This Week on Patt Morrison

Friday, June 5

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Thursday, June 4

Tiananmen plus Twenty: A Revolution in Media
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In 1989, the world watched in horror as demonstrators were attacked by the Chinese Army. It was the first time the world had seen, live on television, such a massive act of violence from inside Communist China. 20 years ago, it was communications technology that brought the images of Tiananmen Square to the world. Since then, the internet and cell phones have made just about anyone a potential journalist, even as China has tried to put up a virtual wall. What steps is the Chinese government taking to control information and do any of the lessons from Tiananmen apply to today's media?

• Dan Southerland, former Washington Post Bureau Chief, Beijing, 1989
• Madeline Earp, Asia research associate, Committee to Protect Journalists
• Tala Dowlatshahi, New York director of Reporters without Borders
• Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director for Human Rights Watch

The Speech Heard Around the World—Except in a Few Key Places
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Syria and Iran didn't air President Obama's speech to the Muslim world. Afghanistan aired it, but without translation. So how much of the Muslim world actually heard his message? Thanks to the efforts of the White House new media team - a lot more than were expected. From more than 5,000 miles away, a flurry of messages flooded the Internet, as the White House's Twitter feed and Facebook page posted multilingual highlights and the State Department sent free text messages about the speech. Just how far did technology reach today?

• Ben Parr, associate editor for Mashable.com, an online social media guide; He was previously a project management for Facebook applications

An Umbrella that Melts in the Rain?
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Nearly two-thirds of bankruptcy filings in 2007 cited medical bills as having contributed to financial failure, according to a new report published in the American Journal of Medicine. What might be surprising, however, is it found that 77.9% of those had private insurance. Isn't that exactly why we get private insurance—to protect us from the financial ravages of a serious illness?

• Dr. David Himmelstein, Harvard Medical School Professor and practicing physician at Cambridge Hospital. Co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program

Will the NBA playoffs be Magic? We Hope Not
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If precedent has any say in the matter the Los Angeles Lakers are going to slaughter the Orlando Magic. Our purple-and-golden boys have 14 championships, 30 playoffs notches in their belts, and a coach with almost as many rings as fingers, as well as every bookie in town favoring the Lakers in game one and to win the series but...you can't predict basketball. The nation was set to watch LeBron and Kobe face off, and now we will have to settle for only seeing the pair as puppets, thank goodness Nike decided to keep running those commercials through the playoffs.

• Brian Kamenetzky at the L.A. Times Lakers Blog
• Nick Roman, KPCC's senior managing editor and sports enthusiast

From Screen to Stage: Taylor Hackford's New Venture
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Oscar nominated director Taylor Hackford, famous for The Devil's Advocate, Dolores Claiborne, La Bamba, and An Officer and a Gentleman tries his hand at the stage. He sizes up the stage versus the set.

• Taylor Hackford, director

Wednesday, June 3

Live from Cairo, it’s the Barack Obama Show!
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In all seriousness, while President Obama does take his cult of personality to Egypt to forge a new American path in the Muslim world, the President faces some daunting challenges during and after his historic speech. The new President can only bank on his popularity (and his identity as the anti–Bush) for so long—soon Muslims will start to demand results on touchy situations like Israeli–Palestinian peace negotiations, progress in Iraq and a nuclear weapon–free Iran. We trace the steps, from the President’s starting point tomorrow in Cairo to the complicated diplomatic maneuvers soon to come.

• Nabil Fahmy, ambassador at large at the Egyptian Foreign Ministry & former Egyptian Ambassador to the United States from 1999 — 2008
• Abderrahim Foukara, Washington Bureau Chief, Al Jazeera
• John Esposito, professor of religion & international affairs at Georgetown University

Hollywood Horse Track Headed to the Glue Factory?
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The Inglewood City Council today announces their decision on the "Hollywood Park Tomorrow" project, a multi–level retail and residence project (including 3,000 homes) to mow down the landmark Hollywood Park race track. The San Mateo track "Bay Meadow" has already shut down and the loss of the Hollywood Park track could be the next nail in the coffin for the former strong–as–a–stallion business. What does today’s vote mean for the greater horse racing industry?

