THE NFL - Alteration of 'Macho' Image?

"How Carl Nassib’s coming out may be a starting point to alter ‘macho’ NFL attitudes" PBS NewsHour 6/22/2021

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Footballer Carl Nassib's decision to come out as gay on Monday makes him the first active player in the NFL's history to do so.  Others have come out only after they retired or left the game.  Nassib, however, is a five-year veteran defensive lineman, currently playing for the Las Vegas Raiders.  Amna Nawaz discusses the coming out with LZ Granderson, a sports columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

2021 GRAMMY AWARDS - Women Rule!

NOTE:  This article was copied from the e-newspaper, there no link to article.

"Women rule this world" by August Brown, Los Angeles Times 3/15/2021

Female artists, particularly Black ones, dominate ceremony

Megan Thee Stallion, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish were the big winners at the 63rd Grammy Awards on Sunday, after a year of lockdown and protests that rattled artists, fans and the music business.

The big four awards were split among some of the top women in music.  Houston rapper Megan Thee Stallion won for best new artist; singer-songwriter-guitarist H.E.R. took song of the year for her protest anthem “I Can’t Breathe”; Swift won the album of the year trophy for her acclaimed quarantine record “Folklore”; and Eilish, who swept last year’s top categories, repeated her victory in record of the year for her moody “Everything I Wanted.”

Beyoncé, who won four awards on Sunday, broke the all-time record for most Grammys for a female artist.  Her 28th Grammy topped country-bluegrass artist Alison Krauss, who’d previously held the record with 27 wins.  She also tied the legendary Quincy Jones for second on the all-time list for most Grammy wins.  (Hungarian composer Georg Solti won 31 Grammys.)

Beyoncé won for R&B performance, for her Juneteenth single “Black Parade”; rap song and rap performance, for her feature on fellow Houstonian Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage”; and music video, alongside her daughter Blue Ivy Carter, for “Brown Skin Girl.”

Megan Thee Stallion won three Grammys on Sunday, while Eilish took home two awards, as did Fiona Apple, for her acclaimed “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” album and its track “Shameika.”  Dua Lipa, nominated for six Grammys, won for pop solo album.

The first pandemic-era Grammys arrived battered from all sides.  COVID-19’s wreckage included shuttered venues, tours grounded and lifelong pros left destitute.  This year’s Grammys’ “In Memoriam” segment reportedly had 800 industry veterans in consideration for inclusion alongside beloved artists Little Richard, John Prine, Kenny Rogers and dozens of others.

Add that to a dramatic change of the guard for the telecast, from the Grammys’ 40-year producer Ken Ehrlich to 39-year-old British TV executive Ben Winston.  Then throw in a public reckoning over how the Recording Academy (and its tightly guarded 12,000 voters and genre committees) declined to nominate R&B/pop star The Weeknd, who in turn called the Grammys “corrupt” and vowed never to allow his music to be submitted for consideration.

Given the chaos behind the scenes, the nearly four-hour show, hosted by “The Daily Show” host Trevor Noah, made an effective case that music can be both a balm amid despair, and a rallying cry for the oppressed during times of racial and social upheaval.

Some Grammy favorites collected major awards.  Swift won for album of the year for “Folklore,” her quarantine-embodying LP made in relative isolation that, with its lonely moods and storytelling, defined a frightful summer.  She’s now tied with Stevie Wonder, Frank Sinatra and Paul Simon for most album of the year Grammys, and she became the only woman to win the award three times.

When last year’s Grammy darling Eilish accepted the award for record of the year, she spent most of her speech shouting out Megan Thee Stallion, who was nominated for “Savage” featuring Beyoncé.

“This is really embarrassing, Megan you deserve this,” Eilish said.  “Genuinely, this goes to her, can we just cheer for Megan?”

The pandemic-mandated reduced scale and sense of intimacy at this year’s Grammys worked in its favor.  From the start, host Noah, situated on a platform outside Staples Center with just a few masked stars at tables in front of him, acknowledged the lack of glitz.  The telecast was “the biggest outdoor event of the year besides the storming of the Capitol,” he quipped.  As Megan Thee Stallion — one of the night’s big winners — accepted her award for best new artist, her speech was briefly drowned out by a car speeding through downtown L.A.

With a public skeptical of the Grammys’ backroom voting processes, the ceremony argued for its more noble intentions.

Swift leaned into the cottagecore aesthetic of “Folklore” by performing in a hobbit shed with producers Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner.  Eilish, Harry Styles and Haim played for one another in-the-round, which made for good-hearted reaction shots of artists looking as if they’d happily wandered into the wrong rehearsal room.

