My latest for LA.com is a review of the interesting new high-end burger joint on LaBrea, near Wilshire, called Umami Burger. They specialize in what they call “the fifth taste.” Here’s an excerpt:

See, there are four basic tastes to a food–sweet, sour, salty, and bitter–but the mysterious umami is crashing the party. In the early 20th century, Dr. Kikunae Ikeda discovered the true nature of “deliciousness” (no small task) and the result was the savory umami, the fifth and most essential taste in determining true flavor. It all sounds like a lot of hooey but rest assured, the burgers at Umami are fantastic.

Read the rest of it here.

Can the online innovations in entertainment TV change the game in politics and news as well? Look inside the Wilshire & Washington crystal-ball with special guests Miles Beckett & Greg Goodfried, the creators of the new CBS social TV event, Harper’s Island, and founders of Eqal. These two online impresarios first came to the world’s attention with the mega-Youtube hit, LonelyGirl15, pulling in audiences in the millions when regular TV shows were being canceled left and right. And now they’re turning their attention to modernizing the studio TV system: How can TV make it in the internet era, and can new technology offer greater creator-control, and therefore better art? Can TV networks (and the news) modernize and take advantage of all the cost-cutting technology out there, hopefully abandoning their old (and expensive) way of doing business? It’s a fascinating discussion with these new hotshots in the entertainment field, so don’t miss this!

Hosts Ted Johnson, Maegan Carberry, and Teresa Valdez-Klein also talk President Obama’s First 100 Days in Office. Why is 100 days our big measuring stick? Isn’t that metric (divisible by 10) and therefore communist? Has there ever been a more over-examined, and less important, event on the blogosphere? Most people are down with what Obama’s doing and know to keep their expectations in check. The dude’s practically a Vulcan in how even-keel he is, which does keep us all calm in this economic panic (according to Teresa, everyone’s favorite Star Trek fan). Still, should the prez maybe show a little enthusiasm to get us more involved again, like during the election? Do things like Serve.gov and Organizing for America have too much of an Orwellian feel for people to really embrace?

Finally, we’ve got the Arlen Specter switcheroo. Specter did go after Senator Jim Jeffords a couple years ago when Jeffords switched parties, so is this hypocrisy, even though it’s not like the Republican Party has been friendly to politicians like Specter in the last couple of years? Was it courageous? Disloyal? Politically opportunistic? And does this reveal the real problem with our system: the constraints of political parties on intelligent politicians? Join us for all this in today’s Wilshire & Washington!

Listen to the show here, subscribe to the iTunes podcast, or use the Blog Talk Radio player to the right.

Wilshire & Washington, the weekly Blog Talk Radio program that explores the intersection of politics, entertainment, and new media, features co-hosts Ted Johnson, Managing Editor of Variety; conservative blogger Teresa Valdez Klein (www.teresacentric.com), and liberal blogger Maegan Carberry (www.maegancarberry.com). The show airs every Wednesday at 7:30am PST on BlogTalkRadio.com.

Torture memos here, torture memos there, torture memos everywhere! On the left, they’re screaming bloody-murder for public hangings of all people involved; on the right, they want Obama’s head for letting out this confidential information. We’re all embarrassed and horrified, but is that a reason for not talking about the fact that the United States DID torture? How do Lynndie England and her crimes at Abu Ghraib fit into this equation? Can you chastise one and not the other? And if letting out the memos is bad for morale, isn’t torturing people bad for morale too? Maegan feels these the authors of these memos should be subjected to some sort of justice, and Teresa tries to remind us that if we want to do it right, we must be patient. Rome wasn’t rebuilt in a day, after all.

Besides torture, wiretapping is all the talk in DC right now after CQPolitics.com broke the story about Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) being wiretapped and getting caught offering to lobby for AIPAC. How much of it is true? Could this be a tempest in a teapot? Is this just another story the media is trumpeting without much evidence? Ted admits this is a big part of the media environment now, with everybody being under a tremendous amount of pressure to break a story.

