street-hassle

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. A scant two years ago, for instance, the Ring cycle that LA Opera produced ran to farce for many--and nearly busted 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. And let's not talk about Hollywood's output in recent years.

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 they're 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 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.

State opens door to end redevelopment, including LA's CRA

2011-12-29T16:21:00.000-08:00

The word has hit the street--and even non-sleeping elements of our mainstream media: in the words of one local law firm, "all Redevelopment Agencies will be out of business on February 1, 2012."

That may be a bit of fearmongering, but...this is no April Fool's. This is December wisdom. The State Supreme Court of California has created the space in which to bring the gavel down on all California redevelopment agencies, including our own dearly beloved CRA.

One local land use law firm says that the State's Supreme Court decision "will create both confusion and possible opportunities." Undoubtedly it has already created confusion.

Successor agencies will be entitled to dispose of assets held by present redevelopment agencies. This is a very big story that many in our local media have, thus far, missed. Maybe Madeline Janis is out of town, or something.

[UPDATE: Times cobbles something together, gets it up at 5:18 p.m., which is only six hours behind the offerings of an all-volunteer local political blog. It takes three bylines for the salaried Times scribes to get the story. Zev, sounding like Walter Moore circa 2009, totally turns states' evidence on the CRA, saying that redevelopment "evolved into a honey pot that was tapped to underwrite billions of dollars worth of commercial and other for-profit projects." LA's Tony Cardenas weeps that the action is "a major blow to the City of Los Angeles and its ability to recover from this economic recession."]

Merry Xmas!

2011-12-24T17:00:00.000-08:00

From me to you! Again, clocking out early and will clock in late. Merry Xmas to San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara and Summerland, to Ojai and San Francisco and Sacramento and San Diego, to Long Beach and Los Angeles and Los Osos and Los Olivos. See you on the other side of the weekend.

2011-12-24T10:06:00.000-08:00

One thing that has been obvious to me for about six months now is that I need to make some changes at the site. The other thing that has been obvious to me for even longer is--so do you.

The reasons I'm making some changes here follow. First, I will turn 55 in early February, and that is, by some measures, the shoreline of senior territory. Some of you are getting up there too--in fact, very few of you are getting younger. Myself, I am not one of these people who will hang on until the fingers are starting to turn blue and cold. But mostly, I will shake things up a little here because I also note that I am turning the exact same age as the average subscriber is to the Los Angeles Times and some other local newspapers. I will--I must--try to share more with those outside of my own immediate age group, especially by offering something here that is vastly dissimilar from those former fishwraps of record to which I contributed in the past.

I sense that whatever changes are coming here--and I don't even know which ones are coming yet--will err on the visual side. I feel more photographs and artwork and graphics coming on. So I have re-landscaped this blog to accommodate this. How I'll fill the new space...already it looks like something that needs to be filled, which is interesting to me.

There will probably be a few more tweaks through the month of January. As many of you know, I also am very active and interactive on social media too. This space must now work to complement that work, and that work complements what happens here.

In recent months I have also worried that those who express cautious interest in this site remain largely unaware that I write novels, poetry, and precious cultural snippings of critique. These writings in fact are what I am mostly known for to others, especially to friends--and these writings are the thing that I best like about myself. So ignoring that ascendant side won't happen here going forward. Whereas in the past I have even been reticent about my very identity here for the sake of driving a political narrative or two, going forward I won't be separating arts and culture from politics, or my name from what I do here.

There will be more coverage of national issues here this year, in part because this is an election year. And I already feel that when I write more about the city, there will be more sense of street life. I've written all my life and I'm not going to make this place, or any place, purely visual. But I do recognize that we live in the kind of city that demands a great emphasis on what we see here, and I expect the visual content to play a more important role here.

And how do you have to change? In my opinion, this way: you should increasingly recognize the ways that the Angeleno experience is a cosmopolitan one, beholden to nobody, and less a provincial suburban one, beholden to absentee landlords and narrow affinity groups. None of us should be hellbent on trying to turn this city into the next New York, the next Seoul, the next Zacatecas. The city is its own city, and not another's. The history of the city and the state does not come from elsewhere, and is not owned by those who live elsewhere; it is all right here, before us.

Peace and boat drinks,

Joseph Mailander

What we're doing here

2011-12-22T07:09:00.000-08:00

The call of the writer is to diagnose, not to cure. Gilles Deleuze said that, and I use it as an organizing principle for what I try to do here. It is distressing to some that they can't flip a switch and change things. Not to me; I try to hone what skills I have in a way that will help me diagnose what might be wrong with my environment and present those findings as clinically and yet also as convincingly as I can.

Along the way, I do try to shape opinion, especially by presenting healthy doses of it.

While I received extensive training in journalism early in life and have written opinion or news analysis for all major local publications at one point or another, I view what I try to do here at this blog more as civitas than journalism. I say it often: I'm not a journalist, I'm a writer. And writing as I practice it is a vocation, not a profession; this is certainly not a commercial site; I don't run ads here that are paid by others, and certainly no content here is paid for by anyone.

And while this is a public site, everything that goes on in its preparation is private. I don't like to talk behind people's back, nor do I even like to surprise people with whatever I'm working on. If disputes arise, which happens a lot--and should happen a lot, in the course of meaningful opinion writing--you generally hear from me, directly and privately, and the dialog stays mute on this end. This is not because I'm a hostile and confrontational guy; it is meant, in fact, to extend you the courtesy of entering a private conversation on whatever difference might exist between us when differences do occur.

At this site, I work largely alone, but sometimes with Debbie Cortez Lopez, especially when we interview civic figures. To her I owe an enormous amount of thanks. I also have cultivated relationships with many press officers around town, and while I don't want to single any out, as they are generally a self-effacing lot, devoted to those whom they serve, I do want to take this year-end opportunity to thank them for all the work they do. And a few people in media who similarly know who they are.

These past two weeks, I've been working on a year-end project that I have already shared glimpses of with many: evaluating the top ten local stories of 2011. This post will appear on Sunday night at 6 p.m. and stand here all through next week, while I step into the basement to prepare for whatever is next.

As you know if you read this site, this has been a dismal year for the City by nearly every measure. I've taken some time not merely to document the failures but especially to try to identify the forces that brought the failures into being. The piece is plenty long and it is plenty opinionated. There are eight negative stories, one half-positive one, and one of a neutral outcome (in my estimation). I have already taken the recommendations of many in preparing for it, and I'll probably continue to work on it right through its publication time. I think it will prove worthwhile reading. Happy holidays!

Times capitulates on local candidate discussions

2011-12-21T09:29:00.000-08:00

After three years of haggling, and though they will never admit it, it does indeed appear that the former fishwrap of record known as the Los Angeles Times has come around to taking action based on my sustained complaints since the 2009 election about the way its editorial board involves itself with local politics.

