Today, Obama is in Florida drumming up support in a key swing state. Plus, new polling suggests that the majority of voters don't support Gov. Brown's Prop. 30. tax measure, A new prison healthcare facility in Stockton hopes to end federal oversight of prisoner medical care, California state regulators meet today to discuss tightening regulations on compounding pharmacies, plus much more.
New polls show most voters don't support Gov. Brown's Prop 30 tax measure
First, a look at the ballot here in California. New polls show the majority of voters do not support Prop 30, Jerry Brown's tax initiative.
The measure would boost the state's sales tax a quarter of a cent and temporarily increase taxes on people who earn more than $250,000 a year. the Governor says that if Prop 30 fails, there will be major cuts to the state's education system.
For more analysis, we turn now to Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a senior fellow at USC Price School of Public Policy.
President Obama drums up support in Florida as election looms
It’s only days to go before Election Day, and Take Two heads to Florida where a mountain of ads, fiery DVDs, and fierce campaigns have swept over the state.
President Obama will spend part of his day in Tampa, Florida today. The Sunshine State has 29 electoral college votes and the latest polls show Romney leading by a razor-thin margin.
For more on the ground war, we turn now to Marc Caputo, political writer for the Miami Herald.
CA officials to ready nation’s largest prison healthcare facility
Seven years ago, a federal judge seized control of California’s prison healthcare system because one inmate was dying each week from neglect. The judge appointed a federal receiver, Clark Kelso, to fix the failing system.
Now, Kelso is allowing the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to take charge of opening the nation’s largest prison medical facility by next July. How well it accomplishes the task will determine how soon a federal judge might end his oversight of prison medical care.
Kelso says opening the new facility in Stockton is a critical step, and delegating the task to CDCR will test the department's resolve to reach a higher standard of care.
"We’re going to find out: Can CDCR hire 2,000 people, do all the procurements that have to get done, actually get people moved in, do the training, get all the supervisors in place, get all the written local policies done?" Kelso said. "There’s a lot that has to get done."
The 144-acre medical hub will house 1,700 inmates too sick to live in regular prisons. Those inmates, who require 24-hour care, are crowding out others who need lower levels of medical attention. Some end up being sent to outside hospitals at a cost of up to $1,500 a day for the state.
"We're generally concerned about the CDCR's ability to handle this critical task," said Don Specter, an attorney with the Prison Law Office, which sued the state to improve medical care for inmates. Specter says letting the Corrections department handle the start-up of the Stockton facility will be a good measure of its ability to manage a complex and large operation before regaining control of the entire prison medical system.
"It directly affects the lives and well-being of tens of thousands of prisoners," Specter said, "and if it’s done wrong, we’ve seen from history that many prisoners will die of malpractice and neglect. And we don't want that to happen again."
If the Department of Corrections successfully opens the Stockton facility, the federal receiver will give more control of prison healthcare back to the state. Kelso says a good way to measure the state’s performance is whether they meet multiple deadlines to open the facility on time.
"You were able to bring on 500 employees by this date, or not," Kelso says. "And if you lose a day, the rest of your schedule slips."
The Corrections department will also manage renovation of the adjacent Dewitt facility in Stockton, and $750 million in renovations for medical clinics at prisons.
The change takes effect Thursday.
A spokesman for the Department of Corrections declined to comment for this story. The Secretary of Corrections, Matthew Cate, has maintained for many years that California’s prisons already provide good healthcare to inmates, and that the state is ready to resume control.
Should CA tighten restrictions on compounding pharmacies?
Today in Sacramento, state regulators are meeting to discuss tightening regulations on compounding pharmacies. This comes after 24 people died and more than 300 became ill after receiving contaminated steroid injections produced at a pharmacy in Massachusetts.
Here in California, public health officials estimate that about 600 patients received contaminated injections from that facility, but so far no one here has fallen ill.
Could the deaths have been prevented by stricter regulations on compounding pharmacies?
Here to help us answer that question is Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
State accused of denying seniors day care access
More than 2,000 seniors are trying to get back into a state program that gives them physical therapy, mental health treatment and a chance to socialize.
