President Obama will announce a new plan to curb gun violence, spearheaded by VP Joe Biden. Plus, a new book details how companies use 'The Fine Print' to raise prices, Patt Morrison talks about the large number of key positions in LA's March election, cocktail mavens Alie & Georgia jon the show to spice up our holiday cocktails this season, plus much more.
VIDEO: Obama picks Biden to lead new plan to curb gun violence
In the wake of the Sandy Hook School shooting, President Obama announces a new plan today to curb gun violence in America, to be spearheaded by Vice President Joe Biden.
For reaction to the president's remarks and a look at the latest gun control efforts here in California, we're joined by Ben Van Houten from the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
For those who missed the president's remarks, we will post his full comments when they become available. Below is a summary from the AP:
South Korea elects Park Geun-hye as country's first female president
South Korean voters have elected Park Geun-hye to be South Korea's next president, the first time the country has elected a female leader.
The turnout in Tuesday's election was almost 76 percent, the country's highest in 15 years.
Park Geun-hye was the former chairwoman of the conservative Grand National Party between 2004 and 2006 and between 2011 and 2012.
L.A. has the biggest Korean population of any American City, and the election has been very closely watched here. Josie Huang was in Koreatown this morning, and she spoke to Hyun Chang a 23-year-old construction worker:
25-year-old LA resident Dustin Chang says the election of Park Geun-hye was a step in the wrong direction, referring to the controversial rule of her father, Park Chung-hye, from 1961 to 1979:
Cocktail mavens Alie & Georgia help you whip up festive holiday libations
We are now deep into the holiday season. The scramble to buy presents, the prepping for school pageants and the inevitable holiday parties are in full effect. If you're sick of washing down the sugar cookies with the same old spiked eggnog and mulled wine, we've got some ideas for mixing up your tipple traditions.
Producer Meghan McCarty met up with the cocktail-concocting duo, Alie Ward and Georgia Hardstark, known as Alie & Georgia, to get some inspiration for creative holiday libations.
Alie and Georgia have appeared on the Food Network and now have a web series for the Cooking Channel. They also appear on the Cooking Channel’s Unique Sweets show.
Alie & Georgia's Recommended Holiday Spirits:
Mostess with the Hostess
2 oz cake-flavored vodka
1/2 oz butterscotch Schnapps
1/4 oz vanilla simple syrup
marshmallow fluff
In a cocktail shaker filled with ice, shake the first three ingredients until well chilled. Dip the rim of a glass in marshmallow fluff, then pour cocktail. Note: this drink is best served as a small dessert cocktail, alongside an optional insulin syringe.
Baby It's Clove Outside
2 teaspoons clove simple syrup
2 dashes orange bitters
2 oz bourbon
Orange rind for garnish
To make the clove simple syrup, simmer equal parts sugar and water in a pan. (For 1 cup, use about a 2 tbs of whole cloves). Let simmer until dissolves, then set aside to cool. Once cool, strain out cloves. Add 2 tsp clove simple syrup to the bottom of a lowball glass, along with bitters. Stir. Add bourbon and ice and stir thoroughly 10-15 seconds until well chilled. Garnish with an orange peel, then refuse to leave the comforts of your arm chair.
The drink that put them on the map: The McNuggetini:
How companies have used 'The Fine Print' to add fees to your bills
Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Cay Johnston talks about his new book, "The Fine Print," in which he details how the U.S. tax system distorts competition and favors corporations and the wealthy.
Interview Highlights:
On how companies increase bills using the tax system:
On why companies are still able to use this type of policy:
On how tax laws favor corporate interests over those of the consumer:
On how gas pipelines make their money:
On why America is falling behind in the world market:
"The problem is AT&T is the only provider in many locations and your only other option is a cable company, which provides virtually the same service at the same prices. And I show that these companies are now becoming a cartel. AT&T cross markets with DIRECTV, which competes with the cable companies. And Verizon cross markets its cell phone services with Time Warner, Cox, Comcast, and Brighthouse cable companies.”
On what should be done so our tax policies stop favoring the wealthy:
"If they keep their fund open until their 80s, they won’t pay taxes for fifty years. That’s simply not a fair system. You should have to pay taxes when you earn your money. And those at the very top who benefit from living in this country, with its freedoms, its military, its courts, its infrastructure, its highways, all the things that make it possible to make a fortune, should bear the heaviest burden. Because that’s the principle 2500 years ago that gave birth to democracy. The greater the benefit you get from living in a society, the greater the burden you should bear so that society will endure and the liberties of the people will endure.”
