The Los Angeles Times is reporting a several new polls:

Lordy, Lordy, Lordy, look what the pollsters just brought in.

A pair of new surveys revealing that President Obama is still declining and has hit a new low in job approval among Americans just 56 weeks after they elected him with a decided margin.

And — wait for it — Republican Sarah Palin is successfully selling a whole lot more than books out there on the road. Even among those not lining up in 10-degree weather to catch a glimpse of pretty much the only political celebrity the GOP has these days.

First, el jefe. Facing double-digit unemployment, rising spending, deficits and Afghan war casualties plus a keystone but stalled healthcare reform effort that caused a rare Sunday presidential visit to Capitol Hill, Obama recently fell below 50% job approval for the first time.

Then, last week’s deft dance of rhetoric over sending reinforcements to Afghanistan but, on the other foot, bringing them home quickly maybe gave him a brief boost. That, however, collapsed with equal rapidity.

Obama’s new Gallup Poll job approval number is 47%. Last month it was 53%.

Regular Ticket readers will recall how in this space in late November we pointed out that Obama’s closely watched job approval slide was coinciding with Palin’s little-noticed rise in favorability. And it appeared they might cross somewhere in the 40s.

Well, ex-Sen. Obama, meet ex-Gov. Palin.

The new CNN/Opinion Research Poll shows Palin now at 46% favorable, just one point below her fellow basketball fan.

(The same poll, btw, has bad news for Dick Cheney-haters; the outspoken former VP has climbed out of the 29% basement, back up to 39% now. How do you suppose he’s done that without a new book? But that’s another story.)

Not that either Palin or Obama will admit caring about such trivial things as disparate political polls….

 …1,071 days before the 2012 election, when Republicans will have the concept of change on their side. Obama’s camp is already using the looming Palin pall as a fundraising tool. Never let any potential threat go unmonetized.

See article at: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/12/sarah-palin-barack-obama-poll-gap-narrows.html

***********************

Of course, a lot can change on the political landscape between now and Election day, and the results of 2010 will help some make their 2012 decisions. My prediction is that in 2012 you will see even more political “unknowns” challenging the career politicians, and WINNING!

Their South Asian and white genetic backgrounds … put their children in potential harm’s way.

Sounds almost like something you’d expect to see on a white supremacist site, but it’s actually from the LA Times.  Nor is this alone: it comes mere months after the Republican party website posted an image with the caption, “Miscegenation is a crime against American values,” and after a Louisiana judge refused to issue a marriage license for an interracial couple, citing increased difficulty for such relationships.

It might seem perfectly reasonable, knowing nothing about genetics, to read the LA Times article and conclude that a real and present danger of genetic disorder exists as a result of mixed-race heritage.  The article certainly does nothing to dispel this myth, and one can easily imagine advocates for racial purity pointing to this in triumph.

While the instance of some genetic disorders (such as the one in the article) may be increased by multiracial pairing, other genetic orders (such as cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anemia) are increased by same-race pairing.  The implication that multiracial pairing is somehow genetically unsafe compared to other options is an irresponsible and uneducated myth.  If mainstream media sources such as the LA Times are unable or unwilling to correct these errors, it is no surprise that their readership and sales continue to plummet.

+ CNN shows off fashionable hijabs for the Islamic woman who wants to be fashionable now, not just in the afterlife.

+ LA Times Image lists 2010 holiday movies with great wardrobes.

+ Karl shows off in Shanghai.

+ Iconic fashion photos hit the auction block.

+ She’s come a long way from ditching Kiefer at the altar.  Lancome signs Julia Roberts.  Let the “Pretty Woman” references commence.

+Yes Virginia, there is a Michael Kors “Pre-Fall” 2010 Collection.

San Fran Music Tech is live today 9-11:30, 1-6 at http://www.justin.tv/richreader.  Follow at #sfmusictech, #sfmt.  Here are the notes from the first panel.

