April 30 - A Critique of Obama's Small Ball Foreign Policy; A Botched Execution and Innocents on Death Row; The Rhetoric Versus the Reality of Racism

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with President Obama’s recent defense of his foreign policy and speak with David Rothkopf, the CEO and Editor of Foreign Policy Magazine where he has an article “The Audacity of Small Ball: Obama’s defense of his foreign policy illustrates much of what’s wrong with it.” We will discuss Obama’s defensive explanation of his Administration’s record on foreign policy which was provoked by criticism from a pugnacious Fox News reporter, and look at a new poll that indicates close to 50% of Americans favor a less active foreign policy with only 19% wanting the U.S. to be more assertive and involved.

Part 2

Then with the grisly, botched execution of a death row prisoner in Oklahoma, we  look into a new study that finds one in twenty death row inmates sentenced to death are likely innocent. Sam Gross, the lead author of the study “Rate of False Conviction of Criminal Defendants Who Are Sentenced to Death” published by the National Academy of Sciences joins us. He is a Professor of Law at the University of Michigan and the editor of the National Registry of Exonerations and we discuss why there are more innocent death row inmates than those exonerated and why avoiding the death sentence often means innocent prisoners still rot in jail for the rest of their lives.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Charles Gallagher, a Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology at La Salle University and author of “New Directions in Race Research” and “Below the Belt: Race, Ethnicity, Labor and Politics in a Changing Sunbelt”. While many are seeing the ostracizing of Donald Sterling for his racist views as a victory over racism, we discuss how much deep-seated racial prejudice remains in America.