10/07/04

LC041007

Coverage of Town Hall Los Angeles speakers on Life and Times is
made possible by a grant from The Boeing Company.

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Stem cell research could lead to cures for chronic illness, but
should California be funding it?

Dr. Vincent Fortanasce>> People don't understand the immensity
of this bill. It is three billion dollars given towards very
speculative science.

Brendan Huffman>> This is going to create thousands of jobs
throughout Los Angeles County and Southern California and we
think it's a good investment.

Val>> And then, our FilmWeek critics tackle high school
football, a mid-life crisis and an existential detective story.

It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> Last year, President Bush announced strict limitations on
using federal dollars for stem cell research, embryonic stem
cell research in particular. But now Proposition 71 is calling
for three billion dollars over ten years to fund just that kind
of research in California. Proponents of Proposition 71 say it
holds great promise for curing dozens of diseases, but critics
say it's experimenting with human life. Kevin Smith looks at
whether Proposition 71 is the right medicine for California.

Kevin Smith>> Ten year old Lauren Ashley Morton sounds an
upbeat note these days. She's in remission from leukemia, the
form of cancer that infects blood cells.

Lauren Ashley Morton>> Now I'm totally different. I can do
much more things and I can go out a lot.

Kevin Smith>> Following chemotherapy, Lauren Ashley received
stem cell treatment at City of Hope Cancer Center which allowed
new healthy blood cells to replace her damaged cells. Do you
still need treatment of any kind?

Lauren Ashley Morton>> Not really. Well, actually not at all.

Sherri Morton>> Stem cells basically give the person a new
lease on life. It gives them a new life. From the first time
she did it with her pajamas and her mask on, the first time we
were allowed out to now, she could barely make the sound. So
now it's just like she was when she was a little girl.

Kevin Smith>> Based on the promise of stem cell therapy,
Proposition 71 would provide three billion dollars in state bond
money for stem cell research over the next ten years.
California would not begin repaying the principle for five
years, after which the state would have to pay about two hundred
million dollars a year for thirty years. Besides the cost,
Proposition 71 is controversial because the money would go
entirely to embryonic stem cell research working with stem cells
taken directly from human embryos.

Dr. Ravi Bhatia>> Well, a stem cell is a very rare cell which
is present inside a tissue.

Kevin Smith>> Leukemia and other blood disorders are just about
the only diseases that can now be treated with stem cells taken
from adults like those used in the case of Lauren Ashley Morton.
These are not embryonic stem cells, right?

Dr. Ravi Bhatia>> No, these are not embryonic stem cells. The
work that we do in our lab is with stem cells derived from
adults, adult stem cells.

Kevin Smith>> Many medical researchers who now work with adult
stem cells like City of Hope's Ravi Bhatia say that embryonic
stem cells have far more potential for treating, even curing,
debilitating illnesses like diabetes, Parkinson's Disease,
Alzheimer's Disease and AIDS.

Dr. Ravi Bhatia>> But the potential advantage to embryonic stem
cells is that they can grow almost indefinitely. You can get an
almost unlimited number of these cells and these cells have the
potential because they are derived from the embryo of being
differentiated into almost any tissue in the body.

Kevin Smith>> So unlike adult stem cells, embryonic stem cells
can be transformed into different types of human cells,
replenishing with healthy cells the dead or malignant cells that
cause serious illnesses.

George W. Bush>> "More than sixty genetically diverse stem cell
lines already exist."

Kevin Smith>> Proposition 71 evolved after President Bush in
2001 under pressure from religious conservatives banned
virtually all federal spending on embryonic stem cell research,
permitting funding only for research on a small group of stem
cells that had already been extracted from embryos.

George W. Bush>> "I have concluded that we should allow federal
funds to be used for research on these existing stem cell lines
where the life and death decision has already been made."

Kevin Smith>> John Kerry has hammered away at the Bush
restrictions during his campaign.

John Kerry>> "What if we have a president who believes in
science like stem cell research and treat illness for millions
of lives?"

Kevin Smith>> And Kerry has found support from Ron Reagan,
whose late father suffered from Alzheimer's Disease.

Ron Reagan>> "And I urge you to please cast a vote for
embryonic stem cell research. Thank you for your time."

Mark Siegel>> You do lose muscle control and you get stiff and
hunched over.

Kevin Smith>> One supporter of Proposition 71 is Mark Siegel,
now fifty-two, who found out six years ago that he had
Parkinson's Disease. He sees embryonic stem cell research as
his best chance.

Mark Siegel>> But I'm basically in a race against time hoping
that they'll find a cure before I'm too far gone.

Kevin Smith>> Supporters of Proposition 71 mainly argue that
more money for stem cell research would be good for medicine and
good for business, but opponents are much more diverse, ranging
from religious groups to fiscal conservatives, even to pro
choice advocates who believe the proposition is fundamentally
flawed. The religious argument is adopted primarily by those
who oppose abortion.

