L.A.'s Stupid Carpool Lanes

Courtesy of the LAist, the easiest question in the world: Are NorCal Carpool Lanes Better than SoCal's?

For those unfamiliar with L.A.'s back-asswards freeway system, for some dumb reason that makes no sense, the carpool lanes here are divided from the next lanes over by double yellow lines, intermittently interrupted by broken white lines. Worse yet, the double yellow lines frequently remain unbroken through one, two, even three exits, which means you actually have to know in advance where the broken white lines are located on each freeway to be sure you can make your exit.

L.A. takes a lot of well-deserved grief for its lack of public transportation (which is getting better, by the way), but this kind of 'policy' doesn't even make sense to the Hummer-driving gasaholics clogging the 405 northbound and southbound every minute of every day.

Happily, Councilmember Janice Hahn is calling b*llsh*t on hostage-taking, carbon-emitting carpool lanes:

"I know for a fact that up in Northern California, car pool lanes don't have the double-double, triple-triple, yellow-yellow, white lines," she exclaimed in a confused manner. "In fact, they treat them as just a lane that you can get in and out of. I think that is one of the number one reasons they [car pool lanes in Los Angeles] are not effective right now--is the exit and entrances to these car pool lanes."

Orange County is getting rid of them -- is L.A. really going to place itself farther back on the learning curve than the place that made these women celebrities?

Juan Devis, Too Good for KCET

I worked for all of two months at KCET, and they had to be the silliest, stupidest two months of my life. That place is the fucking abyss.

However, there is one, single redeeming quality to that clown factory: a straight up creative genius named Juan Devis. Juan's conception of what's possible with online multimedia is visionary, and actually delivers on the much-ballyhooed promise of the internet to combine the best elements of film, television, radio and print media and surpass all of them in its capacity to tell stories in a non-linear, interactive and artistic way. I'd say Juan's 'Departure' series on kcet.org belongs on display at the Guggenheim, or maybe the Smithsonian, but it properly belongs out in the world, not in a stuffy museum.

One thing you can say about Juan's work being on kcet.org is that it's getting the worst of both worlds: no prestige and no exposure. Someone with money and a vision should liberate him from that cesspool of mediocrity.

Here's Juan's latest, a profile of Watts.

Black Gold Digging

Remember back in the early '90s when PBS' News Hour soft-pedaled the crap out of a huge price-fixing scandal involving the agribusiness Archer Daniels Midland, which happened to underwrite the program?

Well, now The News Hour is the happy recipient of gobs of cash from Chevron, but this time they're not even pretending to be careful about drawing the line between journalism and prostitution. In fact, the program has plastered its name all over Chevron's propaganda web site, lending Jim Lehrer's tweedy credibility to Chevron's crude attempt at reverse-psyching people into thinking that the company's new mission is to "find newer, cleaner, more abundant ways to power the world," instead of, say, starting wars in major oil-producing Middle Eastern countries, hoovering record profits while sorry schmucks pay almost $5 a gallon for gas, and paying pseudo-scientists to pretend global warming is just a theory. A News Hour staffer even goes so far as to spell the whole tawdry relationship out it in the 'recommended comment' presently featured on the homepage, underneath the big fat News Hour video clip:

As a member of The NewsHour staff, we appreciate Chevron's support of our reporting on important domestic and international stories like the global food crisis and extending the impact of our work by posting it on their site. We hope it sparks thoughtful conversation about the issue.

The global food crisis is an important international story, good call, robflynn! No wonder PBS hired you to shill for Chevron: you have a real brain for this news stuff. Let's talk about the global food crisis, Rob. You might be surprised to learn that one of the countries where the global food crisis has hit hardest this year is Burma, where a cyclone displaced 1 to 2 million people this past May, whose desperation was then compounded by the criminal indifference of the country's military junta, leading to mass starvation. Chevron has long been a major investor in a major natural gas project in Burma, and a prop behind the military regime. You might even say that Chevron has direct responsibility for the plight of thousands of starving Burmese children. So Rob, how about if The News Hour facilitated some thoughtful conversation about that important international story? Chevron could extend the impact of the story by posting it on their site.

But specifics like political repression in Burma are not really the focus of willyoujoinus.com. Chevron prefers to stick to the broad strokes. On a page explaining the geopolitical challenge facing Chevron and other people of good conscience, for instance, readers are taught that:

A stable social, political and business environment is essential for attracting long-term investments. That means a reliable legal framework that recognizes the rule of law and respects contracts—which in turn leads to predictability and security. Revenue transparency is necessary to reduce the occurrence of corruption and abuse. And the basic needs of the local people must be met to provide a reliable work force, supply chain and market for products.