Throughout the night, the Academy gave the spotlight over to Black music, which thrummed in the streets of last year’s protests against police violence.

Singer Mickey Guyton, nominated for country solo performance, played a regal and resplendent performance of “Black Like Me.”  On the convention center decks, rapper Lil Baby re-created the scene outside the burning Atlanta fast-food restaurant where Rayshard Brooks was killed during his performance of “The Bigger Picture.”  And H.E.R.’s “I Can’t Breathe,” a seething yet vulnerable protest ballad, won song of the year in a major upset.

“I think people are going to think of this song when they think of Breonna Taylor, when they think of all of the people that we’re still fighting for,” H.E.R. said .

“As an artist, I believe it’s my job, and all of our jobs to reflect the times,” Beyoncé said in her acceptance speech for R&B performance.  “It’s been such a difficult time.  So I wanted to uplift, encourage, celebrate all of the beautiful Black queens and kings that continue to inspire me and inspire the whole world.”

Not all of the show was so weighty.  The debut of Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak’s ‘70s-soul-indebted duo Silk Sonic felt as inviting as a fine robe and a glass of brandy, and Doja Cat’s disco romp “Say So” showcased her cyborg-precise dancing.  Though Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B’s live performance of their sex-positive anthem “WAP” did without its wonderfully filthy hook on TV, they had a lively go at it beneath a five-story stiletto heel.

While Grammy voters’ intentions and the telecast’s choices don’t always align, the Grammys tried to mirror pop’s borderless and language-agnostic present, giving formidable screen time to Puerto Rican movimiento star Bad Bunny (who took home his first “gringo Grammy,” for Latin pop or urban album) and to South Korean megastars BTS.

BTS lost to Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande in pop duo/group performance, but played a high-kicking set that consoled fans who vowed that BTS was already bigger than the Grammys anyway.

Many awards presentations were, rather than handoffs from fellow pop stars, delivered from the back bars of threatened clubs like the Troubadour and Hotel Cafe in L.A. and the beloved Apollo in New York City.  Hearing from employees there on the highest-profile night of music was affecting and urgent.

“People don’t want to be anywhere else but [The Troubadour],” said the club’s night manager, Rachelle Erratchu.  “People are going to talk about those shows 40, 50 years later.”

But if legacy was on the Academy’s minds, they still must confront a structure that’s opaque at best and suspicious at worst to the superstar acts they need to keep the show relevant.

“Join in, work with us, not against us,” Recording Academy interim chief executive Harvey Mason Jr. said in his telecast speech.  “We might not be able to get it right 100% of the time, but we will preserve music and educate the next generation and advocate for the rights of all creatives.… Our work is important because music is important.”

Ilana Kaplan contributed to this report.

TRUMP INC - Financial Vampire

"Following Trump's money exposes the awful truth: Our president is a 'financial vampire'" by David Cay Johnston, Los Angeles Times 11/4/2018

Americans were confronted Tuesday with a profound problem, one that challenges our commitment to accountable democratic government and justice.  It is an awful truth that we must face now that the New York Times has published a richly documented, 14,000-word expose alleging decades of deeply corrupt Trump family finances.

After 18 months of interviewing people who worked for or with the Trump family and scrutinizing more than 100,000 documents, the newspaper painted a portrait “unprecedented in scope and precision” of Trump family money, including “outright fraud” that enriched the man who is now the sitting President.  Those extraordinary words require us to pay close attention.

Leaked financial records reveal decades of calculated tax cheating, according to the New York Times.  Father Fred Trump created 295 revenue streams to transfer money to his children, many of which appear to have broken laws.  A lawyer for the President claims the published allegations are false and the reporting “extremely inaccurate,” but the reporters cite bank statements, canceled checks, invoices and tax filings that reveal the apparent evasion of close to half a billion dollars of taxes in today’s money.

In one scheme the value of properties transferred from Fred Trump to his children was discounted by 94%.  Prices paid for refrigerators and stoves were inflated 46%, which enabled dishonest tax deductions while cheating people in rent-stabilized Trump apartments by justifying higher rents.

Not a scintilla of verifiable evidence shows that Donald is anything like as rich as he claims.

As that paper’s former tax reporter and a journalist who has covered Donald Trump for more than 30 years, this was no surprise.  In 1990 I broke the story that Trump was no billionaire.  He called me a liar for months, until he had to put documents in the public record showing he was worth negative-$295 million.

