all, as in the past year "we've had maybe one visit every quarter from one of the councilman's [Krekorian's] staff."

A third resident tells me that Thrush was polarizing not just in Sunland-Tujunga, but throughout Greuel's district. "In Sherman Oaks, Studio City they will tell you the same thing. Always the number one issue was, Dale Thrush needs to be removed from staff. I've seen him hurt so many people. Always standing there like a statue, saying, 'No, you're wrong.'"

Thrush came along with the Day Street parcel to L.A. Family Services. He represents precisely the kind of big-picture player with lots of citywide development ties that Krekorian will have to please to make a good run at a citywide office.

° ° ° ° °

Dale Thrush cut his teeth in the 1970's in land use issues with Victor Gruen Associates--the fabled shopping mall developer. He became an attorney by studying at Loyola Law and he worked for both Councilmembers Joel Wachs and Greuel in the 1990s.

He also supported the Home Depot plans for the community until Councilmember Greuel felt too much heat from the community and was obliged to reverse her own stance on it.

Thrush is believed to be one of Paul Krekorian's top sub rosa resources on planning issues. Like Greuel and Eric Garcetti, he is a "smart growth" proponent and remains one long after the strategy has been dismissed in many academic urban planning circles as a failure because of implementation problems and because it brings choking density to suburban neighborhoods without reducing either consumption or car trips.

The two new affordable housing projects in Sunland-Tujunga, Day Street and Samoa Avenue, both of which Krekorian's office has served as handmaiden to throughout their waltzes through city land use corridors, figure to stigmatize the community as a new center for transient populations the way Covenant House did for Hollywood 24 years ago.

Thrush in fact has gone so far as to express hopes that the former Home Depot site become a public transit hub, making Sunland-Tujunga a friendlier destination for the carless and jobless; significantly, coming changes to Sunland-Tujunga's controversial revision of its Foothill Boulevard Corridor Specific Plan will even especially limit auto repair shops, which sell the occasional vehicle or two, and certainly reduce the opportunities for Sunland-Tujunga's transient population to buy used cars anyplace nearby.

The campaign to make Sunland-Tujunga the city's new homeless destination, pleasing Hollywood and downtown, is already under way. Television reports such as this one, broadcasted to the whole region--and more are certain to come--help promote Sunland-Tujunga as a homeless and indigent haven and already have launched the homeless "boostering" of Sunland-Tujunga. Sunland-Tujunga's anti-gentrification plan has wholeheartedly begun.

The South Carolina Debate, live

2012-01-16T17:45:00.000-08:00

I was out in the garden, smoking an unfiltered Camel and sipping a cup of coffee, black. On the brick path that slips under the tree you can walk through, the beep of the iPhone reminded me that another GOP debate was on in an hour. I don't know that I can focus again on another GOP round of posture and redundancy. But it was cold out there, and the nasturtiums on the north side of the garden have come in early this year. So I came in from the cold and am trying another peek at these god-awful candidates.

My campaign trail cohort Phil Jennerjahn got roughed up this weekend. Not only did Mittens become the prohibitive favorite to win the nomination--Phil is no Romney fan--but he flew to Green Bay only to watch his beloved Packers not show up for the game themselves. Might not one but two seasons end for him tonight, as Romney secures the nomination with a death-grip?

About Mitt Romney, I still don't have much to say. I have noticed that he is now appealing to 35% of all Republicans nationwide, rather than 25%, and that this has happened even before Huntsman's withdrawal today. That is much better but still, to my mind, a dangerous enthusiasm cap. It leaves wide open, at least to my mind, a challenge from the right should Santorum or Gingrich fail to captivate more hearts.

Really, to my mind again, there are not one but three Republican parties. There is the party of doctrinaire conservatives, who have not been a real factor since last summer. There is the party of Tea, and you can lump all the evangelicals into that one. And there is the party of liberty, of Ron Paul presently but this is the Reagan Democrat legacy, and I think that these just might be the most fractious group of all. A ticket is only two people--it can only serve two factions, even as candidates can only appeal to two of three.

Think about it: the people who love Paul love him for his liberty but also he has some doctrinaire conservative appeal--and he has no appeal whatsoever to evangelicals. Romney, again dangerously, does not belong to any one of these three groups--all of them, every one of the three, have sizeable numbers of adherents who cannot stand him. Santorum is in the party of Tea, and has a toe in the conservative bathwater, but he has no appeal to the liberty-loving libertarian side of the party, and Reagan Democrat appeal only among Catholics. Gingrich...oddly, Gingrich is a lot like Romney, despised by factions nearly across the board. It's a tough row to hoe for the GOP this time around.

6:00 An hour and forty-five minutes? Oh dear...

6:09 Gingrich notes Massachusetts did not grow jobs with Romney at the helm.

6:09 Romney mentions organizing Salt Lake City Olympics again. I wouldn't. Just because of California's old Governor, Ueberroth.

6:17: Paul is always most charming when he attacks. He gets away with his attacks. Santorum is wearing his attacks, ha ha.

6:20 Santorum making a pretty good point at Romney's expense. Actually two good points. Definitely cornered Romney on restoring voting rights.

Cold busted by The Twitter. Screengrab: Valley Doll.

6:23 Perry playing up states rights in South Carolina. That's like playing up Joseph Smith in Utah.

6:28: At first break, FOX commentators are fairing most poorly, followed by Romney, followed, surprisingly by Nate Silver, who distinguished between strategy and tactics. It's a debate, there's no chance for evaluating strategy after half an hour.

6:31 Someone on Twitter points out huge Freudian slip by Romney: did he really say that felons shouldn't be allowed to vote after they leave office? Looking forward to revisiting that one.

6:33 Perry sticking with states rights. That's good, they all should be. So far, only Perry though. The rest of them could be talking to Cooper Union.

6:46 Is Romney alienating Latinos? This is why all of a sudden Romney looks good as the nominee--to Democrats. He is saying nothing appealing to immigrants right now. Not many in the audience, one sees.

6:53 Newt judges himself inoffensive to blacks. Not backing down off of statements about getting jobs as janitors. Another way to play to the GOP in South Carolina in particular.

6:58 Newt loves to insinuate people on food stamps who don't work janitorial jobs are lazy. You don't think this is color coded, do you?

7:09 Warmonger segment. Everyone but Paul participates. Paul cites Golden Rule, Christians in audience want more crucifixions.

7:32 Santorum actually wants to end an entitlement, social security, to people who make over a million a year. A good step, but merely a step. Romney sides with Santorum? Can't lose, if he's siding with one or another. Inopportune dust-up between Santorum and Grinch.

7:41 Break observation #1: Debate got so heated and challengers so carried away with selves that challengers forgot to attack Romney for a long time.

7:42: Break observation #2: Way harder to sneak off and mix and pour a pink gin with cohort Phil stuck out of state and not online.

7:47 SuperPAC blather. Yawn. Nothing, neither way.

Final observations: I don't believe anything good happened for Romney, and certainly nothing bad enough happened for him to lose the state. I'll expect him to lose about seven points off of current polling. I'd expect Newt to draft up five points, and Santorum, Perry and Paul all a few points each by Saturday. Now what? Not enough for the challengers, as Romney takes a knee.

"Tell them about your dream"

2012-01-16T06:31:00.001-08:00

"Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had originally prepared a short and somewhat formal recitation of the sufferings of African Americans attempting to realize their freedom in a society chained by discrimination. He was about to sit down when gospel singer Mahalia Jackson called out, "Tell them about your dream, Martin! Tell them about the dream!" Encouraged by shouts from the audience, King drew upon some of his past talks, and the result became the landmark statement of civil rights in America -- a dream of all people, of all races and colors and backgrounds, sharing in an America marked by freedom and democracy." --US Diplomatic Mission to Germany.

On King Day 2012, I am reflecting how much we've lost with regards to the unguarded moment and the art of political improvisation, even political bravery.

There are few unguarded or improvised moments in the life of any politician these days. New technologies and have all but made such a moment as the drama of King's speech impossible today; no politician ever wants to veer much from script. In fact, many of their communications directors no longer even bother to fulfill information requests, but rather try to put writers on the spot with questions of their own, even trying to control what's said or written about them, parsing information frugally, and only agreeing to safe interviews with less-experienced journalists easily flattered by access.

In this week's LA Weekly, we see Eric Garcetti scuttling down a City Hall corridor, insisting that he doesn't have enough time to talk to the publication. The incident is a telling one, because it's easy to build a case against the news side of the LA Weekly with its perpetually raving managing editor and its nascent schmoopie-in-chief. Many in Council, in fact, have learned there's little downside in not talking to the Weekly at all, feeling far safer talking to fawning scribes who have no memory of the Herald Examiner than to some who have been writing news analysis and opinion pieces for over thirty years. If not them, who? It seems odd to be able to make less time for the Weekly than, say, the Los Feliz Ledger.