Meet The Press
Jon Healey, LA Times – Moderator
Artists need to soak the demand curve from those who care, they’re the ones who will pay the most.  Sweet spot on Amazon is $4-5.  Press can help artists with click and buy on name, links to streams/shopping cart, concert listings.  Interesting new business models include Guvera, a place for brands to giveaway music encouraging fans to associate music with brand goodness, what will BMW buy me today?
Paul Reskinoff, Digital Music News- Certain bloggers, influencial analysts become trusted voices, break news, spread opinion.  Follows David Pakman, former CEO eMusic now VenRock partner, Michael Arrington, TechCrunch, Eric Garland, BigChampagne, Bob Lefsetz.  The value of a download to fan is appraoching $0.02 – $0.03 cents, hard to build business $1.29 download, when the wholesale cost of a stream is $0.03 the operating structre has to be smaller, labels need to shrink footprint.  Find aggressive press teams that pitch heavily get ink.
Celia Hirshman, KCRW On The Beat – Not a journalist but have been in music business along time, never takes pitches from publicists, reads everything in the music press, really likes SXSW Daily Chord as an aggregator of music stories, oddities about things reported, write about industry games played, boutique cottage industry middle class wide open to any artist but artists are not living off what they do. Tech companies with low overhead faring better.  Music labels used to finance music videos as promotion to sell records so MTV got content free, now every 3min someone entering the business, labels more cautious about giving away the rights, iTunes once had 90% of the business, now has 60%, Apple makes a forutne on hardware, digital downloads are not the future.  In the past 7 years music has become a loss leader at pennies per unit, $0.05 unit, even at a 7th of a 7th percent labels will never go out of business because they have the rights in perpetuity, but $ will go down, need uniform way to count downloads.
Michael Masnick, Techdirt – Some news sourced from trusted readers, classic sources news.com, wired.com, hypebot, Michael Scott’s @copyrightlaw, using RSS less and twitter more, no more doom and gloom in industry, Topspin and Kickstarter are doing amazing things for direct to fan. Corey Smith built up huge audience doing live shows, giving away stuff for free. Jonathan Coulton too.  Lala had great pr but would rewrite story every six months, hybrid streaming and pay per didn’t work, most never bought a song on lala, personally still buy cds.  Music retail is a loss leader business. Apple sells iPods iPhones, don’t make money on the music, Jobs admitted it’s a loss leader, for Walmart, Best Buy too, gets you in the store to buy higher margin items. EMI, Sony, UMG, WMG need to go out of business.  There are lots of ways to make money that don’t involve selling music directly e.g. live shows ticket sales.  Nine Inch Nails has 5 different levels fans can support $5 download, $10 cd, $300 box set signed by artist, sold 2500 in 30 hours, made $1.6mm in just 1 week.  Matt Ebel offers $5-$15 monthly subscriptions to backstage pass, Ian Rogers said some Topspin artists average $100 per transaction, $22-23 average across all artists.
Ben Parr, Mashable – follow 250 startups/founders of Mint, Flickr, Hunch, like John Batelle, find the insights and analysis raw.  Over the past few months, seen firesales of imeem, ilike, lala, streaming music is a bad business. Companies need to lower their burn rates and  make more money than they spend. Music labels charging too much, big companies ruling with an iron fist, will have power 5-10 more years, artists not making money, pennies to $0.05 unit. Spotify will have to raise a ton of money to pay for licensing deals. Pandora and last.fm everyone listens noone buys.  Things will change with Paypal/FB making it easy to pay for anything anywhere with a click with Paypal X ID and Facebook credits with FB Connect, Google and Apple at some point too. For artists, since its about a penny a piece diversification works: Vevo, YouTube, downloads, live streams.  Traditional media has transformed, editorial has moved on to blogs and online publications.
David Downs, Rollingstone Freelancer – Scans the DailySwarm along with 400 columnists/media names every day, never get to zero in Googel Reader, A1 folder gets read everyday.  Really like what Stones Throw Records are doing out of Oxnard, build strong fan connections, run a tight ship, stay low to ground, put on shows.  Soon we’ll be texting soda machine, easier than buying online.  Likes how Pitchfork uses lala to put streams at bottom of posts.

