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Watch Video | Listen to the AudioJUDY WOODRUFF: Finally, a conversation about education reform and some of its shortfalls. It is the subject of a new book by a familiar face, who joins Jeffrey Brown for tonight’s Making the Grade. JEFFREY BROWN: For close to two decades now, or even longer, depending on your perspective, education reform has been on the agenda of Democrats and Republicans alike, school leaders around the country and major philanthropists who have influenced the debate. It’s all led to big changes, new laws and programs, tougher requirements and additional funding, lots more testing, and occasional school closings and teacher layoffs. But what has it all brought? Our former education correspondent John Merrow chronicled these efforts for our program for many years. He now looks back and into the future with a critique and with prescriptions in his new book, “Addicted to Reform: A 12-Step Program to Rescue Public Education.” And, first, hello again, John. JOHN MERROW, Author, “Addicted to Reform: A 12-Step Program to Rescue Public Education”: Nice to see you, Jeff. JEFFREY BROWN: Nice to see you. Addicted to reform means what? JOHN MERROW: Well, reform are attempts at changing that really don’t change things. What I’m saying is, for many, many years now, we have been tackling small problems which are really symptoms, not the real issues. I can give you a quick example. JEFFREY BROWN: Go ahead. JOHN MERROW: The Obama administration focus was on raising graduation rates, to get it from 70 percent way up. Four things happened. One was good. People came in and tutored. They identified failing kids. They gave them help. And those kids did well. Three other things happened, all of which were bad. One was credit recovery, which is basically a computer scam. You sit in front of a computer for a week and you get a semester’s credit. And almost every school district in the country relied heavily on computer — on credit recovery to get kids to graduate. The second thing that happened, schools, officials would say, Jeff, I think you could do well if you got a GED. Why don’t — you don’t have to — just go get a GED. And so you or I, not doing well, would be helped out the door. We wouldn’t be dropouts. But the graduation rate would go up, because I’m gone, but the school wouldn’t see that I did the GED. The third bad thing, adults cheated. They gave kids answers. They had erasure parties, all to get kids over the bar. JEFFREY BROWN: Yes. JOHN MERROW: That’s a superficial reform, because the problem wasn’t graduation rate. The problem was much deeper. JEFFREY BROWN: I mentioned Republicans, Democrats alike, so many different players involved in this. And I was wondering, as I was looking at the book, is it even agreed upon what we’re after anymore? Do people kind of go back to first principles like that? Do we know what we’re trying to do? JOHN MERROW: No, we don’t have that conversation. We needed that conversation. And I thought Barack Obama would lead us down that road, but it didn’t happen. I mean, look, the fundamental purpose of school is to help grow adults. And if you look at the three words, help is — it’s a team effort. And grow, it’s a process. You can’t just take a test score and say we’re done. And then adults, that’s the key issue. What do we want adults to be — what do we want our kids to be capable of doing as adults? Fill in bubbles or engage in debate and so on and so forth? JEFFREY BROWN: So, take one big issue that you have covered a lot, testing, right? It does look as though there’s been some — even some of the people who have been pushing that over the years, the Gates Foundation, Arne Duncan, the former secretary, they’re perhaps stepping back a little bit, or feeling like perhaps it was overemphasized? JOHN MERROW: Yes. JEFFREY BROWN: What do you see there? JOHN MERROW: I think they have pulled back little bit, but nowhere near enough. We’re still basically the only country in the world that says let’s use test scores to judge teachers. Most countries test kids to see how the kids are doing. So, we have a kind of test and punish. What we should do is assess to improve. JEFFREY BROWN: You have got 12 prescriptions, which we can’t go through all of them. But what is the main idea? JOHN MERROW: It’s a paradigm shift. Right now, schools — we think of school, where the teacher is the worker and the kid, the student, is the product. I’m saying, no, no, no, students are the workers, and knowledge is the product, which means they will work on real projects, they will work — they will create knowledge. They will learn, figure out stuff that they don’t know, that the teacher may not even know the answer to. The second goes back to Aristotle. And I’m not an original thinker. I have stolen a lot from Maria Montessori and Aristotle and so on. JEFFREY BROWN: Well, stealing from Aristotle is allowed, right? (LAUGHTER) JOHN MERROW: But we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. So, what do our kids repeated do in school? Well, in an awful lot of poor schools, kids do test prep. But if kids are actually the workers, creating knowledge, that’s what they — and they repeatedly do that, they will be ready for life in a democracy. They will be ready to be workers, to participate, be good citizens. JEFFREY BROWN: But how practical is that? That sounds great, but how do you do it economically strapped schools? JOHN MERROW: I don’t think this will cost more money. I think a judicious use of technology will help. I think there are 100 schools doing this. We have 10,000 schools — 100,000 schools. So, we have a long way to go. But it’s not going to be easy. But there are 12 steps. You have to acknowledge that these reform efforts have been superficial. You have to say — look at each kid and say, how is this child smart? What can we do to bring out that kid’s strengths? We have to measure what matters. JEFFREY BROWN: Let me just ask you finally a more personal question, because you covered these things for so long. Right? So when you went back to look, are these things that — these are things you were feeling at the time? Did you — did it kind of bubble up for you to look at, you know, I want to now take a big-picture look at all the problems I have seen? JOHN MERROW: I think it bubbled up toward the end of, you know, the 41 years, most of which were with you guys. JEFFREY BROWN: Yes. JOHN MERROW: I don’t think I — I was committed to hearing everybody, and giving everybody — even if I had had strong feelings, the “NewsHour” would never have let me put them on the air. But I don’t think I really had them until I started toward the end thinking about all the marvelous people who have worked so hard to try to change things, and then seeing things had not really hadn’t changed. Why was that? And then I started analyzing, well, maybe we’re just going at superficial problems, you know, raising test scores. That shouldn’t be the end of schooling. JEFFREY BROWN: Right. JOHN MERROW: You know, people talk about the achievement gap. Well, first, we should say, wait a minute, there’s an expectations gap. There is also an opportunity gap. If you close those two gaps, the outcomes will take care of themselves. JEFFREY BROWN: All right, the new book is “Addicted to Reform.” John Merrow, thanks very much. JOHN MERROW: Thank you very much, Jeff. The post Why education reform keeps failing students appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Watch Video | Listen to the AudioJUDY WOODRUFF: Now some perspective on the presidency of Barack Obama and the election of Donald Trump. Hari Sreenivasan has this latest addition to the NewsHour Bookshelf. HARI SREENIVASAN: Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential election was historic for many reasons, but, for all the firsts, the eight years of the Obama administration also fueled a backlash that strengthened many of the political and social divisions within the country. Now comes some perspective on those years. “We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy” is a collection of essays from National Book Award winner and national correspondent for “The Atlantic” magazine Ta-Nehisi Coates. He joins me now. So, let’s start with one of the things you talked about in the epilogue. You called Trump first white president. And from the president’s responses to Charlottesville, to the NFL protests, to his word choice in responding after Maria, how do you process all that? TA-NEHISI COATES, Author, “We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy”: Well, it’s really predictable, as far as I could see. When I use that title for the president, it’s not to identify any physical feature, you know, hair, eye color or fairness of skin or anything like that. Obviously, we have had plenty of presidents that checked white on their census form. But the difference with President Trump is that he was able to make the identity and the entire program of a black president, who preceded him, central to his own identity and his own program. Birtherism, for instance, is where his political campaign began. In addition to that, if you look at some of the data in terms of who his base is, what his base believes, I think he’s pretty much living out exactly what the core of his base actually asks for. So, I wasn’t particularly surprised by that. HARI SREENIVASAN: You had an essay, and part of one of the essays in here is kind of the limits on — the limits that existed on the Obama presidency. Are there any limits that exist on the Trump presidency? TA-NEHISI COATES: That is a great question. I haven’t seen them yet. I haven’t seen them. I’m sure there’s something he could do that would be completely unacceptable. But I have to say, you know, being caught on tape bragging about, you know, grabbing, molesting, sexually assaulting a woman, I think a lot of people thought that was a limit. You know, I think there have been several things that have happened. And I think one of the scary things about this moment right now is, is that those moments are slowly — or, immediately, you know, quickly broken down. What happens for the next president and the president after that? What is the message about norms for the presidency after this? HARI SREENIVASAN: You say eight years in power is part of it, and then the American tragedy is another part. When you look at the statistics for black Americans, they didn’t necessarily prosper under Obama. TA-NEHISI COATES: Right. HARI SREENIVASAN: Black middle-class wealth is staggeringly low. Black homeownership is at record lows. TA-NEHISI COATES: Right. I have no sort of defense of Obama on that score. And I think one of the things he — like, when I think about credit, the big thing I think about actually is the criminal justice system. I think, at the end of his term, even though there are folks who would say — and I think they’re pretty much right — that he waited to the end to use his power of clemency, he granted clemency to more folks in federal prison than all of his predecessors combined, some ridiculous number of people. The ability to see disturbances in Ferguson, and have the Justice Department