Even someone experienced enough to know better, Zev Yaroslavsky now controls things too tightly as well: last week he spoke at the Palm, and two local scribes for major publications, Jim Newton and Jon Regardie, were obliged to write pieces on their audience with the Zev through another interviewer's (a teevee interviewer's, natch) filter. The point of all this bonhomie was to say--nothing new at all, just to keep Zev's name in front of them as a potential candidate. And thus, nothing new was dutifully reported, although the obvious was stated again and again. But really--this is public service? Does a newsmaker really make news when he hosts a banquet with a single interviewer in pocket, and makes no news other than emphasizing yet again that he is making no news?

Or consider this hilarious, tightly-controlled page: Paul Krekorian's on wikipedia. St. Paul, according to this encyclopedic hagiography--ten times longer than Tom LaBonge's, who has served the City almost ten times as long--"has garnered praise for his 'thoughtful' approach and 'decisive' action to help his district and the city of Los Angeles." For dozens of paragraphs, with some references to bloggers half his age, he garners such laurels. Nobody cares enough about St. Paul's wikipedia page to challenge; but who, foe or even friend, reads this much-varnished, beyond comprehensive bio without snickering?

And we needn't say much about the stagecraft of the Mayor. There is little hope of redemption at this point--we've seen the track record, and even other Council members have complained to me about access.

Before rhetoric was supplanted in our college curricula with the voodoo of psychology a century ago, orators and writers alike knew the concept of "kairos"--"a passing instant when an opening appears which must be driven through with force if success is to be achieved."

King's speech was such a moment, and he drove forcefully through it. But alas, with media so vulnerable and under-resourced today, and social media so readily employable for scripting rather than sincere dialog, politicians and public figures don't even avail themselves to improvisation or even real conversation much anymore. They pay the price: everything they say and do comes off as staged, lackluster, scripted, counterfeit.

Oh, dear. Joe Buscaino is already the status quo.

2012-01-13T05:36:00.000-08:00

Joe Buscaino sounds like he can't think on his feet at all. Warren Furutani sounds like he knows what's going on but likes what the Mayor's doing in general. Of the two candidates running for Council in CD 15's special election next Tuesday, it's Buscaino who comes off sounding more like he's beholden to downtown interests and the status quo. The two debated on Warren Olney's KCRW show Which Way, L.A. last night. You should listen for yourself; I'm sure the landsharks already have, and are howling at the prospect of Buscaino.

First debate question: are you going to buck City Council on occasion? Mind you, this is the first question, yet Buscaino starts off, "Well, again..." Olney has to remind Buscaino what the question is, because Buscaino quickly drops into some tangential, inconsequential patter eccentric to it. Furutani reminds Olney that Buscaino has been solidly endorsed throughout downtown and by lots of Council members.

Second question: is the City right not to absorb the CRA? Buscaino says yes, without making a case; Furutani says no, and builds an elaborate one. It sounds like Furutani knows the system far better; he thinks that tinkering with it can fix things. Buscaino sounds like he doesn't know what's going on, except for what he's read on a couple of blogs.

A budget question: Joe Buscaino says that the whole City of Los Angeles is on a credit card system, which obviously isn't going to work. Chillingly, he says, "I balance my checkbook here in the home." This is completely wrong. Joe Buscaino's checkbook, in fact, is hardly balanced; as was well known (but inadequately reported) through the primary, his wife's family has bailed him out quite a lot, and even so, he's still $300,000 under water in his own home. Nor can Buscaino solidly identify where cuts should be made in the budget, and he even confesses he's been too busy campaigning to look much at the budget at all. In short, total status quo, with healthy dollops of naivete tossed in.

More on the budget: Buscaino says he won't cut Police and Fire pensions either. He was first sponsored--at this point, it's not even correct to say "endorsed"--by the Police Protective League and he's coming down on pensions again on the side of expectations, entirely. We already have a phalanx of officers on Council who grease cops and fire; this is the absolute largest reason that we are where we are, budget-wise.

From there, the debate is not worth the time. Well, even less so.

How have the the people of San Pedro put themselves into this position: a choice between one guy who doesn't know anything at all and another guy who mostly knows bad things, but knows them well? How did we get from a wide open seat to two candidates servicing the status quo? Mostly, it was because all local print scribes wrote about in the primary was money, not issues, not ability. Joe Buscaino was not challenged on any issues, so he has had no incentive to learn them. Warren Furutani was not challenged on his machine styled political apparatus, so he's not been obliged to distance itself from it.

I'm glad I don't own property in San Pedro. Joe Buscaino sounds like a hybrid: naive about government and yet just as beholden to it and bought off by particular interests within it as Chris Essel was. A very dangerous combo, that, and maybe the city's worst possible one. If he's elected, you can expect the downtown interests to rake him blind, the way they're raking Council's present junior member, Paul Krekorian. Prediction: Buscaino wins, San Pedro gets saddled with section 8 projects as developers move in, and Joe will continue to smile and call it progress, as other parts of the city rather than his own continue to gentrify.

LA's closet war on music

2012-01-12T08:11:00.000-08:00

It wasn't quite enough for 2013 Mayoral candidate Eric Garcetti to shut down LA's premiere music festival, Sunset Junction last summer. Proving that he can crush festival and venue alike, he has now also found a way to drive Silver Lake's venerable institution El Cid out of business.

This time Garcetti used the old fire marshal trick, skirting the employment of the Mayor's killjoy of choice, Andrea Alarcon altogether. I'm also sure that neighbors across the street at Garcetti's simulated urbanist twenty-pack must have complained too.

Soon you may not be able to party anywhere but where City Council tells you to: LA Live and all its ersatz midway, electric fun-zone, metered-pour glory. Thus the LA-Live-ing styled-midwesternization of Garcetti's Silver Lake continues apace.

Might there be something self-loathing in this frustrated cabaret pianist's lust for shutting down the sexier, gender-bending shindig scenes formerly among us?

° ° ° ° °

Speaking of LA Live, a deejay recently wrote street-hassle:

I'm insulted by the idea of Jan Perry, Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Mayor creating a place for me to be entertained (with exemptions for billboards, density, and the rest). Needless to say, I still haven't been to LA Live. I just have no desire. It looks like a glorified funhouse. I'm not into sports, spray-on tans, big plates of meat. … Am I missing something?

° ° ° ° °

The news comes as the music Dennis Romero, the Weekly's most spectacularly slacker scribe (saying something, that) went off on the Coliseum rave people, for greasing the unions in service at the Coliseum--with cash, even!

Several years ago, even before it went Republican, the Weekly similarly went off on Sunset Junction. What a coincidence: two music festivals right here in LA who don't need to advertise in the Weekly, and the Weekly actually throws what it tries to pass off as investigative journalism at them.

[Meanwhile, Coachella and even SXSW take out adspace all around town that they certainly don't need to take out, and those things can safely grow, unchecked. I said it my year-end piece: "...the LA Weekly, an increasingly slimy organization that sells cultural advertising the way a mafia don sells insurance..."]

Most cosmopolitan cities would only be too grateful to have the market for a gigantic, civic rave venue, especially as clubs can't afford the insurance for anyone underage who shows up. And LA has the market to support it. But also in LA, which might as well be Des Moines by now, we bump up the density to catastrophic levels, but then turn around and don't let anybody congregate anywhere in numbers. Except, say, at the otherwise generally dead LA Live.

And always, the underlying story of all these "exposes" is cash cash cash. Alleged buckets of it, alleged barrels of it. What a surprise, that cash is involved with music events! Like teenagers do a lot of ticket buying on their Am-Exs.

Even at Mardi Gras in New Orleans, if you're paying with a credit card for anything, you're not at anything that's really part of Mardi Gras. But LA finds cash a surprise when it appears in conjunction with entertainment.

° ° ° ° °

In yet another example how weirdly at war the City has become with its own vibrant music scene--one of the few scenes that makes otherwise insufferable LA life worth living--the former national fishwrap of record the NYTimes had a piece a couple of weeks ago about our after-hours club and party scene. It was a kind of arms-length piece filled with subtext suggesting that NYC is secretly covetous of us. I was instructed by people throughout LA's music scene not to draw any further attention to this piece, but now that the City is completely at war with music anyway, I really can't resist at this point. Maybe someone will wake up about the ramifications of having a late-night culture without late-night venues to accommodate it.

Again, in this piece too, money is an evil, not a good--again, there's talk of $20K cash profit at such parties, a figure that has been described to me as "entirely bogus--besides, a cop wouldn't know."

The piece also implies dangers that certainly are not present. NYT, please go back to the New York where you came from. We're having enough trouble understanding what is going on ourselves.

The Albatross Agency

2012-01-11T00:50:00.000-08:00

Excitingly, the City of Los Angeles has until Friday to decide whether or not it will absorb the city's Community Redevelopment Agency into its own budget. If it does, the city will pay an estimated extra $109 million this year in salaries and project management. If it doesn't--any successor agency can offer to take it on, and if none come forward, the State dismantles the organization itself. The city's budget office has advised the city not to take on the albatross. Even Tony Cardenas is beginning to buckle on an absorption vote.

