August 22 - Crossing the Red Line in Syria; Restoring the Old Order in Egypt; Obama Calls for Cutting College Costs While Ignoring the For-Profit College Racket

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the latest apparent use of chemical weapons in Syria that has both the French government and Senator John McCain calling for the use of force against the Assad regime. Raymond Zilinskas, a former U.N. chemical and biological weapons inspector in Iraq, who directs the Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies joins us to discuss the evidence so far that might indicate Assad has crossed President Obama’s red line.

Part 2

Then we look into why the Egyptian military decided to release the former dictator Hosni Mubarak from jail at a time when they are claiming that their month-long imposition of martial law and the bloody crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood is not a coup and that they want to return democracy and civilian rule to Egypt. Egyptian journalist Emad Mekay, a senior fellow in the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley, who writes for Al Jazeera and Inter-Press Service, joins us to discuss whether the army is restoring the old order.

Part 3

Then finally we assess the president’s proposed college-rating system that he is rolling out on his bus tour of the northeast to promote lowering the cost of college. Former Assistant Secretary of Education, Diane Ravitch, the author of “The Death and Life of the Great American School System” and a new book “Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to Public Schools”, joins us to discuss how Obama could claim to want to lower college cost while not dealing with the taxpayer-funded for-profit college racket that is saddling students with worthless diplomas and mountains of debt.