Those are comforting words coming from a company facing a lawsuit for bloody attacks on two Nigerian villages.

Speaking of Nigerians, another helpful user comment on the site comes from Yomi Owope -- perhaps one of Chevron's happy Nigerian employees? -- who explains that honestly, we're entirely too focused on the U.S. as the main culprit in aggravating world energy shortages, and we should really start focusing on China. Note to American Chevron customers from the world's underprivileged: stop being so arrogant as to think that your consumption is the problem - the world doesn't revolve around you, Mr. Narcissist! Fill up your Hummer and burn that stupid bus pass. China is the new black this season.

I haven't read all of these thoughtful comments yet, I must admit, but it strikes me as curious that of the many that I was able to stomach, none of them touch on important issues gaining headlines nowadays about Big Oil gouging consumers and funding political road blocks to alternative energy resource development, or offering helpful campaign advice to a certain presidential candidate who's calling on America to step up and let oil rigs back onto coastal sea shelves in California and Florida. You'd think that with The News Hour on the job, we'd be getting some answers to these tough questions.

My New Favorite Blog

This is my new favorite fucking blog. Well, maybe aside from this one, also amply linked on my new favorite blog, curiously enough. Finally I can bookmark a blog that my job doesn't require me to read. ALL MINE! I think I'll write for it. I understand it has actual readers.

Rubber Stamping the Bush Administration

David Dreier, of course, is an asshole. And the Courage Campaign is most awesome. The best political advertising out there (a low bar, admittedly) has been far and away surpassed by The Courage Campaign's last few spots, like this one and this one.

"Unregulated Political Warriors"

Brave New Films is in The New York Times.

Culver City, 2008 = St. Petersburg, 1917.

The Barack Doctrine

Naomi Klein is brilliant.



She's just about the only progressive public intellectual around right now who's even trying to put the dark days of the post-9/11 era into a broader historical context without resorting to the same tired-ass, over-simplified, 1960s Chomsky-ite critique. And she's not giving Obama a free pass:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080630/klein

Obama's not Superman, and he has to obey the laws of political science just like everyone else, so there's no reason to get hysterical over his general election centrist pivot. But is it too much to ask that the candidate of change throw his base a bone between selling out on FISA, supporting the death penalty and thanking the Supreme Court for handing gun control advocates the biggest setback in history?

Staffing up his economic team with a Friedmanite Wal-Mart triumphalist is not the bone we're waiting for.

Lieberman Must GO

New from Brave New Films:

Cora's Coffee Shoppe

Ok, so people have discovered the hell out of this place on yelp, but I've only lived in L.A. about 16 months, all of them on the east side, so it was new to me.

Anyway, contrary to a few of the yelp reviews, I thought the service sucked ass. Everything else was fucking fantastic. Including my Caesar Salad, and especially my asparagus soup.

Why they feel the need to Europeanize "coffee shop" speaks volumes about Santa Monica. Or at least paragraphs.

UCLA Undie Run

In the middle of final exams each trimester, UCLA undergrads strip down to their chonies, fill up on keg beer, and go for a midnight run. As with all such rituals, the tradition started as a spontaneous act of defiance and exhibitionism (in response to cops cracking down on the prior -- and lamer -- tradition of the "Midnight Yell"), then became an institution that eventually earned itself its own police escort. Now Undie Runners gather by the thousands for what's got to be the most photographed and flickr'd event in Westwood. Here's a booty from last night's run.

Barbarians at the Gates

Next weekend, all over the Golden State, Democratic Party activists will be running for delegate positions to the state party. At a minimum, being a party delegate means attending a yearly convention and voting on resolutions, a platform and candidate endorsements. Symbolically, it also means being an official part of the party, which has an inherent appeal to netroots-type progressives heeding the battle cry to "crash the gate".

Accordingly, the Progressive Democrats of America this year is organizing like-minded Dems to join "progressive slates" in Assembly District races everywhere. The idea, according to a website dedicated to the project, is that "the power to change our party comes from a cohesive group of individuals dedicated to making change happen" (which is funny, since one might do worse than "a cohesive group of individuals dedicated to making change happen" as a definition of a political party in the first place, though I suppose it works just as well as the definition of a faction). To be a "progressive" -- again, according to the site -- is to believe in universal healthcare, to oppose pre-emptive war, and to oppose the death penalty, among other principles (nothing in there about a worker's right to join a union....oh, well). Their policy platform calls for immediate withdrawal from Iraq, clean elections, "elimination of poverty" (big enough?), and "investigations toward impeachment."

