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ERIC PREVEN’S NOTEBOOK - As the new year begins we are—I am—deeply grateful.
The Los Angeles City Council was originally set to begin its winter recess on December 7, but it approved a motion by Council President Paul Krekorian to delay it until December 14. The reason had to do with Nury Martinez's implosion and the election of Imelda Padilla. In any case, the recess has been extended up to January 10 rather than January 3.
Rest easy! We'll be back with a national championship (maybe)! By we, I mean, The University of Michigan!
Jim Harbaugh who brings weapons-grade intensity (including the intelligence-gathering capacity of a sneaky world power) to the fight for greatness told a reporter, “I don’t get sick. I don’t observe major holidays. I’m a jackhammer.”
Harbaugh is our jackhammer. Go Blue!
Every year around this time we tell the third-grade anecdote. It tells you everything you need to know.
Halfway through 1973, a new third grader arrived in Ann Arbor. “My name is Jim Harbaugh. We moved here because my dad is going to help us win some more football games. And when I’m older I’m going to be the quarterback for the Wolverines.”
The third graders must have been intrigued.
At the usual time for recess, everyone was saying, “Jim do you play basketball?” "You want to be on my team?” “Hey, Jim, be on my team!”
During the actual recess, there was a full-blown melee on the playground. At the end of it, the teacher sat the whole grade down and said, “What happened out there?”
Everyone cried, "Jim, wouldn’t pass the ball!”
The teacher, said, "Is that true, Jim? Why wouldn’t you pass the ball?”
Harbaugh replied, “Why would I? I’m better than all of them.”
From there on in, he became known as Hogball.
Go Blue!
Read the article (gift link — no paywall).
The Los Angeles Times offered a slimmed down 26% of the pages offered by the New York Times on the Sunday edition for December 31, 2023, the last day of the year. Specifically…
The LA Times offered a 60-pager comprised of … page number sections
16 Cover
10 Calendar
8 Sports
10 Weekend
12 Calendar
4 Comics
The New York Times offered a 229-pager comprised of... page number sections
30 Cover
16 Style
12 Business
12 Opinion
75 Magazine
12 Kids
23 Book review
16 Arts & Leisure
33 Special Ukraine
Davenport, Get In Here:
"My wish is for my dad to never forget how much I love him. #dementiacaregiver."
While the L.A. County Board of Supervisors recognizes the right of its employees to strike, it must also take all necessary actions to protect the health, safety, and welfare of the constituents the County serves in the days leading up to, including, any work action.
For this reason, the Board authorized DHS to enter into personnel contracts on a sole source basis at augmented rates including but not limited to prevailing or market rates, so that it could remain staffed during the strike and negotiate higher-than-usual payments if patients needed to be transferred to other facilities.
Including but not limited to personnel services contracts, to mitigate the risk of any direct or ancillary services gaps, augment existing rates of payment, waive inclusion of standard terms and conditions, such as insurance and indemnification, and take any other contracting actions necessary to ensure that the Department can augment staffing or otherwise respond during any strike; and to allow DHS to transfer patients to private or other suitable healthcare facilities and reimburse those providers at augmented rates.
So, you'll pay people right if you're desperate, but if the workers are desperate you will negotiate harder?
Davenport, get in here!
A Gust From The South:
In addition to the attorneys who made their way to courtroom 7D to support Ridley-Thomas, there were also physicians, corporate heads, an array of well-known religious figures, deans and professors at universities other than USC, child welfare experts, youth justice experts, former staff members, multiple clusters of longtime constituents, the head of one of California’s largest philanthropic foundations, and the attorney wife of one of the best known and most beloved public affairs commentators, who came to represent both herself and her husband.
WitnessLA adored Mark Ridley-Thomas. Celeste Fremont wrote in her blog that a significant portion of LA residents shared the belief that a shattering miscarriage of justice has taken place that should terrify all of us.
The right to a trial by jury, she noted, is enshrined in the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and also in Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution itself. (“The Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury.”) Thomas Jefferson had this to say on the matter: “I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.”
