President Obama and Governor Romney are back on the campaign trail. Meanwhile, New Yorkers are getting back on their feet after Hurricane Sandy. Producer Mary Plummer visited a school in Chelsea to survey the damage. Plus, community health clinics are on the rise in Los Angeles and across the country, Ruben Martinez joins the show to talk about his new book "Desert America," DJ Kid Koala visits the studio to spin some jams and much more.
Obama and Romney back on the campaign trail after break for storm
The race for the White House revs back up today after both campaigns took brief breaks for the mega storm. President Obama will hold events in Wisconsin, Colorado, Ohio and Nevada, while his challenger, Governor Mitt Romney, will spend the day in Virginia rallying conservative voters.
A poll released yesterday shows the campaigns are tied in the Old Dominion. With just five days left until the polls open, every minute counts.
Here with a snapshot of the race is Ginger Gibson, a reporter for Politico
Presidential election in the home stretch
It's been a long and winding road this election season. After almost two years of speculation, primaries, candidates and campaigns, no matter what happens, one thing is for certain is that it will all be over in only five more days.
Both Obama and Romney are likely getting little sleep — political reporters are posting stories around the clock. And meanwhile , many of us just feel like this 4 year old girl:
That's 4-year-old Abby Evans and her mother Elizabeth in a video that went viral yesterday.
Here with more on what to expect during this final campaign crunch is Major Garrett, White House correspondent for the National Journal.
School in New York's Chelsea neighborhood begins healing process after Hurricane Sandy
Residents of New York are struggling to get back on their feet after Hurricane Sandy flooded much of the city. Some subway lines are back in service this morning, but the traffic in and out of Manhattan is snarled.
Electricity has been restored to the southwest part of the island but hundreds of thousands of people are still in the dark. Economists say Sandy's price tag in the metropolitan area alone could top $10 bIllion.
For one school in the Chelsea neighborhood of lower Manhattan, damage is so bad it’s hard to know what repairs will cost.
Guardian Angel School, a Catholic pre-K to eighth grade school in lower Manhattan, had its entire basement level wiped out by Hurricane Sandy. Two classrooms, two resource rooms and a cafeteria were completely under water until rescue crews came to the schools aid.
"You hate to see something like this. It’s going to be tough for these kids to get going anywhere in the near future," said Ben Drake, one of the cleanup workers. Drake and his team estimated they have a week to go before the building is cleaned up enough to rebuild. Damages to the school are still being assessed, but numbers will likely range in the tens of thousands.
Guardian Angel School was also hit by Hurricane Irene in August of 2011. Justin Kaufman, the senior project manager for the school’s clean up, said that all of the items wrecked by Sandy were brand new and purchased after Hurricane Irene. Now the school will have to start over again.
“That was bad, but this is another level. You kind of have to see it to believe it,” he said. The basement level of the school was littered with debris and classroom items. Workers faced overturned desks, flipped refrigerators and stacks upon stacks of soaking wet books.
The school’s 28-year principal Maureen McElduff was at the site when the worst of Hurricane Sandy hit lower Manhattan.
"There’s never been a storm like this before,” she said. “It burst through two doors here after it broke the windows. It was just like the movie 'Titanic' as the water was coming after you.”
McElduff hopes she can reopen her school on Monday using portable classrooms. She’s eager to get the school up and running, as she says many of the school's 200 or so students live in the projects and are stuck at home without power.
For now, the school remains a chaotic scene with no electricity and scattered classroom items littering the entire ground floor. McElduff was dressed in hooded sweatshirt and said she hadn’t showered in days. Her home is located in Breezy Point, the Queens neighborhood that was one of the hardest hit by Sandy.
More than 100 homes were lost in her neighborhood. McElduff said her home is just around the corner from homes that were consumed by flames. Her home has serious flooding damage, but for today her mind was on the school and her students.
“We’ll make do, we have to,” she said.
