Can the Patriot Act make it a crime for an American to advise a group that has been designated a terrorist organization—if that advice pertains only to human rights and ways to seek peace?

It is this question that was heard before the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday.

The Americans challenging the restriction are the LA-based Humanitarian Law Project and its president, USC professor, Ralph Fertig, who has advised a Kurdish rebel group in Turkey.

This is from the AP:

The Supreme Court struggled Tuesday to balance the constitutional rights of humanitarian aid groups with the government’s efforts to combat terrorism.

The issue arose in a challenge by aid groups and individuals to parts of a key anti-terror law that bans “material support” to foreign terrorist organizations, even when that support consists of training and advice about entirely peaceful and legal activities.

The aid groups involved had trained a group in Turkey on how to bring human rights complaints to the United Nations and assisted them in peace negotiations, but suspended the activities when the U.S. designated the Turkish outfit a terrorist organization in 1997. They also wanted give similar help to a group in Sri Lanka, but it, too, was designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. in 1997.

Now keep in mind, we are not talking about groups like Al Quaeda that have been designated as our enemies, and thus are subject to a host of restrictions, Patriot Act or no Patriot Act.

The organization in question is a Kurdish rebel group called the PKK.

NPR’s Nina Totenberg does a good job of teasing out more of the issues.

And the LA Times David Savage has this post-hearing update.

A ruling is expected in June—with Kennedy again the swing vote. (Or maybe Roberts will also have a sensible moment. At least it is comforting to think so.)

PS: AND THE TWISTED LOGIC AWARD FOR TUESDAY’S HEARING GOES TO Antonin Scalia for this dandy quote: “It hasn’t criminalized speech. Most of that aid and assistance that is prohibited is not in the form of speech, but it happens to include speech as well.I think that is quite different from a law that is directed explicitly at speech.”

(Um, Antonin. Dude. That’s like saying if you advise the criminal to turn his or herself in, or if you similarly tell the criminal not to shoot the hostage, we can criminalize that speech as aiding and abetting, and such a statute in no way impinges on the First Amendment. That’s—-what’s the phrase I’m looking for?—oh, yeah: totally whacked.)

I’m still doing light posting, but here’s a story from the Miami Herald that merits attention.

It is about a free speech case involving a student who said some angry things on Facebook about her teacher, and was punished by the school principle as a consequence.

Here’s how it opens:

A student who set up a Facebook page to complain about her teacher -- and was later suspended — had every right to do so under the First Amendment, a federal magistrate has ruled.

The ruling not only allows Katherine “Katie” Evans’ suit against the principal to move forward, it could set a precedent in cases involving speech and social networking on the Internet, experts say.

The courts are in the early stages of exploring the limits of free speech within social networking, said Howard Simon, the executive director of the Florida ACLU, which filed the suit on Evans’ behalf.

“It’s one of the main things that we wanted to establish in this case, that the First Amendment has a life in the social networking technology as it applies to the Internet and other forms of communication,” Simon said.

In 2007, Evans, then a senior at Pembroke Pines Charter High School, created a Facebook page where she vented about “the worst teacher I’ve ever met.”

But instead of other students expressing their dislike of the teacher, most defended the teacher and attacked Evans.

A couple days later, Evans took the page down.

But after Principal Peter Bayer found out about it, he bumped Evan from her Advanced Placement classes, putting her in classes with less prestige, and suspended her for three days.

There’s more. So read it here.

And here’s an MSNBC story about other incidents in which student speech is challenged, even outside school.

On Sunday, the LA Times reported that the Menifee Unified School District, a school district located in Riverside County, has pulled a book from all school library shelves because of its racy content. And what lust-drenched book might the Menifee school folks have found morally problematic? Tropic of Cancer?— Henry Miller’s 1934-published novel that, while a bit long-in-the-tooth now, is still a perennial favorite when it comes to outraged shelf-yanking

Nope, the tome in question is the Merriam-Webster’s 10th edition dictionary. Its offense? It includes somewhere in its pages the term “oral sex.”

