I’m at a death penalty conference. More on that later. But in the meantime…. Here’s a story about some local kids who are fighting to get the grown-ups to do the right thing:

Yesterday at five in the morning, a van full of eleven Topanga Canyon six graders (plus four mother-type chaperones) left on a road trip to Sacramento to deliver a petition containing 16,831 signatures asking Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger not to shut down Topanga State Park—and the other state parks, for that matter, one out of five of which are scheduled for closure.

Topanga Elementary School encourages its sixth graders to come up with a class projects. So this year, a bunch of the six graders decided they wanted to…well…. change the world. Or more specifically, they wanted to save the park. The students themselves collected around 1000 of the 16,000 plus signatures. (Local parent organizers got the rest) And then, with the help of one of the school’s teachers, made a CD full of original songs that they sold to neighborhood adults in order to raise the necessary bucks to rent the van and pay for the gasoline for the Sac’to trip. (I believe the four mothers agreed to work pro bono, my across the street neighbor Christina, among them, since her son Lorenzo was one of the Topanga 11. )

The closure of 48 of the state’s parks is a hideously penny wise, pound foolish idea. More specifically, closing all 48 would save just $13.3 million out of a budget shortfall of $16 billion. (The rest of the facts and the numbers pertaining to the issue can be found here.)

All the parks deserve to be protected. But Topanga’s 13,000 acres are unique in that they make up the largest wildland park within the boundaries of a metropolitan city in the nation. Topanga State Park is visited by more than half a million people each year (and those are just the folks who come in the front door). Inner city classes come there, LA County’s most famous 10K is run there, people get married there, little kids have birthday parties there (instead of at Chuck E Cheese), it’s 50 miles of hiker/biker/rider trails within driving distance from downtown LA….and on and on.

Oh, yeah, and not maintaining chaparral haunted parks like Topanga would add to the fire danger in a year that promises to be far more dangerous that last year’s awful fire season.

In short, shutting it down is an appalling idea. But it was not an issue that seemed to much interest the media—what with all the education cuts and the never-ending primary and all.

However the Topanga kids and their road trip have generated publicity both on radio and TV.

I, for one, am pretty damn proud of them.

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It is a dramatic legal story….but with a twist. And it’s a hell of a twist having to do with a well-known prosecutor and a stripper.

First, here are the basics:

On Monday, the California Supreme Court decided unanimously that San Quentin inmate Adam Miranda should not have been sentenced to death twenty years ago because senior District Attorney Curt Hazell—and three sitting judges (formerly prosecutors), Judge Lance Ito, San Diego Judge Roger W. Krauel, and Orange County Superior Court Judge Frederick Horn —-either knowingly or accidentally failed to hand over an essential piece of exculpatory evidence—-namely the confession to a related killing by the prosecution’s star witness.

This is complicated case, and Miranda is not a good guy. Here’s how the LA Times explains it in yesterday’s editorial:

[Adam] Miranda is not a sympathetic symbol for abolishing the death penalty. Jurors were presented with a videotape at trial that showed him killing an Eagle Rock convenience store clerk; having committed such a brutal crime, he should never again walk free. But his sentence — death, and not life without parole — was based in part on another killing. The letter found in the prosecutor’s file, but never shared with the defense as required by law and thus never considered by the sentencing jury, contained evidence of another man’s admission to that crime.

In other words, Miranda is a stone killer who deserves life without possibility of parole. But, given the laws of the state, the central issue around which his death sentence was built, was entirely false.

Scarily, it was only the nearly two decades of pro bono digging on the part of entertainment lawyer George Hedges, that got Miranda off death row. Here’s what Hedges told Business Wire:

“We have been through a 20-year struggle to locate evidence the DA’s office intentionally withheld that showed our client did not commit the murder that placed him on death row 26 years ago,” said Mr. Hedges. “The case reveals an outrageous miscarriage of justice.”

“It took us years to force the DA’s office to turn over the Miranda files, and there in the back of one of the files was an envelope containing a confession to the murder by the star witness the prosecutors used to condemn our client to death,” added Mr. Bensinger. “It shows just how corrupt the system is. Without an all-out legal assault our client would have been put to death years ago for a crime he didn’t commit.”

And if that wasn’t bad enough, here’s the twist to the story:

The main witness in Miranda’s murder trial (the murder for which he was righteously convicted), was a woman named Donna Navarro who was working as a stripper at the time of the trial, but who happened in on the scene of the crime, and had the courage to come forward in order to testify to what she saw.
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Disaster aid for Burma isn’t easy because the government is not exactly outsider-friendly. But my friend Richard Walden and Operation USA are already on the ground in Myanmar, because they’re a lean, mean relief organization that has a great reputation for being able to bring supplies into difficult places.