• Steve Andersen, southern California correspondent for Daily Racing Form
• John Harris, Chairman of the California Horse Racing Board
• Joe Harper, president and general manager of Del Mar Thoroughbred Club, which operates the race track in Del Mar

The Sweet & the Sour of the Housing Market
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Two separate stories on the state of the housing market clearly illustrate the trends of the past year coming to a head: first, L.A. county finished a round of automatic reassessments and found that 330,000 homeowners will get their property taxes lowered thanks to sinking home values; and second, the sales of previously occupied homes posted its biggest monthly gain in eight years. It’s a prototypical mixed bag for homeowners and house hunters: property taxes are down, prices are down and inventory is high, but don’t count on much of a return for selling your house. What’s the mood of SoCal homeowners?

• Thomas Davidoff, Professor, Strategy and Business Economics, University of British Columbia

Wanna get a Cup of Coffee?
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Oh gosh. That person in the next cubicle is just so DREAMY. So what do you do about it? Or what if that dreamy person works for a competing company? Or a client’s company? There are all sorts of ways for professional romance to turn into professional trouble... just ask Mayor Villaraigosa. And yet, professional and interoffice dating is a fact of life: Forty–three percent of workers in the United States say they’ve dated a fellow employee; of those, 34 percent reported getting hitched, according to a 2006 survey on office romance by CareerBuilder.com. If that’s so, what’s the right procedure for wooing your co–worker without wooing yourself into the unemployment line?

• Andrea Kay, career consultant, columnist and author of "Works a Bitch and then you make it Work"

Tuesday, June 2

Governor’s Pep Talk on the Budget
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Declaring "California’s day of reckoning is here," Governor Schwarzenegger spoke to the state legislature in an unusual joint session this morning. He reiterated the dismal facts: just three months after Sacramento closed its previous budget gap, legislators again face a $24 billion hole. With new taxes seemingly off the table, how will lawmakers make the tough decisions on budget cuts and generate new revenue?

• Speaker Karen Bass, Speaker of the California Assembly
• Senator George Runner, Republican from Lancaster and member of the Senate Budget Committee

Hello, Old Friend: Offshore Oil Drilling Back in Vogue?
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If necessity is the mother of all invention then the California government is in full blown Thomas Edison mode. Pushed to the brink with a $24+ billion deficit, Gov. Schwarzenegger is attempting a risky end&ndas;run around a state commission to get a revenue–generating offshore oil drilling project approved. The Tranquillon Ridge drilling plan would restart oil exploration off of Santa Barbara, something that the Lands Commission has stridently opposed. The Governor’s solution—take over authority of the project with Legislative approval. Who will win the drilling power grab?

• HD Palmer, deputy director of external affairs at the California Department of Finance
• Paul Thayer, executive officer of the California Lands Commission

U.S. Journalists to Serve 15 yrs Hard Labor in N. Korea?
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North Korea has been detaining American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee since March 17th on charges of illegal entry and "hostile acts." It could use their trial this Thursday to temper its international image, damaged by last week’s nuclear test, but there’s speculation the trial could turn into a political litmus test for party members to prove how orthodox they are on what’s expected to be the eve of Kim Jong Il’s naming of a successor. What is North Korea’s strategy and how can the U.S. leverage for its journalists?

• Marcus Noland, senior fellow for the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a North Korea expert
• Bob Dietz, Asia program coordinator, Committee to Protect Journalists

Producers on Producing
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What does it take to make good product in a bad economy? Be it in film, television, cable or on the internet, the producer faces an ever–changing technological landscape, the challenge of pleasing an increasingly diverse audience, and the consumer’s demand for more, more, and different, please! Three award winning producers tell us how they do it.

• Bruce Cohen, Bruce Cohen, co–producer of "Milk", "American Beauty", "Down with Love," "Big Fish," and the list goes on. In television, Bruce and his partner executive produced the ABC series "Pushing Daisies." He is currently Vice President of Motion Pictures of the Producer’s Guild.
• Marshall Herskovitz, writer, producer and director. He helped create such series as "thirtysomething", "My So–Called Life", and "Once and Again". Among the films he has produced are "Legends of the Fall", "Traffic", "I Am Sam", "The Last Samurai", and "Blood Diamond". He is currently serving as President of the Producer’s Guild of America.
• Gale Anne Hurd, producer of a who’s who of Hollywood action films — "The Terminator" and two of the sequels, "Aliens," "The Incredible Hulk," Marvel’s "The Punisher," and "Armageddon." She is a board member of the Producer’s Guild of America.