Sandy Pearlman and 3eb coming up.  Here is the rest of the day:

M 12/7 9-6
SF MUSICTECH SUMMIT
Hotel Kabuki, 1625 Post, San Francisco
www.sfmusictech.com

When I first read the title of this article in the LA Times, I thought that the article would be about young boys, getting a chance to play a new and improved video game that allowed them to feel like they were not play driving, but actually sitting behind the wheel of the car of their dreams….

And then I read on…

Nathan Olivarez-Giles opens this article with this… “The scene is reminsicent of teenage boys standing around an arcade machine watching a friend play Donkey Kong or Street Fighter.  There are long lines and laughter and cheers from those huddled around the gaming screens. But here at Los Angeles Auto Show, these boys are grown men, many wearing suits, and this isn’t Donkey Kong.”

Lexus, Ford, Volkswagen, and Hyundai all had simulator booths at the L.A auto show. I thought the purpose of having the simulators at the show was a sales and marketing scheme. You know make them feel like they are driving the actual car, and then make them want to buy it, but from reading the article, it doesn’t seem that way at all. It seems like they just wanted to have an alternative to just walking around looking at cars and actually give them something exciting to do and something that brought out the kid in all of them. Men love cars, and the long lines at the Auto Show obviously proved it. This article also proved how technology just keeps expanding. In the article, he talked about how the VW Booth had a display where people could pick up an ipod touch and play real racing GTI, whic is actually a free app for the Iphone.  At the Hyundai booth, people can play Forza Motorsport 3 on an Xbox 360 and race a tricked-out Hyundai Genesis Coupe, which is available as a free download for gamers at home on the Xbox Live Marketplace.  (i.e. more distractions) We are so technology dependent that we don’t even have to have a craving to play a game, watch a movie, or show  because we can do this from our cell phones. And movies? We can just watch them on our Xbox, no need to leave home  and pay 10 dollars for a movie.

“Don Watkins, a 58-year-old contractor who installed much of the carpet for the L.A. Auto Show, said he was impressed by the Ford video game which used hydraulics to shake the chair he was sitting in as he directed the game’s steering wheel over rocks and bumps in the game.”

He said…

“It was a lot of fun and I’d do it again,” Watkins said. “But I was disappointed that I rolled the truck and the game didn’t show a cracked windshield or something. They should have fans to blow wind in your face too.”

Lexus, Ford and VW will be keeping their stations open until December 13

“You can come to the Auto Show and you can learn just about everything possible about each car and you sit in them and you can look at them, but the one thing you can’t do here with these cars is drive them,” said Sean Lenihan, who was manning a $50,000 gaming setup at the Hyundai booth he rented to the automaker through his company, Xtension Marketing.

December 7, 2009 the next meeting in court will take place. The case against Camilla Broe raises an important question:

Who started the extradition process?

The DEA agent stated that it was the minister of Justice herself – Lene Espersen who demanded that the trial should take place in the United States and the Americans should ask for extradition.

This statement is denied by the Danish authorities. Did the Agent then commit perjury?

We have  to wait until December 10, 2009 before this question is answered. The parliament demands an answer and this answer has to be truth or she will have to resign.

In the meantime the Copenhagen Climate Council (COP15) is just around the corner. The state of emergency laws has passed the parliament, the dog cages the police intend to house the activists and bystanders in have been displayed.

Our guests – the leaders from a lot of countries will be served the best meals and have fine ladies giving them the services they so often require when summits are held in Copenhagen.

Now reactions from abroad are hitting Denmark.

L.A. Times attacked Denmark yesterday in relationship with COP15. They state that we are a poor example when we want to house this event.

But I have to state that we didn’t want it in the first place. The decision to house it was done in exchange with India because they are embarrassed to have relief workers from Denmark in their country. According to them they have not hunger or people in need in India so they wanted to prosecute those who travel there anyway. I do personally believe that they could have got the relief workers without trading the climate council for them because India is an important export market. Years ago we have a lot of ships sailing around the world but the crisis has meant that those ships should be taken out of work and at the Alang beach they have the best ship breaking industry in the world.

