Did Levine forget to never forget the Holocaust?

That was the question I asked just now when I saw this post on LA Observed:

Assemblyman Lloyd Levine's office helpfully sends along the news that the boss just finished the Boston Marathon. His time was 3:10:03, good for a pace of 7:15 per mile. Levine represents the Valley.

What struck me about this is that on Saturday, I wrote this story for the Daily News, which focused on a Yom HaShoah commemoration in Sacramento today. The observence, for which Holocaust survivors from each Assembly district were invited to share their stories of survival, was organized by Levine's office. Levine is Jewish and, according to the itinerary, was to host a reception with Assemblyman Ira Ruskin after a ceremony on the Assembly floor.

"The Holocaust was a terrible tragedy that occurred 60-plus years ago. But when you look around the world today, you still see tragedies of the same proportion," I quoted Levine saying. "Kosovo and Darfur and Rwanda. The list goes on. We are not learning, and we need to learn from the past and stop these things before they rise to the level of the Holocaust."

So what was he doing in Boston?

"He qualified for that in December -- at that point we were already months into the planning," his press secretary, Alex Traverso, told me. "Only a couple weeks ago he decided that he was going to (go)."