What are the rules when it comes to political campaigning in the workplace? It it even legal? Plus, in the new Mother Jones, Shane Bauer, an American formerly held prisoner in Iran, criticizes the use of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons. Then, how foreclosures are impacting likely voters this election season, Molly Peterson reports on Prop. 37, and whether the average American really cares whether food is genetically modified, and much more.
The rules of political campaigning in the workplace
Yesterday, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers association filed a lawsuit alleging that a Cal State professor used his university email address to fire off an email urging students to vote in favor of Governor Brown's Prop. 30 tax initiative.
Recently, the CEO of a tech company sent an email to employees which stated the future of the company may hinge on who they choose for president.
What are the rules when it comes to campaigning in the workplace?
For more we're joined by Thomas Ferguson, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
Home foreclosures impact the number of likely voters
Even in presidential election years, it's typical for just over half of the voting age population to actually cast a ballot. But what causes some people to get out and vote and others to skip an election?
People who are younger, poorer and less educated are less likely to turn out, and some new evidence shows the foreclosure crisis could be another factor.
As part of our election 20-12 coverage, Rachel Dornhelm of The California Report visited some communities hard hit by the housing crisis to find out why.
Former prisoner in Iran critical of America's use of solitary confinement
The issue of solitary confinement in California prisons came into sharp focus recently during a series of inmate hunger strikes. Just last month Amnesty International called the state's confinement of 3,000 prisoners in isolation units, "cruel, degrading and inhumane"
Shane Bauer agrees with that assessment. He's one of three American hikers imprisoned by Iranian security forces in 2009 after being accused of spying for the United States.
Bauer spent more than two years in prison and was released last fall. He's back in the United States and is working as a freelance journalist. His first piece appears in Mother Jones magazine and it compares the conditions in California's prisons to those in Iran.
Frank Stoltze asks voters 'what's your issue?' at Carolyn's Cafe in Redlands
There are two initiatives on the November ballot that would reform California's criminal justice system: Props 34 and 36.
Proposition 34 would eliminate the death penalty and replace it with life in prison without the possibility of parole. Proposition 36 would revise the state's three strikes law. It would require the third strike to be a serious or violent crime. Currently non violent crimes can be counted as third strikes
To hear which way voters are leaning on these and other issues, we turn now to KPCC's political reporter Frank Stoltze, who has set up shop at Carolyn's Cafe in Redlands.
Click here to see full coverage of Frank's meetings with voters
BBC series 'Call the Midwife' tops ratings for 'Downton Abbey' in UK
"Downtown Abbey" what? Dowager Countess who?
The most popular show in Britain these days is "Call the Midwife."
The show is based on the memoirs of Jenny Worth, who worked as a midwife in London's East End during the 1950s.
The new BBC show’s blockbuster ratings outpaced those for the first season of "Downtown Abbey."
Julia Raeside, who writes about TV for The Guardian, says that fans enjoy the warm friendships between women portrayed on the show. There's also a heart-warming birth or two on each episode.
But anything saccharine on the show is countered by graphic depictions of childbirth and women's health issues.
"Call the Midwife" is airing on PBS now. Here's the first episode.
Watch Episode 1 on PBS. See more from Call the Midwife.
Guest:
Julia Raeside, who writes about TV for The Guardian.
The butler surge: Why fancy assistance is on the rise in Russia, China and Brazil
Call it the "Downton Abbey" effect — there's been an increased demand for butlers around the world.
A growing number of extremely rich, particularly in countries like Russia, China and Brazil, are looking to hire a trusty attendant with fastidious attention to detail and decorum.
We speak to Anthony Seddon-Holland, a butler who is also the director of the British Butlers Guild. His training courses have been booked through to the next year.
Disney's first Latina princess under scrutiny
Well, we're moving up the social ranks here: from butlers to midwives to ... Princesses.
Disney has a new one and she's already coming under scrutiny. Princess Sofia will join the small but growing ranks of Disney's ethnic princesses. That list already includes Tiana, Mulan and Pocahontas.
But Sofia is the first Latina princess. She'll come to the Disney Channel next month in an appropriately titled film, "Sofia The First: Once Upon A Princess."
KPCC's Leslie Berestein-Rojas of the Multi-American blog joins the show to discuss the criticism surrounding this new Disney character.
