Full Program

Part 1

We begin with last night’s worst mass shooting is U.S. history carried out by a 64 year-old man armed with 23 guns, mostly assault rifles, who fired on a crowd at a country music concert from the 32^nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas, killing 59 and wounding 527. Joining us is an expert on the impact that high-powered firearms have on the human body and a researcher who studies death and injury statistics in America where 92 Americans die from guns every day with American kids 14 times more likely to die from guns than children in other developed countries. Dr. David Hemenway, the Director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and the Harvard Youth Violence Prevention Center and author of “While You Were Sleeping: Success Stories in Injury and Violence Prevention,” will examine the folklore and romanticism surrounding guns. We discuss the myth pervading our gun culture than firearms offer security, when it is increasingly clear from repeated mass shootings that the greatest threat to our life and liberty is the NRA who place the right of gun owners to acquire unlimited unregulated firepower over the right of American citizens to be safe with the right to bear arms envisioned within “a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state” as the 2^nd Amendment promises.

Part 2

Then we get an update on the overwhelmingly negative reaction around the world to the Spanish government’s brutal suppression of the Catalan referendum with riot police beating up citizens trying to vote in a democratic country. Dr. Luisa-Elena Delgado, a Professor of Spanish, Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the European Union Center at the University of Illinois and author of “A Singular Nation: Fantasies of Democratic Normalcy in Spain” and “Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History”, joins us to discuss how Spain’s heavy-handed overreaction has increased support for Catalan independence.   

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Jason Fagone, the author of “The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies”, a new book about a poet and Shakespeare scholar, who along with her husband, laid the foundation of American counterintelligence. Today as the FBI and the NSA lead a highly visible and potentially regime-changing counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia, we discuss how Elizebeth Smith and William Freidman later became estranged from the agency they helped establish after their home was raided by the NSA.

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with Trump’s proposed overhaul of the tax code that White House economic advisor Gary Cohn is insisting will not benefit the wealthy while other experts insist the opposite is true and speak with Bruce Bartlett, who served as a senior policy advisor in the Reagan White House and as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy in George H.W. Bush’s Treasury Department. He joins us to discuss his article at The Washington Post “I helped create the GOP tax myth. Trump is wrong. Tax cuts don’t equal growth” and how the Republicans are going to push through a tax bill in the same way they tried to repeal Obamacare by excluding the Democrats, hiding the details and steamrolling the experts and analysts to get tax cuts for the rich passed before the public finds out later that they have to pay for them and that the promises made to benefit middle class and working Americans were yet another lie.

Part 2

Then we examine Trump’s latest racist outburst from the safe confines of his sycophantic softball news outlet “Fox and Friends”, where the president revived his phony fight with the NFL by dog-whistling that the all-white NFL owners are going along with the protests by the mostly black players because they are being intimidated by them, claiming NFL owners are afraid on their players. David Steele, who writes about the NFL for Sporting News as a columnist and is the co-author of Olympic champion Tommie Smith’s autobiography “Silent Gesture”, joins us to discuss Trump’s unmistakably racist inference and cheap exploitation of patriotism when the NFL owners and players are linking arms in a statement of unity as their president does everything he can to encourage division and fan hatred across the United States of America.    

Part 3

Then finally we look into the desperate and perhaps dangerous measures Spain’s conservative government is resorting to in an effort to thwart and frustrate Sunday’s referendum in Catalonia. Becquer Seguin, a professor of Iberian Studies at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of an article at The Nation “Have Spain and Catalonia Reached a Point of No Return?”, joins us to discuss the Madrid government’s deployment of thousands of riot police to Barcelona and threats to fine and jail secessionist politicians while shutting down polling places and arresting those printing ballots.