Patt Morrison

Al Gore and Google -- Hit the ''Listen'' Key!

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:58:36 -0800

Newsweek's cover boy this week is ''The Thinking Man's Thinking Man'' -- former vice president Al Gore. We snagged him for more than a half-hour about his new book Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis [recycled paper and carbon offsets].

It's a wheels-on-the-ground plan for putting into practice all of the ideas for hitting the brakes on global warming, from top-down policies on fuels to one-man, one-recycling-can solutions that anyone can embrace. He also took on population growth, which has been a bit of a third rail in any discussion of restraining the human uses of resources.

To one listener's question about the green firms he's been investing in, he said that had he put his money elsewhere, he'd be accused of hypocrisy. And he roundly criticized the ''insane'' business policy -- clocking in at 80% of CEOs and CFOs in a recent poll -- of companies refusing to spend any money on long-term, money-saving factory efficiency improvements if that meant a drop of even a couple of percentage points in the next three months' profits. Talk about the grasshoppers and the ants.

As to why fewer Americans believe global warming is real than did three years ago, he pointed out the intense pushback from some corporations and ideological groups, some of whose ads appear in the book, with phrases like ``Some say the earth is warming -- Some also said the earth was flat,'' and other sloganeering.

The former VP is heading to Copenhagen for next month's climate conference, and I expect we'll hear what he has to say there, too.

And Ken Auletta, who writes about media for The New Yorker, unearthed great stories in ''Googled The End of the World as We Know It.'' It's practically a book of anthropology about the Google culture and the men who created it, Larry Page and Sergey Brin who are brilliant engineers but with little knowledge of matters of public policy, politics and the like. The whole ''information should be free'' theory came into focus for Auletta when Brin roller-bladed into a meeting with him, and asked Auletta why he wrote a book -- why not just put it online for free, and get more readers?

I know these guys are regarded as geniuses, but really: Auletta actually had to explain to Brin that writing the book was a job, and he had to be paid for that job, and all the time it took to research and write it, and that's why books are for sale and not for free.

Maybe life looks a bit different when you have a dozen billion bucks in the bank.

Next time, former GOP congressman Dick Armey is helping to lead the Tea Party charge against health care reform, taxes, you name it. And in its first day on the shelves, a new gunslinging video game sells more than $300 million worth -- more than many blockbuster films make, ever.

-- Patt Morrison

Veterans Day and the Debt Owed to Vets, and the National Debt -- Your Share of the Bill is $31,000 and Counting

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:27:00 -0800

I'd like to tell you how big the national debt is, but by the time I'd finish typing it out, it would already have risen by several million dollars.

The 12 trillion dollars works out to about $31,000 for every single American. It's looming out there like the iceberg ahead of the Titanic, and when the country hits it -- as baby boomers begin collecting Social Security and Medicare and government spending goes up while taxes do not -- it could sink us.

For most of an hour we talked to the members of the ''Fiscal Wakeup Tour,'' who I assigned roles as bassist, keyboards, vocals and drums, but who really represent ideologically wide-ranging groups from the Brookings institution to the American Enterprise Institute. The Concord Coalition should be the percussionist because it's been beating the national-debt drum for some years now. Each of the four agreed that there's no dispute over the arithmetic -- only the ideology, and whether political leaders and citizens will have the guts to cut spending and raise taxes.

Again, for most of an hour, we reflected on Veterans' Day -- Armistice Day, as it was known first, to commemorate the end of the First World War. We heard first from Matt Flavin. He is 29, a former Navy SEAL and veteran of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now he directs the White House Office of Veterans and Wounded Warrior policy, and he's not shy about telling President Obama how to deliver on his promises about seeing to the needs of veterans, who tend to have a higher rate of homelessness and joblessness than the rest of the population.

We also talked to vets at VFW posts in Santa Clarita and Canoga Park about what this day means to them and what more this country and its citizens could do to on the home front -- it's a lot more than yellow ribbons.

Next time, former vice president Al Gore sizes up how this nation is coming to terms with global warming and how he expects next month's climate summit in Copenhagen to go, and New Yorker writer Ken Auletta takes us into the virtual world of Google, the phenom that he says changed the world.

-- Patt Morrison

Meaties, or Wheaties? Vegetarianism Passes the Nutrition Test. Can Carnivores Pass the Moral One?

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:09:37 -0800

Maybe all the carnivores were at their favorite burger spots, but we heard from loads of vegetarians and even some vegans calling about a new study by the American Dietetic Association, finding that not only can a vegetarian diet give you the same nutritional values as a diet with meat and poultry in it, it can even have health benefits, especially when it comes to heart health.