So, it's hard to believe after all this time that this is the first Latina princess
"Right? And the fact that it has taken so long for Disney to do this I think means that this princess is really loaded with expectations ... and of course, she's not enchanting everyone. As you mentioned there's already a fair amount of controversy brewing around her."
Well before we talk about that, just tell me a little bit more about her character. Who is she? What's her story?
"She's a young girl whose whose mother marries the king of a place called Enchancia, making her a princess and she's sort of navigating this 'commoner-turned-princess' experience."
What is the controversy about?
"For starters, while the character is supposed to be Latina, Disney executives say they don't plan to make a point of her ethnicity. One of them told Entertainment Weekly that, 'It's sort of a matter-of-fact situation, rather than an overt thing.'"
What does that mean?
"Well, viewers will know that Sofia's mother's name is Miranda, and that Miranda has a darker complexion than her daughter, nothing out of the ordinary in Latino families because we're all multi-hued. Queen Miranda will have been born in a fictional country called Galdiz, which a Disney spokesperson said has 'Latin influences,' whatever that is. But the biggest flap seems to be over her appearance. Sofia has medium-brown hair and blue eyes, now bear in mind, there are plenty of Latinas who look like this, but some critics say that's not representative of the darker-skinned, darker-eyed majority, at least as it exists in places like Southern California. It also bring up the question of, just what does a Latino look like?"
I don't know if we have time in the entirety of the show to answer that
"Right - It sort of depends on where you are. There are lots of Latinas in the Caribbean who look, say, like Princess Tiana from 'The Princess and the Frog,' who is black. There are people who look like Sofia. In fact, I'd say I look a little like Sofia, although my eyes are brown. But there's truth to the fact that at least in the United States, there is a perception of Latinos — at least the majority of Latinos, who here in the Southwest are mostly of Mexican descent — as people with dark hair and olive skin."
And critics say this should be taken into account when creating a Latina Disney princess. As one critic I spoke with put it yesterday, 'Nobody had any problem with Dora.' Though no one really knows where Dora the Explorer is from, either. I've always thought Central America, but I could be wrong."
Release of so-called 'perversion files' sends shockwave through Boy Scouts organization
Yesterday more than 14,000 pages from the organizations so called "Perversion files" were released to the public. These files reveal the names of suspected child molesters who worked in the organization dating back to the 70s.
In many cases these people were never reported to the police or charged with a crime. Jason Felch has been following this story for the Los Angeles Times and he joins us now in studio.
If you or your family have been involved in the Boy Scouts, we'd love to hear how you feel about the release of this information. Follow the link to join our Public Insight Network. Responses to our questions are confidential, so nothing you share will be aired or published without your permission.
ProPublica analyzes how political campaigns tailor email messages to potential voters
This morning, the Obama campaign confirmed that Wednesday was their biggest single day of fundraising ever.
But they aren't releasing an actual figure. While the president's performance at Tuesday's debate probably had something to with it — the campaign's email fundraising efforts also likely played a key role.
Both candidates use sophisticated programs to tailor messages based on age, location, and income.
But little is known about how they gather their data and how they use it. To help figure that out, the journalism non-profit ProPublica has started collecting and analyzing campaign e-mails for a project they've dubbed The Message Machine.
ProPublica's Jeff Larson joins the show, you can help him decode political e-mails be forwarding him yours. The address is emails@messagemachine.propublica.org. Click here to go the the ProPublica Message Machine Project.
The Dinner Party: Blue honey, kidnapping and posture happiness
The Dinner Party guys are back. This week Brendan Francis Newnam and Rico Gagliano talk about blue honey, a Getty family kidnapping and how standing up straight can make you a happier person.
At 50, Madeleine L'Engle's 'A Wrinkle In Time' gets the graphic-novel treatment
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the classic children’s novel, "A Wrinkle In Time." In her dark and complex work, author Madeleine L’Engle introduced young readers to Meg Murry and her brother, Charles Wallace.
The book follows the Murry kids through time and space as they seek to rescue their father, a government scientist held prisoner on another planet.
It was a dark and stormy night. In her attic bedroom, Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind.
