We said goodbye to a who's who of notables in 2010. The sports world mourned John Wooden, Bobby Thomson, Manute Bol, Don Meredith, Les Richter, Merlin Olsen and Bob Feller, among others. The entertainment industry bid adieu to Dino De Laurentiis, Mitch Miller, Lena Horne, Jill Clayburgh, Gary Coleman, "Scar" Lopez, John Forsythe, Barbara Billingsley, Dennis Hopper, Tony Curtis, Eddie Fisher, Ronni Chasen, Satoshi Kon, Art Linkletter and many more. Journalism's Daniel Schorr, Paul Conrad and Edwin Newman signed off, and Elizabeth Edwards, Alexander M. Haig, Daryl F. Gates, Charlie Wilson, Richard C. Holbrooke and Robert C. Byrd left the political stage. A few were memorialized by cartoonists, but all will be missed.
On a recent visit to The Times, it took Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger just 28 seconds to declare, "I'll be back." And not as a movie star, either. There's no doubt that Schwarzenegger enjoys the potency of his celebrity status and, as he told the editorial board, he intends to capitalize on it in his future political endeavors.
War, poverty, unemployment, foreclosures, environmental and humanitarian catastrophes, crippling division -- another difficult year in politics, another banner year for political cartoonists! From Pat Oliphant's masterful bipartisan overview to Jen Sorensen’s snarky serial sarcasm, Jack Ohman's trenchant double entendre and Tom Meyer's changing of the Golden State guard, we chided, cajoled, derided, mocked, parodied and needled our way through another year. Now bring on 2011. Where's that cartoon baby with the top hat?
--Joel Pett
Editorial cartoon by Jack Ohman / For The Times
Editorial cartoon by Stephanie McMillan
Editorial cartoon by Joel Pett / Lexington Herald Leader
Last month, Op-Ed columnist Meghan Daum shared a personal story of contracting the very rare murine typhus from a flea on her dog. What started out as flu-like symptoms turned into a near-death experience. In her first column, A medical odyssey, she recounted the nine nightmarish days she spent in the hospital as doctors tried to figure out what was wrong. The following week she wrote Back from the brink, in which she admitted to feeling a little angry about the experience. "For all of our controlling impulses," she wrote, "one flea can upend life as we know it."
Daum also shared her story on the "Madeline Brand Show," which aired Wednesday morning on KPCC. Joining her to round out the series of events -- and terrifying perspective from the other side -- was her husband, Alan Zarembo, a reporter at The Times who … wait for it … often covers the medical beat. Click here to listen to the radio program. In addition to the medical details, the meaning of this experience also starts to take shape as they talk. Their renewed perspective on life strikes a nice note as we head into the season of resolutions.
As the editorial board puts together its wish list for 2011, we thought we'd take a look back at our hopes for 2010 and see how we fared. We weren't so lucky with some of our requests: Congress didn't pass comprehensive immigration reform, the U.S. Senate didn't pass a climate bill that puts a price on carbon emissions, and newspaper circulation didn't spike.
But some of our wishes were granted. At the start of 2010 we asked for…
California's Legislature and governor to finally get real about the prison crisis and approve a sensible plan for reducing the inmate population without endangering the public.
We got part of this one. Last January, state corrections officials started implementing new parole rules, removing low-level offenders from supervision and ending the practice of returning ex-cons to prison for technical parole violations such as missed drug tests. California's overly tight parole rules are a big part of the reason the state has the nation's highest recidivism rate, so it was a very important reform. But lawmakers, terrified of being labeled "soft on crime," still haven't imposed other changes recommended by criminal justice experts for decades, such as reforming the state's sentencing rules and boosting drug rehabilitation and job training programs.
The L.A. Unified School District to get to work implementing the grand reforms it has announced: better evaluation of teachers, turning around Fremont High, and fairly and apolitically arranging for the takeover of perhaps 250 new and failing schools by outside managers.
LAUSD has at least been making progress. It is proposing reasonable new ways of evaluating teachers that include but don't overemphasize standardized test scores. If only United Teachers Los Angeles would get past its early negotiations rhetoric and help solve this. Fremont High is showing some improvement on scores. And the district has set up more stringent rules for its second round of the Public School Choice initiative, which will give outside operators a shot at running some district schools. These all represent good efforts; we'll check back in six months to look for results.
Markham Middle School in Watts to find -- and be allowed to hire -- enough qualified teachers for all of its openings.
No schools are being made whole in these bad financial times, but the court settlement now being considered by the judge on staffing Markham and other low-performing schools should help protect teacher jobs there.
A new approach by Washington to regulating the banking industry. Instead of providing a backstop to companies deemed too big to fail, we'd like Congress to create mechanisms that enable troubled companies to go bankrupt without endangering the entire financial system.
