Today, KPCC's Molly Peterson talks about the portrayal of fracking in Hollywood. Plus, why fiscal cliff talk is full of doomsday predictions, we look at whether White House petitions ever work, the new Atlanta Braves 'screaming Indian' logo draw ire and much more.
Why fiscal cliff talk is full of doomsday pessimism
Amid all the talk of the looming fiscal cliff — the tax cuts which will go into effect with potential drastic effects if Congress can't come to a compromise to avert them— we have a voice of optimism today, and a call to take the long view on political deadlines.
Aaron Noble of the Washington Post joins the show to talk about his piece in the paper's FIX blog that the final days of many Congressional deadlines teem with doomsday predictions.
Do online petitions to the White House ever work?
A record-breaking petition is asking the Obama Administration to label the Westboro Baptist Church as a hate group. With over 280,000 signatures in two weeks, it's one of the fastest growing petitions ever on a site created just over a year ago by the White House.
Think of it as direct-democracy: The administration promises to respond to any petition that gets 25,000 signees in 30 days. However, the intentions and results of these petitions can be mixed.
Because while there are successful drives tackling serious issues like gun control, there are others more lighthearted ones that ask for the White House's beer recipe and one that asks the administration to build The Death Star.
Is this petitioning process taken seriously enough — both by Americans and by the administration? Joining us is Tommy Christopher, White House reporter and political editor for Mediaite.com.
Friday Flashback: The biggest stories of 2012
L.A. Times columnist James Rainey and The Guardian’s U.S. Finance and Economics editor Heidi Moore will discuss the big headlines of the last year, including the winners and losers in politics, economics and media.
US Rep. Jerry Lewis bids farewell to Congress
He shares a name with a famous comedian but, on Capitol Hill, California Congressman Jerry Lewis is the big celebrity.
The longtime Republican lawmaker from Redlands is stepping down after more than three decades in Congress. Lewis looked back on his political career from his favorite spot in the Capitol: the elegant office of the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.
Lewis chaired the influential committee for two years. When he remodeled the chairman’s office, he replaced the carpet with blue and gold tiles. Lewis is a die-hard UCLA fan. His beloved dog is named Bruin. But Lewis said it was geography, not the design, that made this office special. It's right off the House floor.
"To the say the least," said Lewis, "it’s nicely situated for the chairman."
Lewis described Appropriations as the heart of the work Congress does. It’s close to his heart as well, and the reason he decided to return to Capitol Hill after a rough freshman term.
Lewis arrived in D.C. in 1979, after a decade in the California state legislature where he worked on creating the Air Quality Management District and early childcare legislation. Congress was different.
"The first two years around here," recalled Lewis, "I came within an inch of going back to California and running for Lieutenant Governor because it was so inane."
But in his second term, Lewis snagged a prized spot on the Appropriations Committee, eventually rising through the ranks to chairman in 2005. He served only one term because Democrats took back the House in 2006. He remained the committee’s ranking Republican and is retiring as its Chairman Emeritus.
Lewis said, over time, "you can have a huge effect upon the way our taxpayers have a chance to get a piece of their money back for public purposes."
Democratic L.A. Congressman Xavier Becerra recently said of his colleague: "Much of the infrastructure in California we owe to people like Jerry Lewis. Lewis can say he helped build America."
For Lewis, perhaps the most important piece of public money was spent on a flood control project in the Inland Empire. He remembers a rainy year from his youth when he dropped a ping pong ball out the back bedroom window.
"The ball dropped about two feet, hit the water and floated out through the back fence," he said. "All those years, the Valley facing this horrendous potential for flooding."
Now, the Seven Oaks Dam, at the very head of the Santa Ana River, controls that flood possibility so that, as Lewis said, the Valley "will never flood again."
Two years ago, Republicans pushed through a moratorium on earmarks, making it more difficult for lawmakers to steer money to projects in their own districts. Lewis is a fan of earmarks. He said it’s a constitutional responsibility for Congress to be what he calls “good stewards of public money.”
The ban was a “cause célèbre” of a few members, he said, "but more and more members are recognizing that to serve their constituents, their voice has to be heard. And you don’t do it automatically because some agency head thinks they know more than the Congress should know about how to spend their money."
Earmarks and ties to lobbyists were what brought Lewis under the microscope of the U.S. Justice Department. San Diego GOP member Randy “Duke” Cunningham pleaded guilty to accepting bribes from contractors while serving on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee and resigned from Congress in 2005.
Lewis said a woman "around this place" went to the Justice Department and said since Cunningham had "violated the fundamentals of this process," and Lewis was the chairman of his subcommittee at the time, "he must have been similarly involved and so you’ve got to look at it."