After the jump you’ll find the funds pitch they sent out yesterday. One thing I can guarantee about OP USA, if you give them money, unlike the average administration-heavy nonprofits, they get a big bang for every buck they receive.

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Apologies to all those who found the site down today.

As it happens, I was working on something unrelated, so didn’t discover it for hours.

To be exact, I didn’t see the problem….until I was on the phone with a deputy district attorney and HE tried to log on and got an error message….. and then I got an ACCOUNT SUSPENDED MESSAGE. (That was cheering.)

After an hour’s worth of mildly hysterical shrieking on my part, plus my son’s calming and far more knowledgeable intervention (and the help of a very nice Blue Host tech named Jacob), all is well.

While I’d like to attribute, this to nefarious political plots. I think it’s more likely the perils of a technocracy together with ghosts in the machine.

Thanks to those who emailed me.

xo: Celeste

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So, what does he know that we don’t know?

Or is he just being gutsy? (And, well, Drudge-y)

Russert says that Clinton has canceled all Wednesday morning’s TV appearances. (This via Andrew Sullivan.)

MEANWHILE….. we wait for…

(Ha! I see Andrew Sullivan has his own YouTube version.)

OH, YEAH, the LA Times’ Mark Z. Barabak says that nothing has changed after Tuesday’s primaries.

The results left the dynamics of the presidential race essentially unchanged. Obama remains well-positioned to win the nomination when the voting ends June 3, but has not mustered the strength to finish off Clinton. Clinton has an incentive to keep campaigning, but faces increasingly steep odds that she can push past Obama without some dramatic development.

Uh, huh. Okay, well then, define “push past.” That would be in delegates? The popular vote? What?

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Obama’s found his voice again and he’s got a new musical refrain…

Instead of Yes We Can—which he uses not mostly as a punchline—he is using as his repeating chorus “I trust the American people.

And he uses it well:

We can choose not to be divided…..we can choose not to be afraid..

This time can be different than all the rest….

This is our time to answer the call that so many Americans have answered before…..

I didn’t get into this race thinking that I could avoid this kind of politics, but I am running for president because this is the time to end it.

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Barack Obama has had a very unpleasant April says Andrew Tyndall of the Tyndall report. Well, that’s hardly new news. But Tyndall isn’t talking about Obama’s loss in Pennsylvania or his former pastor’s not-so-comedic stand up performance at the National Press Club. Media analyst Tyndall is talking about the deluge of relentlessly negative media coverage that has plagued Obama in the last month.

Andrew Tyndall, through his Tyndall Report, has been monitoring the nightly newscasts of the three television networks for 20 years. He claims to be the only person on the planet who has personally watched every single weekday network nightly newscast since the summer of 1987.

Here’s what he says about April’s coverage of Obama and Clinton.

As for the candidate coverage, Obama attracted more than HRC and McCain combined (62 mins v HRC 26, McCain 24). For both Obama and Rodham Clinton, most of the month was negative when it came to covering their campaigns. So the accurate way to contrast the two is on their quantity not their quality. The tone of Obama’s coverage was not noticeably more negative than hers; he just received more than twice as much of it.

Tyndall is not suggesting bias. But rather he says something else is at work.

Our explanation rests on the new style of political coverage we have called Reality Gameshow Journalism, a style that sees the Presidential campaign as an elimination contest between larger-than-life personalities, that focuses on the character rather than the ideology of each, that is interested in socio-psychological factors more than issues, that believes that character is most clearly revealed when a candidate is subjected to the ordeal of near elimination.

Under the rubric of Reality Gameshow Journalism, questions about a pastor’s words are transformed from guilt-by-association to insights into judgment and loyalty. Under this rubric, the frontrunner would naturally receive twice the attention of the second place candidate since the closer one comes to victory the more scrutiny one deserves.

And under this rubric, any coverage that helps tighten the race makes a possible elimination primary all the more compelling and dramatic.

What Gameshow Journalism is not, is coverage that examines, illuminates, and weights the worth of the candidates.

And it doesn’t have to be balanced.

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As a companion to the story above about Game Show journalism, I thought you’d enjoy reading this report by one of my smart USC students, Jackie Cook.

The class assignment was to report on a news conference or a speech. Jackie chose the presentation below about how economics drive news coverage. I think you’ll find it intriguing:

THE MARKET FOR NEWS by Jackie Cook

James T. Hamilton, a professor at Duke University, spoke about economics and its effects on the media at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication Monday. With the trend from hard to softer news coupled with the dying age of the nation’s once-primary news source – the newspaper – Hamilton applies economic theory to possible reasons and solutions.

