Patt Morrison

Every day, Patt posts her thoughts on day's broadcast of Patt Morrison. You can post questions or comments about any of the day's topics. We may quote selected comments on the air.

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Latest Entries
Al Gore and Google -- Hit the ''Listen'' Key!

Nov. 12, 2009|Patt Morrison|0 comments

Newsweek's cover boy this week is ''The Thinking Man's Thinking Man'' -- former vice president Al Gore. We snagged him for more than a half-hour about his new book Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis [recycled paper and carbon offsets].

It's a wheels-on-the-ground plan for putting into practice all of the ideas for hitting the brakes on global warming, from top-down policies on fuels to one-man, one-recycling-can solutions that anyone can embrace. He also took on population growth, which has been a bit of a third rail in any discussion of restraining the human uses of resources.

To one listener's question about the green firms he's been investing in, he said that had he put his money elsewhere, he'd be accused of hypocrisy. And he roundly criticized the ''insane'' business policy -- clocking in at 80% of CEOs and CFOs in a recent poll -- of companies refusing to spend any money on long-term, money-saving factory efficiency improvements if that meant a drop of even a couple of percentage points in the next three months' profits. Talk about the grasshoppers and the ants.

As to why fewer Americans believe global warming is real than did three years ago, he pointed out the intense pushback from some corporations and ideological groups, some of whose ads appear in the book, with phrases like ``Some say the earth is warming -- Some also said the earth was flat,'' and other sloganeering.

The former VP is heading to Copenhagen for next month's climate conference, and I expect we'll hear what he has to say there, too.

And Ken Auletta, who writes about media for The New Yorker, unearthed great stories in ''Googled The End of the World as We Know It.'' It's practically a book of anthropology about the Google culture and the men who created it, Larry Page and Sergey Brin who are brilliant engineers but with little knowledge of matters of public policy, politics and the like. The whole ''information should be free'' theory came into focus for Auletta when Brin roller-bladed into a meeting with him, and asked Auletta why he wrote a book -- why not just put it online for free, and get more readers?

I know these guys are regarded as geniuses, but really: Auletta actually had to explain to Brin that writing the book was a job, and he had to be paid for that job, and all the time it took to research and write it, and that's why books are for sale and not for free.

Maybe life looks a bit different when you have a dozen billion bucks in the bank.

Next time, former GOP congressman Dick Armey is helping to lead the Tea Party charge against health care reform, taxes, you name it. And in its first day on the shelves, a new gunslinging video game sells more than $300 million worth -- more than many blockbuster films make, ever.

-- Patt Morrison

Veterans Day and the Debt Owed to Vets, and the National Debt -- Your Share of the Bill is $31,000 and Counting

Nov. 11, 2009|Patt Morrison|0 comments

I'd like to tell you how big the national debt is, but by the time I'd finish typing it out, it would already have risen by several million dollars.

The 12 trillion dollars works out to about $31,000 for every single American. It's looming out there like the iceberg ahead of the Titanic, and when the country hits it -- as baby boomers begin collecting Social Security and Medicare and government spending goes up while taxes do not -- it could sink us.

For most of an hour we talked to the members of the ''Fiscal Wakeup Tour,'' who I assigned roles as bassist, keyboards, vocals and drums, but who really represent ideologically wide-ranging groups from the Brookings institution to the American Enterprise Institute. The Concord Coalition should be the percussionist because it's been beating the national-debt drum for some years now. Each of the four agreed that there's no dispute over the arithmetic -- only the ideology, and whether political leaders and citizens will have the guts to cut spending and raise taxes.

Again, for most of an hour, we reflected on Veterans' Day -- Armistice Day, as it was known first, to commemorate the end of the First World War. We heard first from Matt Flavin. He is 29, a former Navy SEAL and veteran of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now he directs the White House Office of Veterans and Wounded Warrior policy, and he's not shy about telling President Obama how to deliver on his promises about seeing to the needs of veterans, who tend to have a higher rate of homelessness and joblessness than the rest of the population.

We also talked to vets at VFW posts in Santa Clarita and Canoga Park about what this day means to them and what more this country and its citizens could do to on the home front -- it's a lot more than yellow ribbons.