Lawmakers passed a lengthy, complex bill that's a mixed blessing. The measure still relies heavily on regulators to detect financial crises in the making –- something that they've never done well -- and to dismantle troubled Wall Street firms before they become too big to be allowed to fail. Its most important structural protection –- the so-called Volcker Rule prohibiting banks to make risky investments with their own capital –- was watered down en route to the president's desk. But it also provides new protections for consumers against predator and unfair behavior by lenders, banks and credit card companies.
A reality show in which contestants compete to expand their knowledge rather than reduce their waistlines. Call it "The Biggest Reader."
Though we didn't get "The Biggest Reader," we were lucky to get a reality show with substance thanks to the Sundance Channel's "Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys" about the very real friendships shared between straight women and gay men.
Passage of a comprehensive healthcare reform bill that slows the increase in costs, sharply reduces the number of uninsured and improves the quality of care.
The controversial Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that passed without a single Republican vote doesn't go as far as we would have liked to see in controlling costs. And its approach to insurance reform –- requiring insurers to issue policies to all applicants regardless of preexisting conditions, but also requiring all American adults to obtain coverage -– triggered a divisive political and legal fight that still rages. Yet the measure laid the foundation for a sustainable approach to medical treatment, one that fixes the flawed incentives in the system and promotes higher quality care.
I do love the Tournament of Roses parade, but not always for the same reasons other people do.
Anything that’s watched on television by tens of millions of people, and watched from Pasadena’s sidewalks by thousands more -- no , no, no, it’s not a million people, that’s a self-perpetuating urban myth and civic propaganda that Caltech sachems have disproved over and over again.
Anyway, anything that enormous in its reach, that by its very TV wallop represents something bigger than Pasadena civic spirit, is going to attract a lot of people wanting to get to that huge audience, and I’m not speaking of spectators with their ‘Hi Mom’ signs. I mean the parade itself.
The parade seems like it’s always tried to steer clear of controversy, but that doesn’t mean it’s succeeded. In 1992, Native Americans objected to a descendant of Christopher Columbus being made grand marshal to mark the 500 years since Columbus’ landfall in the New World. What with the Columbian and post-Columbian depredations of Native Americans and all, they had a solid point, and the upshot was a compromise by the parade people, a grand marshal twofer: Columbus’ heir, and congressman Ben Nighthorse Campbell, a Cheyenne.
But that was far from the first political dustup in the century-plus history of the little promotional parade that became the biggest deal on the Jan. 1 calendar -- Jan. 2 if the 1st happens to fall on a Sunday.
Anti-Vietnam War demonstrators turned up along the parade route during the 1970s, and the war’s critics weren’t happy with the choices of conservative figures like John Wayne, the Rev. Billy Graham, Sen. Everett Dirksen and Bob Hope as grand marshals.
More recently, AIDS activists attempted to block the route, and Code Pink and anti-George W. Bush demonstrators have also tried to make their point on camera and on the parade route.
Although parade officials say this New Year’s float marking President Reagan’s centennial is the first presidential-themed float, it is not the first parade entry with or about a president.
Republican former presidents have been welcomed as grand marshals -– Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford -– but so far, no Democrats, although each of those Republican presidents had California connections, Nixon having been born here, Hoover having attended Stanford and Eisenhower and Ford coming here for the golf.
The parade has favored as grand marshals military men and sports figures and heroes like astronauts and pilots. Two Supreme Court justices did the honors -– Earl Warren, who also waved down Colorado Boulevard as California’s governor, and the retired Sandra Day O’Connor. Republican-minded actors have also been tapped for the job, like Jimmy Stewart, Shirley Temple Black and Mary Pickford. There was some fuss in 1988 that Gregory Peck was too liberal to be grand marshal, and eventually, the grand marshals Hollywood supplied had virtually no political identity at all -– Carol Burnett, Cliff Robertson [I’m still puzzled by that one], Cloris Leachman, Bob Newhart, Angela Lansbury and William Shatner.
In 1953, the reigning rose queen presided as official hostess of the L.A. County Young Republicans’ dance -– something that would be vetoed today as too partisan.
In 1951, the year before the presidential elections, South Pasadena’s float was called "A Rosy Dream," and showed a Democratic donkey leaving the back door of the White House as a Republican elephant breezed in the front. The next year, when Temple City proposed a floral float showing deep-freezes and mink coats -– a reference to a Truman administration scandal involving officials receiving those goodies in exchange for political favors -– the parade committee vetoed it as too political. (A few years later, Eisenhower’s White House chief of staff would resign in a scandal over his inappropriately accepting the gift of a vicuna coat -– is it really that cold in D.C.?)
South Pasadena tried to make nice in the 1953 parade with a flower-bedecked float of a bicycle built for two pedaled by the Republican elephant and the Democratic donkey, with the elephant in the front as an acknowledgement of the GOP’s taking the White House.
Perhaps the parade’s biggest source of friction was the relative absence of African Americans.
In the ninth Tournament of Roses parade, in 1898, The Times reported at length on all the parade displays and the public’s reaction, including the "hearty laugh at the log cabin of the High School Glee Club, with its darkies singing negro melodies and carving ‘dat watermillion’ …" Given the segregation of the time, the "darkies" may actually have been white students in some kind of blackface.