And the big news yesterday is Gavin Newsom announcing he’s running for Governor of California, and did it via Twitter and Facebook! He might get new media, but he still has to get his message out there to, um, “regular folks” (aka non-twitterers). Will he make his stance on gay marriage a major part of his campaign? Of course, California is lining up a whole host of high-tech candidates for major office: Steve Westly, Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, even Chris Kelly from Facebook. But to command the youth vote, you’ve got to do more than engage the new mediums – you’ve got to speak the language.

Finally, we’ve got a growing controversy, possibly, around Ron Howard’s new film, Angels & Demons, with certain members from the Catholic Church calling it out. While this is surely going to fail in stopping the movie from becoming a massive box office success, a more interesting question is this: do boycotts even work anymore?

Listen to the show here, subscribe to the iTunes podcast, or use the Blog Talk Radio player to the right.

Wilshire & Washington, the weekly Blog Talk Radio program that explores the intersection of politics, entertainment, and new media, features co-hosts Ted Johnson, Managing Editor of Variety; conservative blogger Teresa Valdez Klein (www.teresacentric.com), and liberal blogger Maegan Carberry (www.maegancarberry.com). The show airs every Wednesday at 7:30am PST on BlogTalkRadio.com.

“I rejoice as a moralist at the prospect of a reduction of the duties on wine, by our national legislature. It is an error to view a tax on that liquor as merely a tax on the rich. It is a prohibition of its use to the middling class of our citizens, and a condemnation of them to the poison of whiskey, which is desolating their houses. No nation is drunken where wine is cheap; and none sober, where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage. It is, in truth, the only antidote to the bane of whiskey. Fix but the duty at the rate of other merchandise, and we can drink wine here as cheap as grog; and who will not prefer it? Its extended use will carry health and comfort to a much enlarged circle. Everyone in easy circumstances (as the bulk of our citizens are) will prefer it to the poison to which they are now driven by their government. And the treasury itself will find that a penny apiece from a dozen, is more than a groat from a single one. This reformation, however, will require time.”
- Thomas Jefferson, owner of one of America’s first vineyards

It’s Tea-Bagging-Tea-Party-Glenn-Beck’s-Birthday-Day! Everyone’s going wild about getting tea-bagged today, with parties taking place in major cities all across the country to protest Obama raising taxes and bailing out Wall Street. But what’s interesting to us is how all this is being organized. Twitter, Facebook, and blogs have turned into a huge organizing tool for this group, with #teaparty trending to the top of Twitter’s search. So here’s the big question: how should new technologies, like Twitter and Facebook, be used in campaigns, and how should they be used in government?

Adriel Hampton, a news commentator, new media pundit, and investigator with the San Francisco DA Office, is running for Congress in California’s 10th Congressional District and he joins our hosts Ted Johnson and Maegan Carberry to talk twitter and populism, how the mainstream media has mostly ignored the tea parties, and how government shouldn’t waste this activist energy, no matter which party it belongs to. What’s with Obama stopping his twitter feed just because he’s not in office? Doesn’t that show how the administration isn’t being engaged technologically? Can the Republicans really take this populist “revolt” and somehow organize it for the next election? We also get a friendly call from Steve, a fellow BlogTalkRadio, wondering why the media isn’t taking the tea-bag parties seriously?

Listen to the show here, subscribe to the iTunes podcast, or use the Blog Talk Radio player to the right.

Wilshire & Washington, the weekly Blog Talk Radio program that explores the intersection of politics, entertainment, and new media, features co-hosts Ted Johnson, Managing Editor of Variety; conservative blogger Teresa Valdez Klein (www.teresacentric.com), and liberal blogger Maegan Carberry (www.maegancarberry.com). The show airs every Wednesday at 7:30am PST on BlogTalkRadio.com.

