Full Program

Part 1

We begin with an overview of America’s long and losing wars in the Middle East that are still ongoing, now well into their fourth decade, and speak with Andrew Bacevich, a retired U.S. Army Colonel and professor of history and international relations at Boston University who previously taught at West Point. He joins us to discuss how, from the end of World War 11 until 1980, virtually no American soldiers were killed in action while serving in the Middle East, whereas, since 1990 virtually no American soldiers have been killed in action anywhere else. And since we are still bogged down in wars that not only have we not won, and are not winning, now in this presidential election, candidates are calling on us to double down and try harder in a call to arms which is highly unlikely to produce a different outcome.

Part 2

Then we speak with Matt Angle who directs the Texas Democratic Trust and the Lone Star Project, a Political Action Committee that aims to be an aggressive ‘fact-checker” on the Republican Party. He joins us to discuss the GOP establishment’s desperate embrace on the highly polarizing and extraordinarily untested and inexperienced candidate Ted Cruz, who, after getting elected as the junior senator from Texas based on a few people as possible turning out to vote, is now being backed by the Republican Party and its big donors, not because he is the preferred candidate but because he is not Donald Trump.  And since a brokered Republican convention is becoming more and more likely, we will look into the possibility that Cruz might turn out to be a stalking horse for the more electable Paul Ryan.

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the luckiest politician alive today who is perhaps about to make history having won just one election that depended entirely on as few as possible voters showing up to the polls, whose second election four years later could propel him to the highest office in the land as leader of the free world, not because he is popular, but only because he is not the other guy. Wayne Slater, a long-time political writer for the Dallas Morning News, who has covered Ted Cruz since he came out of nowhere to become the junior senator from Texas, joins us to explain how possibly the most untested politician in American history, who has won just one quirky off-year congressional election, having secured the Republican nomination with just over 600,000 votes, could be poised to be a major American political party’s nominee for president of the United States.

Part 2

Then we speak with Todd Gitlin, a sociologist, political writer, novelist, cultural commentator and Professor of Journalism at Columbia University about the dueling Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, both claiming the other is not qualified to be president, a ludicrous claim when you consider the meteoric free ride that Ted Cruz has had, but nevertheless a sign of a tense and tight race shaping up for them in the New York and Pennsylvania primaries. The author of “Occupy Nation: The Roots, The Spirit and the Promise of the Occupy Movement” and “Letters to a Young Activist”, Todd Gitlin also assess the political future of the youth movement that Bernie Sanders has inspired.

Part 3

Then finally we look into why America has the highest rate of childhood poverty than all but a few developed nations with 17% of American children living below the poverty line. Jeff Madrick, the Director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Rediscovering Government Initiative at the Century Foundation, joins us to discuss how child poverty can and should be addressed in the richest country in the history of the world, and his article in The New York Times “Handouts Are Often Better than a Hand Up".