Wednesday Buzz, 6.14.06

Firefighters on long ladders removed Hannah from the tree and by lunchtime all the protestors, including some who had chained themselves to barrels filled with concrete, had been removed. Bulldozers moved on to the property to knock down fences and demolish the small plots of land. Forty people were arrested, the majority of them protesting outside the gates of the farm.

She didn't feel the bullet that plunged through her chest, nicked a rib, tore through a lung and severed her spine. And she never saw the gun in the suspect's hand — the part that bothers her most, she said. Ten years of reflexively watching people's hands for weapons, and she didn't see it.

There was only an odor — a sudden, overpowering gunpowder smell bursting into her nostrils. Then she was down, dimly thinking that she wanted to go home.

A majority of the Coliseum Commission, the joint state-county-city body that manages the state-owned facility, now believes that the only way to finance a major upgrade of the aging stadium is to turn over the Coliseum to the NFL. The idea is to make the NFL its prime tenant, with key design and operational authority over the property. In return, the league would pledge as much as $800 million in private funds for a state-of-the-art refurbishment.

USC would become a subtenant of the NFL. However, the university has signaled its unhappiness with any deal that would give the NFL unqualified authority over the school's tenancy at the Coliseum, which currently seats 92,000.

Actually there is something very fake about politicians using speech writers, but something even more fake about letter writers — appearing to be just average citizens — using word-for-word talking points from advocacy groups without disclosing that information.

In another era, he would have been called a "race man." He spent 34 years working for Los Angeles County, most of them as a consultant for the Human Relations Commission, which formed in 1967 and inspired many cross-cultural and community groups that came after.

My father's "job" was just about impossible: to improve conditions for dangerously disenfranchised black folk by bringing folks of all colors together — and by any other means he thought necessary. He began ethnic coalition-building long before it became fashionable — black/Jewish, black/Latino, black/Korean, you name it. And he's the first to say that the whole enterprise was not only imperfect but a colossal failure. Still is.