1890 Colonial Revival Home of Bill Baker
Date: Friday July 25, 2008
Time: 5:30 - 8:00 p.m.
Location: Home of Bill Baker, 200 North Avenue 66
Just north of York Blvd. in Garvanza
(overlooking the Arroyo and South Pasadena)
Co-hosted by (partial list): Claire Bogaard, Tim Brick, Tomoko Copon, Carmela Gomes, Tina Gulotta and Charles Miller, Mark Kenyon and Clare Marter Kenyon, Frank Parrello and Heather Hoggan, Nicole Possert, Jesse Rosas, Nancy Steele, Ann Walnum, Dan Wright

Minimum $50 donation requested
Make checks payable to: Friends of Anthony Portantino 2008
ID No. 1292690 (General, 2008), PO Box 93935,Pasadena, CA 91109-3935

Questions/RSVP, Tim Wendler, info@portantinoforassembly.com, (626) 405-8130

In other news, Alvarez is still around and still not resigning. He is, though, apologizing to the entire nation.

Before he was sentenced, Alvarez told Judge R. Gary Klausner that he was “very remorseful” for his false claims of military valor.

“I’d like to apologize to everyone in this whole nation,” said Alvarez, who represents south Pomona on the Three Valleys Municipal Water District board.

Though hilarious at times, I’m beginning to feel like I’m being waterboarded every time I read about Norma Torres’ favorite endorsement.

Chris Hedges on The Loss of Civic Responsibility: Chris Hedges hates corporations, the average reader, and just about everything else that may have caused the downfall of newspapers. Funny, he doesn’t seem to ascribe any blame to the papers themselves for, you know, not changing. Creative destruction is a b****. (LA Observed)

After the jump, 6 more reasons to hate corporations besides the fact that they raped journalism, according to Chris Hedges. (more…)

The Pasadena City Council has appointed Mark Jomsky to take the position of city clerk effective July 26.  He will replace Jane Rodriguez, who is retiring after 35 years of public service.

Jomsky will oversee a $2.1 million budget and 16 employees, serve as clerk to the city council, prepare and maintain official city documents and legislative records, administer municipal and school district elections and provide policy guidance to city departments.

$2.1 million? The power of the city clerk…

A Pew study of US newspapers released today finds that national and international news coverage is declining as ad revenue plummets and emphasis shifts toward local stories. While those survey results may not seem so bad, newspaper editors also report that the biggest customer protests are being seen in response to cuts to crossword puzzles and TV listings - not decreasing news quantity or quality.

Interesting post and worth a read. The crossword outrage may be due to, hmmm, the median age of newspaper readers? Not an insult, just suggesting it’s a different generation who depend on the paper for um…okay, I’m beat. Outrage over the crossword puzzle?

The City Council approved a $1.1 million project to build a re-build a bridge over the Arroyo Seco creek in the park area behind JPL last night, but not before Councilman Sid Tyler grilled the city staff hard on the project.

Only to be expected of the infamous Sid Tyler. Unconfirmed are reports that he built the bridge himself five minutes later using telekinesis.

Bill Gross started Idealab in 1996 to create and operate pioneering technology companies. The structure of Idealab has allowed us to test many ideas at once and turn the best of them into companies, attracting the human and financial capital necessary to bring them to market.

Many of these companies were among the first to introduce new business ideas to the market. CitySearch, now a part of InterActive Corp., established the category of local online community directories. eToys demonstrated the tremendous potential for online consumer retail and became one of the most recognized brands during the early days of e-commerce. Overture Services, which began life as GoTo.com, was the first company to introduce the concept of paid search. Now part of Yahoo!, Overture’s business model is the underpinning of a multibillion-dollar online search market.

Sounds like a pretty sweet idea. Of course, in a curious way, Idealab always seemed to be more famous than any of its most famous creations (see the above examples as evidence). And after the bubble popped, a lot of angry investors wanted to perform an Idealobotomy on the company (couldn’t resist, sorry). But apparently, Bill Gross is still around and still kicking ideas about. From the International Herald Tribune:

As the Internet boom melted down, however, the California energy crisis of 2000 was rekindling Gross’s teenage passion for alternative energy.

It turned out that solar technology had not advanced much since he gave up his mail order business to start writing software in the early 1980s.

Idealab embarked on a mission few others were embracing at the time: developing green energy technologies.

A mechanical engineer by training, Gross is hands-on. A smattering of solar projects are crammed onto the roof of the company’s small building in downtown Pasadena, and he explains them all in rapid and minute detail.

His idea for small, prefabricated solar-powered thermal power plants, being developed by the Idealab company eSolar, caught the eye of Oak Investment Partners and Google. Bandel Carano, a managing partner with Oak who also sits on eSolar’s board, called Gross’s solar thermal technology a breakthrough equivalent to the advantages of PC computing over mainframes.

Hmm. Can’t say I’m terribly impressed yet. One can only hope these are real product and not just subsidy catchers, a la T. Boone Pickens windmill scheme.