After a four-year investigation, no charges were filed against Lewis. But his legal fees topped $1 million. Lewis said: "(It)cast a shadow that I’m not comfortable with at all. It’ll always be there and the reality is that we have attempted to be a positive impact in public service." He insisted the Justice Department was "dead wrong. But lawyers don’t have to be right all the time."
As Lewis looked back over his years in Washington, he said he’s seen a change in Congress — and not for the better. He said over the past two or three decades, the body has moved progressively down a pathway towards partisan confrontation "almost for the sake of it."
Lewis said the reality is that 90 percent of the issues facing Congress are non-partisan. And he advised new members to go out of their way to get to know their colleagues — particularly in subcommittees.
"I think if you work at that, if you care about it, members are willing to deal with members in a personal way." Lewis said when leadership seeks confrontation for the sake of partisan confrontation, "you may as well walk away from those conversations." But he insisted that, member-to-member, you can make a difference — "and it deserves some serious tending."
Lewis won’t miss the weekly round-trip flight between D.C. and Ontario Airport, with Bruin (a Bichon-Poo) under the seat, his wife of 25 years, Arlene Willis — who was also his chief of staff — at his side.
But Lewis said he will miss one of the perks of office he loved in the early days — walking out the back door of the Capitol and running straight down the National Mall.
"You go past the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial," he recounted. "I would go up the steps, read the Gettysburg Address, and then run back again." Lewis called the five-mile round trip "one of the great, great experiences of anybody’s lifetime."
The 78-year-old Lewis has no immediate plans for the future, but said there are “other chapters in this book of life” and other opportunities to have an impact on public affairs.
How uninformed voters make decisions at the ballot box
When it comes to who we vote for to represent us, we all face some limitations. Most of us work long hours, raising kids and doing all the little things that make up a normal day.
Around Election Day, you're expected to keep the hectic schedule going and be up every ballot measure, congressional race and figure out who should be the next president? Good luck.
A new study shows many voters show up to the ballot box under-informed, which might not be that surprising. But you might be surprised at how the make their decisions.
Joining us to explain is UC San Diego Professor Seth Hill, co-author of the study published in the American Political Study Review.
One hunter laments new CA law banning use of hounds in bear hunting
One policy change the new year will ring in the end of an age-old tradition, at least in California. On January 1, a new law goes into effect banning the use of hounds to hunt bears or bobcats. The Humane Society of the U.S. pushed the legislation.
They call using hounds to track and tree bears for hunters a cruel and unethical practice. Of the 32 states which allow bear hunting, 17 of them permit the use of hounds.
Holly Heyser recently went on bear hunt with hounds, one of the last before the law takes effect. She teaches journalism at California State University in Sacramento, and blogs about hunting at the Fair Chase Hunting blog.
Lack of funding continues to stymie gun-violence research
The Centers for Disease Control used to study the relationship between guns and violence as a matter of public health, but their efforts were curtailed by Congress in 1996 after gun rights advocates accused them of using their research for political purposes, not science. $2.6 million in funding was cut from the CDC's budget that year, but later reinstalled for research on brain injuries.
Many other groups that study gun violence have faced opposition from gun groups like the NRA and have also seen money dry up. The NRA claims research into gun violence is illegitimate, and often politically biased against gun owners.
To discuss the problems with getting gun violence research funded we are joined by UC Davis researcher Garen Wintemute.
Fracking makes its way to the big screen
From race to politics, Hollywood often explores tense topics in the news. Now, some movies and TV shows are taking on another headline grabbing issue: fracking.
Hydraulic fracturing is a controversial way to extract oil and gas from land in places like Pennsylvania, New York, Colorado, and yes, Los Angeles. Fracking, as it’s called, gets the Hollywood treatment this weekend, as the subject of a new fictional film called Promised Land.
Matt Damon plays a guy named Steve who closes contracts for a big energy company so that the company can frack under the properties. Sitting down in the local diner with a greedy local politician, Steve plays hardball.
“Best case scenario, there’s 30 million dollars under your town. 0.1% is 30 thousand dollars, that’s what I’m authorized to offer you,” he says, over coffee. “I’m also telling you it’s a one time offer.”
But Steve, as written by Krasinski and Damon, isn’t all good or all bad. In that same diner scene, he really is trying to warn the local official that this is a good opportunity for the struggling town. And he would know, being from a poor farming town himself.
“Don’t do this…after every single town within three states has signed up for this, and the blows of this economy are almost unbearable. We’re going to come back. And we will offer you nothing, we will offer this town nothing,” Steve says. “Now please. Let some other guy be last.”
The energy industry isn’t crazy about Promised Land. It has seen fracking taken on before, in a rash of documentaries released in the last several years: Josh Fox’s polemic Gasland (and the follow-up, The Sky is Pink) has garnered the most attention. Split Estate presented hazards of fracking; Truthland aimed to combat what its makers saw as errors in Gasland. The trend included The Hidden Cost of Hydraulic Fracturing and Unearthed too.