Not a scintilla of verifiable evidence shows that Donald is anything like as rich as he claims.  Candidate Trump said he was worth more than $10 billion, but his 2017 presidential disclosure statement shows just $1.4 billion.

Yet millions of Americans believe Trump is a modern Midas.  They believe the President will lift them out of hard times, after a half-century during which the super-rich flourished and their incomes were mostly flat.  The awful truth is that the man in the Oval Office is not a wealth-building entrepreneur, but a financial vampire who extracts cash from enterprises, leaving behind unpaid workers, vendors and governments.

The President’s father got his start profiteering, to the tune of millions of dollars, from programs to help returning GIs get housing, which prompted President Eisenhower to throw a fit.  Donald Trump is already a proven tax cheat.  He admitted to sales tax fraud in 1983.  He lost two income tax civil fraud trials.  His own tax lawyer, Jack Mitnick, testified that Trump’s 1984 tax return was fraudulent.

Court records show how Trump and his children misled investors in failed condo projects in Baja California and Florida.  Trump promised strivers who paid tens of thousands of dollars to attend Trump University that he would hand-pick a faculty and give them a better education than the best business schools.  That’s not what happened.  In the end, Trump gave back $25 million after insisting he had done nothing wrong.

A Trump project in New York employed hundreds of workers who were in America without permission, paid them laughably low wages and worked them beyond legal limits.  He denied knowledge of the situation, but a judge said Trump’s testimony was not credible.  Trump promised to show voters that his immigrant third wife, Melania, always worked legally.  Business records show she worked illegally as a model.

Trump’s longtime fixer, Michael Cohen, is talking to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.  So is his former campaign manager, who along with Trump’s first son and son-in-law eagerly embraced the Kremlin’s offer of campaign help.  Trump’s first national security advisor has pleaded guilty to being an unregistered agent for Russian interests in Turkey.  Son-in-law Jared Kushner sought to use Russian diplomatic channels to communicate secretly with Moscow.

For many Americans the truth too horrible to consider is that Donald Trump could be a criminal, a wildly successful con artist.  He may well be disloyal.  For those who grasp what Trump is, the corollary truth is that our Constitution’s checks and balances are failing us.

The Republican majority in Congress refuses to properly investigate Trump.  Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, is rushing a vote on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, whose legal writings indicate he might protect Trump from law enforcement.

Prosecutors, tax authorities, casino regulators and other government officials appear to have let the Trump family get away with dishonest conduct again and again.  Trump has bragged that in return for campaign donations politicians always obeyed his wishes, and it seems many did.

The latest expose focuses mainly on the 1950s through the 1990s.  We need to see Trump’s tax returns, and the books and records behind them, from this century.  And if they show cheating, we need to enforce the laws Trump violated.

David Cay Johnston, a former Los Angeles Times and New York Times reporter, is the author of “The Making of Donald Trump” and “It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America.”

JOURNALISTS - Nation's Lifeblood

IMHO:  A truly Free Press is vital to keeping our Democracy alive, and protected from the greed for power and sliding into authoritarian government.

"‘Journalists are our lifeblood,’ new Los Angeles Times owner says" PBS NewsHour 6/21/2018

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Patrick Soon-Shiong, a multi-billionaire surgeon, entrepreneur and part owner of the Los Angeles Lakers, finalized his ownership of the Los Angeles Times [and San Diego Union-Tribune] this week.  Judy Woodruff talks with him about how his upbringing in apartheid South Africa drove his love of newspapers and his vision for the future of the organization despite significant past struggles.

LAW ENFORCEMENT - Los Angeles County Sheriff Department

"Editorial:  Problems in L.A. County Sheriff's Department run deep" by The Times Editorial Board, Los Angeles Times 9/24/2014

Despite the assertion to the contrary by Sheriff John Scott, the sentencing Tuesday and likely imprisonment of six sworn Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies, sergeants and lieutenants does not reflect merely the actions of a "few" bad actors.  The punishments do not remove the isolated corrosive elements in an otherwise solid Sheriff's Department, and they will not end the problems that some within the department and county government continue to insist occurred during a troubling but limited period of time.

The six were convicted of obstructing justice, an especially egregious offense by officers sworn to uphold the law, and their actions came in the form of a plot to shield the department from a federal investigation into the systematic and unwarranted abuse of jail inmates.  The six may not have known at first, in the summer of 2011, that one of their corrupt colleagues had taken a bribe to smuggle a cellphone to an inmate; but they knew that the inmate had the phone and that he was using it to tell FBI agents about beatings and other deputy misconduct.  They conspired to keep the inmate from communicating with federal authorities by moving him around the county's vast jail system using false names.  Two of the defendants even confronted an FBI agent outside her home and tried to intimidate her by claiming — falsely — that they were obtaining a warrant for her arrest.