So we don’t host COP15 because we are the best country in the world to preserve the climate. We host it because none other wanted.

So please leave us alone.

Tom Ford moves from supermodels to celluloid.

Tom Ford’s mid-life crisis career change seems to be so far, a risk worth taking.  Already garnering critical acclaim thanks to the Venice Film Festival, and Oscar buzz for star Colin Firth, Ford’s directorial debut film, “A Single Man” seems to be a successful translation of the former head of Gucci’s keen aesthetic.

The LA Times has today’s interview with Tom Ford and delves into why he was drawn to turning the Christopher Isherwood novel about a gay college professor in 1962 Los Angeles, into a film.  Ford also talks about the film’s star Colin Firth, and his evolution from designer of Gucci sex appeal, into an artist with the singular purpose to produce an interesting message through creating something everyone is willing to look at.

On “Y’all My Niggas” from Untitled album, Nas raps, “if it offends you, it was meant to, it’s that simple.” I wanted to preface what I am about to write with that line to begin. At the end, if you read that far, you’ll find why it’s relevant and ironic.

This post is about what I’m going to call “The Gibbs Affair.” And no, this has nothing to do with Robert Gibbs, President Obama’s communications director. It does, however, have to do with a rapper named Freddie Gibbs, who hails out of Gary, Indiana, and who is the subject of the esteemed, hipster-must-read alternative periodical called L.A. Weekly.

Gibbs is one the cover and the story is written ever-eloquently by my good friend and former colleague Jeff Weiss (what up Jeff!). I usually pick up the Weekly to specifically find and read Jeff’s work, as I am a great fan of his writing and his blog, but this week I haven’t had the time to do that. But, because I am active on Twitter and stay in touch with enough rappers, journalists and industry folk to start a revolution, I found out about the Gibbs cover.

Actually, to be more specific, my orientation with it came from a tweet from an LA rapper I know who took a cheap shot at the story. Then, I had a phone conversation with XXL’s Brooklyne Gipson, who co-wrote this little jawn on the mag’s web site (full disclosure: I contribute to the site as well, here and there). And I found out about the controversy surrounding Gibbs’ LA Weekly cover and the difference in opinion and perspective that comes with it.

Let me put it very bluntly: I do not see Freddie Gibbs emerging into the star that Skee, Jeff and others think he will emerge into. Not yet, at least. There’s always chance I could be wrong, as I have slighted The Knux in the past and look where they have gone. In any case, my point goes something like this. Freddie Gibbs is an act who was signed to Interscope, got some press, didn’t put out any good music that could reach urban radio, much less commercial, got dropped, and is being salvaged by DJ Skee because, quite frankly, Skee probably feels bad for the kid (I would too). Since Skee has shown love and dope producers started coming around – my boy Cook Classics contributed to Gibbs’ mixtape – Jeff went to work on his profile for LA Weekly.

Let me be unequivocally clear: I have no personal or professional problems with Gibbs or Jeff or Skee. Whatsoever. What I question is whether Gibbs is a worthwhile artist to get profiled by LA Weekly and get put on the cover NOW. I simply hold the opinion that he is not. I went to On the Rox, the little room above the Roxy on Sunset (fits about 100 people) to catch Gibbs perform earlier this year. Most in the audience talked through his set, and when another promising act came on, Pill, the same thing happened. What I figured out that day – based on what I saw – was that both of these guys may be decent songwriters and have strong production, but their live shows need work, at the very minimum. They are nowhere ready to be featured on HipHopDX.com and get strong traffic, much less The New Yorker or LA Weekly. But here Gibbs is, and please don’t get it twisted: I’m not hating on him. Again, I just disagree that he deserves to be anointed the next big hip-hop hope by such prestigious publications at this point in time.

After XXL’s questioned whether a guy from Indiana who couldn’t hold his own in an L.A. cypher for the life of him, I imagine, Skee decided to speak out on his blog. That wasn’t very smart, of course, unless we’re talking 50 Cent marketing strategy (in that case, it’s brilliant). In that case, my boy Jeff Weiss is getting worked over, sorry to point out.