Most recently, some Marina Del Rey based journalists made FrackNation. A key idea in that film is that gas has mingled in water throughout American history, and concerns about fracking's harm to water and the people who drink it are overblown. (FrackNation premieres next month on AXS.TV.)
What is new is seeing fracking not just in mainstream movies, but sitcoms too. Last Man Standing is the Tim Allen show this season. Set in Colorado, Allen plays Mike Baxter, a marketing director for an outdoor-sporting good enterprise. Nancy Travis plays his wife Vanessa, a geologist educated at Ohio State who works for an energy company. She takes a lot of flack about fracking after she gives a career day lecture at one daughter's school.
“Mom, if even half this stuff is true you have to quit that job!,” she says. Mike Baxter intervenes. “Stop, we’re done. The Sierra Club meeting is over. She works for an energy company. They produce, what is it called? energy. The best energy now is oil, coal and gas.” Vanessa Baxter points out that natural gas is the most “environmentally friendly” of the three.
Baxter's dismissal of his daughter’s concerns is rooted part in his cantankerous dad character, but it’s also a matter of politics. His daughter’s ex-boyfriend, in on the debate, argues that fracking is always potentially hazardous. “Carbon gases cause climate change. The ice caps are melting, the polar bears are drowning.”
To which Tim Allen replies, “Well maybe those fat cracker bears should learn how to swim.”
Last Man Standing is an old-school, lesson-in-the-half-hour kind of show, based on this one episode. The lesson is compromise: Vanessa Baxter tells her daughter that her burgeoning environmental values don't take into account the fact that geologists only have a couple of work options: energy companies, and teaching college students.
WIll these fracking forays succeed in winning views over to either side? Jury's out, at best. Energy companies haven't pushed as hard against Promised Land as they might have if its reviews were better. Combining the personal and the political in art isn't usually easy. But the box office may not be the best way to decide.
Scientists take drastic measures to curb invasive species on remote islands
A strange thing is happening on some of the worlds most remote islands. From coastal California to the South Pacific, native birds, mice, turtles and foxes are emerging from the threat of extinction.
Good news for conservationists but the methods some scientists are using to protect these endangered species is coming under fire.
In her new e-book "Battle at the End of Eden," science writer Amanda Martinez highlights how far some scientists are willing to go to protect the world's rarest species.
New Atlanta Braves 'screaming Indian' logo draws controversy
Usually when sports teams go retro with their uniforms, for fans it brings back fond memories of a simpler time. The Atlanta Braves baseball team has tuned the clock back on the logo for their batting practice caps but in a surprising and some say, racist way.
Joining us to explain is Paul Lukas of Uni-Watch.com, a website devoted to the study of sports uniforms.
LA Lakers first NBA team to broadcast every game in Korean
When the Lakers named Paul Lee the team’s first Korean-language color commentator this season, his friends all wanted to know one thing.
“When people hear that I get to the do the Lakers broadcasts, they get all excited and ask: ‘Can you take me with you?’ But I actually don’t do it courtside,” said Lee.
In fact, Lee doesn’t even do the games in the same building.
Whether the Lakers are home or away, Lee and his broadcast partner Young Don Lee call the action from El Segundo, deep inside the spacious headquarters for Time Warner Sportsnet and Deportes.
The cable company made a huge bet on the Lakers, forking over an estimated $3 billion to secure regional TV rights for the next two decades. Inside the gleaming new home of the channels are facilities befitting such an investment: state-of-the-art control rooms and studios and an expansive newsroom.
To find the Korean broadcasters, you have to open the door to a small storage room, half of which is used to keep lights and cameras.
With no producer, no engineer, and no staff, the announcers watch the game on a TV smaller than most of us have at home. It’s long way from courtside, but storage room or not, Lee is thrilled to be here.
He lived in Seoul until he was 13, when his family moved to L.A. He fell in love with American sports, and especially enjoyed hearing announcers describe the action, which sounded nothing like the more subdued style he heard in Korea.
“I’m a real big fan of American broadcasting, like the storytelling of Vin Scully, the terminology of Chick Hearn, and the excitement of John Madden,” said Lee. “I’m excited to convey that to the Korean audience.”
He is the rare color commentator who never played the game. Lee says most of his NBA knowledge comes from being a diehard fantasy player. His day job is being a sportswriter at The Korea Times of Los Angeles.
There are more than 300,000 Koreans in the greater Los Angeles area, 70 percent of whom don’t speak English at home.
Given those numbers are only getting bigger, Time Warner Sportsnet Senior Vice-President and General Manager Mark Shuken says the Korean broadcast is overdue.
