Background Briefing: March 24, 2019
Examining Both the Legal and Political Landscape Ahead Now That the Mueller Report Has Been Delivered
We begin today with Ian calling in by phone from the East Coast following Friday’s delivery of the Mueller report to the Attorney General who along with the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein have been examining its findings for most of the weekend. We discuss both the legal and political landscape ahead and look into whether there will be more indictments and referrals in spite of the statement from a senior Department of Justice official that Mueller will not be issuing any more indictments. On the political front, we assess whether the Democrats overplayed their hand as they did in the Kavanaugh hearings and if Trump will benefit from the backlash and be harder to beat in 2020, even though he is not doing a victory lap at this moment and is being uncharacteristically silent. Joining us is Scott Horton, a Professor of Law at Columbia University and contributing editor at Harper’s in legal affairs and national security, and Nina Burleigh, a National Politics Correspondent at Newsweek and author of Golden Handcuffs: The Secret History of Trump’s Women
A Stark Assessment of Global Warming’s Effects on Human Life Over the Coming Decades
Then David Wallace-Wells, deputy editor at New York magazine and the author of the new book The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, joins us for a stark assessment of global warming’s effects on human life over the coming decades. We will discuss how significant an impact the acceleration of global warming has been in the relatively short window of the past 30 years since Bill McKibbon and Al Gore first alerted the public about the threat to life on this planet that global warming poses. He describes a scenario and presents a grim vision of what life could be like in the not-too-distant future on our endangered Earth if immediate actions are not taken. And while the United States is the only country on earth where global warming denial is a holding up progress, our growing awareness of the need to address the issue still does not begin to catch up to the scope of the catastrophe global warming presents.