actually go down there and investigate those disturbances and produce reports, that’s something that’s sorely missing now. You’re correct, though. He didn’t get to the deeper set of problems. And I’m kind of mixed on whether it’s fair to hold him to account. We have a wealth gap in this country between black and white of about — for every nickel an African-American family has, a white family has a dollar. That is a huge, huge chasm. Perhaps he could have done more to close that. HARI SREENIVASAN: I ask that partly because there is this sort of almost kind of a meme that says, well, the first black president existed. Black families should be doing pretty well. And even now, there is almost a tying in to kind of celebrity exceptionalism. We just saw, even after the NFL, the comments of these athletes, they should be so lucky as to have the privilege to earn these millions of dollars. TA-NEHISI COATES: Right. Right. Well, there’s a lot there. The first thing that I would say is that that situation that I just outlined for African-Americans, where you have a 1-20 ratio in terms of wealth, that didn’t come from one white president. That’s the succession of several white presidents over the course of centuries. That’s how we got there. It wasn’t the act of just one. And so the expectation that one would undo it, I think, is a bit unfair. In regards to the celebrity exceptionalism of the NFL athletes, what’s so amazing about that is, this is — nobody feels the same way about the owners. It’s presumed that the owners, who are billionaires to the athletes’ millionaires, earn their money, but the players should be grateful for their millions. And I don’t really understand that. It’s not presumed that they actually worked for anything, you know? And so it’s a very, very different standard being that is applied there. HARI SREENIVASAN: We see really, even in just these eight years, we see your writing style evolve. TA-NEHISI COATES: Yes. HARI SREENIVASAN: And, probably, you saw that evolve. Is it also strange to recognize now that, given that you are a published author, you have had these essays, that people kind of forget about your lean years that you introduce us to in the early part of the book? (LAUGHTER) TA-NEHISI COATES: Well, nobody knew. So I can forgive people for forgetting. I think, like, what is difficult is those lean years are the core of my identity. I have been writing now for 21 years. And the majority of that time was spent in lean years. And so that’s, like, how I see myself. But it’s very clear that, when I go into that world, that other people don’t see that. And it’s probably unfair to expect them to see that. But, for me, like, I have difficulty seeing what they see. I guess I should say that. HARI SREENIVASAN: Finally, you have got a Black Panther comic series. You have got a screenplay, some sort of secret novel you’re working on. (LAUGHTER) HARI SREENIVASAN: I just — I wonder, is your gaze elsewhere? Are you thinking about the world now as critically as you might have been in the last eight years? TA-NEHISI COATES: I don’t think I am, to be honest with you, Hari, to be straight with you. I don’t think I am. This was a — these last eight years, it was the culmination of a long journey that really started for me in West Baltimore, where I looked at, you know, my neighbors and my family, and saw how they were living. And then I would cut on the TV and see how the broader country represented itself and see how different it was. And I always wondered why. And I think I have some pretty good answers now. And I guess I probably have a set of questions now that either need to be answered in other forms or about other things totally. HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, Ta-Nehisi Coates from “Atlantic” magazine. The book is called, “We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy.” Thanks for joining us, Hari. TA-NEHISI COATES: Thanks so much. The post Ta-Nehisi Coates on the unfair expectation that one black president could undo inequality appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Watch Video | Listen to the AudioJUDY WOODRUFF: Twitter remains President Trump’s preferred platform to vent frustrations. This week’s targets, the NFL, a high-ranking Republican senator, and claims of fake news. They speak to and, in some cases, fuel debates that divide the country. More on that now with Karine Jean-Pierre. She’s a senior adviser to MoveOn.org and a contributing editor to “Bustle,” an online women’s magazine, and a veteran of the Obama administration. And Matt Schlapp, he’s the chairman of the American Conservative Union and the former White House political director under President George W. Bush. Welcome back to both of you. So, I was going to start with the exchange of insults over the last few days between the president, Senator Bob Corker. But, in the last few days, Matt, the president seems to have found somebody else to single out. And that’s NBC News… MATT SCHLAPP, American Conservative Union: Right. JUDY WOODRUFF: … because they have reported in the last day or so that, this summer, the president said he wanted to dramatically increase the U.S. nuclear arsenal, tenfold. The president says that’s not true. He’s been backed up by the defense secretary, James Mattis. Now the president is saying he wants to look at NBC’s license. Is this a good move for the president to be making? MATT SCHLAPP: Well, I don’t think it’s necessarily a great week for NBC. They didn’t go with the Harvey Weinstein story. They decided to take a pass. And then there’s this story that Donald Trump went to the Department of State or the Pentagon and had a wide-ranging meeting with foreign policy advisers and asked very basic questions about our nuclear arsenal and the use of our nuclear arsenal. The contents of that meeting or what someone’s — what they thought they heard gets leaked. And a news outlet goes running with the fact that the president wanted to increase our nuclear arsenal tenfold. This is kind of — this is when I think people get frustrated with the news media. I think a president should be able to sit with his foreign policy advisers and ask all kinds of questions in confidence and get direction from them. And I don’t think those very same career Foreign Service or career military people should leak those conversations — it breaches their duty, it’s against the law — to try to weaken this president. I think it’s a big mistake. The president was left with a terrible problem in North Korea and in Iran. He’s got very few good choices, and he’s trying to figure out what he can do. JUDY WOODRUFF: Is this more about leaks then, Karine, and the media, fake news? KARINE JEAN-PIERRE, MoveOn.org: Look, I think we should be concerned that someone at such a high level in the administration is leaking this. But we have to ask, why is that? Why are they so uncomfortable, that they have to leak these really interesting tactical decisions that the president is going to make? It’s because they are concerned about the president’s behavior, about what — how far he wants to take, how aggressive he is, how bombastic he is. So, basically, they’re showing us, what we see him talking about on Twitter, he’s actually seriously talking about it, you know, at the Resolute Desk or in the Oval Office or in these meetings. But the thing about this is that this is the type of dictatorship or authoritarian regime that we’re seeing from this president. He has to understand. John Kelly actually needs to slap the Constitution on his desk and tell him to read it, because he clearly has not read it. You cannot get rid of the free press. It’s part of our democracy. This is what our country is about. And these are the things that he has continued to do. This is not the first time that we hear him talk about the press and fake news. MATT SCHLAPP: Judy, can I — can I just go on this question about what the president inherited? I didn’t read the president comments or I didn’t take the president’s comments as somehow he wants to chill the First Amendment. I think what he’s saying to members of the press is that, just because you have a source — and you’re a respected journalist — just because you have a source, and a source is telling you a story, it doesn’t mean that the source is right. And it’s the job of the journalist to ferret that out, and to only print, which they can use with their best judgment to be accurate. And I think when it comes to this question about nuclear weapons in a nuclearized world, the president is in a terrible position, where we are going to have North Korea with the ability to strike Hawaii, strike Japan, strike California, what are we going to do? There is a more serious policy question here than just people’s dislikes with how Donald Trump talks. KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: But he’s the president. We have to listen to how Donald Trump talks. MATT SCHLAPP: He is president. KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: And he is incredibly dangerous in the rhetoric that he uses. He created the situation for himself. We’re not out here… (CROSSTALK) MATT SCHLAPP: No, no, no, he inherited — he inherited these two nuclear situations. KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: No, no, no. I’m not saying that he didn’t, but his behavior is not helpful. JUDY WOODRUFF: I want to bring up what, as I said, I was going to mention to begin with. And that was the comments of the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Corker. He’s announced he’s not running for reelection. But he’s in a pretty significant position in the Congress, Matt. He said in the last few days that the only thing separating the country from chaos is — are the people around the president, secretary of defense, secretary of state, White House chief of staff. He went on to tell The New York Times that the president’s rhetoric could possibly lead to something like War World III. I mean, this is not a polite statement. MATT SCHLAPP: What could possibly lead to World War III is the idea that Bob Corker and his friends thought it was OK to allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon, and to not force that agreement to go through the Senate as a treaty, where it would have had a tougher time becoming the law of the land. That is what the president has inherited. And so I think Bob Corker is trying to rewrite history to make it seem like the president is being reckless. He has — he has — he has inherited an absolutely terrifying situation, with a nuclearized Iran, soon to be, and a nuclearized North Korea. It’s all of these folks who have been around for the last decade who didn’t take the steps previously to prevent this problem that we have today. JUDY WOODRUFF: Is that — are we just looking at it the wrong way? KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: No, I think we’re looking at it exactly the way it is. One week, you have dotard. The other week, you have moron. Now you have unfit from the Foreign Relations Committee chair. That is a big deal. We have to remember, he’s not — Corker is not running for reelection anymore. He feels free… MATT SCHLAPP: Because he wouldn’t