Those defendants pursued a course of action that displayed a stunning arrogance.  They earned their sentences; but as obstructors rather than defenders of justice, they were not self-taught.  They operated within an ingrained culture of contempt, mismanagement, dishonesty and gratuitous violence.  It is important to remember that they were trying to block a probe into the widespread use of excessive force, and that such force has been documented against visitors as well as inmates in Los Angeles County jails.  It is important to keep in mind also that the department's Antelope Valley stations were found to have engaged in patterns and practices of racially based discrimination and unconstitutional stops, searches, seizures and detentions.  Settlement talks are ongoing in a lawsuit alleging that top sheriff's officials condoned a pattern of violence against inmates.  A court-appointed monitor is operating under a similar lawsuit alleging mistreatment of mentally ill inmates going back decades, and the U.S. Department of Justice advised the county earlier this year that it too would go to court over treatment of the mentally ill in the jails.  Meanwhile, a Times investigation found fluctuating hiring standards that sometimes drop so low as to suggest the department will hire, at times, almost anyone.

It is tempting to believe that problems in the Sheriff's Department began and ended with these six defendants — or with the deputy who took the bribe to smuggle the cellphone, or with those indicted on firearms or financial fraud charges, or with Paul Tanaka's appointment as undersheriff in 2011, or Lee Baca's election as sheriff in 1998 — but the facts belie such a belief.  Problems in the department run deep, and the need for change will continue well after these six defendants are sent to prison.

OPINION - Eric Holder Tenure

"Editorial:  Rights and wrongs under Eric Holder" by The Times Editorial Board, Los Angeles Times 9/25/2014

With Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr.'s resignation, President Obama faces the loss of someone who is not just a legal advisor and Cabinet member.  He is losing a close friend who has often dared to say what one suspects the president himself was thinking but was unwilling to speak aloud.

Holder is the first African American ever to serve as attorney general, and he got the job, of course, from the first African American president.  Almost from the first moments of the administration, however, the president has skittered around fractious conversations of race while Holder has engaged them squarely, if not always skillfully.

It was Holder who, just a month into the new administration, challenged the notion that the U.S. was genuinely an ethnic melting pot; on matters of race, he offered, it was “essentially a nation of cowards.”  It was Holder who fumed at his treatment by a House committee and suggested that members were hard on him and the president because of their race.  It was Holder, not Obama, who traveled to Ferguson, Mo., to help calm a community riven by riots after a white police officer shot a young, black man.

The trip to Ferguson may have been ill-advised — it placed Holder in the dual role of assuaging anger at the police department while supervising a presumably impartial investigation into whether that same department was violating civil rights laws.  But his stalwart determination to confront injustice has been a strength as well.  Among other things, he has defended embattled voting rights, pressed hard for marriage equality and initiated an important overhaul of federal drug sentencing laws.

There were plenty of disappointments during the Holder years.  He tried to put Khalid Shaikh Mohammed on trial in New York, then pulled back in the face of congressional opposition.  He tiptoed around the financial crisis, led overzealous attempts to punish officials who leaked to journalists and was held in contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with an investigation of gun trafficking at the border.  Holder's close relationship with Obama — they often vacation together — fueled suspicion among their critics that the attorney general has failed to vigorously pursue allegations of governmental wrongdoing, from the gun trafficking case to the claim that the IRS targeted conservative groups.

Most of those allegations are nonsense, and serve as a reminder that Holder has spent much of his tenure in combat with shrill partisans.  That's not his fault, and his irritation with those critics has been understandable.  Like Obama, he's faced obdurate, unreasonable opponents; also like Obama, though, he's occasionally deserved their criticism.

EDUCATION - Food For Thought, Schoolchildren's Hunger

"Op-Ed:  No excuse for dismissing high-achieving schoolchildren's hunger" by Garret Keizer, Los Angeles Times 9/27/2014

In the fall of 2010, after a 14-year hiatus from the classroom, I began a one-year job filling in for a teacher on leave from the same rural Vermont high school that I'd entered as a rookie 30 years before.

Almost from my first day, I was moved by the sight of what had always been a good school straining to be a better one.  Multiple tutoring centers did a brisk business at every period and not infrequently after the buses had gone for the day.  Hardly a week went by when teachers were not summoned to an early-morning meeting to discuss an individual student's progress.  Study halls no longer functioned as de facto prep periods for their faculty minders or as down-time for sleepy kids.  Foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the boy who woke at 2 in the morning to do his barn chores no longer had a place to lay his head.