Cross-posted on Huffington Post:
Over the last few days, there’s been an odd kafuffle in the media over Arizona State University apparently choosing not to award President Barack Obama an honorary doctorate when he gives the university’s commencement speech later this year. After intense scrutiny by people who clearly have very little to do with their time, ASU has caved, in a way, and announced instead that it’s naming a scholarship after him, now called the “President Barack Obama Scholars” program, probably one of the more awkwardly named scholarships available, at least until Dick Cheney gets one.

But by giving in to criticism, ASU has just shown itself to be as tone deaf as the people who criticized the university in the first place.

Obama will be delivering a May 13th speech to ASU graduates at the university’s Tempe campus, and over the years, many commencement speakers have received ceremonial degrees there, including “pioneering scientists and college presidents, titans of oil and computer microchips, newspaper publishers and generous donors, a foreign communist educator and a successful movie director.” (See a full list here.) And to all of these distinguished figures, an honorary doctorate from the nation’s third biggest party school (according to Playboy in 2006) might be a nice little trinket to put on the mantelpiece.

But no sitting president has ever delivered a commencement at ASU, and not all speakers have received honorary degrees. So why should President Obama receive an honorary degree anyway?

Right here on Huffington Post, Dawn Teo says Obama is getting “stiffed,” and that complains that Obama’s done quite enough already to merit the honor.

Writing two best-sellers? Not outstanding. Developing one of the largest grassroots organizations in the world? Nothing special. Becoming the first African American President of the United States? Good, but nothing to write home about.

But this flippant, and no one at ASU is suggesting such. The university wouldn’t be inviting Obama to deliver their commencement speech if they didn’t think he was an impressive and important person with a message its graduates would benefit in hearing.

An editorial by the East Valley Tribune, after noting that the University of Notre Dame has chosen to honor Obama with an honorary degree, snarked that, “perhaps Notre Dame has a better understanding of what Obama already has accomplished simply by reaching our nation’s pinnacle of political power and public service.”

Perhaps. Or maybe Notre Dame just has lower standards and wants the media attention, or Arizona State’s administrators have a better understanding of what an honorary degree means. Or maybe the comparing the two universities is completely fallacious to begin with.

Yes, it’s a momentous achievement for Obama to be our first black president. Yes, his campaign was a stunning example of how grassroots organizing and the internet can be leveraged to involve more people in politics than ever before.

But Obama already lives every day with one of our country’s greatest honors: he’s the President of the United States of America. He’s got the nation’s top job as the world’s most powerful person. We the people have entrusted this job to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. That’s nice company.

So at this point, no offense to ASU, but Obama doesn’t need the honor of any university. Obama is honored every day by kings and queens, prime ministers and presidents. In Obama’s recent visit overseas, French President Sarkozy couldn’t look more desperate to please him, and we haven’t had the French so in love with us since the British burned down the White House in the 1800s.

More importantly though, Sharon Keeler, an ASU spokeswoman, was right when she defended the university’s actions initially by telling the AP that, “His body of work is yet to come. That’s why we’re not recognizing him with a degree at the beginning of his presidency.” I’m sure Obama would agree with this assessment – he has barely gotten started. Not yet 100 days into his presidency, he, like the rest of us, hopes and believes that his best and brightest days are in front of him.

When he does, however, complete his work in the White House, after one term or two, then we will honor him, as we honor all our presidents. We will remember him; we will analyze and interpret his policies, his successes and failures – and no one will ever recall whether or not Arizona State gave him an honorary degree on some beautiful spring morning in 2009.

After seeing Rian Johnson’s exemplary Brick a few years ago, I was convinced I had just experienced the birth of a singular talent. It was such a distinctive movie, where the language, the writing, the acting, the music – they were all completely in sync with a individual, bizarre vision. Whether that vision worked for you is a separate question, but there was no doubt in my mind Johnson knew what he was doing.
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