It was only a scant thirty months ago that the loudest critics of the Albatross Agency could not even get a hearing by the local former fishwrap of record, in the most recently passed Mayor's race. But candidates Walter Moore, Phil Jennerjahn, and Zuma Dogg continued to bark about the careening agency while smug local radio hosts like Warren Olney and Larry Mantle rolled their eyes at the prospect of anyone ever doing anything about the $600 million-a-year development slush-fund whose budget mechanisms very few understood.

Not only must the City decide what to do with approximately 200 jobs that earn on an average of $109,000 a year--far more than the City's average of $70,000--but the former fishwrap of record has in the past thirty months lost that many jobs as well as its circulation continues to decline. Now nobody is pleading the case for the CRA, and few are concerned about the editorial staff of the incredible shrinking newspaper either. Arrogant agencies, arrogant businesses--for sure, in troubled times especially, if there is one quality customers despise, it is...arrogance.

With regards to the CRA, think of all the busted deals. Where is that Biotech Center in East LA? Where is Oscar de la Hoya's rehabbed Sears building? Where are those clean-tech businesses after all these years? No, we didn't ever get these types of pie-in-the-sky projects. We got housing, housing, housing--or, rather, developers got lollipops and consumers got pricier cribs, even when LA's owner-occupied to rental ratio was already hopelessly out-of-whack on the renter side. The City has needed more owner occupied homes for twenty years, but the CRA did not deliver these.

So finish the job. Shut it down. Let the State do what it may to the CRA. It does not belong on a cumbersome rope dangling from the neck of the City of Los Angeles.

Live--the New Hampshire GOP Primary

2012-01-10T17:00:00.000-08:00

Analysis: Jennerjahn says, " This race is almost over." Nate Silver says: "The conventional wisdom seems to hold that some conservative opponent will eventually rise to give Mr. Romney a real run for his money. But the odds increased tonight that nobody will be up to the challenge." Also: "What happened to the Tea Party?"

LA's leading purebred conservative Phil Jennerjahn and myself are here once again on the campaign trail, tonight to live-blog the GOP New Hampshire primary.

You should be wondering by now--what do these two people offer that mainstream media don't offer? I would answer that even by wondering, you answered your own doubt. We offer the kind of coverage that ordinary voters should be interested in when they aren't interested in listening to those who pretend to know more than you do. Phil and I both interact with dozens of ordinary voters, Republican and Democrat, every day--I know I interact with many more real voters than with political consultants, and I hold the views of the ordinary voters far more dear. We especially tune into what we perceive interests these kinds of voters. Our interests are the interests of ordinary voters, not of what political consultants want you to hear about candidates.

MAILANDER: That said, I think it's fair to say that tonight a version of the complexities of Game Theory enters into play, whether the voters of the Granite State are aware of it or not. Voters in Yankee New Hampshire, prudent, thrifty, laconic, and again fairly Anglo, are clearly wondering about the ramifications of their votes in relationship to other votes. They may be more inclined than other voters to vote for the candidate they feel has the best chance of beating President Obama rather than the candidate that they feel represents their own best ideas on who the nominee should be. I'm wondering what Phil feels about that.

Jennerjahn: This primary result in New Hampshire tonight will be non-representative of the country as a whole. There are silly voting rules in New Hampshire, which will lead to a lot of cross-voting by Democrats. Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman may do well. That doesn't mean that anyone anywhere else in the country cares about them. I am especially concerned with the lefts continual promotion of Jon Huntsman as if he were some type of legitimate candidate. Basically, the hosts on MSNBC and other loony left channels are basically screaming for their viewers to go out and vote for Jon Huntsman...the mild milquetoast of a man who they do not fear. He is a slightly righty version of Obama..in their book.

MAILANDER: There's no doubt, Phil, that you have the views of the woman-in-the-street nailed. But it really brings up a point I was trying to make during the Iowa Caucuses. Does any Republican really want Romney? Or does he simply represent a Rorschach blot of what 25-35% of the Republican party thinks a candidate that looks like he can beat Obama look like?

MAILANDER: OK, Phil, after three minutes, Nate Silver forecasts it's over. And as we all know, no primary is over until Nate says it's over--and it's over. In fact, just to pile on--he's even got a post up about why the NYT and other outlets called it so early. So what do we do now? And, beyond that--is that an attempt by the vast left-wing conspiracy to stymie further interest in the results of the New Hampshire primary? I mean, obviously, that post was written way before the results were truly tabulated...did the Iowa Caucuses cause too much interest in the GOP race for mainstream media to abide?

Jennerjahn: This race is almost over. Unfortunately, Romney is 2 for 2 and if he wins South Carolina, everyone but Ron Paul will probably drop out.

MAILANDER: Gingrich too? Phil--in the words of John McEnroe--YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS! Isn't the race just getting started? Can Mittens win a single southern state?

Also--isn't the race for second place tonight important? Ron Paul seems to be poised to hit second--despite the Boston Globe's endorsement. Isn't that big news? Has the soul of the Republican party tessered over to the libertarians?

And finally Phil--Phil, stay with me--I SAID NOT TODAY, PHIL! Phil, when the heck did the Boston Globe become an important player in the Granite State? Is the GOP narrative being interrupted, even corrupted, by the liberal elite? Talk to me, Phil!

Jennerjahn: Joseph, the Boston Globe has huge say in New Hampshire. Many people who live/work in Massachusetts have homes in New Hampshire. It's almost like a suburb of Boston. The Massachusetts candidate always wins New Hampshire. Paul Tsongas. Michael Dukakis. And now Mittens Romney. Mitt might get blasted in the Deep South, but the problem is one of perception. Mitt is creating the perception that he is pulling away. That hurts fundraising for the others. Voters start to believe it.

MAILANDER: It's good to hear you say so. I was worried for a minute.

Jennerjahn: Ron Paul taking second will only encourage him to stay in until the convention in Tampa. I think Gingrich, Santorum, and Perry are facing a very existential threat. They need to do well in South Carolina, or they are probably done. They don't have Romneys money and their donors will stop giving if they don't win and get some momentum going.

MAILANDER: Not many were impressed with Ron Paul's speech tonight. And you know his "bring the troops home" message is not going to play well to The Citadel, Bob Jones University, and all the other rightwing Republican bastions of South Carolina. But one thing for sure--this is a great night for cartoons. This one is courtesy DailyKos. Phil, I'm actually beginning to think you're right--this nomination is over, with forty-eight states and a few territories still to go. And here I was hoping for a brokered convention. No chance of that now, is there? Perry will be dropping out soon, and possibly even Santorum. What happened to the Tea Party? Neither Mittens nor Paul are anywhere near Tea Party values...is it your own party, Phil, that jettisoned that peculiar plank?

And still, I see libertarians drinking the Ron Paul Kool-Aid. One of them tweeted: "Ron Paul has tripled his result from four years ago. That's huge." No. Not huge. Just different, with a different cast. You cast Martha Scott in the Ten Commandments and she's a good accessory. But is she box office boffo? I doubt it.

Jennerjahn : Ron Paul has an almost magnetic appeal to the Libertarian/Isolationist wing of the Republican Party. Unfortunately for Ron Paul, there are not enough voters that swing his way. CNN showed focus groups in South Carolina hated his anti-war rhetoric. They train a lot of military down there. I did my boot camp at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. I know how they think and feel down there. The opposition to Romney needs to coalesce around one guy. Four guys getting 15% each of the vote to Romneys 35% will not cut it.

Furutani spot celebrates US battleship, Japanese fusion cuisine

2012-01-10T13:27:00.001-08:00

For a full, priceless minute a little after the text flashes by, you can't tell if this is a Warren Furutani ad or a Benihana / Olive Garden / Pitfire &c. commercial. From there to the Assemblyman's claim that he encountered prejudice because "I didn't have the right color of my skin or the right slant of my eye" to a long firepit-flickered discussion about bringing the USS Iowa--which had a key role in the Pacific theater in WWII--to San Pedro as a tourist destination are indeed some very, very dramatic leaps.

Lollipops elsewhere

2012-01-10T04:22:00.001-08:00

Thanks much once again to CityWatch LA, this time for reprinting the piece immediately below, Gentrification Lollipops Move LA's Poor to the Margins.

The piece is about how Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Councilmember Eric Garcetti are as lame ducks mopping up two density-driving gentrification projects in Hollywood and K-town, and the flip side of the effort: how Councilmember Paul Krekorian's standing as the city's junior Councilmember and exposure in the Kinde Durkee scandal has forcefed displacement of the city's poor to Sunland-Tujunga, where City Planning has recently fast-tracked two complementary affordable housing projects.

EARLIER

Paul Krekorian thrives in LA's toughest Council District
Kinde Durkee, LA Weekly story far from adding up
Krekorian extension request curiouser and curiouser
Paul Krekorian's loan payback end-around
Krekorian down with Korean Air project

Gentrification lollipops move LA's poor to the margins

2012-01-07T07:21:00.000-08:00

The Mayor is a lame duck, Eric Garcetti's a lame duck, it's time for nearly everyone to change seats, and land use fires are breaking out all throughout the City of Los Angeles. Now's the time for attorneys to cash in as their boys will soon be out of office, and they are indeed cashing in, bigtime. Planning chief Michael Lo Grande's offices, already a developer's handmaiden, have been even busier doling out the lollipops to big guns than usual of late.