Evidently one—count ‘em, one—- parent complained so, rather than choosing a thoughtful and measured response to calm the histrionic parent, the local district officials instead swooped in and purged all the district’s schools of the dictionary. (Without consulting the school board, I might add.)

Let me repeat that. School officials removed the Webster’s dictionary from every library in the district on account of the dictionary’s “sexually graphic” content.

The Press Enterprise has a story which features the district’s explanation for the book banning:

School officials will review the dictionary to decide if it should be permanently banned because of the “sexually graphic” entry, said district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus…..

“It’s just not age appropriate,” said Cadmus, adding that this is the first time a book has been removed from classrooms throughout the district.

“It’s hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we’ll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature,” Cadmus said.

Well, as it happens, I have a rather substantial pile of dictionaries in my personal library, so perhaps I can aid Ms. Cadmus in her search. I don’t have the the 10th edition of Merriam-Webster, but I do have two other Webster’s dictionaries among my array of reference books, both of which are approximately the size of bedside tables. Let me just haul ‘em out and take a look.

Okay, neither of my Webster’s volumes contain the term “oral sex.” (Oral herpes, yes, oral sex, no.)

As one might imagine, they do, however, include the term “sex,” (which would logically seem to be the offending part of the term so objectionable to the Menifee parent). And, in a random (but enthusiastic) search of Webster’s 2nd edition (first published in 1955) I found that it also includes words like orgasm, prostitute, orgy, sodomy—and sodomitical, a word I didn’t previously know existed but toward which I developed an instant affection, so much so that I have now vowed to work it into sentences as often as possible, as in, “My dear Ms. Cadmus, perhaps I’m being overly pessimistic, but I’m rather concerned that the new Supreme Court decision—you know the one I mean, yes? It’s known as Citizens United— is going to have a distinctly sodomitical affect on the democratic process. What do you think?”

I find that my half-century old Webster’s also has a whole pile of other words and terms of which the vigilant Menifee-ites really should take note, things like chastity belt, condom, gonorrhea, pimp (”a go-between in illicit sexual affairs; especially a prostitute’s agent”) and dildo (”a device of rubber, etc. shaped like an erect penis, and used as a sexual stimulator: also spelled dildoe…”)

Frankly, I’d have found many, many more treasures for Ms. Cadmus and friends (really, try it yourself) but I had to stop because the dog was bugging me to go for a run.

Before I put on my running shoes, however, I did take the time to check to see if the good old 1955 Webster’s had within its august pages the word cunnilingus. Webster’s did.

(n [L., lit., from cunnus, vulva, and lingere, to lick] a sexual activity involving oral contact with the female genitals.)

It also had fellatio (n. [from L. fallatus p.p. of fellar, to suck] a sexual activity involving oral contact with the male genitals)—thus providing proof positive that the dictionary purgers at the Menifee Unified School District define the term “logic-phobic, anti-literate jackasses,”—which I did not find in the 2nd edition of Websters but, if it is not included in the 10th edition, I truly hope Webster’s will consider adding in the 11th edition, with a nice photo of the Menifee folks to illustrate.

Sadly, even if Webster should take my suggestion, those being pictured would never learn of the honor because, as my brief search has just demonstrated, if we follow the Menifee action out to its natural conclusion, we will have no dictionaries of any kind in our school libraries at all.

NOTE: More news in a while.

As most of you know, on Thursday morning the US Supreme Court blasted aside a century old ban on corporate elections spending with its 5/4 decision in the case known as Citizens United.

Here’s how the LA Times explains it:

Until now, corporations and unions have been barred from spending their own treasury funds on broadcast ads or billboards that urge the election or defeat of a federal candidate. This restriction dates back to 1907, when President Theodore Roosevelt called on Congress to forbid corporations, railroads and national banks from using their money in federal election campaigns. After World War II, Congress extended this ban to labor unions.

Now all that has been handily wiped away.

