November 12 - Senator Bernie Sanders and His Democracy Day Act of 2014; How the Republicans Just Won Running on Democratic Issues; The U.S.-China Climate Change Deal

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with a post-election analysis from U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, the longest serving independent member of Congress in American history. We discuss the irony that in the recent midterm elections, the Republicans ran largely on Democratic issues such as the minimum wage, poverty, median income, real unemployment, underemployment and part-time work, while Democrats ran away from all these issues and President Obama. We also discuss whether in 2016 these issues will be debated, particularly by Democratic presidential Candidates who will be running to the right or center, unless Senator Sanders is some how allowed to be in the presidential debates.

Part 2

Then we speak with William Saletan, the national correspondent at Slate who writes about politics, science, and technology. He is the author of “Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion Wars” and we discuss his recent articles at Slate “A Victory for the Left” and “Forget the Republican Mandate”, to try to understand why the recent election had the lowest turnout in 72 years and whether in the next two years Obama and the Democrats can concentrate on winning the next election, rather than acceding to the Republican fiction that they just got a mandate from an election in which only 36.3% of the electorate voted, meaning the new Congress represents 19% of Americans.

Part 3

Then finally we look into the U.S. - China climate change deal just announced by President Obama and President Xi Jinping at the APEC summit in Beijing. Michael Mann, the Director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University and author of “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines”, joins us to discuss whether these new pledges go far enough to address the dire crisis of global warming, and whether China will be able to achieve them, not to mention can Obama, who will be facing a hostile Congress beholden to polluters like the Koch brother who helped elect them.