Robert Greene says today:

Members of the editorial board interviewed the candidates [in the CD 15 race] on Monday, and this time we tried something different. Endorsement meetings are usually off the record, but for the runoff we made our discussions on the record, and recorded them. Over the coming days we'll include on this blog recorded portions and/or transcripts of our discussions. And we'll be frank about what we thought of the candidates' answers to our questions.

If this remains practice going forward, I can safely feel like walking away from ceaselessly trying to keep these and some other people honest in the realm of local political coverage, and move on to other things that I like to do far better than that.

The newspapers, even though strapped, have far more resources available to them to carry on this type of valuable (but also admittedly unsexy) with local candidates. I hope it works out for them. It has also been indeed a pleasure to enrich the political dialog of the city over the past few years.

Why you should never, ever read the LA Times

2011-12-20T15:22:00.000-08:00

It fires people who write the truth, even in December, even people on the cusp of retirement, and keeps the liars, bunglers and publicists under employ.

Ed Padgett writes:

After working thirty-nine years, four months, and nine days for the Los Angeles Times I was informed over the phone by human resources that I was terminated on Monday December 12th, 2011. I had no clue I was under investigation, so it came as a shock to learn I was being investigated by human resources and terminated upon the completion of the so-called investigation.

I’m not at liberty to share why I was terminated or what my actions in response will be at this time; so stay tuned as this unfolds.

Indeed stay tuned. But not to the former fishwrap of record.

EARLIER:

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

Kinde Durkee, LA Weekly story far from adding up

2011-12-19T03:30:00.000-08:00

About a month ago, the Weekly dispatched Gene Maddaus to cover the Kinde Durkee story--which requires some financial imagination, as nothing solid is known on the alleged crimes even now--and the result was only fair-to-middling.

The long cover story that appeared this week--Kinde Durkee was trusted by California's Top Democrats--Until Millions of Dollars Vanished--often uses the word "embezzled"--suggesting that Kinde may have kept this money for herself, and absolves all others of potential blame.

The website's home page even says she "embezzled" millions.

But when push comes to shove, the story only suggests Durkee was incompetent--even that she had too big of a staff.

In point of fact, no details presented in the matter to-date suggest that she kept any money for herself, or even hid money anywhere.

A far more likely conclusion, in fact, is presented by a simple look at Durkee's long client list.

° ° ° ° °

From her list, it would be more fair to conclude that Durkee was always robbing Peter to pay Paul, and while many of her clients weren't in on the shell game, the few key ones, who doubled down on her services, were.

And from the recent actions of Durkee's clients, it would be more likely to conclude this too.

These are mostly very savvy people and groups. They include County party committees and even top law firms. And someone's embezzling from them?

Hah hah.

Again, take a good look at the long list of groups that she represented. As it happens, it is almost perfectly evenly distributed between candidates for office and organizations that support them. Attorneys too are on the list. Plenty of 501(c)(4)s--the infamous stripe of non-profit whose financial records aren't public. It's almost a perfect balance. It is really more like one giant corporation than like a mashup of four dozen fiddling candidates. It has its profit centers (fundraising orgs) and it has its accounts payable (candidates and consultants). It has a legal arm (Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, which offers its clients "integrated, relationship-based services"), a treasury side (county Democratic party groups), and many profit centers who likely don't even know what they're raising, in the form of Democratic clubs and activist organizations.

° ° ° ° °

If I can present an example of how stratified this all can be: here's the donor page, for instance, of one entity anyone with a suspicious mind would put on the Accounts Receivable side.

California College Democrats is a Durkee client based in Santa Barbara. (The site was all paid for by ActBlue, a nationwide organization--you can click a link to ActBlue too, for "recurrent contributions"--your money will be debited from your Visa like your gym bill is). California College Democrats is a very small account, generally under a $5,000 balance according to the books. Most all of it is paid for with credit card contributions.

And here's the records of its expenditures, in quarterly reports, filed with the FEC. The top "beneficiary" is one Ian Magruder, a student and political organizer at UC Berkeley, who gets generally under $1,000 in any period.

So here's what you have: a Cambridge, Mass. national organization, setting up and (legally) skimming a Santa Barbara statewide organization...awarding some of the money to a Berkeley beneficiary...and a treasurer who is handling it all from...Burbank.

Do you really think, given all that, that either California College Democrats (of Santa Barbara) or Ian Magruder (of Berkeley) were ever given accurate figures on contributions--from that office in...Burbank?

° ° ° ° °

This serves as a good backdrop for where Maddaus' story most disappoints: where did the money go?

He has nothing solid to say--nobody does at this point. But he doesn't asks people with financial background and experience in forensic accounting to speculate. Instead he asks Durkee's "victims"--people with vested interests in a hands-washing outcome--to speculate!

He writes:

The most intriguing mystery remains unsolved. Where did the money go?

It's clear from the federal complaint that some of it went to Durkee's personal expenses, such as her credit cards, her tax bills and her mother's nursing-home care. But that doesn't add up to the millions of dollars that have vanished.

It didn't go into real estate. After Durkee's arrest, the government launched a forfeiture action against her house and a condo in Long Beach. But the cases were dropped, likely because there was not enough equity in either property to make it worth the government's while. (The U.S. Attorney's Office declined to comment.)

In a third case, the government sought to seize Durkee's business headquarters. But the mortgage company objected, noting that Durkee had recently defaulted on her $660,000 commercial real estate loan. Durkee's stake in that property was worthless.

[...]

"I really don't know where all the money went," admits Grant Beauchamp, the auditor who unraveled the case.

Political professionals tend to be gossips, and in the days and weeks after Durkee's arrest, a number of theories made the rounds.

The most popular is that she had a secret gambling problem. Or perhaps she lost the money in the stock market. Yet another theory was that she had squirreled the money away in the Cayman Islands and was preparing to flee the country.

The most likely scenario is far less dramatic.

[...]
She never figured out how to maintain hundreds of clients, charging rock-bottom prices, while doing all the things that a modern campaign treasurer has to do. And so — to cover her payroll — she cheated.

"I've talked to a number of people who think she simply didn't charge enough money," says Renee Nahum, a political consultant and Durkee client. "She paid too many people. It didn't jibe. That money had to come from somewhere, and so she started moving money around."

Durkee employed more than 20 people. David Gould, who handles a comparable number of accounts, employs just seven.

To which you have to say--come on, people. Come on, Gene. Get a clue.

Take for a minute the actions of another Durkee client, Democratic Party of Orange County. This is a group that raises money for Orange County Democratic candidates.

It describes itself as "perpetually out of money." Its chairman, Frank Barbaro, has instructed its treasurer to withhold financial reports even from its own central committee.

I doubt he'd be acting that way if he thought he was a victim of "embezzlement." He'd want as many people as possible, not as few, looking at the reports.

If you can't find the money on Kinde Durkee, it most likely went to other candidates, or especially to the activist groups and privately reporting 501(c)(4)s those other candidates found convenient to order paid outside of their own campaign accounts.