The study also found that children brought up as vegetarians -- meaning eating real vegetarian foods, not just snack foods and sodas -- can actually be better off than their peers when it comes to childhood obesity. Reed Mangels, the co-author of the paper, is a dietitian and nutritionist who's raised her two children as vegans, and spent a good hunk of time answering your questions about varieties of protein from vegetarian sources, especially for kids.

The other ''trigger'' to this topic, besides the study, is Jonathan Safran Foer's book, ''Eating Animals.'' As he told me, the book isn't so much about turning people into vegetarians as it is about making sure people know just what happens to put that chicken breast or burger on your plate.

Raising animals for meat is the single biggest contributor to greenhouse gases -- bigger even than driving cars -- because it takes up space, and uses up water in vast amounts, and animal waste is a huge polluter of rivers and groundwater. Pound for pound, it is far more expensive and exponentially less efficient as a protein source than vegetable protein.

As for the creatures themselves, a lot of people would rather not know what it takes to get it to your plate. It isn't just the ten minutes of ''torture'' that animals suffer as they die in the slaughterhouse -- that's Foer's word, describing the animals who are sometimes being skinned and cut to pieces while they're still alive. It's the ``factory farming,'' a phenomenon that didn't exist until 1923, that circumscribes the cruelty of their lives -- chickens get their beaks cut off, and live stacked six cages deep in wire cages the size of a sheet of paper; cows never set foot on grass but are locked into stalls and fed remains of dead dogs, cats and even other cows; piglets, which have the intelligence of two-year-old children, are ''thumped'' to death on the floor.

As hard as these things are merely to read, Foer argues, imagine what pain and suffering these creatures have to endure. He argues that if you eat meat in any form, directly or in products that use meat by-products [and they show up in places you don't suspect], you cannot refuse to know these consequences of your purchases and eating habits: that every time you down a piece of meat or poultry, you cannot dodge your moral or ethical role in that meat, as a citizen, a consumer, and a sentient being.

Next time, Americans spend $34 billion a year on alternative treatments and remedies. Do they work, and are they safe?

-- Patt Morrison

The New LAPD Chief, and Finding Love at the Animal Shelter

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:04:36 -0800

Police chief-designate Charlie Beck won't officially become the next chief of the LAPD until the City Council votes on November 19, but as council president Eric Garcetti told me earlier this week, he wouldn't be surprised if the vote is unanimous.

Chief Beck joined me in what I hope will continue the tradition of ''Ask the Chief'' segments we began with Chief Bill Bratton. Chief Beck is an LAPD ''lifer,'' and his family has three generations in the department. He talked about being a bottom-up kind of chief, and certainly he's worked his way up through the ranks, in the busy South Bureau, among other assignments, and undertaking a cleanup of the Rampart Division after that scandal.

He talked about the value of transparency, about the changes wrought by the federal consent decrees the department had operated under, about his love of his championship Motocross pursuits, and his wife's love of horses, in which his role mostly involves a ''one-wheeled'' implement -- a wheelbarrow -- and mucking out the stalls. Good preparation, he joked, for his job.

The Nobel laureate novelist Orhan Pamuk waxed lyrical -- of course! -- about his love for storytelling, both when he heard them recounted by his grandmother as he was growing up in Istanbul, and the stories he now writes. He also had thoughtful things to say about how even writers of literary fiction find themselves expected to address political issues -- something he's done, even in the face of criticism, in his native Turkey, when it comes to sensitive topics like the treatment of Kurds and the Armenian genocide.

For National Animal Shelter Appreciation week, I asked you for your stories about creatures you've rescued from shelters -- and who have turned out to be wonderfully enriching in your lives. Our engineer and I couldn't meet each other's eyes when we heard from Lorena in Burbank, who started talking about her own beloved rescue dog and was so moved she began crying. We were afraid we would, too!

Loads of you called with other pet-testimonials, and as a dog rescuer, I still want to hear them all -- cats, dogs, birds, horses, snakes, pigs. Please blog your November valentine to your little loved one on the Patt Morrison page.

Next time: maybe you were in Berlin in 1989 for the fall of the Wall. I was. Let's share some stories, shall we? My photos from that world-changing event will be on our website on Friday. [Yes, I know, you can see my shadow in my pictures; what can I say? I'm no Ansel Adams. I'm not even Weegee.]

''Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me'' is pitching its tent here in Los Angeles, and Peter Sagal and Carl Kasell will be here with me at KPCC. Got limericks?

-- Patt Morrison

Sheriff Joe and Senator Max -- hot stuff

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:31:12 -0800

Max Cleland is the former U.S. senator from Georgia, a Vietnam vet who lost three of his four limbs at Khe Sahn when a green private didn't secure the pins on his grenades. And he's the politician whose supporters say he got swiftboated two years before John Kerry, when Republicans ran an ad with his picture alongside Osama bin Laden's and Saddam Hussein's, implicitly impugning his patriotism; an enraged John McCain called the ad ''reprehensible.''