Budget cuts forced state officials to tighten the eligibility requirements for its adult day care program known as Community Based Adult Services.
Now, a federal judge is expected to weigh in on whether these seniors — who've been waiting for months — should be reinstated. The California Report's Health Reporter Mina Kim explains.
Home foreclosures on the decline in California, but for how long?
A new RealtyTrac survey shows home foreclosures in Los Angeles have dropped to their lowest levels in five years. Prices are starting to firm up too.
We turn to KPCC’s Matt DeBord to find out if this is a turning point, or maybe just another false start on the road to a housing recovery.
How will Obama, Romney address the housing crisis?
Talk of housing has largely been absent from the presidential campaign until recently.
Mitt Romney declared he would fix the housing crisis during a Wednesday trip to Nevada, which has been particularly hard-hit by the mortgage crisis.
Also on Wednesday, the Financial Times reported that Obama, if re-elected, would get rid of the controversial official overseeing Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
We talk to Shahien Nasiripour, the FT reporter who broke the story.
White House builds secret 'disposition matrix' to track terrorist targets
As the U.S. begins to scale down its military presence in Afghanistan, it appears that the so called "war on terrorism" is also winding down.
But the U.S. has a secret blueprint in place called the "disposition matrix" which includes the names of all known terrorists. These names will remain targets for many years to come, and the White House, CIA and other counterterrorism agencies are declining to comment in the issue.
Guest:
Greg Miller, Washington Post intelligence reporter
Will attack on consulate in Libya mar Hillary Clinton's diplomatic legacy?
Hillary Clinton is set to walk out of the State Department for the last time in January. Up until a few weeks ago, her term as Secretary of State was going smoothly. She enjoyed high approval ratings and is widely seen as more popular than the president.
But then the attack on a U.S. consulate in Libya happened and opened up questions as to why terrorists were able to kill the U.S. ambassador and three others, all on Hillary Clinton's watch.
For the first time, she left the door open to possibly extending her term as Secretary of State, telling the Wall Street Journal that staying on would be "unlikely" but that plenty of people are asking her to stay.
Monica Langley is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. She's been traveling with Hillary Clinton.
Venezuelan Pablo Sandoval makes history with three homeruns in World Series game
Now a follow up to a segment we did on yesterday's show about the popularity of baseball in Venezuela.
As we reported, it's been a banner year for Venezuelan baseball players with nine men from that country currently playing in the World Series.
Well, last night in Game 1, Giants third baseman Pablo Sandoval made Venezolanos proud with a historic game at the plate. Sandoval became only the 4th player in baseball history to hit three homeruns in a World Series game.
The Giants beat the Tigers 8-3, game 2 is tonight in San Francisco.
New Earth-size planet found orbiting Alpha Centauri B
Perhaps our dream of traveling to a planet outside our solar system is just a bit closer to becoming reality. Last week, astronomers discovered a planet circling around the star Alpha Centauri B.
It's close, in astronomical terms that is, at only 4.3 light years away. However, this new planet is too hot for life; Its proximity to its star makes its surface around 2,200 degrees.
Scientists hope that there are other similar planets orbiting this star in the so-called "Goldilocks Zone," where the right temperature and proximity to a star equals the existence of water and the other elements of life.
How parents unwittingly fall into 'The Gender Trap' when raising children
At baby showers all over America, it's almost always the same: blue for boys, pink for girls. But what if a choice as simple as baby clothes can lead to gender inequality in adults?
We talk with Dr. Emily Kane, a professor of sociology and author of "The Gender Trap: Parents and the Pitfalls of Raising Boys and Girls."
Interview Highlights:
What's wrong with pink for girls and blue for boys?
"I think in some ways it seems like just a trivial, harmless thing, but in fact it ends up being the first step in a process that really ends up constraining kids and constraining all of us in the long run.
How can these gendered colors constrain our kids?
Let me start with the idea that what animated my interest in doing this project was an interest in the gender inequalities that persist in the adult world that I think a lot of us are familiar with. The wage gap that tends to return greater earnings to men than women, the occupational segregation that makes it difficult to pursue a wide range of career options, and a whole lot of other intersecting inequalities. I was interested in trying to think about the ways those trace back in some ways to really minor-seeming things earlier in life."
