Month: January 2022

Biden Gets Tough on Voting Rights and Republican Obstruction Via the Filibuster

We begin with President Biden’s passionate speech today in Atlanta in defense of voting rights, perhaps referring to Senators Manchin and Sinema when he said he has been having conversations with lawmakers about voting rights for months and now wants to see action, angrily stating “I’m tired of being quiet.” In calling out Republican senators for obstruction of majority rule via the filibuster, Biden mentioned how world leaders have expressed concerns to him about ongoing threats to American democracy, remarking, “we must be vigilant, and the world is watching, they’re watching American democracy and seeing if we can meet this moment.” Joining us is Fred Wertheimer, the Founder and President of Democracy 21, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that promotes campaign finance, lobbying, ethics and related reforms to bring about government transparency and accountability. Wertheimer has spent 35 years working on government integrity issues and has an article at The Washington Post, “Fixing the Electoral Count Act is no substitute for real election reform.” We discuss this make-or-break moment for American democracy as the Senate takes up the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act with Senate Majority Leader Schumer promising action on filibuster reform by January 17.

The 1933 Coup Attempt Against FDR and Today’s Plots By Plutocrats

Then we speak with Sally Denton, an award-winning author, investigative journalist and historian whose books include The Profiteers, Passion and Principle, American Massacre, Faith and Betrayal, The Bluegrass Conspiracy, Money and the Power, and the forthcoming book, The Colony: Faith and Blood in a Promised Land. A Guggenheim fellow and a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, she is the author of The Plots Against the President: FDR, A Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right, and we discuss her article at The Guardian, “Why is so little known about the 1930s coup attempt against FDR?”

What a War Between Russia and Ukraine Might Look Like

Then finally with diplomatic talks between the U.S. and Russia yielding little, we look into what a war between Russia and Ukraine might involve and speak with Taras Kuzio, Research Fellow on Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia at the Henry Jackson Society think tank in London. He is the author and editor of 21 books, including Russian Nationalism and the Russian-Ukrainian War, Autocracy-Orthodoxy-Nationality and Putin’s War Against Ukraine and Revolution, Nationalism, and Crime and we discuss how he thinks a full scale conflict is unlikely but wars around the periphery of Ukraine in the Donbass and on the Black Sea Coast are a distinct possibility.