As Cleland himself explained the election to me, ''Georgia had a senior moment.'' His book, ''Heart of a Patriot,'' isn't just about the 2002 election, but about his early commitment to politics -- lettering Stevenson-for-president signs with his mother's lipstick -- and to military service.

The youngest-ever head of the VA is still working on behalf of better treatment for his fellow veterans, and isn't hesitant about sizing up U.S. interests at home and abroad, like the Afghanistan war, in which, he says, we shouldn't be trying to turn Afghanistan into the 51st state.

Just as lively was Joe Arpaio, the elected sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, since 1993. He's the man who put jail inmates in pink underwear, cut them back to two meals a day, put them on chain gangs and has ardently gone after finding illegal immigrants. A new Justice Department rule would, by most interpretations, confine the sheriff's hunt for illegal immigrants to those who come through his jail system -- but he says other laws are on his side.

Arpaio, who revels in the description someone gave him as ''America's toughest sheriff,'' disputes an Arizona newspaper's Pulitzer Prize-winning findings that the illegal immigrant effort has lengthened lawmen's response times and left some violent crimes unsolved -- his language on this is a lot saltier than mine. And he will indeed be running for reelection in 2012, he assured me -- he'll be 80 years old.

Next time, the governor of Maine is with me, on the day that state votes on whether to repeal a same-sex marriage law he signed, and the author of a new book about the operations of the Secret Service shares some secrets and assesses how the forces is coping with a 400% increase in threats, now that Barack Obama is president.

I have to share one of many dear and funny moments from the memorial service at the Wilshire Ebell on Sunday for my friend, the actor and poet Henry Gibson. ''Laugh-In'' stalwarts like Gary Owens and Jo Anne Worley were there, along with friends from virtually every part of his life, including the vet who looked after his and his wife Lois' beloved dogs.

Henry, who died in September, let on to very few people how sick he was. One of them was his friend Charlie Adler, who recounted how he and Henry were driving down Wilshire Boulevard right after Michael Jackson had died, and the mourning was still at its height.

''I want my memorial to be at Staples,'' Henry said. ''Really?'' Adler asked. ''At Staples?'' Henry, deadpan, repeated, ''I want my memorial to be at Staples,'' and then he made some kind of gesture out the car window, to the edifice they were just passing: a Staples office supply store.

He was as sweet as he was funny; they don't make many like that.

-- Patt Morrison

Meg Whitman In, Gavin Newsom Out -- and Our Halloween Monster Mash-Up

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:59:27 -0800

About two hours after you heard Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman talking with me [in what I gather is a rare radio interview for her], there came the news that Democratic gov candidate Gavin Newsom is dropping out of the race, pretty much leaving that side of the field to former governor and current attorney general Jerry Brown.

I'm trying to imagine what Antonio Villaraigosa is thinking right now -- he decided not to run for gov in part because of the Newsom challenge, which is now ... pffft.

Anyway, Meg Whitman talked a great deal about applying her CEO skills to the governor's job, much as Arnold Schwarzenegger touted his own approach to the position. She talked about cutting another 20% of state jobs, and about her very spotty voting record, as well as positions like pro-abortion rights that run in line with general election voters but are not likely to endear her to hard-core Republican primary voters.

Carla Marinucci, the swell San Francisco Chronicle writer, pointed out that the Republicans haven't yet nominated a woman for governor or Senate. the one GOP woman's name who came to Carla's mind is Ivy Baker Priest, who was state treasurer in the 1960s and '70s, after she served as U.S. treasurer under Eisenhower [the U.S. treasurer signs the paper money, although I expect those with her signature have pretty much worn out or been taken out of circulation by now.]

She was also the mother of Pat Priest, who played Marilyn Munster on ''The Munsters,'' which is a perfect transition to tell you about the ''monster hour.'' In the second hour of the program we heard from the woman at the National Academy of Sciences whose job is to help TV and film creators get it right when Hollywood puts science on screen, from robots to DNA.

Dr. Robert Smith? [his name is indeed spelled with a question mark] gave us the skinny on zombies and epidemiology. Instead of tracking how disease spreads by using a real disorder, like the H1N1 virus, he and his co-author jazzed it up a bit by using zombies -- how they spread zombieism [and it ain't by sneezing] and how that model is useful to those studying how actual diseases behave. B-R-A-A-A-I-N-S!

And just for the heck of it, we invited in three investigators of the paranormal; one was inspired to this pursuit after he was working at an amusement park and said he saw an apparition, a little girl who had died because of one of the park rides. Another paranormalist detailed her work at Alcatraz, and at an empty house in Nevada, where pebbles dropped out of nowhere as she asked questions of whatever might have been there.