So far, their efforts seem to be gaining some traction, at least among bloggers. DDay's post on MyDD and cross-post on Calitics have sparked lively discussion threads, and who knows if Chris Bowers' entreaty back in early December was what drove the unwashed masses to the barricades in the first place? If you believe what you read on blog comments, it sounds like there's at least a handful of reasonably organized rank-and-filers running slates, and if you believe idle chatter from electeds and their aides, at least a couple of them are serious enough to pay attention to, if not necessarily to fear.

However these slates play out, next weekend's DSCC elections should be at least a little more interesting than usual.

Seymour Martin Lipset, deceased at 84

Seymour Martin Lipset was one of the giants of American academia and progressive political thought. As a student of American society and government steeped in the intellectual traditions of European social theory, Lipset brought to the social sciences a highly original and cosmopolitan perspective on "American exceptionalism." Lipset brought light to such conundrums as the extraordinary vibrancy of voluntary associational life in the U.S. and the conspicuous absence in U.S. history of a serious American socialist challenge. As a committed Socialist in youth, Lipset helped build an aspirational American social scientific tradition that dwarfed in creative fecundity the plodding methodicalness of Talcott Parson's reigning postwar paradigm of Structural Functionalism. Yet, as an intellectual offspring of Max Weber and Roberto Michels, he was finely attuned to the capacity of ideology to yield and give shape to new modes of domination within the structures of workers' organizations and political parties ostensibly committed to egalitarianism and class struggle. This combination of moral vision and disciplined skepticism engendered a social analysis that cut to the core of a culture so profoundly shaped by moralism in a society so fundamentally perverted by inequality. Lipset's contribution to the U.S.' understanding of itself looms as large as that of Toqueville. For as long as American civilization lasts, Lipset's intellectual legacy will persist.

Happy Holidays (and Count Yourself Lucky)

Not to be the holiday party buzzkill, but a quick glance at the leading local stories in the L.A. Times from the 21st through today is enough to inspire most of us to count our yuletide blessings. Here's a smattering:

Officer kills knife attack suspect
A rookie Los Angeles police officer shot and killed a 27-year-old man early Monday after the man attacked his former roommates with a 6-inch butcher knife, police said.

Man is shot to death in Los Angeles
A man was shot to death on Christmas night outside his apartment in Silver Lake, authorities said.

Hollywood woman, 56, dies in fire
A 56-year-old Hollywood woman was killed Saturday night when she was trapped by flames inside her home after an artificial Christmas tree apparently caught fire, officials said.

3 security guards are shot outside nightclub
Three security guards were shot and seriously wounded outside a nightclub early Saturday, police said.

Girl dies, 2 men injured as car slams into a wall
A girl died and two men were injured Saturday after their car slammed into a wall and tree and burst into flames, authorities said.

Killings of youths tied to L.A. County child protection system soar in 2006
The 79 homicides were more than twice the 37 at-risk children slain in 2005.

Area's homeless can't find shelter
Even the supplemental cold-weather services are filled to capacity on cold and windy nights.

11 taken to hospitals after Blue Line train hits firetruck
About 250 rush-hour commuters were aboard when accident occurred at Washington and Central, a 'notorious bad intersection.'

Suspect held in hate crime slaying of girl, 14
Los Angeles police detectives have arrested a Latino suspect in the killing of a 14-year-old African American girl in what police say was a hate crime.

4 accused of smuggling women for prostitution
Four women from Guatemala have been arrested as part of a scheme in which young women were lured into the U.S. with promises of good jobs and forced to become prostitutes in Los Angeles.

Memorial service puts name, face on year's dead in skid row
The event gives 'these people the honor of saying, your life meant something,' mayor says.

Fiery crash kills 3 teenagers
The youths die early Wednesday after the driver veers off Los Feliz Boulevard and strikes a tree near Griffith Park. Two passengers pulled from the vehicle survive.

Not Gonna Do It!

Much to my chagrin, I can say with certainty that Al Gore is NOT running for President of the U. S. of A. Never mind the hype -- he's not gonna do it.

Last week I had the chance to 'meet' Al Gore at an event that was hosted by the Directors Guild of America (DGA). As you can expect, VP Gore was there to talk about this film, "An Inconvenient Truth" -- not to campaign, as I would have hoped.