My own suspicions: the more focused you stay in and around Burbank, the sooner investigators and media will discover where the money went.

But investigators will have to do the heavy lifting here before the real story gets told to the public, because media these days have very little financial imagination, and don't seem interested to ask people who do.

EARLIER:
Krekorian extension request curiouser and curiouser
Paul Krekorian's loan payback end-around

Hitchens/Snitchens

2011-12-16T08:53:00.000-08:00

There often comes a point in a lefty scribe's life when he may find it convenient to capitulate to conventional conservative wisdom: in Christopher Hitchens' case, he was both ferociously left and he was a hawk on the War in Iraq. So were half of America, if never quite half of England. An avowed atheist, he would at least have to give a nod to karma today, as the War--which nearly everyone now says was pointless--ends precisely as Hitchens himself expires.

But that was far from all he was contrary about. In fact, he seemed to live for the thrill of being contrary. It's cute when you know it a few days a year and tiresome when you endure it year in and year out.

I doubt that Hitchens would be consoled by effluent praise, even in death. Nor should we offer it; it's out of step with him. He was, in fact, part of a ceaseless logrolling society, as clubby Brits often form, including Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis. None are known for their character or moralizing, and that's a fine thing not to be known for if you're a writer. Hitchens also was a bit of a toper, but who isn't.

Is he a giant? He didn't write giant books; his books are, in fact, are not at all tame (good) but also not at all tight (bad). The Trial of Henry Kissinger, in fact, is a speculative mess. His book on the Clintons is a pastiche of the work of other journalists, a breeze blown to gale by Hitchens' bomb-throwing style (he shared much with Newt Gingrich in this). He even wrote a couple of them for hire. He was among the first to desecrate Mother Teresa. &c. He found the contrary notion and exploited it to the hilt.

He had phrases, good stock ones. He made for good copy. He thought to a degree most aren't privileged to, and he flaunted it. A coming biography will likely work well.

And? If his life has a "message", it's this one, found in Letters to a Young Contrarian--another book he wrote for hire:

Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the 'transcendent' and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.

It's a tosspot's toss-up, whether those imperatives are right or wrong. There is wisdom in them but they are scarcely adages. They sound like...Henry Miller. Almost exactly.

The GOP Iowa debate, live

2011-12-15T17:00:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the live-blogging of what figures to be the most intense, most critical debate the Republican party has experienced since last Saturday. Two of LA's top political desperadoes, Joseph Mailander of street-hassle and Phil Jennerjahn of The Jennerjahn Report, are watching this debate attentively for clues as to how the race for the GOP nomination will play out after tonight.

MAILANDER: Thank God they start these things at 6 Pacific. If I had to wait a minute longer, the Grey Goose would be toast.

Jennerjahn: In the interest of full disclosure, I think we should reveal our biases. I am fully supporting Governor Rick Perry for President in 2012, and I hope he does well in the debate tonight. My second favorite candidate is Michele Bachmann. I am not fond of Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich, as they are simply Big Government RINOs who will not reduce the size or scope of government power.

MAILANDER: And in the interest of full disclosure, I am rooting for the biggest of all possible trainwrecks. Though I do have a soft-spot for Bachmann. My view of those who populate the mainstream of the Republican party is so low that I think that only she can answer the call with any degree of credulity.

Jennerjahn: My fondness for Bachmann comes from the pureness of her ideology. She is the hardest-right Conservative in the race. The only reason I'm not backing her for President is that she has an awfully thin resumé and no record of accomplishments or results as far as getting things done. I think Perry has the better record with his long tenure in Texas, and that package of Conservatism and financial results will sell very well in the general election.

MAILANDER: I really think that this is it for Perry, unless he does something he's never done: have a good debate. If he doesn't, not all the media in Manhattan will move these cornlovin' folk.

Jennerjahn: Joseph, you are underestimating Perry's abilities as a campaigner. He has never lost an election. I met him at CPAC and he is great in person. Yes, he bungled some debate answers, but that is not what makes a great President. He has character, and integrity and vision...most of the other candidates don't. He needs to do well tonight to get some momentum re-started. But he was #1 in the polls at one point because he is a good candidate.

MAILANDER: Well, I'll leave you to Perry. I was talking to one of his aides a couple of weeks ago and he sort of reminds me of Kerry but without the debating skill. Very headstrong, can't be told he's doing much wrong. Kerry thought he would win by his sheer force of debating prowess; Perry can't be thinking that, but I wonder indeed how he thinks he's going to win.

But I think the most interesting part of tonight though will be the performance of Ron Paul. I think a lot of people in this state are giving him a second look after the last debate. Even last time, in 2008, a very prominent LA media figure asked me at the LA Press Club, "Is this guy for real?" I didn't know what to say--so I said, "No." But if he is to become for real, ever, it will likely be tonight.

Jennerjahn: Perry will be just fine due to his personal style of campaigning. He'll work his butt off in Iowa doing door-to-door if he has to. Ron Paul has too many Libertarian stances for me, but he is polling well in Iowa. I wouldn't be surprised if he pulls off an upset win. His supporters tend to be the fanatical type. Maybe they will be like Obama and bus people in from nearby states in order to win.

MAILANDER: I love these subliminal messages FAUX tries to spam its catatonic audience with:

Jennerjahn: Fox News is fair and balanced! Just like they say....

MAILANDER: "A vote for Ron Paul is a vote for Mitt Romney." Somebody said something true! Even if not technically.

Jennerjahn: Good that they are getting to the negative/suspicions question about Newt right away. It's one of the few things holding him back.

MAILANDER: Doesn't help Paul to say something wrong immediately. Weirdly, he says everyone on stage can beat Obama, but truth is nobody is leading him in any poll. And he's supposed to be the reality-based guy!

Jennerjahn: Ouch. Meagan Kelly just basically said "Rick Santorum, why does your campaign suck so bad!?"

MAILANDER: And he didn't need to respond at all--it's because he wears candy cane ties at Xmas time. Kinda makes him look elfin. At least Romney has a nice foulard. Republicans don't want no elfin preznits.

Damn, every time I hear that thing ding, I check my iPhone. Sounds like my email.

Jennerjahn: Huntsman makes catty comment about not attending Trump debate. I can't stand him.

MAILANDER: A what kind of radical, Newt? Sorry, I missed it. Stoli Whiskey? Stalin Nitzsche?

Jennerjahn: One of my Conservative friends had a really funny tweet about Romney throwing $10,000 cash in the air and saying "I'll make it rain up in here, bitches!" -- Wish I could go back and copy it, but feed is scrolling way too fast.

Jennerjahn: Governor Gary Johnson just tweeted that he is the only pro-choice candidate for the GOP. That's why he isn't onstage tonight.

Jennerjahn: Michele Bachmann looks and sounds great tonight. Good job bashing Gingrich and Fannie/Freddie. I get tired of Newt calling her a liar. He's the liar!

MAILANDER: Newt worked for Habitat for Humanity? OMG, someone needs to go nuclear now.