Pasadena Paranormal's therapist and case manager, Jason Carrasco, says he is careful to sort out people who may have some mental disorder or psychiatric problem from among those who report paranormal phenomena, the better to discern what may be happening. James Underdown of the Center for Inquiry-West and the Independent Investigators Group brought his scientific take to bear -- and had never turned up anything to substantiate paranormal activity. Still, 68% of Americans told Pew pollsters they believe in angels and demons, and perhaps other things that go bump in the night.

Next time, Vietnam veteran and former senator Max Cleland, who lost his reelection after opponents characterized the triple amputee as unpatriotic, and Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio, who makes inmates wear pink and charges women prisoners as much as $600 for transportation to get abortions; he's not running, as he has said, a taxicab service.

-- Patt Morrison

Matthew Shepard's Mother, and Enviro-Futurist Stewart Brand

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:26:25 -0800

With President Obama set to sign a hate crimes law on Wednesday, the mother of one of the two men whose names are on that legislation came in to talk about the law, and her son's life and death.

The bill bears two names: one is James Byrd, the black man who, in 1998, was chained to the back of a pickup truck in Texas and dragged to his death by being driven for three miles. The other is Matthew Shepard, the gay Wyoming college student who was beaten and left to die three months after James Byrd was murdered. He was found near death, his hands lashed to a fencepost, outside of Laramie. His mother's book puts real life to her son's name -- not an easy life, but one that's always been important to his family long before it became a watchword for the toll of homophobia. If you missed the interview with his mother, Judy, I would really suggest that you take a chance to listen to it here on the website.

Stewart Brand, is a ''founding green,'' and one of the minds behind the seminal Whole Earth Catalog. His new support for nuclear energy as a cleaner alternative to coal, and his endorsement of genetically modified foods, has put him at odds with some environmentalists, but he's okay with that. At 70, he's trying to think in terms of centuries, not decades.

My interview with him followed a slightly puzzling segment about how Americans' belief in global warming has slipped dramatically even in the course of 18 months. The Pew Center pollster made the point that people's political priorities often shift -- the economy versus the war in Iraq or Afghanistan versus the environment -- but what that doesn't explain in why fewer people should put credence in global warming, period. There's been a lot of playing around with numbers and dates by those wanting to undercut the campaign to slow global warming, and maybe that's having an impact. And if people are merely judging by the weather outside their front doors, they may dispute the findings of scientists whose business it is to track the temperature of the entire planet.

Hot enough for you?

Next time, President Obama's senior adviser and longtime friend Valerie Jarrett, and the decline of the deli.

-- Patt Morrison

A Historian Puts His Money Where His Mouth Is, and the Dog Whisperer Speaks Up

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:58:53 -0800

Can you beat that moment? A few moments after I wrapped up my interview with historian Taylor Branch about his book ''The Clinton Tapes,'' Molly Peterson and David Lazarus were making their pitch to listeners to pitch in to contribute to KPCC, and the award-winning writer opened his wallet right there in the studio and slapped down a double sawbuck -- twenty bucks, and the newest KPCC member!

On top of that, he was one terrific interview, so I can imagine what kind of interviewer he must have been, in those 79 sessions with Bill Clinton throughout the Clinton presidency. The switcheroo is that Clinton kept those tapes -- in his sock drawer, as it turned out -- and Branch, who had first met Clinton during the 1972 McGovern presidential campaign, recorded his own impressions on his way home from the interviews. I thought Branch's storytelling about those sessions made for a more engaging book than just reprinting big hunks of Clintonian transcript would have been.

The first hour was the province of that top dog, Cesar Millan, the ''dog whisperer,'' answering your calls about dog misbehavior, most of which he traces to people giving dogs all the wrong cues and letting the dogs become the leaders of the family pack. We could have spent the rest of the day taking your calls and concerns and hearing his answers about your nervous Jack Russells, too-submissive border collies and leaping German shepherds. Maybe we can persuade him to come back again -- if we behave ourselves.

Next time, health care for illegal immigrants was a matter of controversy long before the latest round of health care reform legislation. Let's hear how both sides can make their cases for and against delivering any health care to anyone in this country illegally.

Know anyone who got the H1N1 flu? Did doctors test for it? Or are they overdiagnosing the H1N1 virus? Not every case of flu gets tested – so are the medical honchos assuming wrongly that most flu is H1N1? We’ll test that premise.

-- Patt Morrison

The Middle Class in the Middle East, and Your Inner Fearful Demons

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:20:00 -0800

Vali Nasr's portfolio as senior adviser to Richard Holbrooke -- Holbrooke is the White House's special envoy to Afghanistand and Pakistan -- prevented Nasr from saying too much about developing international matters like a pact for overseeing Iran's handling of its nuclear material. But there was no stopping him on the subject of his new book, ''Forces of Fortune.''