Dr. Vincent Fortanasce>> A cell, when it's first born or first
made, has DNA. That DNA is that of a human being. It is a
living organism and we believe that living organisms which are
homo sapiens should not be experimented upon.

Ron Reagan>> "It is a hallmark of human intelligence that we
are able to make distinctions. Surely we can distinguish
between these undifferentiated cells multiplying in a tissue
culture and a living, breathing person."

Kevin Smith>> Most of the embryos that would be used for stem
cell research would come from in vitro fertilization clinics.

Dr. James Thompson>> If you restrict yourself to embryos that
would otherwise be discarded, my personal ethical belief is that
discarding them would be a less ethically viable choice than
donating them to research that could help other people.

Vicki Michel>> I'm not just pro choice. I'm strongly pro
choice.

Kevin Smith>> But some opponents who call themselves pro choice
on abortion say that Proposition 71 lacks adequate protections
for donors when fertility clinic embryos run out.

Vicki Michel>> If you're going to get eggs from women, you've
got to make sure that you don't do anything that's going to
jeopardize their own health.

Kevin Smith>> Another argument against Proposition 71 is that
California, now facing a major budget crisis, can't afford a
three billion dollar bond issue to fund stem cell research.

Dr. Vincent Fortanasce>> How are we going to pay up to two
hundred million dollars a year out of the general fund when our
emergency rooms are closing, when our trauma centers are
closing?

Brendan Huffman>> This is going to create thousands of jobs
throughout Los Angeles County and Southern California and we
think it's a good investment. In order to compete with stem
cell research moving abroad, we have to make a more significant
contribution at this effort.

Kevin Smith>> Still, some who support more federal funding of
embryonic stem cell research oppose Proposition 71, claiming it
would put three billion dollars in the hands of venture
capitalists and research institutions to conduct just one type
of medical research.

Vicki Michel>> We should look at everything that's out there
and we should make choices about where the money goes and not
give a huge pot of money to people who have a vested interest in
a particular direction of research. I think this is just
incredibly inappropriate.

Kevin Smith>> Meanwhile, Parkinson's Disease sufferers like
Mark Siegel believe that, if the federal government won't fund
embryonic stem cell research, California should.

Mark Siegel>> If it's five or ten years away for Parkinson's
Disease to be cured or juvenile diabetes, then I say let's start
the clock ticking today.

Kevin Smith>> For Lauren Ashley Morton, the reality of stem
cell therapy exceeded her expectations. But come November, it
will be up to California voters to decide whether the three
billion dollars earmarked by Proposition 71 for embryonic stem
cell research would be a boon or a boondoggle. I'm Kevin Smith
for Life and Times.

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Val>> The voting debacle of the last presidential election
spawned a new coalition, a group that is determined not to let
another "Florida" happen again. One of the leaders is Theodore
Shaw. He is President of the Legal Defense and Education Fund
of the NAACP. Shaw is a long-time civil rights attorney who
fought against desegregation and capital punishment, and for
minority rights. Shaw was a recent speaker at Town Hall Los
Angeles. He spoke with Toni Guinyard about what will not happen
this November.

Theodore Shaw>> The right to vote is one of the most sacred
rights in America. We fought for the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
We celebrate its fortieth anniversary next year. People died
for the right to vote. In this country, people take the right
for granted. They don't want to register to vote because they
might be called for jury service or because they think that the
choice is between two candidates, neither one which is perfect,
and they are willing to walk away from that right.

The 2000 election, if it demonstrated anything, demonstrated
that every vote counts or should count. We know the shenanigans
that occurred in Florida and elsewhere in 2000 where thousands
if not tens of thousands of votes of African-Americans and other
people of color were thrown out in parts of Florida.
Nationwide, there are some estimates that say maybe a million
black votes were thrown out. So this is a problem that we don't
want to see recur again.

If people do not participate in democracy, they can complain,
but their complaints are hollow. This is not a problem in the
black community only. This is a problem throughout this country
where Americans of all colors, white Americans, African-
Americans, Asian-Americans --

Toni Guinyard>> -- everybody.

Theodore Shaw>> Everybody, takes the right to vote too often
for granted and people don't participate enough. But I think
that we're seeing an increase because in part of what happened
in 2000, because of the concerns that people have about the
direction that the country has taken. The Legal Defense Fund is
a 501c3 nonpartisan organization, so we're not telling people
for whom to vote. Whatever your politics are, you should find a
way to pursue them in the electoral process.

I think that we're going to see more voting take place this year
than what the pollsters are telling us. I think that there's a
surge in registration that's not being picked up by the
pollsters. They're going to the same old places and talking to
the same old people. The only poll that counts is the one
that's taken on election day after the votes are counted and, if
you don't vote, you're not a player in this process and other
people are going to make decisions on you and for you.