The Fine Print by David Cay Johnston
Excerpted from THE FINE PRINT: How Big Companies use “Plain English” to rob you Blind. Published by Portfolio/Penguin. Copyright (c) David Cay Johnston, 2012.
Many key positions to be decided in LA's March election
In March, Los Angeles voters will head to the polls to choose a new mayor, a city attorney and city controller. They'll also elect more than half of the City Council and several members of the LAUSD school board.
The election is likely to have a major impact on the future of the city. We asked KPCC's Patt Morrison to come in studio to explain.
Patt will moderate a mayoral debate at Occidental College on January 24.
LA Mayoral candidate Eric Garcetti looks to connect with Latinos
As candidates prepare for the election, they're assembling coalitions-including Latino voters--to help push them to the May runoff. Even though none of the major candidates has a Spanish surname, one hopeful is letting Latinos know about their shared ethnicity. And it's proving to be a sensitive matter. KPCC's Alice Walton has the story.
A high turnout of Latino voters in 2005 helped make Antonio Villaraigosa L.A.'s first Latino mayor in modern times and then helped re-elect him in 2009.
Though none of the major mayoral candidates in the 2013 campaign has a Spanish surname, one candidate is working to remind Latino voters of their shared ethnicity – and that’s City Councilman Eric Garcetti.
Garcetti is Mexican-American on his father’s side, though some fellow Latino politicians have questioned his background. Assembly Speaker John Perez of Los Angeles told KPCC: “There isn’t a Latino candidate running for mayor that I know of.”
And L.A. City Councilman Jose Huizar said of Garcetti: “He says he’s Latino but, you know, that’s for the voters to see or the constituents to see.”
Garcetti, sitting for a recent interview in his council office, recited his paternal ancestry: “Both of my father’s parents were proudly Mexican-American, both spoke Spanish as their first language. My grandfather was born in Mexico, my grandmother’s parents were from Mexico.”
Garcetti grew up in Encino and attended the private school Harvard-Westlake. He later became a Rhodes Scholar and joined the Naval Reserve. His last name is Italian, a vestige of a paternal ancestor who emigrated from the country.
“No one would say Salma Hayek’s not Mexican and she has an Arabic, Lebanese last name,” Garcetti said.
As for why some Latino politicians may question Garcetti’s credentials, Louis DeSipio, a Chicano Studies professor at UC Irvine, says it may be more about life experiences.
“I’ve never heard anybody deny [Garcetti's] father’s heritage and consequently his own," DeSipio said. "Instead, I think what they’re saying is that he hasn’t faced some of the same struggles that many multi-generation Mexican-Americans in the Los Angeles area have.”
One of Garcetti’s competitors, Controller Wendy Greuel, has picked up endorsements from some of Los Angeles’ Latino leaders, including Huizar, Congressman-elect Tony Cardenas, and County Supervisor Gloria Molina. United Farmworkers co-founder Dolores Huerta is also supporting Greuel.
It’s unclear what effect those endorsements will have. A recent survey from Loyola Marymount University’s Center for the Study of Los Angeles found Garcetti is leading among Latinos voters.
Garcetti has won the endorsement of council colleague Ed Reyes.
"If you look at the pictures of his grandfather, they look like the pictures of my grandfather," said Reyes, "and my grandfather is Mexican, and that's real.
“How we each translate our heritage, our culture, varies from area-to-area because you're looking at different socio-economic dynamics. So, what might be interpreted as Latino for one might be different to another."
Juan Rodriguez, a local gallery owner who co-hosted a recent fundraiser for Garcetti that targeted young Latinos, said: "(Garcetti) seems very real. He has the energy. He’s innovative. He’s into technology, into architecture. I just kind of felt that he was very much what Los Angeles embodies as a new leader."
Rodriguez continued: “We have different backgrounds, our parents could be maybe Indios or Spanish or any other race, but you know he has the history. He’s still Mexican by his father, his roots, but he still has L.A. I feel the connection.”
The Garcetti campaign predicts that Latino voters could account for as much as 30 percent of the turnout in the March fifth primary.
