Podcasts about Superior court

The Brian Walshe murder case, in which Walshe is accused of killing and dismembering his wife, Ana Walshe, has been postponed until April 4th in the Quincy District Court. This follows a brief hearing on February 9th, in which Walshe appeared remotely from his jail cell and his lawyer stated that the prosecution had not yet turned over critical pieces of evidence. The trial has now moved to the Norfolk Superior Court, where a grand jury will make a final decision on the indictment, expected by mid-March. The case against Walshe is based on circumstantial evidence and the findings of the police investigation, including Google searches made by Walshe in the hours and days following Ana's disappearance and ten trash bags filled with blood-stained items recovered by authorities. This highly anticipated trial continues to captivate the nation with its drama and suspense. #WalsheMurderCase #LackofDiscovery #TrialUpdate #JusticeForAna #CircumstantialEvidence #CrimeScene #NotGuilty #TimelineofEvents #HighlyAnticipated #DramaticTurnofEvents Want to listen to ALL of our Podcasts Ad-Free? Subscribe through Apple Podcasts, and try it for 3 days free: https://tinyurl.com/ycw626tj Follow Our Other Cases:     Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski (All Cases) - https://availableon.com/universityofidahomurderspodcast4killedforwhat Chad & Lori Daybell -   https://availableon.com/demiseofthedaybellsthelorichaddaybellstory   The Murder of Ana Walshe - https://availableon.com/findinganathisdisappearanceofanawalshe Alex Murdaugh - https://availableon.com/thetrialofalexmurdaugh The Idaho Murders, The Case Against Bryan Kohberger - https://availableon.com/theidahomurdersthecaseagainstbryankohberger True Crime Today (All Cases & EXTRA Commentary) - https://availableon.com/truecrimetodayatruecrimepodcast  Follow Tony Brueski On Twitter https://twitter.com/tonybpod Join our Facebook Discussion Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/834636321133

Wow, what a blockbuster episode! Aliza Shatzman, President and Co-Founder of the Legal Accountability Project, shares her harrowing story of harassment and retaliation in her clerkship at the hands of a former judge. Fueled by lack of effective means of redress, and the cloak of secrecy around judicial misconduct, Aliza is now seeking to remedy that situation. She is attempting through her non-profit to bring transparency to the clerkship process and support for the law clerks. She details her disturbing story of mistreatment by a former DC judge, and the hurdles she faced in seeking relief from the retaliation. She lost her dream legal position as a result. But that did not stop her. Aliza's story is one of courage, resilience and passion. She is now attempting to bring dramatic changes to judicial accountability. Your eyes will be opened when you hear Aliza's journey and how she is creating a new clerkship world. Aliza Shatzman is the President and Founder of The Legal Accountability Project, a nonprofit aimed at ensuring that law clerks have positive clerkship experiences, while extending support and resources to those who do not. Aliza earned her BA from Williams College and her JD from Washington University School of Law. After law school, Aliza clerked in D.C. Superior Court during the 2019-2020 term. In March 2022, Aliza submitted written testimony for a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing about the lack of workplace protections in the federal judiciary, detailing her personal experience with gender discrimination, harassment, and retaliation by a former D.C. judge, in order to advocate for the Judiciary Accountability Act, legislation that would extend Title VII protections to judiciary employees, including law clerks. Aliza now writes and speaks regularly about judicial accountability. Want to help?? You can contact her directly at Aliza.Shatzman@legalaccountabilityproject.org, https://www.legalaccountabilityproject.org/ Connect with her on LinkedIn / Follow her on Twitter @AlizaShatzman Want to learn more? See her written testimony, submitted to the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet on March 17, 2022; her article with the Harvard Journal on Legislation, The Conservative Case for the Judiciary Accountability Act; her article with the UCLA Journal of Gender & Law, Untouchable Judges? What I've learned about harassment in the judiciary, and what we can do to stop it; her article with the Administrative Law Review, The D.C. Courts Are Article I Federal Courts, and They Should Be Regulated That Way; and The Legal Accountability Project's website: legalaccountabilityproject.org.

Judge Frank C. Mills III, a former chief Superior Court judge in Cherokee County, died Friday at the age of 74 at his home in Canton. Mills was first appointed as a Superior Court judge on Feb. 9, 1981, a position he would go on to hold for 30 years, getting elected eight times. Before that, he was the district attorney for the Blue Ridge Judicial Circuit, which serves Cherokee County — he was appointed to that position by then-Gov. George Busbee in 1978. Even after he retired as chief judge in 2012, he continued to serve on the circuit as a senior judge until last year. Mills' son, Frank “Tater” Crouthers Mills, said his father is the “epitome of selfless service.” Mills' wife of over 40 years, Mandy Mills, added that her husband was “truly the kindest and best of men.” Here is one of Judge Mills' longtime friends Billy Hasty talking on their friendship. ***Audio CTL Billy Hasty*** Outside the courtroom, Mills was active in community affairs such as the Boy Scouts of America, serving as district chairman and was the recipient of the District Award of Merit in 1992 and the Silver Beaver Award in 1996, the highest award on nomination of a Boy Scout Council for distinguished service to youth. Mills was also presented the Whitney M. Young Award in 2005 for distinguished service to rural or low-income urban youth, was a volunteer Red Cross lifeguard, CPR, first aid and wilderness first aid instructor, and also received the Justice Robert Benham Public Service Award from the State Bar of Georgia. In 2013, the local chamber of commerce named him the First Citizen of Cherokee County. A former Cherokee High School art teacher is bringing an art studio to downtown Canton this summer. Shanna Coulter, who was an art teacher for seven years at Cherokee High School, is opening Local Color Studio, a 6,200 square-foot art studio that is expected to open in May. Coulter describes what Local Color Studio will be as a “creative co-working space” for Canton, similar to Made Mercantile in downtown Woodstock. The studio is located at the basement level of the former Audio Intersection building at 210 E. Main St. in downtown Canton. The entrance to the studio will be on North Street. The studio, designed with an open floor plan, will feature a ceramics studio, classroom space and private studio spaces for lease. Classes will include painting, drawing, ceramics, collage and mixed media. Coulter said she will teach several classes as well. Membership will work like a gym, with studio and equipment access and discounted classes and workshops, Coulter said. Walk-in guests will have access to the maker space, as well as the 2D and ceramic studios, artist workshops, classes and socials. An Easter egg hunt April 2 is inviting families to help raise money for a pantry giving food to children at Free Home Elementary School. West Milford Farm's annual egg hunt is 2 to 4 p.m. April 2. Thousands of eggs will be hidden on the grounds. Families are invited to bring their own baskets. Admission is a $5 cash donation per participant, or $20 per family. Proceeds from the event will go to Free Home Elementary's Rocket Pantry. West Milford Farm is located at 7938 Ball Ground Road in east Cherokee County, near Cumming. Children will be invited to hunt for eggs according to age groups: 2-2:30 p.m.: 3 and under 2:30-3 p.m.: 4 to 6 years old 3-4 p.m.: 7 to 10 years old Additional activities throughout the day will include a silent auction, cake walk, yard games, face painting and music. It was forced to stave off a spirited late push, but the Walton girls basketball team defeated Cherokee 66-56 on Friday night at Wheeler to claim the Region 5AAAAAAA championship. The Warriors outscored the Raiders 33-32 during the second half, but Lexy Harris' 35 points were too much to overcome as Walton beat Cherokee for the first time this season and win its first region title since 1983. Cherokee had no answer for Harris, who dominated the paint on both sides of the floor. Behind her, Cici Childers finished with 15 points, while Graycen Ehlen and Kate Bagley each scored eight points. Toni Warren led the Warriors with 20 points, Hannah Harris scored 14 points and Elle Kenney added seven points. Friday's loss marked the end of Cherokee's six-year region championship run, along with its 13-game winning streak. For Walton, it finally broke through after dropping its first two games against the Warriors this season. The Cherokee County School District is a step closer to replacing Free Home Elementary with a new facility. Thursday, the school board unanimously selected Carroll Daniel Construction for a $36 million construction contract to build the new Free Home Elementary School. The project is funded by the Education Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax, which voters renewed in 2021. As of October, Free Home Elementary has an enrollment of 311, one of the smallest schools in the district. The project has been brought on by the state's plans to widen Highway 20 — the campus, at 12525 Cumming Highway near Canton, is in the area slated to become new highway lanes. In 2021, the school board purchased land from the county for $1.6 million for the new school. The 40.7-acre site is near the current school, north of the intersection of Highway 20 and Highway 372. Free Home Elementary School has a long history in Cherokee County. While the current facility was built in the 1950s, the site has served as a school for over a century. Etowah wasn't going to let it happen again. Last season, in Class AAAAAAA, the Eagles reached the region title game before losing to Roswell. This year, the Eagles were given the chance to win a Region 6AAAAAA championship, they didn't let this one slip away. Etowah used its trademark defense and transition game to put away a stubborn River Ridge team 61-54 in the region title game Friday at Rome High School. The Eagles, now 19-8 on the year, claim the coveted No. 1 seed from the region heading into next week's state tournament. For the River Ridge Knights, a 20-7 record and a No. 2 seed in the state tournament are good accomplishments — but the coaching staff knows that to win games on the state level, the Knights will have to be more focused. Brandon Rechsteiner, a Virginia Tech signee, led a balanced Etowah attack with 17 points. Aiden Weaver scored 15, Etter added 11, and Angelakos chipped in 10. River Ridge was led by Jay McCord's 16 points, while Greyson Hopf scored 11 and Grayson Helms added 10. #CherokeeCounty #Georgia #LocalNews           -          -          -          -          -          -          The Cherokee Tribune Ledger Podcast is local news for Woodstock, Canton, and all of Cherokee County. Register Here for your essential digital news.             This podcast was produced and published for the Cherokee Tribune-Ledger and TribuneLedgerNews.com by BG Ad Group     For more information be sure to visit https://www.bgpodcastnetwork.com/    https://cuofga.org/   https://www.drakerealty.com/   https://www.esogrepair.com/         See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

lovethylawyer.comA transcript of this podcast is available at lovethylawyer.com.Go to https://www.lovethylawyer.com/blog for transcripts. In collaboration with the Alameda County Bar Association, Love Thy Lawyer presents an interview with:Hon. Glenn Kim, Contra Costa County Superior Court Following a stellar career as an Alameda County Deputy District Attorney, Glenn Kim was appointed to the Superior Court.  He oversees jury trials, preliminary hearings, civil proceedings, and calendar matters.   Alameda County Bar AssociationThe Alameda County Bar Association (ACBA) is a professional membership association for lawyers and other members of the legal profession. The ACBA provides access to ongoing legal education; and promotes diversity and civil rights in the Alameda County legal community. Our mission is to promote excellence in the legal profession and to facilitate equal access to justice. Louis Goodman www.louisgoodman.com louisgoodman2010@gmail.com 510.582.9090  Special thanks to ACBA staff and members: Cailin Dahlin, Saeed Randle, Hadassah Hayashi, Vincent Tong and Anne Beles. (https://www.acbanet.org/) Musical theme by Joel Katz, Seaside Recording, Maui Technical support: Bryan Matheson, Skyline Studios, OaklandAudiograms & Transcripts: Paul Roberts    We'd love to hear from you.  Send us an email at louisgoodman2010@gmail.com. Please subscribe and listen. Then tell us who you want to hear and what areas of interest you'd like us to cover.  Please rate us and review us on Apple Podcasts.    Louis Goodman www.louisgoodman.comhttps://www.lovethylawyer.com/510.582.9090Music: Joel Katz, Seaside Recording, MauiTech: Bryan Matheson, Skyline Studios, OaklandAudiograms: Paul Roberts louis@lovethylawyer.com

