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Then with today’s announcement that the European Union is joining the U.S.-led embargo against Iran, we examine the role of Iran’s largest trading partner, China, in avoiding another Gulf war and the closure of the Straights of Hormuz. Minxin Pei, the director of the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies and a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College joins us. He has an article at the BBC, “China’s Iran Dilemma”.

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Then finally, Joshua Landis, the director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma and the author of “Syria Comment” a daily newsletter and blog on Syrian politics, joins us. We discuss Saudi Arabia’s withdrawal from the ineffective observer mission and the Arab League’s demand that Syria’s bloody dictator Basher Assad hand power to a transitional government, a demand that the regime has already rejected as a “foreign conspiratorial scheme”.

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We begin with author and media critic Robert McChesney and discuss the real winners in the elections so far, and that is the media monopolies who will rake in a record five billion from TV advertizing in 2012, up from 2.8 billion in 2008. Robert McChesney has an article in the Nation “After Citizens United: The Attack of the Super PAC’s”.

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Then we examine the serious First Amendment questions that Mitt Romney’s official position in the hierarchy of the Mormon religion raise, with Francis Boyle, a professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law, who previously taught at Harvard Law School where he was a classmate of Mitt Romney’s. We discuss the functional equivalent to the Mormon Pope and his College of Cardinals sitting in their Salt Lake Vatican City giving orders to an Archbishop, President Mitt Romney.

RETRACTION: Exaggerated claims of Romney's connection to the Mormon Church heirarchy made in this interview are corrected in the January 22nd program.

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