This morning I attended an event at UCLA called “Millennials in the Next Economy,” put together by The Atlantic Monthly and sponsored by Allstate.  The topic: “the economic prospects of the Millennial Generation (people born between 1981 and 2002) – how they are making their way through this job market, how they are coping with economic uncertainty, and what they can expect in the years to come.” (This link will take you to more information, including the results of a nationwide survey of Millennials.) After about fifteen minutes of the presentation, I texted my 19-year-old to say, “You’re screwed.”

A few key takeaways:

• 24% of recent college graduates have been unable to find a job. For the last two graduating classes, their entry into the job market was “a rout.”
• About a quarter of people aged 26-29 are living with their parents.
• Nationwide unemployment of Millennials is about 16%. In some areas, it’s 28%.

The second speaker was a guy who did market research and polling for Bush/Cheney 2004. Shortly after his remarks — and after I didn’t applaud — I put my hand up. I never got called on, so in frustration I posed my question to the other people at my table:  “Do you think Millennials are really pissed at the cost of a trillion-dollar misadventure in Iraq, when that money could have been invested into our economy?”

Here were the responses at my table:

From a middle-aged Latino man to my right: “You are sitting next to the right guy.”

From two other people: smiles and nods.

From the young woman across from me:  “This Millennial is.”

There’s plenty of blame to go around for the subprime mortgage meltdown (some of it in our collective mirror). But blame for the Iraq war, as well as recognition of the enormous ongoing cost of it, needs to be delivered to a certain address in Texas.

Last week I had my new suit fitted by a tailor. I don’t think she did a good job:  the legs now ride too high and the waist is too expansive. But listening to this call in which President Johnson specifies precisely how he’d like his new pants to fit made me think that perhaps I wasn’t explicit enough. LBJ was someone who always knew exactly what he wanted, including extra room from the bunghole to the brass tacks.

Slate helps us understand why it cost Alvin Greene $10,440 to get on the South Carolina ballot.

Now if they could help us understand how an unemployed unknown who lives with his father came up with $10,440 — let alone winning the Democratic Senate primary —  they’d really be providing a public service.

Here’s what it’s like to be one of the locals caught in the oil situation, where people are wrestling with their options: help in the clean up (but risk your health and sign away your rights), or sit it out and starve because the fishing industry is wiped out. Horrible options.

I also enjoy the PR show the lead local claims BP is putting on for the President every time he flies over, and the company’s inability to answer basic scientific questions about the aftereffects of the spill.

The end of this video, which is co-produced by Edward James Olmos, tells us to “visit the Gulf” rather than forget the people there, because they “need our help.” True. But I’m unclear how visiting them is going to help. And I can’t resist noting the awful irony that visiting them would mean consuming more petroleum — and it’s our consumption, ultimately, that led to the spill.

This tells you everything you need to know.

Meg Whitman just won the Republican primary for governor of California. She spent more than $71 million of her own money on the campaign, and more than $88 million overall. Or about $194 for every vote she got.

Had she taken a stack of twenties down to skid row, I’m sure she could have done even better.

Want to guess what the statewide turnout was today in California’s primary election?  9.8%. In Los Angeles County, it was 5.5%.  If someone you think “doesn’t represent the mainstream” gets in, you’ll know why.

A few days ago I set out to write a tribute to my friend and former student, playwright EM Lewis. Along the way, the piece also turned into a rumination about being a playwright, and being a playwright in Los Angeles. Here’s the piece.

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I’m in Omaha at the Great Plains Theatre Conference, where I’ve seen many old friends and made some new ones. I’ve also been making new Friends — Friends with a capital “F” being the designation one gives when it’s someone you know, or will know, primarily through Facebook.  Lately I’ve noticed a new dynamic:  Friending snobbery. I note it when two strong egos clash over who Friended whom (and, therefore, was seemingly the weaker person in the engagement). Several months ago my son claimed I had Friended him. I had not. I pointedly had not. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be reading his wall. But when I received a Friend request from him, I figured he was permitting that relationship, so I confirmed him. He still claims he didn’t do this. Twice since then I’ve come into contact with well-known people who had Friended me, and I’ve mentioned our Facebook Friendship and they’ve immediately clarified that they didn’t Friend me — I must have Friended them. And they didn’t. Really. Before they made an issue of it, it didn’t matter; now it seems to establish some sort of bragging rights. So I’m considering unFriending them. I also sense that this is going to turn into a short play of mine in the near future.

Final note on this topic:  If you’re on Facebook, please join this page:  Yes for State Parks.  This initiative will generate nearly $500 million to preserve California’s state parks. Full disclosure:  I am working on this initiative. And no, I don’t generally support initiatives, because I’m hoping for overall state constitutional reform. But as my family and I have seen first-hand, California’s historic state parks are in a desperate state of disrepair — last year nearly 150 of them were shut down part-time or suffered service reductions; for the two years prior, they all almost got shut down due to our ongoing budget crisis — and honestly, I’ve lost faith in elected officials to solve this any time soon. For an $18 registration fee on every California license plate, we can directly fund the parks, protecting and preserving trees and water and animals and keeping it all open and available to the public. So I hope you’ll join me in Friending the parks.

