Tuesday Hotsheet at 3 a.m.

JM, Poppies, Scott & Alvarado Meridian, 2.26.08


Joseph Mailander a guy in la • elsewhere • email

From this perch: Hillary in three of four. The real Roger Simon nails her strategy: the victim who victimizes.

When it comes to the City, jurors hand make-up money out like cotton candy at the fair: now those poor white firefighters who were punished for hazing that poor black firefighter also get absurd million-dollar judgments. Now almost all of them---victim and perps alike---are a million plus richer for their involvement in a prank that wouldn't even make the paper on a college campus. Can't wait until the Latino guy sues for not being victimized enough to be a part of any lawsuit.

Doing its level best to protect itself from answering to curious taxpayers, City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo's office not only blew the defense of the City's deep pockets but then went the extra mile and declined all comment on the case.

You're so busted: Self-published books look a bit better this morning as the second work of fiction masquerading as fact in a month is recalled by a mainstream publisher. This one involved a Valley girl with a top-drawer family pedigree who faked living la vida loco with gangbangers in South LA for the sake of scoring a contract with Penguin.

If you missed the earlier incident, about a woman who claimed she was raised by wolves during the Holocaust, here's a good account.

CityWatch has a great piece regarding rumblings on repealing SB 1818, the State bill which turns affordable housing into a slush fund for developers. Shills use SB 1818 to bilk cities of billions (yes, billions) even while doing so little to create truly affordable housing. The Mayor of Los Angeles and his hand-picked, career-beholden Planning Chief, Gail Goldberg, (a woman with no knowledge of Los Angeles whatsoever prior to her appointment) have been the top performing prime offenders in the State. Most Councilpeople have also been complicit in handing over the City from the People to the Few, while rendering the streets unparkable and the lawns unplayable, all for the sake of letting developers rake cash off of a few crappy units per mega-development that do nothing to make housing afforable for anyone but the tiniest handful of lottery winners.

Money quote from the piece: "In fact, right now – throughout our city - sleeper cells of developers and architects are designing massive, neighborhood busting complexes of the type you and your neighborhood council – mistakenly – thought your community plan protected you against."

And the problem performance of yet another out-of-town Antonio appointment, Ed Boks, is the subtext of this piece by Rick Orlov, who informs his readers that the Animal Reg has let animals stand in the cold rain without adequate protection, and at last spent $118,000 (of $50,000,000 the voters pledged to them) to give the critters an adequate rainfly at last.