"Today we say to America: We've come here to work: We clean your toilets!"

Friday, May 11, 2007

Zuma Dogg's Shady Report

Alright, y'all...so much shadiness happening in the City of Los Angeles under Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, I'm afraid I might show up to City Hall, one day soon for public comment, and find the doors to City Hall padlocked by George W. Bush!?!?

Here are some things Inspector Zuma Dogg is looking into that may, or may not be part of what's being looked into: (AKA: ZD's Bat Computer is working round the clock on -- and seems to be some things on the radar:

* Several lawsuits against the City over civil right's violation, across multiple departments. DWP (employee suing for unauthorized phone survelance), LAUSD (teacher suing for overtime), Ruby De Vera (suing LA and Ed Reyes over political expression violation/termination -- outside counsel hired), Female LAPD officer (sex discrimination/hostile work envronment). I understand there is some connection to all of these for a possible upcoming "collective" (or class action lawsuit, but I don't know if that's possible...I hear it IS from some, isn't from others.)

PLUS, ZD announces Geragos and Geragos suing LAPD in Federal Court of failure to process exculpatory DNA evidence that set the Plaintiff free, after being locked upi for two months.)

* "Dirt" Burnell housing development in Mt. Washington: Complaint HAS been filed with Building and Saftey alleging developer, Michael Zenon (Xenon)submitted substantial mistatement of facts with intention to mislead City into issuing permits.
(Are three CMs tied into this?)

ALSO: XENON was denied a condo conversion in CM Rosdendahl's district over all the stuff ZD has been talking about (vacancy rates, Ellis Act, notification issues). So he is appealing to Council first week in June for permission. Rosendahl claims to be "tenant friendly". Let's see if he and council can stand up to Zenon. ZD says, "Hell Naw". CM will cave and apartments will be converted and Rosendahl will never hear the end of it.

* SW Museum/Griffith Park expansion/Autry Non-Profit: (See ZD/Mayor Sam story)

* Wyvenwood Apartments: Is Mike Fink's Fifteen company (who owns the apartments) planning a demolition to make way for a condo? Huizar claims to be unaware of it...But ZD says he is VERY aware of it. Better demolish all those "historic" buildings and chop down all those dozens of old oak trees to make way.

* ED REYES'S LA River Project: CRA boondoggle to turn LA River project into the "Condorodo River". Just an excuse to build high density housing around no infrastructre. WAAAAAAAY more to come on this.

* Prop K (State Park Bond Money): Waaaaaaaaay too many loopholes to allow non-profits to bamboozle the fund and not build the parks.

* HONORABLE MENTION: Froniter Building Supply, tract maps, bulky item collection fee/tax, Amiga, non-profits paying huge salaries and blinged out rides to the boardmembers we all have heard of, CRA ($14 Boyle Heights bond),

For more info call me at 310-928-7544 and I will be glad to follow up. Otherwise, check the Mayor Sam blog for all of these current stories, with way more to come.

email: zumadogg@netzero.com

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Zuma Dogg's Shady Report

by Zuma Dogg
Public Advocate of the Community

Are There Two Concurring Investigatons at LA City Hall? (1 Fed, 1 State)

This past Superbowl Sunday, some comments by Captian Jack Sparrow (a frequent comment poster on "Mayor Sam's Sister City" blog www.mayorsam.blogspot.com) caught my attention.

Since then, he/they (more than one contribute to the "Cpt. Jack blogger persona) has/have been leaving clues about a sticky situation regarding a Los Angeles City Councilmember's (CM) trip to Florida, for the Superbowl game. And now, additional bloggers have seconded Cpt. Jacks claim that Federal Agents are investigating City Hall, over a civil rights violation by DWP, involving "listening in on phone conversations, without proper notification...aka: spying, and who knows, "what else".

To read the rest of the report, please click here.

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Bratton and Villaraigosa Should Resign

Placing blame for bad decisions made by police officers at last week's May Day protests, Police Chief Bill Bratton reassigned two top cops and busted one of them down from Deputy Chief to Commander.

Deputy Chief Cayler ``Lee'' Carter a 33-year veteran of the LAPD and commanding officer of operations at the LAPD's Central Bureau was demoted to the rank of commander and assigned to his home. Commander Louis Gray, a 39 year veteran and Carter's second-in-command was moved to a post in the Office of Operations. Bratton will announce his recommended replacement for Carter during the Police Commission meeting Tuesday.

