John McMullen Show

Community Organizer, Activist, and past-Candidate for the State Legislature Joy Silver talks with John McMullen about the current focus of Courageous Resistance of the Desert. The conversation gets into issues about homelessness, racism, refugee treatment and whether our local leadership is reasonably focused on these concerns of progressives in the Coachella Valley.

Dr. Brian Hodgkins, Executive Vice President of Clinical Services at Desert Oasis Healthcare in Palm Springs, updates us on how efforts to vaccinate Riverside County are going, what constitutes our reaching herd immunity and how that is achieved, efforts to help monitor school-age students until they can be vaccinated, and the concerns about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and how that has affected people who may fear getting vaccinated.

John McMullen engages in discussion about Transgender Issues including a story about possible problems being created by Trans-phobic corrections officers in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation ahead of the State's planned transfer of inmates classified as Transgender Female to women's prisons in the Golden State, with local transgender activist Laura Meeks.

They also discuss the complexity of transgendered people's lives and why it is so difficult for people to understand the issues this community must face and deal with.

Visit Laura Meeks' Website

Larry Davis is the Vice President of the Coachella Valley Region for Forest Lawn Mortuaries & Memorial Parks. He discusses the impact that COVID-19 has had on the mortuary and funeral industry in Southern California over the past year on the John McMullen Show.

Forest Lawn has been able to meet the need of the communities of Southern California in spite of nearly two-thirds of all COVID-related deaths in the state being in five of the counties surrounding the Greater Los Angeles and Inland Empire area. How did they accomplish this? What did they learn and what steps did they have to take to keep up with the strain of the greater-than-usual volume of decedents? Larry shares the experience of the once-in-a-lifetime circumstance from the position of handling final arrangements for those who sadly lost their lives to pandemic-related causes.

Forest Lawn Website

Telephone: (760) 328-3140

Melissa Daniels joins John McMullen from Lift To Rise, an organization that helps people who are trapped by the disadvantages of poverty and convenes private, public and nonprofit partners for collaborative action networks focused on housing stability, community health, and social connection in the Coachella Valley. Melissa talks about how they are assisting communities including the City of Indio with managing its rental assistance program, getting nearly $650,000 in Community Development Block Grant funding to help 286 households.

Damon Rubio, owner of D'Place Entertainment and operator of Cathedral City's Mary Pickford Theatre talked with John McMullen about the challenges faced through the pandemic by movie theatres, the studios, and the entertainment industry as a whole. He talked about how the Mary Pickford Theatre had to pivot to survive the past year, and some of the steps that they took to survive, and what he is looking forward to as people get vaccinated and are anxious to resume their favorite recreational activities including seeing movies on the big silver screen.

Laura James, Vice President of Innovation at the Coachella Valley Economic Partnership (CVEP), talks about Innovation Month activities in Riverside County throughout the month of April. She also details the Greater Palm Springs Fastpitch competition which will take place on April 14, where entrepreneurs will have an opportunity to present their innovations and possibly be invited to move on to the county-wide competition featuring a grand prize of $10,000. This is similar to Shark Tank, where up and coming businesses vie for financial support of their start-up ventures on network television.

Assemblymember Eduardo Garcia (CA-56) returns to the show to talk with John about the next steps in an important statewide infrastructure measure that he has co-sponsored, which would give voters a chance to support a $10 billion project that makes it possible to lay the high-speed internet bandwidth everywhere in California, and maintaining reasonable pricing for these services in order to leave no resident behind and reduce the digital divide. Education, Economy, and Entertainment - the 3 E's - that require fast connectivity to the web has been essential over the past year in dealing with surviving in the pandemic. Garcia explains how this will help all Californians. They also talk about the importance of the annual California Agriculture Day and the objectives and activities happening on March 23.

Almost since the inception of iHub Radio and the iHub Network, we have made it a priority to offer programming that helps people in a dark, lonely and harmful place with addiction issues, an oasis of information and inspiration to help with recovery. Toby C has led these weekly journeys on In This Moment. Now comes a new program beginning on Saturday, March 27, that will be broadcast on the iHub Network at 10 pm to 12 midnight Pacific every Saturday and Sunday that will deal with the nitty gritty of evil forces that play such a significant role in people's battles with all forms of addictive behavior. The new program is called The Fourth Dimension hosted by Toby C. He shares with John McMullen the inspiration, the mission and what you can expect when those shows are broadcast starting next weekend.

Palm Springs City Manager David Ready talks with John McMullen about steps the City is going to take to force compliance with permits for new hotel properties that have not been completed and have become blight as unfinished developments. Ready will be retiring in days, but says that Palm Springs' legal team will hold developers to their original commitments or lose control of the properties to a court appointed receiver to either complete construction or demolition. John also talks with the outgoing city manager about what he feels his greatest accomplishments have been over the past two decades as the city's chief executive.