How can you make that correlation between infancy to adulthood?
"I Interviewed parents from a wide variety of backgrounds about how they think about their children's gender, and one of the things that was striking me was the ways in which most people were, at least to some extent, reinforcing traditional patterns like preparing their girls more for the sort of nurturance we associate with parenting, and preparing their boys more for the kind of competition we might associate with the work place of politics or the public sphere, in effect. I think in some ways even those early decisions on whether you're going to encourage your daughter to hold a doll and nurture it, whether your'e going to encourage your son to be competitive in sports, to be more independent, to be outside with a wider range of activity can end up reinforcing paths that lead women to have more obligations for family care, for example, and I should say in some ways really constrain boys and men too."
Do most parents do this on purpose?
"I think they fall into these traps without even knowing they're doing it. What I was so struck by was that often parents were trying to lead their kids someplace very different, very much more open and full of possibilities but along the way a variety of different things would in effect trip them up and they'd find themselves back in that trap. Sometimes because they assumed it was inevitable, sometimes because they assumed it was natural, but also sometimes because the small decisions didn't feel like they were going to have any long term consequences."
What are some main gender traps that parents fall into?
"One of the traps I focus on in the book is assuming all these gendered outcomes in childhood, the different attributes we notice for boys and girls are fixed in nature. If you look at them that way, its pretty likely that you're not going to feel even possibly like you could resist them nor maybe even like you should. But I think another trap is some of the unconscious actions that research has documented but most parents probably don't know about. Some of the ways that we are more soft and quiet in talking with girls than with boys, some of the ways we're inclined to give boys a greater range of motion."
How has this been shown in a scientific setting?
"A really interesting experimental study I read had parents in a laboratory setting with toddlers and gave them an incline to set and they were asked to set it at a level that would be challenging. Parents set it higher for toddler boys than toddler girls even though there were no physical differences between those children, so sometimes it's unconscious. But I also think that sometimes it's that giving in, that sense of inevitability, the feeling that you can't push back against what a child's peers are encouraging. That will sometimes trap people as well.
How do outside judgments affect how parents treat their children?
"The thing I got most interested in as I got deeper into the research was how many people felt trapped by the judgments and the responses from other people around them. So they might want…to allow those things, but they're worried about how other kids, other parents and society in general might respond to their kids if they let that happen."
Does parental desire for a son or daughter have an effect on reinforcing gender norms?
"What was striking to me was how deeply traditional their reasons for those preferences were and what I mean by that was, for example, a lot of people talked about wanting a daughter because the activities they enjoy that only a daughter would enjoy as well, or activities that only a son would enjoy as well. So simple as it seems, if I were to say to you, 'I'd really like to have a daughter because I like to go shopping and I want someone to go shopping with me,' and a surprising number of mothers actually said that, then I'm already constructing the assumption that boys don't like to shop and girls do and I think that phenomenon, which I write about as gendered anticipation, has some real impact on the other side."
How important are gendered toys in reinforcing these ideas?
"I think that gender marking in toys is still very much with us, and in some ways I think it is even more with us than it once was. In my opinion, as a sociologist, that marking is part of what constructs these categories that seem so different. We begin to feel, because we engage in this social practice, of using different colors giving different toys to boys and girls, it just reaffirms our sense that they're deeply different but maybe, partly, they seem so different because we're giving them different things. As we engage in that process, we're constructing these categories of boys and girls and kind of convincing ourselves that it's inevitable."
What do you hope this book will help parents learn?
"One of my hopes with this book is that if parents and educators and people who are concerned about children read it or think about the issues, that we may realize there are more of us who want to see some kind of relaxing of those constraints that we might otherwise realize, so in that sense it would't be so hard to swim up stream."
What would you say is a good gender-neutral baby shower gift?
"I always try to bring things that are neutral colors. I don't judge other people's desire to use pink and blue I would just love to see us all shake it up more often so that when pink and blue come along, that's fine, because its just part of a wide range of possibilities for what one might bring. So I always when it comes to babies try to bring neutral colors and toys and objects I think would be interesting to any small human being."