DAVID DALEY, author RATFU_ _ED and UNRIGGED on voter suppression and our upcoming mid-terms

Written on November 2nd, 2022

November 8th is the last day to vote in the current elections. Our democracy is under threat as is the availability, validity, accuracy, and reliability of voting and vote-counting. Between closing poll sites, purging voter rolls, and putting obstacles in the way of voting by mail, some states are going to great lengths to keep you from voting. I talk with DAVID DALEY, senior fellow at FairVote.org, author of RATF**KED (gerrymandering) and UNRIGGED (electoral reforms) re the good news and bad news regarding our upcoming mid—terms.

How do Republicans plan to keep you from voting? – Investigative journalist GREG PALAST (2020)

Written on October 29th, 2022

The final day to vote – what used to be Election Day – is just over a week away. Here’s my conversation with investigative journalist GREG PALAST recorded prior to election day 2020. He laid out voter suppression efforts – closing poll sites, purging voter rolls, manipulating voting machines, and putting obstacles in the way of voting by mail – that The Trump administration and many state governments used to keep Americans from voting. Yet turnout broke records. Sadly Republican tactics are the same this year and we assume they’ve learned from their mistakes. We won’t know how well till the votes are counted – and certified. 

DAVID CORN, The Stakes of the MidTerms:- AMERICAN PSYCHOSIS: How The Republican Party Went Crazy

Written on October 20th, 2022
In AMERICAN PSYCHOSIS, DAVID CORN reminds us that Trump and Trumpism is not a radical departure for the Grand Old Party. Picking up the story at the end of World War II, he traces a continuous, long, deep-rooted Republican practice of boosting and weaponizing the rage and derangement of the Right, nurturing and exploiting fear and loathing fueled by paranoia, grievance, and tribalism. John Birch to The Big Lie, Rush Limbaugh to Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, The Religious Right to the Supreme Court. And a very real threat to democracy up and down the ballot in the mid-terms. We talk about that history as well as what’s at stake in these elections.
 

We need to be able to work together on climate JOANNA CHIU, CHINA UNBOUND: A New World Disorder.

Written on October 13th, 2022
Recent headlines: Taiwan Politicians Dismiss Musk’s ‘ill-Informed and Belittling’ China Comments. In Global Slowdown, China Holds Sway Over Countries’ Fates. A Dilemma of US-Trained Chinese Scientists: Stay or Leave? US Tries to Hobble China Chip Industry with New Rules. How did we get here?  How do we navigate our relationship moving forward? I talk with JOANNA CHIU, a senior journalist for the Toronto Star, who served for years on the ground in China as a correspondent for European news agencies and the Associated Press, about her first book, CHINA UNBOUND: A New World Disorder. You can learn more at joannachiu.com

As DeSantis & Abbott pull cruel political stunts-GREG GRANDIN (2019), THE END OF THE MYTH: From the Frontier to the Border Wall

Written on October 5th, 2022
Here’s my 2019 conversation with GREG GRANDIN about his book, THE END OF THE MYTH: From the Frontier to the Border Wall. Grandin reminds us that patrolling the border has often brought out our worst, and writes, “The border wall is America’s new myth, a monument to the final closing of the frontier…a symbol of a nation that used to believe that it had escaped history, but now finds itself trapped by history, and of a people who used to think they were captains of the future, but now are prisoners of the past.”