What determines coverage is not the traditional five W’s journalists often use to draft a story – who, what, when, where, why. Rather, Hamilton states his “five economic W’s” can predict what will appear on the front cover of next week’s Los Angeles Times.

His five points are:

1. Who cares about particular piece of info?
2. What are they willing to pay to find it? What are others willing to pay to reach them?
3. Where can media advertisers or outlets reach these ppl?
4. When is it profitable to reach these people?
5. Why is it profitable?

“News is a commodity, not a mirror image of reality,” said Hamilton, a professor of political science and economics.

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In case you missed Steve Lopez’s column yesterday, it’s a good one. Here’s how it began:

“What is it?” Kelly Charles asked as he walked to his job as a custodian in downtown Los Angeles and gazed up at a rather odd construction project. “A roller coaster?”

As I wandered the neighborhood, other guesses were:

A ski jump.

A toboggan run.

A water slide.

What’s got everyone talking is the odd-looking tower that rises 140 feet above the 101 Freeway, directly across from the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. The futuristic metallic edifice, with a wraparound spiral Dr. Seuss would love, is not part of a theme park. It is the signature adornment on a new arts-oriented public high school that will cost roughly $230 million.

(Most everyone I know guessed an escaped ride from Six Flags Magic Mountain.)

Evidently the high school was going to be an ordinary campus until Eli Broad decided it should be a state of the art design monument, as the Times and the Daily News reported in 2003. To that end, Broad hooked the district up with his friend the $800,000 designer. And pretty soon the water slide wonder tower (or whatever) was in the works.

All of this would have been fine if Eli was footing some of the bill. But he wasn’t. (He offered to loan the district some money, which is not exactly the help that was needed.)

Still, way back then the Superintendent Roy Romer said that the school would still just cost the approved $73.2 million.

And then the cost ballooned to $230 million.

The tower rises from a 950-seat performing arts theater, and this part of the project alone is priced at $49 million, writes Lopez.

Soooo-o-o-o-o-o. in an era when neighborhood schools are badly in need of repair, classes are catastrophically overcrowded, and the state is planning to slash 10 percent out of public education across the board, the district is spending an extra $100 million for this fancy design?

This is not giving us confidence in the Sup and the LAUSD board. Priorities, people!

As Lopez points out, the toboggan run school design boondoggle is not David Brewer’s doing. But he has done nothing to fix or ameliorate the situation.


Calling Ray Cortines. We are ready for some sane and sensible leadership.

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One of this morning’s must reads is the Alex Kotlowitz article in today’s New York Times Magazine called Blocking the Transmission of Violence about gang violence as a public health problem.

The article is about the work of Gary Slutkin, an epidemiologist and a physician who for 10 years battled infectious diseases in Africa, and who now has founded an organization called CeaseFire. “Slutkin,” writes Kotlowitz, “wants to shift how we think about violence from a moral issue (good and bad people) to a public health one (healthful and unhealthful behavior).”

So far, so good.

And Kotlowitz is one of the writers able to assess such a program with more clarity than most. He is the author of such much lauded books as,There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America.

According to Kotlowitz, Slutkin says that “….violence directly mimics infections like tuberculosis and AIDS,” and so “the treatment ought to mimic the regimen applied to these diseases: go after the most infected, and stop the infection at its source. …”

Slutkin’s chosen method to “stop the infection” is to use what he calls “interrupters,” hard core former gangsters and shot callers to step who step in to try to stop cycle of retaliation when violence occurs.

This method of hard core gang intervention, as it is called, is all the rage now—both in Chicago and in Los Angeles, and it is unfashionable to criticize it.

However if examined more closely, although Slutkin talks in terms of health and cures, on the face of it anyway, his approach is symptomatic, not curative at all.

Rather than stopping “the infection at it’s source,” maybe the better analogy for Slutkin’s work—and hard core gang intervention in general— is that of a tourniquet. If one stops the immediate bleeding maybe one can address the underlying illness, and there’s something to be said for that.

On the other hand, the approach is something of a slippery slope. It is a rule of thumb that to successfully mature out of the gang, most people find they need to move out of the neighborhood. Otherwise it’s just too difficult. With this in mind, metaphorically speaking, is it wise to send former alcoholics repeatedly into the bar to try to talk the other bar patrons out of drinking? Maybe. Maybe not. At present, the risk/benefit ratio still remains unclear.

There are many things about this approach that are controversial. But it is an approach that must be discussed. Here’s an excerpt:

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