I don’t remember if it was a dark and stormy night when I first picked up "A Wrinkle In Time" as a girl. But I know I felt a kinship with the people in it, the same way LA-based cartoonist Hope Larson says she did. Larson has adapted "A Wrinkle In Time" as a graphic novel.
“The Murrys are messy and, like, angry, and they just have issues,” Larson says.
Two dozen publishers rejected "A Wrinkle In Time" before it found its way to bookstores. In a recording made shortly before she died Madeleine L’Engle talked about why.
“[T]he general feeling was that it was much too hard for children,” L’Engle says, disdain audible in her voice. “Too many grownups tend to put themselves into little rooms with windows that don’t open.”
But millions of kids like me and Hope Larson, who soared on thoughts of time travel, and weren’t freaked out by quotes from Dante and references to Copernicus, were glad L’Engle wrote the book.
“I was definitely an introverted, awkward kid. And I, you know, I’m still that person,” she says.
L’Engle’s ugly-duckling heroine, Meg, has brown eyes behind thick glasses…is good at math and terrible at geography. Hope Larson loves Meg’s darkness.
“One of the big things about Meg that appeals to me so much is that she’s angry,” Larson says. (YES!) “She’s angry a lot of the time. She’s not comfortable with herself physically, or she’s worried about school. She’s bad at a lot of things.”
Larson consulted Sears catalogs from the period to give Meg bobbed hair and period-correct clothes. As she reread the story, she remembered that it takes off just after Meg gets into a fistfight with a boy at school.
“I never thought about the fact that she had a black eye until I had to draw this book,” she says.
As she got deeper into the project, Larson had to forget some things, too. One time her editor let slip L’Engle had never wanted "A Wrinkle In Time" illustrated. Larson was stunned.
“That was my big stumbling block. That I was going to be the person that was going to take this on and mess it up,” she says, adding that she didn’t say anything to her editor during lunch about it.
She used the information to steel herself for criticism she feared online. “There’s always this group of people who say, something’s going to be ruined when there’s a new interpretation of it. Which is a frustrating thing because if you’re the person doing the adaptation, you think, the original novel still exists and is perfect and I like to think I’m not tainting that.”
In fact, Larson’s best pages transcend L’Engle’s language. She says that’s an advantage of working in the comic book format.
“Where an image falls on a page, where a page falls on a spread, can really affect your story telling. The idea is basically that you turn the page and bam! The thing on the next page is going to blow your mind,” Larson says. “It’s almost like a movie. The physical act of turning a page is a really important part of comics.”
Take this excerpt of the book. (The audiobook is read by actress Hope Davis.) Late in the story, a creature named Aunt Beast is singing to a sick Meg Murry to prepare her for a final battle to save her family.
It was a music more tangible than form or sight. It had essence and structure. It seemed to travel with her, to sweep her aloft in the power of song.
Larson’s full-page illustration is more grounded, and yet reaches for the imagination in a wholly different way than L’Engle’s words do. A full panel, black and white, with blue accents, shows a weakened Meg in bed, a furry faceless creature bent over her. Above them, in a formless bubble, floats an imagined Meg. Larson has drawn her strong again, and happy.
“This part where Aunt Beast sings to Meg was an opportunity for me to do something really interesting because you cannot draw music,” she says.
Larson’s 392-page comic-style adaptation of "A Wrinkle In Time" is something of an outlier. A decade ago, graphic novels were booming; Larson had three books published as part of her first book deal. Now they’re sort of petering out.
Larson says she’s burned out on the form after adapting "A Wrinkle In Time," but she says she’d like to return to it in the future.
“One of the things I really love about comics is it’s like getting to see the person’s handwriting,” she says. “You learn something more about the creator than you would I think if you were reading a novel that’s typeset.”
Hope Larson will be signing copies of her graphic novel adaptation of "A Wrinkle In Time" tonight at 7 p.m. at Secret Headquarters on Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake.
Friday Flashback: Debate No. 2, Google earnings and Newsweek changes
Joining us for this edition of Friday Flashback, L.A. Times political columnist James Rainey and Meagan McArdle, special correspondent for Newsweek and the Daily Beast.
Part III: Do most people care if their food is genetically engineered?
This is part III in a three-part series on Prop. 37. Click here for part I and here for part II.