More here - including a special song about Unincorporated Pasadena.

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Ruddy Tracks, originally uploaded by Centinel of the SGV.

Reader Albert sent in a link to Supervisor Mike Antonovich’s piece in the SGVT last Friday. The gist of the piece is that the city of Los Angeles has been snapping up far more dollars than it deserves from the Proposition 1B bond money:

From the three major Prop 1B funding categories for highways, transit and traffic signal synchronization, the city of Los Angeles took home a whopping 61 percent, 52 percent and 94 percent of the county’s share, respectively. This recent exploitation of the subregions’ trust and their collaboration with the city of Los Angeles will not be repeated again in any new countywide sales tax measure or in the current proposed state legislation, AB 2321.

On the whole, the city of LA grabbed almost fifty percent of bond funding, even though it only has forty percent of the population. Antonovich also decried a recent LA Times piece in which Gloria Molina was called parochial and obstructionist for demanding regional distribution of the sales tax measure MTA wants on the ballot.

So, let me get this one straight: we all got together and voted to allow some guys in Sacramento to take out a huge loan in our name (the bond), without an explicit promise that we would get a reasonable chunk of the loan money. Hmm, smart. Of course, it’s not like we would have any reason to distrust those guys in Sacramento to butcher a job of spending tax dollars. Naaaah.

Anontovich’s main point is that the funding raised by the bond issue should be “equitably” shared out. Of course, we already gave all the money to the state, so they’re probably going to be looking at traffic issues with a bit of a big picture view. Yes, Mike, Santa Clarita may have gotten screwed. Santa Clarita’s traffic problems also are a laughable far cry from those of the city of Los Angeles. In fact, of all the areas that Antonovich lists, it’s pretty clear that LA’s traffic is the worst. So, why wouldn’t they get the most money?

I would argue because funding shouldn’t be contingent upon which city hires a good lobbyist to lobby to state officials. Rather, funding should be come directly from the users of the service provided, in this case freeways/transportation. Los Angeles still might get the most money, but at least it would receive for a real reason.

I don’t buy Antonovich’s complaint, however: “This result was well below these subregions’ fair share of funding based on any measurement of equity, most notably population. ”

Really? Is population really the ultimate variable for distributing infrastructure funds? What about areas of high population that commute to low population areas that happen to have more jobs and, as a result, have more traffic? Doesn’t population seem like a ridiculously crude measure of distribution?

I do agree with Antonovich that we have a problem: how funds are being spent makes little to no sense. What I can’t agree with is that we need to continue working with the current system (taxes and bonds collected by larger entities, which cities and agencies must approach in servile humility, begging for their “fair share”). I hope the good Supervisor doesn’t have to get burned on many more occasions before he realizes that the system doesn’t work.

• Previously berated for bringing the Apples to Apples analysis and need to remove PERS from salary calculation he was attacked for not understanding.  PERS now removed from salary calculation.  Win for Parry.
• Chided for using “un-named sources” and innuendo cites his sources including the PIO.  Win for Parry.
• Points CM compensation package now includes 15% bonus and questions how out of touch the CM is with the rest of us.  Draw?

Enjoy the op-ed piece.  Up for discussion - where/how will the next attack on him take place for speaking up?

You ever hear that old saying “Everyone loves a Sid Tyler fact“?

• Sid Tyler puts the “laughter” in “manslaughter”
• Sid Tyler knows what happened to Baby Jane.
• If you try to introduce your mom to Sid Tyler, she’ll introduce you to your biological father.
• Back in the 80’s, Sid Tyler had a Saturday morning television show for kids called “Captain Sid’s Kid Cavalcade”. He’d do funny drawings, sing songs, perform magic tricks, and disarm bombs.
• GEICO saved 15% by switching to Sid Tyler.
• Sid Tyler can never get a brain freeze. Slurpees know when to back the $!@# off.
• Aunt Jemima cheated on Uncle Ben with Sid Tyler.
• Also - the Quaker Oat Men on all of the oatmeal in Sid Tyler’s cupboards have that look on their face like the people who watched the videotape in “The Ring”.
• Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know when Sid Tyler is going to kill you.

More insanity here.

- AP

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81mB6DKNA6Q

Hilda Solis talks at the San Gabriel Valley Legislative Caucus meeting on congestion pricing on the 210 and 10.

You guys remember Congresswoman Hilda Solis, right? Well, at the under reported event last June, local lawmakers and transportation officials discussed levying a special tax on commuters to use the carpool lane if they don’t have a second passenger, even varying the toll depending on traffic levels. It’s a scheme called, “congestion pricing,” touted by some traffic planners as a solution to growing traffic problems and as a source of revenue for transportation projects, including new rail transit services.

Except that that our representatives, both liberal and conservative, are united in opposition to the idea.

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- “The Way” by Fastball

So - I’m trying to figure out this whole “Pasadena Way” thing and what it exactly means. My suspicions are quickly being proven correct: This is going to be one cluster$!@# of answers

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