How cities like New York rebuild after a natural disaster
For the East Coast, the challenge right now isn't just recovery, but rebuilding. For some, the Sandy superstorm presents a unique opportunity to reevaluate transportation systems, electrical and phone grids, and flood prevention measures.
We'll talk with David Biello who writes about these issues as an associate editor for environment and energy at Scientific American.
Dining in the Dark: How to feed your family during a longterm blackout
It will be quite some time before any major changes to infrastructure can happen on the east coast, but right now there are still more than 4.6-million homes and residences without power. And yet, everyone's gotta eat.
Feeding your family for days on end without electricity can be challenging at best, but it's a situation any American might be forced to face in the wake of a disaster.
For more on how to dine in the dark, we're joined by Dan Pashman, creator and host of the James Beard Award-nominated podcast The Sporkful.
Interview Highlights:
What is the most important piece of advice for food when you don’t have any power?
“Eat your most prized foods first… the stuff you don’t really wanna lose if it goes bad. When in doubt throw it out. Also its really important to keep the refrigerator and freezer closed when possible. Open it once take a picture with your cellphone and now you have an inventory of what you have. Also group your food together in the fridge so it stays cool.”
What is some advice for cooking with out the lights?
“Be careful, the hardest thing to cook without light is knowing when food is done. If you have steak thawing in the fridge that you want to grill, because you can still grill without power, find the heel of your hand, the part at the base of your thumb, when your hand is relaxed that part feels like raw steak if you touch it. If you touch your thumb to pointer finger, it feels like rare steak. If you touch your thumb to your middle finger, it feels like medium rare steak, thumb to ring finger, medium well, thumb to pinky, well-done steak.”
Obviously this is a tragedy, but do you think cooking without power could be an opportunity to get creative?
“Sure, a lot of folks whose stoves and ovens aren’t working may still be able to use their grills, which are often overlooked. You can boil water in a pot on a grille; you can cook bread on a grill... If you have cheese that hasn’t gone bad you can make pizza on your grill. If you have enough propane you can take sweetened and condensed milk and boil it for an hour and a half and you have dulce de leche”
How do you feel about canned food?
“Canned tuna has a lot of potential. You can make a great tuna salad with olive oil and vinegar instead of mayo, because mayo is perishable.”
San Diego mayoral race between Bob Filner and Carl DeMaio heating up
With less than a week to go before the election, the mayoral race in San Diego has taken a decidedly ugly turn. The frontrunner, 70-year-old Democratic Congressman Bob Filner, has seen his lead disappear and is getting in trouble for his temper.
His challenger, 38-year-old Republican Carl DeMaio, while openly gay, has incurred the wrath of the city's gay and lesbian population for his opposition to same-sex marriage.
Joining me on the line now for more on the race is Katie Orr, Metro Reporter with KPBS in San Diego.
DJ Kid Koala spins back into the music scene with '12 Bit Blues'
Musician Eric San — better known as DJ Kid Koala — is one of the most influential and well known-members of the scratch DJ scene. San has composed songs with the band The Gorillaz, performed with Jack Johnson, and has performed at Preservation Hall in New Orleans, typically a more traditional venue.
San talks with us about his brand new album “12 Bit Blues” which is a combination of old jazz songs, original music and beats all mixed live.
Interview Highlights:
First can you explain a little about the technique of the scratch DJ?
“If I had to break it down to its most simple form, all scratching is a combination of rubbing the sound back and forth, and cutting the sound on and off with the volume lever essentially. With that combination of things you can create many different rhythms and pitches that is what I have been practicing for the past 20 years. Anyone can do it, the first scratch you learn is the baby scratch. The volume is up and you just rub the record back and forth.”
Are your turntables different than just a normal at home turntable?
“Yes, these are professional directive turntables. They don’t have the belt underneath them they have a very strong magnet and motor so that even if you are scratching and putting a lot of weight on the record you are not slowing down the platter. If someone was trying to do this at home with their normal turn tables it would sound different... but my first maybe year and a half of practicing was off flexi records.”
Where did the scratch DJ scene really come from?