Finally, Freddie Gibbs, who to me resembles Pleasure P, is far from becoming  the new Scarface, as a dear writer friend in Atlanta told me earlier this year. If anything, another DJ Skee-supported artist, Young Dre the Truth, should have been on the LA Weekly cover this week, for several reasons, not the least of which being that he is signed to EA Sports’ in-house label, because he’s from L.A. and because he rocks a killer live show. Oh, and let’s not forget he collaborates with Joel and Benji Madden of Good Charlotte.

So there it is, I’ve said what I had to say, and although I feel like Byron Crawford at the moment, it was necessary (Bol, I’ll still whoop your ass, LOL). Oh, and as far as that Nas reference above, well, here’s what that’s all about. Jeff Weiss happened to be given the responsibility to review Untitled in the L.A. Times. He all but destroyed it in his review, naturally missing the point that the album represented a First Amendment case study set to beat more than anything else.

I’ll get into why Untitled is the Nas’ best work at another time, but get this: when QB’S finest took to the stage at his MySpace release show at the Roxy in 2008, he said “Fuck the L.A. Times!” on stage.

Given this case, unfortunately, I kinda feel where he was coming from.

WOW- Brand X, the cool LA Times publication, featured MixMyGranola in its annual gift guide! Here is what they said:

“Customize your own granola mix with a few clicks. Go for something seasonal, like cinnamon granola with dates, apples and chestnuts, or opt for an uber-healthful combo like muesli, goji berries, flax seed and chia seeds (they pack a whopping 11 grams of fiber per serving, but don’t blame us if you wake up looking like a grass-haired porcupine).“

Read the full feature from Brand X here.

“Man arrested for allegedly trying to chop down tree (no word on if it was cherry)”

Wow! What a terrible headline! That’s just…awful. So so so so bad. How do we know it’s bad? 1) It thinks it’s cute; 2) It’s trying too hard; 3) It uses, lamely, a reference to an apocryphal story about the first President; 4) It’s from the — wait for it — L.A. Times. That, friends, is a perfect shitstorm.

Read the original blog post here, and stay away from sharp objects and firearms as you do.

Seems like it might be tougher than applying to college. The LAUSD school choice program is a good one in that it offers a whole ton of options to parents and students. That’s mostly a scale thing; the district is so huge it has the capacity to create and maintain a whole lot of programs. But applying to admission seems like a real nightmare. A central website for all these programs doesn’t seem too much to ask, but don’t hold your breath. Nothing “extra” will becoming from California’s K-12 system until we figure out a way to find it.

Andrew Coulson teaches the LA Times a thing or two about charter schools in his post on the Cato blog.  Here’s the meat of it:

Yesterday’s LA Times editorial on charter schools combined errors of fact and omission with a misrepresentation of the economic research on public school spending. First, the Times claims that KIPP charter public schools spend “significantly more per student than the public school system.” Not so, says the KIPP website. But why rely on KIPP’s testimony, when we can look at the raw data? LA’s KIPP Academy of Opportunity, for instance, spent just over $3 million in 2007-08, for 345 students, for a total per pupil expenditure of $8,917. The most recent Dept. of Ed. data for LAUSD (2006-07) put that district’s comparable figure at $13,481 (which, as Cato’s Adam Schaeffer will show in a forthcoming paper, is far below what it currently spends). Nationwide, the median school district spends 24 percent more than the median charter school, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Next, in summarizing the charter research, the Times’ editors omitted the most recent and sophisticated study, by Stanford professor Caroline Hoxby. It finds a significant academic advantage to charters using a randomized assignment experimental model that blows the methodological doors off most of the earlier charter research. The Times also neglects to mention Hoxby’s damning critique of the CREDO study it does cite….

There are certainly reasons to lament the performance of the charter sector, and the Times’ editors even came close to citing one of them: its inability to scale up excellence as rapidly and routinely as is the case in virtually every field outside of education. Before getting into such policy issues, however, the Times should make a greater effort to marshal the basic facts.