Decades later, in the civil rights year of 1963, parade officials announced what was reported as the first "Negro-sponsored float" for New Year’s Day 1964. The parade’s chairman said, "We’ve always had Negro participation. The majority of the bands have had Negroes in them. We’ve never had a policy on Negroes one way or another."
Still, in that same watershed year, the local NAACP decided to go ahead and picket the parade because there hadn’t been a single minority serving as queen or on the court in the history of the event. "We are not suggesting," said the local chapter president, Fletcher Smith, "that there should have been a Negro girl in at least one of the courts necessarily, but certainly one of Mexican, Japanese or Chinese descent. The minority races are a part of this community and the Rose Parade is meant to portray this city to the world. By omitting them from the royal court, the true image of Pasadena is not being shown."
Watch this spectator’s fabulous home movies of the 1965 parade...
...and you’ll see both a "Negro" float with its own beauty queens, as well as a float sponsored by the National Rifle Assn., which had parade floats for at least two years, although certainly not recently.
My money for this New Year’s grand marshal was on Betty White. But parade officials chose TV chef and restaurateur Paula Deen. She is not by any stretch the stuff of controversy, unless you can start an argument over Southern cooking. I can’t, but Deen and I did have a little do-si-do not long ago, on my KPCC radio program.
Because so many of her Southern dishes are meat-driven, I asked her, what recipes would you suggest for vegetarians?
Well, she mused, '"if you don't want to go with pork... '' -- I made it clear that indeed, vegetarians don't want to go with pork. She finally settled on, "You can certainly find smoked turkey wings from the grocery store."
What if, in addition to LAPD's efforts, there's another factor at play? "I've wondered for a long time if there is any correlation between crime rates at home and wars abroad?" writes author, playwright and journalist Deanne Stillman on LA Observed. "Are there fewer murders at home when many of the country's young men are gone? Conversely, does the rate increase during peace time?"
Stillman brings up an interesting theory, but, as our editorial also points out, there were more than 1,000 homicides a year in Los Angeles during the early '90s, when the Persian Gulf War also took place.
Photo: Los Angeles Police Department Assistant Chief Sandy Jo MacArthur, the highest ranking female in the department, at a press conference with Police Chief Charlie Beck on Sept. 2. Credit: Al Seib / Los Angeles Times
Whatever one thinks of the proposal to allow BlackBerrys and other electronic devices on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, it might have one salutary effect: silencing hecklers.
Remember Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C), who said, "You lie!" after President Obama said illegal immigrants wouldn't be covered under health reform? If other members of Congress are tempted to imitate Wilson, they now may text their criticism -- or ignore the president's comments because they're busy friending their constituents on Facebook.
Photo: Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) is surrounded by colleagues as he listens to President Obama's remarks on healthcare after shouting, 'you lie!' when Obama referenced illegal immigrants in his speech to a joint session of Congress in September 2009. Credit: Mike Theiler / EPA
Despite President Obama's low approval ratings, which are at 45%, he is still the most admired man in America for the third year in a row, according to a recent USA Today-Gallup poll. How can that be? Our columnist Doyle McManus weighed in Tuesday morning on KPCC's "AirTalk."
"I think we need to disentangle these numbers a little bit because they're measuring different things and they're asking different questions," he said. "It's not a number that tells you an awful lot about the politics of the moment."
What the number does reveal is that Obama has a hardcore fan base. So why, then, does he have a fairly low job rating?
"That’s mostly, we think, because there's a terrible recession on and he hasn't fixed it," McManus said. "The same thing happened to Ronald Reagan in his first term when he had a terrible recession [yet was still] someone Americans admired."
As for the women, Hillary Rodham Clinton is the most admired of 2010, but trailing her closely is Sarah Palin. Here's the podcast for further analysis.
Photo: Obama waves as he addresses troops during a Veteran's Day event at US Army Garrison Yongsan in Seoul on November 11, 2010 on the sidelines of the G20 Summit. Credit: AFP PHOTO / Jim Watson / Getty Images
With the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" accomplished, efforts now turn back to marriage equality for gays and lesbians, something conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg says confounds both liberals and conservatives. In Tuesday's column, Goldberg describes how the gay community has gone from free-loving Bohemia to embracing the bourgeois way of life, a lifestyle that includes marriage. As a reference , he points to Cameron and Mitchell on ABC's "Modern Family," which, interestingly enough, is the no. 1 sitcom among Republicans.
The sitcom is supposed to be "subversive" in part because it features a gay couple with an adopted daughter from Asia. And you can see why both liberal proponents and conservative opponents of gay marriage see it that way. But imagine you hate the institution of marriage and then watch "Modern Family's" hardworking bourgeois gay couple through those eyes. What's being subverted? Traditional marriage, or some bohemian identity politics fantasy of homosexuality?
Where does Goldberg, a staunch conservative, fall on the topic of gay marriage? His feelings may surprise you. Read "As gay becomes bourgeois."
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