Full Program

Part 1

We begin with all but three Democratic senators pulling the trigger on the so-called “nuclear option” in a 52 to 48 vote to pass executive branch and judicial nominees by a simple majority vote after the persistent use of the filibuster by the Republicans that has all but paralyzed the senate. Michelle Schwartz, the Director of Justice Programs at the Alliance for Justice joins us to discuss this dramatic change in senate rules and its likely consequences.

Part 2

Then, on the 50^th anniversary of the assassination of President John F Kennedy, we speak with Senator Gary Hart who served on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Agencies, known as the Church Committee that investigated CIA, Cuban and Mafia ties to the assassination. We examine important leads that Senator Hart feels the press should have picked up on and followed, that to this day remain largely unexamined since one of the two main Mafia witnesses the Committee investigated was killed shortly after testifying and the second was murdered shortly before testifying.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with the first person to deliver the first eyewitness account of President Kennedy’s assassination, Julian Read, who at the time was Texas Governor John Connally’s representative to the national media for President Kennedy’s visit to Texas in November of 1963. He joins us to discuss what he saw and experienced on that tragic day as the first person to arrive at Parkland Hospital to find Jackie Kennedy and Nellie Connally standing alone outside trauma rooms 1 and 2, waiting to hear the fate of their husbands inside who had both been shot.

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with what appears to be a taunt by Senate Republicans to dare the Democrats to go ahead and make their day by changing the senate rules to end the Republican abuse of the filibuster that just blocked Obama’s latest nominee to the third of three vacant seats on the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. A veteran Senate Senior Staffer Mike Lofgren, the author of “The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats became Useless and the Middle Class Got Shafted”, joins us to discuss whether Harry Reid will make good on his threat to invoke the so-called “nuclear option”.

Part 2

Then we go to Jordan to speak with Nicholas Heras, a Contributing Editor and Analyst with the international affairs journal Fair Observer. We discuss the bombing of the Iranian embassy in Beirut and the war within the war amongst the Syrian rebels where the more secular Free Syrian Army has clashed with the Salafist Al Nusra Front who in turn have clashed with other al Qaeda affiliated groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, turning northern Syria into a patchwork of warring fiefdoms.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Saudi expert Toby Jones, a professor of history at Rutgers University and author of “Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia”. We discuss the role of Saudi and Gulf money pouring into Syria in support of the hardline Salafist groups among the Syrian opposition and the hollow nature of the Saudi regime’s claim that in spite of a powerful secret police and omnipresent religious police that keep such a tight lid on the feudal kingdom, they are unable to stem the flow of private money funding al Qaeda affiliated groups in Syria.