MAILANDER: Uh-ohs. Newt losing it now. Ron Paul secret weapon: Austrian economists. "Government-sponsored enterprise" will be a new Republican iTune. Bachmann "There's a big difference between a credit union and Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae." Damn straight. Bachmann tearing Newt up. Bachmann!

Jennerjahn: Ron Paul doesn't want to do anything as President. So why is he running?

Jennerjahn: Perry got the crowd fired up with his bashing on Congress and telling them to "go home" and serve part-time.

MAILANDER: Loved that schizo bit where Perry said Congress should work 140 days every other year and get a job the rest of the time. Each member only reps about 800,000 people.

MAILANDER: Newt as history prof bashing law schools--academic turf war. Someone please call the Chancellor to massage over this deplorable situation.

Jennerjahn: Jesus. Ron Paul is bringing the crazy again with his pacifist talk about Iran. I really cringe every time they ask him a national security question.

MAILANDER: I don't remember a more welcome break in recent teevee history.

Jennerjahn: Bachmann and Perry love the Keystone oil project. Me, too.

MAILANDER: Did anyone win foreign policy, Phil? I can't tell--I'm not part of the fear-based hegemony.

Jennerjahn: Bachmann was tough on foreign policy. Made Ron Paul look like a chump, although that isn't difficult. Rick Perry gave a good answer about Eric Holder and "Fast and Furious".

MAILANDER: Grinch, the bomb-throwing diva, used the big Pat Buchanan hate-term: "San Francisco." That's hardcore Republican code for "people with cooties." "Hollywood" can't be far behind.

Jennerjahn: Romney explains flip-flops on abortion. Bachmann bashes Romney & Gingrich on poor stances. Gingrich still calling her a liar by saying her facts aren't right. "I DO have my facts right!" she says. Slapping him around. Love it! Could be the moment of the night!

POST DEBATE ANALYSIS:

MAILANDER: Newt wasn't bad--until the end, when he tried to make Bachmann look bad, and Bachmann turned it around on him. Paul did not help himself--he will finish third. Perry and Bachmann made big strides I think. Romney probably sealed the deal, but everything got tighter. Thanks much for coming over, Phil! You helped my readers look a little more deeply into the Republican world.

Jennerjahn: I think several people did well. Romney was smooth, didn't get ruffled. Gingrich got slapped around a bit, but didn't get hurt too bad. Perry was down-to-earth and likeable. Bachmann was strong in her attacks on Romney and Gingrich. She fought back when Gingrich kept being condescending to her. Paul imploded with his nutty Iran answers. Huntsman and Santorum did little. They are out. We are down to 5: Gingrich, Romney, Paul, Perry and Bachmann. One of them will win Iowa, two or three others will survive to continue their campaigns.

Fear and Loathing on the Caucus Trail

2011-12-15T14:17:00.000-08:00

It's time for the last Republican debate in Iowa--which means it's the last Republican debate for two or three of our GOP Jeopardy contestants. This is, in fact, Double GOP Jeopardy!, where the answers double and the scores can really change. That's why your two resident patriots, tax-averse socialist yours truly and rightwing firebrand Phil Jennerjahn, are live blogging tonight's Iowa debate...in the same post. Right here at street-hassle. 5 p.m.; debate starts at 6 p.m. Pacific. Because the GOP deserves us. If you want to join the fun, join us right here!

It's come to this

2011-12-14T20:59:00.000-08:00

Your next City Council President, Herb Wesson, hard at work in chamber in 2004.

We're Number....58

2011-12-14T17:43:00.000-08:00

Where LA ranks on the list of major cities that are friendly to business. Thanks Antonio, thanks Eric!

LAT: Council, Mayor shocked re Housing Dept.

2011-12-14T15:24:00.001-08:00

The City Council and the Mayor proclaim themselves shocked to learn that the City's Housing Department is inadequately controlled. Then, they call on everyone else other than themselves to do something about it.

PS: here's but one op-ed I wrote in that former fishwrap of record--in 2006--about how the Mayor and Council was in full support of giving the Housing Department a billion more in the next election.

PPS: here's another from even earlier in which I wrote about the CRA maintaining different floors in different buildings for its own tenants, in the name of affordable housing.

PPPS: I want a pony too.

Herb Wesson: not found

2011-12-14T15:06:00.000-08:00

All of Council President-Elect Herb Wesson's previously issued press releases are coming up dry. I wonder why?

The Maharaja

2011-12-13T13:27:00.000-08:00

Does it work for you? Colorless business schlub Russ Stanton, who thought journalism was measured by clicks and door-prizes, is out at the LA Times, and in ten day's time colorful news schlub Davan Maharaj is becoming the Times' fifteenth editor.

Maharaj is said not to be interested in much outside of world events at all--he's been a newspaper man too long. His local roots are not too deep either--in fact, all of LA County is mostly something he skirts through. Despite much coming blather about global coverage &c., both Stanton and Maharaj cultivated their journalistic souls in the business section, which is the present Times hothouse for getting ahead.

And therein the bed is made. Maharaj, from Trinidad with the Indian roots, sees the world through a global and not much of a local lens, and is more intrigued by the bourgeoisie than the proles. One of the 45 people he follows on Twitter is Wendy Fitzwilliam, Miss Universe 1998, of Trinidad. He doesn't tweet himself--he appears not to know how with confidence. On the other hand, he has been a cricketeer with a little more confidence. One co-editor once complained that she "needs subtitles to understand him." He retains fervent cultural ties to the polyglot Caribbean, but cuisine at home is often Indian.

Home? Like any real hardcore ed-in-chief at the former fishwrap of record--and like many non-Anglos of privilege in SoCal--Maharaj has commuted from the OC for years, especially from Orange.

This is all sad news for those hoping that the next editor might clean house in the editorial-opinion section, because, like Stanton, Maharaj does not likely know what to buy for those pages, or even recognize that something's presently wrong with them. But he is a bit of a sports fan.

The Mayor, Council, and the Occupiers

2011-12-13T06:30:00.000-08:00

Thanks to CityWatch again for reposting an opinion and news analysis piece of mine that originally appeared here two days ago at street-hassle, suggesting that since the Mayor and Council welcomed the Occupiers to their park with open arms and coddled their cause throughout the occupation, then the Mayor and Council should pay for park repairs out of their own staff budgets.

And thanks also to Matt Welch @ Reason for reposting the piece too.

The Shame of Paul Koretz

2011-12-12T12:38:00.000-08:00

Opinion: City Council should save the city money and shoot down the Alarcon/Koretz-sponsored pitch by Johnny Cochran's old law firm to file a "reverse redlining" suit on behalf of the City against local banks. Such suits are based on flaky, partisan research, and have failed elsewhere.

Councilmember Richard Alarcon has some funny ideas about banking; I've watched them unfold with considerable interest.