If you want to know a bit more about the broad strokes of the case, listen to NPR’s Nina Totenberg.

Adam Liptak of the New York Times also has a fairly cogent description:

Overruling two important precedents about the First Amendment rights of corporations, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.

The 5-to-4 decision was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most basic free speech principle — that the government has no business regulating political speech. The dissenters said that allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace would corrupt democracy.

The ruling represented a sharp doctrinal shift, and it will have major political and practical consequences. Specialists in campaign finance law said they expected the decision to reshape the way elections were conducted.

Ironically, this comes right at the time when ordinary Americans have been growing increasingly alarmed and enraged by the way that big money interests influence lawmaking, both on Republican and Democratic sides of the aisle. However, after Thursday’s decision, those big money interests will be able to go upstream of the pesky and time consuming lobbying process in order to focus directly on buying electing the lawmakers whom they believe will view their agendas from the most felicitous possible perspective.

The Citizen’s United decision is being presented as a free speech issue. Yet, it was not really speech that was being protected on Thursday. It was the ability to use unlimited corporate money to slam or promote a candidate. Had it been so inclined, the court could have narrowcast its ruling to address the principle that was the supposed center of this case, which was the right to show, shortly before an election, an attack dog documentary on Hilary Clinton.

But the five Supremes who voted to give Citizens United its victory, went much further than a decision that would have merely viewed the documentary as protected. Instead the court gave its blessing to the corporate right to spend an unrestrained amount of cash in promoting and buying time for said documentary— or election ads or whatever form of electioneering a corporation thinks will most benefit its candidate of choice. Cynically, the court shrouded all this suddenly unfettered corporate elections spending under the cloak of the First Amendment.

In his written dissent, an impassioned Justice Stevens, vehemently objected to the Constitutional slight of hand that would magically transform a Lehman Brothers or a Pfizer into a…well….person. Here’s how Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick puts it in her article on the ruling,The Pinocchio Project: Watching as the Supreme Court turns a corporation into a real live boy:

Stevens hammers, more than once this morning from the bench on the principle that corporations “are not human beings” and “corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires.” He insists that “they are not themselves members of ‘We the People’ by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.”

But you can plainly see the weariness in Stevens eyes and hear it in his voice today as he is forced to contend with a legal fiction that has come to life today, a sort of constitutional Frankenstein moment when corporate speech becomes even more compelling than the “voices of the real people” who will be drowned out. Even former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist once warned that treating corporate spending as the First Amendment equivalent of individual free speech is “to confuse metaphor with reality.” Today that metaphor won a very real victory at the Supreme Court. And as a consequence some very real corporations are feeling very, very good.

The rest of us, I am sad to say, should feel very, very worried.

The PEN USA Annual Literary Awards Dinner was Wednesday night.

If one is a writer (or an editor or a writers’ agent) it is fun to hang out for a night with a ballroom full of other writerly types, most of whom look distinctly startled to find themselves dressed up and away from their computers.

Among the dressed up and startled were:

Sandra Tsing Loh, who looked fetching in skinny black pants and pigtailed hair…. LA Times Op Ed editress Sue Horton who went for black button-up elegance, novelist/memoirist Aimee Liu, who had on a cunning little beaded number, and journalist Sara Catania who wore a very cool girly, frilly, sheerish thingy.

(The men looked swell too but, with a few exceptions, their accessories were less notable.)

Of course, the point of the evening was to give an array of literary awards (and to raise money for PEN’s excellent programs, like PEN in the Classroom, and others).

All the PEN awards are listed here. But memorable among them were:

Steve Lopez, who won the creative nonfiction award for his terrific book The Soloist, about his (still ongoing and daily) relationship with homeless, mentally ill and gifted violinist, Nathaniel Ayers.

The always amazing Elmore Leonard, who won the Life Achievement award, and dispensed a few nuggets of writing advice when he accepted the prize, including his now classic: “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”

(Note to my writing students: A good idea to at least consider.)