Late last year the planning department gave the final green light to the crazy Korean 100-room boutique hotel coming to Sixth and Normandie--Koreatown, LA's Tenderloin--a civic move that will force many poor people paying modest rents out of the neighborhood.

There's been a mad late push by termed-out Garcetti and the termed-out Mayor, both anxious to demonstrate their fealty to the land use firms that control the purse-strings of so much political contributions, to surrender even more of Hollywood to even more big-development congestion via the upgrading of the Hollywood Community Plan. This is making for such a notable incineration of a presently modestly-priced neighborhood that even former news schlub and perennial CRA shill Jim Newton has noticed it. The so-called opinion writer couldn't quite find voice enough to form an opinion of his own, but the fact that it emerged on his radar at all was a small victory for the contrary forces. At least Newton courteously noted that actual community input has been completely ignored to-date.

Opposition to some recently greenlit projects has been similarly ignored in Sunland-Tujunga, where all the displaced from Hollywood and Koreatown will ultimately be directed. To accommodate the displacement, the city's junior Councilmember Paul Krekorian, who is already possessed of the Council's most paranoid staff, just this week rammed through Planning approval of a 60+ unit affordable housing displacement-plex on a street without sidewalks at a site within a soft nine-iron of Historic Bolton Hall.

This is on top of another project called Day Street Apartments, a homeless complex coming to Sunland-Tujunga that Krekorian's office similarly rammed through in a hurry, as Sunland-Tujunga is quickly evolving as the City's welcome mat for its displaced populations from less-affordable elsewheres.

° ° ° ° °

Paul Krekorian is a perfect foil for the City's big development players--he's still learning the ropes and still clumsier than most. It's well-known, for instance, that he's the local figure with the most exposure in the Kinde Durkee scandal, in which an increasing number of envelopes are presently sealing up.

As Krekorian has navigated his career often without help from local machines, there are many skeletons in the former Assemblymember's closet, and even some presently evolving ones. For instance, pushing for his staffer Adrin Nazarian (left) to run for State Assembly has enabled someone in the Councilmember's stable to steer city lobbyists in a direction friendly to both Krekorian and Nazarian himself whenever they want something done, and they're leaving very messy tracks while doing this.

One of his Krekorian's staffers even pointedly asked me early last year if I knew where Cary Brazeman, now a candidate for City Controller but a longtime land-use watchdog, got his money from. No question: they're outsiders, a bit amateurish, they whine and even get vindictive when they get caught with their pants down, compounding their problems and making them susceptible to be on the losing end on big Council deals, while obliged to sell what they've bought to an increasingly skeptical constituency.

The LA Times, which has largely served as cheerleader for all these civic rearrangements that benefit the basin at the expense of the outlying valleys, mostly either doesn't see or refuses to see the ramifications. Newton's recent column included this howler:

The elected officials, meanwhile, are trying to create a vision for a future Los Angeles, one with denser housing and fewer cars, a place where people live close to their work and use public transportation to get to it.

That's the way they all sell it--the way Garcetti's been selling it for years. Everyone knows its a lie. Of course, the last thing anyone staying in a boutique hotel or a Hollywood highrise wants to do is hop onto disease-laden, grimy public transportation. No, the new developments in Hollywood and Koreatown, as with most of the downtown development of the preceding decade, will be for professional people and the smug bourgeoisie, who own, lease, and rent their vehicles, just as all the developers and land-use attorneys do. This is what's created all the congestion in the City, as the population really hasn't increased, but the number of cars and car-trips keeps climing in the gentrified pockets.

Alas, it's the poor displaced souls who are being forced out of the central parts of the city and into its increasingly poor margins, like in Krekorian's Sunland Tujunga--where it's cheap and easy to buy out neighborhoods and local orgs, and where--ironically--there isn't even much dependable public transportation to service the poor at all. But people downtown are termed out, and the gentrification of our most beguiling ghettos is proceeding at a clip.

Pulling punches

2012-01-06T09:05:00.000-08:00

To read an old piece that demonstrates what journalism once was can be an instructive thing. The best pieces escape the bounds of journalism itself and become irrefutable indictments that hypocrites must wear around their collars all their lives should they revert to old tricks.

Journalists used to be involved enough with politicians to question their motivations through the very things they observed, not by today's most tedious practice of reporting duplicitous quotes and then running out and fetching equally duplicitous quotes from the "other side."

Here are two fine examples, noted this morning, one involving Newt Gingrich and the other George HW Bush. (They are noted in, of course, a book blog). They both came from Lars-Erik Nelson, who died over a decade ago, a Daily News columnist whose columns deserve a book of their own.

I remember hearing again recently something I also heard long ago "If you're a journalist and more than two people show up at your funeral, you failed." Of course that's an exaggeration--Cathy Seipp was occasionally a great journalist and I remember standing among about 1,000 others at her funeral five springs ago, and yet not one of them could remember a single time when she pulled a punch.

The mural mob keeps busy with Occupy LA relics

2012-01-04T17:42:00.000-08:00

Philly, left / LA, right

City now taking requests for letter of interest

The City of Los Angeles's mural mob has been busy of late. Tomorrow and next Tuesday, dialogs commence on a new civic mural ordinance, devoted to securing LA's claim on being the "mural capital of the world"--just as Philadelphia claims to be.

And now LA wants someone to take the crates that protected civic property from the Occupy L.A. vandals off its hands.

LA presently has 1,500 civic murals, and our Department of Cultural Affairs insists that that number is "more than any other urban center."

About that--sorry. But Philadelphia, for what it's worth, has commissioned or administrated over 3,000 murals, and some say over 3,500. Its murals program ramped up in 1984 and hasn't let up since. Ours has ramped down many times.

LA has given no evidence to date of even being able to maintain the murals we have, let alone provide for more, as the sad fate of the marathon mural on the Santa Monica Freeway demonstrated.

Philadelphia also has all that history: the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall...

And in an historic spirit, LA's Department of Cultural Affairs has issued a "call for letters of interest" in preserving the tagger "artifacts" from the recent Occupy LA protests.

Here's a snip from the call for letters of interest that the Department issued.

During the Occupy LA encampment period on the South Lawn, two wooden structures were built and erected by the City to surround and protect monuments located within the area. These plywood enclosures immediately became a canvas for paint, aerosol, and collage images that convey the ideas and experience of the Occupy LA participants. These wooden enclosures, therefore, became artifacts of the Occupy LA movement. As such, these wooden enclosures (Occupy LA Artifacts) are now perhaps cultural artifacts and works of art, evoking the spirit of an event of national/international importance and attention.

I'm not a fan of the Occupy movement, nor of graffiti murals. Admittedly, some murals in Philadelphia are lovely; but most in LA are not.

LA's mural mob, mostly lefty and mostly crabby, is a de facto arts lobby, run by the same handful of people for about twenty-five years now. Always pleading the case that the city's murals serve some exemplary purpose, the mob has made some howling mistakes along the way. Tag crews have bombed some of the CalTrans Olympic murals on our freeways out of existance.

Nor have the subjects always been inspirational in any civic sense. One mural, still a part of Sunset Boulevard, celebrated Marc Abrams, the nutcase psych doctor who walked around in swim trunks all day and signed some prescriptions "Doctor Kevorkian" -- and who committed suicide just before being charged with over prescribing. I used to run into this clown nearly every day for ten years and I don't think I was able to exchange more than ten words to him in that time.

Many murals in LA are graffiti murals, which a large percentage of the population considers to be more blight than art, and which many students of sociology believe inspire a more virulent tagging culture--but the mural mob steams ahead anyway, because they see themselves as some kind of progressive political movement as well as an artistic one.

My own idea on what to do with these two non-archival glorified crates is to set them near the River and offer them as temporary housing for the homeless. But artists have historically made the best of junk--and these civic found objects may yet serve a purpose even more useful and appropriate than that. Even so, I find it ironic that Cultural Affairs would bother to fret so much about preserving the the plywood boxes defaced by Occupy LA even while it threatens to shut down two of its high profile fine arts centers--Warner Grand Theater and Barnsdall Art Center. Let's set some priorities in our local civic arts that service arts, not politics.

EARLIER: GRAFITTI-BAIT MURAL ORDINANCE IN PLANNING STAGES (October 13, 2011)

A Child's Garland of Snark

2012-01-04T08:24:00.000-08:00

Twitter favs from last night:

wildbell Will Campbell
Rummy's 8-vote win over Sanitarium in Iowa is being described as a "powerful start." Get me rewrite!

secupp S.E. Cupp
I think Newt rivals Tom Brady for revealing the best angry face.

joshtpm Josh Marshall

Good thing this was whites only election. Otherwise fraud claims wld be seriously complicating things abt now.