“Grand Wizard Theodore is credited as the originator of the scratch in the 70s, so then he was practicing this back spinning technique so he had his headphones on one ear like we do right now. The story was his mom was calling him for dinner and he didn’t want to lose is place, so he just kept rubbing the record back and forth to keep his place and while he was hearing this he was listening to his mom in one ear and the sound in the other ear. The next show he did he integrated that sound, the crowd went wild, and that was that.”
One of the older songs you have done people will probably recognize, “Moon River,” what made you decide to do that song?
“My mother has always been my number-one fan, but her comprehension of what I do technically or musically soars over her head. At one point a few years ago, all the kids have moved away she said, 'It's your father and my 30th wedding anniversary and we wanna bring the family all together.' So I booked a show, just so someone would fly me to Hawaii, knowing that the whole family would be there. I knew she would be at that show, so I said I’m gonna do something special for her, so I picked “Moon River” because it was her favorite song.”
How do you deal with people who say the song is fine as it, and ask why does this have to happen?
“It doesn’t. I think in terms of my personal education on an instrument it’s sort of the challenge of seeing if I can find a way to play turn tables and in that case finding a way to bend tones and notes on records to follow a chord cycle or to emote something.”
What is special about the limited edition CD cases for your new album “12 Bit Blues?”
“The first round of the album is packaged with a science kit. A cardboard gramophone that you can fold up, you fold up the ampliphone and the base, and it comes with a little four-inch flexi record, all you need to do is get a pin or a needle and use that as the stylus and you basically have a little cardboard gramophone.”
You kick off your tour tonight, what can people expect?
Well the '12 Bit Blues,' the equipment is vintage, a lot of it older than me, I felt that to do the live show instead of going with the high tech light show that would soar over people's head I wanted to think of an old school way to present this, oldest technology I can think of, which was dancing girls and puppets. A kind of vaudeville show, a variety show that sort of I can play some of this music but there is a lot of spectacle around it.”
You can see Eric San, DJ Kid Koala, tonight at the first show of his album tour. The concert is at the Echoplex in Echo Park.
What happens if Prop 30 and Prop 38 both fail?
It's been an expensive battle between Governor Jerry Brown's Prop 30 and attorney Molly Munger's Prop 38. Both initiatives would increase taxes to fund education, and both are facing an uphill battle.
Prop 38 would raise income tax for almost all filers to help pay for schools, while Prop 30 would temporarily increase the sales tax by one quarter of a percentage point and increase the taxes on single filers above $250,000 and couples over $500,000.
Today's Field Poll shows support for both initiatives has dipped, especially for Prop 38. At the same time, the number of undecided voters for both props has actually increased.
Joining us to talk about what will happen if both props fail is Political Editor for KXTV in Sacramento, John Myers.
Gay school teacher battles GOP county leader in high stakes Inland congressional race
Two Riverside natives are competing to become the first representative of the newly drawn 41st Congressional District. It covers a big part of the Inland Empire including Riverside and Moreno Valley.
The Republican is a veteran county leader who moonlights in a garage band. The Democrat is an openly gay Asian American teacher.
KPCC's Steven Cuevas reports that the race is getting lots of attention.
Community health centers on the rise in Los Angeles
Joe Castel never pictured himself driving to Skid Row to visit his doctor. But the 49-year-old Pasadena resident is a contract employee with the government agency FEMA and that job does not provide health insurance.
So when his friend, the CEO of the John Wesley Community Health Institute (JWCH), invited him to visit the clinic, Castel accepted.
Still, the rough neighborhood where the clinic is based gave him pause, especially on his first trip down there. Castel’s doctor had him run around the block to get his heart rate up to check his heart murmur.
“I was literally jumping over people laying on the street ,” Castel said. “I mean, people shooting up, I was running past them. Doing drug deals, I was running past them. Pushing their carts, I was running past them. You know, they were like hurdles laying on the ground.”
Although the neighborhood feels troubled, on the inside, the superstore-sized clinic is stocked with clean exam rooms, a pharmacy and a seven-chair dental wing. It also offers psychology, radiology, vision and even housing services.
