Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the shutdown of the U.S. government which begins at midnight Tuesday and speak with Jonathan Chait, a writer for New York magazine where he has an article “The House GOP’s Legislative Strike”. We discuss the strategy behind the Republican shutdown of government that goes back to a House Republican retreat in Williamsburg where they met after their demoralizing 2012 election defeat and decided to go on strike and force Obama to accede to their demands without offering any him concessions.

Part 2

Then we speak with Noam Scheiber a senior editor at The New Republic about his contention that this shutdown of the government will be much worse for the Republicans that the 1996 shutdown that benefited Bill Clinton was for Newt Gingrich. We discuss his article at The New Republic “Countdown to Shutdown” and the last-minute effort by Republicans engaged in government by extortion, to portray themselves as being reasonable while accusing the Democrats of being obstructionists.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Tom Edsall a professor of journalism at Columbia University and author of “The Age of Austerity” who has an article at The New York Times “How Did Conservatives Get This Radical?” We discuss what is driving the tribalism and xenophobia of the Tea Party radicals as they careen forth in an “all or nothing” putsch to either get their way or shut down the government and ruin the economy. 

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with Mike Lofgren who has spent 28 years working in Congress as a Senior Analyst on the House and Senate Budget Committees. He is the author of “The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats became Useless and the Middle Class Got Shafted”. We discuss the latest threats by House Republican to both shut down the government and risk the full faith and credit of the United States unless they get all of their legislative wish list.

Part 2

Then we speak with the former Chief Investigator for the Senate Banking Committee Bartlett Naylor to find out whether government by extortion is the new normal in Washington since the House Republicans are abandoning the very process of negotiation and compromise laid out in the Constitution. And whether there was ever a time in the history of the American government where laws that were passed and upheld by the Supreme Court were held hostage by a small faction of extremists prepared to both shut down the government and destroy the economy unless the law they don’t like was repealed.

Part 3

Then finally we examine the latest declassified documents obtained by the National Security Archive on a six-year NSA domestic spying program “Minaret” that targeted 1,650 individuals, including prominent Americans like Martin Luther King, Mohammed Ali and the humorist Art Buchwald. Matthew Aid, a leading intelligence historian who obtained the documents joins us to discuss the revelations that the NSA spied on two prominent U.S. Senators, Frank Church and Howard Baker and his article in Foreign Policy “Secret Cold War Documents Reveal NSA Spied on Senators”.