Patt Morrison

Every day, Patt posts her thoughts on the 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
The Director of ''Precious,'' and the Blue Cross Blues

Feb. 8, 2010|Patt Morrison|0 comments

Boy, you burned up the phone lines about Anthem Blue Cross' notice of big premium hikes in California -- and we didn't keep you waiting on hold nearly as long as insurance company toll-free numbers!

Even the Obama Administration, in the person of HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius, is concerned about the rate hike of as much as 39% to some of the 800,000 Californians who hold individual Anthem Blue Cross health care policies.

These are mostly small business owners and individuals who are not part of group plans, and such policies can cost up the wazoo. One of our guests, a Century City podiatrist named Mark Weiss, is getting squeezed both ways: insurance companies are paying him less for his patients' visit, and his Blue Cross policy premiums for him and his wife just went up by $900 a month -- I repeat, they went UP by $900 a month. His tab for health insurance will now be more than $27,000 a year. Just what it will cover is another matter.

California's insurance commissioner, Steve Poizner, is looking into whether the rate hike meets the state requirement for insurance companies to be spending at least 70% on actual health care -- but my guest, Democratic congressman George Miller, of the East Bay, says his original health care plan would have required companies to pay out 80% to 85% on actual care.

That's the plan that had its plug more or less pulled after the election of Republican Senator Scott Brown in Massachusetts meant that 59 Democratic votes isn't enough to pass a health care overhaul.

I smell Congressional hearings ...

The Oscar races are on their first lap, and today we heard from the man whose film, ''Precious,'' has six nominations -- among them one for best picture, and one for himself as best director.

Lee Daniels and I had a remarkable conversation -- if you didn't hear it, I really recommend you go to the Patt Morrison page at kpcc.org and give it a hearing. He's been fearless in his choices of material; he produced ''Monster's Ball,'' which revolved around a death row inmate and won an Oscar for Halle Berry, and ''The Woodsman,'' about a pedophile -- and now ''Precious, Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire.''

Some critics have found it exploitive, and Daniels said he did have some dark nights of the soul. Who wants to reveal all that pain and sorrow? But for my money, ''Precious'' is about making visible those parts of our society that have been kept hidden and invisible, and about which we have agreed not to speak: the underclass, the under-educated, the under-the-rug people.

Watch for more from Lee Daniels, and more from this program about the Oscar contenders!

Lancaster, a Christian City? And Next, John Yoo

Feb. 4, 2010|Patt Morrison|6 comments


The mayor of the Antelope Valley city of Lancaster has been a guest here before, when the city was the first in these parts to adopt E-Verify, a program to screen who's legally eligible to work in this country. R. Rex Parris came back again; earlier this week, he'd spoken to a group of ministers and talked about Lancaster as ''growing a Christian community.

This really engaged so many of you, and your calls fell on both sides: support for the mayor, and criticism that his remarks were unconstitutional [the ACLU thinks so], or hurtful -- the mayor did say that a Jewish friend of his had told him she felt excluded.

The question of Christian prayers at Lancaster public meetings will be on an April ballot, as will mayor Parris.

Next time, LAUSD superintendent Ramon Cortines for another session of ''Big Man on Campus,'' talking about education in the nation's second-largest school district ... and lawyer and Berkeley law professor John Yoo is here with his new book, the last in his trilogy about executive power. He's the architect of the legal justifications for some of the Bush Administration's actions after 9/11, from Guantanamo to warrantless searches. He's a big thinker but an immensely controversial one.

Today was the program's ''maiden voyage'' from KPCC's new studios in the Mohn Broadcast Center today, and naturally there were a few gremlins -- we'll have them cleared right up for clear radio sailing ahead from within the pale-blue walls of the ''mother ship,'' studio B!

Being FDR's Grandson, and Could There Be a Personal Foul Called on Pro Football?

Feb. 1, 2010|Patt Morrison|0 comments

I'm a sucker for history, and living history? I'm swooning! Curtis Roosevelt was three when his grandfather, FDR, was elected president, and so he virtually grew up in the White House with ''Papa,'' the president, and ''Grandmere,'' Eleanor Roosevelt -- herself the niece of one President Roosevelt [Teddy] and the wife of another.

It was like stretching a hand across the decades, to think, ''This man I'm talking to once played in the pool with his grandpa, FDR, to get him to exercise and relax.'' For the rest of America, the Roosevelts were the First Family -- to ''Buzzie'' Roosevelt, ''Buzzie,'' they were just family.