Castel, who has since joined the clinic board as a consumer representative, is not the only one looking to community health centers for care. Clinics like this one are booming, in California and across the country. They are expanding and renovating with billions in federal dollars provided by the stimulus legislation and the Affordable Care Act.
This clinic is part of a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC), a type of clinic targeted in President Obama’s health reform measure as a key component in building medical capacity for the millions of Americans expected to gain health insurance under the legislation. In Los Angeles alone, one million people are projected to land federally subsidized coverage starting in 2014, and many are likely to go to clinics for their care.
In California, there are about 120 FQHCs, representing over 1,100 “delivery sites” and serving upwards of 2.9 million patients. Nationwide, there are more than 1,100 FQHCs providing care to about 20 million patients at 8,000 delivery sites.
The clinics use the federal money to build more centers, add more exam rooms, expand services and switch over to electronic health records. As a result, many of these clinics are no longer operating on shoestring budgets.
Just last May, the JWCH Institute received a $2.7 million federal grant to renovate and expand its Norwalk clinic, about 15 miles southeast of Skid Row.
“There’s also a special reimbursement that we get for each patient that has Medicare or Medi-Cal that exceeds what a doctor in private care would get,” said Dr. Paul Gregerson, medical director for the JWCH Institute.
This higher reimbursement allows clinics to build a team-based approach, or patient-centered medical home, emphasized under the Affordable Care Act. Under this model, patients see teams of caregivers from chronic disease specialists to social workers to nutritionists to clinical pharmacists.
“All these people … will be able to see the patient and we’ll be able to afford them because the overall visits when they do see the doctor will be reimbursed at a higher rate of pay,” Gregerson said. An added benefit, he said, is that the team approach allows primary care doctors to see more patients.
With all this federal money, community clinics are growing quickly, but this rapid growth is creating some anxiety.
“It’s creating a lot of tension because the growth has just been so fast,” said Melissa Schoen, an independent consultant for community health centers and foundations. “I think clinics are really struggling with this, the increase in demand they’ve been seeing and now getting ready for health reform and more and more patients potentially coming to them.”
Lauren M. Whaley is a reporter at the CHCF Center for Health Reporting, based at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. The center, which provides in-depth reporting on California health issues, is funded by the nonpartisan California HealthCare Foundation.
'Desert America' examines the boom and bust of the West
Ruben Martinez is a native Angeleno who's spent decades writing about immigration and Latin America. His previous books have chronicled everything from the music scene in San Salvador to the meat packing industry in Kansas.
In his new book, he turns his attention to the deserts of the American west: Joshua Tree, Northern New Mexico and Marfa, Texas. It's called "Desert America: Boom And Bust In The New Old West."
Interview Highlights:
On how the tech bubble of the 1990s reshaped the desert landscape:
“The pressure was on coastal cities, they were pushing people out, often times it was poor whites, working class African American, Latino, Asian, and that very diverse cohort started winding up in places like Las Vegas, Phoenix, Denver, Tucson, Albuquerque, the way I describe it in the book is kind of like a re-opening of the frontier in a reverse manifest destiny, in which the migrants that are arriving are actually refugees from the city of the coast, what do they start doing to the desert? Well the desert starts taking on a very different demographic look, its gets more diverse not that it didn’t have that before hand. Look at Las Vegas. Look at the politics that start changing along with the demographic change."
On the affect this has on the people who have lived there for generations:
"The indigenous cultures. There are three, the first peoples Native Americans, the Hispanos (Latinos), after 500 years I think they qualify as permanent residents of the area, and plenty of old Anglo ranching families… Each of these conquests deposits a new kind of migrant on the landscape, and there is no going back to what it was before. Now this new cohort with the new boom is really diverse socio-economically too. There are a lot of the people that are working class, and then there is the sort of one percent that is arriving in the desert as well. So there is working class family that moves into the cookie cutter subdivision on the outskirts of Albuquerque, but then there is the second home New Yorker who wants to winter in the Southwes. There is a huge gulf between them, talking about the one and the ninety-nine is completely applicable. We have perfected the one and the ninety-nine in the Southwest. Desert capitalism. The distance between the really rich and the really poor is so vast and the communication is non-existent.”