After a few seconds of small talk with the handsome yet portly Gore, I built up the courage to say to him, "Mr. Gore, I hope you will consider running. The country could use your leadership." Never have I seen an elected official react with such an immediate scoff. (I think scoff is the best way to explain his action.) After the aforementioned statement, he quickly moved on to the next in the crowd. He appeared annoyed, if not agitated, by the thought that someone would ask him to consider running for the position he once won.

I was mildly upset. Not only was I scoffed at by a man that I have grown to admire and respect, but, more importantly, I was convinced from his reaction that Gore's mingling in the Presidential name dropping game is a ploy to continue his effort to keep his name a household one. For a good cause, of course. He is on a quest to save the world and it only helps the cause to have such a big name in the world working so hard on the subject.

I am going to start looking for a new candidate. Take down the website -- http://www.reelectgore.org/ -- because it ain't gonna happen.

Globalize L.A.?

American Apparel is about to go public.

Emblazoned with the command "Legalize L.A.," American Apparel's factory is as much a fixture of the downtown Los Angeles cityscape as its hyper-sexual and socially progressive brand is a fixture of American youth culture. The company's politics are a bit more elusive, however, than the image it has crafted would lead one to believe. Despite its pro-immigrant, anti-sweatshop labor practices and public pronouncements, in 2003, American Apparel's founder and owner Dov Charney defeated a UNITE-HERE union organizing drive at his downtown factory by employing standard union-busting tactics familiar to workers in meatpacking plants and nursing homes.

Whether American Apparel is a renegade company swimming upstream in a globalized race to the bottom or a shrewd manipulator of the political sympathies of its target consumers is anyone's guess. Now the answer may become a bit more discernible.

When Google went public, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin chose to structure the deal with "dual class voting," which allows management the authority to make decisions on behalf of the company that may not be popular with stockholders. This was because Google felt that stockholders' focus on short-term gain should play second fiddle to the founders' commitment to the company's long-term, core mission. The latter includes both its risk-taking entrepreneurialism and its charitable goals.

So far, no such precautions against the stock market impinging upon the "non-rational" priorities of a mission-based company like American Apparel appear to be forthcoming in the $244 million deal. Perhaps outsourcing is in American Apparel's future after all, or perhaps investors will leave the company's anti-sweatshop policies alone as long (and only as long) as the image helps move product. Either outcome would indicate an accomodation between the corporate rebel and the globalized free market forces it was ostensibly created to reject. American Apparel may be on its way to becoming Global Apparel, which is to say to becoming a facsimile of every other garment manufacturer in the world. Which, in a sense, would not be such a radical departure from its mission, which concludes with the statement:

"Not to suggest that we are more ethical than the next business. We're just out to try something different, to make a buck, to bring people the clothes they love, to be human, and have a good time in the process. So far, so good."

All of that can be accomplished as easily from China as from downtown L.A.

Happy Monday

No smog in Smog Land today. It's one of those crisp, cold days that make L.A. in the winter feel like the East Coast in the fall. A couple pictures from this morning.

Flipping Birds

If you live or drive in L.A., you're probably familiar with the accompanying image. You may even have pondered its meaning and origin, while waiting for the light to turn green.

The crack investigative reporters at Metroblogging Los Angeles have solved the mystery with this exclusive interview with The Creator Himself.

Apparently, however, he's not too hard to find if you know where to look. He has his own MySpace page, and even a blog (composed entirely of pictures).

Adding the blog to our blogroll now, because when you think about it, what better can be found on the internet than photos of hot young people getting trashed and having fun?

Friend of the Animal World

Assemblymember Lloyd Levine has got to be one of the most eclectic lawmakers in Sacramento. Levine's crusade to liberate elephants from their prison cells at California zoos and circuses is yet another Levine original to add to a list that mocks the virtue of a coherent legislative agenda. Slot that into this hit list of legislative priorities straight out of Philip K. Dick's imagination:

• Ban on pet cloning (Is this for real? Apparently so.)
• The California Vampire Slayer Act of 2006 (Again, no shit: "Vampires" are "electronic devices that continue to 'suck' electricity even when you think they are turned off.")
• Assisted suicide bill

Ok, so assisted suicide is a pretty serious issue. The point being, though, that none of these issues are big polling winners in the West San Fernando Valley, or really anywhere else on earth. It's hard to imagine some hard-nosed political consultant saying, "Ok, Lloyd, I've crunched the numbers, and this is what we've got to do to win: Pet cloning, energy-sucking electronic devices, euthanasia and elephants."