Also memorable, was the choice of Linda Ollson, of Texas Monthly, who won the night’s award for Literary Journalism for her story Before and After, about the affects of an immigration raid at the Pilgrim’s Pride Corp. in Mount Pleasant, Texas. The story is good for many reasons, among them the fact that it doesn’t grind political axes, but merely shows—through a very human lens—the giant pile of complexities and contradictions that plague America’s immigration policy.

This is about as political as Ollson gets:

…It seems disingenuous to single out individual employees or supervisors, since these sorts of dealings are the product of a de facto bargain struck years ago: Poor people from other countries will make our food under harsh conditions, enabling us to eat cheaply and conveniently. Few people want to spend much time contemplating this, so we tend to construe the fact that chicken is inexpensive as if it were a property of the meat itself, like calorie content, rather than the result of a particular economic arrangement situated in a legal and ethical gray area.

You have to register (for free) to read the whole of Ollson’s piece, but here is how the story opens:

There was a man—call him Max, the name he went by at work, or Pancho, as he was known to his family and friends, or Francisco Garcia-Rodriguez, the name recorded on his birth certificate, or Sealed Defendant 3, the title under which he would eventually be indicted by a grand jury in Texarkana. He was 37 years old and lived in the East Texas town of Mount Pleasant. A father of five, he worked in the mornings and brought his kids to the park in the afternoons. He rooted for the Pumas, a Mexico City soccer team, and took an interest in politics and current events; he was a longtime Reader’s Digest subscriber and had recently plowed through the Spanish translation of Bill Clinton’s autobiography. His job was to load boxes of frozen chicken parts onto trailers at a chicken-processing plant owned by Pilgrim’s Pride Corporation, a place locals would often just call Pilgrim’s. He’d worked there for nearly twenty years.

Read the rest of this entry »

Me we each renew our commitment to our best aspirations.

“And crown thy good with brotherhood….”

Have a terrific day!

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PS: If you want to have a brief semi-political moment today, read the smart essay written by my friend and Annenberg colleague, Roberto Suro, in the Washington Post, in which he makes a provocative pitch for dumping the Emma Lazarus poem from the Statue of Liberty, the crown of which has finally been reopened today for the first time since September 11.

Whether you agree or disagree (I’m actually pretty attached to the poem, myself), Roberto has an intriguingly thought out rational for tossing those fourteen famous lines, including an historical rundown on how the poem, “The New Colossus,” came to grace the base of our Lady of Liberty in the first place.

All of the above provides a perfect jumping off point for a spirited 4th of July argument….uh…discussion…while you’re waiting for the fireworks.

Then for an alternate point of view of Lazarus’ sonnet, here’s what poet Robert Pinsky had to say about those same familiar lines: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to……”

The AP reports that King County, Washington has agreed to pay conservative blogger Stefan Sharkansky $225,000 to settle a public-records lawsuit he brought over the county’s delay in releasing documents about the 2004 governor’s election.

Good for Stefan Sharkansky. King County officials complained that they didn’t have the time to comply in timely fashion—which since, the election appears to have hinged on someone getting to the bottom of voter anomalies—is hardly an acceptable excuse.

Here are some of the details:

Sharkansky filed his request in December 2004, seeking a list of everyone who voted in the county in the election that year, but the county didn’t satisfy the request until more than two years later.

He said the documents that were ultimately provided revealed that elections officials in King County counted hundreds of ineligible ballots — including double votes and votes from unregistered or improperly registered voters. That could have changed the outcome of the razor-thin race between Democrat Chris Gregoire and Republican Dino Rossi, he said. Gregoire won by 133 votes following two recounts and a trial in Chelan County Superior Court.

The documents were not produced during the trial, and therefore “the trial never explained this mystery of why there were more votes than voters,” Sharkansky said April 24.

Sharkansky is a controversial and occasionally polarizing figure in the Seattle area. That is of no consequence here. He battled ferociously for reporter’s rights and for the public interest with this lawsuit.

And he won.

Read the rest here.