Next time, former vice president Al Gore sizes up how this nation is coming to terms with global warming and how he expects next month's climate summit in Copenhagen to go, and New Yorker writer Ken Auletta takes us into the virtual world of Google, the phenom that he says changed the world.

-- Patt Morrison

Meaties, or Wheaties? Vegetarianism Passes the Nutrition Test. Can Carnivores Pass the Moral One?

Nov. 9, 2009|Patt Morrison|0 comments

Maybe all the carnivores were at their favorite burger spots, but we heard from loads of vegetarians and even some vegans calling about a new study by the American Dietetic Association, finding that not only can a vegetarian diet give you the same nutritional values as a diet with meat and poultry in it, it can even have health benefits, especially when it comes to heart health.

The study also found that children brought up as vegetarians -- meaning eating real vegetarian foods, not just snack foods and sodas -- can actually be better off than their peers when it comes to childhood obesity. Reed Mangels, the co-author of the paper, is a dietitian and nutritionist who's raised her two children as vegans, and spent a good hunk of time answering your questions about varieties of protein from vegetarian sources, especially for kids.

The other ''trigger'' to this topic, besides the study, is Jonathan Safran Foer's book, ''Eating Animals.'' As he told me, the book isn't so much about turning people into vegetarians as it is about making sure people know just what happens to put that chicken breast or burger on your plate.

Raising animals for meat is the single biggest contributor to greenhouse gases -- bigger even than driving cars -- because it takes up space, and uses up water in vast amounts, and animal waste is a huge polluter of rivers and groundwater. Pound for pound, it is far more expensive and exponentially less efficient as a protein source than vegetable protein.

As for the creatures themselves, a lot of people would rather not know what it takes to get it to your plate. It isn't just the ten minutes of ''torture'' that animals suffer as they die in the slaughterhouse -- that's Foer's word, describing the animals who are sometimes being skinned and cut to pieces while they're still alive. It's the ``factory farming,'' a phenomenon that didn't exist until 1923, that circumscribes the cruelty of their lives -- chickens get their beaks cut off, and live stacked six cages deep in wire cages the size of a sheet of paper; cows never set foot on grass but are locked into stalls and fed remains of dead dogs, cats and even other cows; piglets, which have the intelligence of two-year-old children, are ''thumped'' to death on the floor.

As hard as these things are merely to read, Foer argues, imagine what pain and suffering these creatures have to endure. He argues that if you eat meat in any form, directly or in products that use meat by-products [and they show up in places you don't suspect], you cannot refuse to know these consequences of your purchases and eating habits: that every time you down a piece of meat or poultry, you cannot dodge your moral or ethical role in that meat, as a citizen, a consumer, and a sentient being.

Next time, Americans spend $34 billion a year on alternative treatments and remedies. Do they work, and are they safe?

-- Patt Morrison

The New LAPD Chief, and Finding Love at the Animal Shelter

Nov. 5, 2009|Patt Morrison|1 comment

Police chief-designate Charlie Beck won't officially become the next chief of the LAPD until the City Council votes on November 19, but as council president Eric Garcetti told me earlier this week, he wouldn't be surprised if the vote is unanimous.

Chief Beck joined me in what I hope will continue the tradition of ''Ask the Chief'' segments we began with Chief Bill Bratton. Chief Beck is an LAPD ''lifer,'' and his family has three generations in the department. He talked about being a bottom-up kind of chief, and certainly he's worked his way up through the ranks, in the busy South Bureau, among other assignments, and undertaking a cleanup of the Rampart Division after that scandal.

He talked about the value of transparency, about the changes wrought by the federal consent decrees the department had operated under, about his love of his championship Motocross pursuits, and his wife's love of horses, in which his role mostly involves a ''one-wheeled'' implement -- a wheelbarrow -- and mucking out the stalls. Good preparation, he joked, for his job.