By all official measures, the school was succeeding.  Ranked as the state's poorest on the basis of the number of its students eligible to receive free or reduced-price lunches, Lake Region Union High School was outperforming many of its more affluent competitors on standardized tests.  The year before I returned, its writing scores were the highest in the state.  The next year, the free-and-reduced-lunch students performed above the state average in reading, writing, math and science on the New England Common Assessment Program exams.

I threw myself into the mission with as much gusto as a man can summon in late middle age.  I did my best to coach for the NECAPs — yes, we took time away from our lesson plans to do some teaching to the test — and resolved to keep my skepticism about the ultimate value of the tests to myself.  There were good reasons for doing so.  I knew that voters in the community were likelier to approve the school budget if the tests results were good.  I also knew that some of the kids I coached and cajoled would go on to surmount the social conditions that stood in their way.  I knew this because a few of them always had.

But I also knew the school's sincere efforts were in the service of a cynical agenda.  The battle cry of the school reform movement, that “poverty should never be an excuse for poor academic achievement,” all too often masks the blithe conviction that good academic achievement can serve as an excuse for poverty.  As long as the test scores are at par, you see, we need not be overly concerned if the pantries are bare, the parents jobless or jailed, and the gap between rich and poor more appalling than it's been since 1928.

In the same county where Lake Region is achieving its impressive test results, an estimated 1 in 4 children is “food insecure.”  It's a phrase that tries the imaginations of those who have the luxury of spicing their security with complaint.  “What to cook for dinner, always such a dilemma.”  Imagine waking up in a state of food insecurity and going to school to take a standardized test.  Imagine how ashamed you'll feel if your school is judged to be failing because of you.

Not to worry, though, because the hunger goes away just as soon as you've performed at grade level or are enrolled in an Advanced Placement course.  And within a few short years, you'll be getting the math right when you divvy up your welfare check after your job at the furniture mill has been outsourced or the family farm auctioned off.

In one of my classes was a girl who'd been rescued the previous winter from an unheated trailer behind her grandparents' house.  She was a tough and determined kid, intelligent, ready to seek extra help, not afraid to speak out in class, almost never behind in her homework.  I happen not to know her standardized test scores, but it's reasonable to assume that her better-than-average application resulted in a performance that was at least on a par with the better-than-average test scores of her school.  It is far less reasonable to assume that those test scores significantly improved her lot.  They certainly didn't improve her grandparents' lot.  They did nothing to allay the economic conditions that made her every achievement in school outrageously more difficult for her than it had to be.

No matter how dedicated, teachers alone cannot change conditions that will take nothing short of a revolution to change.  I didn't have to teach for a year in a “high-performing” rural high school to recognize the obscenity of using “failing schools” to ignore the implications of a broken democracy.  Or to recognize the moral futility of being charged with the task of creating “a level playing field” so that society can sort its winners and losers with a clearer conscience and a colder eye.

Of course, I can bear witness to the impressive academic achievements of students from impoverished backgrounds.  So can many other teachers, and they should.  To withhold one's applause for the sake of advocating broader social progress is to insult those students and their struggles.  It is also to forfeit what may be our best challenge to a society of mounting inequality.

After all, if food-insecure 16-year-olds can master a prescribed curriculum, then what is the excuse of the richest nation in the world for failing to master the common core of a livable wage, a color-blind legal system and a society in which the word “class” refers to a course you take and not to chances you never had?

CALIFORINA - Mammoth Lakes Earthquakes

IMHO:  Think about the frequency of tornadoes in the U.S. vs earthquakes.  I'll take the risk of earthquakes over tornadoes any day.

"Mammoth Lakes earthquake swarm tied to water pressure, tectonic stress" by Veronica Rocha, Los Angeles Times 9/27/2014

The more than 600 earthquakes that have struck the Mammoth Lakes region over the last 24 hours are an indication of tectonic, not volcanic, stress, an expert said Friday.

At least 109 of the earthquakes were magnitude 2.0 or greater, with smaller quakes making up the bulk of the activity, said David Shelly, a seismologist at the U.S. Geological Survey's Volcano Science Center.  At least six, however, were greater than magnitude 3.0.

The largest, a 3.8 temblor six miles from Mammoth Lakes, occurred at 9:21 PM Thursday.