Toni Guinyard>> Lawsuit filed by the NAACP Legal Defense and
Education Fund after the 2000 election. It forced some changes.

Theodore Shaw>> The Legal Defense Fund was a part of a
coalition of organizations and institutions that filed suit in
Florida after the debacle in the 2000 elections. Part of what
we were trying to do was make sure that we didn't see a repeat
of what happened. Of course, people were concerned about the
resolution or the outcome of the election which, by the way, we
all know was decided by the Supreme Court. As an aside, I want
to make clear that the next president of the United States will,
in all likelihood, have three or maybe four appointments to the
Supreme Court.

I think that's all I need to know in terms of the importance or
the significance of voting in the presidential election in spite
of all of the reservations about choosing between two imperfect
candidates. Having said that, we were trying to reform the
electoral system in Florida. We wanted to make sure that we had
poll workers who were adequately trained. We also wanted to
make sure that we didn't see the kinds of intentional efforts to
keep people from voting that occurred in 2000.

Toni Guinyard>> Names purged off of the voting rolls?

Theodore Shaw>> Names purged off the voting rolls. Now we see
that, by the way, recurring again this year. We see attempts to
do that just recently in Florida. We found out -- and it's been
publicized -- that there were attempts to target African-
Americans in particular as former felons and to purge them. The
African-American community and the Latino community both have a
problem with this whole issue of felon disenfranchisement. You
know, so many people of color are being incarcerated for
nonviolent drug offenses or being told that they have violations
on their records that never occurred. So this felon
disenfranchisement issue is a big one and we saw that in 2000.

We wanted to make sure that those efforts are not underway now.
We're part of a coalition this time around of individuals and
organizations and institutions around the country. We're going
to have about 25,000 trained people around the country. They're
going to be available in the 2004 election and the weeks running
up to the election for people who try to register to vote, have
problems registering to vote, nationwide. There's a toll-free
number, 1-866-OUR-VOTE, and we encourage people to call whether
it's before election day or on election day. We'll have an
opportunity to help them or give them advice. If they're told
they're not registered to vote, they don't stand alone. They
can call us and we can try to see that these problems are
straightened out.

Toni Guinyard>> Your concerns about requiring newly-registered
voters to use an ID or present an ID at the polls for the first
time.

Theodore Shaw>> The law is Help America Vote Act, HAVA it's
called, and it's a law that was passed in the aftermath of the
2000 election, the notion being that it would help to fix some
of the problems that cropped up in that election. The problem
with the law -- I mean, there are some good things in it, but
the problem with the law in part is by requiring voter IDs,
governmental IDs, we're concerned that there are many poor
people, particularly poor people because wealthier people,
middle-class people, are going to have government IDs. They're
going to have no problem with that. They're going to have the
phone bill to show with the address on it, for example, to prove
that they live where they live. But poor people, many times
they live in intergenerational households. Many times these
individuals don't have automobiles, so they don't have driver's
licenses. They don't have other forms of licenses. They still
have a right to vote.

Toni Guinyard>> Theodore Shaw, I want to thank you for spending
a little time with Life and Times and we'll be watching as you
watch during this election day.

Theodore Shaw>> Thank you. Appreciate it.

Val>> Theodore Shaw was a guest of Town Hall Los Angeles. If
you'd like more information about future speakers or how to
join, you can go to their website at www.townhall-la.org.

To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us
by mail at this address:

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contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Larry Mantle>> Welcome to FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm
Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC. Our first film this week is the
Texas high school football saga, "Friday Night Lights".

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> I'm joined this week by critics Henry Sheehan of
henrysheehan.com and Andy Klein of CityBEAT and ValleyBEAT.
Well, Henry, were you ready to take the field in "Friday Night
Lights"?

Henry Sheehan>> Well, I was actually. I was looking forward to
the movie because I think Texas high school football, you know,
is a great subject. This was based on a very successful book, a
work of journalism. But, again, it just shows you how tough it
is to do journalism on film. There is no real focus here. The
film is kind of all over the place. You think it's going to
focus on the coach of this high school team from a very small
school in west Texas in Odessa played by Billy Bob Thornton.
He's quite good, but then it turns out he's not going to be on
screen that much.

The film goes over to some of the players on the team and it
just kind of jumps from one to the other, so nothing ever really
gets going. No drama begins to build. The only thing there is
that it's the progress of their season as they try to get into
the state's championship round and it's not enough.

Larry Mantle>> What did you think, Andy?

Andy Klein>> My take is -- actually, the result of my take is
similar to Henry's even though we're coming from a totally
different place. There is no subject in the world I have less
interest in than Texas high school football and I really dreaded
seeing this. I ended up pleasantly surprised. I don't think
it's a great film, but I do think that, for somebody like me
who's really almost hostile to the subject matter, it was
engaging.

