November 23 - The P5+1 Deal with Iran is Better Late Than Never; The Former Commissioner of the INS on Obama's Immigration Overhaul; Why Reform of the NSA Failed

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with an analysis of the last-minute efforts by the P5+1 to make a deal with Iran over its nuclear program ahead of the November 24 deadline. Mohsen Milani, the Executive Director of the Center for Strategic and Diplomatic Studies at the University of South Florida and author of “The Making of Iran’s Islamic Revolution”, joins us to discuss what happens if the talks fail to conclude by Monday’s deadline and provide an assessment of the conflicting forces inside Iran between so-called moderates and hardliners that might explain why the U.S., Russia, China, the UK, France and Germany failed to make a deal with Iran.

Part 2

Then we get an appraisal of President Obama’s recently-announced Immigration overhaul from Doris Meissner, the former Commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and a Senior Fellow at the Migration Policy Institute. She joins us to discuss how the new rules of deporting felons, not families, will be enacted by the INS and whether there will be a reduction in the funding for border security which is now at a record level of 20% higher than the combined total of all spending of all federal law enforcement agencies combined.

Part 3

Then finally we examine the recent failure of the Senate to pass the USA Freedom Act that was meant to reign in the abuses of bulk collection of private data on all Americans following the revelations by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Neema Guliani, a legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington Legislative Office joins us to discuss why the bill was killed in spite of lobbying by a coalition of civil liberties, libertarian and powerful Silicon Valley companies like Google and Facebook and why Senator Rand Paul, who earlier conducted a Senate filibuster against NSA abuses, voted against the bill.