February 17 - A Partisan Judge Blocks Obama's Executive Action on Immigration; Dr. Helen Caldicott on "Crisis Without End"

We begin with the move by a federal judge in Texas to block the implementation of President Obama’s executive action on immigration due to begin on Wednesday. Nicholas Espiritu, a staff attorney with the National Immigration Law Center joins us. He is on an amicus brief before the court in Texas v. United States and we will discuss this highly political and partisan decision that will be appealed by the Justice Department and is likely to make its way to the Supreme Court, as well as the apparent collusion between the Republican-appointed judiciary and the Republican Congress who have dug a hole for themselves by threatening to shut down the government over de-funding the Department of Homeland Security, but have now been rescued by a partisan judge, in the same way the conservatives on the Supreme Court are expected to rule in favor of gay marriage in order to rescue the Republicans from their increasingly unpopular stance that is likely to hurt them in the 2016 elections.

Part 2

Then we speak with Dr. Helen Caldicott, a physician, author and anti-nuclear activist who founded Physicians for Social Responsibility and was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize by Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling. She is organizing a major international symposium in New York on the 4^th anniversary of the Fukushima disasters and we will discuss the costly and continuing deadly legacy of the nuclear meltdowns in Japan as well as the potential for similar disasters from accidents with the same power reactors here in the United States, and her new book, just out, “Crisis Without End: The Medical and Ecological Consequences of the Fukushima Nuclear catastrophe”.