JoeTrippi Joe Trippi
I am so looking forward to my 5:15am @foxandfriends hit right now!

busblog Tony Pierce

33 people on Newt's stage at his headquarters. All white. pic.twitter.com/soIx0F9z

secupp S.E. Cupp

Oh boy. To compete with Santorum, Romney is resorting to quoting our national anthem.

fivethirtyeight Nate Silver

6 votes for Lizard People just counted in Allamakee County

fivethirtyeight Nate Silver

Not even sure what to write/report at this stage. You guys can press F5, F5, F5 as well as I can.

valleydoll Debbie Cortez Lopez

WHY IS THERE NO BLINGEE APP FOR iPad DEAR GAWD?!

jim_newell Jim Newell

SAY SOMETHING CRAZY PLEASE

cschweitz Callie Schweitzer

Obama's face right this minute: bit.ly/z1NBAh

secupp S.E. Cupp

Newt Gingrich to speak about his fourth place finish in Iowa momentarily. (Spoiler: "I blame effective ads.")

@AlbertBrooks
I never wonder what's going on in Iowa and I'm from Iowa

davidaxelrod David Axelrod

One of the closest,most exciting contests I've seen in years!Bulls and Hawks tied at 62 with 6 minutes to go. Oh, how are the caucuses?

secupp S.E. Cupp

Huntsman is practicing for the NH debate...by raising his hand over and over again.

secupp S.E. Cupp

Huntsman is spending the night teaching Mandarin to a group of seniors at a Manchester, NH old folks home.

secupp S.E. Cupp

Don't feel bad for Huntsman. He's in NH, coming up with new 90s grunge music references.

&c.

The Iowa Caucuses, live

2012-01-03T17:00:00.000-08:00

This is a live blogging of the 2012 Iowa Caucuses. Local Republican firebrand Phil Jennerjahn will be joining me in a few minutes. We're going to comment on what we observe is happening tonight and we'll identify what each of us writes with our last names. We did this for the last Republican debate in Iowa and we were very glad to do it then, and I think some of our friends were glad we did it too.

GOP firebrand Phil Jennerjahn wants his party to Occupy this place

While I'm watching video reports, I'll also be tuning into some great live-blogs and streams elsewhere. Nate Silver is doing one at the New York Times. Silver, the wunderkind statistician, has been all over the map with this race in the past twenty-four hours. At one point, he was even begging for a new poll. He has Romney winning, Santorum surging, and Paul very close; as does nearly everyone else. But he has also been hedging bets for three straight days, uncharacteristic for the star media pollster of 2008.

I'm also going to be looking at Wake Up America, which you can safely call a hard right blog. There are other hard right blogs, but this one also aggregates what people on left and right are saying, which kills two birds with one stone, at least for me.

Also, I don't know if the libertarian publication Reason is going to live-blog the Caucuses, but I'll be looking to the libertarian publication's excellent Hit & Run blog and editor Matt Welch on Twitter especially for Ron Paul fever.

And finally, I'll be looking to the Twitter feed of a political writer in on the Iowa ground named John Deeth, well known throughout the State, who'll mix in what progressives are doing with his reports.

One feature our readers might like to watch through the evening is the FOX Iowa Caucus vote tracker. Click the link and you're there.

MAILANDER: Hey, it's 5 p.m. Pacific! Here we go--something that's actually politically meaningful in 2012--underway at last!

The top surprise of the evening to me, Phil, even before the caucusing begins, is the way Romney has already been crowned as the party's presumptive nominee despite so many things suggesting that he is even weaker against the President than polling would indicate. For instance: almost certainly, Romney tonight will not draw as high a percentage of caucus votes tonight as he did in 2008. The winner tonight will, as The Fix has said, almost certainly garner a lower winning percentage than anyone in history--the previous low Iowa winning percentage was Bob Dole with 26% in 1996.

Romney has had organization in the state since 2009--orgs extending back to his last run, really--and a sizable previous voter base. And yet he's not likely to do as well as he did four years ago, when he scored 25% of all caucus voters. And we generally look to this salt-of-the-earth state for moderation and balance.

The other downside to Romney is that as he continues to draw less than 25% of all Republicans--even in Iowa, a swing state where moderates matter--where will the enthusiasm for him be coming from? Should he gain the nomination, can he really buy a really enthused GOTV mechanism such as one needs to unseat an incumbent--one as efficient as, say, John Kerry's? And of course Kerry didn't win either. It seems a challenger needs to fire up the base, the way Reagan did in 1980, to have a shot at beating an incumbent. It seems Romney is like a poison pill for the Party that they'll swallow at their peril in the General Election.

And then--there's Newt, who alienates everyone he doesn't appeal to. It's a little late, but the original "bomb throwing diva" of the GOP says he's now going to go negative on Romney starting tomorrow--in fact, he already started today, calling Mittens a liar. It's fairly easy to understand why nobody's gone negative on him to-date--you have a bunch of people who are not front runners hoping to become Vice President. But Newt for all his mouth and his weaknesses and his polarizing can really talk to the people who do the heavy lifting among Republican party voters--he speaks to Rush dittoheads and he speaks to Reagan Democrats too. These are two kinds of voters who are disinclined to support Romney anyway.

So Phil, let me ask you going in--and let's presume that Romney simply can't lose tonight, unless he finishes third or fourth--would you, could you work as hard for Mittens as you would for nearly any other candidate?

Jennerjahn: Thanks for inviting me, Joseph. As for your questions about Romney, let me be blunt. I don't like the guy and if he is our nominee I'm not doing anything this election period. Not out of spite, you see, but just because Romney is such an awful RINO that I can't support him. He stands for and believes in nothing. He's worse than Clinton in that way. One of my friends derisively calls him "Mr. $50 Abortion" for backing a segment of Romneycare that did exactly that...provided abortions for $50.

But having said that, I can only blame the GOP for not going out and getting better candidates to run. We have seven players left on the GOP side, and some of them suck. We have few real choices. People begged Chris Christie. They begged Mitch Daniels and Jeb Bush. If Mike Pence had run, I'd be working on his team right now instead of supporting Perry. It was a real shame he didn't run. He was deeply loved by Conservatives. Instead, we had to waste months of our lives being spoon-fed clowns by the media. Donald Trump? Herman Cain? The only way those people should enter the White House is on the public tour of the facilities.

I don't care for Gingrich either...another Big Government RINO in my book. But I do admit that Newts bluntness appeals to many voters. I have always felt Newt was the most dangerous candidate for Obama to face because he is so unpredictable. Gingrich could actually blow out Obama if he gets the nomination. He is far more talented and competent than Obama. But Newt comes with issues and baggage.

Nobody is talking about Ron Paul, but I think Paul will win tonight.

MAILANDER: It's funny, I think Paul is going to win tonight too, or at least come very close. I think he'll actually pull out a squeaker. Yet mainstream media seemed to back off him in the past week, and the "unelectable" charges are beginning to tarnish him. Paul's really in a tough place for a guy trying to beat some odds: if he wins, it's no big deal, but if he doesn't win outright, there's going to be a lot of pressure on him to get out, because there are no other states anytime soon that he's likely to win--even though I think he's got a better shot in New Hampshire than people think. Paul--the party seems afraid of him. I recall with some fondness that they were afraid of a guy named Reagan too.

Jennerjahn: Ron Paul is no Ronald Reagan. Ron Paul is a Libertarian with dangerously naive world views. But his supporters are wildly fanatical and that is what wins caucuses. I'd be surprised if he doesn't win tonight. But we are getting close to a dangerous threshhold for Romney. If Romney wins tonight and wins New Hampshire next week, this race is pretty much over early. That is why I am praying for a Romney defeat tonight to give the other candidates more time.

MAILANDER: A few fun facts before any results. One, Nate Silver said that there are over 70 polling organizations in Iowa. Another: the blog RedState.com is linking to Nate's last analysis. You don't see that every day. Seventy polling organizations, and yet people are that desperate enough for info.

I think blogs like RedState, which help move voters among a certain stripe of devotee--in that case evangelicals--moved to Santorum in recent days. I think they were, like you, rooting for Perry but now think Santorum is their best shot. I also think they sent someone to Iowa--unless Erick Erickson lives there?

Ron Paul at 25% in an exit poll? We know 25% is going to win.

Jennerjahn: I don't know. Anything is possible. I was actually talking to someone from Iowa yesterday and came away with a more clear understanding that these Caucus meetings are part debate/part wrestling match. Tears, yelling and threats. Sometimes people are forced to abandon their candidate and go with someone else. It's a weird way to do things.

I just caught a clip of Michele Bachmann on the news. I love her. Her fiery last address in Northern Iowa. Called Obama a Socialist and said "Not on my watch!!"

Who knows...maybe she could do well tonight. I think the Santorum surge is fake.

Just my humble opinion.

MAILANDER: Interesting shot from Point of Grace Church, one of Fox's feeds, of Rick Perry directly addressing a caucus of 900. Electioneering is not banned here!

Turnout said to be big tonight. Gingrich v. Perry--which one will get the boost of it?

Two interesting grafs. One I saw on Twitter: a Fox talking head says that Bachmann is likely to finish last, which would or should certainly finish her. The other just in, from Nate Silver:

Another key finding in the entrance polls so far: almost 30 percent of voters identify as either independent or Democratic, much higher than in 2008 and toward the high range of the estimates that pollsters made in their likely voter models. The entrance polls report that about half of those voters are breaking for Ron Paul.