“We had the Korean community really speak up about the Lakers,” said Shuken. “As we looked into who are Lakers fan we saw that after the Hispanic community and the general community, the Korean community was the next largest. Simultaneously we had conversations with the Lakers and Jeanie Buss and Dr. Buss and when we shared this idea with them, they were thrilled by it.”
It became much easier technically to broadcast in Korean this season. That’s because the secondary audio programming channel reserved for Spanish opened up after Time Warner started Deportes.
Could Korean Laker fans one day get a network of their own, too? Yes, but probably not on TV as we know it now, says Shuken.
“I think digital distribution of media and the way that people ultimately will receive their media will make it a lot easier, less expensive and more easily accessible for any version of content,” said Shuken. “Once we can figure out the economics and the protection of the rights holder and the content provider in those streams you could see a Lakers game with 10 different languages supporting it all through a digital stream.”
The NBA broadcasts about 24 games, featuring multiple teams, in South Korea. Shuken says the league has expressed interest in expanding to more games in the next year or two, using the Lakers’ feed.
For now, he says he’s trying to avoid the mistake he’s seen other media companies make – only changing the language with little sensitivity to cultural differences.
“We always have to ask the fans in the community what they want and then deliver as opposed to telling them why they like that which we bring,” said Shuken.
The general manager says he’s still figuring out what Korean fans want. For example, there’s not even a way of measuring how many people tune in yet.
What he’s found with the Spanish-language audience is that stories matter more than statistics and that they watch more as families.
“The stereotype of a general market customer might be a couple guys in a bar,” said Shuken. “I think the general understanding we have of the Hispanic community is it’s much more of multigenerational familial gathering.”
Paul Lee agrees that Korean fans care more about the stories, and he tries to appeal to those who haven’t necessarily heard of the Princeton offense. So far, Lee says the biggest complaint has been about how he says players’ names: Should he use the English or the Korean pronunciation?
“Am I supposed to say Meta World Peace (with an English pronunciation) or Meta World Peace (with Korean pronunciation?) Some will say I’m showing off," said Lee. "Then, if I use chopped off Korean English, they’ll say I’m using broken English, and 'Can’t they find someone who speaks English better?'”
For now, Lee is saying it both ways. You can’t please everyone, but at least he and his partner will be moving out of the storage room soon.
They still won’t be at the games, but Time Warner is building them a proper sound booth.
Study looks inside a rapper's brain to reveal the origin of freestyling
Ever wonder what's going on under the hood (i.e. in the brain) when a rapper busts out a freestyle rap on the fly?
A recent study by the National Institutes of Health scanned the craniums of MCs for clues about what's happening in the brain when a performer is improvising rhymes.
The research was co-authored by Dr. Allen Braun. He did a similar study in 2008 that involved scanning Jazz musicians brains while they improvised. For this study, Braun enlisted the help of hip-hop producer Daniel Rizik-Baer.
Braun and Rizik-Baer created a control condition by using conventional rap lyrics set to a background beat produced by Rizik-Baer, which the MCs were then asked to memorize. In the test condition, the artists had to freestyle rap.
In both conditions, Braun explained, “we acquired images related to brain activity, and this is using an fMRI method,” (functional MRI) “and that tells us what areas of the brain are more or less active and we can get a picture of what the brain is doing, specifically during freestyle rapping.”
Unlike most rap performances, once inside the MRI machine, no movement is permitted. So the rappers were unable to keep time using their hands or by nodding their heads.
“However,” Rizik-Baer said, “it ended up not being that big of a deal. Once you got into it. Once you were in that machine, it was kind of like being in a whole different world, time flew by.”
Braun examined the brain images of the rappers while they were freestyling rhymes. He found an interesting pattern of activity in the prefrontal cortex. Basically, the areas associated with self-generated and self-motivated behavior were active but the areas that monitor or censor behavior were de-activated. So while there is an aspect of the brain that is energized by using improvisational skills, there is much less self-censoring at play.
Hip Hop Producer Daneil Rizik-Baer said the findings seem in-line with what he expereinced while freestyling. He noticed that when he wasn't as worried about making sense or winning audience approval, he was able to tap into his subconscious and generate creative rhymes. “I was surprising myself,” Rizik-Baer said. “You’re not thinking about the words, it’s almost like they’re being handed to you and you’re just providing the vehicle for them to come out.”
Researcher Allen Braun explained that as this self-censoring area of the brain is deactivated, the “artists... are able to produce these improvisatory associations, surprising connections between words and rhythmic patterns and so on, that are produced really outside of conscious awareness.”
In subsequent studies, Braun was able to discover that anyone is capable of generating this disassociated pattern of brain functions during improvisation. “So it’s not any kind of magical, you know, hot spot in the brain that occurs only in creative people, everybody is capable of it,” Braun added. “It’s what is made of it by these highly creative individuals that’s different.”
Web text by Jenna Kagel