I thought the final game, the championship game, was incredibly
exciting. I mean, almost unbelievable, though I gathered that
it was factually correct. There are some good performances
among the kids, but they don't leave you with much. I mean,
Billy Bob is the only one who gets a lot of face time here. Tim
McGraw playing an abusive drunken father of one of the kids
really surprised me. I thought he was very good.

Larry Mantle>> Next up is the ensemble comedy from writer-
director, David O. Russell, "I (Heart) Huckabees".

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> Andy Klein, did you find "I (Heart) Huckabees" a
fun film?

Andy Klein>> Yeah. I think I loved this film, but it's such a
strange film that it's almost hard on one viewing to get a
handle on. I mean, it's kind of like a blob of mercury that
keeps slipping out of your mind as soon as you're trying to
understand what it's really about. Jason Schwartzman plays this
environmental activist whose life is a mess, but what he's
really worried about is that he's run into the same stranger
three times independently and this haunts him. So he goes to
the existential detectives played by Lily Tomlin and Dustin
Hoffman, both of whom are hilarious, to try and solve his
coincidence.

Meanwhile, he's having professional problems dealing with this
slick corporate jerk played by Jude Law and his girlfriend,
played by Naomi Watts, this vacuous blonde who's discovering
that maybe she's not vacuous. The film meanders all over the
place. It doesn't really have a structure to speak of and yet I
roared throughout this. I mean, I found it really, really
funny. It's possible that, when I see it a second time, it may
completely fall apart for me or it's possible that I'll think
it's really, you know, an enduring film.

Larry Mantle>> Henry?

Henry Sheehan>> Well, I thought Jude Law's corporate tool was
very funny. I mean, it had a kind of a point to its story
because here is someone who pretends to have a personal crisis
and then it turns into a real personal crisis. You know, that's
a good art to follow, but the rest of it I didn't like at all.
It's shot really peculiarly. You know, fifty percent of the
shots are one-shots, just one person in the frame, and it looks
like they're all like pickup shots, like they had to go back and
insert them because they got nothing with everybody together.
It doesn't express so much the isolation of the characters as
the disconnectedness of the whole film.

If you're going to make a movie about philosophy, make it about
philosophy. At one point, Dustin Hoffman says "We offer
philosophy, not psychological advice" and then he spends the
entire rest of the movie offering only psychological advice.
They're not existentialists even by the words. They kind of
belong to some kind of pot Buddhist school and then Isabelle
Huppert comes in and they call it the anti-existentialist, but
she express perfect existentialism. I really -- you know, Jude
Law, period.

Larry Mantle>> Finally this week, the drama "Rick" which stars
Bill Pullman.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> Despite his Boston Red Sox shirt, we'll let
Henry Sheehan lead on "Rick".

Henry Sheehan>> Thank you. This movie is based on "Rigoletto".
Forget that. Just put that aside. And it's written by Lemony
Snicket under his real name which is Handler. A very good Bill
Pullman plays a really mean executive who also is a brown-nose
to his much younger boss and his fury is building up and an old
college mate played by Dylan Baker, also very good, shows up to
offer him a very criminal solution and there's murder. The
basic problem with this movie is there are too many
coincidences. You know, the rule is that you can get away with
one big coincidence in a movie, but this has like four and it
just loses all credibility.

Larry Mantle>> What did you think, Andy?

Andy Klein>> I was a little more sympathetic than Henry. I
actually thought this was a pretty good first feature for
Curtiss Clayton, who's an editor. Bill Pullman is terrific and
indeed Dylan Baker is very good. I agree with Henry's analysis
of the problem here that an opera is all so stylized that it's
not supposed to be vaguely plausible. You can get away with
that on film if you really stylize the visuals which they do to
some degree here, but perhaps not enough. I think if this had
been almost presented as a fantasy, it would have played better.
But I still enjoyed it. I thought it was a pretty good film.

Larry Mantle>> Thanks so much for joining us for another
edition of FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3
KPCC joined by critics Andy Klein of CityBEAT and ValleyBEAT and
Henry Sheehan of henrysheehan.com. Please join us again next
week for another edition of FilmWeek on Life and Times.

Val>> And, of course, you can hear a full hour of FilmWeek
every Friday morning at 11:00 a.m. on KPCC Public Radio 89.3.
And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life
and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> Next time on Life and Times --

Crumbling buildings, missing money and unsupervised workers. Is
that any way to treat Los Angeles's birthplace?

>> This is a problem and we've identified it. We can't have
this happen anymore. We've gone through mismanagement to
mismanagement to mismanagement. We got some issues. Either we
step up to the plate now and take care of it or we're going to
lose this treasure.

Val>> That's next time on Life and Times.