Parents need to be aware of what's going on in their kids' lives online, in addition to offline, panelists at a Cherokee County School District forum said Tuesday. As part of its Parent University series, CCSD brought in professionals from the school district, a school police officer, a counselor and a prosecutor to discuss cyberbullying and social media's impact on local students. Panelists agreed that parents need to have conversations with their children about the internet and social media, and create a safe environment where children can come to them if there's a problem. A poll of attendees showed 76% of parents had not had a child disclose that they had been cyberbullied. Unlike previous generations who could leave their problems with peers when they went home from school, with social media, bullying follows today's students home, hurting their mental health. High school students are less confident than they were before social media, Creekview High School Principal Michael Santoro said. Ashley Snow, a Cherokee County deputy chief assistant district attorney for juvenile court, warned that the internet can give children access to content that's not appropriate for kids. Many young children, as young as 9, are exposed to child pornography, she said, and some try to act out or experiment with behavior that “breaks families apart.” It's also common for children to share information with strangers on the internet, not realizing the risks, Snow said. She recommended that parents restrict their children's access to the internet, video game devices and cell phones. If a child sends explicit content to another person, it “absolutely” should be reported, Dobbs said, even if it's to another minor. To report cyberbullying or another issue to school officials, parents and students can use CCSD's Vector Alert system, and can submit reports anonymously. The system isn't 24/7, Murdock said, but officials will respond quickly. People can also report to a teacher or counselor, or to a school administrator. Athletes from all six Cherokee County high schools celebrated the annual National Girls and Women in Sports Day on January 30 at Woodstock High School. More than 500 female athletes participated as NGWSD recognized the contributions they made in their sports and celebrated their positive influence on the landscape. The day is celebrated in all 50 states, and Cherokee County has hosted its own event since 2005. Each year, the program chooses a coach to honor for their contributions and support of the area's female athletes. Woodstock athletic director Julie Crowe earned this year's award and was also acknowledged for her 20 years as the Wolverines' girls' basketball coach. Cherokee County's 18 female wrestlers were recognized with the Trailblazer award for their participation in a historically male-dominated sport. Each school had an Athlete of the Year recipient, along with an alumna and team of the year. Cherokee's Athlete of the Year was Lexi Pavese, Creekview's was Anslie Pettit and Astrid Medina was honored from Etowah. Mataya Gayle was River Ridge's honoree, Laurel Blase earned the award from Sequoyah and Hannah Obenauf was Woodstock's winner. Creekview also honored alumna Alivia Mynes, who was tragically lost in a car accident in 2022. Nine Cherokee County football players put pen to paper Wednesday, signing their national letters of intent to join collegiate football programs. Etowah led the way with three signees, followed by Creekview, River Ridge and Sequoyah with two. Etowah kicker Carson Allen made one of the biggest splashes, signing with a Southeastern Conference school in Mississippi State. He was a five-star kicker as rated by Kohl's Kicking, and he was the No. 42-ranked kicker in the class of 2023. Etowah also had two defensive backs sign Wednesday, with Frank Mosley going to West Virginia State and Jamir Maxime to Reinhardt. Sequoyah also had a pair of defensive backs sign in Cantrell Davis (Tuskegee) and Ridley Joseph (Concordia-St. Paul). Creekview, offensive/defensive lineman Anthony Caraballo inked his letter with Huntingdon, while fullback/defensive lineman Jacob Hefner signed as a preferred walk-on at Furman. Defensive lineman Ethan Anderson (Warner) and offensive lineman Reed Albers (Centre) were River Ridge's signees. Woodstock did not have any signees Wednesday, though it had two players sign with Division I programs during the early signing period in Adonis Garcia (Wofford) and Tyler Douthit (Samford). Cherokee is expected to have two players sign on a later date in Kyan Simmons and Ryane Martin. Canton Mayor Bill Grant is "excited" to address the Interstate 575 exit at Hickory Flat Highway into the city this year, he told attendees at a Cherokee County Chamber of Commerce event Thursday. Grant, Canton City Council members Brooke Schmidt, JoEllen Wilson and Shawn Tolan, and City Manager Billy Peppers shared updates about the city with local community and business leaders at the Cherokee County Chamber of Commerce's Good Morning Cherokee meeting Thursday. Grant, the council members and Peppers shared a number of statistics and bullet points showcasing how Canton has grown and continues to grow with the guidance of the city's "Roadmap to Success." The eight tenets of the city's roadmap are: Creating Great Neighborhoods Celebrating the Diversity of Our Community Advancing Regional Economic Success Enhancing Historic Downtown Canton Sustaining Our Natural Environment Connecting Citizens to Parks and Recreation Improving Infrastructure for Future Demands Leading with Excellence In 2022, Canton saw its population grow to over 35,000 — about five times its 2000 population, which was 7,000, Peppers said. The number of city employees also grew to 134, and the city changed its starting base compensation for employees to $20 an hour. To address housing needs, last year in addition to approving private housing developments, Canton officials committed $2.8 million in a low interest loan for the Shipp Street housing redevelopment.  The city also entered into an agreement with the Canton Housing Authority for $1 million in support for a 9% low-income housing tax credits application. Susan Treadaway has taken an administrative oath as Cherokee County's acting district attorney, after former District Attorney Shannon Wallace was sworn in as a Superior Court judge. Chief Superior Court Judge Ellen McElyea swore in Susan Treadaway as acting district attorney of the Blue Ridge Judicial Circuit serving Cherokee County January 31, the district attorney's office announced. Katie Gropper was sworn in as chief assistant district attorney. Treadaway was previously the chief assistant district attorney. The design phase includes field surveys and survey database, environmental documentation including all required special studies, geotechnical, preliminary construction plans, as well as lighting and right-of-way plans (including revisions) for the improvements at I-575 at the Ridgewalk Parkway interchange, according to city documents. The change comes after Governor Brian Kemp swore in Wallace in Atlanta Jan. 30. Kemp appointed Wallace to the newly created fourth judicial seat on the Superior Court. Treadaway will hold the position of acting district attorney pending Governor Kemp's appointment of Wallace's successor. There was a three-way tie for the 2023 STAR Student for Cherokee County this year. Griffen Bon and Braden Flournoy from Cherokee High School, as well as Avi Stein from Etowah High School, were recognized last week at the annual STAR Student and Teacher Recognition Ceremony hosted at the Canton Theatre by the Canton Lions Club, which has been the local sponsor since the STAR program began in 1958.  The winners were announced last Tuesday at a program sponsored by the Canton Lions Club at the Historic Canton Theater. They were selected from the eight STAR Students named for each of the seven high schools in Cherokee County. The Cherokee County School District recognizes its high school students with the highest SAT scores and their teachers through the Student Teacher Achievement Recognition program. The STAR Student honor is awarded to the high school senior from each Georgia public and private high school with the highest score on any single test date of the SAT and who also ranks in the top 10 percent or top 10 students of his or her class based on grade point average. Each honored student is invited to select his or her favorite teacher to be named that school's STAR Teacher. For a complete list of CCSD Honorees, please go to Tribune Ledger News dot com. #CherokeeCounty #Georgia #LocalNews           -          -          -          -          -          -          The Cherokee Tribune Ledger Podcast is local news for Woodstock, Canton, and all of Cherokee County. Register Here for your essential digital news.             This podcast was produced and published for the Cherokee Tribune-Ledger and TribuneLedgerNews.com by BG Ad Group     For more information be sure to visit https://www.bgpodcastnetwork.com/    https://cuofga.org/   https://www.drakerealty.com/   https://www.esogrepair.com/       See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Susan Treadaway has taken an administrative oath as Cherokee County's acting district attorney, after former District Attorney Shannon Wallace was sworn in as a Superior Court judge. #CherokeeCounty #Georgia #LocalNews           -          -          -          -          -          -          The Cherokee Tribune Ledger Podcast is local news for Woodstock, Canton, and all of Cherokee County. Register Here for your essential digital news.             This podcast was produced and published for the Cherokee Tribune-Ledger and TribuneLedgerNews.com by BG Ad Group     For more information be sure to visit https://www.bgpodcastnetwork.com/    https://cuofga.org/   https://www.drakerealty.com/   https://www.esogrepair.com/     See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Title:​ Exploring Legal Accountability; Improving The Courts, One Clerkship At A TimeEpisode summary:​ Aliza Shatzman went to school for law and became a clerkship so she could get a government job. She needed to clerk under a judge for 1 year, that was the last of her requirements. Unfortunately, she was unknowingly assigned to a judge who had a history of mistreatment of clerks. He discriminated against women and Aliza was no exception. He mistreated her as well and ended the clerkship early. Aliza tried everything in her power to get a job, but with the clerkship ending early, it made it almost impossible. After a year, she finally landed her dream job only for it to be revoked because the judge made a bad statement about her. Not only did this revoke her job offer, but it revoked all the job interviews she had. Not only had this judge harassed her then, but he continues to do damage. So what is Aliza to do? She created a non-profit organization aimed at ensuring that law clerks have positive clerkship experiences while extending support and resources to those who do not. Guest Name & Bio: Aliza Shatzman is the President and Co-Founder of The Legal Accountability Project, a nonprofit aimed at ensuring that law clerks have positive clerkship experiences while extending support and resources to those who do not. Aliza earned her BA from Williams College and her JD from Washington University School of Law, where she served as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Law & Policy. After law school, Aliza clerked in D.C. Superior Court during the 2019-2020 term.In March 2022, Aliza submitted written testimony for a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing about the lack of workplace protections in the federal judiciary, detailing her personal experience with gender discrimination, harassment, and retaliation by a former D.C. judge. Aliza now regularly writes and speaks about judicial accountability. She has been published in numerous forums, including the UCLA Journal of Gender & Law, Yale Law & Policy Review, NYU Journal of Legislation & Public Policy, Above the Law, Law360, Slate, Ms. Magazine, and Balls & Strikes.Contact Info: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aliza-shatzman-58b55223/Website: https://www.legalaccountabilityproject.org/ Thank you for listening!Please subscribe on iTunes and give us a 5-Star review! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-mindset-and-self-mastery-show/id1604262089Listen to other episodes here: www.TheMindsetAndSelfMasteryShow.comLearn more about your host:  www.NickMcGowan.comWatch Clips and highlights: www.youtube.com/channel/UCk1tCM7KTe3hrq_-UAa6GHAGuest Inquiries right here: www.TheMindsetAndSelfMasteryShow.comShare your thoughts here: nick@nickmcgowan.com- Your Friends at “The Mindset & Self-Mastery Show”

lovethylawyer.comA transcript of this podcast is available at lovethylawyer.com.Hon. Michelle TongJudicial Assignments·       Elected March 3, 2020; Sworn-in January 4, 2021·       Judicial Assignments: Small Claims (January 2021 – present); five week coverage Civil Harrassments and Default Judgments   Community talks·       Judges in the Classroom – presented Animals in the Classroom to bilingual Cantonese immersion elementary school classes·       Vanguard – summer interns, July 2021·       Transforming the Judiciary – UCLA Criminal Justice Program, August 2021·       McGeorge School of Law – Road to the Bench, August 2021  Prior Employment  San Francisco Public Defender's Office·       Managed Pretrial Release Unit (PRU), April 2020 – December 2020·       Felony Trial Attorney, 2008 – April 2020·       Misdemeanor Attorney, March 2006 – 2008·       Felony Paralegal, January 2004 – March 2006 Eviction Defense CollaborativeEviction Defense for Self-Represented tenants, October 2001 – January 2003 Judge Edward M. Chen, US District Court for the Northern District of CaliforniaExtern, September - October 2001 Professional Experience Tried 53 cases to a Jury Verdict and conducted hundreds of preliminary hearings and pretrial motions.  Represented thousands of clients.  Litigated various legal defenses and issues including self-defense, mental health defenses, intoxication, eyewitness identification, DNA evidence, three strikes, possession of weapons, narcotics sales, sexual assaults, robbery, residential burglary, domestic violence, gang allegations, shootings, assault and threats against police officers.    Louis Goodman www.louisgoodman.comhttps://www.lovethylawyer.com/ 510.582.9090  Musical theme by Joel Katz, Seaside Recording, Maui Technical support: Bryan Matheson, Skyline Studios, OaklandAudiograms & Transcripts: Paul Roberts    We'd love to hear from you.  Send me an email at louis@lovethylawyer.com. Please subscribe and listen. Then tell us who you want to hear and what areas of interest you'd like us to cover.  Please rate us and review us on Apple Podcasts.     Louis Goodman www.louisgoodman.comhttps://www.lovethylawyer.com/510.582.9090Music: Joel Katz, Seaside Recording, MauiTech: Bryan Matheson, Skyline Studios, OaklandAudiograms: Paul Roberts louis@lovethylawyer.com

Aliza Shatzman is the President and Founder of The Legal Accountability Project, a nonprofit that ensures that law clerks have positive clerkship experiences, while extending support and resources to those who do not. Aliza earned her BA from Williams College and her JD from Washington University School of Law. After law school, Aliza clerked in D.C. Superior Court during the 2019-2020 term. In March 2022, Aliza submitted written testimony for a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing about the lack of workplace protections in the federal judiciary, detailing her personal experience with harassment and retaliation by a former D.C. judge. The intent of her written testimony was to advocate for the Judiciary Accountability Act, legislation that would extend Title VII protections to judiciary employees, including law clerks.Aliza now writes and speaks regularly about judicial accountability. She has been published in numerous forums, including the Harvard Journal on Legislation, UCLA Journal of Gender & Law, Yale Law & Policy Review, NYU Journal of Legislation & Public Policy, Administrative Law Review, Above the Law, Law360, Slate, Ms. Magazine, and Balls & Strikes.You can follow Aliza on Twitter @AlizaShatzman or email her at Aliza.Shatzman@legalaccountabilityproject.org to learn more and get involved.

Judge Robert McBurney of the Superior Court of Fulton County held a hearing on Tuesday to decide whether or not to release the Fulton County Special Grand Jury's report on 2020 election interference in Georgia. Lawfare's Fulton County correspondent Anna Bower was in the room live-blogging the matter, and Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes caught up with her right after the hearing to talk it through. Why did the district attorney argue that the report should continue to be sealed for now? What were the media organizations' arguments, and which way was Judge McBurney leaning? Is the report going to become public? And if so, when? Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode provides a first-person roadmap through the seat of Aliza to the creation of a new nonprofit mission, a go-to-market strategy for nonprofits, sustainable fundraising approaches, and the approaches to overcoming challenges as a leader who's “first to market” on an issue. Aliza Shatzman is the President and Co-Founder of The Legal Accountability Project, a nonprofit aimed at ensuring that law clerks have positive clerkship experiences, while extending support and resources to those who do not. Aliza earned her BA from Williams College and her JD from Washington University School of Law. After law school, Aliza clerked in D.C. Superior Court during the 2019-2020 term. In March 2022, Aliza submitted written testimony for a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing about the lack of workplace protections in the federal judiciary, detailing her personal experience with gender discrimination, harassment, and retaliation by a former D.C. judge, order to advocate for the Judiciary Accountability Act, legislation that would extend Title VII protections to judiciary employees. Aliza now writes and speaks regularly about judicial accountability. She has been published in numerous forums, including the Harvard Journal on Legislation, UCLA Journal of Gender & Law, Yale Law &; Policy Review, NYU Journal of Legislation &; Public Policy, Administrative; Law Review, Above the Law, Law360, Slate, Ms. Magazine, and more. Check out this link to Aliza's House Judiciary Committee written testimony.

