October 10 - Trump and His Hate-Filled Handlers; Why NBC Blew Their Own Scoop; The GOP is Relying on Putin and Assange to Get Their Candidate Elected

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with an assessment of last night’s second presidential debate and speak with Norman Ornstein, a contributing writer for The Atlantic and a columnist for National Journal as well as an election eve analyst for BBC News. The author of “It’s Even Worse Than it Was”, he joins us to discuss how much our political discourse has been lowered by Donald Trump whose rancorous rhetoric is egged on by his hate-filled handlers, David Bossie, Stephen Bannon and Roger Ailes, and the moral crisis Trump’s candidacy is creating for the Republican Party, in particular the GOP’s evangelical wing that professes to stand for “family values” which Trump’s lewd statements make a mockery of in the recently-released video from “Access Hollywood”. We also look into efforts the get the reality TV mogul Mark Burnett, an evangelical and alleged Trump supporter, to release out-takes from “The Apprentice” that are said to be even more incriminating than Trump’s sexual boasts to the “Access Hollywood” host.

Part 2

Then we examine the role of the corporate media in the behind-the-scenes activities that went on before the incriminating “Access Hollywood” tape was released to the public by David Farenthold of The Washington Post” even though the parent corporation of NBC News, Comcast, owned it and had it in their vault. Robert Jensen, a professor of journalism in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, joins us to discuss the role of corporate lawyers and executives in stifling the news and blowing a scoop as well as the behavior of the Alpha male Donald Trump on stage last night with his chorus of Bill Clinton accusers in the front row who claim to be victims of a sexual predator while supporting a sexual predator.

Part 3

Then finally we look into the extent to which the GOP is relying on Vladimir Putin and Julian Assange to elect their candidate Donald Trump president, and Trump’s obvious reluctance to criticize Putin who is accused of war crimes for bombing civilians in Syria which Trump defended. Steven Pifer, the Director of the Brookings Institution’s Arms Control Initiative and a former special assistant to the president and senior director of Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia on the National Security Council, joins us to discuss the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s warning that the U.S. and Russia have brought the world to a “dangerous point” and that “I do want to say that this needs to stop. We need to renew dialogue. Stopping it was a big mistake”.