Weekend reads

Good weekend.

• At least 268 children who had passed through the Los Angeles County child welfare system died from January 2008 through early August 2009, including 18 deemed "the direct result of abuse or neglect by a caregiver, says a Sunday story by LAT reporters Kim Christensen and Garrett Therolf.
• California Chief Justice Ronald M. George called "our state government dysfunctional" and blamed the too-easy initiative process in a speech to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences: "chickens gained valuable rights in California on the same day that gay men and lesbians lost them" last November. LAT, NYT
• Reacting to LAPD chief William Bratton calling City Councilman Paul Koretz "naive," Councilman Greig Smith said, "This is the kind of crap that got him fired in New York. If he wasn't leaving right now, I think he'd find himself in a fight he didn't want."
• If Roman Polanski is extradited from Switzerland, he "could face a more severe punishment than he did in the 1970s, as a vigorous victims’ rights movement, a family-values revival and revelations of child abuse by clergy members have all helped change the moral and legal framework regarding sex with the young," says Michael Cieply in the NYT.
• Los Angeles writer Richard Nemec, in an LAT opinion piece, sees a legacy of over-politicizing the top job at the city's Department of Water and Power.
• Hollywood PR exec Howard Bragman's role as counselor and guide to gay and lesbian performers lookint to come out of the closet is explored by Patrick Range McDonald in the LA Weekly.
• The Los Angeles Conservancy's new "The Sixties Turn 50" campaign shows that efforts to build support for postwar buildings "is often far from straightforward -- and can easily prove a minefield of contradiction and irony," writes Christopher Hawthorne.
• The Times is running abridged excerpts with video from former pop critic Robert Hilburn's book, "Corn Flakes with John Lennon (and Other Tales From a Rock 'n' Roll Life)," out this month.
• Sports columnist Doug Krikorian writes in the Press-Telegram about having to reluctantly leave the east Long Beach home where he has lived "since Gerald Ford was president and Walter Alston was managing the Dodgers and Chuck Knox was dispensing those conservative game plans for the Rams."

Plus, Mark Lacter returns from the Central Coast to embrace Barbara Ehrenreich's attack on "mind-numbing cheerfulness," and Bill Boyarksy calls on the school board to name the schools at the Ambassador Hotel site for RFK.