Likewise, the percentage of moderates according to the the exit polls is about 20 percent - twice as high as in 2008 - and those voters so far are breaking for Mr. Paul as well.

Those are two big points in Paul's favor.

Phil, are you getting a little nauseous? With eight percent in, and Santorum, Romney and Paul all in a dead heat right around 25%, that only means one thing: it's a bad night for Republicans in general. Santorum is the surprise. I'm surprised that he's above 20--to me that's the biggest surprise so far.

Jennerjahn: I'm not too worried about it. You might want to ask President Huckabee about how important it is to win Iowa. No, Iowa just gets you out of the starting gate. If you don't finish in the top three or four, you are probably doomed....but John McCain finished fourth here in 2008 and went on to win the nomination.

MAILANDER: Fair enough, but I think the narrative changes after tonight. I think GOP challengers can now say--"Look, Romney is not going to beat Obama. Romney's been in Iowa for six years and he can't get more than 25% there. This is a swing state, and Romney's not a strong candidate here." It's a pretty compelling argument. Just saw the last tally, and Romney's finally ahead but...by less than 100 votes! With a fifth of the vote reporting.

Jennerjahn: I think Romney would be a decent enough candidate in the general to beat Obama. I just don't want him as the nominee. But these results are troubling. Romney could still pull this out tonight. And he is going to win New Hampshire next week. That is a double blow to any of the other candidates. I put him at about 60-70% chance to be the nominee. If he wins Iowa tonight, that goes up to 80%.

MAILANDER: Over 50% of the vote now, and no clearcut winner, though it now appears that Paul will finish third. Paul is only leading in "collar counties" and nowhere else, neither in top cities (Romney) nor in rural counties (Santorum). Those collar counties were key in a two-way race, but not in what's emerging to be a three-way.

Well, with 80% counted...and 45 votes separating the leaders...it's safe to say...no winner. None here. The top two candidates are not going to break 50% of the vote, and neither is going to get more than 25%.

Nate Silver tweets: "Am very confused. But it looks like Paul won't win."

Jennerjahn: Fox just said that with 81% of the vote now reporting that Romney is winning. Headline tomorrow "Mitt Romney wins Iowa Caucus." I feel ill.

MAILANDER: Santorum and everyone else now readying to bomb Romney in New Hampshire. Still not resolved at 92%. Outstanding counties are Santorum territory--but very small. Madison is the largest one outstanding.

But your reaction, Phil, is the way I'm sure 75% of the Republican party feels. The people who want Paul can't stomach Santorum, that's for sure. The people who want Santorum can't stomach Romney. And the people who want Romney--does anyone really want Romney?

Listening to Gingrich pledging and hedging--he is the most divisive element. But Santorum will have to go directly after Romney now, and that should be fun to watch from this side.

With about 2,000 votes to count, Nate Silver is projecting an 85-vote Romney victory via a rigorous statistical analysis.

Jennerjahn: Still unclear if Romney or Santorum is going to win Iowa. But very surprisingly, Perry, Gingrich and Bachmann all gave concessions speeches where they vowed to fight on. We are all headed to South Carolina...where I suspect that Romney will get his butt kicked.

Schmoopie on 84th Street

2012-01-03T06:00:00.000-08:00

Holiday issues of weekly newspapers are notoriously malnourished, but the LA Weekly came in at 84 pages last Thursday, its lowest page count in over two decades. Those of you who remember thumbing back to Rockie a little further back, say page 184 or so, may wish to take a moment of reflection on the dearly departed sorceress.

In the present slender volume, the last word of editorial content--two classical listings--appears on page 64, before the long tail of mental health, call girl, and med 420 ads.

I suppose the overriding subliminal message of the LA Weekly as gleaned from the advertising profile is: "If you're reading this, there must be something wrong with you."

Editorially, in this issue....there is Jonathan Gold, and eight pages of comics...this is designated as a "Comics Issue" in fact, which suggests that others before it have not been.

The new appreciation for comics must by now certainly have been noted by the diaspora of fine comic strip artists the Weekly has spurned over the past half-decade, including personal favorites Tony Millionaire and Carol Lay, the latter of whom has lent her creative hand to the Simpsons for the past few years. (And whom it has been my fortune to see quite a bit strolling the neighborhood over the past decade after arriving from NYC around the turn of the millennium).

It's hard to tell if Schmoopie has offered any new editorial direction yet. But the young, shiny new editor has introduced the comic section herself in the clumsiest, clunkiest manner possible:

"For 51 weeks, we've given you words. We gave you words about Occupy L.A. and trouble in the county jails and bad school lunches...."

Of course, the Weekly has given us words for 33 years, not 51 weeks--it's only in the last few years, though, that it's deemed school lunches newsworthy. But it is encouraging to note that Ms. Fenske as editor already has mastered the paper's ceaselessly self-congratulatory style; it suggests that the subordinate managing editor's concerns for self-aggrandizement are being noted and duly absorbed.

Also, on an early page, there's a fairly hilarious correction:

"Also, in the article Eric Bauman's Controlling Hand' (Dec. 23), Bauman was misidentified as a former trauma surgeon; he was a trauma nurse."

I'll say he was.

EARLIER:

Ex-Schmoopie talks to someone about something she should not talk about
Kinde Durkee, LA Weekly story far from adding up
Sarah Penske hearts white hearts
Weekly rips Krekorian...
Weekly prints unsourced, anonmous email rumor as election coverage
Weekly: Kevin James is still gay
Century Boulevard
Sourcing Trujillo, Sourcing Stewart
96th Street
96th Street
92nd Street

2012-01-02T18:52:00.000-08:00

I watched the Mayors' (there were two of them present, including West Hollywood's) press conference on the arrest of the arson suspect. It was the usual fill-the-frame media event, with Villaraigosa, LaBonge, Garcetti all getting a chance to speak.

At the media op, the phrase "domestic terrorist" was tossed about freely and frequently. It seems be a grandiose epithet for the kind of criminal whose actions endangered life but whose target apparently was not life but property, especially empty cars. Perhaps the investigators have materials in pocket suggesting more sinister hopes than damage to property.

Accused of setting up to 40 fires, all of which were potentially endangering of human life, the suspect is being held on $250,000 bail, according to some reports. That's a quarter of what the guy who posted a single illegal supergraphic--the one that that our City Attorney, Carmen Trutanich, argued might harm someone if it flew off a building--was held for. (NOTE: CBS reports that suspect is being held without bail).

The suspected arsonist, Harry Burkhart, a German national who lives in this multiuse building, is reported to be involved with a dispute with the INS involving his mother's immigration status. He is said to have considerable contempt for America as a result of the experience. "The Hollywood Arsonist: Thank God he's not Latino," Lalo Alcaraz tweets.

City of LA sponsors "Latino-touch" County float in Rose Parade

2012-01-02T14:35:00.000-08:00

Bewildering but noted: The City of Los Angeles tendered the County of Los Angeles some free global publicity today, entering what Fox News has called "Dinosaurs with a Latino Touch"--a float celebrating the dinousaurs at the County Museum of Natural History, into the annual Tournament of Roses Parade.

Dinosaurs--the ultimate reconquista? They were certainly here before everyone.

Floats are paid for by private donations. It's hard to tell what the City thought it was doing handing free publicity to a County venue, and what Fox is trying to do by identifying a float with a dinosaur theme as having a "Latino touch."

PS, the float itself was very nice, and won an award.

Floating along

2012-01-02T05:08:00.000-08:00

The day--New Year's--was, of course, a wonderful one around here. Today figures to be one too. In fact, it figures to be such a beautiful day that it disappoints me that the Occupy folks want to toss a few sabots along the Rose Parade route. This Occupation is not like the others--for starters, it's not leaderless, and its key organizer, Peter Thottam, has a decided vainglorious streak. Even Occupy Pasadena is distancing itself from this action.

That story, by Brian Charles in the Pasadena Star-News is an excellent one; especially as already there have been disappointments at other fishwraps; not overwhelming ones, but the kind that remind me that when a new year begins, not every light is green. Who would have thought that early on in 2012 the Pasadena Star-News would win out for best local reporting of the day in a derby that includes also the NYTimes and LA Times? Well, I would...but I think you already know that.

The Adam Nagourney piece in the national fishwrap of record on LA arson and "a city set on edge", for instance, starts off with far too many cliches. It's the Day of the Locust, yet again, and we helpless, fearful locust-eaters are all just sitting around again, waiting for the apocalypse. Drill down and you see the most nervous people--who are barely nervous at all--are a handful of apartment managers, a hardly representative class.

This is more creative writing than reporting. In fact, it's precisely that pigeonholing stripe of fiction loosely based on fact that New York's commercial mills most like to buy. The LA we read in fiction, vaguely anchored in reality, is mostly not so much like the LA we truly know, but the LA that conforms to the expectations of some detached NY editor.

For most of us, as far as I can tell, and certainly evidenced by my balcony, which the Farmer's blimp buzzed around noon (photo, left--I guess this is the year of the dirigible for me), yesterday was simply a beautiful day, and nobody at all was on edge that I saw.