win. Because he wouldn’t win in a primary. (CROSSTALK) KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: Well, let me finish. Let me finish my point here, Matt. Because he is free to say what he believes. He is — like you said, he is the chair for the Foreign Relations Committee. He knows exactly what’s going on. And the problem with Donald Trump is that he’s not used to people hitting back. And Corker gave him a knockout punch. MATT SCHLAPP: And the voters of Tennessee have given Bob Corker a knockout punch. If you look at all the polls, he would have gone down in flames in a primary. People are tired of people who stand in the way of the Trump agenda. KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: Corker — we — you know this better than I do. This is not the type of man he is, Bob Corker. MATT SCHLAPP: Oh, I’m not so sure of that at all. KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: Well, that’s what people say. That’s what Republicans are saying. I don’t know him. That’s what I have heard Republicans are saying. MATT SCHLAPP: The words… (CROSSTALK) MATT SCHLAPP: … out of his mouth… (CROSSTALK) MATT SCHLAPP: … didn’t reflect… (CROSSTALK) KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: I think believes — I think he wants to save this country. JUDY WOODRUFF: There’s another interview that was done that ran today in The Washington Post. Tom Barrack, who is a longtime friend of the president’s, Matt, who the president — we’re told he and the president speak all the time — who said that he has been concerned, shocked, he put it, by some of the president’s tweets, and hopes that the president will tone it down, in effect. MATT SCHLAPP: Yes, I think he said something to the effect that the president could communicate better, he’s better than this. I read the story. I didn’t take as this — an attack by the president’s close personal friend. I took it as some coaching in an article about what Tom Barrack would like to see the president do better. JUDY WOODRUFF: Does he have a point? MATT SCHLAPP: Sure. Absolutely. I think a lot of people who like and respect the president, there’s a tweet here or a comment there where it leaves them saying, I don’t — I wish he would have said it differently. And I think a lot of them try to talk through the media to him. I think that shows that he has friends that give him diverse viewpoints and direction. I think it’s good. JUDY WOODRUFF: Fifteen seconds. KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: Well, it’s fascinating that his friends have to go to the press in order to connect with Donald Trump, because they know Donald Trump is going to listen and hear what he has to say. MATT SCHLAPP: He loves television. KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: Yes, he does. But I think that’s kind of weird that your friends have to do that. But this is nothing surprising. This is all very predictable. This is who Donald Trump is. I don’t know why his friends are surprised. JUDY WOODRUFF: So much to cover today. (LAUGHTER) JUDY WOODRUFF: We didn’t even get to Steve Bannon trying to run against — get some people to run against the Senate. KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: Waging war. MATT SCHLAPP: That’s OK. That s

Watch Video | Listen to the Audio JUDY WOODRUFF: But, first, we continue with our America Addicted series, looking at the opioid epidemic. Roughly 100 million Americans suffer from chronic pain. And most health officials agree that legal painkillers, prescribed by doctors and filled by pharmacies, triggered a tidal wave of addiction throughout the U.S. Recent guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urge doctors to avoid or dramatically limit these prescriptions in most cases. But where does that leave the chronic pain sufferers? Special correspondent Cat Wise has our report from Orange County. AMY CRAIN, Kaiser Permanente Patient: Let’s go to the park. CAT WISE: In many ways, Amy Crain’s story has followed the same path as hundreds of thousands of other chronic pain sufferers caught up in the opioid epidemic. There was the accident, in her case, getting slammed in the family car… the hospitalization and surgeries that saved her from paralysis… AMY CRAIN: Ready? One, two, three, jump. CAT WISE: And a resulting dependency on prescription painkillers — OxyContin, methadone, and Norco, that had left her foggy and barely functional. AMY CRAIN: I couldn’t lift my daughter, couldn’t care for her. CAT WISE: But then Crain’s story took a dramatic turn that has led her on a very different path, thanks to this doctor and a new effort by one of the country’s largest health care providers to tackle this national emergency. Dr. Anh Quan Nguyen is a Kaiser Permanente pain specialist who has been prescribing Crain and other patients alternative therapies, all covered by Kaiser’s insurance plan. The treatments include needles in the back, carefully placed by an acupuncturist; mindfulness at the clinic; yoga training, which she often practices in a local park. And, perhaps most importantly, she’s been prescribed fewer and fewer pain pills. In fact, Crain is now taking just a small percentage of the meds she was once on … a result at first she didn’t think was possible. AMY CRAIN: How am I going to do this? How am I going to, you know, get to clean my house? How am I going to, you know, get up in the mornings? And it was terrifying. But it wasn’t as hard as I thought it was, with the other tools. CAT WISE: Crain knew the stakes were high; 33,000 people died in the United States in 2015 from opioid overdoses, and early estimates from last year indicate that the numbers are up significantly. As communities and health care providers around the country seek solutions, some are turning here, to Southern California, where Kaiser Permanente’s program has led to a big drop-off in opioid prescriptions. DR. ED ELLISON, Southern California Executive Medical Director, Kaiser Permanente: We have seen between 2010 and 2015 a reduction of more than 80 percent in the use of OxyContin, the long-acting opioid. CAT WISE: Eighty percent? DR. ED ELLISON: Eighty percent. CAT WISE: Dr. Ed Ellison is the executive medical director for the Southern California Permanente Medical Group. DR. ED ELLISON: Across the program, we have seen more than a 30 percent reduction in opioid prescribing. So, we’re seeing significant movements being made. CAT WISE: Ellison says getting those reductions wasn’t easy — a sign that far too many of the drugs were being prescribed in the first place. In fact, in 2009, when a small group of Kaiser leaders gathered in Pasadena to look at recent prescription numbers, they were stunned. They expected to see diabetes and hypertension medications top the list. DR. STEVEN STEINBERG, Southern California Family Medicine Chief, Kaiser Permanente: And instead, we saw hydrocodone, oxycodone, OxyContin, fentanyl, methadone. CAT WISE: Dr. Steven Steinberg is the lead physician for the medical group’s controlled substance task force. DR. STEVEN STEINBERG: And we saw these just massive numbers of prescriptions, massive numbers of refills. And not just that, huge numbers at one time. People were getting 800 or 1,000 pills at a time. CAT WISE: Kaiser Permanente may have been among the first to spot the problem, but its numbers reflected a deep national trend. Billions of pills have been prescribed over the past two decades. Addictions and overdoses have surged, both for prescription painkillers and a growing number of people turning to illegal opioids like heroin. So, in 2010, Kaiser decided the new approach for patients like Crain, and their doctors, was needed. They called it the Safe and Appropriate Opioid Prescribing Program. DR. ED ELLISON: Pain is very subjective. And I can’t sit here and tell you you’re not in pain. My job is to help alleviate that pain. The key is to understanding that all roads don’t lead to an opioid. CAT WISE: It started with data assembled from the organization’s nearly 12 million members and 21,000 physicians. Doctors were given reports of their prescription habits and their patients’ histories with pain killers. And Kaiser Permanente’s computer system was reprogrammed to make it harder for physicians to prescribe certain high-risk opioids or dangerous combinations. DR. STEVEN STEINBERG: Type in OxyContin. You cannot proceed without answering various questions. Are there any other drugs that you tried first that are safer? Are you aware this is a dangerous drug? And what we found is, people do change their behavior. It’s one thing when you know it, and one thing when you have to commit it to print. CAT WISE: Pharmacists have been trained to spot high-risk activity, duplicate prescriptions, excessive quantities or early refills, and to contact the prescriber or a supervisor to discuss their concerns. DR. ANU SINGH, ER Chief Physician, Kaiser Permanente: And on a scale of 10 to zero, where would you put your pain right now? It was eight? CAT WISE: In emergency departments, where it was once the norm for patients to be handed scripts for 30 to 50 pain pills, patients have been put on notice that the rules have changed. DR. ANU SINGH: We have posters in every room. We have handouts we give out to our patients where we don’t give out prescriptions for more than a three days’ supply. We don’t refill lost or stolen prescriptions. So, all those guidelines are made clear to every patient when they walk in. CAT WISE: Dr. Nguyen and his colleagues have regular training sessions on opioids and meetings to discuss difficult cases. But they still worry about creating “opioid refugees,” pain patients who turn to street drugs like heroin when their medications are yanked away quickly. That’s a sensitive subject for Crain and many other patients. AMY CRAIN: I resent it when doctors treat us like we’re some kind of drug addicts, because I didn’t put myself in this situation. CAT WISE: Dr. Nguyen says one of the first steps, with all his patients, is to build trust. And so he’s developed what he calls the difficult pain conversation. DR. ANH QUAN NGUYEN, Pain specialist, Kaiser Permanente: The first thing I will tell patients is, ‘I know you have pain. I believe you. I’m going to examine you today, and figure out what I can do for you.’ After the examination, I say, ‘Look, I happen to notice that you’re on these medications, and I really want to have an open conversation with you about the dangers of these medications. Can we have this conversation?’ CAT WISE: George Teter has had that difficult pain conversation with Dr. Nguyen. Teter found himself on high levels of prescription fentanyl and other opioids after two surgeries on his elbow. GEORGE TETER, Kaiser Permanente Patient: I would have to kind of schedule around, like, make sure I wasn’t doing any driving or anything like that. CAT WISE: Dr. Nguyen’s slow and steady regimen of reducing his opioid intake made him feel more like his old self. Teter’s off fentanyl completely now and has cut his other opioid pain med by about 75 percent. These days, when his pain surges at work, he finds relief by meditating at a fountain near his office. He says the process wasn’t always easy, but he credits Dr. Nguyen’s careful approach with saving his life. GEORGE TETER: He told me one thing that really stuck in my head, that the pain will never kill you. DR. ANH QUAN NGUYEN: But if you keep these medications up, it will kill you. These medications tell you to go to bed at night, ‘Stop breathing. Stop breathing.’ And eventually your brain listens to it, and then you don’t wake up in the morning. So it’s not a painful way to die. It’s just very sad. CAT WISE: But some doctors say the nationwide crackdown on pain pills has gone much too far. In West Covina, California, just outside L.A., pain specialist Dr. Forest Tennant says patients are now flying in to see him from all over the country, like Gary Snook of Montana. Tennant says a small fraction of pain patients, about 3 to 5 percent, have rare chronic conditions, like Snook, and need high doses of opioids to function, but can’t get them elsewhere. DR. FOREST TENNANT, Pain Specialist: There’s no question about it. The pendulum has swung too far. CAT WISE: After reviewing details on Kaiser Permanente’s program, Tennant had some praise for its depth and general approach. But he said there’s still a very good chance that the type of patients he sees most frequently would be left behind. DR. FOREST TENNANT: It takes a lot of work to treat these people. It takes a special clinic, special time. And I hate to say it, but I’m afraid a lot of parties just don’t want to treat these folks. CAT WISE: But, for chronic pain patient Amy Crain, Kaiser’s program, she says, was exactly what she needed, when others might have written her off. And it’s helped her learn to cope. AMY CRAIN: You just kind of acknowledge the pain. You know, ‘OK, you’re there. I’m working with you today.’ CAT WISE: She now marks progress in the simple things, rides on the swing, trips down the slide, and in the laughter that makes her feel like she’s gotten her life back. For the PBS NewsHour, I’m Cat Wise in Anaheim, California. JUDY WOODRUFF: Online, you can f

Watch Video | Listen to the Audio   MICHAEL OATES, Welder: I would wake up in the morning and take four pills and snort two. That’s just to get out of bed. PAUL SOLMAN, Economics Correspondent: Michael Oates, a lifelong welder, is recovering from a 10-year opioid addiction which began when he took Vicodin for pain while working at a steel mill. Did you lose the job? MICHAEL OATES: Actually, my job went to China. And that was my excuse to do even more pills. PAUL SOLMAN: Have you worked since? MICHAEL OATES: I have had four or five different jobs since then. PAUL SOLMAN: And what happened to those jobs? MICHAEL OATES: I lost them all due to being addicted to opiates. They would random drug-test me, and I would be like, well, see you later. I would walk out. I even got caught one time with synthetic urine in my underwear, because I got pretty slick at using that, you know? PAUL SOLMAN: Do you stash it in your underpants? MICHAEL OATES: I would stash it in my underwear, and I would go in, and it’s synthetic urine. It’s got everything in it that you need to make them think it’s your urine. PAUL SOLMAN: Out of work for three years now, Oates is just one example of how the opioid crisis has decimated the American work force. Business owner Clyde McClellan has seen plenty of other examples. CLYDE MCCLELLAN, Owner, American Mug and Stein Co.: We have people that come in on a regular basis looking for employment that are obviously under the influence when they come in. PAUL SOLMAN: Really? You can tell? CLYDE MCCLELLAN: Oh, yes. They look like they’re the walking dead. I say, we’re going to send you for a drug test, and what is the drug test going to show us? Most of the time, if it’s pot or booze or anything like that, they tell me. If it’s something other than that, they don’t come back. PAUL SOLMAN: McClellan owns American Mug and Stein in East Liverpool, Ohio, once known as the pottery capital of the world with dozens of firms. Foreign competition has since wiped out all but two of them. McClellan owes his survival to his top customer, Starbucks. You would think would-be workers in town might be flocking here. But they’re flocking to drug dealers instead. CLYDE MCCLELLAN: One day, I was looking out of my office in 2015, and there was two policemen standing in my driveway with rifles. And I went out. I knew one of them. And I said, what’s going on? He said, well, we’re raiding this house that’s next to your building, and — for heroin distribution. PAUL SOLMAN: And these indelible photos of a couple overdosed in their car with their son in the backseat were snapped just three blocks from here. You don’t need experience to get a job at American Mug and Stein, but you do need to be clean. Half of applicants are not. CLYDE MCCLELLAN: I have been an employer in this area since 1983. Drugs were not at the forefront when you were talking to somebody about possible employment. Now the first thing we think of is, are they on drugs? How do we find out? What kind of references? PAUL SOLMAN: Somebody came in here looking for a job with a reference from one of your other employees? CLYDE MCCLELLAN: He was using this person as a reference. And when we asked the employee, he said, he’s a dope head. He steals money. He has stolen money from me. Obviously, we didn’t bring him in. PAUL SOLMAN: Donna Dibo has been there. A full-time waitress, she was prescribed opioids after a car accident. In time, scoring heroin became her main line of work. DONNA DIBO, Former Waitress: It is like a job itself, actually. It is. PAUL SOLMAN: Just trying to find that day’s drugs? DONNA DIBO: Yes. And then, once that day is over, your mind’s already going 1,000 times a minute, thinking, what am I going to do for the next day? PAUL SOLMAN: How long have you been out of the work force? DONNA DIBO: I have been out of work for about seven years. PAUL SOLMAN: The prime skill she honed? Shoplifting. DONNA DIBO: I would go into all the stores. My trunk and my backseat would be full with everything. Sears, I’m no longer allowed on their property. I stole so much from them, I probably own their store. PAUL SOLMAN: And then there was her daughter’s new cell phone. DONNA DIBO: We had some people over, and, all of a sudden, it just came up missing. I made it look like it came up missing. I am the one, actually, in fact, that did it. PAUL SOLMAN: You stole it from your daughter and sold it? DONNA DIBO: Absolutely. PAUL SOLMAN: Scott Schwind was a well-paid machinist when his addiction took charge. SCOTT SCHWIND, Machinist: I was just working to supply myself. I would have people come to my work, deliver stuff to me at work. PAUL SOLMAN: At the machinist shop? SCOTT SCHWIND: Yes. I was on third shift, so they would come at night and bring me stuff. But that’s how I messed the job up, is, I wouldn’t show up, or I was doing shady stuff, like having people come there. I would be in the bathroom for half-an-hour. So, I lost that job. And then I have had other jobs, but I have never been able to keep a job for long because of the addiction. PAUL SOLMAN: So, how long have you been out of work now? SCOTT SCHWIND: Since 2011. PAUL SOLMAN: Schwind, Oates and Dibo are now sober and enrolled at Flying High, a nonprofit program in Youngstown, Ohio, to get those out of the work force back in. It teaches hard skills, like welding and machining. An urban garden is for soft skills, showing up on time, teamwork. Jeff Magada says job training is critical to places like Youngstown, its population down more than 60 percent since its steel furnaces last ran full blast. JEFFREY MAGADA, Executive Director, Flying High: You don’t have a lot of industry coming here because they know there’s not a lot of skilled workers here, and then workers who can also pass a drug screen. PAUL SOLMAN: That’s a problem for Michael Sherwin’s company. MICHAEL SHERWIN, CEO, Columbiana Boiler Co.: We have had positions open for a year-and-a-half to two years. PAUL SOLMAN: Sherwin’s Columbiana Boiler Company has lots of demand for galvanized containers, but figures it’s foregone some $200,000 in business because he can’t find skilled, drug-free welders. MICHAEL SHERWIN: We probably lose 20 to 25 percent. PAUL SOLMAN: Because they can’t pass a drug test? MICHAEL SHERWIN: Mm-hmm. PAUL SOLMAN: Flying High places ex-addicts in shops like this and pays their salary for six months. But the threat of relapse is always there. That’s why Scott Schwind is taking it slow. SCOTT SCHWIND: I just want to get a foundation of being sober and dealing with things before I jump into a job and all that stress, and you know what I mean, having a bunch of money in my pocket, to where I’m not tempted to do something that I’m going to regret, because, like, the drugs out there today will kill you. PAUL SOLMAN: Why would you be tempted if you had money in your pocket? SCOTT SCHWIND: You forget how to deal with problems. It was a coping mechanism. Something went wrong, and you’re like, I’m just going to get high, and then you don’t have to worry about it. I had a house, I had a car, I had all my stuff taken care of. I was a good father, you know what I mean? And everything’s gone. And it takes a lot of work to get back to where you were. So, it’s easy to just throw your hands up and be like, you know what? Screw it. PAUL SOLMAN: So, you could imagine having money in your pocket and going back to drugs? DONNA DIBO: Absolutely. Absolutely. It takes two seconds for us to get a thought in our head, and we act on it. PAUL SOLMAN: So, technical instructors like Ivan Lipscomb wear two hats. IVAN LIPSCOMB, Flying High Instructor: Not only are we welding instructors, but we’re life coaches also. So we can try to talk to them about that also, maybe throw in a little joking in there every once in awhile just to keep their spirits up. PAUL SOLMAN: Magada says those who complete this program pose much less risk than those who don’t. JEFFREY MAGADA: We’re not just going to let them go. We’re going to monitor them over the next six months, while they have money in their pocket, and be working with them on those life skills. PAUL SOLMAN: Life skills absent in those whom opioids have overtaken, says Michael Sherwin. MICHAEL SHERWIN: Ten years ago, the drug screen wouldn’t have been an issue. PAUL SOLMAN: At all? MICHAEL SHERWIN: No. PAUL SOLMAN: And now you’re losing 25 percent of… MICHAEL SHERWIN: Of eligible candidates to it. So, for us, it’s a big deal. PAUL SOLMAN: A big deal for the broader economy as well, says Princeton economist Alan Krueger. He’s found a direct link between opioid use and out-of-the-work-force Americans. ALAN KRUEGER, Princeton University: For both prime-age men and prime-age women, the increase in prescriptions over the last 15 years can account for perhaps 20 percent of the drop in labor force participation that we have seen. PAUL SOLMAN: The rate has been falling for years, as the population ages, says Krueger. But opioids are increasingly the story, as the participation rate has hit historic lows. ALAN KRUEGER: We have had a change in medical practices, which has caused the medical profession to prescribe 3.5 times more opioid medication today than was the case 15 years ago. I think that’s made it harder for some people to keep their jobs and has led them to leave the labor force. PAUL SOLMAN: Clyde McClellan has seen it happening in East Liverpool. CLYDE MCCLELLAN: When you drive around town, you see too many young and middle-aged people just out during the middle of the day, when, normally, they’d be at work. If they’re out on the streets, many times, they’re not looking for work. They’re just out there looking for their next fix. PAUL SOLMAN: Donna Dibo is on the lookout no longer. Instead, she’s reinventing herself as a welder, Scott Schwind updating his machining skills. Michael Oates hopes to get back to work welding, and to rebuild the links shattered by his addiction. MICHAEL OATES: It tore my family completely apa