Now he wants the City of Los Angeles to hire the firm that defended OJ--Johnny Cochran's old firm--to sue banks that extended credit to high-risk borrowers. A couple of out-of-it municipalities (Baltimore and Memphis) have done this inconclusively, and other cities have tried it and courts have shown them the door, but no place the size and scale of Los Angeles has done it.

The would-be minoritized here, backed by very suspicious, partisan research, which has been debunked by top-drawer research, are claiming "reverse redlining"--an odd scenario in which banks willfully extend tough-to-pay loans to minorities who might not qualify for loans with better terms.

In truth anyone in banking would be hard pressed even to fantasize of a scenario in which a bank would willfully extend a note on a property to a customer it knew it likely couldn't pay. This would force the result of the bank acquiring the property. Banks do not want to hold property...period. It's a nuisance for them to do so, and they always lose when they do. When they hold property, they miss payments on loans. Money is far more liquid than property, and therefore far more valuable to banks than property is, as the more liquid the asset, the closer to the core competency of the bank the asset remains. It's that simple. This is why the claims of those who have made up "reverse redlining" make absolutely no sense for banks with long traditions of banking wisdom behind them, and every banker knows that.

Nonetheless, we expect this of Alarcon by now. His view of banking is colored by his idea that home ownership itself is a civil rights issue. But it is an enormous surprise to see an ordinarily responsible lawmaker like Councilmember Paul Koretz backing this silly motion, penned by Alarcon, that would if successful bring the full force of shame of the nation's most esteemed banks, all for the sake of hoping to retain (at taxpayer expense) a law firm not known for its expertise in the financial service sector.

If you want the crudest ad hominem, you have the study of the nation's most esteemed east coast bank and one of its most esteemed ivies on one side, and on the other side you have the firm that sprung OJ and the Councilmember too afraid of the law even call police on a squatter in his own house. But that's a mere guilt-by-association argument; there are plenty of far better arguments against this motion coming before Council Wednesday. Council should bury all subsequent discussion of this; either send it back to committee or vote it down Wednesday. Don't waste money on this kind of frivolous suit, that has been dismissed three times out of five that it has been tried, and may face even more dismissal.

Pay for City Hall park repairs out of staff budgets

2011-12-12T06:07:00.000-08:00

Opinion: The money to repair City Hall's park at South Lawn should come out of the existing budgets of the Mayor and City Council staff, who gave scofflaw Occupiers free and unprecedented use of civic facilities, even while issuing capricious bills to organizations who use public facilities responsibly.

That's Public Works Commission president Andrea Alarcon on the left, explaining why she suddenly issued bills to the Sunset Junction Street Fair promoters for $240,000. And that's her father, Councilman Richard Alarcon, on the right, coddling the Occupiers at City Hall's south lawn with his "Responsible Banking" ordinance, even as the Occupiers paid nothing for their 60-day stay.

Now the Downtown News reports that the damage the Occupiers did to City Hall's lawns and park space will cost the City between $300-$400,000. The extra police hours will cost the City at least that much again, and perhaps up to three times that much.

What rankles here is that the City welcomed the Occupiers with such open arms--while making other groups with long histories of showing far more respect towards civic property pay for use of civic services.

The Mayor originally welcomed the Occupiers and even bought the Occupiers ponchos when it rained. Councilmember and Mayoral candidate Eric Garcetti, then Council president, told the Occupiers to "stay as long as you need to."

But when there are private vendors who solicit the use of civic property, these same civic figures increasingly asks the vendors themselves to pay for policing. Garcetti did so with the promoters of Sunset Junction Street Fair, ultimately killing the 31-year-old festival because he couldn't shake the promoters down this year for an extra $240,000. Councilmember Jan Perry and the Mayor also shook down the food vendors of Downtown Art Walk for $8,000 an evening when extra policing became an issue there. Andrea Alarcon has become the City's point person for such capricious and often unexpected billing, even as her father mollycoddled the protesters along with Garcetti, Bill Rosendahl and many others.

But City Council and the Mayor didn't bill the Occupiers. Instead, our top elected officials welcomed them with open arms. They bought them ponchos when it rained. They told them to "stay as long as you need to."

We have so many staffers in City Hall who are completely unresponsive to routine information requests of ordinary citizens. Communications directors and chiefs of staff--one per each Councilmember, and a larger staff for the Mayor--are asked to serve at the public's mercy, but instead they serve the capricious whims of their elected officials--and they are increasingly billing events organizations for providing them civic services. The City did not do this, however, with the Occupiers, ingrates who left a mess behind and hoped that the taxpayer would pick up after them.

The City itself made this mess, indeed invited it with open arms. As it increasingly asks responsible organization to pay for civic services, it should now pay to clean up the mess it created out of its own staff budgets. Dismissing unresponsive staffers who pick and choose whom to serve and whom to ignore would be the best place to start.

Trouble at Home

2011-12-11T10:16:00.001-08:00

I probably should not treat the new production of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in any thorough or rigorous way--after all, it does not treat the novel in any such way. I knew it was going to let me--let us--down, and it did. It is not an atrocity but it is not good either; most of all, it not only misses the literary but trades it for the vulgar. I am reminded by a quote by the horse racing writer Joe H. Palmer, "A man who would change it would stir champagne." They stirred.

To a fault, they stirred and stirred. They try to honor some of the scenes from the BBC production but these are mere lip-service. They do not honor the book much at all and do not even seem to know where they are dishonoring it (the idea that Jim Prideaux might lock and load on Bill Haydon right in broad daylight is so far from the book that it might as well be taken from a Tom Clancy novel). Mostly the production errs towards the macabre when it has to make a flavoring decision of its own, and while these are acceptable they are also often trite. One whole character, Ricky Tarr's unfortunate fling, seems to exist only to be violated again and again; that's not good. The macabre is gratuitous, often pointless, set in steampunk settings in London, Budapest, Istanbul. Nobody's going to want to join the Circus after seeing this film; everything's too neo-gothic.

I don't know that Oldmam is so much acting as mimicking. He is mimicking Alec Guinness who was acting like George Smiley. That's one step removed. We don't see the intellect, the Germanic rigor in him. He's not bad; he just brings nothing new; he is not Guinness, and I think he shouldn't have tried to have been.

We've also sacrificed the character of Ann for the character of--Connie Sachs? Not only that, but an extra-vulgar Connie Sachs. Why?

Also lost are the interactions between Prideaux and his best boy, Jumbo. There is so little of this that I wonder why they included Jumbo at all, except to lend more lip-service to the literary.

But the new production is, most jarringly, short on spycraft. The most glaring example is the scene in which Smiley ratchets up the pressure on Toby Esterhase, the Circus's chief lamplighter, on a runway with a plane approaching--it's in the trailer. The character of Toby in all the books is of a man who bends to ambition but not to pressure, and who is also one of the most acute observers of spycraft in existence. The Toby of the books is going to see that this is a shakedown and is confident enough of his abilities that even if he's obliged to board the silly plane he will work things out on the other end if things don't go his way. But no matter--he's certainly not going to whine and cry at the first breeze of such an obvious shakedown. The idea that Toby doesn't recognize that him being dragged off to a runway with a plane ready for takeoff is a shakedown attempt is a hideous violation of his character. And it's far too clumsy on Smiley's part to orchestrate as much. Not even Whitehall would greenlight that kind of a use of Her Majesty's test strip.

