Full Program

Part 1

We begin with talks underway as lawmakers meet to fund the rest of fiscal 2014 through September and look for ways around the sequester to mitigate more deep cuts coming in mid-January. Scott Klinger, the Director of Revenue and Spending Policies at the Center for Effective Government joins us to discuss the effects of cuts so far and the impact of much more to come.

Part 2

Then with billionaire Bill Gross of PIMCO calling on his fellow one percenters to pay more taxes to spur economic growth and help those who use their hands for a living, we examine the growing disparity in wealth in America with Harvard researcher Michael Norton, a professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School who has studied the reasons why most Americans are unaware of how wide the income gap is and when told how more and more of the nation’s wealth is going to the top, rich and poor alike agree it is unfair and un-American, but then disagree on how to address the problem.

Part 3

Then finally we examine the roll of Rafael Cruz, the director of the Purifying Fire Ministry, who recently campaigned with his son Senator Ted Cruz in Iowa. Best-selling author Frank Schaeffer, whose parents Francis and Edith were the founders of what has become the Christian Right, joins us to discuss the Christian reconstruction Dominionist movement which seeks to rule America according to “biblical law” and pastor Cruz’s remarks that Obama is an “outright Marxist” who should be sent “back to Kenya” and his belief that the United States is “a Christian nation formed to honor the word of God”.

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with testimony by senior intelligence officials before a House panel on Tuesday where Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that learning the intentions of foreign leaders is a key goal of U.S. spying agencies, contradicting Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman Diane Feinstein who called for an end to eavesdropping on leaders of countries allied with the U.S. Elizabeth Goitein, the co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice joins us to discuss the growing international outrage over the latest NSA revelations.

Part 2

Then, following profuse apologies in testimony from the government official in charge of the troubled healthcare.gov website, we will speak with the author of an article in National Affairs, “Kludgeocracy: The American Way of Policy”.  Steven Teles, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, joins us to discuss the clumsy and inelegant patchwork of solutions known as kludges which are at the heart of the dysfunction between the government and private contractors in the context of a larger ideological battle over the size of government.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Dr. Ali Alyami, the founder and director of the Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia about the Saudi women who are defying the repressive religious police and the feudal government by driving cars, an activity that is banned for fear it will encourage licentiousness and damage women’s ovaries. We discuss stirrings of protests for freedom and democracy in a tightly-controlled country under the absolute rule of a royal family determined to insulate their kingdom from the Arab Spring.