"I have to be comfortable with the leadership around me," Bratton said, but he noted that he could not state the specific reasons for the moves because they were personnel matters.

Mayor Villaraigosa - who was out of the country during the protest and surrounding incidents - told reporters ``We're not going to shift responsibility down the chain of command. Accountability begins at the top. What happened on May 1st was wrong and we're taking immediate action to address it. Let me be clear about this: When I say accountability starts at the top, it starts with me."

We have to remember that both Villaraigosa and Bratton planned to be out of the country weeks before the protests. Surely the LAPD had intelligence that troublemakers were likely to take advantage of the event and egg police on. Given that, it was completely irresponsible of Bratton and Villaraigosa - as top leaders of the city - to attempt to skip out of town when this volatile event was on the calendar.

"Let me be clear about this: When I say accountability starts at the top, it starts with me."
Mayor Villaraigosa
There is no doubt that some officers acted badly. However there were protestors and other troublemakers who were the source of the trouble; these moves to blame officers by Bratton and Villaraigosa only seek to wash over their behaivor and allows the perpetrators to get away with it.

And it also discounts the fact that a number of the protestors - no matter how much they are good people, hard working and are very good at cleaning toilets (according to the Mayor) are here ILLEGALLY and are violating the law as well. However the Mayor, the Chief, the City Clowncil and a good chunk of LA are in denial of that fact.

Indeed, as much as Carter and Lee are responsible for the actions of the officers below them, so too are Villaraigosa and Bratton. The Mayor said "accountability starts at the top."

Therefore considering all that happened - and that the Chief and the Mayor irresponsibly planned to leave town (Bratton was scheduled to leave a little later than Villaraigosa and therefore when things got of hand there was time for the Mayor to cut the Chief loose and order him to stay in the country) - its only fitting and right that the Mayor and the Chief resign.

Of course, they are going to deny all responsibility, pin the blame on underlings and move on. But no doubt the members of the Command Officers Association and the Police Protective League will have a few words to say. We'll be glad to hear them.

A few other views:
Mayor Villaraigosa Pisses Me Off
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa Rushes to Judgment

Monday, May 07, 2007

We Install Your Toilets!

Part and parcel of the problem with local government is not a lack of resources or even ideas. No, its a failure of leadership. This failure extends not only to a lack of action but probably even worse self-aggrandizing action that is really non-action by our elected officials. Quite frankly, they're often blowing smoke up our ass.

Case in point is the Mayor's $168 million plan to fight the ever increasing scourge of gang violence in Los Angeles. David Zahniser writing in the LA Weekly blows the cover off this bogus, flawed and downright silly program the Mayor hopes to ride to getting his picture in the paper and becoming Governor, perhaps even President someday.

Zahniser does probably what no other publication in Los Angeles did - got off his ass to take a look at the program.

As it turns out, nearly $150 million is money the city already spends on existing programs. And many of those initiatives are only tangentially related to the difficult work of eliminating street gangs, including such things as boat trips for fifth-graders in the Los Angeles Harbor to the ramped-up deployment of park rangers at the city’s biggest parks (are street thugs roaming Griffith Park and no one warned us?).
Indeed, not only is the Mayor's spending all jacked up (more on that in a minute), apparently really very little thought has gone into the plan. When the Mayor was introducing his plan at his "State of the City" speech at a local high school, he wrongly cited that very school as having a gang problem.

And the most bizarre aspect of the program, the Mayor is going from cleaning toilets to installing them. That's right over $1 million will be spent on having gang members install no-water toilets at city facilities:
And that gets us to the most intriguing weapon in the mayor’s $168 millon anti-gang arsenal: water-saving urinals. As in, the self-cleaning kind that rely on — yipes! — suction instead of water. The mayor’s 41-page gang proposal promises to spend $1.2 million on the Water Demand Management Installation Program. Or to put it another way: the Department of Water and Power will teach the city’s youth to install water-efficient urinals and sprinklers in public parks.

Yet not one municipal facility or park in the City of Los Angeles has plans to install the toilets, except for by the Department of Recreation and Parks at Taylor Yard and a department official told Zahniser “But that would only be as an experiment, and we haven’t done that yet.”

Even when these programs are directly tied to gang intervention, they tend to be colossal wastes of money. The long fabled "LA Bridges" program has spent over $100 million in ten years and gang violence is worse than ever.