The swarm of quakes, which began Thursday in the 20-by-10-mile Long Valley caldera east of the central Sierra Nevada Range, isn't uncommon for the region.  About 200 small quakes -- the largest a magnitude 2.7 -- shook in Long Valley Caldera in July.

Still, Shelly said, “this one is a bit more energetic than what we have seen in a while."

The earthquakes may have been triggered by water pressure from area hot springs shifting through the ground surface, stressing tectonic plates.  Scientists, Shelly said, are closely watching the earthquake swarm, but don’t believe it's connected to any magmatic activity.

Shelly said seismic analysts plan to review the swarm and update locations and magnitudes of the quakes, but the activity is not nearly on the size and scale of what was measured in the 1980s and 1990s.

In the 1980s, the area was hit with a swarm of multiple 6.0-magnitude temblors, but they were overshadowed by the Mount St. Helens eruption in Washington, Shelly said.

A decade later, in 1997, the area was rocked with another series of mostly 4.9-magnitude quakes over the course of several months.

The Long Valley caldera is one of the most seismically active regions in the state, and is part of a quiet network of 17 volcanoes throughout California.  Many of the older volcanoes haven't been active for thousands of years.

The last time the Long Valley caldera erupted was 50,000 years ago.

Some volcanoes, like the Clear Lake Volcanic Field just 90 miles north of San Francisco, and Salton Buttes, which lies within the Salton Sea Geothermal Field 90 miles east of Palm Springs, experience some seismic activity, but nothing near the shaking in the Long Valley caldera.

"We are not having any eruptions in California ... in the near future," Shelly said.

Scientists rate a volcano's potential threat by assigning one of three different categories -- high to very high, moderate, or low to very low.

The USGS created the measurement to ensure hazardous volcanoes are monitored so scientists can better develop forecasts and warnings for residents.

The Long Valley caldera carries high to very high threat potential, likely because it rests near the community of Mammoth Lake.

ACA HEALTH CARE - The Spin Intensifies, Dueling Personal Stories

"Next phase of the Obamacare battle:  dueling personal stories" by Maeve Reston, Los Angeles Times 1/2/2014

When the White House and its allies sought to regain control of the healthcare debate as Obamacare rolled into effect Wednesday, the face of that effort was not President Obama, but Mary-Therese — a Floridian who said she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006 and then lost her coverage.

"I’ve been waiting a long time for Jan. 1, 2014," she says in a Web ad from Organizing for Action, the advocacy group born out of the president's campaign operation.

But the story about the healthcare law being publicized in a new video from the campaign of Monica Wehby, a Republican making a long-shot bid against Democratic Sen.  Jeff Merkley in Oregon, was very different.  It featured "Donna of Portland," who said she never received enrollment options from her state’s exchange after applying when her family’s insurance plan was canceled.

"We heard that the Oregon Medical Insurance Plan was probably going to be closing, but we just thought I would fold into another insurance," Donna says to the camera from her kitchen in a video that accuses Merkley of misleading Oregonians about being able to keep their health plans.  "We had no idea there would be this kind of time involved, or turmoil."

Those sorts of dueling stories are the next phase of the battle over Obamacare, and the question of which version Americans will find most compelling could tip the balance in a dozen or so Senate races this year that will determine the balance of power in Washington.

For much of the fall, the Obama administration and vulnerable Democratic lawmakers have been buried under stories about technical difficulties of the lurching federal insurance portal known as HealthCare.gov, and the shock waves that followed the cancellation of about 5 million plans that did not meet the law’s requirements.  In a frank assessment during his last news conference, the president said simply that the law got "about as bad a bunch of publicity as you could imagine."

White House advisors think they are turning the corner with about 2.1 million people enrolled in Obamacare plans, in addition to 4 million others who have been found eligible for coverage under the law's expansion of Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program.

Starting Wednesday, the spotlight shifted, at least in part, from government mechanics to insurance companies, who will now share responsibility for handling any sign-up glitches.

But the campaign against the healthcare law — and the Democratic senators who voted for it — has been vociferous, well-financed and multi-faceted.  Conservative legal strategists, who have led a multi-front march to the Supreme Court, notched a small victory on New Year's Eve when they succeeded in getting Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor to grant a temporary reprieve to an order of Catholic nuns, shielding it from complying with a mandate in the law to cover birth control.

Outside groups like Americans for Prosperity have poured millions of dollars into anti-Obamacare ads against top targets like Democratic Sens. Mark Begich of Alaska, Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana and Kay Hagan of North Carolina.  (The group drew heat, however, for hiring a Maryland actress to star in its Alaska ad.)