Watch Video | Listen to the Audio JUDY WOODRUFF: Now let’s turn to our series on the opioid crisis, its enormous toll in American life, and efforts to get a handle on it. We have spent the past couple of days showing some of the devastation it has wreaked, as more and more people have become hooked. Tonight, as part of our weekly Leading Edge science segment, Miles O’Brien explores the mechanics of pain, and some possible alternatives for coping with it. It’s part of our ongoing focus, America Addicted. MILES O’BRIEN: Kevin Walsh is intimately familiar with pain, excruciating pain. KEVIN WALSH, Patient: When it very first happened, it was just so intense that I would literally — my whole body just kind of froze for a minute. MILES O’BRIEN: He is talking about the day he got burned by hot grease in the commercial kitchen where he worked. KEVIN WALSH: They have a pain scale of one to 10. It was like a 15. MILES O’BRIEN: The treatment protocol for burn victims is almost as painful as the injury itself. Nurses repeatedly remove dressings and scrub the wounds. It’s called debridement. KEVIN WALSH: Sometimes, they really get in there, and they will scrub pretty hard. And it gets — yes, it gets very, very painful. MILES O’BRIEN: To endure it, he takes opioids, the most effective pain treatment medicine offers. But he also does something else. While the nurses do their work, he enters SnowWorld, a virtual reality video game that is simple and yet engrossing. KEVIN WALSH: I could tell that they were peeling off a bandage, and I remember actually thinking in my head, you know, this should hurt a bit more. But I was focused on the game, because I was trying to shoot a penguin, and not really worrying so much about them taking my dressing off. MILES O’BRIEN: Kevin Walsh was a patient at Seattle’s Harborview Hospital, run by U.W. Medicine, a pioneer in the treatment of pain. DR. DAVID TAUBEN, UW Medicine: Virtual reality is a way of moving someone to a different place, a safe place, a place they don’t have pain. MILES O’BRIEN: David Tauben heads the Division of Pain Medicine. DR. DAVID TAUBEN: We underestimate the power of our brains and our minds to shape and regulate our own experiences. MILES O’BRIEN: This is a place that was built on wrestling with pain in novel ways. One of its founding doctors, the late John Bonica, had a previous career as professional wrestler. He earned fame, fortune and a long litany of injuries. Hobbled by arthritis, the man knew pain inside and out. JOHN BONICA, Founder, UW Medicine: For some 45 years, I have had to wrestle the medical profession, the public, the health agencies, in order to make them aware that pain is a very important subject for studying and for education training. MILES O’BRIEN: It was the first place to treat pain as the problem, not just a symptom of something else. The approach is multidisciplinary. DR. DAVID TAUBEN: It includes psychologists, physical therapists, and a lot of non-drug providers, was based on eliminating the opioids and the sedatives that so many patients were put on. MILES O’BRIEN: Opioids are similar to naturally produced chemicals that attach to nerve cells called receptors in our brains and central nervous systems. Opioids affect our limbic brain, which manages emotions, giving us feelings of pleasure, relaxation and contentment, our brain stem, which controls unconscious activity, like breathing, coughing and pain. And they attach to receptors in the spinal cord, blocking pain messages sent back to the brain. During the Civil War, doctors used opioids widely on soldiers to treat pain, but many started showing symptoms of addiction. This led doctors to a century of conservatism in prescribing opioids. But then, in 1980, a letter to the editor of “The New England Journal of Medicine” turned that thinking on its head. The authors looked at 40,000 hospitalized patients. Although 12,000 of them received opioids, only four of them became addicted. Their conclusion? The development of addiction among medical patients is rare in cases where there is no history of addiction. It was a survey of existing databases, not a rigorous peer-reviewed study, and yet it had great influence. The pendulum swung. Opioid drug prescriptions increased dramatically. DR. DAVID TAUBEN: The pharmaceutical manufacturers were quite happy to promote these agents. They had a big incentive to minimize the associated risks. MILES O’BRIEN: The opioid push also made it harder for patients to get reimbursement for alternatives, such as biofeedback and hypnosis, even though studies show half to three-quarters of those who undergo hypnosis have improvement in their pain. DAVID PATTERSON, UW Medicine: How’s your pain been doing? TIM CLARK, Patient: A little better. DAVID PATTERSON: yes. TIM CLARK: I have cut back on some of the opioids. MILES O’BRIEN: Tim Clark is debilitated with intense, chronic neuropathic pain, the lasting result of contracting the Guillain-Barre virus five years ago. DAVID PATTERSON: Describe what the neuropathic pain is like for you. TIM CLARK: It’s usually like an electrical shock. It’s a sharp, shooting pain. MILES O’BRIEN: He regularly sees psychologist David Patterson for hypnosis sessions like this. DAVID PATTERSON: Now let that breath go and let your eyelids close. Hypnosis is really a special learning state, and, again, what happens is the part of the brain, that sensory, the part of your brain that’s saying, you can’t do this, it’s not possible, turns off, and so you’re really able to get people to a different place. Maybe you have a thought that, oh, I’m getting worse, I’m never going to get better. And what you’re going to find is that, first of all, these thoughts are ridiculous. It’s not this type of hands-off, bring you back to the present. It’s bringing people to a similar state as when they’re meditating, but being very directive with the suggestions that you give. MILES O’BRIEN: Tim was once extremely active, a competitive sailor with a rewarding career. His horrible pain ended all of that, and while opioids seemed like the solution for a while, they soon made matters much worse. TIM CLARK: And so why wouldn’t I be depressed? But the opioids make it worse, and I get in a real funk. If I can cut back on them even a little bit, I seem to have a more positive attitude. MILES O’BRIEN: He used to take three to four Dilaudid pills a day. Now it’s more like three to four a week. This has surprised David Patterson, who once thought hypnosis helped only patients with acute pain. DAVID PATTERSON: Now we’re finding that if you train people in hypnosis over weeks, they start changing the neurostructure of their brain. So it is actually useful for chronic pain too, but we’re just beginning to understand that better. MILES O’BRIEN: Pain is essential for survival. It is nature’s alarm bell, a way of protecting us from further harm. But no one really knows why pain persists long after the body has healed. DR. DAVID TAUBEN: Acute pain is a nice warning that you need to make a change in what you’re doing. It feels like it’s wrong. You respond as if it’s wrong, but that signal continues. And that becomes overwhelming for many people. Chronic pain is a stuck alarm. MILES O’BRIEN: I know this all too well. I deal with chronic pain that seems to emanate from a place that doesn’t exist: my amputated left arm. It’s called phantom Pain. HUNTER HOFFMAN, UW Medicine: So, the brain is expecting there to be a hand, and it’s filling in the blanks. MILES O’BRIEN: Hunter Hoffman is director of the Virtual Reality Research Center and the creator of SnowWorld. He says phantom pain is called top-down, meaning it’s in the head. HUNTER HOFFMAN: Your phantom limb is an excellent example of your brain’s expectations and predictions, even in the absence of a physical limb there. MILES O’BRIEN: Chronic pain is usually top-down. Hoffman designed SnowWorld with bottom up, acute pain sufferers like Kevin Walsh in mind. To demonstrate it, he inflicted some pain on me. HUNTER HOFFMAN: There are people that actually make pain inducers. MILES O’BRIEN: With a thermal stimulator, an adjustable heater. HUNTER HOFFMAN: One more, or you want to go up a half-a-degree? You can go up a half-degree if you don’t want to go… MILES O’BRIEN: Let’s do a full degree and see how that feels. HUNTER HOFFMAN: Is that comfortable? I can adjust it. MILES O’BRIEN: Oh, yes, it’s pretty good. HUNTER HOFFMAN: All right. And here, we will put on your earphones. MILES O’BRIEN: While I was intent on hurling snowballs at penguins, I didn’t feel the heat at all. And, on top of that, I didn’t feel any phantom pain. It apparently addresses pain both coming and going from the brain. This got Hunter’s attention. HUNTER HOFFMAN: Well, what we showed was, it helped reduce your chronic pain. MILES O’BRIEN: Right. HUNTER HOFFMAN: That was actually, I think, the first demonstration of that. MILES O’BRIEN: Yes? HUNTER HOFFMAN: That was the first… MILES O’BRIEN: Really? HUNTER HOFFMAN: … first demonstration. MILES O’BRIEN: We just did bleeding-edge science, huh? HUNTER HOFFMAN: Exactly. MILES O’BRIEN: Pain needs an audience, and the better we get at focusing on other things, the more we can manage it, without turning to narcotic drugs. In Seattle, I’m Miles O’Brien for the PBS NewsHour. JUDY WOODRUFF: Tomorrow, our series continues with a look at how the opioid crisis has hurt the nation’s work force. And online: Leaving old unused pain medication in the bathroom cupboard increases the likelihood of it being ingested by children or pets. How do you safely get rid of them? Find a doctor’s advice, and more stories from our series, at PBS.org/NewsHour. The post Understanding the science of pain with the help of virtual reality appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Watch Video | Listen to the AudioJUDY WOODRUFF: While the shooter’s motives remain unclear, we are learning more about the veritable arsenal that this man brought into his hotel room. William Brangham explains how some of those weapons were likely modified to become even more deadly. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: You can hear it in those horrible cell phone videos from Sunday night. (GUNFIRE) WILLIAM BRANGHAM: That rapid fire is virtually impossible for one person to do, unless you’re using a fully automatic weapon. Fully automatic means one pull of the trigger fires a continuous stream of bullets. It continues firing until you release the trigger or run out of ammunition. That’s certainly what the video from Las Vegas sounded like, but it’s been illegal to sell automatic weapons since 1986, when Ronald Reagan signed a law that banned them. They were simply considered too deadly for civilians to own. Existing owners in most states were grandfathered in, and those can be sold, but no new sales to civilians have been allowed since. So how was the killer able to shoot so many rounds so quickly? One clue is right here. This is one of his guns from that hotel room. See this part of the gun? That’s an added modification known as a bump-stock, and it’s likely one of the ways he was able to kill so many people so quickly. A bump-stock is one of several ways that people now modify legal semiautomatic weapons into acting like a fully automatic machine gun. YouTube is full of videos of manufacturers and their customers showing how these easy inexpensive bump-stocks actually perform. If you attach a high-capacity magazine, like this one that holds maybe 100 rounds, these weapons become virtually indistinguishable from automatic weapons. Another common modification is the so-called gat crank, where this small silver crank is inserted into the trigger mechanism of a semiautomatic weapon, making it act like a fully automatic one. These current modifications are not technically illegal, because, remember, a gun is only considered fully automatic if one pull of the trigger unleashes that continuous volley. These devices don’t do that. They just dramatically speed up the actual firing mechanism of the gun. So they can still be legally sold to anyone under federal law. In fact, they’re available right now at Wal-Mart and at sporting goods stores and all over the Internet. For the PBS NewsHour, I’m William Brangham. The post The legal gun device that likely sped up the carnage in Las Vegas appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Watch Video | Listen to the AudioHARI SREENIVASAN: But first: The political storms keep raging around the Trump White House, from Puerto Rico to North Korea. Lisa Desjardins has more. LISA DESJARDINS: That’s right. Thanks, Hari. It means it’s time for Politics Monday. We’re joined, of course, by our regulars, Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report and Tamara Keith of NPR. What a privilege to be with Walter and Keith. Thank you for joining us. AMY WALTER, The Cook Political Report: Thank you, Lisa. LISA DESJARDINS: We start with the topic that obviously we have had to touch on before, a sad one, mass shootings again. We have been on this territory for before. But yet we still have the obligation to really check in with what our leaders are doing and saying. Tam, what are the dynamics at play tonight for our leaders in Washington when it comes to gun violence? TAMARA KEITH, NPR: Tonight, Chris Murphy of Connecticut, the senator, Democratic senator, is giving a floor speech. He’s given these floor speeches before. And he is talking about that in the floor speech, saying that gun violence continues. He believes, he firmly believes that now is the time to have a conversation about gun control. And he is really not satisfied by what his colleagues have been doing. Meanwhile, I was at the White House press briefing earlier today, and it is very clear the White House doesn’t want to have that conversation. Sarah Sanders said it is time for condolences, it’s time for grief, and that it would be premature to talk about policy. And if this sounds familiar, it is because it is. We have had this political dance so many times before that it is hard to keep track. AMY WALTER: Yes. And the divide too politically goes beyond just what is going to happen in Congress, among Americans as well, that NBC/Wall Street Journal had earlier sent around some social trend polling that they would be looking at before the shooting in Las Vegas. And what they found when they asked the question about, do you think government is going to go too far in restricting gun rights or not go far enough, you won’t be surprised to know that it is incredibly polarizing. If you voted for Donald Trump, you overwhelmingly think that the government is going to go too far; 78 percent of Trump voters believe that. If you voted for Hillary Clinton, 74 percent of them think that you aren’t going far enough, the government isn’t going far enough. And so I suspect that we will fall back into that pattern, which is what makes it very hard to meet in the middle. If most people think one side is going to go way too far, then they’re never going to be willing to meet them somewhere where they can both agree to lose a little bit of something. LISA DESJARDINS: You know, We did see Hillary Clinton tweet, and also Democrats in Congress now tweet about a Republican bill that Republicans would like to pass this month, at least in the House. And that is a bill that would make it easier, remove one less background check, if you want to buy a silencer. Republicans I talked to said, well, they think this issue is misunderstood, that it would still make a rifle loud, it would just make it not so loud that it harms your hearing. Of course, Democrats feel very differently. They think that’s not safe to make it easier to buy silencers. I want to ask both of you. We have Democrats speaking on the floor tonight, but what can Democrats do more than protest? And what can Republicans do? Do they need to wait on a bill like this, Tam? TAMARA KEITH: Well, clearly, Democrats are having the same conversation that they have had again and again and again. And they are responding to the idea that it is not time to politicize by saying , this is exactly the time to politicize. And I — I mean, I hate to repeat myself, but Republicans are doing what they do and say, you know, mostly quiet about gun control for the moment, and then at some point, it will return to the conversation of defending the Second Amendment, and around and around and around. (CROSSTALK) AMY WALTER: This bill will be very difficult to get through the Senate. The House, obviously, you have a bigger margin for Republicans. In the Senate, to get 60 votes on something like this will be very unlikely. TAMARA KEITH: But let me make a prediction. If there is gun legislation that gets a vote sometime in the next few months, it is more likely to be the silencer measure than it is to be expanded background checks or some of the other things that Democrats like Nancy Pelosi are calling for. LISA DESJARDINS: We see a theme, obviously, and we have seen it for years now, which is Americans looking for leadership, hoping for more leadership. Tam, you were looking back at what past presidents in recent memory have said after mass shootings. What are the lessons there? What worked, what helped, or what didn’t? TAMARA KEITH: Yes, there is sort of a grim routine that develops in the hours immediately following a mass shooting. I went back and watched President Clinton after Columbine, President Bush after Virginia Tech, President Obama after Sandy Hook. And they all talk about the shock and the sadness. And they all cite Scripture. And President Trump today very much followed that same formula. The one break from that is President Obama after Sandy Hook began saying, and we need to do something about it. That is certainly not something that President Trump said in his remarks today. LISA DESJARDINS: Amy, I want to ask you about crisis in general. This is not the only crisis on this president’s desk right now. He has Puerto Rico, as we saw many Americans still struggling there, still needing a lot of help. And, obviously, this is a president who tweeted — he praised Puerto Rico’s governor, but sharply criticized San Juan’s mayor. And then, at the same time, he also has North Korea. And he has criticized or at least he’s said that his efforts by his own secretary of state to try and broker a deal with North Korea are a waste of time. AMY WALTER: Right. LISA DESJARDINS: What have we learned in the last week about the way this president manages crisis? AMY WALTER: Well, we have learned, especially by his Twitter habit, that he tweets as a president much like he did as a candidate, which is, it is impulsive, it is unpredictable. There is — doesn’t seem to be any sort of strategic message in this. (CROSSTALK) AMY WALTER: I know there’s a lot of — it is going to make headlines. I know there is a lot going around about whether he does this strategically, as a way to get his base fired up and keep them engaged, especially when he’s maybe moving — moving too far to the left for some people on the left, or when he has been — for some people on the right, or he has been unsuccessful legislatively. I don’t mow if I necessarily buy that. I think that he really does react and instantly gets onto his phone, and then it gets onto your screen. And I think the biggest example of this is the fight with the mayor of San Juan, where I think this was simply about he saw somebody that was being critical of him. We know that he reacts instantly to criticism. Usually, he does it by critiquing or going after that person over Twitter. But what we also know — and this is where we are getting into watching this polarization happen beyond the president. Just scrolling through my social media over the weekend, already, the folks in my feed who are on the right siding with the president, the folks on my feed in the left siding with the mayor. And so this becomes then for the president a way to once again polarize America, even at a time when what folks are looking for, as you pointed out, is unity. And this is what is going — it will be very interesting. The president, after tweeting a lot of stuff over the past couple of weeks, whether it is the NFL, Puerto Rico or, of course, Rex Tillerson, now is trying to go to places like Las Vegas this week and Puerto Rico. LISA DESJARDINS: And speaking of Puerto Rico, tomorrow. TAMARA KEITH: Yes. LISA DESJARDINS: Tamara Keith, you cover this White House, you cover this president. What should we watch for when he actually lands in Puerto Rico? TAMARA KEITH: So, he says that he’s going to be meeting with military observations, first-responders, FEMA. The White House says that the mayor of San Juan has been invited to some of the events around the president’s visit. We will certainly be watching to see if she is there and how their interaction goes. And the president said that, more importantly than all of those people that he is supposed to meet with, he is also supposed to meet people in Puerto Rico on the ground who have been affected by this storm, like real people. And President Trump in the past has been very affected by the conversations that he has with real people. AMY WALTER: Well, and he got high marks for his performance in the aftermath of the hurricanes in Florida and Texas. Over 60 percent of voters said they approve of the job that he was doing and the government was doing in response there. We haven’t seen any polling in the wake of the most recent response in Puerto Rico. But I will be very curious to see… LISA DESJARDINS: After. AMY WALTER: … after he goes down there and what the reaction is. TAMARA KEITH: This storm is about to get a lot less abstract for President Trump. LISA DESJARDINS: One last quick question. All these headlines, there is other news that we’re not able to cover in depth. What are watching politically, quickly, that you think might be overshadowed right now, Tam? TAMARA KEITH: It has been 52 days since President Trump said that the opioid crisis was an emergency and that he was declaring an emergency. That emergency has never actually technically been declared, and now there is no HHS secretary. LISA DESJARDINS: And Amy? AMY WALTER: In all of the debate about what is happening to health care, the one thing that got lost or fell through the cracks was the child health… LISA DESJARDINS: Health insur

