Morning Buzz: Friday 3.30.07

State offices and courts are closed, city halls are generally open, schools could go either way. Mail will be delivered.

Mayor Villaraigosa says his new budget will propose enough money to grow the LAPD by 220 officers above attrition this coming year. LAT , DN

Richard Alarcon will be sworn in before today's City Council meeting as the new councilman from the Valley's 7th district. His predecessor, State Sen. Alex Padilla, will join the festivities in the chambers. Alarcon's staff includes Becca Doten, the former chief of staff in Brentwood for Arianna Huffington.

Tom Tugend counts heads in the Jewish Journal.

Bright, light, non-lethal and $100 each. LAT

Plans for eight more charter schools are nixed, "a move that almost certainly violates state law and firmly sets back future collaboration between the charter group and the school district." LAT

Their $1-better-than-Zell's bid for the Tribune has to be considered by the company's board. If accepted they would become co-chairmen of Tribune. LAT, WSJ, Chicago Tribune plus Mark Lacter at LA Biz Observed

Dean Starkman covered him for the Wall Street Journal and writes at CJR that "colorful" doesn't really capture him. CJR Daily

John Powers begins a monthly column for Los Angeles Magazine in June. "As yet unnamed, the column will be about Los Angeles as a place where many (if not most) of the country's competing ideas and trend get played out. Or to put it differently, it'll try to explore the ways in which L.A. has become the the city of influence--whether its politics, pop culture, fashion, the arts, and on and on," writes Editor Kit Rachlis. Powers is critic-at-large for "Fresh Air", film critic for Vogue and the author of Sore Winners: American Idols, Patriotic Shoppers, and Other Strange Species in George Bush's America.

Tom Christie offers an LA Weekly tribute to the late Cathy Seipp, leading with an anecdote from the funeral: "The writer and blogger Cathy Seipp, who died last week at 49, once asked her friend Greg Critser if he thought her lung cancer was divine retribution for being mean. Critser, pointing out that Ann Coulter was still alive, told her this couldn’t possibly be true. Seipp had laughed, of course..." The Weekly also reproduces eulogies from Sandra Tsing Loh and Allan Mayer, the PR exec who was at the center of the Grazergate incident at the Times.

Former LAT Editor Dean Baquet says Times morale is "in the tank" and he would not have turned Current over to Brian Grazer or anyone else. Former Publisher Jeffrey Johnson, however, liked the idea. Marketwatch

Jerrold Perenchio takes the cash and goes. LAT

The Times checks out the interest. LAT

Deanne Stillman is interviewed in the March/April issue of the Bloomsbury Review about her books Joshua Tree, Twentynine Palms and the forthcoming Horse Latitudes.