Yet, according to a 2018 report by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), the jury trial has become such a rarity it is teetering at the edge of extinction. “Over the last fifty years”, wrote the NACDL authors in their report, “trial by jury has declined to the point that it now occurs in less than 3% of federal criminal cases.” (In state cases, that figure hovers at around 6%.) Thirty years ago, federal defendants chose to go to trial at least 20% of the time.
Now, there is a stack of evidence that criminal defendants—both at the federal and state levels, whether innocent or guilty—are being coerced to plead guilty because the penalty for exercising their right to a trial, if they lose, is simply much too high to take the risk “Plea bargaining as currently practiced is often unjust, unfair and lacks transparency,” writes the American Bar Association of a February 22, 2023 report on the topic released by the ABA’s Plea Bargain Task Force. The report has a great deal to say about what is known as the trial penalty.
WitnessLA claimed it “is arguably likely that the prosecutors expected Ridley-Thomas to eventually take a deal, as a list of other local office holders and LA officials had recently done. There was, for example, the federal bribery and corruption case against former Los Angeles City Council member, Mitchell Englander who, in March of 2020, pled guilty to lesser charges and received a sentence of 14 months in a federal prison, and paid a fine of $79,830.
Then, in December of 2021, David Wright, the former general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, rather than going to trial, pled guilty to a federal charge for accepting high ticket bribes in a multi-million dollar pay-to-play scheme.
A month before, in a related case, attorney Paul Paradis, an ex-special counsel for Los Angeles, had agreed to plead guilty to a single federal count of bribery for accepting a nearly $2.2 million kickback for arranging a lawsuit against the LA Department of Water and Power.
And in January of this year, former LA County Council member, Jose Huizar, took a plea deal rather than continue to fight federal racketeering charges from 2020, in which government prosecutors alleged he received $1.5 million in bribes from local real estate developers. He has yet to be sentenced.
Of course, Curren D. Price of the new ninth is still on the hot seat.
MRT’s new four-person team is made up of lawyers who are particularly experienced when it comes to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal, notably including Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California Berkeley School of Law.
MRTs team has launched a Batson challenge, claiming two black female jurors were removed.
The government argued that there were jurors of races other than solely white jurors on the panel. MRTs team said that didn’t fix the problem of the prosecution eliminating the only two Black women from the jury. In Ridley-Thomas’s case, the defense moved, “the prosecutor claimed it had removed Juror No. 1, the last Black female in the panel because when the allegations were read aloud, ‘she was shaking her head and she had her head tilted downward,’ she had sunglasses on and took them off only when the Court addressed her, and she was at that time unemployed.’”
The defense objected to this explanation saying they had not seen Juror No. 1 shake her head and noted, “that the other reasons given are the type of reasons frequently used as pretexts to remove Black jurors.”
Furthermore, the defense added, that when Judge Fischer denied the final Batson motion during jury selection, she remarked that she had not “personally observed the juror’s disputed demeanor.”
Dr. Ridley-Thomas’ attorneys claim that they will raise this and other “substantial questions” on appeal “that are likely to result in reversal, a new trial, or, at minimum, a substantially reduced sentence.”
Others feel MRT lucked out with this short sentence because there is way more and worse that hasn’t been held accountable for.
His attempts to minimize his involvement and accept ZERO responsibility is off-putting.
One nasty reader wrote, “He needs to stop playing the martyr and victim. He’s nothing more than a nasty narcissistic political bully.”
Your time has expired.
Paul Krekorian and Marqueece Harris-Dawson.
The Hammer: Comer al aire libre:
Lulu is the Hammer’s acclaimed restaurant led by chef, writer, and cookbook author David Tanis and conceived with legendary chef and food activist Alice Waters. It’s pleasant.
At lunch, Lulu offers a daily changing three-course market menu as well as an à la carte selection of salads, soups, sandwiches, light lunch fare, coffee, tea, and desserts.