The other thing that rang uncomfortably untrue to me in the new production was the holiday party, which is revisited in flashback after flashback. It is cheap, tawdry, and most of the time looks like the people who write The Office temporarily took over the script.

Maybe they should have taken over more of it.

Krekorian extension request curioser and curioser

2011-12-10T04:38:00.001-08:00

"The problem I am having...is that we can't get any information on what bills to pay, to see what checks have been deposited, to see what we owe," Councilmember Paul Krekorian told Rick Orlov at the LA Daily News two days ago, about his hopes to extend a loan payback window, which Orlov dutifully reported. The senior City Hall scribe also noted that "Krekorian has a debt of more than $74,000 - most of it owed to his campaign manager, Eric Hagopian [sic]."

Puzzling, i'n't it? How you can know with certainty that you owe more than $74,000, and most of it to your campaign manager--and yet also claim you don't know what you owe? And how does not even being able to see what bills you owe translate into extending an Ethics Commission debt payback window, rather than the usual kinds of redress for a delinquent bill?

Not to know what was paid and what wasn't at this stage suggests that when Krekorian did business with his alleged felonious treasurer Kinde Durkee--who was responsible for paying Hacopian--only Durkee and nobody else, including Krekorian and Hacopian, had access to the campaign's ledgers, bank statements, accounts payable, &c. That's also hard to understand.

In fact, I can't think of any ways how Krekorian can not know what has cleared and what hasn't, after all this time has gone by since the accounts have been frozen. When a bank freezes an account because of legal intervention or garnishment, they don't freeze the statements too, of course. You already have those in pocket up to a time. When the customer receives a notification that an account is frozen, that customer is encouraged to go to anyone holding any outstanding checks and tell them that the account is frozen; otherwise, items will indeed come back NSF. There's really not a lot to sort out.

The only way it could be true that he doesn't know how much he owes is if he or his staff doesn't even have access to his own campaign's bank statements on the problem frozen account. But even if that is so--if he indeed doesn't know--then how can Krekorian then be certain that the city's Ethics Commission needs to "allow an extension of the fundraising window for committees that may have been affected by the recent investigations" as he's proposed?

Of course, because accounts are frozen doesn't mean that ledgers are. If your treasurer isn't sharing accounts payable information with you--and you can't even tell, say, how much you've already paid Eric Hacopian as of any given moment--that may not precisely mean that you've set yourself up for victimization, but a little more financial due diligence than that would certainly be a reasonable expectation of a public servant.

I'd more expect something like this from, say, Councilwoman Jan Perry--who at a recent meeting in Venice couldn't even state with certainty the size of the City budget. But I don't expect it from Councilmember Krekorian, who once was enough of a budget analyst to tell me with perfect confidence that the City of LA could not "borrow against structural deficits" to solve its finance troubles.

EARLIER

Paul Krekorian's loan payback end-around

LA Photo Metaphor in Progress

2011-12-09T12:11:00.001-08:00

Sepulveda Pass buckling, "No major threat reported." Photo/twitpic by Antonio Castelan, NBCLA.

CityWatch, some Alarcons, and moi on LA banking

2011-12-09T07:22:00.000-08:00

Thanks to CityWatch again for picking up a piece that appeared here earlier this week on Richard Alarcon's responsible--and irresponsible--banking measure before City Council. My piece contends that the action, while well intended, would bar the very banks that acted most responsiblly in the run-up to the financial meltdown, and would give a nod to banks that would make the City's financial structure less competitive.

It also notes how civic leaders from the 1990s, notably from the Latino left, ironically pushed for the kind of easing of credit that led to the financial meltdown in the first place, and finally found their easy credit not from today's top banks, but from banks like CountryWide, IndyMac, and Washington Mutual--the ones who targeted Latinos, and that the bigger banks were obliged to take over when the easy credit banks when belly up.

On a tangential note, I was amused to listen another Alarcon, Alicia Alarcon (not to be confused with Andrea Alarcon, Richard's daughter and the mayor's appointee to top the Public Works Commission, and also known around here as the Mayor's killjoy), chime in from yet another quarter.

Alicia Alarcon hosts a Spanish-language radio show in the Univision sphere, and it turns out she is also very concerned about banking in these parts. She is trying to help Spanish-speakers to save homes, which is good. And two days ago, she invited the lead attorney from the County's real estate fraud unit on her show, to talk about...something.

It was kind of a set-up, mostly devoted to implying to Spanish-speaking listeners who face foreclosure that they haven't been so much victims of too-easy credit terms but victims of an actual crime of real estate fraud, and I wish I could have told the attorney ahead of time that it would be. The interview transpired in English.

Alicia's questions were almost angry in their tone. Why have Latinos been victimized, where can Latinos go when they're being foreclosed on, why isn't the County doing more for Latinos, &c. The attorney was obliged to try to remind gently to his host that (despite his Latino surname) he represents all of the people of the County of Los Angeles, &c..

To the District Attorney's office, and to most who practice real estate law, real estate fraud mostly happens when people steal titles (and thereby properties) that aren't rightfully theirs. But to Alicia Alarcon, real estate fraud mostly happens when Latinos sign loan docs on which they later default.

Thus, in this past week, I found there to be a very wide and seemingly La Raza-defined chasm regarding the what constitutes responsible banking and real estate fraud among some Alarcons and the rest of us.

Paul Krekorian's loan payback end-around

2011-12-07T12:30:00.000-08:00

Opinion: the City's Ethics Commission should not indulge Councilmember Krekorian's request to re-write campaign finance for the worse by extending a key loan payback window.

I tried to give up on Councilmember Paul Krekorian a couple of months ago, when one of his many exhausting, combative staffers snarled at me that I "went yellow" on his office's handling of the SB1818-styled Samoa Avenue affordable housing project, even after that office failed to respond to my many futile inquiries on the topic.

This was completely astonishing, this finger-wagging from an empowered City staffer and civil servant (granted one half my age), hectoring a lowly local scribe for simply trying to understand what the hell was going on with a sixty-plus unit Section-8-plex on a street without sidewalks. The public servant, who is there by the grace of the taxpayer's nickels, is supposed to serve the citizen, and not vice versa.

So I was simply ready to give up on him, with the idea of letting him walk whatever sunny path he was on for a while. But never mind all that now.

Now it's nearly two months later, and Krekorian has topped even his own staffers in sheer audacity; in fact, the former campaign finance reformer has now even topped his own previous flop on that key SB1818 project. The Councilmember, whose own recent campaign finances were handled by suspected felon Kinde Durkee as some others in the City and State were, is now pleading for a longer window in which to retire campaign debt than the City's guidelines presently allow--and has the audacity to blame the Durkee situation on the proposal.