Gearing up for trial with experts? You're ready with your Sargon and Sanchez objections. But don't forget Kelly: if the expert's opinion is outside the consensus, that's not a Sargon objection—you have to be ready with a People v. Kelly objection.Filing an MSJ? If the court sets your hearing after your trial date, you're entitled to get it advanced—or to have your trial continued. (Might be a backdoor strategy to continuing trial dates.)And a trial court abused its discretion in hearing a SLAPP motion before a restraining-order motion. The SLAPP ruling meant the case was stayed and the restraining-order issue couldn't be heard. That's not right. Trial courts need to make sure those issues are heard with or before SLAPP motions.Also:Is allowing a juror to view the trial remotely a “structural error” reversible per se?Are vexatious-litigation determinations appealable as injunctions?Are city council appointees entitled to more First Amendment protections if appointed by a majority of the council rather than a single councilmember?Appellate Specialist Jeff Lewis' biography, LinkedIn profile, and Twitter feed.Appellate Specialist Tim Kowal's biography, LinkedIn profile, Twitter feed, and YouTube page.Sign up for Not To Be Published, Tim Kowal's weekly legal update, or view his blog of recent cases.Use this link to get a 25% lifetime discount on Casetext.Other items discussed in the episode:Plan to Exclude an Expert Under Sargon? Don't Forget Kelly, discussing Bader v. Johnson & Johnson, No. A158868 (D1d4 Dec. 23. 2022).A Timely MSJ Is Entitled to a Timely Hearing, Appellate Court Holds, discussing Cole v. Superior Court, No. D081299 (D4d1 Dec. 30, 2022), and Luckett.Vexatious Litigant Determination Is Appealable, discussing Blizzard Energy, Inc. v. Shaefers (D2d6 Nov. 29, 2022) 85 Cal.App.5th 802.Episode 42 discussing Luckett, and Tim's post on *Luckett.*White v. Davis, No. E077320, at *1 (Cal. Ct. App. Jan. 5, 2023)Lathus v. City of Huntington Beach, No. 21-56197, at *1 (9th Cir. Jan. 5, 2023)United States v. Knight, No. 21-10197, at *1 (9th Cir. Jan. 4, 2023)Videos from this episode will be posted at Tim Kowal'

Slam the Gavel welcomes Judge David B. Katz to the podcast. Judge Katz is the President of the National Council of juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ), and is the Presiding Judge in the Essex Vicinage of the New Jersey Courts. The NCJFCJ's mission is to provide all judges, courts and related agencies involved with juvenile, family and domestic violence cases with the knowledge and skills to improve the lives of the families and children who are seeking justice. Judge Katz was appointed to the Superior Court of New Jersey in 2008. Judge Katz is also chair of the New Jersey Supreme Court's Family Practice Committee and the Conference of Presiding Family Judges and in that capacity, he has served as a member of the New Jersey's Judicial Council. He has also served as the lead judge for Domestic Violence, lead judge for the Children in Court Docket and the family drug court judge and chair of the Model Court. A former chair of the state-wide Domestic violence Working Group, Judge Katz is also active in his community where he served three terms as mayor and fifteen years as a member of his local Emergency First Aid Squad as an EMT. We discussed many issues including Domestic Violence, firearms and when should a case be referred to Criminal Court if so. We talked about accountability when litigants disobey judge's orders and Child Psychological Abuse (Parental Alienation. To Learn More: NCJFCJ Supportshow(https://www.buymeacoffee.com/maryannpetri) dismantlingfamilycourtcorruption.com --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/maryann-petri/support

     Slam the Gavel welcomes Judge David B. Katz to the podcast. Judge Katz is the President of the National Council of juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ), and is the Presiding Judge in the Essex Vicinage of the New Jersey Courts.     The NCJFCJ's mission is to provide all judges, courts and related agencies involved with juvenile, family and domestic violence cases with the knowledge and skills to improve the lives of the families and children who are seeking justice.    Judge Katz was appointed to the Superior Court of New Jersey in 2008. Judge Katz is also chair of the New Jersey Supreme Court's Family Practice Committee and the Conference of Presiding Family Judges and in that capacity, he has served as a member of the New Jersey's Judicial Council. He has also served as the lead judge for Domestic Violence, lead judge for the Children in Court Docket and the family drug court judge and chair of the Model Court.   A former chair of the state-wide Domestic violence Working Group, Judge Katz is also active in his community where he served three terms as mayor and fifteen years as a member of his local Emergency First Aid Squad as an EMT.    We discussed many issues including Domestic Violence, firearms and when should a case be referred to Criminal Court if so. We talked about accountability when litigants disobey judge's orders and Child Psychological Abuse (Parental Alienation. To Learn More: NCJFCJSupportshow(https://www.buymeacoffee.com/maryannpetri)dismantlingfamilycourtcorruption.comSupport the showSupportshow(https://www.buymeacoffee.com/maryannpetri)http://www.dismantlingfamilycourtcorruption.com/

An EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW with Fresno County Sheriff John Zanoni on the Superior Court's decision to end Zero Dollar Bail.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This episode of All Things Judicial  features a 2009 interview with former Supreme Court of North Carolina Associate Justice, Harry C. Martin. Justice Martin has the distinction of serving as a judge on the North Carolina Superior Court, the North Carolina Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court of North Carolina, and the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court. In the interview, Martin offers a glimpse into the history of the North Carolina Judicial Branch, and gives time-tested advice to Superior Court judges and young lawyers who are just getting started in the legal profession."The important thing for a young lawyers to remember is that they are professionals; they are not in a business to make a certain amount of profit," Martin said on the podcast. "The practice of law is a true profession and the principle object of the practice of law is to help people."The interview was conducted by the Chief Justice's Commission on Professionalism's Executive Director Mel Wright, and is part of the Chief Justice's Commission on Professionalism's historical video series. A video of this interview can be viewed on the Judicial Branch YouTube Channel. 

In this edition Clay Carroll and Shaun Griffin are back with Chris Kuhlmann reviewing the news and fall out from the unconstitutional January 6th Committee hearings, summarizing the actions taken against law abiding US Citizens concerned about election integrity. An unarmed mob of concerned patriots and Trump supporters committed insurrection on January 6 according to the liberal, Democrat narrative. What mob commits insurrection WITHOUT weapons? How strong is a government when 964 unarmed citizens can take over the capitol, and thus the country? Does the Speakers denial of National Guard deployment for security invite hostile actions? Or set the stage for a democrat instigation of a riot?   CREDITS Hosts: Chris Kuhlmann, Clay Carroll and Shaun Griffin Produced by: Shaun Griffin Music composed by JD Kuhlmann Art: Shaun Griffin Sound: Chris Kuhlmann and Shaun Griffin   Questions? Drop us a line at admin@kingdompatriot.us Visit us at www.kingdompatriot.us and check out our Vision Video   Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words Drawing on historical documents and exclusive interviews, authors tell the inspiring story of Clarence Thomas's rise from a childhood of poverty and prejudice in the segregated South to Supreme Court Justice. Companion to blockbuster documentary Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words, but a fascinating stand alone listen, as well! *The full story behind the wildly successful documentary film, Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words* LINK   UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE The UNITED STATES ATTORNEY'S OFFICE – DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA Dec 6, 2022 LINK Based on the public court documents, below is a snapshot of the investigation as of the close of business Tuesday, December 6, 2022. Complete versions of most of the public court documents used to compile these statistics are available on the Capitol Breach Investigation Resource Page at https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/capitol-breach-cases. Arrests made: Approximately 900 defendants have been arrested in nearly all 50 states and the District of Columbia. (This includes those charged in both District and Superior Court). Criminal charges: Approximately 283 defendants have been charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers or employees, including approximately 99 individuals who have been charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer. Approximately 140police officers were assaulted January 6 at the Capitol, including about 80 from the U.S. Capitol Police and about 60 from the Metropolitan Police Department.  Approximately 11 individuals have been arrested on a series of charges that relate to assaulting a member of the media, or destroying their equipment, on January 6. Approximately 821 defendants have been charged with entering or remaining in a restricted federal building or grounds. Of those, 91 defendants have been charged with entering a restricted area with a dangerous or deadly weapon. Approximately 57 defendants have been charged with destruction of government property, and approximately 36 defendants have been charged with theft of government property. More than 290 defendants have been charged with corruptly obstructing, influencing, or impeding an official proceeding, or attempting to do so. Approximately 50 defendants have been charged with conspiracy, either: (a) conspiracy to obstruct a congressional proceeding, (b) conspiracy to obstruct law enforcement during a civil disorder, (c) conspiracy to injure an officer, or (d) some combination of the three.   Pleas: Approximately 470 individuals have pleaded guilty to a variety of federal charges, many of whom faced or will face incarceration at sentencing. Approximately 115have pleaded guilty to felonies. Another 355 have pleaded guilty to misdemeanors. A total of 49of those who have pleaded guilty to felonies have pleaded to federal charges of assaulting law enforcement officers. Approximately 22 additional defendants have pleaded guilty to feloniously obstructing, impeding, or interfering with a law enforcement officer during a civil disorder. Of these 71 defendants, 33 have now been sentenced to prison terms of up to 90 months. Four of those who have pleaded guilty to felonies have pleaded guilty to the federal charge of seditious conspiracy. Trials: 33 individuals have been found guilty at contested trials, including 3 who were found guilty in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Another 8 individuals have been convicted following an agreed-upon set of facts. 15 of these 41 defendants were found guilty of assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers, a felony, including one who has been sentenced to 10 years in prison.  Sentencings: Approximately 335 federal defendants have had their cases adjudicated and received sentences for their criminal activity on January 6. Approximately 185 have been sentenced to periods of incarceration. Approximately 85 defendants have been sentenced to a period of home detention, including approximately 14 who also were sentenced to a period of incarceration. Public Assistance: Citizens from around the country have provided invaluable assistance in identifying individuals in connection with the January 6 attack. The FBI continues to seek the public's help in identifying approximately 350 individuals believed to have committed violent acts on the Capitol grounds, including over 250 who assaulted police officers Additionally, the FBI currently has 14 videos of suspects wanted for violent assaults on federal officers and one video of two suspects wanted for assaults on members of the media on January 6th and is seeking the public's help to identify them. For images and video of the attackers, please visit https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/capitol-violence. Anyone with tips can call 1-800-CALL-FBI (800-225-5324) or visit tips.fbi.gov.  

A Superior Court judge ruled today that Republican Representative David Eastman is eligible to hold office. Also tonight… the Alaska Supreme Court hears arguments in an appeal over state management of herring brought by the Sitka tribe.

Vickie Brett was born and raised in Southern California and through the Inclusive Education Project she focuses on advocating and educating families about their legal rights. Vickie is committed to strengthening her clients who come to her disheartened and beaten down by the current education system. Because Vickie is bilingual, she represents and empowers many monolingual Spanish-speaking families.  She is a dedicated pro bono attorney for the Superior Court of Los Angeles's Juvenile and Dependency 317(e) Panel and in the past was a supervising attorney for the UCI Law School's Special Education Law Project.  Amanda Selogie received a bachelor's degree in Child and Adolescent Development, specializing in Education from California State University, Northridge and a Juris Doctorate from Whittier Law School where she served as a Fellow in the prestigious Center for Children's Rights Fellowship Program and served in the school's pro-bono Special Education Legal Clinic. Amanda immersed herself in the world of civil rights and educational advocacy through her work in education, empowerment and advocacy with the Inclusive Education project, supporting inclusion in early education through her appointment to the Orange County Child Care and Development Planning Council and their Inclusion Collaborative Committee, previous work serving as a supervising attorney for UCI Law School's Education Rights Pro-bono project and coaching of AYSO's VIP (Very Important Player) program coaching players living with disabilities and creating an inclusive soccer program. Join us for this important discussion about creating Individualized Education Programs so students can learn and thrive, addressing systemic problems in the education system, and making sure there is understanding and collaboration when developing plans.   IN THIS EPISODE, WE DISCUSS: Vickie and Amanda's journey creating a non-profit to address systemic problems in the education system and advocate for low-income families. The most common challenge when developing IEPs. Having open conversations with educators, administrators, and families about student disabilities, learning styles, and their expectations. Handling difficult moments when collaborating to create a plan that fits the best interest of the child.   RESOURCES AND LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: Connect with The Inclusive Education Project on Instagram and Facebook or send them an email at info@iepcalifornia.org Join The Inclusive Education Project Podcast Facebook group Listen to The Inclusive Education Project Podcast. Learn more about Rebel Educator, explore our professional development opportunities for educators and students, and check out our project library Visit us at UP Academy to learn more about our personalized and inclusive learning environment Connect with Tanya and UP Academy on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram and learn more about her journey here     Check out my book Rebel Educator: Create Classrooms Where Impact and Imagination Meet: amzn.to/3AcwlfF   Enjoying the show? Leave us a rating and review and help more people find us! bit.ly/RebelEducatorApplePodcasts   We'd love it if you could take a few minutes to fill out this survey to let us know how we can bring you the best possible content:  forms.gle/JcKHf9DHTZnYUmQr6    Interested in being on the Rebel Educator podcast? Fill out this form and we'll reach out to you if we think you'd be a great fit for an upcoming episode. forms.gle/zXR2KGPK3WEmbrRZ6    Want to learn more about opening your own UP Academy? Check out the Rebel Educator Accelerator: www.rebeleducator.com/courses/the-accelerator   MORE ABOUT THE REBEL EDUCATOR PODCAST: In each episode of the Rebel Educator podcast, I deconstruct world-class educators, students, and thought leaders in education to extract the tactics, tools, and routines that you can use as teachers and parents. Join me as we discuss how to shift the classroom, the learning environment, the mindset, and the pedagogy, to resist tradition, reignite wonder, and re-imagine the future of education. This podcast is dedicated to all of the educators who work thankless hours to make our next generation the best it can be.  It was designed to begin conversations on how we can redesign education for the future of work and the success of our students.  It is meant for teachers, students, administrators, homeschoolers and anyone who interacts with and teaches youth.

