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The Morning's Stories: Numbers Game

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We're not sure if The Daily News is just being sarcastic or out and out lying when the opening line of their lede story today calls President Bush's $2.37 trillion dollar budget proposal "lean". As Janet Hook explains in The Los Angeles Times, this budget "would be more than a third bigger than the 2001 budget he inherited four years ago". The Daily News does note that the budget plan heavily increases military funding while it cuts severely back on many domestic programs and that LA will be hit hard by those cuts.

Meanwhile, The Los Angeles Times fronts the biggest local story which is the aftermath of the shooting of 13-year-old Devin Brown by 10-year veteran police officer Steven Garcia. Chief Bratton is expressing concern about the use of deadly force in the case but says he'll wait until the investigation is completed. LAist is concerned about this kind of sketchy language in the Police Department's manual: firing at or from moving vehicles is generally prohibited. Even though officers are discouraged from shooting at moving vehicles, such shootings are, more often than not, found to be justified uses of force.

Isn't that basically saying don't do it but if you do do it, you'll get away with it? That's some worrisome logic.

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Our Daily Breeze story of the day is the tale of a Manhattan Beach jury that meant to award $1 million total in damages in a fraud case but ended up giving each of the plaintiffs $1 million each. There were 1,800 plaintiffs. That equals $1.8 billion dollars.

We need to move to Manhattan Beach.

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