We’re back from a wonderful, joyous, relaxing and incredibly fun family vacation. After we got the kids settled into bed tonight following 12 yours of travel, and as I think about the upcoming Committee Days in Olympia, I came across this article in the Los Angeles Times.

It’s just another reminder of how serious the situation has become in states across the nation. The lack of transparency in how we spend $1.2 billion-plus is a problem not just in Washington but in California and many other states. It’s time for a serious, detailed analysis of our state’s history of managing major technology projects.

In the coming weeks, I plan to dig deep into the list of computer projects that have gone well and not so well to try and get a handle on our track record of overall project management, deployment, spending and implementations. I know of three major projects in particular that required a full scale ‘reboot’ (pardon the pun).

Hopefully State Auditor Brian Sonntag’s audit of the state’s IT spending, due out in the coming days or weeks, will set a strong course for a deeper analysis.

If you have suggestions, ideas or knowledge of particular projects, please let me know. And–of course–real success stories are critically important as well. This isn’t a slap down exercise, it’s merely an effort to look under the hood of how our state manages very complex and expensive IT projects.

Here’s the text of the LA Times story in full as well as the link:

After spending billions, state remains hampered by outmoded, unreliable computer systems
An embarrassing legacy of cost overruns, botched upgrades and failed networking projects has left California to rely on decades-old technology and jury-rigged software systems.

By Patrick McGreevy
November 22, 2009

Reporting from Sacramento – California may be known as the cradle of computer innovation, but several state agencies can’t get their computers to perform essential functions despite hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns for repair and upgrade work.

Although taxpayer money has been flowing to corporate consultants and software overhauls, some computer systems are on the verge of collapse, and some replacement projects are years behind schedule or have been scrapped because they didn’t work.

The antiquated systems have even been cited by top finance officials as a contributing factor in the difficulty the state has managing its money. A lack of shared databases results in a sluggish information flow that can hamper financial decision-making. Budget officials may have trouble obtaining accurate, up-to-date numbers, and the information lag can hinder purchasing and investment decisions.

“It’s embarrassing,” said Tracy Westen, chief executive of the Center for Governmental Studies in Los Angeles. “If California can’t get it right, who can?”

Among the computer flops:

* The wheezing, 1970s-vintage computer system that prints paychecks for the entire state workforce is held together by software patches and jury-rigged connections and is in danger of failing, according to officials in the state controller’s office. A $130-million overhaul called the 21st Century Project was supposed to have been activated two years ago, but instead state officials have been locked in a lawsuit with the contractor and say it will now cost 39% more.

The Legislature’s chief budget analyst said the project was a mess. One option: pull the plug and start over — leaving taxpayers with a $70-million bill and nothing accomplished.

* Similar setbacks have plagued a colossal project intended to enable state budget and accounting databases to interact. The existing, obsolete system forces workers to spend hours manually processing data and doesn’t allow agencies to coordinate their purchasing and contracting, according to H.D. Palmer, a spokesman for the state Finance Department. If a contractor does shoddy work for one agency, there is no automatic warning system to advise other departments against hiring the company.

Called The Financial Information System for California, or FI$Cal, the system is $300 million over budget and three years behind schedule, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

* State officials predicted that a centralized computer system for California’s courts would cost $260 million and be done this year. But they weren’t even close. The expanded project won’t be done until at least 2013, according to court officials, and its cost has ballooned to $1.3 billion.

The problems are part of a long history of technology fumbles by Sacramento, which has spent billions of dollars on projects that have fallen short in performance or cost much more than promised.

In 1994, then-Gov. Pete Wilson pulled the plug on a DMV computer project after the state spent $50 million on a system that never worked.

In 2001, the state awarded a $95-million computer contract for software to link information and services across government agencies to Oracle Corp., without competitive bidding. The state auditor later concluded that Oracle’s service was overpriced and involved a system for which there was little demand from state agencies.