And as the 2014 races gear up, Republican Senate challengers with less money to spend — like Wehby in Oregon, Rep. Bill Cassidy in Louisiana and Rep. Tom Cotton in Arkansas — are on the hunt for Americans who will tell their stories about mishaps with Obamacare.  As they solicit their experiences through campaign Facebook pages and websites and at their events, Republican operatives are also combing news stories for evidence of shrinking doctor networks, rising premiums or unexpected coverage gaps.

Because the healthcare law touches so many Americans, there is no shortage of stories on both sides.

A Wehby aide said one of the women featured in the campaign’s video is the mother of one of Wehby’s former patients (the candidate is a pediatric neurosurgeon).  She contacted the campaign through Facebook after watching her health insurance premiums rise and her network of doctors shrink over the last year, changes that she believes result from broader shifts in the healthcare system because of the new law.

Last fall, Republican operatives used robocalls, Web ads, social media and billboards to bludgeon Democratic senators who used variations of Obama’s line that those who liked their health insurance plans could keep them.  The new Wehby video closes with a clip of Merkley comparing the healthcare system to a Rubik’s cube that he holds in his hand: "Healthcare is not a game," the ad says.

Merkley’s seat is considered to be relatively safe in a solid blue state.  The freshman senator won in 2008 with 48.9% of the vote to 45.6% for his closest challenger, but Oregon’s disastrous problems with its health insurance marketplace, where consumers still cannot sign up online, have given his challengers an opening.

Asked about the criticism of Obamacare and Oregon’s troubles, a spokesman for Merkley said the senator was focused "on ensuring that Oregonians have access to health insurance."

"No one should go without health insurance due to Cover Oregon’s mistakes.  That is why he supports allowing people to sign up for coverage into January, with coverage retroactive to Jan. 1," Merkley spokesman Matt McNally said.

"Republicans want to repeal the bill, which would send us back to the old way of doing things on healthcare:  People being kicked off their insurance when they got sick, caps on people’s coverage, and no coverage for those with preexisting conditions.  Instead, Sen. Merkley is ready to work with his colleagues across the aisle to make improvements to the law that retain the critical consumer protections contained in health reform."

After being skewered for moving too slowly when the healthcare law’s problems moved into the public eye, the White House and partners like Organizing for Action are trying to be more proactive in this second phase, arming their allies with resources to help resolve post-Jan. 1 insurance glitches quickly.  A White House tip sheet issued Tuesday, for example, offered telephone numbers for consumers to call for help if their medical provider is unable to locate their information.

And now that coverage is in effect, they hope to draw more attention to the stories they have been culling over the last month — like that of Mary-Therese, who was featured in a three-minute video montage of Americans who successfully signed up for coverage under the new law.

"For decades millions of Americans have not had access to quality affordable healthcare," the ad says as pictures of newly covered individuals pop from a map of the United States.  "This is why the Affordable Care Act matters.  Millions of Americans now have the peace of mind and security of being insured."

Organizing for Action operatives say they plan to roll out many more of those stories as the months go on; no doubt with Republicans countering with stories of their own.

MEDIA - The San Quentin News

"Newspaper behind bars boasts compelling storytelling" By Chris Megerian, Los Angeles Times 1/1/2013

For the inmate editors and writers of the San Quentin News, the work is a reminder that life doesn't end when people are locked up.  They want to increase circulation tenfold.

The scene was almost indistinguishable from that in any other newsroom.  Editors sat around chatting about the next issue and tinkering with stories.  Front pages were tacked up on the walls, and family photos were taped to computer terminals.

But in fact this newspaper office was unlike almost any other, obvious from the dress code:  Staff members wore the standard blue uniform of California prison inmates.

When the phone rang, the answer was a crisp, "Hello, San Quentin News."

The newspaper — motto: "The Pulse of San Quentin" — is one of the country's only inmate-produced publications.  Convicts write the articles and design the pages from behind the walls of the all-male lockup outside San Francisco that houses California's death row.

It's a community newspaper for a community of felons and the guards who keep them there.  Articles mark officers' retirements, inmates' releases and the latest developments in the federal court battle over reducing California's swollen prison population.

A regular column highlights "an OG's perspective" — OG for "old guard," rather than the more common "original gangster."  There are Sudoku puzzles, book reviews and recaps of prison-yard sports.

The paper typically has an aspirational tone, emphasizing uplifting stories about inmates improving their lives and taking advantage of education programs.  Headlines refer to prisoners who "promise to work for peace" or go from "criminal life to positive futures."

Staffers say their work can induce soul-searching, that telling other people's stories helps them explore their own lives.  And it can be a source of pride.