LAUSD ordered to pay nearly $7 million in molestation case
Late yesterday, a jury said the LAUSD will have to pay nearly $6.9 million to a 14-year-old boy who was molested by an teacher when he was in fifth-grade
The decision comes as the district faces close to 200 pending molestation and lewd conduct claims arising from another teacher's alleged conduct at Miramonte Elementary School.
Howard Blume, who has been reporting on this for the L.A. Times, joins the show.
Calif. releases fracking rules for first time
State regulators have released rules for "fracking." The controversial drilling process has sparked an oil and gas boom around the country, along with heated debate about the environmental costs.
KQED's Science reporter Lauren Sommer has the story.
Thousands mourn death of singer Jenni Rivera at Gibson Amphitheatre
Now to Universal City where thousands of mourners are gathered at the Gibson Amphitheater to say goodbye to Latin superstar, Jenni Rivera.
La Diva de la Banda, as she was known, was one of the biggest acts in Latin music, and she had recently crossed over into TV stardom with a reality show called "I Love Jenni."
Rivera died on December 9 when her small plane went down in a remote area of Northern Mexico. KPCC's Ruxandra Guidi joins us from the memorial with more.
After 40 years, 'Free To Be... You And Me' gets a reboot with 'It's OK To Do Stuff'
Forty years ago, actress Marlo Thomas put out the classic children's album "Free to Be... You and Me." It featured celebrities like Michael Jackson, Alan Alda and Dianna Ross performing songs and skits that broke down gender and racial stereotypes
The message? You're great, just the way you are:
Well, a lot has changed since 1972, so Rob Kutner, a writer for the Conan show and musician and fellow comic Joel Moss Levinson decided to reboot the album. The result is the newly released spoof, "It's Okay To Do Stuff."
"For me it was the one respite in my parents record cabinet from all the relentless Neil Diamonds and John Denvers," said Kutner. "I think it was an act of love for Joel and Stephen [Levinson, Joel's older brother] and I because we were so obsessed with it and it had such a warm fuzzy place in our childhood. We're such twisted people the only way we can deal with warm fuzzy feeling is to turn them around into something with a little more of an edge."
Both Kutner and Levinson grew up listening to "Free to Be... You and Me," and have fond memories of its message of equality and acceptance. But since so many societal changes have taken place since the 1970s, when "Free To Be" was popular, the pair thought it was about time for an update. Albeit an irreverent one.
"It's a commentary a lot about how much this album did," said Levinson. "There was a time when you really had to discuss [gender differences] and this album did so much to push it forward and now we've reached gender conversations which can leave anybody confused just trying to keep up with how to be appropriate in this world and how to make it right, so we thought we'd play with it."
Can Connecticut school shootings lead to better mental health care?
In the wake of the Sandy Hook elementary school shootings, an online essay written by the mother of a mentally ill son has gone viral, shifting a portion of the post-tragedy conversation away from the familiar debate on gun control and toward a conversation about untreated mental illness and its link to violence.
In the essay, “I am Adam Lanza’s Mother,” Liza Long of Boise, Idaho offers a poignant and personal tale of her struggles with her violent 13-year-old son, whom she says has long suffered from mental illness.
She tells of incidents in which her son pulled a knife and threatened to kill her and himself.
The article struck a chord in a nation numb from the Dec. 14 mass killing at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Authorities have identified Adam Lanza, 20, as the shooter whom they say killed his mother Nancy, along with 20 children and six adults at the school, before turning his gun on himself.
“This problem is too big for me to handle on my own,” Long writes. “Sometimes there are no good options. So you just pray for grace and trust that in hindsight, it will all make sense.”
“We hear stories like this all too often from families who are desperate and who are saying, 'How do I keep my child safe? How do I keep myself safe?'” says Doris A. Fuller, executive director of the non-profit Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC). Her organization focuses on how best to treat those who are severely mentally ill. “I have one mother who routinely sends me emails, ‘I’m locked in my room, he’s threatening to kill me,’" says Fuller. "And what is just heart wrenching is we are not doing anything to fix the system that allows that to happen.”
Widespread elimination of psychiatric hospital beds in California and throughout the nation, Fuller says, has resulted in a mental health system that “completely fails individuals with mental health illness, and the communities they live in.”
As an example, she cites the lack of psychiatric hospital beds nationwide, which are at levels last seen in 1850, according to a study TAC issued in July, “No Room at the Inn.”