He believes that a thriving market economy can bring much of the Middle East, including his own native Iran, into the world of commerce, and of nations, by creating a stabilizing middle class. His strongest example is Turkey, which is Euro-looking in its economic gaze, but he has hopes for Iran, where a well-educated and techno-literate middle class is frustrated by structural theo-politics and the repressive arm of a regime where citizens have a vote but an appointed cleric sits for life at the top of the political heap.

It's inner turmoil that Harold Kushner's talking about in his book, ''Conquering Fear: Living Boldly in an Uncertain World.'' It's the rabbi's twelfth book, and his name may be familiar to you from his seminal ''When Bad Things Happen to Good People." He makes the distinction between fear, which can be a useful survival trait in small doses but can become paralyzing, and the more reasonable concern.

He knows whereof he speaks -- not only as a spiritual adviser, but because he happened to be at Logan Airport in Boston the morning the 9/11 flights took off from there -- and in San Francisco for the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. He jokes to his friends, ''Don't follow me around!'' But many of you called about following his advice about how to dial back the fear and feeling of rejection that accompanies loss -- from jobs to family members -- and change.

Next time, renowned historian Taylor Branch is here lugging his massive tapes tome, ''The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History With the President,'' the account of his 79 sessions with President Bill Clinton over the course of that eight-year presidency, and dog behaviorist Cesar Millan.

Gone Fishing Today, Harold Kushner and Vali Nasr Next Time

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:51:53 -0800

Since 1950, the world's appetite for seafood has gone up eight-fold, and the sad state of the oceans shows it. Fish and marine mammal and bird species are going down for the third time as they near extinction, grotesque fishing practices called ''bycatch'' -- the fishing version of ''collateral damage'' -- mean killing and throwing out five, ten, twenty pounds of sea creatures for every pound of ''target'' catch they take in.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium's new Seafood Watch picks and chooses among the seafood and fishing practices that are safe -- safe for humans and sea life -- and those that aren't. It's not just worth a listen, it could be a matter of survival -- as the oceans go, so goes our species. www.seafoodwatch.org is one way to check, and, funny I should ask our guest: the aquarium now also has an iPhone app so you can sit right there with the restaurant menu in one hand and the aquarium recommendations and don't-eat list in the other.

I was surprised at how many of you are fans of the music website Pandora, which was founded by a frustrated musician who wants to broaden the world's musical tastes beyond the top-of-the-pops, using algorithms that take the music you listen to and extrapolate your tastes to recommend other works. www.pandora.com might even, as we heard from caller Chris, open up a world of unexpected music to die-hard fans of another genre -- say, hip-hop to Rachmaninoff, or vice versa!

Next time, Rabbi Harold Kushner takes on our terrors in his new book, ''Conquering Fear,'' and Middle East sage Vali Nasr brings us ''Forces of Fortune,'' about the significance for the world of a growing Muslim middle class.

[The other meaning of ''gone fishing'' is that, by rising to the morning challenge for fund-raising, you've all guaranteed yourselves a tuesday afternoon and evening of regular programming, in which the fundraising has ''gone fishing''! Well done, you!]

-- Patt Morrison

Top of the LAUSD, and Past the Top of the Pops

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:57:57 -0800

Is his nickname Supe-rman? Ray Cortines, the superintendent of the LAUSD, came in to talk about all things K-12, after a morning he spent going to several homes in the district, looking for truants -- students who've just stopped coming to school.

One of his most moving encounters, he said, was with a high school senior who started skipping classes to help his mother run her little store, and he just never went back. The school is working on a schedule that will let him graduate and still help out the family business. Truancy, says the superintendent, creates one of those tragic downward spirals that people just can't pull out of. Poverty is the inevitable result, and, sometimes, even crime.

If you like the way Amazon steers you to certain books based on your tastes, you'll love Pandora. the Internet radio service that uses mathematics to analyze what music you like, and recommends other work that it thinks you'll enjoy. Its founder thinks the top pop performers have a stranglehold on the market and crowd out lesser-known creative types. We'll open up Pandora's virtual box and see if indeed hope lies at the bottom!

In the meantime, take an example from Bonnie Reiss, former assistant to Gov. Schwarzenegger and a member of the UC Board of Regents, who appeared on the program today talking about California higher education: the first words out of her mouth were about how important KPCC is to ongoing education, and how as soon as she got off the program, she'd be pledging her support, too!

-- Patt Morrison

Leaving On a Jet Plane? Check In Here Before Boarding!

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 15:31:10 -0800

Where in the world do you want to go?

Travel guru Rick Steves took us on a whirlwind Grand Tour with your calls and his expertise at roaming the world, which he does on radio, TV, online and in the books and DVDs being made available to folks contributing to KPCC; you can find out all about that at kpcc.org.