A woman charged in connection with the death of a toddler in Canton is now charged with second-degree murder in the case, police announced Friday. Phillissa Diallo, from Canton, was arrested Wednesday and charged with second degree cruelty to children and concealing a death, Canton Police Department reported. Friday, detectives secured an additional felony warrant and have charged Diallo with second-degree murder. According to the Canton Police Department, police received a walk-in report of a deceased toddler found inside a residence and responded at about 4:10 p.m. Wednesday to a home on Hearthstone Landing Drive, where they found the body of a female toddler. GBI Crime Lab will examine the body to determine the cause of death and identification confirmation. The toddler's death remains under investigation. Anyone with information is asked to contact the Canton Police Department. A north Georgia DJ was killed in a crash on Interstate 575 near Canton Thursday. According to the Cherokee Sheriff's Office, deputies responded at about 3 p.m. Thursday on Interstate 575 south near the Old Vandiver Road overpass. Preliminary indications are that Daniel Blankowski, of Talking Rock, driving a Kia Sedona south on the interstate, struck the rear of a Toyota FJ that had stopped for traffic due to a different accident in the city of Canton, the sheriff's office reported. Blankowski was transported to Northside Hospital Cherokee, where he died from his injuries, authorities said. The driver of the FJ was transported to Wellstar Kennestone Hospital with non-life threatening injuries. Blankowski was known as DJ Dano to friends and others in the community, his daughter, Jazeri McHenry, said. McHenry said the local coroner told the family Blankowski had a heart attack while driving. The crash remains under investigation by the Cherokee Sheriff's Office Traffic Enforcement Unit. Cherokee County District Attorney Shannon Wallace has been appointed by Governor Brian Kemp to serve as the county's newest Superior Court judge, the governor's office announced. Wallace will be the fourth judge on the Blue Ridge Judicial Circuit Superior Court, a position created earlier this year by state law. Cherokee is the only county in the Blue Ridge circuit. Wallace is Cherokee County's first female district attorney. Before being elected, she was the chief assistant district attorney for the former District Attorney Garry Moss. Before coming to the district attorney's office, Wallace was a prosecutor in the Ocmulgee Judicial Circuit in middle Georgia. She handled all manner of major felony offenses there, according to the governor's office, but quickly developed a passion for handling crimes against women and children. Wallace sits on the board of Cherokee FOCUS, a Cherokee County collaborative that focuses on creating strong family units. District Attorney Wallace also sits on the board of Cherokee Triad - S.A.L.T. and is an active member of the Canton Rotary and Cherokee Chamber of Commerce. The district attorney graduated cum laude from the University of Georgia in 1999 with a bachelor's in psychology and criminal Justice. She then received her juris doctor from the University of Georgia School of Law, graduating cum laude in 2002. The Reinhardt women's basketball team picked up its sixth consecutive win before heading into the winter break. Led by Maria Sanchez Ponce's double-double of 24 points and 12 rebounds, the Eagles posted a 75-67 win over Bluefield on Tuesday to improve to 13-3 this season. It was a big offensive game for Reinhardt, which had three players in double figures, led by Julia Craft's 22 points and Summer Cramer's 13. Cramer also had a team-best seven assists. The Eagles also remained undefeated in the Appalachian Athletic Conference at 12-0, already nearing last year's conference win total of 15. Twelve conference games still reside on the schedule before the AAC tournament begins Feb. 20. Sanchez Ponce, a freshman from Spain, is third on Reinhardt's scoring chart at 10.1 points per game and second in rebounding with 7.1 per game. She has the highest field goal percentage on the team, converting on 51.9% of her shots. Ashley Woodroffe leads the Eagles in scoring at 14.8 points per game, followed by Craft's 12.9. Tarrah Gibson is grabbing 7.5 rebounds per game to lead the team, with 3.1 assists also counting as a team-best. Reinhardt is the only team in the AAC with an undefeated conference record, while its overall record is also the best. Bryan, Milligan, and Point trail the Eagles in the standings. Cherokee High School had six all-region selections in 5AAAAAAA, along with nine honorable mentions following the conclusion of the 2022 season. Senior linebacker Kyan Simmons and junior defensive lineman Javon Hobson earned first-team honors. Simmons finished the year with 103 tackles, 11 sacks and 10 tackles for loss, while Hobson tallied 58 tackles, seven sacks and seven tackles for loss. Simmons had a big impact in Cherokee's 30-14 win at Kennesaw Mountain toward the end of the season. It was the deciding game on if the Warriors would qualify for the Class AAAAAAA state playoffs, and Simmons totaled 13 tackles, four tackles for loss and two sacks. The 6-foot-2, 210-pound linebacker received his first Division I offer from Marist on Monday. Cherokee's other two first-team members were senior kicker Rodion Averianov and junior punter Reed Chandley. Averianov connected on four of six field goals this season with a long of 51 yards and did not miss an extra point all year, despite being a late addition to the team. Chandley averaged 40 yards per punt, which Shaw said consistently gave the Warriors an advantage in flipping field position. Another special teams player, long snapper Spencer Radnoti, also deserved recognition, according to Shaw. On the all-region second team, the Warriors saw junior receiver Pops Jameson and junior defensive lineman JD Burn earn recognition. Jameson finished the season as Cherokee's leading receiver with 400 yards and four touchdowns on 32 receptions, while Burn finished with 42 tackles, six tackles for loss and one sack. Sophomore quarterback Tanner Savasir led the Warriors' nine honorable mentions, along with Jayce Jones, one of Savasir's favorite targets in the passing game.   The Cherokee County fire department's first chief has died. Joe Carmichael died December 10 at his home in Corryton, Tennessee, at the age of 79. Carmichael was born in Birmingham and moved to Cherokee County in 1972, spending a large portion of his adult life in Cherokee before he eventually moved to Tennessee. The former fire chief began his fire service career at the City of Atlanta Fire Department. In Cherokee County, he started out as a firefighter in the Oak Grove Volunteer Fire Department. Carmichael became Cherokee County's first fire chief in 1973 when he noticed there was no fire protection. All firefighter positions were volunteer. The fire chief position was on a volunteer basis until 1976, when Carmichael became the official fire chief of unincorporated Cherokee County and started receiving pay for his services. Carmichael also founded the Oak Grove Civic Association. The county's fire department has grown from fewer than 10 members when it first went paid to almost 500 members today. Cherokee County Fire and Emergency Services plans to have a small memorial service in the spring, according to a Facebook post by the department. #CherokeeCounty #Georgia #LocalNews           -          -          -          -          -          -          The Cherokee Tribune Ledger Podcast is local news for Woodstock, Canton, and all of Cherokee County. Register Here for your essential digital news.             This podcast was produced and published for the Cherokee Tribune-Ledger and TribuneLedgerNews.com by BG Ad Group     For more information be sure to visit https://www.bgpodcastnetwork.com/    https://cuofga.org/   https://www.drakerealty.com/   https://www.esogrepair.com/             See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Cherokee County District Attorney Shannon Wallace has been appointed by Gov. Brian Kemp to serve as the county's newest Superior Court judge, the governor's office announced. "I am deeply honored to be appointed by Governor Kemp to the Superior Court bench. I am excited to begin this new journey and look forward to continuing to work hard and serve my community," Wallace said in an email. Wallace will be the fourth judge on the Blue Ridge Judicial Circuit Superior Court, a position created earlier this year by state law. Cherokee is the only county in the Blue Ridge circuit. #CherokeeCounty #Georgia #LocalNews           -          -          -          -          -          -          The Cherokee Tribune Ledger Podcast is local news for Woodstock, Canton, and all of Cherokee County. Register Here for your essential digital news.             This podcast was produced and published for the Cherokee Tribune-Ledger and TribuneLedgerNews.com by BG Ad Group     For more information be sure to visit https://www.bgpodcastnetwork.com/    https://cuofga.org/   https://www.drakerealty.com/   https://www.esogrepair.com/         See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Top stories: - Numerous letters written on his behalf indicate former girls basketball coach Keith Cash conducted himself in an exemplary manner in public, a Superior Court judge said. - A former assistant chief of BPD said he was forced out of law enforcement because he cooperated with the Attorney General's Office investigation of a deadly shooting by the son of the then-Bakersfield police chief.- Kern County Firefighter Mark Schmidt, a 17-year veteran of the department, died Sunday after battling cancer the past few years, Fire Chief Aaron Duncan said in a news release.

GUEST OVERVIEW: Andrew Gould's path to public service began with his parents. Growing up, the Gould family never had a lot of material success, but they were rich in far greater ways. Andy's parents were good, hard-working people of great faith who stressed the importance of integrity, honesty, and humility – values that inspired him to pursue a career in law. As a prosecutor in Yuma, Andy tried every type of criminal case imaginable, including the prosecution of criminal organizations located in Mexico. In 2001, Andy was appointed by the Governor to fill a vacant seat on the Yuma County Superior Court, where he served in that capacity for eleven years. In 2006, while serving on the Superior Court bench, he was appointed as the Presiding Judge for Yuma County. In 2012, Andy was appointed to the Arizona Court of Appeals until he was given the honor of being appointed as Justice to the Arizona Supreme Court in 2016. Arizona needs an Attorney General who will be ready on day one to go to court and fight for their rights, and Andy Gould is the right person for the job. Andy understands the legal challenges facing Arizona because he has spent more than 30 years addressing and presiding over the most complex civil and criminal cases in the State. To show his commitment, Andy has stepped down from the Arizona Supreme Court – a decision that not many before him have made. But to quote Thomas Paine, “these are the times that try men's souls.” Arizona needs leaders who are willing to sacrifice something for its people, and Andy Gould has proven he will do just that.

Three people were seriously injured in an early morning crash on Whitlock Avenue in Marietta Monday.  The crash happened around 6 a.m. Monday morning when a car crossed over the centerline on Whitlock Avenue near Winn Street, according to Marietta Police Department spokesman Chuck McPhilamy. The vehicle collided head-on with another vehicle headed in the opposite direction. McPhilamy said the drivers of both vehicles were seriously injured in the crash, while a passenger in one of the cars was ejected from the vehicle and also seriously injured. The three injured people were taken to the hospital. There could soon be two Ojularis playing defense in the NFL. Two years after former Georgia linebacker Azeez Ojulari left Georgia to turn pro, his bother, BJ, an edge-rusher and outside linebacker and LSU, is about to follow him.  The former Marietta High School standout made it official Sunday when he made the announcement on social media. Ojulari is looking to follow in the footsteps of his brother, who was selected by the New York Giants in the second round of the 2021 draft with the 50th overall pick. Ojulari, a 6-foot-3, 250-pound junior, has had 58 tackles, 5½ sacks, 8½ tackles for loss and a forced fumble this season, earning All-Southeastern Conference first-team honors. Over his three-year career in Baton Rouge, he has had 129 tackles, 25 tackles for loss, 16½ sacks and 25 quarterback hurries.  LSU is scheduled to face Purdue in the Citrus Bowl on January 2. It has not been determined if Ojulari will play in the bowl game. Ojulari has been projected to be a late first-round or early second-round selection in April's draft. ESPN analyst Todd McShay has Ojulari ranked as the fifth-best outside linebacker on his draft board, behind Alabama's Will Anderson, Army's Andre Carter, Georgia Tech's Keion White and Georgia's Nolan Smith. Fellow ESPN analyst Mel Kiper Jr. has Ojulari ranked seventh. Sonja Natasha Brown was sworn in Thursday evening as the newest judge on the Cobb Superior Court bench. Brown, a Cobb magistrate judge and past president of the Georgia Association of Black Woman Attorneys, replaces retiring Judge Robert Flournoy III. She defeated James Luttrell in a runoff election this summer with 64% of the vote. As a Superior Court judge, Brown will be tasked with handling felony criminal cases, civil disputes, real estate matters and more. With Brown's accession to the bench, she becomes the third Black person to hold a Superior Court judgeship in Cobb, after Kellie Hill and Angela Brown were elected in 2020. Chief Magistrate Judge Brendan Murphy noted the Superior Court bench will also now, for the first time, be majority woman.   Despite cloudy skies at Piedmont Church's annual “Christmas at Piedmont,” children flocked to the petting zoo's goats and llamas and waited in a lengthy line for a snow slide with a tube. And, of course, there was the opportunity to share wish lists with Santa. Meanwhile, more than 20 elementary school choirs performed on two stages, and people shopped for the holidays at an arts and crafts market of local vendors during the free event off Piedmont Road. Marlon Longacre, one of Piedmont's pastors, estimated 13,000 to 15,000 people attended the two-day event. Last year's event raised $24,500 for local schools, according to Longacre. This year's main sponsor was Superior Plumbing. Longacre said the event provided an outlet for the music programs of schools in unincorporated northeast Cobb, comparing it to holiday events usually thrown by city governments, like Santa's arrival in Acworth. Piedmont Senior Pastor Ike Reighard, also CEO and president of the nonprofit MUST Ministries, said he hoped the event allowed parents with busy schedules to see their kids perform.   Wheeler suffered its first loss of the season in a battle of nationally ranked teams. Number 10 Columbus, from Florida, defeated the Number 7 Wildcats 73-70 on Saturday in the Battle of the Peach at Wheeler High School. Columbus was led by a combined 44 points by the Boozer brothers – Cameron and Cayden – the sons for former NBA All-Star Carlos Boozer. Wheeler led 37-32 at the half, but Columbus rallied in the third quarter to take a 56-51 lead behind 14 points in the period by Cameron Boozer. Wheeler's Isaiah Collier, Jelani Hamilton and Arrinten Page combined for 57 of the Wildcats' points. Wheeler will travel to Florida to play Tampa Catholic in the City of Palms Classic on Friday.   At the Battery Atlanta there is an ongoing holiday double feature — Santa himself, behind the desk of one of his many remote offices, and a holiday market featuring minority-owned businesses. Sponsored by Truist, through Christmas Eve, “Santa's Post Office” will be open at 800 Battery Ave. People can visit and take pictures with Santa while delivering their wish lists to Santa and do some holiday shopping, complimentary gift wrapping included. Visiting with Santa is also free. Odette Shirley owns the self-care boutique Maison Jovence and said that on the first day of the holiday market, her business made about double what her pop-ups usually make. She sold out of many of her candles. Another business owner, Omar “Chilly-O” Mitchell, said he was happy to see the support for Black-owned businesses. His clothing company, Chilly-O Culture Co, has been a mainstay of the Atlanta street wear scene, according to Chilly-O's partner for this pop-up, who goes by the name Lurchero. Chilly-O and Lurchero said they go way back in the Atlanta art scene. Lurchero is the creator and owner of Only Positive Energy, a brand that curates and produces art exhibitions and events around Atlanta. Only Positive Energy partnered with Chilly-O Culture Co for the holiday market, jointly selling Chilly-O's clothes bearing the OPE brand. Santa, the ultimate holiday celebrity, was a major draw, according to parents at the market. Avery Kaczynski, a 6-year-old from Vinings, said she asked Santa if she was on the good list. She added that she hopes to get a coffee-making set to practice her barista skills. She wants to be a barista someday. #CobbCounty #Georgia #LocalNews      -            -            -            -            -            The Marietta Daily Journal Podcast is local news for Marietta, Kennesaw, Smyrna, and all of Cobb County.             Subscribe today, so you don't miss an episode! MDJOnline            Register Here for your essential digital news.            https://www.chattahoocheetech.edu/  https://cuofga.org/ https://www.esogrepair.com/ https://www.drakerealty.com/           Find additional episodes of the MDJ Podcast here.             This Podcast was produced and published for the Marietta Daily Journal and MDJ Online by BG Ad Group   For more information be sure to visit https://www.bgpodcastnetwork.com                    See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Improving the courts, one clerkship at a time...Do you feel empowered in your role within the law industry to speak up and report when something is wrong? Particularly if you are working as a law clerk, do you feel it easy to be able to complain and report a Judge and their wrongdoings?This week on the Legally Speaking Podcast, our host Robert Hanna is chatting to Aliza Shatzman, President and Co-Founder of the Legal Accountability Project!Aliza is a passionate advocate for bringing awareness about harassment in the judiciary and served as a law clerk herself in the Superior Court of District of Columbia. Aliza's experience in the legal industry stretches far and wide - as well as working as a law clerk, she has previously worked as a legal intern at the US Department of Justice, the US Attorney's Office and US Senate and US houses of Representatives. Aliza and the team at the Legal Accountability Project are on a mission to ensure that as many law clerks as possible have positive clerkship experiences, while extending support and resources to those who do not.