Even more so than the toilet scheme is another aspect of the "plan," the City's "Junior Golf" program. As Zahniser notes, the $9 million program allows 350 children to play golf at Griffith Park. An admirable activity, but that equates to about $26,000 per child. That's actually a bit more change than annual tuition for a child at the prestigious private Brentwood School, which has graduated notables such as actor Fred Savage, author Andrew Breitbart and members of the band Maroon 5. Instead of building toilets or playing golf, sending 350 kids to elite private schools could probably do more to keep them out of gangs, but I digress.

As it is, the plan has been harshly criticized by attorney Connie Rice, who is seen as sort of a guru on the gang question. Rice released her own plan earlier this year from which the Mayor plagiarized a good portion but didn't provide the funding Rice proposed. Zahniser points out that Rice is reserving a nuclear option; suing the City for not adequately spreading anti-gang resources across the city.

In the end, the Mayor has created a plan out of whole cloth: tossing in existing programs and services (many of which are questionable as to their direct connection to anti-gang efforts) and grafting on a few other items which are bizarre at best and shameful at worst.

But hey - it got the Mayor a lot of photo ops!

Villaraigosa Poised to Take Over LA School Board

Brady Westwater writing at LA Citywatch says that Mayor Villaraigosa has won his battle to take over the school board; the teachers' union has essentially given up the ghost by pulling a half million dollars in funding to support incumbent Jon Lauritzen over the Mayor's candidate, attorney Tamar Galatzan. Westwater also predicts that Villaraigosa backed Richard Vladovic will win in the 7th District. With Galatzan and Vladovic joining Yolie Flores-Aguilar and Monica Garcia who were elected previously, this gives the Mayor full control of the Board of Education.

Saturday, May 05, 2007

Help Wanted

Want to be a blogger? Would you like to join the Mayor Sam family? We could use a few bloggers in the following areas:

No pay (yet) but your opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a blogging empire. If interested, please email Mayor Sam at mayorsamyorty@aol.com.

Friday, May 04, 2007

Mayor V Coming Home Early

When you leave town and don't mind the store when the weathers rough, chickens come home to roost.

Mayor V has all of a sudden decided his work in El Salvador is done; he's coming back to LA to save Bill Bratton's ass which is in big trouble right now with the left, the right, the media, possibly the District Attorney and the FBI.

So much for that sailing to renewal. Bitter Bernie has got to be feeling good about right now.

If Chief Bill has to leave town; some of these items might be useful to him.

Bloggers Blog on Mayor V

Villaraigosa returning early

46 minutes ago
With the LAPD yet again giving the city a black eye, Mayor Villaraigosa cut short his trip to Latin America and will return to Los Angeles Friday morning. He broke the news during a live interview tonight on Televisa, then his office ...
LA Observed - http://www.laobserved.com/

ANSWER Answers Bo
16 hours ago by Blue Collar Republican
We demand that Mayor Villaraigosa and all city officials take immediate action to bring the officers involved to justice. We also demand that the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners fire LAPD Chief William Bratton. ...
Blue Collar Republican - http://bluecollarrepublican.com/blog - References

The hits keep comin'
8 hours ago
Yes, that's right, straight out of Los Angeles, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's takeover bid (which we've covered here, here, and here) has hit yet another snag. If you recall, a Superior Court judge declared the law, which was hastily ...
BoardBuzz: NSBA's Daily Weblog - http://boardbuzz.nsba.org/

Rogue LAPD Assaults Demonstrators, Press
14 hours ago by Ken Reich
Without the strong, steadfast support of officials like Villaraigosa, Bratton and City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo, who should be but are not beholden to the public, the prospects of such legislation are hopeless. ...
Take Back the Times - http://takebackthetimes.blogspot.com/

The Roundup for Thursday, May 3rd
2 hours ago
The LAT's Duke Helfand writes that Antonio Villaraigosa is under criticism for traveling to El Salvador during the May Day immigration protests, which turned violent in a city park. "On Wednesday, he defended his decision to start the ...
The Roundup - http://www.capitolbasement.com

“The next thing I heard was the shotguns”
14 hours ago by marisacat
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who is traveling in El Salvador:. “Yesterday, across the country, we witnessed a day of overwhelmingly peaceful speeches and assemblies in the best American tradition. … Any time that our law enforcement ...
Marisacat - http://marisacat.wordpress.com