Traveling with kids, traveling alone, traveling on the cheap -- he does it all, and he told us all about the best hints and tips for getting the most out of our vacation bucks, especially important since Americans have so little vacation time compared to the rest of the world.

On Monday, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's here to size up how the city council may vote on the LAPD budget, and maybe he'll drop a hint or two about what he's looking for in a new chief, after William Bratton, CBE [Commander of the British Empire] departs the scene at the end of the month.

In the meantime, if you haven't shown KPCC some love lately, go to kpcc.org and put your money where your ears are.

-- Patt Morrison

Academic freedom at a California ag school, and yes, the 2010 governor's race, already

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:54:00 -0800

I must say, I liked the moment as I was wrapping up an interview with Rep. Jane Harman, the LA-area Democrat, about her measure to ratchet up the monitoring of foreign visitors to make sure they leave the country as they're supposed to. The last question was about reports that she was considering running for governor, something she did before, filing at just about the last minute in 1998. [She lost in the primary to Gray Davis.]

She said no one had talked to her about the race and she had no intention of running, and that was that; as we approached the break, I slipped and said, ''Thank you, Governor Harman,'' to which she laughed and responded, ''Thank you, Governor Morrison.

Thanks but no thanks. Not a job I'd want -- another billion-dollar state deficit, and we heard from Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg who says the furloughs of state workers whose jobs are at 24/7 agencies like prisons and mental hospitals will end up costing the state even more in the long run, as employees come to work on their furlough days to cover shifts, and just pile up the furlough days/comp days that they then use instead of vacation days, for which the state still owes employees. The governor's office says it's a true savings, not a false one, and with another billion to whack out of the budget, where else can the state turn?

I so liked the academic freedom debate at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, about a planned speech on campus by Michael Pollan, who you've heard here talking about his books on sustainable food. Evidently a beef processor, the potential donor of a $150,000 meat processing plant to the school, said he was thinking about withdrawing his donation because of what he called Pollan's ''anti-agricultural'' views and his ''stand against conventional agricultural practices.'' Pollan ended up speaking on a panel, and we ended up talking to the agricultural school dean and the dean of Yale Law School about the frontiers of academic freedom, especially in hard economic times when public funding of public universities is taking a hit. If you missed it, go back and give it a listen.

Next time, Rick Steves, the travel wise guy, a big advocate of solo travel and a guy who will be fielding all calls and questions about movin' on down the road and around the globe, so be sure your passport is up to date, and give a call!

-- Patt Morrison

California's Own Black Hole, and How Do You Define a Hate Crime?

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:09:33 -0800

Pretty soon astronomers won't need a black hole to point to as something that sucks in everything around it. They can use the California budget deficit instead. It's coming up another billion bucks short in this terrible economy, as we heard today -- and this only ten weeks after the last budget black hole got closed. No wonder one British newspaper, the Observer, is asking whether California could become this country's first failed state.

On the eleventh anniversary of the killing of gay college student Matthew Shepard, we got a lot of het-up calls about the House passing a hate-crimes law that includes sexual orientation. On balance, I think a slight plurality of you called to say you think murder is murder, but some of you argued that as the state recognizes degrees of culpability -- first degree, second degree -- so should it be able to put special resources to attacks based on race, gender, sexual orientation or disability. What do you think? That's what the blog is there for, you vox pop, you!

Next time, author Michael Chabon examines his own life for definitions of manhood and fatherhood in a series of essays. Here's a teaser: ''a purse is a vagina with a strap.'' Better not miss this one, dudes.

-- Patt Morrison

How Green Is Our Program?

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 23:53:18 -0800

We went through a bit of climate change ourselves at the Governor's Global Climate Conference -- our microphones were in the press tent, which was equatorially sultry before we went on the air. And then they turned on the AC. We practically had hoarfrost on the microphones! One guest on the program, former Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, who is now the head of UNICEF, was figuring how long she had before airtime, so she could step outside to get warm -- and a lot of people would have followed her.

What an array of talented, committed people you heard from the conference:

-- the governor of the biggest state in Brazil, Amazonas, about trying to strike a balance to preserve the rainforests

-- primatologist and environmentalist Jane Goodall, about global warming of our own creation as an imminent menace to us and our fellow creatures. She challenged us to save energy one by one, starting with the light there at my side. While we were on the air, I slid my hand under the shade -- and found an energy-saving compact fluorescent bulb. I scorched my fingers in this bit of research, but such are the hazards of reporting!

-- the governor of Oregon, whose state is home to the nation's greenest city, Portland

-- the head of the Sierra Club about the strange bedfellows, environmentalists and business, partnering to create clean energy and to tidy up the dirty bits

-- the head of Google.org -- not dot com -- on how something as simple as a smart phone can help African farmers get weather forecasts and make the most of their fields and crops.