Which brings me to my second point: Lloyd Levine has got to be one of the most principled lawmakers in Sacramento. Because there's no way he's taking on Big Zoos just to position himself for his run at Senate District 23. Santa Monica might be liberal, but this probably isn't the hallmark issue of the district.

As hard as it is to imagine, it seems like Lloyd Levine is just a guy who finds certain issues morally important, and takes them on for that reason alone. And you'd have to be quite an asshole to argue against the morality of saving animals from dying of heat stroke while stuck in unattended vehicles. Whether in cars or cages, captured animals don't have a lot of powerful actors looking out for them, and Levine, for one, is stepping up to the plate.

When it comes down to it, zoos and circuses are monuments to voyeurism and captivity, and civilization would be better off without them. Lloyd Levine is trying to do something practical to make them a little more humane, and could give a shit what political dividends result from it. In the context of today's brand of transactional politics, that makes him a goddamned hero.

Carpetbagging the 45th

Kevin De Leon, the new Assemblymember for the 45th district just north and east of downtown, had his district swearing-in ceremony this week. Reports back estimate attendance at forty.

To put that in perspective, Assemblymember Mike Eng's swearing-in was attended by somewhere around a thousand.

What a difference actually living in the district makes!

Not that De Leon doesn't have a residential address in the district somewhere. Surely getting one was high on his to-do list at the very outset of his campaign, somewhere between setting up a state PAC account and finding a good mail consultant.

But if you listen to former 45th Assemblymember Jackie Goldberg, there's apparently a difference between running for a seat in a community you've never had a relationship with because the Speaker is your boyhood friend and can twist a lot of arms to get you the right endorsements, and actually sharing a history with the constituents you're running to represent. Go figure.

Goldberg, by the way, endorsed Elena Popp to succeed her. But as beloved as Jackie is in the 45th (and she is, and for very good reason), she ain't the Speaker of the Assembly, and can't more or less instruct the big organizations where to put their campaign cash.

And as the California Nurses Association never tired of reminding us this election cycle, big money controls elections. So even though De Leon was trailing badly at the beginning of the race, once those independent expenditures started kicking in, out went the whole "relationship with the community" crap (who needs it!) and in came the unearned votes. And thus the 45th District inherited an Assemblymember nobody's ever heard of, let alone trusts.

Except maybe those forty people who bothered to show up to his swearing-in ceremony (I wonder how many of them live in the district?). Hopefully the new Assemblymember took notice of the fact that however wrapped up he might have things in Sacramento, being the Speaker's BFF and all, he has a lot of work to do back here in L.A.

Two Senators Have Brain Surgery

News reports today inform us that two Senators have had brain surgery in the past day.

The State Senator from the SF Valley, Alex Padilla, underwent surgery to remove a 'malformation' from the lining of his brain. The former city councilman (and future State Senate President) is said to be recuping well and should be back to work in January when the State Senate convenes. Always the workaholic, Alex says this experience will help us this year when the state legislature begins its work on healthcare reform.

In more frightful news, Senator Tim Johnson of South Dakota yesterday, experienced stroke-like symptoms and was taken to a Washington DC area hospital. Doctors revealed that the 59 year old Senator did not have a stroke, but instead was suffering from bleeding of the brain. He had surgery last night and is now in critical, yet stable condition.

This is bad bad news for a number of reasons. The US Senate is divided with 51 Dems and 49 Republicans. Should Johnson be unwilling or unable to serve out the rest of his term, South Dakota's Republican Gov Mike Rounds would be able to appoint someone to fill out the rest of his term, thus spliiting the House of Lords 50/50. (Would it be possible that GOP Gov Rounds would appoint someone other than a Republican -- NOT!) Under such a scenario, the Reeps would have the advantage since VP Cheney could cast the deciding vote in any 50/50 tallies.

You may remember in 2000, when the Dems and the Reeps were divided 50/50, they agreed to a power sharing agreement where the Reeps were the majority party, yet the parties had equal representation on committees. This was until Jim Jeffords of Vermont switched parties and gave the Dems a one vote advantage -- that they eventually lost in the 2002 mid term elections.

Given the most recent election and the sinking feeling Reeps must be experiencing, I would not expect them to agree to such a power sharing scenario.

Lets wish Senator Johnson well. Not only for him and his family, but for the country.
Its sometimes hard to believe that so much is relying on the heart beat of one man (or woman).