Thursday Hotsheet at 3 a.m.

JM, Beach Day, 3.14.08


Joseph Mailander a guy in la • elsewhere • email

It's gone this low: the Mayor tries leading by siesta. First he handed out raises like candy, now he asks City employees to take a day or two off, sending the ironic clear message: City employees make too much.

In an important but inconclusive piece yesterday, Zahniser went after lobbyists who aren't fully disclosed as lobbyists. Singled out for the headlights were Hillary Norton Orozco, who repped the Las Lomas developers without registering, Mickey Kantor, a former trade chief who consulted the Port of LA, and L&W land use attorney William Delvac, registered in some categories but not others, and who has been conversant with the Autry Museum over the disposition of the Southwest Museum, without officially repping them.

How dependent are Councilpeople on registered City Lobbyists in helping them to make decisions? Enormously. Anything the Mayor, the City Attorney, or the CLA doesn't tell them to do, a lobbyist will. If you think they listen to ordinary citizens...no, they don't. Never. Not ever.

The fact is, however, that the thirty-hour rule is not a good one, it's an arbitrary, capricious one. You can see a lobbyist an hour a month and they are likely to have far more influence than an NC president you meet once a week. The perceived connectivity of the lobbyist is everything; it's not a matter of time, it's a matter of influence (and pols apply the same yardstick to scribes and bloggers, too). There is no single good demarcation regarding who constitutes being a "lobbyist", and there never will be: as with the banker, the politician's evaluation of another human's prospective shadow of influence is a highly subjective business; but the quality is at the essence of every political career.

As Red Spot noted, the Autry takeover wardance with the Southwest Museum is featured at the Weekly. In the process, the Weekly dismisses the Autry as a "tourist trap", which will surprise the thousand-odd working artists who are featured in the museum's galleries, at big-tent sales, bbqs and quick-draws every year. It may be predatory, but it's also the lifeblood for hundreds of artist colonies throughout the southwest; the "tourists" from throughout the southwest are all too willing to be trapped.

Here's a bold educational strategy out of Idaho: actually teach students something! In this case, it's chess. LAUSD's enormously diverse statistical pool could easily produce a junior champion if they ran the game by their own second and third graders.

Negative images of Latinos on a police station mural in Boyle Heights, some residents claim. But Sandow Birk is a very renoun and talented artist who certainly knows the stakes of public art, and I suspect he's smiling to himself. The best public art is always an image that exhibits the tension between political ideology and social reality.

Should the Daily News distribute to Boyle Heights? We say yes. We think they'd find lots of friends there.