Watch Video | Listen to the AudioBy Sam Weber and Laura Fong JEFF GREENFIELD: On a recent Tuesday evening, dozens of Wisconsin voters gathered in a Milwaukee public library, to hear about a campaign — aimed not at protecting the right to vote, but about where those votes are cast. The featured speakers were Dale Schultz and Tim Cullen, both former state senators, both leaders of opposing political parties in the state senate — but with a common cause: redistricting. TIM CULLEN, (D) FORMER STATE SENATOR: He’s Republican and I’m a Democrat — a lot of things we don’t agree on. We agreed that this issue was a problem. It was just inherently wrong that you can use your raw political power to guarantee yourselves a job. And guarantee yourselves power. DALE SCHULTZ, (R) FORMER WISCONSIN STATE SENATOR: We need to put the people first. Give them the opportunity to pick their representatives. That’s what this boils down to. And it’s the difference between being a good partisan as opposed to a good patriot. JEFF GREENFIELD: They’re talking about “gerrymandering”— when legislative maps are drawn to advantage one party over the other during redistricting… which happens every 10 years after the census. It’s a practice almost as old as our country. In 1812, Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry signed off on a highly misshapen district that a newspaper lampooned as a salamander, and labeled it a “gerrymander.” In Wisconsin, the power to redistrict hadn’t belonged to one party for 100 years… But in 2010, Republicans won control of the state assembly, the state senate, and the governor’s office, and like parties have done throughout American history, they used that power to maximize their political advantage. Listening at the library meeting was retired school principal Helen Harris. She lives on the northwest side of the city with her husband, Curt. The 2011 redistricting plan placed their heavily democratic Milwaukee neighborhood into a Republican-leaning district that stretches far to the northwest past the suburbs into farm country. HELEN HARRIS: We live in the city. And now we — our little neighborhood — I think it’s like six or seven thousand people were taken and attached to a very strongly Republican district. JEFF GREENFIELD: The new district line was just two blocks from her house. So when the district line was redrawn, anything this side of it was moved into the new district? CURT HARRIS: That’s correct. HELEN HARRIS: Mmm-hmm. JEFF GREENFIELD: In the 2012 election for her district, the Republican candidate ran unopposed – winning almost 99 percent of the vote. HELEN HARRIS: I don’t feel that I have a voice in this district. If every single Democrat in this district voted, it wouldn’t change anything. And many of the districts have been specifically aligned and created so that that Democratic voice will not be heard. JEFF GREENFIELD: Moving the Harris’s from a Democratic, Milwaukee district into a larger Republican area was part of a strategy known as “packing and cracking.” Heavily Democratic Milwaukee voters were “packed” together in fewer districts, while other sections of Milwaukee were “cracked” and added to several Republican districts… diluting that Democratic vote. The result? Three fewer Democrats in the state assembly representing the Milwaukee area. In 2015, Helen Harris and eleven other Wisconsin Democrats sued in federal court, alleging the partisan gerrymandering was unconstitutional and deprived their candidates of a fair chance to win. The plaintiffs won in Wisconsin and now the Supreme Court will decide whether the maps went too far. In 2011, Republican leadership hired consultants to use mapping software to draw new district lines behind closed doors — in secrecy — and without any input from any Democrats. Even when Republican assembly members were shown their new districts, they had to sign non-disclosure agreements. The impact was clear in 2012, when Republicans won 49 percent of the votes for the state assembly, but captured 61% of the seats. Republican State Senator Dale Schultz voted for the plan, but he’s since had a change of heart. DALE SCHULTZ, (R) FORMER WISCONSIN STATE SENATOR: When I realized the Democrats had won by over 100,000 votes in Wisconsin and yet in the State Assembly the Republicans ended up with 60 seats. It just didn’t make sense to me. JEFF GREENFIELD: Helen Harris’ former state representative, Democrat Fred Kessler, was drawn out of his district. He decided to move to stay in the assembly. FRED KESSLER, (D) STATE REPRESENTATIVE: We had about a 3,500 square foot house, brand new, that we built in 2005, and then they put the whole subdivision out. And my border was four blocks away. We had to sell a house and we had to buy another house and I know it was deliberate on their part. JEFF GREENFIELD: Helen Harris’ new representative was Republican Don Pridemore, who lives near the town of Hartford, 20 miles west of Milwaukee County. He said he was pleased his district included sections of the city. DON PRIDEMORE, (R) FORMER STATE REPRESENTATIVE: Some people in the district admitted to me that they were Republicans, but they were they didn’t want me to let anybody know that especially their neighbors. But that’s just the way it is the Republicans in those wards. We’re very happy now that they had somebody to represent them, even though they may have been in the minority. JEFF GREENFIELD: And Pridemore says gerrymandering is just normal part of politics. DON PRIDEMORE, (R) FORMER STATE REPRESENTATIVE: I have no doubt that Democrats would do the same thing, if not even a little worse than what was done, when we had the opportunity. JEFF GREENFIELD: Across the country, state legislatures in the majority use mapping software to protect their incumbents and enable their candidates to win as many seats as possible. So, in some states where Republicans dominate — like North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — gerrymandering has helped Republicans win a greater percentage of seats than their statewide share of votes. It’s happened in democratically drawn states too, like Maryland and Massachusetts. The Supreme Court has allowed partisan gerrymandering in the past, as long there was no intent to racially discriminate, and districts had roughly the same number of people. Wisconsin’s Republican Attorney General, Brad Schimel, thinks the case is motivated by sour grapes. BRAD SCHIMEL, (R) WISCONSIN ATTORNEY GENERAL: That’s what Democrats in Wisconsin are doing is using this as a tool to try to convince voters, ‘Hey, Republicans aren’t really winning because of their message or because their candidates, they’re winning because they cheated. JEFF GREENFIELD: In winning their case in Wisconsin, attorneys for Helen Harris and her fellow plaintiffs convinced the district court of the republican majorities intent. They also introduced a new metric called the efficiency gap, which measures the number of so-called “wasted” votes in each district, in other words, the number of votes beyond the majority needed to win an election plus the votes cast for the loser. It attempts to quantify the amount of “packing and cracking” in a legislative map. The argument was designed to appeal to Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote in a 2004 redistricting case that “… We have no basis on which to define, clear, manageable, and politically neutral standards…” JEFF GREENFIELD: If a state legislature chooses to draw the lines to maximize its political advantage, are there any circumstances under which that would cross a constitutional line? BRAD SCHIMEL, WISCONSIN ATTORNEY GENERAL: Well the United States Supreme Court hasn’t found that line. The majority of the court has concluded that political consequences are both predictable and intended in redistricting efforts. So as long as the legislative body follows traditional redistricting principles like compactness, avoiding dividing municipalities, population equity. The fact that there’s a political gain built into it as well is not problematic from the Court. JEFF GREENFIELD: As for that split between the statewide vote and the large Republican majority in the assembly, Schimel says that’s because of “clustering”—Democrats win by massive majorities in Milwaukee and Madison, while Republican votes are spread out more evenly. BRAD SCHIMEL, WISCONSIN ATTORNEY GENERAL: It is very much a factor that people choose to live in particular places that they are with people who vote like them. I live in the very Republican county of Waukesha. I’m glad that we aren’t close in my county. JEFF GREENFIELD: Schimel also argues — if the Supreme Court adopts the efficiency gap as a standard for measuring partisan gerrymandering, it would create chaos for legislative maps all over the country. BRAD SCHIMEL, WISCONSIN ATTORNEY GENERAL: One third of the maps drawn across the last 45 years across America would fail. Those consequences are enormous. The litigation will be endless and fruitless. And we’ll constantly be back in the court looking at it again, and again, and again until you satisfy whatever judge or judges you’re in front of. JEFF GREENFIELD: The Supreme Court will hear the case this week. And a decision could have implications not only here in Wisconsin, but across the country. The post Supreme Court to hear case testing the limits of partisan gerrymandering appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Watch Video | Listen to the AudioBy Ivette Feliciano and Zachary Green IVETTE FELICIANO: Since Hurricane Maria hit, 40-year-old barber Hector Cruz Santiago hasn’t been able to reach his 20-year-old daughter, who’s a student at the University of Puerto Rico, in San Juan. HECTOR CRUZ SANTIAGO: Nothing. I’ve tried a thousand ways to communicate, and I haven’t been able to. It really worries me, because I have no idea how she’s doing, if she’s OK, if she’s unwell. It’s a huge stress. IVETTE FELICIANO: Santiago settled in this Puerto Rican enclave of Bethlehem in central Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley 15 years ago. LUZ ESTREMERA: I really have no idea how my family is doing. I just want to know what’s going on and to know that they are OK. IVETTE FELICIANO: Santiago’s wife, Luz Estremera, is worried about aid reaching her grandmother and aunts in the coastal town of Guayama. She’s hasn’t heard from them, but she’s gotten tidbits of information about her hometown on social networking apps. LUZ ESTREMERA: