Full Program

Part 1

We begin with President Trump threatening Iran today warning they will have “big problems” if they resume their nuclear program while Trump seems determined to blow up the P5+1 deal with Iran which is preventing Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons.  A veteran CIA operative and Middle East expert Robert Baer, who is currently a national security analyst for CNN, joins us to discuss what exactly Trump may be threatening as he stood beside France’s President Macron, who incidentally is trying to persuade Trump to stick with the Iran deal which Trump characterized today as “insane”. With rumors rampant in the Middle East press about a buildup of U.S. naval and air forces in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf, we will assess the extent of the belligerent influence of the new national security advisor John Bolton as well as warlike threats from Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince who are lobbying the White House to blunt Iran’s growing influence in the region, particularly in Syria and in Iraq where elections are about to take place with an Iranian-backed candidate the frontrunner.

Part 2

Then we go to Canada and speak with Henry Giroux, the McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest whose most recent books are “America at War With Itself” and “The Public in Peril: Trump and the Menace of American Authoritarianism”. He joins us to discuss yesterday’s use of a van as a weapon in Toronto which resulted in 10 killed and 14  wounded, mostly women. We try to understand the motives of the driver Alek Minassian who appears to be influenced by the so-called Incel rebellion and the fact that the suspect who taunted the police to shoot him, is alive because the police in Canada are not as trigger-happy as they are here in the U.S.

Part 3

Then finally we look into the increasingly tenuous state of Trump’s nominee to head up the Veterans Administration, Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, who was elevated from his position as White House physician by Trump to head up the second biggest government department after the Pentagon.  Suzanne Gordon, an award-winning journalist and author of “The Battle for Veteran’s Healthcare: Dispatches from the Frontlines of Policy Making and Patient Care” whose forthcoming book is “Wounds of War: How the VA Delivers Health, Healing and Hope to the Nation’s Veterans”, joins us. We discuss Trump’s extraordinarily back-handed endorsement of his nominee today in a press conference in which Trump said he was standing by his nominee while at the same time saying he did not want his nominee to go through an ugly process and be attacked by a “vicious group of people”, meaning the press, concluding with the nail in the coffin, “If I were him, I wouldn’t do it”.

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the Democratic National Committee suing Russia, the Trump campaign and Wikileaks and discuss how this might impact the Mueller investigation and bring the issue of impeachment to the forefront in this year’s mid-term election campaign as the central plank of the Democrat’s platform. Matt Angle who directs the Texas Democratic Trust and the Lone Star Project and served as the Executive Director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, joins us to assess whether the fundraising benefits of the DNC’s lawsuit will be outweighed by the negative messaging Democratic candidates in swing districts will be stuck with as large numbers of hopefuls join in the primary races. We explore the depth of the anticipated “Blue Wave”, particularly in Texas where Democratic Congressman Beto O’Rourke is challenging Ted Cruz in a U.S. Senate race which could prove a tectonic upset for the Trump-dominated GOP, particularly since Cruz has written in Time magazine such fawning praise of his previously bitter rival Trump which has been mocked widely for its unctuous sycophancy.

Part 2

Then we speak with Lawrence Jacobs, the Chair of Political Studies at the University of Minnesota where he directs the Center of the Study of Politics and Governance at the Hubert Humphrey School of Political Affairs. He joins us to discuss how Donald Trump is capitalizing on the imperial presidency erected by presidents since World War 11, provoking dire fears that American democracy will die since our national security and foreign policy is in the hands of a unilateralist with an aberrant personality and a reckless governing style. We assess whether a deal coming out of the Trump-Kim Jong-un summit, no matter how cosmetic, could revive Trump’s presidency, or a war with Iran could give him a short-term boost before things turns sour as they did with the Iraq war.

Part 3

Then finally, with students across the country demonstrating on Friday on the anniversary of the Columbine school massacre, we will speak Josh Koskoff, a Connecticut-based trial attorney who represents 10 Sandy Hook families in a groundbreaking case against the Remington Arms Company for marketing the Bushmaster AR-15 used in shooting 20 six and seven-year-old schoolchildren and 6 educators in just under 5 minutes. We also discuss the lawsuit by a number of Sandy Hook families against Alex Jones of Infowars for promoting his despicable conspiracy theories that has led to the further victimization of these families who already suffered such unspeakable losses.