Emphasizing that Durkee was always hired, according to Democrats, in perfect good faith, Krekorian's name appears more often in conjunction with Durkee's than any other on a client list from the Sacto Bee, according to this excerpt from the Democratic website Daily Kos:

....IRVINE CITY EMPLOYEES ASSOCIATION PAC
JOBS AND ECONOMY VOTER GUIDE
KENNEDY DEMOCRATS OF THE SAN FERNANDO VALLEY
KREKORIAN 2010, CALIFORNIANS FOR PAUL
KREKORIAN 2010, CALIFORNIANS FOR PAUL
KREKORIAN 2010, CALIFORNIANS FOR PAUL
KREKORIAN 2010, CALIFORNIANS FOR PAUL
KREKORIAN FOR CITY COUNCIL 2009 - GENERAL
KREKORIAN FOR CITY COUNCIL 2009 - GENERAL
KREKORIAN FOR CITY COUNCIL 2009 - GENERAL
KREKORIAN FOR CITY COUNCIL 2009 - GENERAL
KREKORIAN FOR CITY COUNCIL 2009 OFFICEHOLDER
KREKORIAN FOR CITY COUNCIL 2009 OFFICEHOLDER
KREKORIAN FOR CITY COUNCIL 2009 OFFICEHOLDER
KREKORIAN FOR CITY COUNCIL 2009 OFFICEHOLDER
KREKORIAN FOR CITY COUNCIL 2009 OFFICEHOLDER
KREKORIAN FOR CITY COUNCIL 2011
KREKORIAN FOR CITY COUNCIL 2011
KREKORIAN FOR CITY COUNCIL 2011
KREKORIAN FOR CITY COUNCIL 2011
KREKORIAN, FRIENDS OF PAUL
KREKORIAN, FRIENDS OF PAUL
KREKORIAN, FRIENDS OF PAUL
KREKORIAN, FRIENDS OF PAUL
LIEU FOR ATTORNEY GENERAL 2010, TED...

As Krekorian's name is far more listed in conjunction with Durkee than any other Democrat's is, you get a feeling that the Councilmember's ties to Dundee are indeed extensive.

To quote from the recommendation...

The city's existing campaign finance law prohibits candidates from doing any fundraising for a campaign committee nine months after the date of the election for which the committee was formed (LAMCSection 49.7.7(B))...

I THEREFORE MOVE that the City Council REQUEST that the City Ethics Commission consider and report to Council in 30 days regarding potential administrative action or actions to allow an extension of the fundraising window for committees that may have been affected by the recent investigations and surrounding circumstances...

This comes along with a request for recommendations for revisions--details the devil will hold dear.

The truth is that in the context of the Move to Request, the Durkee cause celebre is a complete red-herring, having absolutely nothing to do with ability to pay back a loan, of course. If you borrowed to pay an alleged crook, you borrowed to pay an alleged crook, and nobody in real life gives you an extension for that--so why should the City?

But this request has further reaching ramifications than Krekorian's own case. What Krekorian is really asking for here is a more extensive ability for prospective office-holders to borrow against their own injudiciousness while spending money like drunken sailors in the final days of a civic campaign.

Granting a larger window in which to pay back campaign debts will only grant candidates an ability to spend more. In short, his hope is to give an opportunity for the most daring gambler-debtors a chance to extend their debt enough to game a race their way should they be unlucky enough to raise enough cash to compete, but then lucky enough to borrow enough to win--as Krekorian himself was, going against the Mayor's sputtering and largely disgraced machine at the best possible time but with what he feared were inadequate resources.

As anyone can readily see, this hope to tilt the local casino odds more favorably towards the biggest political debtors is very far from a progressive attitude towards campaign finance.

The City of Los Angeles's Ethics Commission should not indulge this request of Krekorian's/Council's. The measure threatens to turn elections into a poker game in which not the sharpest campaigner but the biggest bettor stands to benefit the most. That is precisely the kind of fiscal impropriety that put the City into its present financial strait-jacket in the first place.

While watching the Councilmember pivot like Shaq in the lane on campaign tenets like campaign finance reform and SB1818 opposition, even while suffering the insolence of his petulant, Masada-like staff, the residents of the City of Los Angeles have not got what they bargained for when they voted for Paul Krekorian. Not a new story--Councilmember becomes something he assured us he wasn't--but a surprising one in this case.

Other staffs respond to and through criticism, and keep responding to and through it, gladly and with grudging good cheer. But Krekorian's staff still bristles at all opposition. And here in this latest action, the Councilmember appears to be not only following the lead of his wagon-circling troupe, but actually out-flanking them, to change the law about raising money while he can. How quickly the promising can fall from grace!

Parke Skelton--relic?

2011-12-06T17:47:00.001-08:00

Joe Buscaino, according to polling, is going to be our City's next Councilmember, despite his personal insolvency, his closet Republican-ness, and especially despite the wishes of not only the Mayor but also the entire City Council of the City of Los Angeles.

In fact, as Chic Anderson said of Secretariat at the top of the stretch at the Belmont, Buscaino "is in a position that seems impossible to catch."

And Warren Furutani, Assemblymember and friend of the Mayor, will not get to ride into office from the lower chamber the way so many others have before him.

This is a new day in local politics, and it is a new day that the old guard has been very slow to acknowledge (John Shallman is equally clueless about it as Parke Skelton is; among the old guard, only Harvey Englander seems to have been willing to learn a few new tricks to stay competitive in local races).

For nearly a decade, the old guard has believed that nothing meaningful happens citywide unless it happens on television--and they also believed that in Council races, nothing meaningful happens unless it happens along a carrier route. But recent results have proven that where all the real action unfolds in Council races is in the blogosphere and the media it most impacts, social media--the media element both Skelton and Shallman have completely shunned.

Some of the younger consultants seem aware, for instance, as Skelton and Shallman do not, that more people read many local blogs and are impacted by their social media presence every single day than line a community parade route one time a year.

So sayonara Furutani--and sayonara Parke. A new crop of consultants, all under fifty, will, after the coming Furutani debacle, have officially taken over, and it will be impossible for the old guard to disguise for much longer that they have after that.

You really see it in open seat races, where there is no incumbent to skew results.

Frankly, this day comes not a moment too soon, as the condescending arrogance Skelton and Shallman have shown the local blogosphere has long been nettlesome to nearly everyone who actually shapes local political opinion. But this is the kind of result Skelton and Shallman deserve for imagining that mainstream media access and direct mail marketing could conspire to keep them winning races forever. The men who all but ignored the impact of the blogosphere on races in the previous decade will likely have the favor returned on them for the subsequent one--one already has, in fact, and the other is waiting in the wings.

