JERRY BROWN SUES A BAD BANK 4 DOING BAD THINGS
Attorney General Edmund G. Brown, Jr. will hold a news conference Thursday morning to announce that he is suing one of the nation’s largest banks for defrauding thousands of California investors out of more than $1 billion.
“Investors put large sums of money into risky financial instruments, depending upon false and deceptive advice that these investments were as safe and liquid as cash.”
(Go Jerry!)
More on this shortly.
******************************************************************************************************
UN-PARKERING THE NEW NOT-THE-PARKER CENTER
At Wednesday’s meeting, the LA City Council screeched to a halt when asked to vote to name the new LAPD building after Bill Parker writes the LA Times’ Joel Rubin.
Yeah. I bet.
Even Bernie Parks, who has been pushing the issue, is back pedaling.
The Police Commission assuredly isn’t into it, Rubin reported yesterday.
Jasmyne Cannick has been all over the controversy for days…here and here and here and here.
(Caution: Cannick’s site plays music, whether you want it to or not. So mute your sound if you don’t want music to give away the fact that you’re blog surfing, rather than….whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing instead.)
******************************************************************************************************
THE LA TIMES OPINES ABOUT STRIP-SEARCHING STUDENTS
Like most sane people, the LA Times editorial board thinks that strip-searching a 13-year-old in order to possibly find some hidden pain medication is ill advised and whacked, and hopes that the Supremes won’t succumb to anti-drug hysteria and thus be deflected from fashioning a sensible ruling and legally sound ruling.
*******************************************************************************************************
WHEN THE MEDIA WRITES ABOUT THE MEDIA….WELL
The finalists for the third annual Mirror Awards competition was just announced, and the short lists are fun to check out. The Mirror awards sponsored by Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, “honors the reporters, editors and teams of writers who hold a mirror to their own industry for the public’s benefit.”
There are some terrific selections here—things like Eric Alterman writing in the New Yorker about the life and death of the American newspaper, and Rachel Sklar writing for the Huffington Post about the problems with the important but significantly flawed New York Times article exposing the Pentagon’s secret campaign to influence TV “analysts, (which just won the investigative Pulitzer, by the way).
For sheer delight of prose I prefer the not one but two Mark Bowden article’s nominated, both written for the Atlantic, one a profile of the very obsessed Rupert Murdoch, the other a wonderful profile of the Wire’s David Simon’s titled “The Angriest Man in Television.”
Here’s how it opens:
Behold the Hack, the veteran newsman, wise beyond his years, a man who’s seen it all, twice. He’s honest, knowing, cynical, his occasional bitterness leavened with humor. He’s a friend to the little scam, and a scourge of the big one. Experience has acquainted him with suffering and stupidity, venality and vice. His anger is softened by the sure knowledge of his own futility…..
Photo by Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times