In addition to Kevin de Leon, another person who went from state legislative leadership to local government is county supervisor Sheila Kuehl. Once the actress portraying Zelda Gilroy on Dobie Gillis, now being persecuted by the sheriff for trying to exercise oversight on him. It's okay, he's probably going to lose reelection.
A distant relative was LA county commissioner. I went to the wedding of his daughter. The best man's speech was an extended riff on the Godfather.
At least your racists aren't trying to overthrow the government.
Sorry - he was on the LA county board of supervisors.
Good thread from Assemblymember Laura Friedman - along with other less trivial distinctions, the representative of the most Armenian parts of LA - on the systemic issues feeding corruption, especially with regard to development.
I was going to correct you, bur in my understanding supervisor and commissioner are more or less the same position with different names in different states.
15 members! That's a big city council. I guess it's a big city, to be fair.
Council expansion is perhaps on the docket too! (The Board of Supes is perhaps the worst anywhere: 10 million people, 5 members.)
Municipal district elections appear to increase NIMBYism per published research, but I think they're still valuable in reducing the barrier to newcomers, plus representation; without them, councils tend to be a bunch of white people clustered from the same few rich neighborhoods, so I'm not ready to throw district elections out if I were dictator. Their detriments might be eased a bit by having a bunch of 3-member districts instead of single-member. Plus of course just take the power to NIMBY out of city hands.
I can definitely see how it would increase NIMBYism - it does work against any one neighborhood accepting something unpalatable for the good of the whole.
The thing is, though, that NIMBYism is effective in an asymmetric manner - wealthy regions deploy it most effectively. Do single-member districts actually increase it with respect to wealthy neighborhoods, or just level the playing field? (Still problematic, of course, because homeless people are worse-off when NIMBYism has become egalitarian across the board.)
KDL is my councilperson.* I know a lot of people who used to work with him, and they've never had anything good to say -- when he started running for office, two separate people predicted to me that his career would end in scandal. His policy positions have generally been good, but I guess he really did turn out to be a stupid POS.
*He took office in 2020, replacing my last councilperson, Jose Huizar, who had to step down because he's being federally prosecuted for corruption. (Not to be confused with Mark Ridley-Thomas, who is also probably going to prison, or Mitch Englander, who's already there.) Why are our local politicians such a bunch of crooks and idiots? What are we, Chicago?
There is definitely precedent for low-income areas seeing downzoning as protective - even though it really isn't; the working class is worse off too. Interesting question though.
Oh yeah, my circles also hate de Leon because he was the most NIMBY of major candidates in the mayoral open primary (he came in third with 8%) and he's been taking beaucoup consulting bucks from the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, quod videt a href="https://la.streetsblog.org/2016/02/01/coalition-grows-in-opposition-to-nimby-ballot-initiative/">one, two, three, four.
But when I spent the GWB years saying that the future held clashes between African-American and Latin constituencies and interest groups that should be anticipated and addressed before they got ugly, I was being a Debby Downer.
What was your program for addressing those issues?
Racism is white and American, but it's also global and human. It's intersectional!
Say what you will about Kevin De Leon, but he represents a familiar constituency. The problem for decent people has always been mitigating the impact of racism on politics. There are many places in this country where you're simply not going to assemble a non-racist small-d democratic majority.
From the tape, KDL represents the constituency of sitting in the room and not making slurs but not raising a fuss over them either. The person who dropped the most bombs was Nury Martinez, from the Valley.
The fact that all this hatred bubbled up as part of redistricting strategizing
"Hatred" seems pretty strong and largely unjustified. The two worst things that these terrible people seem to have said are "he treats his son like an accessory" and "his son is like a little monkey". (I'm assuming those are the worst because they're the ones that are singled out in the headline.)
All the rest of the conversation seems to have been a pretty coarse but probably pretty accurate discussion about how best to exploit existing racial voting blocs in LA.
(There are also some pretty appalling-sounding remarks possibly about Oaxacans but the LA Times didn't headline them so presumably they aren't considered that bad. I guess Oaxacans don't vote, or buy papers.)
During the conversation with Councilmembers Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León and Los Angeles County Federation of Labor President Ron Herrera, Martinez described Bonin at one point as a "little bitch," according to a recording of the meeting reviewed by The Times.
Oh my goodness gracious. A little bitch? Heavens to Murgatroyd, I believe my frontal cortex is melting at the sheer rudeness.