Katherine Norton and Morgan Grey of Duquesne University's School of Law are leveraging their experience in the law and artificial intelligence/machine learning to create a program that allows pro se custody litigants to bring better crafted custody appeals to the Superior Court. This program hopes to be an example of how technology can serve the dual purpose of giving access to justice for pro se litigants, while also providing pro bono counsel an effective intake and preparation program that will allow them to maximize their time and expertise when accepting a custody appeal. Katherine L.W. Norton, is an assistant professor and director of clinical and international programs at the Thomas R. Kline School of Law of Duquesne University. Within the clinical legal education program, she teaches and acts as the supervising attorney for the Family Law Clinic. The Family Law Clinic provides limited legal services to low-income individuals needing assistance in the areas of child custody, divorce, family support, and domestic violence. Norton focuses her research on issues relating to access to justice and the role that technology and artificial intelligence have in this arena. Most recently Norton received an American Bar Endowment Grant for the project, Utilizing Technology to Enhance Access to Custody Appeals. This research will result in the development of an online tool to assist low-income individuals access the custody appellate process. Morgan A. Gray is an Adjunct Professor of Law at the Thomas R. Kline School of Law of Duquesne University, where he teaches programming for lawyers. He is also a Doctorate Student in the University of Pittsburgh's Intelligent Systems Program. His main area of research is Legal Text Analytics, which focuses on using Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to analyze and learn information from legal text. Aside from this, his research interests include access to justice. In this vein, he is currently researching the development of a tool to increase access justice for low-income individuals with respect to custody appeals. This research has been enabled by the American Bar Endowment Grant for Utilizing Technology to Enhance Access to Custody Appeals. *audio editing, voice over & music by Nick DeMatteo

Former NJ Superior Court Justice Andrew Napolitano takes his weekly spot on the show to talk about Elon Musk coming out and saying Twitter did have their hand in affecting the elections, his thoughts on the FBI, and the conspiracy that imprisoned oath keepers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode, I will be talking to Alene Anello, whose law firm, Legal Impact for Chickens, is pursuing a shareholder derivative case against Costco regarding the treatment of the poor little birds whose bodies end up being their extremely popular, and very cheap, rotisserie chickens. Essentially, in Smith v Vachris, currently pending in Superior Court in King County, Washington, Legal… The post Animal Law Podcast #90: The Case of Costco’s Chickens appeared first on Our Hen House.

Returning to the podcast today are Vickie Brett and Amanda Selogie in a unique collaboration episode that will also air on the Inclusive Education Project (IEP) Podcast. Through my experience as a clinical neuropsychologist specializing in pediatric assessments, parents ask a lot of great questions. In this episode, together with Educational attorneys, Vickie and Amanda, we are addressing some of the most common IEP-related questions in an effort to inform and educate parents.   Show Notes: [1:26] - Does my child need a diagnosis to get accommodations at school? [4:49] - What should parents do when they approach the teacher with concerns, but the teacher discourages an assessment? [6:53] - What are SST meetings and their purpose within the school? [10:01] - Does a child need an assessment if there is a diagnosis of just ADHD? [11:23] - If I, as a parent, do not agree with the school's assessment results and believe that something else is going on, what are my options? [13:12] - What will an IEP provide that a 504 Plan will not? [16:10] - What are the pros and cons of requesting an Independent Educational Evaluation (IEE)? [18:04] - If a parent chooses to have a private assessment done and the results show the need for accommodations, modifications, or treatment, what is the next step with their school district? [20:41] - What are parents entitled to if they have a private evaluation done? [24:01] - Why are services not provided at private schools and can private school students still access public school services? [26:57] - How does Child Find work in school districts to ensure they find students in private schools that need services? [28:29] - If the school is recommending support that is not evidence-based, can I push back to ensure that my child gets an evidence-based intervention, and what should that look like? [34:01] - No matter the situation, follow your gut feeling.   About Our Guests: Vickie BrettVickie Brett was born and raised in Southern California and through the Inclusive Education Project she focuses on advocating and educating families about their legal rights. Vickie is committed to strengthening her clients who come to her disheartened and beaten down by the current education system. Because Vickie is bilingual, she represents and empowers many monolingual Spanish-speaking families. She is a dedicated pro bono attorney for the Superior Court of Los Angeles's Juvenile and Dependency 317(e) Panel and, in the past, was a supervising attorney for the UCI Law School's Special Education Law Project.   Amanda Selogie Amanda Selogie received a bachelor's degree in Child and Adolescent Development, specializing in Education from California State University, Northridge and a Juris Doctorate from Whittier Law School where she served as a Fellow in the prestigious Center for Children's Rights Fellowship Program and served in the school's pro-bono Special Education Legal Clinic. Amanda immersed herself in the world of civil rights and educational advocacy through her work in education, empowerment, and advocacy with the Inclusive Education project, supporting inclusion in early education through her appointment to the Orange County Child Care and Development Planning Council and their Inclusion Collaborative Committee, previous work serving as a supervising attorney for UCI Law School's Education Rights Pro-bono project and coaching of AYSO's VIP (Very Important Player) program coaching players living with disabilities and creating an inclusive soccer program.   Connect with Vickie and Amanda: Inclusive Education Project Website   Links and Related Resources: Episode 32: Advocating for Children with Special Needs with Heather Zakson Episode 1: Demystifying the Assessment Process What is a Comprehensive Evaluation and How Can It Help Support My Child's Learning? How to Initiate a Special Education Assessment   Need a more individualized learning and support experience? Join one of our learning groups! Join our email list so that you can receive information about upcoming webinars - ChildNEXUS.com The Diverse Thinking Different Learning podcast is intended for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for medical or legal advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Additionally, the views and opinions expressed by the host and guests are not considered treatment and do not necessarily reflect those of ChildNEXUS, Inc or the host, Dr. Karen Wilson.

In this episode, our guest Josie M. Porras Corporon, CELA, will be diving into the misunderstood world of elder law.  This episode is geared towards practitioners who don't know what an elder law attorney does and when they need to refer their clients to an elder law attorney; as well as to the general public as a guide for where to start when they want to plan for a long term disability in addition to their passing.  We will discuss the basics of long term care planning and public benefits and provide examples of when and how to best plan for a crisis. About Our Guest:Josie M. Porras Corporon, CELA is a Certified Elder Law Attorney by the National Elder Law Foundation, Certified Specialist, Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law by the State Bar of California Board of Legal Specialization, Certified Dementia Care Practitioner by the National Council of Certified Dementia Practitioners. As a Certified Elder Law Attorney, she is well-versed in creating a plan to protect families in the event of crisis as well as helping families deal with the crisis with or without planning.  Josie received her BA/BSW in Social Work from California State University, Chico, and her JD from the University of Iowa College of Law. Josie was a medical social worker prior to becoming an attorney and has incorporated those skills into her law practice. She is the appointed attorney representative on the State's Advisory Committee on Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias; is a member of the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys, Past President of the Northern California Chapter; and is appointed to the Executive Board for Legal Services of Northern California. Locally, she sits on the Advocacy Committee for the Chico Chapter of the Northern California and Northern Nevada Chapter of the Alzheimer's Association and is a Board Member at the Peg Taylor Center. Josie can be reached at (530) 892-2421.About Our Host:Host Kimberly R. McGhee is a Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law by the State Bar of California Board of Legal Specialization, Certified Elder Law Attorney by the National Elder Law Foundation, and V.A. Certified Accredited Attorney. She is a Member of the California Lawyers Association, Trusts and Estates Executive Committee (TEXCOM), former President of the Southern California National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys, Member of the Board of Directors for Palomar Health Medical Group, Member of the Board of Directors for Southern Caregiver Resource Center, contributing author and editor for CEB (Continuing Education of the Bar's) Trusts & Estates practice guide and Vice-Chair of the North County Bar Association California Conference of Delegates. She also serves as a Court Appointed Attorney and Guardian Ad Litem in the Superior Court of San Diego County, California.  Trust Me is Produced by Foley Marra StudiosThank you for listening to Trust Me!