Eyal Press on Tiller Shooting
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On May 31st George Tiller was shot during Sunday service inside of his church in Wichita Kansas. Tiller was not the first Doctor that performed abortions to be targeted and/or murdered. An abortion provider had not been gunned down since the murder of Barnett Slepian in 1998. Today we speak with Eyal Press author of Absolute Convictions and the son of Dr. Shalom Press, another Dr that was targeted by anti-abortion extremists.

• Eyal Press, Author of Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict that Divided America

E3 Kicks Off Today
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The annual electronics entertainment expo began yesterday with celebrity heavy–weights Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr announcing a Beatles version of the successful game Rock Band. The expo isn’t just for music loving gamers, other announcements — a new version of the old fantasy football favorite "Madden", a brand new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Star Wars and Assassin’s Creed 2 plus many more from the likes of Ubisoft, EA, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. Join us as we discuss the latest and greatest in gaming news.

Joel Johnson, Editor at OffWorld.com, the video game section of the boing boing website

Monday, June 1

CA Wants Feds to Back Its Loans — Should it?
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AIG and GM may have been too big to fail, but what about the world’s eighth–largest economy? Gov. Schwarzenegger is asking Congress not for a cash bailout, but rather to co–sign the state’s borrowing by backing it with money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The plan could save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars by making it easier for the state to borrow money on the bond market, but what legs does that state with the worst credit rating in the nation have to stand on?

• Brad Sherman, Congressman, 27th district (San Fernando Valley)
• John Campbell, Congressman, 48th district (Irvine)

The Loss of Air France 447
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There seems little hope of finding survivors from Air France Flight 447, which vanished over the Atlantic last night carrying 228 people from Brazil to Paris. Little is known, but there’s speculation that some kind of electrical failure, potentially related to lightning, was the culprit. What will be the steps in determining what happened? And what were the causes and results of similar over–water disasters?

• Bill Voss, President & CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation

Seeds of Terror
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Award winning journalist Gretchen Peters is here with the story of Afghanistan’s exploding opium trade, detailing how terrorists have segued into the big business of illegal drugs and how a second terrorist attack could be funded entirely by drug sales to western drug addicts. Did our government know about the drug smuggling activates of both its enemies and its allies in the Karzai administration but repeatedly turn a blind eye?

• Gretchen Peters, Author of "Seeds of Terror, How Heroin is Bankrolling the Taliban and Al Qaeda"

VAT to the Future: Reforming the U.S. Tax Code
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Recognizable to anyone who has ever traveled abroad, the value added tax is the exotic, onerous–seeming sales tax that accompanies almost every purchase throughout Europe and beyond. The VAT has never seriously been considered here, but that could soon change: eager to reform a ridiculously convoluted tax code, close a multi–trillion dollar budget deficit AND fund hugely expensive programs like single–payer healthcare, the Obama Administration is ready to give the VAT a new look. While a 10 — 20% VAT would spike the sales prices of almost every conceivable service or commodity, it could raise trillions in revenues—is the long–term payoff worth the pain at the cash register?

• Michael Graetz, professor of law at Yale Law School; author of "100 Million Unnecessary Returns: A Simple, Fair and Competitive Tax Plan for the United States":
• Len Burman, senior fellow at the Urban Institute & direct of the Urban–Brookings Tax Policy Center; visiting professor at Georgetown’s Public Policy Institute

No Summer School — At What Cost?
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No more pencils, no more books, and no more access to summer school for students in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Superintendent Raymond Cortines announced on Friday that the cut will save the LAUSD $34 million but at what cost to parents and children? Many working parents can not afford day care or camp and depend on summer school not only to teach their children but to keep them out of trouble, while children depend on the courses to help them keep up. And what about the teachers that depend on that extra income? We discuss the summer–school shut down and what it means to you.

• Bill Ring, director of TransParent, a parent advocacy and leadership development organization
• Pamela Ezell, parent of children starting in LAUSD magnet schools in the fall

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