July 29 - A Super PAC Designed to Reign in Campaign Spending; Drifting into a War with Russia; Political Grandstanding Trumps Humanitarian Concerns as Congress Debates Immigration Reform

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with an ironic approach to reigning in campaign spending with the formation of the Mayday Super PAC designed to support pro-campaign finance reform politicians. Lawrence Lessig, the Director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University and co-founder of the Mayday Super PAC with former George W. Bush adviser Mark McKinnon, joins us to discuss their PAC’s growing crowd-funded war chest and the candidates they are helping in this year’s mid-term election.

Part 2

Then we speak with Dr. Stephen Cohen, a professor of Russian Studies and History at New York University and professor of politics emeritus at Princeton University, about his editorial, co-written with Katrina vanden Heuval, “War With Russia?: Kiev’s Siege of the Donbass” that will be posted Wednesday at thenation.com. We discuss the dangerous dynamic driven by hawks in both Moscow and Washington that is inflaming the volatile situation in Ukraine, and an apparently detached President Obama who does not appear to have the counsel of wise and seasoned statesmen at this moment of crisis where urgent diplomacy is needed, instead of incremental confrontation.

Part 3

Then finally we look into congressional deliberations on the crisis at the border following the influx of unaccompanied children from Central America, that appear to be aimed at removing due process provisions in the law in order to fast-track deportation of the minors. Doris Meissner, the former Commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service under President Bill Clinton, joins us to discuss the fate of any form of immigration reform in this election year in which humanitarian concerns appear to have been trumped by political grandstanding.