So what happens to the old culture, does it disappear?
“No. Absolutely not. It resists, it survives, it abides. In northern New Mexico the indigenous Hispano culture alongside the indigenous Native American culture is vibrant, it survives, it even thrives, because the stakes are so high now. The conquest via real estate speculation and the establishment of public lands like national forests is one thing, but cultural memory is something else. Cultural memory resides in a people’s soul. And they have held on and they have resisted and a lot of the resistance is cultural as well as political. A lot of the political class of the Southwest is Latino.”
On the different experiences between the city dwellers and immigrants from South of the border:
“Irony, if I arrived on this landscape thinking I would be received as a long lost brother to my brown-skinned Spanish surnamed brethren. Immigration in New Mexico became tremendously politicized, just in the last few years. The election of governor Susana Martinez heralded a completely new wrinkle in the immigration story. She has sponsored legislation kind of like Arizona SB1070 light, not quite as extreme, but still, wanting to row back everything. How did that happen? Why did she get elected on an anti-immigration wave by a huge Hispano population? It has to do with completely different experiences of being Latino on the landscape. We are not all the same, we diverse among ourselves too and Hispanos tend to wax conservative on issues like immigration and other things too. Hispanos voted for George Bush in 2004 strongly in New Mexico. We saw tremendous tension between the Hispano population and the recently arrived immigrants. One Spanish speaking one is English speaking, the food is different, the music is different, we saw fights breaking out in the high schools, very reminiscent of L.A. in many ways. Very complicated landscape for many people who would assume we would all just get along if we all have names like Garcia and Martinez."
On what happens to the people in the area if the real estate bubble bursts:
“The real estate boom never reached everybody. The riches. The new gilded age, the gap in income was growing throughout this period. The ninety-nine and the one, the distance between them was growing. The people were working harder for less money. The middle class was slipping down. There were blocks of foreclosures even in the working class areas, four or five houses on a block foreclosed. When the bust arrived we felt it. It reached into every corner of our lives. And the book tries to carve out the idea; do we really have to do it this way? Do we really have to have a boom and bust cycle over and over again? The “Desert of America” tells us that story, the cycle of boom and bust and how people are starting to dream of a way beyond that. We don’t need the desert of capitalism. The desert also offers wonderful traditions of hospitality and neighborliness in which people live together in harmony on a harsh landscape. That’s the thing about the desert, you can’t make it across the desert without the help of other pilgrims and the people who live there, and their knowledge of the place. That’s the story about the desert ultimately. It’s a place that is inhospitable in many ways, only made hospitable by the people that live there. The desert of the west tells us both how difficult it is to live but together we can survive it.”
On what's next for the desert cities in the American West:
“I am filled with a sense of hope for the West. We’ve bottomed out, the recovery is slow and uneven, and the country has been addicted to this cycle. The West knows that so deeply. The old boom economies were based on extractive industries: mining, oil, cattle ranching. And these led to huge run ups of speculation and then huge crashes. There is a new generation that has experienced this and it is a West whose demographic profile has changed profoundly. That in turn has had an impact on the political, the ideological landscape of the west. Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, all voted for Barack Obama in 2008, and those historically were huge turn arounds; for a democratic candidate to recapture those states was truly a reflection of who is living here now. Arizona, well yeah, it is representing the old West. Jan Brewer and SB1070, that is the last dying gasps of the old order. That is John Wayne riding off into the sunset and we are not gonna see him again. Arizona will turn blue within 10 years. There will a democratic governor and the state will vote blue in a presidential election within 10 years.”
Books and films to get you into the spirit of Dia de los Muertos
Our book critic David Kipen offers some reading and viewing suggestions to help you celebrate Dia de los Muertos, Day of the Dead, which begins today.