Full Program
 

Part 1

We begin with the production line killings being carried out by the state of Arkansas with eight men scheduled to be put to death in 11 days because suppliers of drugs used for lethal injections will only allow their products to be used for medically approved purposes so the state’s executioners, who are short on supply, had to drive to an undisclosed location to make a drug deal with an unnamed dealer who made no record of the sale.  The President of Death Penalty Focus, Mike Farrell, a political and social activist best known for his roles in MASH and Providence, joins us to discuss the unseemly rush to kill which resulted in Justice Gorsuch casting his first vote on the Supreme Court to put a likely innocent man to death even though Ledell Lee in mentally incapacitated, DNA evidence was never tested, his defense was grossly incompetent and the judge who sentenced him was having an affair with the prosecutor.

Part 2

Then we go to Istanbul, Turkey to speak with Ronald Suny an historian at the University of Michigan and a professor emeritus of political science and history at the University of Chicago. The author of “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else: A History of the Armenian Genocide”, he joins us to discuss the local reaction to the 102^nd anniversary of the Armenian genocide and how the educated and urban half of Turkey who voted against President Erdogan’s recent power grab feel about Donald Trump’s endorsement of their new dictator.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with the Turkish scholar who is considered the Sherlock Holmes of the Armenian genocide.Taner Akcam, who holds the chair of Armenian Genocide Studies at Clark University and is the author of “The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity” joins us to discuss how he found documentation, the “smoking gun” that proves the genocide against the Armenians that the Turkish government persists in denying, took place.

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with more heated rhetoric from the White House and accusations of “alarming ongoing provocations” from a country that the Secretary of State just said “has the potential to travel the same path as North Korea and take the world along with it”.  That country, Iran, is the same country which the Trump Administration on April 18 just certified as abiding by the nuclear of 2015, the same Obama deal that Trump promised to tear up. Joining us to try to make sense of the flip-flopping and incoherence of Trump’s Middle East policy, which is headed up by his son-in-law who has no government or diplomatic experience other than being in New York real estate, is Mansour Farhang, a professor of international relations at Bennington College. He resigned as revolutionary Iran’s first ambassador to the United Nations when Khomeini’s regime refused to accept the U.N.’s recommendations to release its U.S. hostages.

Part 2

Then with Attorney General Jeff Sessions poised to revive Nancy Reagan’s “war on drugs” prioritizing his personal obsession against marijuana over the very real problem of a nation-wide opiate addiction scourge, we will speak Norm Stamper, a retired Seattle police chief and advisory board member of Law Enforcement Action Partnership, a drug policy advocacy group. The author of “To Protect and Serve: How to Fix America’s Police”, he joins us to discuss Sessions’ coming war on legal marijuana.

Part 3

Then finally we discuss President Trump’s threat to kill the Affordable Care Act by taking away subsidies to insurers as a way to get Democrats to negotiate changes in the 2010 health law. Wendell Potter, who was chief spokesman for CIGNA and head of corporate communications at Humana before becoming a senior analyst on healthcare at the Center for Public Integrity joins us in the studio to discuss this cruel and callous tacit designed to make Trump’s prediction that Obamacare would “explode”, come true.