Closer to home, the post Robert Greene filed on the race in San Pedro also disappointed. The item discusses the Furutani-Buscaino race--one of the dullest in recent memory--in terms of campaign money raised within the District (Furutani almost none, Buscaino almost all). This may be analysis, but it's mere financial analysis, and in a race to represent 270,000 people, you're hoping for more issues discussed and direct interaction with the candidates. With the grand access to candidates that newspapers have, it is rueful to watch them squander their special access while examining data that is available to anyone at all who looks for it.

[There was another development in the race: the Buscaino camp revealed in a presser that Wendy Greuel has jumped on the Buscaino bandwagon and endorsed their man. Our City Controller, who tries so hard to project the image of a civic skinflint, was undaunted by the fact that Buscaino is underwater by a wide margin at his own personal residence. ("My parents are underwater at their house, too," someone close to the campaign recently told me, shrugging both facts off.) Ironically, this endorsement in truth is more Wendy hitching to a star than providing star power herself, and the unusual circumstances at play here--a fresh face who's a shoe-in--figures to fetch a few noisy endorsements from faces that are not so fresh.]

Adam Nagourney, Robert Greene...these are big names in journalism, looked to by decision makers. I understand taking it easy on New Year's Day. Take a mulligan and try again. Meanwhile, Brian Charles...I think I'll look for him on Twitter.

2011-12-31T17:00:00.000-08:00

Left, Blimp on Target, 1969, Roger Kuntz, at Louis Stern. Right, from Ride of a lifetime, at Virtual Tourist.

Happy New Year! And a Good Year to you!

This past year has been, people tell me, a good year for me. The people who read this site may not necessarily thrill to that outcome, which is fine with me; I am inclined to question it myself. But almost all who read this site want 2012 to be a good year for the City of Los Angeles, and on that point we all agree.

With our media and our politicians all mostly owned by absentee landlords--even our timeless blimp is tendered to us by a company based in Akron, Ohio that mostly sees LA as a place to market to, while the local company got bought out--and with our cultural institutions mostly bowing to the out-of-town media--how can we get that done?

That's the question I most ponder when pondering my civic side. To me, Los Angeles is an exceptionally vibrant place--at street level. Our cultural side, from arts and music to fashion and entertainment, is all astonishing, even world-beating. And Los Angeles is also a miserable maladjusted hellhole for lackeys at the institutional, workaday level. Our absentee landlord companies and the politicians they own are rendering good life here nearly intolerable, and certainly insufferable.

Street-hassle is evolving--a little, and in a way that I don't fully know myself. (If you've noticed that the column is wider here, for instance, I've explained why in the one that is more narrow to the right.) I expect to tinker with the site in a way that allows it to bear further witness to the central dilemma of the city--our cultural excellence walking hand in hand with our institutional failures--all through the early part of January. Suggestions are welcome.

The Top Ten LA Civic Stories of 2011

2011-12-29T18:00:00.000-08:00

This has been a year of spectacular failure for the City of Los Angeles. Anyone who says otherwise is not being honest.

If you don't believe that this year has seen some of the greatest failures to come to LA since the early 1990s, try to come up with one of your own lists like this--our top ten civic stories--for 2011, and see if failure doesn't dominate it. Failure upon failure upon failure, barely relieved by incidental patches of success--successes that are far from clearcut. Even so, this is all useful to note. It demonstrates how much our City has declined in a single year.

The following are, as I saw it, the top ten things that happened to Los Angeles in 2011, in order of importance. Seven are bad, one is politically destabilizing, one is politically neutral, and one is halfway to favorable. Some were extensively covered by our increasingly failing mainstream media--others--like my second top story of the year, redistricting--I offer more as theory than as story. But this was, as far as I can see, a desperate year, rife with the aggregate consequences of civic irresponsibility of both the Mayor and Council, and these stories will mostly continue to scar our future even as they brought us to new depths this year.

The top ten stories of 2011 have been:

1. Brian Stow beating
2. La Raza Redistricting
3. The end of the fishwrap of record
4. Occupy LA
5. The end of the Mayor's machine
6. Garcetti, Andrea Alarcon cancel Sunset Junction
7. City scandals
8. Shocking political failures
9. LA River renaissance
10. Farmer's Field

Comment follows.

1. Brian Stow beating

This sealed the fate of Frank McCourt forever, and it was a pivotal moment in local sports history--and undoubtedly the City's top moment of shame in 2011, and one of the most decisive ones as well. But beyond this, it was the top indicator that something was profoundly wrong in the City of Los Angeles.

The police weren't at Opening Day in adequate numbers--after all this time, we still don't know why not. The Dodgers weren't adequately interested in policing the crowd--after all this time, we still don't know why not, and nobody's been curious enough to ask, and civic leadership has actually stood by McCourt's side.

A senseless beating, a man damaged for life, certainly consigned to a hospital bed for months, a DA questioning the effectiveness of local police work, a baseball season of ignominy, a terrible first half for a team with tremendous talent, and a key economic furnace for Los Angeles rendered to a modest flicker of what it once had been, with profound questions about its ability to recover anytime soon. The gradual, then sudden implosion of one of the world's premiere sports franchises. And nobody says much at all, other than what bad guys the perps were--which is, of course, simply to state the obvious, and nothing more.

2. La Raza Redistricting

Change in an Echo Park census tract; pie charts rom LA Eastsider, March 9, 2011

The interests of balanced, affinity-based representation no longer carve up the City of Los Angeles, the County of Los Angeles, or the State of California after a census. This already legendary ProPublica piece, first published a scant few days ago, proves as much. Other such pieces are in the works.

But the truth is that affinity-based representation hasn't been a part of the view of most our best-known politicians for some time. Instead, the interests of a peculiar kind of redistricting not found elsewhere in America--call it La Raza Redistricting--dominates the local redistricting zeitgeist at State and City level within the bailiwick of Los Angeles. The practitioners, drawing mostly from partisan, agenda-driven materials provided to them by MALDEF and the William C. Velasquez Institute, are by no means exclusively Latino; but they do use shopworn, outmoded Latino political and demographic myths to advance their cause, which is closely wed to Democratic Party gaming of the process in the City and the State.

The myths the La Raza Redistricters use to advance their cause are two: they insist that the City of Los Angeles is growing, and they insist that as it grows, it is becoming more Latino-multicultural all the time.

Neither premise is true at our civic level. The City is not growing in any appreciable way whatsoever, in fact; it is more like a kaleidoscope, shifting patterns but not colors, and generally displacing low rentals for pricey ones, while giving lip-service to affordable housing efforts that are more of a lottery for the remaining poor than a policy for all. The City's ethnic saturation point has long ago been reached--likely around 2003 and 2004. But the La Raza Redistricters at MALDEF and WCVI who ply and play the redistricting appointments at both the City and State level pretend these things are true for the sake of extending Latino-tilting Democratic power.

LAUSD Enrollments by year

How far off base are these myths, so readily swallowed as conventional wisdom even by Valley Republicans?

Consider this: even with more Mexicans here than any city outside of Mexico City, with more Salvadorans here than in any city outside of El Salvador, &c., Los Angeles still didn't appreciably grow in population in any way over the past decade. Two and six-tenths percent growth over the past decade is almost exactly a quarter of one percent a year. Of course, had the Mayor not pushed the census count up so aggressively with a big PR campaign in 2009--which was, in fact, cheating--LA would have actually shown population loss from 2000 to 2010.

And the institutions that most widely services all these people who are not arriving--the LAUSD--has been shrinking in enrollment numbers since 2003--this year dropping to 1999 levels--despite building 160 new schools over the past decade.

So where's all this Latino growth in this pueblo? If the City isn't growing in population--and if the local public school district is shrinking in size--where are all these booming Latino communities?

Despite all this, top Democratic Party officials and the La Raza Redistricters continue to dominate the process of drawing our lines, as they did in 2001 with tools provided them by WCVI and MALDEF in hand. They're able to do this in part because every other Democratic group from Labor to local chambers of commerce hopes to meld the Latinos into whatever they're selling themselves, and hand them half the keys to their own shrinking pueblos for the sake of hanging onto majority party power.

This doesn't work, is not working, hasn't worked, will not work for the city, as now people of all cultures leave Los Angeles in parallel numbers. Not only that, the maps generate the kind of representation that prioritizes government services over job creation--hurting us all.

At the heart of the sleight-of-hand is the fuzziness surrounding the definition of "Latino" itself. All the studies WCVI and MALDEF issue suggest that Latino populations are exploding everywhere. It's good for Democrats and it's good for Univision--but is it true?

Defining what constitutes a "Latino" or a "Hispanic" is not even reliably done by the U.S. Census--and there is no other measure.

The 2010 Census lists "Persons of Hispanic or Latino origin" and "White persons" and "White persons not Hispanic" categories. Simply trying to identify the "difference" between ethnicities (Filipino? German-Mexican? Mestizo-American?) let alone track reliable numbers in a city that offers sanctuary to immigrants is all but impossible.

But our hardcore myth panderers continue to herd people by their likelihood to vote for people with diacritical marks in their surnames rather than the affinities found in their neighborhoods.