The price fixe lunch, the other day, was offered at $45. It consisted of three courses, including a nice piece of fish, an appetizer and a dessert.
Lunch is served Tuesday through Sunday. A bar menu is available throughout the day.
As I made my way through, “The Pritzker Court” at the Hammer in the unceded land of the Tongva people, I had to reflect on how irritating the fact that big money that makes so many good things possible… like the Hammer, can also be put to bad uses, like the Harvard-Westalke Bad River Plan in Studio City.
The food and ambience were both first rate and the place felt like a real reflection of an authentic Los Angeles culture.
Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living was the sixth iteration of the Hammer’s biennial exhibition highlighting the practices of artists working throughout the greater Los Angeles area.
These practices embrace the value of craft, materiality, performance, and collectivity. The biennial situates art as an expanded field of culture that is entangled with everyday life; community networks; queer affect; and indigenous and diasporic histories. The show ended on the last day of 2023.
Admission to all exhibitions and programs at the Hammer Museum is free. Tuesday-Sunday: 11am to 6pm. Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Boulevard at Westwood, Los Angeles. Onsite parking $8 (maximum 3 hours) or $8 flat rate after 5 p.m. Visit hammer.ucla.edu for details or call 310-443-7000.
FREE: One wonders, Will the George Lucas museum be free? It better be.
The Hammer Museum is part of the School of the Arts and Architecture at UCLA, and offers exhibitions and collections that span classic to contemporary art. It holds more than 50,000 works in its collection, including one of the finest collections of works on paper in the nation, the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts. Through a wide-ranging, international exhibition program and the biennial, Made in L.A., the Hammer highlights contemporary art since the 1960s, especially the work of emerging and under-recognized artists. The exhibitions, permanent collections, and nearly 300 public programs annually— including film screenings, lectures, symposia, readings, music performances, and workshops for families—are all free to the public.
Former Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva has agreed to testify before the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission about deputy gangs inside the department, according to a letter from his attorney to the panel. Villanueva resisted a subpoena from the panel for more than two years.
He had argued in court that the commission doesn’t have the authority to force a sitting sheriff to testify under oath. Villanueva left office in 2022.
The letter did not state why Villanueva decided to testify now.
But the answer is self-evident. He is currently running for county supervisor against powerful incumbent Janice Hahn in the fourth district. He needs all the press that he can get.
Irena Boulevard:
These groups, including Bob Blumenfield, are supporting the Battle of the Bands! Yay!
This is in addition to sponsoring the best damn legal fireworks display in the valley. The First Round for Battle begins 1/22.
Hey, why not name an NHL practice facility after Blumenfield? Or possibly Warner Center?
I'm sure they could make room for the termed-out... West Valley Titan...
Any objections to The Blumenfield-Warner Center?
Or maybe we should recognize real heroes...
Irena Stanisława Sendler also referred to as Irena Sendlerowa in Poland, nom de guerre Jolanta, was a Polish humanitarian, social worker, and nurse who served in the Polish Underground Resistance during World War II in German-occupied Warsaw.
During WWII, Irena got permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto, as a plumbing/sewer specialist. She had an 'ulterior motive'...
She knew what the Nazi's plans were for the Jews (being German). Irena smuggled infants out in the bottom of the toolbox she carried and she carried in the back of her truck a burlap sack (for larger kids) .
She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers, of course, wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the kids/infants' noises...
During her time of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants. She was caught, and the Nazis broke both her legs, arms and beat her severely.
Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out and kept them in a glass jar buried under a tree in her backyard.
After the war, she tried to locate any parents that might have survived it to reunite the families. Most had been gassed. Those kids she helped got placed
into foster family homes or adopted.
Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize in the mid two thousands... she was not selected, Al Gore won that year for a slide show on global warming. He was ahead of the curve on climate...
Let us never forget!
October 7:
“But nobody had trained to repel an invasion.”
(Eric Preven is a longtime community activist and is a contributor to CityWatch. The opinions are of Mr. Preven and not necessarily those of CityWatchLA.com.)