In 2008, a computer system began operating to allow better tracking and collection of child support payments, but it had taken so long to be completed that California had to pay $987.8 million in penalties to the federal government. And after spending $1.5 billion on the project, California still has one of the worst collection rates in the nation: 53.1%, according to the federal government.

The child support database is part of a plan to spend $6.8 billion overhauling state computer systems. But an Assembly panel is launching an investigation into the entire effort, Assemblyman Hector De La Torre (D-South Gate) told The Times.

De La Torre, who is heading the probe, attributes California’s computer woes to “a lack of sophistication . . . and in some cases consultants taking advantage of that lack of sophistication.”

State bureaucrats repeatedly award work to contractors who promise smooth fixes for low prices but later determine a project to be more complicated and expensive, he said. The 21st Century Project contractor won the work with a bid of $69 million, but doing the project right will probably cost $500 million, according to former state chief information officer John Thomas Quinn.

Red tape and contractors who don’t deliver are both elements of the legal dispute over the 21st Century Project, which is intended to replace payroll and personnel management systems installed in the 1970s and ’80s.

The payroll system is so old that state employees cannot get electronic statements of their payroll history, and state officials warn that the entire network could collapse, which would be a bookkeeping and legal catastrophe. In addition, the systems use the COBOL software language, developed in the 1950s, in which a dwindling number of state-employed programmers are fluent.

The state chose a contractor, BearingPoint, that it now alleges — after paying the firm $25.8 million — botched the job.

“From the inception of the project, BearingPoint misrepresented the complexity and level of effort necessary” to complete the project, state officials said in a letter notifying the firm that it was being fired.

BearingPoint said in an appeal to the Department of General Services that there was plenty of incompetence and foot-dragging on the project — and it was all on the part of the state.

State officials “actively frustrated BearingPoint’s performance,” the firm wrote. It charged that State Controller John Chiang’s office failed to meet its obligation to co-manage the project and took too long to make key decisions. And the company filed a lawsuit seeking $20 million from taxpayers for wrongful discharge and breach of contract.

The state Legislative Analyst’s Office suggested in February that officials could scrap the work and start from scratch, noting in a report to lawmakers that the project “has expended about $70 million with few tangible deliverables to show for this.”

But lawmakers decided to try to salvage the work. A new contractor is to be selected early next year. But one state analyst estimated that the improvements envisioned in the 21st Century Project may not be online until 2013.

(end of story)

What about Washington? How should we go about doing this analysis?

Your thoughts, insights and perspectives welcome.

Increasing numbers of home owners are struggling with the decision to walk away from their homes because their mortgages are so far underwater.

Whether it is a good idea or not is an open question with strong arguments on both sides of the decision.

Leaving a home and a mortgage ruins a credit score, complicating future transactions, and makes it more difficult to rent another residence and buy a car.

Despite this potential pain, Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Zillow.com, believes that people should consider giving up.

“I think there are a lot of people who don’t walk away from their house for moral reasons that are economically irrational,” he said.

Some experts believe that credit-evaluation companies will view foreclosures differently in this era. “This is a once-in-a-century real estate market. The question that FICO will be asking itself is, foreclosure in 2008 and 2009 the same as a foreclosure in 1998, 1999 or 2003 and 2004?” said Todd J. Zywicki, a bankruptcy expert at George Mason University School of Law in Arlington, Va.

Source: The Los Angeles Times, Alejandro Lazo (11/29/2009)

Cobra subsidies begin expiring for the unemployed from LA Times

GE pact with Vivendi clears way for sale of NBC to Comcast

TV in 10 years will know what shows we like, what music to offer from RAIN

Ron Paul gains mainstream steam from Politico

FBI viewed intel from ultra-right radio host as ‘irreplaceable’

Google and News Corp do need each other from NY Times

By Bliss Davis, Bowling Green State University Journalism Student

One of my favorite photo galleries is Boston.com’s The Big Picture. True to its name it features, well, really big pictures: crisp, clear and tell a good chunk of the story at hand before you get to the caption at the bottom.