CALIFORNIA DMV SUSPENDING LICENSES FOR USE OF MEDICAL MARIJUANA?

Well, maybe.

The LA Times Maura Dolan has an intriguing story about a lawsuit recently filed against the California Department of Motor Vehicles by Americans for Safe Access.

The suit contends that the DMV has a pattern of investigating and suspending the driver’s licenses of people who use pot on the recommendation of their doctors.

“It happens a disturbing amount,” said Joseph D. Elford, chief counsel for Americans for Safe Access, which promotes legalizing marijuana for medicinal purposes and research.

Maybe it’s nothing, or maybe it’s a pattern. I hope the DMV isn’t that stupid.

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SHIELDING JOURNALISTS

Also in the LA Times Monday, on the editorial page, some strongly worded encouragement for President Obama to keep his campaign promise by supporting a federal shield law for journalists.

Here’s how it opens.

During his campaign for president, Barack Obama expressed support for a federal “shield law” to protect journalists’ confidential sources. Thirty-six states and the District of Columbia offer such protection.

With the reintroduction in the House of the Free Flow of Information Act, Obama has the opportunity to fulfill his commitment.

The Times, however, advises that we might need to be a teensy bit worried about Eric Holder in this matter.

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HOW BAD IS IT IN THE WORLD OF JOURNALISM?

Next Thursday night, Feb. 26, the LA Press Club is hosting a panel called: What to Do After You Leave Your Job in Journalism.

I’m not kidding.

It’s at 7 p.m. and open to the public. (LA Press Club members get in free.)

It’ll be held at the Steve Allen Theater at the LA Press Club; 4773 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, 90027.

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NATIONALIZE ‘EM OR LOSE ‘EM? (BANKS, THAT IS.)

Prescient economist, Nouriel Roubini, has a co-written column in the Washington Post that calls for the nationalizing America’s banks.

Here’s what he said:

The U.S. banking system is close to being insolvent, and unless we want to become like Japan in the 1990s — or the United States in the 1930s — the only way to save it is to nationalize it.

As free-market economists teaching at a business school in the heart of the world’s financial capital, we feel downright blasphemous proposing an all-out government takeover of the banking system. But the U.S. financial system has reached such a dangerous tipping point that little choice remains. And while Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s recent plan to save it has many of the right elements, it’s basically too late.

According to The Swamp, a number of conservatives are buying into the idea.

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HUFF POST TAKES ON MORTGAGES

The Huffington Post’s Off the Bus Section is calling for citizen journalists to report on the ongoing mortgage crisis from all corners of the nation. Good idea.

Assuredly, there is a lot of room to cover this story better. As to whether the Huffington Post is in a position to provide something new on the subject, remains to be seen.

They sent this note out to possible contributors:

HuffPost wants to tell the story better, by digging deeper in more places than any other news organization. To do it right, we need you.

Cool. We await the outcome.

The mood among my friends at the LA Times is bleak and growing bleaker. Some buyout/firing notices went out Monday. More will go out today. Still more tomorrow.

Over the weekend, the rumors that had swirled for days grew white hot. Then gossip turned to fact on Monday morning when LA Times publisher David Hiller flew to Chicago where he was promptly ankled (to use the grand old Daily Variety euphemism) by the Tribune Zellots on the same day that the Chicago Tribune’s editor of seven years duration, Ann Marie Lipinski, resigned.

“Your new owners should have their own editor, compatible with their style and goals,” Lipinski wrote as she fled ahead of 80 newsroom cuts at the Trib, adding her exit memo to a stack of such epistolary offerings that is now thick enough to be bound as a novel.

Yet it is not just the firings that are so troubling.

Industries all over America have downsized and outsourced, often wrecking lives in the process. Moreover, the wrecking ball usually hits professions in which workers have far less room for resilience than news folks generally do. Plus most newspapers, including the Washington Post, are going through rounds of cutbacks as they struggle to reinvent themselves in response to the rapidly and radically transforming nature of the medium.