Being able to take microphones and headphones on the road to such remarkable gatherings of big thinkers as this conference had -- that's singularly KPCC!

More green on Friday with that evergreen colleague David Lazarus keeping my chair warm, and the new rulers of the road from the Alt Car expo -- vehicles running on anything but fossil fuels!

The foreign minister of Pakistan is here as well to size up the vital and delicate relationship between his country and ours.

-- Patt Morrison

An Ambassador, A General and a Novelist -- A Smorgasbord For Your Ears and Brain!

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 16:41:11 -0800

Was I a little cheeky referring to the United States and the United Kingdom as BFFs? Well, so be it. The Obamas gave Her Majesty an iPod, so Tweets from Buckingham Palace surely can't be far behind. I asked more substantial questions of Sir Nigel Sheinwald, Britain's ambassador to the U.S., who makes it to California a few times a year OHMS [On Her Majesty's Service -- you remember that acronym from James Bond, right?]

We covered a lot of ground, from Britain's commitment in Afghanistan to the Pittsburgh G-20 conference and disciplining the financial markets, and how Britons are reacting to anti-health care reform protesters in the U.S. insisting that they don't want ''British socialist health care.'' [As happened at a Texas town hall, some of the same crowd who declared that they oppose ANY form of government health-care are likewise card-carrying recipients of Medicare. My GP, the brilliant and funny Dr. Michael M----, told me that saying ''Keep government out of my Medicare!'' is like saying ''Keep water out of my swimming pool!''

All kudos toe producers here for getting His Excellency the ambassador, along with retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, who ranged over the world in his assessments of U.S. military and diplomatic and persuasive power, and novelist Margaret Atwood, who ranged over the world of an apocalyptic future in her new novel, ''The Year of the Flood.''

Her best-known work is probably ''The Handmaid's Tale,'' about an Old Testament-tinged theocratic dictatorship that rounds up fertile women and forces them to reproduce with the men of the ruling class. Atwood says she simply takes reality and teases out the strands of possibility into nightmare futures -- in ''The Year of the Flood,'' it's a pharmaceutically generated plague that kills people, but not animals, and the few survivors are divided between religio-environmental pacifists and killer mercenaries and prisoners. It's got some comic moments in there with the terrifying ones, as most of Atwood's work does. The duality of our nature is a constant in her work -- because, as she said, it is in our lives.

On Wednesday, the first head of homeland security, Tom Ridge, the former governor of Pennsylvania, is here to talk us through his book about the inside power politics and feuds in post-9/11 America. And Bill Bratton's still the chief -- here with another chance for you to ask the head of the LAPD about the badge job.

-- Patt Morrison

Zinni! Atwood! As Ed Sullivan Said, a Really Big Shew

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 17:17:49 -0800

Good things come in threes -- in this case, very good guests.

On Tuesday's program, we'll hear from retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, who served as a special mideast envoy in the Bush administration, and find out his thoughts about Afghanistan, Iran, and ''smart power.''

Britain's ambassador to the U.S. also weighs in on Afghanistan and the British military presence there, as well as the UK's and the US' like-mindedness at the G-20 meeting, and how Britons are reacting to conservatives sounding the alarm about health care reform in this country with warnings that ''we don't want to have socialized medicine like England!''

And renowned novelist Margaret Atwood is here with her first novel in six years, ''The Year of the Flood,'' a post-apocalyptic tale of two women, rare human survivors in a blasted landscape otherwise populated by pathetic genetically altered creatures, and haunted by memories of the not-very-much-better world that preceded it, with its opposite forces, the mega-corporation that runs the world and the well-intentioned but preachy ''God's Gardeners'' environmentalists who want to run away from all that.

Some lineup, eh?

Monday's program explored the psychological profile of teenaged boys who are accused of arson -- about half of the arson arrests in California are of such young boys. Two teenaged boys have been arrested in connection with fires in the Inland Empire and the San Gabriel Mountains. And we followed the money to government and private websites, recovery.gov and recovery.com, tracking where stimulus money is going, and how well it's being spent.

You'll find links to those and more on the patt morrison page at www.kpcc.org

-- Patt Morrison

Roller Derby and Wall Street's High Rollers

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 21:49:02 -0800

Okay, okay, it's not earthshaking, but it sure was fun, wasn't it?

KPCC's own Alex Cohen is the derby adviser for the new film -- Drew Barrymore's directorial debute --''Whip It,'' about women's roller derby. It opens nationwide on October 2, and Alex taught the women in the film, including Ellen Page, how to make the ''quads,'' the skates, do those astounding feats, just like the women who wear them. The moments of mayhem in modern roller derby are real, but so are is the great affection and bonding among the women who take part in this sport.