Rahsaan Thomas, a convicted killer, mailed his mother a copy of the October issue, where he appeared in a front-page photo of a basketball game.

"It was the first time I was in the paper and nobody got shot," said Thomas, 43, the sports editor.

Before they reached San Quentin, many of the editors' only brush with journalism was as subjects of articles about the crimes that put them behind bars.  Each issue of the monthly San Quentin News is a reminder that their lives did not end when they were locked up.

The paper is distributed inside San Quentin and mailed to libraries at 16 other California prisons.  And the editors have larger plans.

They're working with graduate students at Berkeley to expand the publication, hoping to increase circulation tenfold to at least 120,000 copies and distribute them in all of the state's 34 prisons.

"We have a vision," said Arnulfo Garcia, 61, the editor in chief.  "Our dreams are big."

Their plan hinges on funding from foundations, individual donors and even some subscriptions.  It could take more than a decade to reach fruition.  But slow progress isn't an obstacle.

"We've got a lot of time," joked Managing Editor Juan Haines.

Haines, 56, is serving 55 years to life for bank robbery; Garcia's sentence is 65 years to life for burglary and skipping bail.

It's not just the criminal records that make the San Quentin News unconventional.

Staff members have an obvious stake in the topics they cover, although they strive for objectivity.  And they lack true editorial freedom because of oversight and occasional censorship by prison officials.

They also have a captive audience.  But roughly a third of California's inmates can't read above a sixth-grade level, according to state statistics.

A team of outside advisors, former reporters and editors from around the Bay Area, donate their time to help put out each issue.  One of the advisors, Berkeley professor William Drummond, discovered a surprising connection with an inmate.

Walking across the prison yard in the summer of 2011, he was introduced to Watani Stiner.  He told Drummond, "You wrote about me years ago."

Four decades earlier, Drummond had been a reporter for the Los Angeles Times.  He wrote a story about a deadly shooting at UCLA that led to conspiracy convictions for Stiner and his brother.  Now Stiner pens the "OG's perspective" column.

"When you write about a crime and someone goes to prison, you say that's the end of the story," Drummond said.  "But when working at San Quentin, you realize that's the beginning of the story."

The prison has had a newspaper on and off since at least 1930.  When Robert Ayers became warden in 2006, the paper had been shut down since the early 1980s.

Ayers thought reviving it was a good idea at a time when California's prison system was facing enormous challenges.  Inmate healthcare was being placed under federal control because of unconstitutionally poor care, and "there was all kinds of information, misinformation, rumor," he said.

A newspaper would provide "a vehicle for communicating to the inmate population," he decided, and the first issue of the rejuvenated San Quentin News appeared in June 2008.

Only a handful of such publications still come from behind prison walls, including the monthly Prison Mirror newspaper in Minnesota and the Angolite magazine in Louisiana, which is published six times a year.

Although there's a phone in the San Quentin newsroom, it connects only to other prison offices.  The computers have no Internet access.

Studies and news coverage that may be fodder for the San Quentin News have to be walked into the prison on flash drives by advisors so inmates can use them to generate their own articles.  Photos are taken by inmates under close supervision or by the prison's public information officer.  The paper's website is maintained externally by an advisor.

Every issue is reviewed by prison administrators before going to press.  Although the editors say it's rare for officials to block something, it has happened.

When Haines wrote a review of the book "Makes Me Wanna Holler," a memoir about growing up black in America, prison officials yanked it, fearing it would inflame racial tension in the lockup.

"We're in a subservient position," Haines acknowledged.

Sgt. Don McGraw, administrative assistant to the prison's current warden, Kevin Chappell, said the decision was about "the safety and security of the institution."

The newspaper does carry articles critical of budget cuts and prison conditions.  The hunger strike that roiled California's prisons last summer received front-page coverage.

But there are "two things you don't criticize, the food and the package room," Haines said.  "We get all our goodies through packages, and we have to eat in the cafeteria every day."

Inmates who work at the newspaper can find more than pride and a way to pass time behind bars.  Some find themselves again.

David Marsh earned a journalism degree more than three decades ago but never used it until he wound up at San Quentin for selling drugs.  He joined the prison newspaper and fell back in love with journalism.

"It was like I had just done it the day before," said Marsh, 58.

He was released from San Quentin in 2010 and began hunting for a job in the Central Valley. Although his resume was thin, he was able to show the editors at the Valley Voice in Visalia some articles he had written for the San Quentin News.

Marsh was hired.

"If I could afford it," he said, "I'd pay them for the job."