But, for the papers stuck in the purgatory that is Zell/Tribune World, the changes dictated from the top seem to have less to do with the hard realities of the news business, and more to do with the arrogance of a man who already believed he knew better than everyone else even before he decided to start disemboweling media outlets, but who now—as a result of a leveraged purchase that may or may not have been wise—has a big ass debt to service.

Those two elements make for a toxic combo-burger. Because Sam Zell and his psycho-memo-writing cronies are not pulling the wings and legs off of just any company. They are doing it to a major newspaper—our hometown paper, thank you very much.

(Yes, I realize I just succumbed to an unattractively feverish bout of metaphor mixing. Deal with it.)

Selling newspapers, as USC Annenberg’s Marty Kaplan points out in yesterday’s Huffington Post, is not the same as selling….say…donuts. Selling donuts is an honorable profession. But donuts are a snack food. Newspapers are a public trust.

As to whether Zell and his crime ….uh…business partners at the Tribune Co have even a marginal understanding of what the phrase” public trust” means, the question was likely answered when, according to the AP, Chief Operating Officer Randy Michaels told lenders on a conference call last month that the company can save a lot of money by trimming staff and “rightsizing” its newspapers. Michaels said Tribune executives were evaluating the productivity of individual journalists with an eye toward cutbacks.

Okay, if we follow Michaels’ logic, “rightsizing” newspapers is akin to correctly staffing a manufacturing production line. It’s all about “productivity”—speed and volume.

Of course, using that metric anybody who’s won a Pulitzer or another big award, should likely be the first journalistic neck on the block since, while one might wish it to be otherwise, good reporting and writing takes hard work and….well…..time.

Here’s how Kaplan put it:

To Sam Zell, however, running the Times, as well the other papers he bought when he acquired the Tribune Co., isn’t a public trust, and its stewardship doesn’t include serving the public interest, no more than would running a bagel joint. Like the asset-stripping private equity buccaneers of the Blackstone Group, Zell’s business is capitalism, plain and simple. Having saddled Tribune with more than $8 billion in highly leveraged debt (he invested only $315 million of his own money in order to take Tribune private), now he has to sell assets and cut costs at a furious pace in order to keep his debt service from eating up his profit.

[SNIP]

If Zell’s editorially pared down, graphically tarted up and otherwise reinvented Orlando Sentinel is a sign of what’s to come, our local paper will soon be a cross between My Weekly Reader and a ransom note.

[SNIP]

I’m not claiming that print journalism is a swell business to be in right now, but I am contending that Zell’s ocean of red ink is more a consequence of his own debt-ridden acquisition strategy than of declining advertising sales and circulation, and that he’s punishing the city’s civic IQ to make up for his piratical swagger.

So what is to be done? Write letters? Sign petitions? Cancel subscriptions? Make bomb threats? (Kidding.)

I wish I had an answer but I don’t.

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By the way, all in all, this seems like a bigger deal than whether the New Yorker did or did not show good or bad taste with this week’s cover.

(For the record, I think the New Yorker blew it.)

Water King and Water Boy huddle right after testy exchange with me over water bills

I got a letter this weekend from David Nahai that shows the general manager of the Department of Water and Power and I have a great deal in common.

No, I don’t live in a 6,012-square foot Benedict Canyon mansion and when people call me names, they usually don’t invoke royalty the way I call him the Water King.

But for nearly a month, I’ve been trying to get him to turn over his water and electric bills to me. It’s his duty to tell us how he’s conserving as he demands that Angelenos make sacrifices.

Turns out, Water King possesses a fertile imagination just like me. He tells me that he’s been planning to release the records all along. He just doesn’t want to give them to me. I can believe that last statement. And all this time I thought his best-selling wife Gina was the family’s fiction writer.

“In fact, I plan to disclose such information in the near future, for reasons unrelated to your inquiry,” he deadpanned, in his letter of June 13. “I ordinarily would have no objection to releasing my water and power usage information. However, in light of how you have conducted yourself, your inappropriate behavior with my family and your admitted harassment of me earlier this week, I see no point in providing this information to you in particular.”