Episode one hundred and fifty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “White Rabbit”, Jefferson Airplane, and the rise of the San Francisco sound. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three-minute bonus episode available, on "Omaha" by Moby Grape. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Erratum I refer to Back to Methuselah by Robert Heinlein. This is of course a play by George Bernard Shaw. What I meant to say was Methuselah's Children. Resources I hope to upload a Mixcloud tomorrow, and will edit it in, but have had some problems with the site today. Jefferson Airplane's first four studio albums, plus a 1968 live album, can be found in this box set. I've referred to three main books here. Got a Revolution!: The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane by Jeff Tamarkin is written with the co-operation of the band members, but still finds room to criticise them. Jefferson Airplane On Track by Richard Molesworth is a song-by-song guide to the band's music. And Been So Long: My Life and Music by Jorma Kaukonen is Kaukonen's autobiography. Some information on Skip Spence and Matthew Katz also comes from What's Big and Purple and Lives in the Ocean?: The Moby Grape Story, by Cam Cobb, which I also used for this week's bonus. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, I need to confess an important and hugely embarrassing error in this episode. I've only ever seen Marty Balin's name written down, never heard it spoken, and only after recording the episode, during the editing process, did I discover I mispronounce it throughout. It's usually an advantage for the podcast that I get my information from books rather than TV documentaries and the like, because they contain far more information, but occasionally it causes problems like that. My apologies. Also a brief note that this episode contains some mentions of racism, antisemitism, drug and alcohol abuse, and gun violence. One of the themes we've looked at in recent episodes is the way the centre of the musical world -- at least the musical world as it was regarded by the people who thought of themselves as hip in the mid-sixties -- was changing in 1967. Up to this point, for a few years there had been two clear centres of the rock and pop music worlds. In the UK, there was London, and any British band who meant anything had to base themselves there. And in the US, at some point around 1963, the centre of the music industry had moved West. Up to then it had largely been based in New York, and there was still a thriving industry there as of the mid sixties. But increasingly the records that mattered, that everyone in the country had been listening to, had come out of LA Soul music was, of course, still coming primarily from Detroit and from the Country-Soul triangle in Tennessee and Alabama, but when it came to the new brand of electric-guitar rock that was taking over the airwaves, LA was, up until the first few months of 1967, the only city that was competing with London, and was the place to be. But as we heard in the episode on "San Francisco", with the Monterey Pop Festival all that started to change. While the business part of the music business remained centred in LA, and would largely remain so, LA was no longer the hip place to be. Almost overnight, jangly guitars, harmonies, and Brian Jones hairstyles were out, and feedback, extended solos, and droopy moustaches were in. The place to be was no longer LA, but a few hundred miles North, in San Francisco -- something that the LA bands were not all entirely happy about: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Who Needs the Peace Corps?"] In truth, the San Francisco music scene, unlike many of the scenes we've looked at so far in this series, had rather a limited impact on the wider world of music. Bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company were all both massively commercially successful and highly regarded by critics, but unlike many of the other bands we've looked at before and will look at in future, they didn't have much of an influence on the bands that would come after them, musically at least. Possibly this is because the music from the San Francisco scene was always primarily that -- music created by and for a specific group of people, and inextricable from its context. The San Francisco musicians were defining themselves by their geographical location, their peers, and the situation they were in, and their music was so specifically of the place and time that to attempt to copy it outside of that context would appear ridiculous, so while many of those bands remain much loved to this day, and many made some great music, it's very hard to point to ways in which that music influenced later bands. But what they did influence was the whole of rock music culture. For at least the next thirty years, and arguably to this day, the parameters in which rock musicians worked if they wanted to be taken seriously – their aesthetic and political ideals, their methods of collaboration, the cultural norms around drug use and sexual promiscuity, ideas of artistic freedom and authenticity, the choice of acceptable instruments – in short, what it meant to be a rock musician rather than a pop, jazz, country, or soul artist – all those things were defined by the cultural and behavioural norms of the San Francisco scene between about 1966 and 68. Without the San Francisco scene there's no Woodstock, no Rolling Stone magazine, no Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, no hippies, no groupies, no rock stars. So over the next few months we're going to take several trips to the Bay Area, and look at the bands which, for a brief time, defined the counterculture in America. The story of Jefferson Airplane -- and unlike other bands we've looked at recently, like The Pink Floyd and The Buffalo Springfield, they never had a definite article at the start of their name to wither away like a vestigial organ in subsequent years -- starts with Marty Balin. Balin was born in Ohio, but was a relatively sickly child -- he later talked about being autistic, and seems to have had the chronic illnesses that so often go with neurodivergence -- so in the hope that the dry air would be good for his chest his family moved to Arizona. Then when his father couldn't find work there, they moved further west to San Francisco, in the Haight-Ashbury area, long before that area became the byword for the hippie movement. But it was in LA that he started his music career, and got his surname. Balin had been named Marty Buchwald as a kid, but when he was nineteen he had accompanied a friend to LA to visit a music publisher, and had ended up singing backing vocals on her demos. While he was there, he had encountered the arranger Jimmy Haskell. Haskell was on his way to becoming one of the most prominent arrangers in the music industry, and in his long career he would go on to do arrangements for Bobby Gentry, Blondie, Steely Dan, Simon and Garfunkel, and many others. But at the time he was best known for his work on Ricky Nelson's hits: [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, "Hello Mary Lou"] Haskell thought that Marty had the makings of a Ricky Nelson style star, as he was a good-looking young man with a decent voice, and he became a mentor for the young man. Making the kind of records that Haskell arranged was expensive, and so Haskell suggested a deal to him -- if Marty's father would pay for studio time and musicians, Haskell would make a record with him and find him a label to put it out. Marty's father did indeed pay for the studio time and the musicians -- some of the finest working in LA at the time. The record, released under the name Marty Balin, featured Jack Nitzsche on keyboards, Earl Palmer on drums, Milt Jackson on vibraphone, Red Callender on bass, and Glen Campbell and Barney Kessell on guitars, and came out on Challenge Records, a label owned by Gene Autry: [Excerpt: Marty Balin, "Nobody But You"] Neither that, nor Balin's follow-up single, sold a noticeable amount of copies, and his career as a teen idol was over before it had begun. Instead, as many musicians of his age did, he decided to get into folk music, joining a vocal harmony group called the Town Criers, who patterned themselves after the Weavers, and performed the same kind of material that every other clean-cut folk vocal group was performing at the time -- the kind of songs that John Phillips and Steve Stills and Cass Elliot and Van Dyke Parks and the rest were all performing in their own groups at the same time. The Town Criers never made any records while they were together, but some archival recordings of them have been released over the decades: [Excerpt: The Town Criers, "900 Miles"] The Town Criers split up, and Balin started performing as a solo folkie again. But like all those other then-folk musicians, Balin realised that he had to adapt to the K/T-event level folk music extinction that happened when the Beatles hit America like a meteorite. He had to form a folk-rock group if he wanted to survive -- and given that there were no venues for such a group to play in San Francisco, he also had to start a nightclub for them to play in. He started hanging around the hootenannies in the area, looking for musicians who might form an electric band. The first person he decided on was a performer called Paul Kantner, mainly because he liked his attitude. Kantner had got on stage in front of a particularly drunk, loud, crowd, and performed precisely half a song before deciding he wasn't going to perform in front of people like that and walking off stage. Kantner was the only member of the new group to be a San Franciscan -- he'd been born and brought up in the city. He'd got into folk music at university, where he'd also met a guitar player named Jorma Kaukonen, who had turned him on to cannabis, and the two had started giving music lessons at a music shop in San Jose. There Kantner had also been responsible for booking acts at a local folk club, where he'd first encountered acts like Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, a jug band which included Jerry Garcia, Pigpen McKernan, and Bob Weir, who would later go on to be the core members of the Grateful Dead: [Excerpt: Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, "In the Jailhouse Now"] Kantner had moved around a bit between Northern and Southern California, and had been friendly with two other musicians on the Californian folk scene, David Crosby and Roger McGuinn. When their new group, the Byrds, suddenly became huge, Kantner became aware of the possibility of doing something similar himself, and so when Marty Balin approached him to form a band, he agreed. On bass, they got in a musician called Bob Harvey, who actually played double bass rather than electric, and who stuck to that for the first few gigs the group played -- he had previously been in a band called the Slippery Rock String Band. On drums, they brought in Jerry Peloquin, who had formerly worked for the police, but now had a day job as an optician. And on vocals, they brought in Signe Toley -- who would soon marry and change her name to Signe Anderson, so that's how I'll talk about her to avoid confusion. The group also needed a lead guitarist though -- both Balin and Kantner were decent rhythm players and singers, but they needed someone who was a better instrumentalist. They decided to ask Kantner's old friend Jorma Kaukonen. Kaukonen was someone who was seriously into what would now be called Americana or roots music. He'd started playing the guitar as a teenager, not like most people of his generation inspired by Elvis or Buddy Holly, but rather after a friend of his had shown him how to play an old Carter Family song, "Jimmy Brown the Newsboy": [Excerpt: The Carter Family, "Jimmy Brown the Newsboy"] Kaukonen had had a far more interesting life than most of the rest of the group. His father had worked for the State Department -- and there's some suggestion he'd worked for the CIA -- and the family had travelled all over the world, staying in Pakistan, the Philippines, and Finland. For most of his childhood, he'd gone by the name Jerry, because other kids beat him up for having a foreign name and called him a Nazi, but by the time he turned twenty he was happy enough using his birth name. Kaukonen wasn't completely immune to the appeal of rock and roll -- he'd formed a rock band, The Triumphs, with his friend Jack Casady when he was a teenager, and he loved Ricky Nelson's records -- but his fate as a folkie had been pretty much sealed when he went to Antioch College. There he met up with a blues guitarist called Ian Buchanan. Buchanan never had much of a career as a professional, but he had supposedly spent nine years studying with the blues and ragtime guitar legend Rev. Gary Davis, and he was certainly a fine guitarist, as can be heard on his contribution to The Blues Project, the album Elektra put out of white Greenwich Village musicians like John Sebastian and Dave Van Ronk playing old blues songs: [Excerpt: Ian Buchanan, "The Winding Boy"] Kaukonen became something of a disciple of Buchanan -- he said later that Buchanan probably taught him how to play because he was such a terrible player and Buchanan couldn't stand to listen to it -- as did John Hammond Jr, another student at Antioch at the same time. After studying at Antioch, Kaukonen started to travel around, including spells in Greenwich Village and in the Philippines, before settling in Santa Clara, where he studied for a sociology degree and became part of a social circle that included Dino Valenti, Jerry Garcia, and Billy Roberts, the credited writer of "Hey Joe". He also started performing as a duo with a singer called Janis Joplin. Various of their recordings from this period circulate, mostly recorded at Kaukonen's home with the sound of his wife typing in the background while the duo rehearse, as on this performance of an old Bessie Smith song: [Excerpt: Jorma Kaukonen and Janis Joplin, "Nobody Loves You When You're Down and Out"] By 1965 Kaukonen saw himself firmly as a folk-blues purist, who would not even think of playing rock and roll music, which he viewed with more than a little contempt. But he allowed himself to be brought along to audition for the new group, and Ken Kesey happened to be there. Kesey was a novelist who had written two best-selling books, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion, and used the financial independence that gave him to organise a group of friends who called themselves the Merry Pranksters, who drove from coast to coast and back again in a psychedelic-painted bus, before starting a series of events that became known as Acid Tests, parties at which everyone was on LSD, immortalised in Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Nobody has ever said why Kesey was there, but he had brought along an Echoplex, a reverb unit one could put a guitar through -- and nobody has explained why Kesey, who wasn't a musician, had an Echoplex to hand. But Kaukonen loved the sound that he could get by putting his guitar through the device, and so for that reason more than any other he decided to become an electric player and join the band, going out and buying a Rickenbacker twelve-string and Vox Treble Booster because that was what Roger McGuinn used. He would later also get a Guild Thunderbird six-string guitar and a Standel Super Imperial amp, following the same principle of buying the equipment used by other guitarists he liked, as they were what Zal Yanovsky of the Lovin' Spoonful used. He would use them for all his six-string playing for the next couple of years, only later to discover that the Lovin' Spoonful despised them and only used them because they had an endorsement deal with the manufacturers. Kaukonen was also the one who came up with the new group's name. He and his friends had a running joke where they had "Bluesman names", things like "Blind Outrage" and "Little Sun Goldfarb". Kaukonen's bluesman name, given to him by his friend Steve Talbot, had been Blind Thomas Jefferson Airplane, a reference to the 1920s blues guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Match Box Blues"] At the band meeting where they were trying to decide on a name, Kaukonen got frustrated at the ridiculous suggestions that were being made, and said "You want a stupid name? Howzabout this... Jefferson Airplane?" He said in his autobiography "It was one of those rare moments when everyone in the band agreed, and that was that. I think it was the only band meeting that ever allowed me to come away smiling." The newly-named Jefferson Airplane started to rehearse at the Matrix Club, the club that Balin had decided to open. This was run with three sound engineer friends, who put in the seed capital for the club. Balin had stock options in the club, which he got by trading a share of the band's future earnings to his partners, though as the group became bigger he eventually sold his stock in the club back to his business partners. Before their first public performance, they started working with a manager, Matthew Katz, mostly because Katz had access to a recording of a then-unreleased Bob Dylan song, "Lay Down Your Weary Tune": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Lay Down Your Weary Tune"] The group knew that the best way for a folk-rock band to make a name for themselves was to perform a Dylan song nobody else had yet heard, and so they agreed to be managed by Katz. Katz started a pre-publicity blitz, giving out posters, badges, and bumper stickers saying "Jefferson Airplane Loves You" all over San Francisco -- and insisting that none of the band members were allowed to say "Hello" when they answered the phone any more, they had to say "Jefferson Airplane Loves You!" For their early rehearsals and gigs, they were performing almost entirely cover versions of blues and folk songs, things like Fred Neil's "The Other Side of This Life" and Dino Valenti's "Get Together" which were the common currency of the early folk-rock movement, and songs by their friends, like one called "Flower Bomb" by David Crosby, which Crosby now denies ever having written. They did start writing the odd song, but at this point they were more focused on performance than on writing. They also hired a press agent, their friend Bill Thompson. Thompson was friends with the two main music writers at the San Francisco Chronicle, Ralph Gleason, the famous jazz critic, who had recently started also reviewing rock music, and John Wasserman. Thompson got both men to come to the opening night of the Matrix, and both gave the group glowing reviews in the Chronicle. Record labels started sniffing around the group immediately as a result of this coverage, and according to Katz he managed to get a bidding war started by making sure that when A&R men came to the club there were always two of them from different labels, so they would see the other person and realise they weren't the only ones interested. But before signing a record deal they needed to make some personnel changes. The first member to go was Jerry Peloquin, for both musical and personal reasons. Peloquin was used to keeping strict time and the other musicians had a more free-flowing idea of what tempo they should be playing at, but also he had worked for the police while the other members were all taking tons of illegal drugs. The final break with Peloquin came when he did the rest of the group a favour -- Paul Kantner's glasses broke during a rehearsal, and as Peloquin was an optician he offered to take them back to his shop and fix them. When he got back, he found them auditioning replacements for him. He beat Kantner up, and that was the end of Jerry Peloquin in Jefferson Airplane. His replacement was Skip Spence, who the group had met when he had accompanied three friends to the Matrix, which they were using as a rehearsal room. Spence's friends went on to be the core members of Quicksilver Messenger Service along with Dino Valenti: [Excerpt: Quicksilver Messenger Service, "Dino's Song"] But Balin decided that Spence looked like a rock star, and told him that he was now Jefferson Airplane's drummer, despite Spence being a guitarist and singer, not a drummer. But Spence was game, and learned to play the drums. Next they needed to get rid of Bob Harvey. According to Harvey, the decision to sack him came after David Crosby saw the band rehearsing and said "Nice song, but get rid of the bass player" (along with an expletive before the word bass which I can't say without incurring the wrath of Apple). Crosby denies ever having said this. Harvey had started out in the group on double bass, but to show willing he'd switched in his last few gigs to playing an electric bass. When he was sacked by the group, he returned to double bass, and to the Slippery Rock String Band, who released one single in 1967: [Excerpt: The Slippery Rock String Band, "Tule Fog"] Harvey's replacement was Kaukonen's old friend Jack Casady, who Kaukonen knew was now playing bass, though he'd only ever heard him playing guitar when they'd played together. Casady was rather cautious about joining a rock band, but then Kaukonen told him that the band were getting fifty dollars a week salary each from Katz, and Casady flew over from Washington DC to San Francisco to join the band. For the first few gigs, he used Bob Harvey's bass, which Harvey was good enough to lend him despite having been sacked from the band. Unfortunately, right from the start Casady and Kantner didn't get on. When Casady flew in from Washington, he had a much more clean-cut appearance than the rest of the band -- one they've described as being nerdy, with short, slicked-back, side-parted hair and a handlebar moustache. Kantner insisted that Casady shave the moustache off, and he responded by shaving only one side, so in profile on one side he looked clean-shaven, while from the other side he looked like he had a full moustache. Kantner also didn't like Casady's general attitude, or his playing style, at all -- though most critics since this point have pointed to Casady's bass playing as being the most interesting and distinctive thing about Jefferson Airplane's style. This lineup seems to have been the one that travelled to LA to audition for various record companies -- a move that immediately brought the group a certain amount of criticism for selling out, both for auditioning for record companies and for going to LA at all, two things that were already anathema on the San Francisco scene. The only audition anyone remembers them having specifically is one for Phil Spector, who according to Kaukonen was waving a gun around during the audition, so he and Casady walked out. Around this time as well, the group performed at an event billed as "A Tribute to Dr. Strange", organised by the radical hippie collective Family Dog. Marvel Comics, rather than being the multi-billion-dollar Disney-owned corporate juggernaut it is now, was regarded as a hip, almost underground, company -- and around this time they briefly started billing their comics not as comics but as "Marvel Pop Art Productions". The magical adventures of Dr. Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts, and in particular the art by far-right libertarian artist Steve Ditko, were regarded as clear parallels to both the occult dabblings and hallucinogen use popular among the hippies, though Ditko had no time for either, following as he did an extreme version of Ayn Rand's Objectivism. It was at the Tribute to Dr. Strange that Jefferson Airplane performed for the first time with a band named The Great Society, whose lead singer, Grace Slick, would later become very important in Jefferson Airplane's story: [Excerpt: The Great Society, "Someone to Love"] That gig was also the first one where the band and their friends noticed that large chunks of the audience were now dressing up in costumes that were reminiscent of the Old West. Up to this point, while Katz had been managing the group and paying them fifty dollars a week even on weeks when they didn't perform, he'd been doing so without a formal contract, in part because the group didn't trust him much. But now they were starting to get interest from record labels, and in particular RCA Records desperately wanted them. While RCA had been the label who had signed Elvis Presley, they had otherwise largely ignored rock and roll, considering that since they had the biggest rock star in the world they didn't need other ones, and concentrating largely on middle-of-the-road acts. But by the mid-sixties Elvis' star had faded somewhat, and they were desperate to get some of the action for the new music -- and unlike the other major American labels, they didn't have a reciprocal arrangement with a British label that allowed them to release anything by any of the new British stars. The group were introduced to RCA by Rod McKuen, a songwriter and poet who later became America's best-selling poet and wrote songs that sold over a hundred million copies. At this point McKuen was in his Jacques Brel phase, recording loose translations of the Belgian songwriter's songs with McKuen translating the lyrics: [Excerpt: Rod McKuen, "Seasons in the Sun"] McKuen thought that Jefferson Airplane might be a useful market for his own songs, and brought the group to RCA. RCA offered Jefferson Airplane twenty-five thousand dollars to sign with them, and Katz convinced the group that RCA wouldn't give them this money without them having signed a management contract with him. Kaukonen, Kantner, Spence, and Balin all signed without much hesitation, but Jack Casady didn't yet sign, as he was the new boy and nobody knew if he was going to be in the band for the long haul. The other person who refused to sign was Signe Anderson. In her case, she had a much better reason for refusing to sign, as unlike the rest of the band she had actually read the contract, and she found it to be extremely worrying. She did eventually back down on the day of the group's first recording session, but she later had the contract renegotiated. Jack Casady also signed the contract right at the start of the first session -- or at least, he thought he'd signed the contract then. He certainly signed *something*, without having read it. But much later, during a court case involving the band's longstanding legal disputes with Katz, it was revealed that the signature on the contract wasn't Casady's, and was badly forged. What he actually *did* sign that day has never been revealed, to him or to anyone else. Katz also signed all the group as songwriters to his own publishing company, telling them that they legally needed to sign with him if they wanted to make records, and also claimed to RCA that he had power of attorney for the band, which they say they never gave him -- though to be fair to Katz, given the band members' habit of signing things without reading or understanding them, it doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that they did. The producer chosen for the group's first album was Tommy Oliver, a friend of Katz's who had previously been an arranger on some of Doris Day's records, and whose next major act after finishing the Jefferson Airplane album was Trombones Unlimited, who released records like "Holiday for Trombones": [Excerpt: Trombones Unlimited, "Holiday For Trombones"] The group weren't particularly thrilled with this choice, but were happier with their engineer, Dave Hassinger, who had worked on records like "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones, and had a far better understanding of the kind of music the group were making. They spent about three months recording their first album, even while continually being attacked as sellouts. The album is not considered their best work, though it does contain "Blues From an Airplane", a collaboration between Spence and Balin: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Blues From an Airplane"] Even before the album came out, though, things were starting to change for the group. Firstly, they started playing bigger venues -- their home base went from being the Matrix club to the Fillmore, a large auditorium run by the promoter Bill Graham. They also started to get an international reputation. The British singer-songwriter Donovan released a track called "The Fat Angel" which namechecked the group: [Excerpt: Donovan, "The Fat Angel"] The group also needed a new drummer. Skip Spence decided to go on holiday to Mexico without telling the rest of the band. There had already been some friction with Spence, as he was very eager to become a guitarist and songwriter, and the band already had three songwriting guitarists and didn't really see why they needed a fourth. They sacked Spence, who went on to form Moby Grape, who were also managed by Katz: [Excerpt: Moby Grape, "Omaha"] For his replacement they brought in Spencer Dryden, who was a Hollywood brat like their friend David Crosby -- in Dryden's case he was Charlie Chaplin's nephew, and his father worked as Chaplin's assistant. The story normally goes that the great session drummer Earl Palmer recommended Dryden to the group, but it's also the case that Dryden had been in a band, the Heartbeats, with Tommy Oliver and the great blues guitarist Roy Buchanan, so it may well be that Oliver had recommended him. Dryden had been primarily a jazz musician, playing with people like the West Coast jazz legend Charles Lloyd, though like most jazzers he would slum it on occasion by playing rock and roll music to pay the bills. But then he'd seen an early performance by the Mothers of Invention, and realised that rock music could have a serious artistic purpose too. He'd joined a band called The Ashes, who had released one single, the Jackie DeShannon song "Is There Anything I Can Do?" in December 1965: [Excerpt: The Ashes, "Is There Anything I Can Do?"] The Ashes split up once Dryden left the group to join Jefferson Airplane, but they soon reformed without him as The Peanut Butter Conspiracy, who hooked up with Gary Usher and released several albums of psychedelic sunshine pop. Dryden played his first gig with the group at a Republican Party event on June the sixth, 1966. But by the time Dryden had joined, other problems had become apparent. The group were already feeling like it had been a big mistake to accede to Katz's demands to sign a formal contract with him, and Balin in particular was getting annoyed that he wouldn't let the band see their finances. All the money was getting paid to Katz, who then doled out money to the band when they asked for it, and they had no idea if he was actually paying them what they were owed or not. The group's first album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, finally came out in September, and it was a comparative flop. It sold well in San Francisco itself, selling around ten thousand copies in the area, but sold basically nothing anywhere else in the country -- the group's local reputation hadn't extended outside their own immediate scene. It didn't help that the album was pulled and reissued, as RCA censored the initial version of the album because of objections to the lyrics. The song "Runnin' Round This World" was pulled off the album altogether for containing the word "trips", while in "Let Me In" they had to rerecord two lines -- “I gotta get in, you know where" was altered to "You shut the door now it ain't fair" and "Don't tell me you want money" became "Don't tell me it's so funny". Similarly in "Run Around" the phrase "as you lay under me" became "as you stay here by me". Things were also becoming difficult for Anderson. She had had a baby in May and was not only unhappy with having to tour while she had a small child, she was also the band member who was most vocally opposed to Katz. Added to that, her husband did not get on well at all with the group, and she felt trapped between her marriage and her bandmates. Reports differ as to whether she quit the band or was fired, but after a disastrous appearance at the Monterey Jazz Festival, one way or another she was out of the band. Her replacement was already waiting in the wings. Grace Slick, the lead singer of the Great Society, had been inspired by going to one of the early Jefferson Airplane gigs. She later said "I went to see Jefferson Airplane at the Matrix, and they were making more money in a day than I made in a week. They only worked for two or three hours a night, and they got to hang out. I thought 'This looks a lot better than what I'm doing.' I knew I could more or less carry a tune, and I figured if they could do it I could." She was married at the time to a film student named Jerry Slick, and indeed she had done the music for his final project at film school, a film called "Everybody Hits Their Brother Once", which sadly I can't find online. She was also having an affair with Jerry's brother Darby, though as the Slicks were in an open marriage this wasn't particularly untoward. The three of them, with a couple of other musicians, had formed The Great Society, named as a joke about President Johnson's programme of the same name. The Great Society was the name Johnson had given to his whole programme of domestic reforms, including civil rights for Black people, the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts, and more. While those projects were broadly popular among the younger generation, Johnson's escalation of the war in Vietnam had made him so personally unpopular that even his progressive domestic programme was regarded with suspicion and contempt. The Great Society had set themselves up as local rivals to Jefferson Airplane -- where Jefferson Airplane had buttons saying "Jefferson Airplane Loves You!" the Great Society put out buttons saying "The Great Society Really Doesn't Like You Much At All". They signed to Autumn Records, and recorded a song that Darby Slick had written, titled "Someone to Love" -- though the song would later be retitled "Somebody to Love": [Excerpt: The Great Society, "Someone to Love"] That track was produced by Sly Stone, who at the time was working as a producer for Autumn Records. The Great Society, though, didn't like working with Stone, because he insisted on them doing forty-five takes to try to sound professional, as none of them were particularly competent musicians. Grace Slick later said "Sly could play any instrument known to man. He could have just made the record himself, except for the singers. It was kind of degrading in a way" -- and on another occasion she said that he *did* end up playing all the instruments on the finished record. "Someone to Love" was put out as a promo record, but never released to the general public, and nor were any of the Great Society's other recordings for Autumn Records released. Their contract expired and they were let go, at which point they were about to sign to Mercury Records, but then Darby Slick and another member decided to go off to India for a while. Grace's marriage to Jerry was falling apart, though they would stay legally married for several years, and the Great Society looked like it was at an end, so when Grace got the offer to join Jefferson Airplane to replace Signe Anderson, she jumped at the chance. At first, she was purely a harmony singer -- she didn't take over any of the lead vocal parts that Anderson had previously sung, as she had a very different vocal style, and instead she just sang the harmony parts that Anderson had sung on songs with other lead vocalists. But two months after the album they were back in the studio again, recording their second album, and Slick sang lead on several songs there. As well as the new lineup, there was another important change in the studio. They were still working with Dave Hassinger, but they had a new producer, Rick Jarrard. Jarrard was at one point a member of the folk group The Wellingtons, who did the theme tune for "Gilligan's Island", though I can't find anything to say whether or not he was in the group when they recorded that track: [Excerpt: The Wellingtons, "The Ballad of Gilligan's Island"] Jarrard had also been in the similar folk group The Greenwood County Singers, where as we heard in the episode on "Heroes and Villains" he replaced Van Dyke Parks. He'd also released a few singles under his own name, including a version of Parks' "High Coin": [Excerpt: Rick Jarrard, "High Coin"] While Jarrard had similar musical roots to those of Jefferson Airplane's members, and would go on to produce records by people like Harry Nilsson and The Family Tree, he wasn't any more liked by the band than their previous producer had been. So much so, that a few of the band members have claimed that while Jarrard is the credited producer, much of the work that one would normally expect to be done by a producer was actually done by their friend Jerry Garcia, who according to the band members gave them a lot of arranging and structural advice, and was present in the studio and played guitar on several tracks. Jarrard, on the other hand, said categorically "I never met Jerry Garcia. I produced that album from start to finish, never heard from Jerry Garcia, never talked to Jerry Garcia. He was not involved creatively on that album at all." According to the band, though, it was Garcia who had the idea of almost doubling the speed of the retitled "Somebody to Love", turning it into an uptempo rocker: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Somebody to Love"] And one thing everyone is agreed on is that it was Garcia who came up with the album title, when after listening to some of the recordings he said "That's as surrealistic as a pillow!" It was while they were working on the album that was eventually titled Surrealistic Pillow that they finally broke with Katz as their manager, bringing Bill Thompson in as a temporary replacement. Or at least, it was then that they tried to break with Katz. Katz sued the group over their contract, and won. Then they appealed, and they won. Then Katz appealed the appeal, and the Superior Court insisted that if he wanted to appeal the ruling, he had to put up a bond for the fifty thousand dollars the group said he owed them. He didn't, so in 1970, four years after they sacked him as their manager, the appeal was dismissed. Katz appealed the dismissal, and won that appeal, and the case dragged on for another three years, at which point Katz dragged RCA Records into the lawsuit. As a result of being dragged into the mess, RCA decided to stop paying the group their songwriting royalties from record sales directly, and instead put the money into an escrow account. The claims and counterclaims and appeals *finally* ended in 1987, twenty years after the lawsuits had started and fourteen years after the band had stopped receiving their songwriting royalties. In the end, the group won on almost every point, and finally received one point three million dollars in back royalties and seven hundred thousand dollars in interest that had accrued, while Katz got a small token payment. Early in 1967, when the sessions for Surrealistic Pillow had finished, but before the album was released, Newsweek did a big story on the San Francisco scene, which drew national attention to the bands there, and the first big event of what would come to be called the hippie scene, the Human Be-In, happened in Golden Gate Park in January. As the group's audience was expanding rapidly, they asked Bill Graham to be their manager, as he was the most business-minded of the people around the group. The first single from the album, "My Best Friend", a song written by Skip Spence before he quit the band, came out in January 1967 and had no more success than their earlier recordings had, and didn't make the Hot 100. The album came out in February, and was still no higher than number 137 on the charts in March, when the second single, "Somebody to Love", was released: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Somebody to Love"] That entered the charts at the start of April, and by June it had made number five. The single's success also pushed its parent album up to number three by August, just behind the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Monkees' Headquarters. The success of the single also led to the group being asked to do commercials for Levis jeans: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Levis commercial"] That once again got them accused of selling out. Abbie Hoffman, the leader of the Yippies, wrote to the Village Voice about the commercials, saying "It summarized for me all the doubts I have about the hippie philosophy. I realise they are just doing their 'thing', but while the Jefferson Airplane grooves with its thing, over 100 workers in the Levi Strauss plant on the Tennessee-Georgia border are doing their thing, which consists of being on strike to protest deplorable working conditions." The third single from the album, "White Rabbit", came out on the twenty-fourth of June, the day before the Beatles recorded "All You Need is Love", nine days after the release of "See Emily Play", and a week after the group played the Monterey Pop Festival, to give you some idea of how compressed a time period we've been in recently. We talked in the last episode about how