January 11 - Trump Punishes the Poor With a Bogus Work Requirement; Trump's Tweets Almost Scuttle FISA Reauthorization; The Alt-Right Disowns Bannon for the True Hero Donald Trump

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the announcement from the Trump Administration that states may now impose work requirement on Medicaid recipients with Trump’s director of the federal Medicaid office arguing that “higher earnings are positively correlated with longer lifespan” and there is “strong evidence that unemployment is generally harmful to health”. Judith Solomon, Vice President for Health Policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, where she focusses on Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, joins us to discuss this reversal of the Obama era effort to expand access to Medicaid, with the Trump Administration now trying to restrict it. And we  assess whether most if not all of the states who rejected Obama’s Medicaid expansion are the states that now want to run demonstration projects to test work requirements.

Part 2

Then with the House passage of the reauthorization of the controversial FISA surveillance law on a vote of 256 to 164 today, we look into the chaos that preceded the vote with first Trump tweeting out his increasingly hysterical distortions about FISA and the Steele dossier and the imagined Obama surveillance of the Trump campaign, only to reverse himself two hours later with another tweet presumably in response to adult supervision. Michelle Richardson, the Deputy Director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Freedom, Security and Technology Project, joins us to discuss the six year renewal of the controversial 702 statute that critics argue allows the government to spy on Americans without a warrant.

Part 3

Then finally, with neo-Nazi and white nationalist leaders like Richard Spencer and Andrew Anglin disowning Steve Bannon and making it clear that their true heroes and leaders have been and still are Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, we speak with an award-winning journalist, author and expert on American right wing extremism, David Neiwert, the author of the new book “Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump”. He joins us to discuss how we have a classic authoritarian, fascist leader in Trump, but without the fascist ideology, and mercifully, so far America’s democratic institutions have been able to prevent the authoritarian in the Oval Office from engineering a totalitarian takeover of America.