As a consequence, we're not even losing white-flight Anglo talent to Seattle and Portland and Irvine anymore; those middle managers have mostly long gone pursuing their opportunities elsewhere. With a crop of legislators more interested in baseline services than securing better jobs, now we're losing top Latino talent too--to Colorado, North Carolina and Massachusetts--even as La Raza Redistricters continue to promote the false case that Latinos form a consistent, amorphous, ever-growing underclass here.

La Raza Redistricters do not only include the Mayor, his cousin John Perez, Richard Alarcon, Maria Elena Durazo, Monica Garcia, Jose Huizar, &c. They include Nancy Pelosi, Eric Garcetti, Madeline Janis, Julie Butcher, Janice Hahn.

These redistricters are, in short, devoting all of LA's potentially transformational redistricting energy to planning for a more Latino-dominated, more multicultural future--a future that gives no demographic evidence of ever arriving.

3. The End of the Fishwrap of Record

The LA Times is no longer a newspaper that serves local civic life in an estimable way or a way that is even relevant to most local lives. Perhaps best exemplified by some harmless local endorsements it has made in recent years--as Councilmembers Ron Galperin and Gordon Teuber can testify--the former fishwrap of record now routinely publishes advertorials on its former op-ed pages--sometimes even on behalf of our public utilities or CRA commissioners.

Perhaps its callowness was best exemplified by the firing of a 39-year-vet a few months before a natural retirement and a couple of weeks before Xmas.

There is journalistic awfulness all through the paper, but as an opinion writer I especially watch the editorial board. Jim Newton, Sue Horton, Nick Goldberg--these are the weaklings who turned states evidence as soon as they hit the Times board. Robert Greene tried to bail them out at year's end, after persistent exposure here to what they were not doing for so long--and the following list just grew and grew throughout the year--but while this is a welcome change, it comes far too late, and now the Times will get to learn how truly ineffectual it is as it deals with the candidates and also with the voters first hand rather than from behind a curain. This was the year they all jumped the shark for good, The End, please just go away, goodbye.

The following list: (just click randomly for fun) The Maharaja Jim Newton now wants DWP rate hikes Jim Newton: Doubling down on incompetence Jim Newton as moderator tony's wild years Who reads the LA Times these days? Jim Newton disorder spreads virally to Times newsroom Newton hypes Janis, LAANE yet again Madeline Janis "tight as ticks" with Times, Newton Why Jim Newton must go Madeline Janis in the headlights Patrick McDonnell almost wakes up in time to bury CD 12 race Note to Jim Rainey: Nobody cares The LA Times: A poor joke on local democracy
Morning Eye Opener

4. Occupy LA

I visited Occupy LA a few times. This was my experience of it: protesters with iPhones (Apple--Nasdaq 100 and the next Dow 30 company) using Google (Google--Nasdaq 100 company) and showing up in their Nikes (Nike--global conglomerate) while blaming Wells, BofA, Citi and Chase for the sins of Countrywide, IndyMac, Washington Mutual and Wachovia, railing about banks and corporations, all the while encouraged by our own Mayor and City Council (real unemployment rate in LA: 20%) to do so.

But in the end, Occupy LA embarrassed city government. It demonstrated (yet again) how out of step the City Attorney was with the City. Initial mainstream media reports stating that the LAPD had used restraint when dealing with the protesters later proved to be false. A captive MSM did everything they were told to do, even suffering the indignity of a lottery for the right to be embedded with the Police Department.

Social media forced mainstream media coverage of a quixotic movement that probably should have probably stayed social media based. One of the movement's many mistakes was valuing mainstream media's attention in the first place.

5. The End of the Mayor's Machine

Some birthday party clown named Carmen Trutanich won the race for City Attorney a couple of years back (oh yeah, the Times endorsed him, too), and that was the first blow. Then, a year ago, Chris Essel lost--that was the second. But this year: a throwback from the early seventies who comes up a little lame, Bennett Kayser, beats the heavily-backed Luis Sanchez for a school board seat. Now the Mayor's man in San Pedro Warren Furutani has already thrown in the towel as Parke Skelton can't hit his ass with a paddle anymore. And you know what? The end of the Mayor's machine is a good thing--but it's made for some frightful fragmentation at the governing level, and it's also given the Democratic County machine more power than it deserves or can handle. It all led me to wonder if Parke Skelton is simply out of touch.

6. Garcetti, Andrea Alarcon cancel Sunset Junction

By no means did I attend every Sunset Junction Street Fair since 1980. But I did attend most of them, and I did watch the festival emerge as a gay and lesbian outfest to something bordering on Mardi Gras--but for a fee in recent years, and one that was inching upwards. And therein was the rub. It was crippled by Eric Garcetti, in whose district the festival resided, and also the LA Weekly, an increasingly slimy organization that sells cultural advertising the way a mafia don sells insurance. Sunset Junction didn't need to pay the LA Weekly to attract enough attention (as other cultural advertisers will find out soon enough), so it took it lumps there too.

What the City did to Sunset Junction was a civic disgrace--and it introduced us to Andrea Alarcon, the Mayor's designated killjoy. It also exposed the situational ethics practice of allowing City staffers like Paul Michael Neuman to game Neighborhood Councils--even while under the influence of their bosses--as usual business for Garcetti, Koretz & Co.

As it happened, I wrote quite a bit on this as it was happening. I'll not bother you with it.

Oh...maybe I will.

In Re: City Staffers on Neighborhood CouncilsPaul Michael Neuman, a staffer in Paul Koretz's office, plays a key citizen role in killing Sunset Junction, inviting concerns.

Final Thoughts on Sunset JunctionThe media and the City are on the same page, proving it's pretty easy to vilify promoters.

KPCC presents one side of Sunset JunctionDeparting from usual practice, David Lazarus presents one side of the Sunset Junction dispute, and one side only.

Garcetti, Alarcon flimflam Sunset Junction into obvlivionThe City kills the Sunset Junction Street Fair and rewrites some history while doing so.

Alarcon asserts her authority over Sunset JunctionThe daughter of Richard Alarcon, a Villaraigosa appointment, wags her finger at Sunset Junction.

Will 219 NIMBYs kill Sunset Junction?The Silver Lake Neighborhood Council, dominated by a small Chamber of Commerce, took actions to kill its headlining annual event.

"All we need is a loan for a week"Sunset Junction promoters plead with City government; the City turns a deaf ear.

Despite legacy, board hijacks Sunset JunctionAndrea Alarcon kills Sunset Junction over an amount that doesn't keep the City running for half an hour.

7. City Scandals

[Mayor's freebies and ethics fines, Housing Department, Building & Safety scandals, Gold Card scandal, Richard Alarcon, Kinde Durkee...&c. &c. and don't forget Al Abrams]

The scandals to hit City Hall and local politics in general this year were also spectacular. Most resulted in stiff fines and some resulted in criminal charges. The scandals need their own top ten, so thick and fast did they come. Feds, ethics commissions, the DA, everyone was crawling all over LA this year--it was a MayorSam fantasy come to life.

But for all this wrongdoing, nobody outside of about 500 people who follow City politics has noticed. Nobody cares, even now, even in aggregate. Everyone's too busy with their own lives. Everything to see here...but move along anyway.

8. Shocking political failures

Pat McOsker, Debra Bowen, Luis Sanchez, Tom LaBonge, Stephen Box all got about half or even a quarter as many votes as they were projected to at the start of their respective races. Take a quick look at that list--who was in charge of their campaigns? Nobody under forty-five in any case.

9. LA River Renaissance

Is this the one silver lining to 2011? Sort of. Maybe.

Tens of millions of dollars have thus far bought a 500-yard canoe track and some quality time with a few bulldozers, rearranging the gravel on the strip of damp concrete behind Echo Park. But it's a start, and it might bring the LA River up to actual river status by 2025.

10. Farmer's Field

The real axes in play in bringing Farmer's Field to Los Angeles are largely undiscussed. Every green light is an inconclusive one. Every word uttered in mainstream media is a bought-off one. And every team from Buffalo from San Diego has been portrayed as the one that's certainly coming. And even after all this, it's still...an imaginary stadium for an imaginary team.

° ° ° ° °

So what to do? Sell? Here's what to do: for starters, quit complaining, start observing. Make it a point to follow a local political blog (if you can find one) once a week, and to share what you see there with others.

The local tepid media? Start tuning 'em out . Those weak-kneed, ever hopeful to cash in, commercial-blog news aggregators out there--the ones that are actually afraid of writers and opinions? Forget 'em. After all these years, CityWatch, MayorsSam, RonKayeLA and this blog are still the best local opinion and news analysis sites--and they all persistently fly below the radar of our tonguetied mainstream media.

That should not be, btw. It's time for new blood to step up, too. Alice has been a little crankier and more circumspect lately--that's a good thing.

Start demanding of the media that you read that they start looking at what's going on in this city with an honest eye, and not with an eye only to retail and ad dollars.

Don't let anyone filter your city for you. Find it out for yourself. Have an interest in how your town works.

I don't ask you to agree with me about our city. I only ask you to know about it.