there's a big difference between American and British psychedelia at this point in time, because the political nature of the American counterculture was determined by the fact that so many people were being sent off to die in Vietnam. Of all the San Francisco bands, though, Jefferson Airplane were by far the least political -- they were into the culture part of the counterculture, but would often and repeatedly disavow any deeper political meaning in their songs. In early 1968, for example, in a press conference, they said “Don't ask us anything about politics. We don't know anything about it. And what we did know, we just forgot.” So it's perhaps not surprising that of all the American groups, they were the one that was most similar to the British psychedelic groups in their influences, and in particular their frequent references to children's fantasy literature. "White Rabbit" was a perfect example of this. It had started out as "White Rabbit Blues", a song that Slick had written influenced by Alice in Wonderland, and originally performed by the Great Society: [Excerpt: The Great Society, "White Rabbit"] Slick explained the lyrics, and their association between childhood fantasy stories and drugs, later by saying "It's an interesting song but it didn't do what I wanted it to. What I was trying to say was that between the ages of zero and five the information and the input you get is almost indelible. In other words, once a Catholic, always a Catholic. And the parents read us these books, like Alice in Wonderland where she gets high, tall, and she takes mushrooms, a hookah, pills, alcohol. And then there's The Wizard of Oz, where they fall into a field of poppies and when they wake up they see Oz. And then there's Peter Pan, where if you sprinkle white dust on you, you could fly. And then you wonder why we do it? Well, what did you read to me?" While the lyrical inspiration for the track was from Alice in Wonderland, the musical inspiration is less obvious. Slick has on multiple occasions said that the idea for the music came from listening to Miles Davis' album "Sketches of Spain", and in particular to Davis' version of -- and I apologise for almost certainly mangling the Spanish pronunciation badly here -- "Concierto de Aranjuez", though I see little musical resemblance to it myself. [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "Concierto de Aranjuez"] She has also, though, talked about how the song was influenced by Ravel's "Bolero", and in particular the way the piece keeps building in intensity, starting softly and slowly building up, rather than having the dynamic peaks and troughs of most music. And that is definitely a connection I can hear in the music: [Excerpt: Ravel, "Bolero"] Jefferson Airplane's version of "White Rabbit", like their version of "Somebody to Love", was far more professional, far -- and apologies for the pun -- slicker than The Great Society's version. It's also much shorter. The version by The Great Society has a four and a half minute instrumental intro before Slick's vocal enters. By contrast, the version on Surrealistic Pillow comes in at under two and a half minutes in total, and is a tight pop song: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "White Rabbit"] Jack Casady has more recently said that the group originally recorded the song more or less as a lark, because they assumed that all the drug references would mean that RCA would make them remove the song from the album -- after all, they'd cut a song from the earlier album because it had a reference to a trip, so how could they possibly allow a song like "White Rabbit" with its lyrics about pills and mushrooms? But it was left on the album, and ended up making the top ten on the pop charts, peaking at number eight: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "White Rabbit"] In an interview last year, Slick said she still largely lives off the royalties from writing that one song. It would be the last hit single Jefferson Airplane would ever have. Marty Balin later said "Fame changes your life. It's a bit like prison. It ruined the band. Everybody became rich and selfish and self-centred and couldn't care about the band. That was pretty much the end of it all. After that it was just working and living the high life and watching the band destroy itself, living on its laurels." They started work on their third album, After Bathing at Baxter's, in May 1967, while "Somebody to Love" was still climbing the charts. This time, the album was produced by Al Schmitt. Unlike the two previous producers, Schmitt was a fan of the band, and decided the best thing to do was to just let them do their own thing without interfering. The album took months to record, rather than the weeks that Surrealistic Pillow had taken, and cost almost ten times as much money to record. In part the time it took was because of the promotional work the band had to do. Bill Graham was sending them all over the country to perform, which they didn't appreciate. The group complained to Graham in business meetings, saying they wanted to only play in big cities where there were lots of hippies. Graham pointed out in turn that if they wanted to keep having any kind of success, they needed to play places other than San Francisco, LA, New York, and Chicago, because in fact most of the population of the US didn't live in those four cities. They grudgingly took his point. But there were other arguments all the time as well. They argued about whether Graham should be taking his cut from the net or the gross. They argued about Graham trying to push for the next single to be another Grace Slick lead vocal -- they felt like he was trying to make them into just Grace Slick's backing band, while he thought it made sense to follow up two big hits with more singles with the same vocalist. There was also a lawsuit from Balin's former partners in the Matrix, who remembered that bit in the contract about having a share in the group's income and sued for six hundred thousand dollars -- that was settled out of court three years later. And there were interpersonal squabbles too. Some of these were about the music -- Dryden didn't like the fact that Kaukonen's guitar solos were getting longer and longer, and Balin only contributed one song to the new album because all the other band members made fun of him for writing short, poppy, love songs rather than extended psychedelic jams -- but also the group had become basically two rival factions. On one side were Kaukonen and Casady, the old friends and virtuoso instrumentalists, who wanted to extend the instrumental sections of the songs more to show off their playing. On the other side were Grace Slick and Spencer Dryden, the two oldest members of the group by age, but the most recent people to join. They were also unusual in the San Francisco scene for having alcohol as their drug of choice -- drinking was thought of by most of the hippies as being a bit classless, but they were both alcoholics. They were also sleeping together, and generally on the side of shorter, less exploratory, songs. Kantner, who was attracted to Slick, usually ended up siding with her and Dryden, and this left Balin the odd man out in the middle. He later said "I got disgusted with all the ego trips, and the band was so stoned that I couldn't even talk to them. Everybody was in their little shell". While they were still working on the album, they released the first single from it, Kantner's "The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil". The "Pooneil" in the song was a figure that combined two of Kantner's influences: the Greenwich Village singer-songwriter Fred Neil, the writer of "Everybody's Talkin'" and "Dolphins"; and Winnie the Pooh. The song contained several lines taken from A.A. Milne's children's stories: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil"] That only made number forty-two on the charts. It was the last Jefferson Airplane single to make the top fifty. At a gig in Bakersfield they got arrested for inciting a riot, because they encouraged the crowd to dance, even though local by-laws said that nobody under sixteen was allowed to dance, and then they nearly got arrested again after Kantner's behaviour on the private plane they'd chartered to get them back to San Francisco that night. Kantner had been chain-smoking, and this annoyed the pilot, who asked Kantner to put his cigarette out, so Kantner opened the door of the plane mid-flight and threw the lit cigarette out. They'd chartered that plane because they wanted to make sure they got to see a new group, Cream, who were playing the Fillmore: [Excerpt: Cream, "Strange Brew"] After seeing that, the divisions in the band were even wider -- Kaukonen and Casady now *knew* that what the band needed was to do long, extended, instrumental jams. Cream were the future, two-minute pop songs were the past. Though they weren't completely averse to two-minute pop songs. The group were recording at RCA studios at the same time as the Monkees, and members of the two groups would often jam together. The idea of selling out might have been anathema to their *audience*, but the band members themselves didn't care about things like that. Indeed, at one point the group returned from a gig to the mansion they were renting and found squatters had moved in and were using their private pool -- so they shot at the water. The squatters quickly moved on. As Dryden put it "We all -- Paul, Jorma, Grace, and myself -- had guns. We weren't hippies. Hippies were the people that lived on the streets down in Haight-Ashbury. We were basically musicians and art school kids. We were into guns and machinery" After Bathing at Baxter's only went to number seventeen on the charts, not a bad position but a flop compared to their previous album, and Bill Graham in particular took this as more proof that he had been right when for the last few months he'd been attacking the group as self-indulgent. Eventually, Slick and Dryden decided that either Bill Graham was going as their manager, or they were going. Slick even went so far as to try to negotiate a solo deal with Elektra Records -- as the voice on the hits, everyone was telling her she was the only one who mattered anyway. David Anderle, who was working for the label, agreed a deal with her, but Jac Holzman refused to authorise the deal, saying "Judy Collins doesn't get that much money, why should Grace Slick?" The group did fire Graham, and went one further and tried to become his competitors. They teamed up with the Grateful Dead to open a new venue, the Carousel Ballroom, to compete with the Fillmore, but after a few months they realised they were no good at running a venue and sold it to Graham. Graham, who was apparently unhappy with the fact that the people living around the Fillmore were largely Black given that the bands he booked appealed to mostly white audiences, closed the original Fillmore, renamed the Carousel the Fillmore West, and opened up a second venue in New York, the Fillmore East. The divisions in the band were getting worse -- Kaukonen and Casady were taking more and more speed, which was making them play longer and faster instrumental solos whether or not the rest of the band wanted them to, and Dryden, whose hands often bled from trying to play along with them, definitely did not want them to. But the group soldiered on and recorded their fourth album, Crown of Creation. This album contained several songs that were influenced by science fiction novels. The most famous of these was inspired by the right-libertarian author Robert Heinlein, who was hugely influential on the counterculture. Jefferson Airplane's friends the Monkees had already recorded a song based on Heinlein's The Door Into Summer, an unintentionally disturbing novel about a thirty-year-old man who falls in love with a twelve-year-old girl, and who uses a combination of time travel and cryogenic freezing to make their ages closer together so he can marry her: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Door Into Summer"] Now Jefferson Airplane were recording a song based on Heinlein's most famous novel, Stranger in a Strange Land. Stranger in a Strange Land has dated badly, thanks to its casual homophobia and rape-apologia, but at the time it was hugely popular in hippie circles for its advocacy of free love and group marriages -- so popular that a religion, the Church of All Worlds, based itself on the book. David Crosby had taken inspiration from it and written "Triad", a song asking two women if they'll enter into a polygamous relationship with him, and recorded it with the Byrds: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Triad"] But the other members of the Byrds disliked the song, and it was left unreleased for decades. As Crosby was friendly with Jefferson Airplane, and as members of the band were themselves advocates of open relationships, they recorded their own version with Slick singing lead: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Triad"] The other song on the album influenced by science fiction was the title track, Paul Kantner's "Crown of Creation". This song was inspired by The Chrysalids, a novel by the British writer John Wyndham. The Chrysalids is one of Wyndham's most influential novels, a post-apocalyptic story about young children who are born with mutant superpowers and have to hide them from their parents as they will be killed if they're discovered. The novel is often thought to have inspired Marvel Comics' X-Men, and while there's an unpleasant eugenic taste to its ending, with the idea that two species can't survive in the same ecological niche and the younger, "superior", species must outcompete the old, that idea also had a lot of influence in the counterculture, as well as being a popular one in science fiction. Kantner's song took whole lines from The Chrysalids, much as he had earlier done with A.A. Milne: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Crown of Creation"] The Crown of Creation album was in some ways a return to the more focused songwriting of Surrealistic Pillow, although the sessions weren't without their experiments. Slick and Dryden collaborated with Frank Zappa and members of the Mothers of Invention on an avant-garde track called "Would You Like a Snack?" (not the same song as the later Zappa song of the same name) which was intended for the album, though went unreleased until a CD box set decades later: [Excerpt: Grace Slick and Frank Zappa, "Would You Like a Snack?"] But the finished album was generally considered less self-indulgent than After Bathing at Baxter's, and did better on the charts as a result. It reached number six, becoming their second and last top ten album, helped by the group's appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in September 1968, a month after it came out. That appearance was actually organised by Colonel Tom Parker, who suggested them to Sullivan as a favour to RCA Records. But another TV appearance at the time was less successful. They appeared on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, one of the most popular TV shows among the young, hip, audience that the group needed to appeal to, but Slick appeared in blackface. She's later said that there was no political intent behind this, and that she was just trying the different makeup she found in the dressing room as a purely aesthetic thing, but that doesn't really explain the Black power salute she gives at one point. Slick was increasingly obnoxious on stage, as her drinking was getting worse and her relationship with Dryden was starting to break down. Just before the Smothers Brothers appearance she was accused at a benefit for the Whitney Museum of having called the audience "filthy Jews", though she has always said that what she actually said was "filthy jewels", and she was talking about the ostentatious jewellery some of the audience were wearing. The group struggled through a performance at Altamont -- an event we will talk about in a future episode, so I won't go into it here, except to say that it was a horrifying experience for everyone involved -- and performed at Woodstock, before releasing their fifth studio album, Volunteers, in 1969: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Volunteers"] That album made the top twenty, but was the last album by the classic lineup of the band. By this point Spencer Dryden and Grace Slick had broken up, with Slick starting to date Kantner, and Dryden was also disappointed at the group's musical direction, and left. Balin also left, feeling sidelined in the group. They released several more albums with varying lineups, including at various points their old friend David Frieberg of Quicksilver Messenger Service, the violinist Papa John Creach, and the former drummer of the Turtles, Johnny Barbata. But as of 1970 the group's members had already started working on two side projects -- an acoustic band called Hot Tuna, led by Kaukonen and Casady, which sometimes also featured Balin, and a project called Paul Kantner's Jefferson Starship, which also featured Slick and had recorded an album, Blows Against the Empire, the second side of which was based on the Robert Heinlein novel Back to Methuselah, and which became one of the first albums ever nominated for science fiction's Hugo Awards: [Excerpt: Jefferson Starship, "Have You Seen The Stars Tonite"] That album featured contributions from David Crosby and members of the Grateful Dead, as well as Casady on two tracks, but  in 1974 when Kaukonen and Casady quit Jefferson Airplane to make Hot Tuna their full-time band, Kantner, Slick, and Frieberg turned Jefferson Starship into a full band. Over the next decade, Jefferson Starship had a lot of moderate-sized hits, with a varying lineup that at one time or another saw several members, including Slick, go and return, and saw Marty Balin back with them for a while. In 1984, Kantner left the group, and sued them to stop them using the Jefferson Starship name. A settlement was reached in which none of Kantner, Slick, Kaukonen, or Casady could use the words "Jefferson" or "Airplane" in their band-names without the permission of all the others, and the remaining members of Jefferson Starship renamed their band just Starship -- and had three number one singles in the late eighties with Slick on lead, becoming far more commercially successful than their precursor bands had ever been: [Excerpt: Starship, "We Built This City on Rock & Roll"] Slick left Starship in 1989, and there was a brief Jefferson Airplane reunion tour, with all the classic members but Dryden, but then Slick decided that she was getting too old to perform rock and roll music, and decided to retire from music and become a painter, something she's stuck to for more than thirty years. Kantner and Balin formed a new Jefferson Starship, called Jefferson Starship: The Next Generation, but Kantner died in January 2016, coincidentally on the same day as Signe Anderson, who had occasionally guested with her old bandmates in the new version of the band. Balin, who had quit the reunited Jefferson Starship due to health reasons, died two years later. Dryden had died in 2005. Currently, there are three bands touring that descend directly from Jefferson Airplane. Hot Tuna still continue to perform, there's a version of Starship that tours featuring one original member, Mickey Thomas, and the reunited Jefferson Starship still tour, led by David Frieberg. Grace Slick has given the latter group her blessing, and even co-wrote one song on their most recent album, released in 2020, though she still doesn't perform any more. Jefferson Airplane's period in the commercial spotlight was brief -- they had charting singles for only a matter of months, and while they had top twenty albums for a few years after their peak, they really only mattered to the wider world during that brief period of the Summer of Love. But precisely because their period of success was so short, their music is indelibly associated with that time. To this day there's nothing as evocative of summer 1967 as "White Rabbit", even for those of us who weren't born then. And while Grace Slick had her problems, as I've made very clear in this episode, she inspired a whole generation of women who went on to be singers themselves, as one of the first prominent women to sing lead with an electric rock band. And when she got tired of doing that, she stopped, and got on with her other artistic pursuits, without feeling the need to go back and revisit the past for ever diminishing returns. One might only wish that some of her male peers had followed her example.