June 27 - The Republican Overhaul of Healthcare is Stalled; A Critique of Oliver Stone's Valentine to Putin; How the World Sees the US Under Trump

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the Republican Senate delaying their vote on the repeal and replacement of Obamacare that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was hoping to ram through before the 4^th of July recess. A leading authority on healthcare and healthcare reform, Jonathan Oberlander, a professor of Social Medicine and Heath Policy and Management at the University of North Carolina joins us. We discuss the difficulty pleasing the demands of the Libertarian wing who want to do away with any government role and the moderate Republican wing who don’t want to see millions of citizens in their states loose healthcare coverage that they have only recently gained. We will look into the obvious truth about these bills that they are tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans at the expense of taking coverage away from our poorest citizens, and whether in the event that the Republicans get nothing done, we will be left with the probability that Obamacare will be slowly but surely undermined and killed by neglect and sabotage.

Part 2

Then we speak with Masha Gessen, the author of “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin” who is now a contributing writer for The New York Times where she has an article “How Putin Seduced Oliver Stone, and Trump”. We discuss her critique of the four hour-long interviews of Vladimir Putin that Oliver Stone made for Showtime which were widely panned as a platform for Putin to parry sycophantic softball questions into a propaganda exercise. We also examine whether Putin’s meddling in the U.S. election has backfired.

Part 3

Then finally we analyze a major shift in global attitudes about the United States reflected in the latest poll from the Pew Research Center that surveyed over 40,000 people in 37 countries to find that only 2 countries, Israel and Russia have a better opinion of America under Trump while 26 of the 37 countries consider Trump dangerous. Michael Fuchs, a former deputy assistant secretary of state who was a special advisor to the secretary of state and a member of the secretary’s policy planning staff, joins us to assess how far the U.S. has fallen in the estimation of the world since Trump became president.