When I got home this evening I was glad to see my vote-by-mail ballot waiting for me. I had mailed in the application only a few days ago and was worried I wasn’t going to get the ballot before leaving town on Thursday for three weeks, thus missing the election. And I always vote. Always. We had a special election a couple of months ago and I purposely booked my flight for a couple of hours after polls opened so that I wouldn’t miss the chance to vote. That wouldn’t work this time, though, and given the frequency of my travels the past year I figured it was better to file for a permanent absentee ballot, despite my preference for tradition:  going to the polling place, lining up with people, discussing politics and local issues, greeting the polling-place workers, and proudly leaving with a sticker on my lapel that reads “I voted.” Yes, I am corny about my vote. So I was pleased to see that the ballot had arrived.

What surprised me was how relatively complicated it was to fill out. Remember the infamous “butterfly ballot” that was the excuse some people gave for seating George W. Bush after the election that Al Gore won? Thousands of surprised seniors, many of them liberal Jews, learned that they had accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan for president. Here’s why:

Gee, wonder why they got confused. The GOP apologists said that people who couldn’t understand their ballot shouldn’t be allowed to vote anyway, but look at that image, and then imagine you’re in your 80’s and you know perfectly well whom you want to vote for. But because of the layout you vote for someone diametrically opposed to most of what you’re trying to support. (Which wouldn’t have mattered if the state had counted all the black votes in other districts… but that’s a separate story.)

Now let’s take a look at California’s absentee ballot kit. Here’s an example (yes, taken from 2008, but the components are the same):

You get a general election guidebook, mailed separately. Then you get the kit, which includes, from left to right, the envelope in which to mail it back, the “privacy sleeve” for you to insert your completed ballot, your actual ballot (tucked in this case inside that privacy sleeve), your voting instructions and sample ballot containing the candidate names and issues on which you’re voting (plus a numbered bubble next to each option, and the Vote By Mail instructions and guide. I opened this up, looked over all of this and — was confused. A few facts before we go on:

1. I’m 47, not 87.
2. I read, and write, for a living.
3. I am a delegate for one of the two major parties, and in this state.
4. I have three college degrees.
5. I’m a reasonably intelligent person.

To me, the first indication that this might be confusing to a great number of people was that I actually had to read the instructions.  I know that they are there to be read, but how often does anyone have to read instructions any more? I didn’t read them for my iPhone (which should be far more confusing than a ballot). I didn’t read them for setting up my home computer. Have you read them for your microwave oven or your coffeemaker or your refrigerator? But to vote, you need to read the instructions — not to grow informed about candidates and issues, but to fill out the form. That seems wrong. And it is mandated mostly because the candidate names and issues are on one booklet of paper, and the ballot is a separate piece of paper with just numbered bubbles in it. And those numbered bubbles aren’t printed in the same array as the representative numbered bubbles in the official sample ballot. Also, the back of the pink return envelope has three places to sign it — I signed it on the left side only, which seems to be correct, but the two options on the right side seemed like viable choices as well before I studied it more carefully. All of this left me wondering how many of these would be left uncounted because of a technical foul — signing the wrong side, let’s say — or how many of these would result in votes that are counter to the wishes of the voter. But then, I was also left wondering this:  How many of these just won’t get delivered? Because, you’ll note, it requires a stamp. If someone is mailing in a ballot, should we really require the postage? If members of Congress have the franking privilege, could we at least extend it to voters when they mail in their ballots?

I’m now a permanent absentee voter. Unless I go through the process of changing that status, I’ll be dealing with these ballots every time. That prospect makes me miss the voting booth. It also reminds me again how far behind our public institutions are; surely there must be a viable secure way to vote online, and if there isn’t, we should develop one. Until then, we’ll be seeing more and more of these mailed ballots — some elections are mail-only (including some here in Burbank), and in some areas of California, all elections are done by mail. That may be good for the post office, and good for voters, like me, who can’t make it to the polling place. But the only way we’ll know it’s good for democracy is if the format is simple.

Laura Bush’s book gets a rave review in today’s LA Times. Tim Rutten writes that it is “beautifully written… One of Laura Bush’s best qualities as a memoirist — and she is a particularly fine, lyrical one — is her ability to speak the language of feelings without recourse to cant or contemporary psychobabble.” As though this is somehow relevant to the reason that most people will — or won’t — buy the book. Sarah Palin’s prose further damns her, but if she wrote like Flaubert, it wouldn’t exonerate her. I’m sorry, Mrs. Bush, many of us can’t set aside the knowledge of whose company you keep, and the terrible lasting impact of that.