The Nobel laureate novelist Orhan Pamuk waxed lyrical -- of course! -- about his love for storytelling, both when he heard them recounted by his grandmother as he was growing up in Istanbul, and the stories he now writes. He also had thoughtful things to say about how even writers of literary fiction find themselves expected to address political issues -- something he's done, even in the face of criticism, in his native Turkey, when it comes to sensitive topics like the treatment of Kurds and the Armenian genocide.

For National Animal Shelter Appreciation week, I asked you for your stories about creatures you've rescued from shelters -- and who have turned out to be wonderfully enriching in your lives. Our engineer and I couldn't meet each other's eyes when we heard from Lorena in Burbank, who started talking about her own beloved rescue dog and was so moved she began crying. We were afraid we would, too!

Loads of you called with other pet-testimonials, and as a dog rescuer, I still want to hear them all -- cats, dogs, birds, horses, snakes, pigs. Please blog your November valentine to your little loved one on the Patt Morrison page.

Next time: maybe you were in Berlin in 1989 for the fall of the Wall. I was. Let's share some stories, shall we? My photos from that world-changing event will be on our website on Friday. [Yes, I know, you can see my shadow in my pictures; what can I say? I'm no Ansel Adams. I'm not even Weegee.]

''Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me'' is pitching its tent here in Los Angeles, and Peter Sagal and Carl Kasell will be here with me at KPCC. Got limericks?

-- Patt Morrison

Sheriff Joe and Senator Max -- hot stuff

Nov. 2, 2009|Patt Morrison|3 comments


Max Cleland is the former U.S. senator from Georgia, a Vietnam vet who lost three of his four limbs at Khe Sahn when a green private didn't secure the pins on his grenades. And he's the politician whose supporters say he got swiftboated two years before John Kerry, when Republicans ran an ad with his picture alongside Osama bin Laden's and Saddam Hussein's, implicitly impugning his patriotism; an enraged John McCain called the ad ''reprehensible.''

As Cleland himself explained the election to me, ''Georgia had a senior moment.'' His book, ''Heart of a Patriot,'' isn't just about the 2002 election, but about his early commitment to politics -- lettering Stevenson-for-president signs with his mother's lipstick -- and to military service.

The youngest-ever head of the VA is still working on behalf of better treatment for his fellow veterans, and isn't hesitant about sizing up U.S. interests at home and abroad, like the Afghanistan war, in which, he says, we shouldn't be trying to turn Afghanistan into the 51st state.

Just as lively was Joe Arpaio, the elected sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, since 1993. He's the man who put jail inmates in pink underwear, cut them back to two meals a day, put them on chain gangs and has ardently gone after finding illegal immigrants. A new Justice Department rule would, by most interpretations, confine the sheriff's hunt for illegal immigrants to those who come through his jail system -- but he says other laws are on his side.

Arpaio, who revels in the description someone gave him as ''America's toughest sheriff,'' disputes an Arizona newspaper's Pulitzer Prize-winning findings that the illegal immigrant effort has lengthened lawmen's response times and left some violent crimes unsolved -- his language on this is a lot saltier than mine. And he will indeed be running for reelection in 2012, he assured me -- he'll be 80 years old.

Next time, the governor of Maine is with me, on the day that state votes on whether to repeal a same-sex marriage law he signed, and the author of a new book about the operations of the Secret Service shares some secrets and assesses how the forces is coping with a 400% increase in threats, now that Barack Obama is president.

I have to share one of many dear and funny moments from the memorial service at the Wilshire Ebell on Sunday for my friend, the actor and poet Henry Gibson. ''Laugh-In'' stalwarts like Gary Owens and Jo Anne Worley were there, along with friends from virtually every part of his life, including the vet who looked after his and his wife Lois' beloved dogs.

Henry, who died in September, let on to very few people how sick he was. One of them was his friend Charlie Adler, who recounted how he and Henry were driving down Wilshire Boulevard right after Michael Jackson had died, and the mourning was still at its height.

''I want my memorial to be at Staples,'' Henry said. ''Really?'' Adler asked. ''At Staples?'' Henry, deadpan, repeated, ''I want my memorial to be at Staples,'' and then he made some kind of gesture out the car window, to the edifice they were just passing: a Staples office supply store.

He was as sweet as he was funny; they don't make many like that.

-- Patt Morrison