This morning President Obama signed an executive order creating a bipartisan debt commission. That same commission was shot down in the senate earlier this month by seven Republicans who voted against the President’s bill after they learned the commission might recommend tax increases. Pushing through the commission by executive order doesn’t look great for bipartisan relations and won’t solve the problem of how to get fiscal conservatives to join in, but the White House says it's imperative for future fiscal planning. Republicans counter that it's nothing more than political posturing and warn they refuse to raise taxes; Democrats fear deep spending cuts to Social Security and are wary of touching it in an election year. Does this commission get the American people and career politicians any closer to talking about the elephant in the room?
LA's arts have soldiered on through thin and thinner, but with the city threatening more arts funding cutbacks, what will be lost? Where will the money come from? Patt sits down with some of L.A.'s leading cultural philanthropists—they’ve supported the arts for decades, both personally and through their institutional leadership, through good times and bad, with innovative approaches to economic and artistic survival. But now with the fiscal state of the arts looking especially dismal, what can be done? They still have some ideas.
The Nobel Prize-winning 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which graphically laid out the coming consequence of climate change from melting glaciers to dying rain forests, is suddenly not worth the value of the paper it’s printed on—if you are to believe critics who have seized on errors in the report to assail the entire science of global warming.
It’s not possible to imagine California without cars; today we’re known for our vast network of freeways and bumper-to-bumper traffic, all of which is well documented. But Kevin Nelson, in his new book “Wheels of Change: From Zero to 600 m.p.h.,” brings to life the personalities that helped shape the car culture in California, from engineering wizards to rebels without a cause, and tells how California changed cars irrevocably and cars changed California forever.
Patt Morrison is known for its innovative discussions of local politics and culture, as well as its presentation of the effects of national and world news on Southern California.
