News
DA Cooley and Cardinal Mahony
Steve Cooley has been critical of the Cardinal and kept it up Monday, saying his investigation of the Archdiocese handling of sex abuse cases would continue to seek files that Cardinal Roger Mahony does not want to give up. In the
LAT:
J. Michael Hennigan, attorney for the Los Angeles Archdiocese, said he is "generally a big fan of Steve Cooley," but that the district attorney's remarks were "irresponsible."
"It is irresponsible for a law enforcement official to suggest that a crime has been committed when he has no evidence of it," Hennigan said.
The settlement with 508 victims, formalized Monday, calls for a private judge to review and release church documents obtained during the negotiations, although attorneys and advocates for the victims noted that details of the handoff have yet to be worked out. They said they doubted the full truth would ever emerge.
Target: Cardinal Mahony
"It was about protecting Mahony's image...Still don't know what to do next, cardinal? Tell the truth, and all of it. Protect children, not criminals, and certainly not yourself. And if you still have to ask, maybe it's time to step down," writes Steve Lopez in the
Times.
"Cardinal Roger Mahony may forever be linked to the scandal, which he tried to cover up by first transferring known molesters from parish to parish, then fighting prosecutors - all the way to the Supreme Court - to keep church records of the abuse a secret," writes Tony Castro in the Daily News.
"Although Cardinal Roger Mahony has apologized to the victims of the abuse, he has carefully dodged personal responsibility," says a Daily News editorial.
"We have no doubt that the apology was a heartfelt one. But the cardinal also bears responsibility for his excessively defensive legal strategy," says the Times editorial.
Victims tears
No mention of clergy abuse at Mass
Carl Marziali went to Mass in the Pasadena area on Sunday
hoping the clergy abuse case and settlement with victims would come up. It didn't.
My wife and I wondered what to do: Should we stay away in anger at our leaders, as some of our churchgoing friends in the Pasadena area were doing? And what, if anything, should we put in the collection basket — a comically symbolic question when viewed against a $660-million payout....
When the collection basket came around, my wife set her jaw and passed it on. Maybe if that happens 660 million times, someone will notice.
Alhambra fire destroys Chinese landmark
The mini-mall at Valley and Atlantic boulevards was a crossroads for the Chinese American community int he San Gabriel Valley.
LAT Tribune editor also opposed front page ads
They didn't listen to Ann Marie Lipinski's
argument in Chicago any more than they did
Jim O'Shea's here.
Levine hires Samantha Stevens
The former Gray Davis staffer will be a senior advisor in the Van Nuys office for Assemblyman Lloyd Levine. Legislative Director Tara Mesick was promoted to Chief of Staff in the Sacramento office.
Noted
Lunch with Aaron Sorkin
He takes the blame for the failure of "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," in a sit-down at Nate 'n Al's with Patrick Goldstein. The LAT columnist
writes:
Let me put my cards on the table: I'm an unabashed admirer of Sorkin's work. He is a rare breed of writer today who uses both humor and a bracing moral seriousness to wrestle with the complexity of the real world. But "Studio 60," as good as some individual episodes were, never seemed to find a consistent voice, a must for must-see TV. It was, in hindsight, a bad idea, if for no other reason than it tried to graft Sorkin's fascination with social issues onto a story about career crises in the rarified [sic] world of TV comedy writers. But that made the show only more irresistible — we got to see a brilliant writer try to breathe life into a doomed premise.
Starting to fill in nicely
Steve Harvey's latest column of quirky bits