Police Fire on Journalists and May Day Rally demonstrators
9 hours ago by Laron Cue
Chief William Bratton has issued a statement regarding the incident, and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa also issued statements, calling the police reactions unfortunate. Villaragosa is in the unenviable position of having to speak on the ...
Blogcritics Section: Politics - http://blogcritics.org/politics/ - References

Help Wanted!
2 hours ago by Mayor Sam
Pro and Anti Antonio Villaraigosa bloggers for We Clean Your Toilets; News bloggers/press release journalists for Mayor Sam 2; Bloggers who want to cover/comment on the Presidential campaign/national politics for Sam Yorty's America ...
Mayor Sam's Sister City - Home of Los... - http://mayorsam.blogspot.com/
[ More results from Mayor Sam's Sister City - Home of Los... ]

The Day of the Immigrant brings LAPD Violence
2 hours ago by michael-
Call Villaraigosa and demand the termination and prosecution of all officers involved! 213-978-0600 or email him at mayor@lacity.org. If enough citizens are outraged, perhaps this will be dealt with swiftly. ...
HELIOLITH - http://heliolith.com

LA Mayor Seeks Gang Solutions in El Salvador17 hours ago
Concerns about gang culture prompt Antonio Villaraigosa to visit San Salvador. Both cities must deal with gangs that have strong ties in both nations. In San Salvador, felons deported from the US have taken LA's gang culture back to the ...
NPR Topics: Nation - http://www.npr.org/templates/topics/topic.php?topicId=1003&ft=1&f=1003 - References

Thursday, May 03, 2007

"Something Went Wrong" Tuesday

More blowback following the near riot at the MacArthur Park pro-illegal immigration rally on Tuesday.

The LAPD is being severely criticized for an alleged use of "excessive force" by firing 240 rounds of foam bullets and using batons to clear pro-immigration protesters and media members from MacArthur Park.

LAPD Chief William Bratton - who was supposed to join Mayor Villaraigosa in El Salvador and Mexico - is still in town dealing with the mess. Not a good time for Bratton who was coasting to a renewal of another five years on his contract; indeed the Chief has admitted that some officers' actions may have been "inappropriate."

A two-phased internal investigation will be conducted to determine if Los Angeles police violated policy Bratton said. The Chief met with members of his command staff last night after seeing news footage showing officers in riot gear knocking protesters and some media members to the ground with batons.

Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, D-Los Angeles, asked Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley to conduct an independent investigation into the officers' actions. City Council President Eric Garcetti said the Police Commission will also conduct its own probe of the incident.

Councilman Herb Wesson said the clash reminded him of confrontations between police and civil rights protestors in the South during the 1960s. "If there were dogs available, I would have thought that this great city of Los Angeles had been transported to Mississippi during the late `60s.'' Wesson told reporters "Something went wrong yesterday."

A number of television reporters including KTTV's Christina Gonzalez and KCBS/KCAL's Mark Coogan allege being attacked by police officers. The Society of Professional Journalists issued a statement expressing "grave concern" over how police officers acted towards members of the media. And yes, even La Voz de Atzlan had something to say.

And of course bloggers had plenty to say. Of course they wonder - as is everyone else - why did the Mayor leave the country just prior these turn of events?

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Antonio, Immigrants Go MIA

What if they gave a protest rally and no one came, especially the Mayor who stood before them so stridently a year before declaring he cleaned our toilets. We hate to say we told you so.

What a difference a year makes as only a minuscule fraction of the crowds of 2006 turned out at twin protests on Tuesday. And some of those who did became violent, requiring tough action from the LAPD.

One person who was conspicuous by his absence was Mayor Villaraigosa. He was heading off on a trade mission south of the border. And there is no indication that immigration will be discussed with Mexican government officials during the Mayor's trip.

In other Villaraigosa related news the Mayor set tongues wagging at last weekend's state Democratic convention by his unusually low profile and his private meeting with his potential 2010 gubernatorial primary opponent, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.

To end the day the Mayor got some bad news. His 2003 Council campaign is the subject of a 31 count ethics violation accusation filed Tuesday by the City of Los Angeles Ethics Commission.

Keep up with the Mayor including latest news and video up to the minute at We Clean Your Toilets.

Open Thread for Mayday

The big march is today! What do you think? Check back to We Clean Your Toilets throughout the day for updated news and your latest comments.