How do Republicans plan to keep you from voting? – Investigative journalist GREG PALAST (2020)
Written on October 29th, 2022The 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, 2022In 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, 2022Recent 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, 2022Here’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.”
Is STEVE LOPEZ of the LATimes really thinking about retirement? – INDEPENDENCE DAY
Written on September 27th, 2022STEVE LOPEZ, award-winning columnist at the LATimes and best-selling author (The Soloist), just won a prize from Harvard for political reporting, but I don’t think of him as a “Political Reporter”. He’s a story-teller and the leading characters in his stories are the unsung heroes of Los Angeles. We talk about how he sees his role at the Times and in the community, his current take on Southern California and the state of journalism, and his new book (out 11/1), INDEPENDENCE DAY: What I’ve Learned about Retirement from Some Who’ve Done It and Some Who Never Will
