Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the alarming possibility that a hostile foreign government has already hacked into the election databases in two states and could do so again on a larger scale in November, possibly swinging the election for Donald Trump. We begin with the President of Verified Voting, Pamela Smith, who is the co-author of “Counting Votes 2012: A State by State Look at Election Preparedness”. She joins us to discuss the FBI warning that foreign hackers believed to be Russians penetrated the election systems in Illinois and Arizona months ago, extracting information on 200,000 voters in Illinois while inserting malware into Arizona’s voter registration database. We examine the vulnerabilities of the various state voting systems, more and more of which are adapting to verifiable paper ballots, and assess whether, given that Donald Trump has already said the November election will be rigged, Trump’s supporter in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, could rig the election for him by hacking America’s 2016 election.

Part 2

Then we investigate the hacking of voter rolls further with Dan Wallach, a professor in the systems group at Rice University’s Department of Computer Science who manages Rice’s computer security lab. An expert on the security of electronic voting machines who was part of the team at Princeton University who demonstrated the vulnerability of electronic voting machines, he joins us to look into how easy it is to hack the touchscreen DRE machines and, since a provision of the Help America Vote Act passed after the Florida 2000 debacle was to put voting rolls online, how easy it is for hackers, foreign or domestic, to manipulate the voting rolls.

 Part 3

Then finally, following a major article in The New York Times and an editorial in Sunday’s New York Times that looks into the growing ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia, we get an update on the growing awareness in the Press about the pernicious role America’s so-called ally Saudi Arabia has played in promoting its radical and reactionary Wahhabi sect of Islam. An expert on Wahhabi Islam, Saudi politics and Saudi-American relations, Ali Al-Ahmed, the founder of the Institute for Gulf Affairs, joins us to discuss a growing awareness of this troubled if not toxic relationship between the U.S. and the family-run government of Saudi Arabia.

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the speech today in Reno, Nevada by Hillary Clinton who confronted Donald Trump with the charge that he has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia, accusing him of taking “hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over the Republican Party”.  Michelle Goldberg, a senior contributing writer for Slate magazine where she has an article “How the ‘Hipster Nazis’ on the Alt-Right Got Big Enough for Hillary Clinton to Denounce Them”, joins us to discuss whether Trump’s effort to preempt the speech by calling Clinton a bigot will blunt Clinton’s factual case that Trump “is someone who’s questioned the citizenship of the first African-American president, who has courted white supremacists, who’s been sued for housing discrimination against communities of color, who’s attacked a judge for his Mexican heritage and promised a mass forced deportation, is someone who is very much peddling bigotry, prejudice and paranoia”.

Part 2

Then we speak with Elyse Avina, the president of Students Against Campus Carry at the University of Texas, Austin and one of the organizers of the #cocksnotglocks protest which took place yesterday on the first day of classes highlighting the absurdity of the so-called campus carry law backed by the state’s Republican leaders that allows students over 21 to carry concealed handguns into college classrooms.  

Part 3

Then finally we look into the price gouging by Mylan, the sole supplier of Epipens, a lifesaving emergency injection for people who have allergic reactions to peanuts or bee stings etc. that used to be priced at $100, but since Mylan acquired the device in 2007, the price has skyrocketed to $600 along with the salaries for Mylan’s top executives. David Howard,  a faculty member in the Department of Health Policy at Emory University and a former consultant to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, joins us to discuss how Mylan’s move to increase eligibility for its patient assistant program for low-income customers is a cosmetic PR ploy that will not lower the price for the majority of patients who need Epipens.