February 26 - The Net Neutrality Victory; Fox News Circles the Wagons on O'Reilly's Big Lies; Jihadists from the Former Soviet Union Slip through the Net

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the historic ruling by the FCC on protecting the Internet from cable and telecom monopolies as well as taking on efforts by those same monopolies to preemptively restrict the abilities of communities to offer competitive high speed Internet service. Craig Aaron, the President and CEO of Free Press, joins us to discuss his article at The Huffington Post “How We Won Net Neutrality” and the battles ahead in the Congress as Republicans try to restore monopoly control, as well as the broader battle for the U.S. to play catch-up to Japan, South Korea, France and much of the world in providing universal low cost high speed Internet service.

Part 2

Then we speak with David Corn, the Washington Bureau Chief at Mother Jones magazine whose reporting uncovering exaggerations and fabrications by Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly has been met with character assassination, indignant attacks on the messenger without refuting the message, as Rupert Murdoch’s minions circle the wagons around their popular talk show host and best-selling author. We discuss the irony that NBC’s Brian Williams has been fired for embellishing his war zone credentials far less that O’Reilly has done on many occasions without being anywhere near a war zone, all the while claiming he is the truth-teller in charge of the no-spin zone.

Part 3

Then finally we examine the apparent lapse in screening immigrants from the former Soviet Union who harbor sympathies and have ties to jihadists, as was the case with the Boston bomber and now appears to be the case with the two Uzbeks and the one Azeri charged by the FBI with plotting to kill the president and attempting to joins the so-called Islamic State in Syria. Gordon Hahn, a professor at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies in Monterrey and the author of “Russia’s Islamic Threat” and a new book “The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond”, joins us.