Santa Monica Lions & MT’s Citizens United Knight, and More

DID THEY REALLY HAVE TO SHOOT THIS SANTA MONICA MOUNTAIN. LION?

I live in Topanga where we very occasionally see these critters, thus my neighbors and I had a lot of questions about why Santa Monica PD and Fish and Game couldn’t somehow get its act together enough to dart the confused big cat who unaccountably wandered into an enclosed courtyard in Santa Monica on Tuesday morning, then curled up in a state of nervous bewilderment.

Santa Monica PD had few convincing answers.

“Attempts to tranquilize the lion and return it to the wilderness were unsuccessful,” the spokesperson told the LA Times. “Unsuccessful” meaning they shot tranquilizer darts at the cat and missed. Then they started shooting non-lethal projectiles, squirting it with a firehose in an attempt to herd it, and succeeded in totally freaking the lion out, at which point a cop shot it a bunch of times.

Yes, we understand it was downtown, and that there was a preschool nearby, and certainly lethal force is called for if a mountain lion threatens’ children. Still we know that officials were smart enough to send somebody over to said preschool to tell teachers to keep kids inside until the cat was secured, thus removing children from danger, so what was the rush?

Perhaps I’m wrong, but mostly it sounds like the humans blew it—acting clumsily, and spooking the lion then killing him. (The cat was a three year old male, officials say.)

By the way, I’d give you more useful details on the matter but SMPD also bobbled their spokesperson thing rather dreadfully when I called three different times yesterday. My neighbor didn’t fare much better.

I spend a part of most summers in West Glacier, MT, where they deal with mountain lions and grizzlies rather routinely with the rare need to kill an animal in order to protect the common good. (This would include the at least a dozen different griz who have wandered into our MT yard over the years). So forgive me if I suspect the SM cops and Fish and Game could have done better.

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CITIZEN’S UNITED: MONTANA AG’S GLORIOUS OBSESSION

And speaking of Montana, the state—specifically in the person of its Attorney General— is entirely serous about its challenge to Citizen’s United that the Supreme Court will soon decide whether or not it will hear.

Mike Sach’s at the Huffington Post has the details. Here’s a clip:

WASHINGTON — Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock says that he has been so personally involved in the Citizens United sequel soon to be considered by the U.S. Supreme Court that his coworkers say he is the case’s “attorney specific.”

It is a role Bullock welcomed following the 2010 ruling in Citizens United, which held that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” Bullock, a Democrat, led 26 states in submitting a brief to the Supreme Court for that case, in favor of the federal law that restricted such corporate spending and was ultimately struck down as unconstitutional. He is the top lawyer for Montana, the only state not to abandon its own corporate spending regulations in that decision’s wake.

So when an out-of-state conservative interest group now known as American Tradition Partnership brought suit in Montana to topple the state’s century-old Corrupt Practices Act as invalid under Citizens United, Bullock took it upon himself to fight back.

“I dove down deep early on when the first challenge came into the case,” Bullock told HuffPost. “I’ve been working with my sleeves rolled up ever since on it.”

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WHEN PRISONERS COME HOME

Sean J. Miller writing for the Christian Science Monitor has a terrific story on prisoner reentry, much of the reporting based in LA. As the CSM points out, these days roughly 700,000 ex-cons are hitting US streets each year, thus it would be in everyone’s best interest if the rest of us found good ways to help the men and women trying to make it on the outside.

Here’s a clip:

Jason Corralez donned a freshly pressed collared shirt. He had shaved neatly around his salt-and-pepper goatee. He looked like a man about to go on a job interview, which he was. It was a job he desperately wanted, but one question gnawed at him: Would they be willing to hire a convicted murderer?

Corralez didn’t leave out why he went to prison, either. “I’m an ex-felon for the offense of second-degree murder,” he told the manager. A former member of The Mob Crew, an East Los Angeles gang, he served 24 years for killing a member of the rival MS-13 gang in a drive-by shooting. “This is the person I was,” he said, “and this is the person I am now.”

According to Corralez, the manager stepped back, stunned. “Thank you for being honest,” Corralez recalls him saying. As the ex-prisoner walked to the bus stop, he knew what it meant. “I took everything that I had accomplished, everything that I had to do to get a second chance,” he says. “But I could see it in his reaction. It was like the nail in the coffin.”

Corralez’s struggle to transition from prisoner to free member of society is one that thousands of inmates across the country are going through as states trim their prison populations on a scale unseen in American history.essed collared shirt. He had shaved neatly around his salt-and-pepper goatee. He looked like a man about to go on a job interview, which he was. It was a job he desperately wanted, but one question gnawed at him: Would they be willing to hire a convicted murderer?