Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the stalled transportation bill in the Senate that the Democrats were supposed to vote on without having time to read it. Joan Claybrook, the president emeritus of Public Citizen and the former administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration joins us to discuss this industry-friendly bill that lowers the age of interstate truck drivers to 18 so that trucking companies can recruit cheap labor and cuts the required amount of rest time for drivers. We also look into the demonstration by hackers working with Wired magazine who, via the Internet, hijacked the controls on a Jeep Cherokee driving on a freeway and ran it into a ditch.

Part 2

Then we speak with Michelle Goldberg, the author of “Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism” who is a Senior Contributing Writer to The Nation where she has an article “Why Planned Parenthood Shouldn’t Be on the Defensive”. We discuss the propaganda hit that an anti-abortion front group got from a sting they conducted against Planned Parenthood and how the calls to prosecute the actors posing as fetal tissue procurement officers for a fake biomedical company Biomax, would backfire, turning these “right-to-life” zealots into martyrs.

Part 3

Then finally, with a chorus on the right, and some on the left claiming that Iran got the better of Obama in the recent P5+1 deal, we will hear from Nader Hashemi, the Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver. He argues that Iran effectively capitulated to the demands of the West and we discuss how the sanctions have strengthened the grip of the clerics and the Revolutionary Guards over the Iranian people and that their removal could reverse that trend. 

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the opening of the Cuban embassy in Washington and talk with the former chief U.S. diplomat in Cuba from 1999 to 2002 Ambassador Vicki Huddleston. She joins us to discuss the new U.S. charge d’affaires in Cuba, our man in Havana Jeffrey DeLaurentis, who worked with her during turbulent times between the U.S. and Cuba when Fidel Castro and Miami Cubans were tussling over a Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez who was picked up at sea in the Florida Straits. We discuss the long-overdue re-establishment of diplomatic ties between the closest of enemies and the prospects for building on them.

Part 2

Then we go to Havana, Cuba and speak with Mark Frank who works for Thompson Reuters and the Financial Times and is the author of “Cuba Revelations: Behind the Scenes in Havana”. We discuss how much Cuba’s failing economy was a factor in breaking the more than five decade-long hostility since, according to Cuba’s official data, its GDP in 2003 was $77.2 billion at the official exchange rate, but using the internal exchange rate of 24 pesos to the dollar, Cuba’s GDP could be as low as $3.2 billion.  

Part 3

Then finally we look into the suicide bombing in the Turkish town of Suruc, near the Syrian border which killed 30 and wounded 100 mostly young Kurdish members of the Federation of Socialist Youth Associations meeting to plan to go to Kobane to help rebuild the nearby town devastated by fighting between the Islamic State and Kurdish fighters supported by U.S. air power. Henri Barkey, the Director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars joins us to discuss whether this incident will force Turkey to confront the Islamic State which has benefited from Turkey’s inaction in preventing jihadist recruits from crossing through Turkey to join ISIL in Syria.