Alarcon's Responsible--and Irresponsible--Banking

2011-12-05T15:11:00.001-08:00

In his "Responsible Banking Act," Councilmember Richard Alarcon would like the City of Los Angeles to show preference to small financial institutions rather than large ones. This may mean, for instance, shifting the City's payroll account from its longtime home to a smaller bank.

There are two problems with this homespun, well-intended ordinance. One is that the top banks that are the target of Alarcon's actions--Wells, BofA, Citi, and Chase--were not at all (repeat: not at all) responsible for the financial markets debacle of 2008. Quite conversely, they were all among the stingiest banks around when it came to issuing bad home loans. It was the banks they were asked by the government regulators to acquire--CountryWide, IndyMac, Wachovia, and Washington Mutual--who were the real culprits on the banking side of the meltdown (it was AIG on the insurance side, and many investment banks on the mortgage-backed securities side).

I have likened blaming these big banks for what happened to blaming a stingy, responsible aunt who took in a delinquent nephew--a delinquent nephew who ran up gambling debts so high that his debt threatened the whole economic structure of the town. Blaming the stingy aunt for being solvent and taking the prodigal nephew in is wrong--and it is also the great error of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Blame auditors, yes, and blame the actual perpetrators like IndyMac and CountryWide (who both preyed on the kind of low-income, ESL borrowers that populate Alarcon's district and are responsible for his district having the highest foreclosure rate in the city), but don't blame the people who did not offer the flaky loans in the first place.

The second great problem with Alarcon's Responsible Banking action is that it was politicians like Alarcon, right or wrong, who were begging these very same banks--the big banks--to ease lending in the run-up to the financial debacle. Yes, politicians on the left, for whom housing and home-ownership was a "civil right"--as Alarcon himself described it to me last summer--were begging the big banks to ease their credit lines the way that the irresponsible bankers at CountryWide and IndyMac were easing them. In short, all through the zeroes, Alarcon and company--Garcetti, Villaraigosa, etc,--were on the side of the delinquent nephews, not on the side of the stingy, responsible aunts. The whole phenomenon of "liar loans"--which the top banks like Wells and BofA wouldn't go near--was part and parcel of an effort in the late 1990's and early zeroes to get disenfranchised, and often insolvent, workers and even non-workers into homes. Some bankers at this time even derided these lenders as making "NINJAA loans"--No Income, No Job At All Loans.

Once the people from the City's Treasury Management division weigh in on this Ordinance, I doubt it will go far. It is hard to imagine a small bank offering the kind of products and services a big City--one with a Mayor doing business in Asia and Latin America--needs to stay solvent and to lure business. It's already hard enough to get paid by the City of Los Angeles--it won't be any easier if the City settles on a local bank with a puny track record at wire transfers or bankers' acceptances, and who are baffled when it comes to referrals for bond construction or capital markets investments. A big city, alas--certainly one with a $7 billion budget--needs a big, sturdy, responsible bank to do its financial business.

Jim Newton now wants DWP rate hikes...

2011-12-05T09:34:00.000-08:00

It's shocking how former news schlub who was once interested in covering local government could become such a willful handmaiden to it.

But look at this: Jim Newton, who might as well be working for the city's PR office at this point, now says that to solve its problems, we all need to pay the DWP more.

Worse, he offers no supporting arguments other than this one:

But this isn't about union politics. DWP users pay far less for their water and power than customers in other California jurisdictions. Even with this hike, they'd still pay less.

In other words, let's not weigh the atrocious service and insouciance we get from our power agency. Technically, we pay a little less than some others for this atrocious service. Therefore, we should pay more.

Newton would have us ignore the fact that the average line worker at the DWP makes over $100,000 a year. He pretends to be totally unaware that salaries are so bloated at the agency that the DWP's PR office mostly makes more than the editorial staff of the LA Times. He seems completely oblivious to the fact that the DWP has been squandering money on the water side that could have been spent improving the city's infrastructure on the power side.

No, he thinks that the DWP will be fixed if only we all pay a little more.

Fortunately, nobody now listens to a word he says except the government agencies that game him. Unfortunately, the people at local news stations who once looked to the Times op-ed page for insight into civic problems now have nothing to follow from it except amplifications of the city's own press releases.

What a disaster for the City of Los Angeles the local paper's investment in this incompetent fool has been! He's engineered a complete commentary vacuum at the top of Los Angeles mainstream media opinion writing. He's a worthless, obsequious fool, a willful cudgel for the powerful, and a total tool of local government; he is the precise opposite of what an opinion writer should be.

EARLIER:

Jim Newton: Doubling down on incompetence
Jim Newton as moderator
Newton hypes Janis, LAANE yet again
Madeline Janis "tight as ticks" with Times, Newton
Boycott Amazon? Garcetti might like to...
Madeline Janis in the headlights

Low Rider in San Pedro

2011-12-04T16:57:00.001-08:00

Did the Mayor loan you that low rider, Furutani? Did it come with a chauffeur too?

EAP

2011-12-04T04:50:00.001-08:00

While not everyone likes the poetry of even the most noted poets of today, almost everyone likes the poetry of the orphan who came to be known as Edgar Allan Poe. It also bears an indelible cadence: if you read a line or two to a friend, the friend will likely be able to identify it as Poe's, even if not recalling either poem or lines around it.

Poe had a great mind, and messed with it: he let it run everywhere, including to drink and ruin, and also to science and mystery. While not a scientist, he was really the first person to articulate Olbers' Paradox, and even upstaged the Big Bang with a similar theory of his own by almost a century. He also is widely credited with inventing the detective story and was keenly absorbed by the tough art of cryptography.

What I find most intriguing about Poe, however, is how his reputation survived all attempts to tarnish it. Not only has it survived the sharp criticism of the likes of T.S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley. It survived and even thrived despite almost nobody liking the man at the time of his death.

As one of the first Americans to make a living by means of writing, Poe was obliged to be a social critic, and he was a harsh one. Dying at 40, he outlived few of his many enemies, and once safely silenced, those enemies indeed brought out the knives. Even his New York Tribune obituary began:

Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it.

The first Poe "biography," in fact, is a hatchet job of lies and stories that cast Poe in the worst light. Yet within a generation, everyone knew Poe's name, and nobody recalled the name of Rufus Wilmot Griswold, whose name is cast ever in darkness as the man who held enough of a grudge against Edgar Allan Poe that he tried to sully him even in death.

That fact alone is an encouraging and uplifting enough story, certainly even more uplifting than any that Poe as one of our darkest scribes ever penned. And it's a grand lesson to scribes who dare to write about their fellow scribes: you can control what you write, but you can't control what your reader takes from it; not at all.

Readers hear tones in text that writers can't hear themselves. They can recognize it almost instantly when a writer is being petty, vindictive, mean-spirited, or just plain surly. The greatest slimes are often simply met with chuckles and rolled eyes. When a writer is lying--even lying to himself--you generally can see it at a glance. Those who tried to kill Poe even after he was dead were simply jealous of one touched by fire, and it showed.