The prospect of ending the Bush administration's ''No Child Left Behind'' occupied us for a long while; the Obama adminstration has its own ideas about federal education programs, some of which teachers like -- and some of which, like certain performance standards, they're not all that happy about. It's all of a piece with the Obama budget, and more on that as it unfurls.

Next time, the research is piling up like points on a Brett Favre offense -- all those head-smacks that pro footballers take can add up to early dementia and other problems. What does the science show, and what is the NFL doing about it? The Super Bowl's a few days away, so let's hear about findings that could change the nature of football ... next time at one o'clock.

A Big Legal Eagle and A Big Web Thinker

Jan. 28, 2010|Patt Morrison|1 comment

Theodore Olson's pedigree is rock-solid conservative: present at the birth of the Federalist Society, a board member of American Spectator magazine, a stalwart in the Reagan administration, and solicitor general under George W. Bush, who he represented in the 2000 Florida recount. His wife, Barbara, was aboard that plane that hijackers crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11.

So you could hear the necks snapping from the whiplash when Olson announced he'd be going to federal court to defend same-sex marriage in the challenge to the constitutionality of Proposition 8, California's same-sex marriage ban. He is a believer in marriage as a fundamental human and constitutional right, and in this, in court, he's joined his old adversary David Boies, who headed Al Gore's challenge in the 2000 recount.

Olson joined me on the program to talk about how he think the case has gone, with his witnesses testifying both about the emotional and social damage inflicted by a same-sex marriage ban, and about the constitutional protections the U.S. Supreme Court has extended to others who found their way to the altar blocked.

Testimony has ended, and Judge Vaughn Walker will be hearing closing arguments some time next month. [We spoke yesterday to the attorney arguing for the constitutionality of Proposition 8.] You'll be hearing from him again here as the case wends its way toward the Ninth Circuit, and eventually to the Supremes.

We ranged through President Obama's call to repeal ''don't ask, don't tell,'' and a collection of studies about whether there are differences in how same-sex couples and single parents bring up children compared to heterosexual couples [answer: none, really].

And I could have spent an hour or two with Jaron Lanier. His is a big name in the early conceptual work on the World Wide Web, but in his book, ''You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto,'' he makes a great case that the ''wisdom of crowds'' on the Internet is not always wise, that the idea of ''free'' on the Internet is destroying artistic creativity and expertise -- but that it can be fixed. This is one smart, big thinker, and I hope we can hear from him again.

[Actually, I did hear from him immediately afterwards, outside the studio: he'd brought one of his hundreds of musical instruments with him, a Laotian bamboo mouth organ called a ''khene.'' He played me a tune, and reminisced about the time he took it to Caltech, where he and the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman tried to figure out some trick of the reeds that kept them always in tune. What did I tell you? A fascinating guy!]

Guest host David Lazarus is here Friday, with the head of the Hemlock Society, talking about Montana judges ruling that physician-assisted suicide is legal in the Big Sky State.

-- Patt Morrison

When They Play ''Hail to the Chief,'' Go Online!

Jan. 27, 2010|Patt Morrison|2 comments

I had loads of fun live-blogging the State of the Union speech with WNYC's Brian Lehrer -- and they got something like five times more participants than their old record. The West Coast delivers!

We'll be analyzing the President's speech on Thursday, going down a checklist of issues as to what he addressed and what he didn't. On a crossover point, the Supreme Court justices sit down in front at the State of the Union speech, but they're not supposed to react to anything. Not this time: when President Obama said that the court ruling lifting restrictions on campaign finance millions, and letting foreign corporations with an American presence put money into U.S. elections, Associate Justice Samuel Alito mouthed the words ''Not true.'' I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot more about that moment.

Especially interesting because we spent part of Wednesday's program with Joan Biskupic, longtime Supreme Court reporter and author of a new biography of Antonin Scalia, in which the justice cooperated with Biskupic. The book gives enough information to let people decide about Scalia for themselves, but the way Biskupic lays it out, his strict-constructionism is shown to be in contrast with his activist decisions in Bush v. Gore in 2000, and the court's new ruling on sky's-the-limit campaign contributions.

As an aside and an insight, I have to say how disappointed I am in some very well-paid public figures. PR people and members of Congress often tell our producers that they won't be on the air at the same time as their opponents. This is so disappointing -- listeners would be so much better informed if the people who have vested interests in any argument would engage with the opposition and let listeners make up their own minds. It's kind of wussy, frankly, that figures who debate one another in the cut and thrust of Congressional discussion can't come on a radio program to do the same thing -- ditto for professional and well-paid spokesmen and spokeswomen who shy away from answering the oppositions's arguments, to help all of you make up your minds.

Hasta manana!

-- Patt Morrison