Alex's ''nom de skate'' is the very clever ''Axles of Evil,'' and she suggested that my derby pseudonym should be ''Splatt Morrison.''

What should your skate name be? Unleash your alter ego and have a go at that, right here.

And the inspector general for the Securities and Exchange Commission had some sharp things to say about how enforces missed the Bernard Madoff scandal, and the challenges of trying to keep up when the bright boys of Wall Street know they can make millions coming up with weird financial instruments that the feds haven't even heard of yet, much less passed regulations to govern.

And yes, H. David Kotz agrees with a lot of assessments that not much has change on Wall Street since the big financial meltdown. Maybe the sense of hubris is in retreat, but financial houses -- the ones that survived -- are still going at it hammer and tongs, including some of the techniques that put the world's finances at risk in the first place. Everyone's waiting to see whether Congress has the chops to change things, or whether the so-far-modest recovery has let people just forget and paper over the terrors of the past twelve months.

Later this week, I'll be talking to Tom Ridge, the first head of homeland security, and to the renowned novelist Margaret Atwood about her new novel of the world post-apocalypse.

-- Patt Morrison

The Moon and Moral Quandaries

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:27:23 -0800

I'm a sucker for space stories, and the news that the moon has ice on it -- okay, maybe only a millimeter thick, not even enough to supply an open bar at a Carrie A. Nation memorial -- is just the niftiest, isn't it? For decades it had been thought that the moon didn't have enough atmosphere to retain water [some of us wish we were the same!] but this is ice, and the moon is evidently generating its own, even in these minuscule amounts. A toast to the inconstant moon!

Harvard's Michael Sandel was one of the most provocative thinkers we've had on in a while, and now he's given us a taste of the kind of argument that his students get in class. What is justice? Is it the same as fairness? What framework of social morality do we operate in? He ranged over the ethical field, from whether the Christians being eaten by lions are utilitarian entertainment to having our personal standards challenged [you're against any kind of taxpayer-supported health care option but you're in the emergency room when a poor woman comes in bleeding to death; what should they do?] and Dick Cheney's endorsement of ''harsh interrogation'' -- if lives depend on extracting information from a possible terrorist, would it be okay to inflict pain on his child in front of his eyes?

These kinds of questions and challenges are the bread and butter of democracy, and his book ''Justice'' does more than justice to the subject. [Rumor is that he was the physical prototype for Montgomery Burns in ''The Simpsons,'' but he bears no moral resemblance to that repugnant tycoon.] i'd love to have him back on -- would you?

And this weekend's New York Times Magazine details how more and more gay 'tweens and teens are ''coming out,'' announcing their homosexuality in middle school or even earlier. Is this just a ''phase,'' as one caller asked? A natural outgrowth of a more frank sexuality? And what do young people risk by coming out in a homophobic school culture? Great calls and great guests, including a couple of teenagers who came out at a very young age, and are glad they did.

Next time, the inspector general of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Wall Street's cop, and women's roller derby is big, again, and Drew Barrymore directs and stars in a movie about the comeback of the wheeled vixens!

-- Patt Morrison

''Open for Business'' on State Parks, and Fighting Fires with a Pen -- and Guts

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:36:55 -0800

What was supposed to be a story about which hundred or so state parks would have to be closed to make a $14 million budget cut turned into a story about how it would probably cost the state more to close the parks than keep them open.

We heard this all during the budget negotiations -- short-term savings make for long-term costs -- but this has smacked the state in the face pretty fast, according to a leaked memo. Close the parks and some of the concessionaires who operate snack bars and gift shops and boat rentals and such might sue for their lost revenues. Close the parks and you might violate coastal access rules and even the protections in the Endangered Species Act. Close the park and wanderers or trespassers might still sue for damages if they get hurt in the park confines. For that reason, Gov. Schwarzenegger may cut back the list of to-be-padlocked parks to, oh, maybe zero.

And even as thousands of acres were burning up in Ventura County, fire policymakers and politicos were meeting in San Diego to try to get ahead of the fires -- not with hoses and airdrops but with planning policies that keep fires from populated places to begin with. That, of course, is not easy; Democratic state senator Christiine Kehoe said that at this very moment, builders are planning to put up another 100,000 homes in the very parts of California that are most prone to devastating fires -- the picturesque urban-wildland interface. Does California have the gumption, the spine, to lay down strict planning rules about where houses can and cannot go, and to toughen up regulations about building materials and accessible roads? It hasn't before, but who knows? The state is running out of money before it runs out of fires, and the prospect of beng tapped out on the fire lines may start changing some minds.

Justice -- such a simple word, such an elusive concept. Most of us can't get into Michael Sandel's moral reasoning class at Harvard, which explores the nature of justice, but you can get a taste of it from him here next time at one o'clock.

-- Patt Morrison