Now, I’m not sure as to when The Big Picture came into being (feel free to indulge me!), but it represents a web trend I’ve been seeing for quite some time: big pictures, and often with it a preference for very horizontal layouts. In lieu of the evolution of convergence, print and broadcast media have always agreed on one thing: visuals do a great job of moving a story along. Pictures are really worth a thousand words.

Here are a few sites that beautifully utilize visuals, per myself and my small group of awesome high school journalism students :

• The Big Picture
• LA Times
• TBO.com

This is obviously a short list and there are many other news oriented sites out there that demonstrate this trend. It looks like one that’ll stick, that is, become the norm or even a standard on many sites. Now I don’t necessarily think pictures will mimic the page swallowing size of those on The Big Picture, but definitely those in actual stories (versus bona fide galleries) on TBO and NBC-Universal owned sites.

In this really excellent article, Carla Rivera profiles the impact the recent state budget meltdown is having on the Cal State system and then links the role of Cal State to the larger context of the state’s economy. The battles are different for students, staff, faculty, and administrators but all are facing immense obstacles as the CSU system is forced to remake itself.

Of course I’m struck by the human interest stories of the student and the lecturer, but I’m most interested in the way the provost of CalPoly Pomona articulated her priorities and challenges as a top campus administrator. That type of clear thinking and communicating seems totally absent at UC and UCSD.

Screenwriter of the award-winning film, “Pulp Fiction” was sentenced to prison after a fatal DUI that killed one person and injured Avary’s wife, and had been tweeting about life behind bars since October.  Or at least we thought.

Mark Milian of the Los Angeles Times wrote an article questioning whether or not Avary was really tweeting from inside the Ventura County Jail as @avary, referring to himself as #34 (profile is now private).  As it turned out, he wasn’t. After a follow up investigation, The LA Times wrote a second article reporting that Avary was serving his time in a furlough program that allowed him to go to his job during the day and report back to the furlough facility at night and on weekends.  

Inmates in the program are not allowed to work at home, and it is unclear as to where Avary was working during the day.  It is also unclear when and why officials permitted Avary to enter the furlough program.  

As of Thanksgiving day, Avary is back in full-time custody at Ventura County Jail.  He tweeted on Thursday evening, “#34 is ‘rolled up’ to a higher security facility for exercising his first amendment rights. The truth he has discovered is too dangerous.”

What Avary was tweeting, about his life in prison, a life he made seem very difficult, wasn’t reality.  Perhaps he thought using Twitter to describe his life in prison would help get away with serving in the furlough program, but it backfired when Milian picked up the story.  I’d call it a win for Twitter and it’s accidental role in criminal surveillance.  

Here are some of Avary’s tweets:

A year after five people were slain in a homeless encampment, the LA Times posted an audiovisual story about life under the 7th Street Bridge in Long Beach since the killings. It follows the stories of three people making life under the bridge and their different approaches and perspectives to homelessness.

You can read the article here: Gimme Shelter

Trying to imagine what climate change will look like?

Think … Australia.

Think … Record bush fires. Record dust storms. Possible ghost cities (Perth’s water supply has dropped by two thirds, and they’re building carbon-dioxide-spewing desalination plants to make things “better”.) And now, herds of marauding camels:

The camels, which are not native to Australia but were introduced in the 1840s, have butted water tanks, approached houses to try to take water from air conditioning units and knocked down fencing at the small airport runway… The carcasses of camels killed in stampedes at water storage areas were contaminating the water supply…

Or skip to the LA Times: “What will global warming look like? Scientists point to Australia…“

• Congo massacre witnesses were threatened [AP]
• UN chief urges new election date for Cote d’Ivoire [China News]
• Education not Execution: Uganda’s Defilement problem [Independent]
• Did Mbeki really support, for a while at least, the Equatorial Guinea coup attempt? [The Daily Maverick]
• Israel announces plans to limit West Bank construction for 10 months [LA Times]
• Burma engagement offers false hopes [Sydney Morning Herald]
• Indonesian government may allow mining in protected forests [The Jakarta Post]
• Haiti: UN troops shoot again [World War 4 Report]
• Blood Oil [VF]