Nationwide, the study indicates there are about 14 hospital beds for every 100,000 persons, far lower than the 50 beds per 100,000 persons that’s “generally considered by people in the field to be minimally adequate,” Fuller says.
The consequences of too few public psychiatric beds include: “increased homelessness; the incarceration of severely mentally ill individuals in jails and prisons; emergency rooms being overrun with patients waiting for a psychiatric bed; and an increase in violent behavior, including homicides, in communities across the nation,” says a 2008 TAC study, “The Shortage of Public Hospital Beds for Mentally Ill Persons.”
That’s prompted many in the mental health community to fight for mandatory outpatient treatment for a small subset of the mentally ill - the untreated severely mentally ill who suffer from a lack of awareness about their illness and their need for help.
Called, Anosognosia, this lack of awareness is a neurological condition that mandatory outpatient treatment laws are designed to address. With such laws in place, family members can ask a court to order their mentally ill loved one to undergo outpatient treatment.
In California, Laura’s Law is a state law that allows counties to adopt mandated outpatient care in certain cases. It applies only to patients with severe mental illness and a history of multiple hospitalizations or jail time.
The law lets a judge order such patients into “assisted outpatient treatment” that enables them to maintain jobs and live in their communities.
Nevada County, the only one of California’s 58 counties to adopt the law, issued a grand jury report last June that says Laura’s Law saves money and lives.
So far, Nevada county officials say every dollar they’ve spent on Laura’s Law has saved them $1.81, as fewer people end up in jail or locked down on emergency psychiatric holds.
But not everyone agrees court-mandated psychiatric care is a good idea.
“If somebody in fact is involuntarily treated, often they will avoid mental health services in the future. For a lot of reasons I don’t think it’s the panacea it’s made out to be,” says Jim Preis, an attorney with Mental Health Advocacy Services in Los Angeles, a non-profit organization that represents clients with mental illnesses.
“Nevada County is small and I’m not saying they weren’t helped," says Preis, "but it’s not clear to me that if they were provided intensive services without the court, without the judge ordering them, that they wouldn’t have been helped equally well.” Preis advocates for “intensive” community mental health services, such as 24-hour clinic assistance, social support for patients and help in obtaining food and shelter. He says patients, not judges, should be the ones to choose such treatments.
But some families of the sickest of the sick counter that while that sounds good, it won’t work for their children, among them Orange County resident Jennifer Hoff.
Jennifer Hoff of Orange County raised a mentally ill son. She fears that patients-rights laws that proved valuable in protecting the mentally ill against abuses uncovered in the former overcrowded state psychiatric hospital model need revamping. Under today's system, such laws that emphasize patients' rights put the most severely mentally ill patients at risk, along with their families and neighbors.
Hoff says that beginning at age five, her son displayed episodes of violence and mental instability. Hoff ultimately sent him to an out-of-state, locked residential treatment program to protect her two younger sons from him and to get him help. But when he turned 18 and was released to Orange County, she discovered she was no longer able help him as a parent.
“I would call the social workers who said I need to support his decision-making,” Hoff says. “They'd say things like, ‘we find that our ‘clients’ respond better when they’re allowed to learn from their own mistakes. I’m like, ‘clients?’ He’s a patient. But when he turns 18 he’s no longer a patient, he’s now a client of mental health services.”
In the 18 months since his return, Hoff’s son – now 19 – has been off his meds and in jail several times. Now, she says, he’s facing prison time for walking into a bank and handing the teller a note that said he’d blow it up if the teller didn’t give him $1,000.
“He’s going to jail for 11 to 17 years and there’s nothing we can do," Hoff says.
A 2010 TAC study says he won’t be alone. “There are now three times more seriously mentally ill persons in jails and prisons than in hospitals,” according to the report, “More Mentally Ill Persons Are in Jails and Prisons Than Hospitals: A Survey of the States.”
“We don’t really know what Adam Lanza’s diagnosis was and we don’t know his psychiatric history at all," says TAC's Fuller. "But we know the histories of enough people in these mass murders to know he wasn’t stable and treatment very likely was an option for him.”
Fuller says it’s her hope that the Sandy Hook tragedy will bring greater recognition that such mass killings can be prevented.
Severe mental illness, she says “is a real disease, it can be treated. There are humane, proven, legal ways to intervene before we get to this point and those who receive time and effective treatment are no more dangerous than anyone else."