15 members! That's a big city council. I guess it's a big city, to be fair.
That's a remarkably small council for a city that big. NYC has 51.
The most idiosyncratically LA thing about this scandal is the racism metastasizing out from the usual groups to include Armenians and Oaxacans. Global city indeed.
The implicit homophobia in her remarks about Bonin seems not remotely subtle to me, but is also not remarked upon by any of the journalists. But it's not so much that any one comment is so terribly offensive in isolation (there's a hell of a lot that goes pointedly unsaid), it's just the whole worldview. It's so organic.
Wait, I thought we could compartmentalize every comment made into inner-heart racism versus political calculation.
Don't forget the racist bones that someone may or may not have in their body.
22 is a good point - didn't know Bonin was gay. That reads rather worse. Odd that it wasn't remarked on - I suppose there isn't that one killer quote.
Remind me to link this conversation the next time something offends Ajay.
didn't know Bonin was gay
Hahahahahahaha
21: agreed very LA. I remember going to a comedy club there years ago and hearing streams of offensive jokes made about ethnic groups that I barely knew existed. My only ethnic stereotype about Persians would have been something vague to do with carpets, but Californians could rant about how ghastly they were for most of a ten-minute set.
Carpets are an abomination, it's true.
Those Sierpinskians are the worst.
Have you ever tried to clean a fractal? Not very thoroughly, you haven't.
You'd need some sort of self-similar broom.
You let one spell get out of control...
It was very inevitable. Still is for the other two.
https://twitter.com/brotigupta/status/1580398839734759424?s=46&t=Y238FjtR-Yj3F421h4LhiA
I'm sure this is the least important fact about this story to most people, but two-party consent states baffle me. I get in a very general sense wanting to know if you're being recorded, but when it means outlawing stories like this? Saying that the person who made and released this recording is the bad guy here? This kind of thing is what journalism is for.
I wonder how much prosecution there really is. A relative who lives in California recorded a number of out-of-control tirades by her partner, and shared the recordings with the prosecutors charging the partner with felony DV. Also played a tape in family court as impeachment when the partner denied ever having said X, Y, or Z. The literal language of Cal Penal Code section 632 would lead one to expect different results, although the expectation of confidentiality of an out-of-control high volume tirade might be compromised.
The prosecution of this sort of thing is probably very highly selective.
39: Well, for things in the public interest, there is a more or less functional First Amendment exception - at least for established media. Here are emails traded between lawyers of the involved union and the LA Times on these particular recordings, where the LAT general counsel walks through all the favorable precedent. Of course a blogger without legal counsel might easily be scared off by the starting letter.
40: I think you're looking at Penal Code 632 which appears to exempt nonconsensual recordings from court proceedings with a broad brush, but the sections following it add a lot of specific exemptions, like for law enforcement, and I notice in particular 633.5:
Sections 631, 632, 632.5, 632.6, and 632.7 do not prohibit one party to a confidential communication from recording the communication for the purpose of obtaining evidence reasonably believed to relate to the commission by another party to the communication of the crime of extortion, kidnapping, bribery, any felony involving violence against the person, including, but not limited to, human trafficking, as defined in Section 236.1, or a violation of Section 653m, or domestic violence as defined in Section 13700.
And if that doesn't apply there might be something else.
41.last: I don't think expressing a desire to beat up someone else's kid counts as domestic violence. Even if the desire is acted on, that's just, well, violence.
(I'm not even sure that violence towards your own children is generally described as domestic violence.)
This kind of thing is what journalism is for.
Yes, definitely. If they'd been unable to publish this recording then all the council members would have escaped their otherwise inevitable and richly deserved prosecution for, well, for something pretty bad, I'm damn sure of that.
I would have said that prosecution is what the legal system is for, but maybe I was confused.
I'm not even sure that violence towards your own children is generally described as domestic violence.
It is unless the violence happens in the correct region of France.
41: I was saying it was applicable to the case in 40, not the OP.
On the question of who leaked it, the LA Times just did another article which adds up the evidence to still very little. None of the councilmembers were facing an election (Cedillo just lost his, the others were off-year). The accompanying text that it was originally posted with on Reddit, plus the Twitter handle of the person who tagged it to LA journalists, suggest perhaps a grudge against the LA Labor Federation generally or its president Herrera specifically.