It’s harvest time at Greg Palla’s Bakersfield farm. Big green machines scrape along rows of his cotton crop, gathering plant fiber and seeds — fiber for clothes, seeds for cottonseed oil, which is used in products from salad dressing to fried foods. Palla stops one harvester to open a small door in the front.
"There are literally thousands of spindles," he says, pointing. "And there are probably over 100,000 moving parts to this harvest equipment."
If prop 37 passes, Palla says he would have to declare under penalty of law that genetically modified cotton and non-GMO cotton aren’t comingled. But with all the places where the seeds could get stuck in his harvesters...
"We couldn’t do that!" he says.
Nearby, packing machines press gathered cotton into dense rectangles that ride on trucks to a cotton gin.
Palla says passage of Prop. 37 would force him to buy separate harvesters, handlers and storage facilities, at a cost of up to half-a-million dollars. That’s because he figures at least some of his clients would want only non-genetically modified cottonseed. Though, he's not sure.
"We don’t have controls over what the downstream supply chain does with the product after it leaves the farm," says Palla.
California’s market is enormous, he says, so opting out of prop 37 ‘s requirements isn’t an option.
"Oh, oh no no no no," he says. "If I said, no I’m not going to sign a statement like this, then effectively the supply chain serving the California market would say, okay, sorry, we’re not going to buy your crop, try to sell it somewhere else."
At the other end of the food supply chain, grocery stores worry that they’ll be liable for labeling 70,000 to 100,000 products, the typical number they carry. Michael Steel, a lawyer with Morrison & Foerster, says that puts pressure on his clients, including independent grocery stores plentiful in the L.A. area.
"Big grocers might be able to pull that off with enough time and money," Steel says. "I don’t think that the corner market’s ever going to be able to do that. So they’re really sitting ducks for this kind of nuisance lawsuit."
Steele says the economic risk for grocers is compounded by the fact that anyone could sue over bad labeling.
"The person does not have to have purchased the product. Doesn’t have to have seen the label. Doesn’t have to have relied on the label. They don’t have to have suffered any actual physical or economic harm," Steel says.
Proposition 37 pits a mostly grassroots campaign of consumers against high-profile money from Monsanto and General Mills. California farmers and grocers are speaking out against the measure; they say they’re worried about what would happen if the measure passes, too.
But Stacy Malkan with the Yes on 37 campaign says Steele and others blow the threat of lawsuits and costs way out of proportion. And she insists that the labeling requirement for grocers would not be onerous.
"A grocer would be responsible for literally sticking a sign with scotch tape on the bin saying genetically engineered," she says, "that’s all they have to do."
The text of the measure doesn’t explicitly say who’s responsible for what. Legal experts suggest that those issues will be sorted out in future court cases.
Malkan also argues other markets haven’t experienced cost catastrophes from labeling GMOs.
"It’s already in place in 61 other countries, costs didn’t go up in those countries and they won’t go up here."
The difference in the United States is that the vast majority of American crops and foods now have GMOs in them. Sourcing GMO-free here would take more work than in Europe.
"To get that you’re actually going to have to pay more out of your pocket," says Oklahoma State agricultural economist Jayson Lusk.
In the U.S., Lusk anticipates competitive interaction among big food brands will be complex. So, maybe cereal brands will change their recipes to avoid genetically engineered labeling. But do people who eat Fritos really care if they’re made with GMO corn?
"And it’s not necessarily a question of necessarily whether they want to avoid genetically modified ingredients per se," he says. "It’s how Frito lay thinks about how much market share it could lose to competitors if they offer an equivalent kind of chip that says it’s not with GE ingredients."
Frito Lay and other big companies aren’t talking – another reason nobody is quite sure how food markets will absorb prop 37. NYU food policy expert Marion Nestle backs labeling, as a common-sense benefit to consumers. But even she’s not sure how consumers will use the information.
"Most people won’t care," she guesses. "Consumers say they want labeling, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to act one way or another as a result of it."
Supporters of the initiative say that, in the end, Prop. 37 is worth any inconvenience or extra cost to farmers or producers, or even consumers. What’s most important, they say, is that people know what’s in their food.
On a tower of guesses about California’s food industry and proposition 37, the guess about how labeling GMOs could change the way Californians buy food may be the most important of all.