He takes one final jab: “I also respectfully request that you refrain from contacting members of my family in the future.”

Hold on, may I get a word in here before we send the case to the jury?

The saga started politely enough May 15. That’s when I asked then-friendly Nahai about his water bills after a press conference in which he announced a massive water conservation and recycling plan. I’ll say more about me and my behavior, all of which bore the daylights out of me, later in the post. But now, let’s delve into the legal points we haven’t talked about before.

In his letter rejecting my request, Water King cites California Government Code Section 6254.16, which deals with the confidentiality of utility bills. But it also lists exceptions. Subsection E describes certain elected and appointed officials whose utility bills should become public. No way Water King, as the key leader dealing with water and electric rates and policies, would not be among this group whose bills should be released to the public.

This little provision has David Nahai written all over it:
(e) Upon determination by the local agency that the utility
customer who is the subject of the request is an elected or appointed
official with authority to determine the utility usage policies of
the local agency, provided that the home address of an appointed
official shall not be disclosed without his or her consent.

Water King falls into this group as both the general manager of the DWP, a position he’s held since October 2007, and as a member of the DWP’s Board of Commissioners, a position he held from September 2005 to shortly before he was named general manager. My request covered a year’s worth of bills, starting in June 2007.

Water King’s a lawyer and earned his degree from one of the best schools in the United States – UC Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law. Of course, he knows this subsection applies to him, and that he must release his bills to the public. But now he wants to do it on his own terms, and not give them to some obnoxious columnist who calls himself L.A. Sniper. He’s probably imposed strict water rationing on his family and will wait for a billing cycle that shows he’s cut water use in half. Maybe he’s boarded-up six of his seven bathrooms, drained the swimming pool and ordered his wife and three children to shower at the gym.

Unfortunately for Water King, the law does not grant him the discretion to release the requested public information on his own terms. Clearly, the ball is now in my court. I’ve scheduled meetings here at L.A. Sniper headquarters to plot my next move.

In nearly three decades in journalism, I’ve filed dozens of requests for public information, and most of time the responses are not signed by head of the agency. Water King took personal interest in my request and I applaud him for it.

He still seems to be fried that I stopped by his house to ask his wife for the bills. I’ve listened several times to a recording of our conversation at the May 15 press conference. When I asked him how much his water bill was, he said: “You’d have to ask my wife.” Many of my own friends say I shouldn’t have taken his words so literally and gone to his house. I would have gone to check it out even without his implied invitation. Go ahead, convict me of treading into the personal domain of one of most powerful public officials in L.A., who dictates policies that affect millions of people. The public interest served by my inquiry far outweighs the ripple of invading his family’s privacy for five minutes.

There’s plenty of room here for debate, but you should know that I conducted myself as the model of diplomacy in my low-key approach with Gina Nahai and son who came to the door. I apologized several times for imposing on them and asked only once to see the bills. I spoke in normal tones.

In contrast, I grew more persistent by the nanosecond in my questioning of the Water King at a June 9 press conference in Silver Lake. He invited the harsh questioning. I flat-out told him that the reason it might seem that I’m harassing him is because he violated the California Public Records Act by not responding to my request within 10 days. (He held his press conference on Day 15 and finally responded to my request on Day 19, nine days too late.)

The Water King should not only be big enough to take the badgering, but he should realize he needs to hand over the information. He made a mistake by rejecting my request. His judgment must have been clouded by his tense working conditions. It can’t be easy for a man as sharp as David Nahai to be so subservient to the political whims of the mayor and of the DWP’s union boss, who calls many of the shots at the powerful utility.

But maybe he’s on the right track. Right below David Nahai’s signature is the DWP motto: “Water and Power conservation…a way of life.”

Too bad Water King didn’t prove it when I gave him a chance. Maybe I should have asked a simpler question, like does he drink tap or bottled water at home?