The Blog

Hayes Davenport: Today is Monday, October 26th. Tomorrow is a week before the election… that will never come.

Alissa Walker: Tomorrow is a- tomorrow is a year,

Hayes Davenport: yeah.

Scott Frazier: Now, this is funny because I just, you know, last week I was like, “Oh, well, we should try and be a little bit more optimistic,” in an anticipatory fashion. I tried to carry that spirit. And then there was the game four of the World Series where I was like, “Oh shit, why am I being, being optimistic when things like this are still possible?”

Alissa Walker: So you saw it as like a metaphor for-

Scott Frazier: Yeah, no, I think Hayes is right now. The election will never come. We’re-

Hayes Davenport: This is our second to last episode. This is episode 145 From Husk Till Dawn. We’ll talk about husks later in the show, former husks. Thank you to Brian Holmes, producer of the show, to everyone for listening. This sounds like the end, but it’s actually […]

This summer, as residents of the City of Los Angeles found themselves caught in the middle of the deadly economic reopening pushed by Kathryn Barger, the Republican head of the County Board of Supervisors, I called Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti the “unhittable object.” As he had done at so many points during his now nearly two-decade-long tenancy in City Hall, Garcetti had put his best foot backward, reopening gyms, bars, and other businesses in Los Angeles, despite, by all appearances, never thinking it was a good idea to do so.

The Mayor’s obsequiousness to the county in allowing businesses to briefly reopen had real costs, both in lives lost and in businesses disrupted if not destroyed. Nonetheless, the mayor had a simple rationalization for his inaction: once Governor Newsom had acceded to Supervisor Barger’s reopening request, there was “no public health benefit” to the city maintaining more protective standards than the county. The whole issue was, in his opinion, out […]

This is a rough transcript of LA Podcast Episode 144, “Pelosing My Religion.” We put this together with a crazy, basically unheard-of mix of computers and human beings trying to work in harmony to create a well-edited finished product. Notwithstanding that, I can’t promise you won’t occasionally find the mayor referred to as “A Red Car Setting,” which is almost poetic if you think about it. And, then, if you think about it some more, it’s really not.

Scott Frazier: It’s Monday, October 19th. This is Los Angeles podcast episode 144!

Hayes Davenport: Come on. 

Scott Frazier: Pelosing my religion.

Hayes Davenport: How- What did you say?

Scott Frazier: Pe-losing my religion. Pelosing.

Hayes Davenport: This is why we don’t say the titles. 

Alissa Walker: Never meant to be said.

Scott Frazier: Pelosing my religion. I’m sticking with that.

Hayes Davenport: And I actually like Pelosi-ng my religion better as a,

Scott Frazier: Well, now we’ve got them both in and listeners can pick which they want in a sort of choose their own adventure. 

Alissa Walker: They should never be said […]

Council District 4

Things have continued to heat up in the race between David Ryu and challenger Nithya Raman.Following last week’s announcement that Bernie Sanders endorsed Raman in CD4, two big announcements came in for Ryu. On Tuesday, Ryu announced the support of Speaker Nancy Pelosi. On Friday came the word that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had also weighed in in favor of the incumbent.There’s also been a continued spate of one-sided press coverage from local outlets, including the Los Feliz Ledger – which was roundly criticized for a story that suggested Nithya Raman had been responsible for a vitriolic campaign season. They subsequently ended up apologizing for their claim that they had reported about Ryu’s attempted rape charge when it turned out their reporting had been an “aggregated” version of an Emily Alpert Reyes story for the Los Angeles Times.In brighter news, Nithya responded to a Ryu attack ad with her own video explaining how her campaign routinely […]

In the early morning of July 18, during one of a series of recent confrontations between residents of Portland, Oregon and the federal government, reporters in the field captured one of the most impactful images to date of the popular protests that have riveted the United States since the May 25 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers.

In photos that have now appeared in print nationally, a woman, who appears to be either white or white-passing and cisgender, sits upright in the glare of the headlamps of a police SUV, naked on the asphalt with her head masked and covered, legs abducted from her midline. Her arms rest on her knees, palms facing upward in a gesture of offering. 

Photo from the Twitter feed of Donovan Farley

The pose suggests itself as yogic, but I don’t know whether it is or what its meaning might be if so. What transcends the pose is the way the body is […]

On Friday, in an interview with The Appeal, Mayor Garcetti was asked if he would push to ban the use of tear gas by LAPD. He replied:

“Yeah, we don’t use tear gas so we don’t need to, and it’s not part of our policy, and we don’t have that. We haven’t done that in over 50 years.”

Here’s video of what he said.

He seems kind of PO’d that he’s even being asked about this. Who can blame him? Tear gas is banned by the Geneva Convention for use in war. If I were falsely accused of using tear gas I would probably be upset. And Garcetti knocks down the entire premise with three very direct statements.

It’s not part of our policy.We don’t have that.We don’t use tear gas/We haven’t done that in over 50 years.

But these statements… are they true?

IS TEAR GAS PART OF THEIR POLICY?

A week ago, the LAPD released a statement clarifying their Use of Force Policy in response […]

Preface: What Makes Sense

On May 27th, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California released a plea agreement signed by George Esparza, a high-ranking former assistant to outgoing 14th district councilmember José Huizar. Esparza is only the latest among the members of what appears to be a vast bribery ring in City Hall who has agreed to plead guilty to charges including racketeering, bribery, and attempting to conceal criminal activity from federal investigators.

Over the course of the past three months, the still in-progress investigation led by the attorneys of the Central District’s Public Corruption Section has netted plea agreements from disgraced former District 12 Councilmember Mitch Englander and real estate consultants George Chiang and Justin Kim. The plea deals have thrust to the fore questions about the conduct and integrity of some of the city’s most prominent public figures.

At the same time, these early legal victories have bolstered the FBI’s claims of a years-long and much wider conspiracy […]

On June 5, Los Angeles Times executive editor Norman Pearlstine sent an all-staff email announcing reforms, acknowledging the LA Times’ failures “addressing concerns of people of color in the newsroom,” and “focusing on a white subscriber base even as the city became majority non-white.”

The email was shared with LA Podcast by LA Times employees who asked to remain anonymous.

NEWS: LA Times exec editor Norman Pearlstine sends all-staff email announcing reforms, acknowledging LAT's failures "addressing concerns of people of color in the newsroom" and "focusing on a white subscriber base even as the city became majority non-white." (con't next post) pic.twitter.com/zNBut834VM— LA Podcast (@thelapod) June 5, 2020

Dear Colleagues,

This has been an extraordinary week during an extraordinary year. Thousands of Americans have taken to the streets during a pandemic to protest longstanding racial injustice, prompted by the deaths of George Floyd in Minnesota and Breonna Taylor in Kentucky. These incidents are the latest in a terrible legacy of state violence against black […]

Los Angeles has been torn apart in the past decade by scandal and crisis. The Great Recession that served as the capstone for the criminal administration of George Bush II in the aughts gave way in the Obama years to maybe the most unequal economic recovery in history. The rich became dizzyingly richer, and, in Los Angeles as elsewhere, the average resident was laden down with longer work hours, falling real wages, and ever-more expensive rent.

When we review the unsurpassed challenges we faced here in the 2010s – among them an unconstitutionally overfull prison system, the worst homelessness crisis and the least affordable housing in the country, a resurgent national xenophobia aimed at migrant Angelenos – it is no wonder that we have become so troubled by the apparent incapacity of our leaders to lead. In each case, the response of the City has been faltering and dilatory; in an era that seemed to demand urgency and vision, the council […]