Puerto Rico is my island, it’s so sad. I love her, I want to live there but… everyone wants to come here. You can’t live there anymore. IVETTE FELICIANO: Adding to their stress, concerns about how the U.S. territory will pay to rebuild given its massive debt crisis, rampant poverty, and high unemployment rate. Puerto Rico’s power company owes 9 billion dollars of the island’s 72 billion dollar debt. Maintenance cutbacks before the hurricane exacerbated damage to the electric grid. The Lehigh valley’s Puerto Rican community has grown to almost 40-thousand people in the last few years. It’s sending cans of food and supplies to help the island’s residents. MARY COLON: What we are envisioning is as we get more and more of our families from the island, they are going to be coming through here. IVETTE FELICIANO: At the area’s Hispanic center, board president Mary Colon believes the hurricane will accelerate the exodus that began due to Puerto Rico’s financial crisis. MARY COLON: We have to roll up our sleeves and welcome the families that are coming here and help them as well as help those who are staying behind. IVETTE FELICIANO: Michelle Cabrera moved with her husband and two children to Bethlehem from Puerto Rico 7 years ago and says her sister and niece will soon to join them on the mainland. MICHELLE CABRERA: My mom is still pending because she takes care of her grandparents. They are sick, diabetic. And my grandmother does not want to come. She has her house there. IVETTE FELICIANO: Puerto Rico’s three-and-a-half million U.S. citizens have one representative in congress, but she can’t vote. So Cabrera and the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce here are organizing a letter writing campaign to Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation asking for more federal aid. MICHELLE CABRERA: Puerto Ricans that have moved from the island here, it is our job to make a movement and to talk to the community, the representatives. Anything that we can do to have that voice. IVETTE FELICIANO: Yarimar Bonilla, an associate professor of Latino and Caribbean studies at Rutgers University, is from Puerto Rico. YARIMAR BONILLA: You know a lot of people are discovering Puerto Rico and its political status for the first time right now. You have this in a bureaucratic apparatus that is not able to work quickly and efficiently especially when they’re in a context outside of the continental United States. IVETTE FELICIANO: She’s written about how Caribbean territories like Puerto Rico with limited self-governance are more vulnerable during a crisis. YARIMAR BONILLA: In the sense that they have complicated arrangements with US and imperial European powers. So places like Guadeloupe, Turks and Caicos the British Virgin Islands, a lot of the sites that have been impacted by the hurricane season this year, they are in different kinds of entanglements with the United States in Europe. IVETTE FELICIANO: Bonilla’s caught a flight from Puerto Rico and packed as if she’ll never go back. YARIMAR BONILLA: We saw that in New Orleans after Katrina. Many people left and did not return. All of us observing this in the United States, we’re–we’re very scared about what is going to happen to our communities and we feel the clock ticking. The post Puerto Ricans in anguish as they await news from the island appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Watch Video | Listen to the AudioJUDY WOODRUFF: Sometimes overlooked in this week’s debate over whether athletes should take a knee during the playing of the national anthem before games is the original focus of Colin Kaepernick’s protest, the deaths of unarmed black men in confrontations with law enforcement. Riley Temple is a lawyer and author. And, tonight, he shares his Humble Opinion on how those confrontations with police are a direct legacy of slavery and the racism that fueled it. RILEY TEMPLE, Author: Whenever I go to the Smithsonian’s African American History Museum, I make my pilgrimage to Joseph Trammell’s tin wallet. It’s a handmade, thin case that holds his freedom papers. Joseph Trammell, a black man, was born a slave in Virginia in 1831. When he was 21, he was freed, and surely believed that he had some measure of liberty so long as he had his tin wallet with him. When he was stopped, he invariably had to effect a servile posture to the whites, who demanded to know who, why, how come, and what for. The very sight of him, no slave tag, no white supervision in sight, was terrifying, an errant and aimlessly roaming Negro going about his ordinary days. His family undoubtedly reminded him, be nonthreatening, say yes, ma’am, no, sir, effect servility, cower even. Just don’t get killed. I was having an ordinary day not long ago, when, in my upscale and overwhelmingly white Washington, D.C., neighborhood where I have lived for the past 25 years, my dog Wilson and I walked past an apartment building just across the street from my own. As Wilson paused, a blustery white man appeared and bellowed at me to not let my dog stop there. Then he demanded to know if I lived in his neighborhood. I asked why it was a pertinent question. He became furious, threatened to call the police. Three cops in two cruisers appeared within a couple of minutes, flashing lights and all. They told me they were answering a trespassing complaint. I pulled out my I.D. I didn’t have to, but I knew I had to show my papers to de-escalate the situation. I wasn’t a trespasser in this rich white neighborhood. I lived there. I got out of my brush with the police unscathed, but not before telling a belligerent cop to go to hell. And, in so doing, I broke a rule, the rule by which the Joseph Trammells of slavery days lived, and by which all black people today are told to obey, in order to survive confrontations with law enforcement: Be nice. Be servile. Say, no, sir, yes, ma’am. By all means, do nothing that smacks of dignity or claim of right, else you will be killed. My story was minor. But so too is failing to signal a lane change or selling illegal cigarettes, and those acts turned deadly for Sandra Bland and Eric Garner. By questioning my right to be, I was suddenly slammed onto that continuum of history, a black man, perceived to be an interloper, a trespasser, an imminent threat, just like freed slave Joseph Trammell in 1852 Virginia. Editor’s Note: On tonight’s broadcast, we aired an essay by lawyer Riley Temple. We did not include in our introduction that Mr. Temple is a trustee of the Greater Washington Education Television Association, which owns and operates PBS NewsHour. The post Why I broke the rule of survival for black Americans appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Watch Video | Listen to the AudioJUDY WOODRUFF: And let’s turn to a different conversation on questions of sexism, in tech, finance and Silicon Valley. Ellen Pao became a kind of cause celebre in 2012 after she filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against her employer, the powerful venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. Pao had been a junior partner and claimed that her bosses didn’t promote her because of her gender and retaliated against her for complaining. She asked for $16 million in damages in a trial, but lost. And her personal reputation was damaged along the way. Still, her case served as a wakeup call. She has a new book about it and the aftermath titled “Reset.” Our economics correspondent, Paul Solman, sat down with Ellen Pao, part of his weekly series, Making Sense. PAUL SOLMAN: Ellen Pao, welcome. ELLEN PAO, Author, “Reset”: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change”: Thank you for having me. PAUL SOLMAN: From your biography, you do not seem like the person who would sue Kleiner Perkins or, for that matter, pretty much anyone. ELLEN PAO: It’s not my nature. I think the lawsuit was part of a mission to call attention to this problem. So, I had tried so many other ways beforehand. I’m not doing that much press. I’m an introvert. It’s hard for me. But it’s like kind of now it’s going to go on air and all these people, calling attention, seeing me on the street and recognizing me. PAUL SOLMAN: You don’t want that. ELLEN PAO: I don’t want that. It’s not my personality, and it makes me uncomfortable. But this is a culture that has pervasive problems. And seeing the extent of it, we need to do a whole reset. PAUL SOLMAN: Reset is the title of Pao’s book. And with its claim of gender discrimination in Silicon Valley, it’s become part of an increasingly polarized debate. Just in the last few months, charges of sexual discrimination and harassment have brought down the CEOs of Uber and the online lending startup Social Finance, spurring a backlash. A front-page article in this Sunday’s New York Times featured Silicon Valley men alleging discrimination. Pao is a Princeton grad with degrees from Harvard Law and Harvard Business School, jobs in Silicon Valley since 1998, including a stint at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins that triggered the gender bias lawsuit. What was the percentage of women in venture capital when you were there? ELLEN PAO: I believe it was about 6 percent. PAUL SOLMAN: And what is it now? ELLEN PAO: I think it’s gone down. I think it’s gone down to maybe 5 percent. And less than 1 percent are black or Latinx. PAUL SOLMAN: Do you think that you were sort of suppressing feelings you were having at the time, or the sense that you were getting that there was systemic discrimination against you as a woman, perhaps you as a minority ELLEN PAO: There are a lot of — like 1,000 cuts in little small things that would make it very hard for a woman to be successful. So, women were asked to take notes at meetings, and men were not. Women were asked to baby-sit. Women were asked to do some of the menial tasks of organizing events and planning conferences that the men were not. So, when it came time to invest, which was the work that you would get recognized and promoted for… PAUL SOLMAN: And compensated for. ELLEN PAO: … and compensated for, it was much harder for a woman to be taken seriously and was harder to get investments through and was harder to be successful. And it was also possible for men to take away investments that women were working on if they looked good, and to dump investments that weren’t doing so well on the women when they didn’t want to work on them anymore. PAUL SOLMAN: Now, this sounded strikingly familiar. Listen to Maureen Sherry describing Wall Street gender bias when she was a trader. MAUREEN SHERRY, Former Managing Director, Bear Stearns: Accounts not being given equitably, that is really one way, or an account being taken away when you felt it wasn’t something that you deserved. PAUL SOLMAN: And the atmosphere wasn’t exactly congenial for a woman. MAUREEN SHERRY: When I had come back from my maternity leave, I was still nursing and kept a breast pump under my desk. One trader would notice, and he would start making a mooing sound, and sometimes other herd members would join in. PAUL SOLMAN: Actually mooing? MAUREEN SHERRY: Yes, mooing. PAUL SOLMAN: Her problem, Pao claims, is that the young men went West. ELLEN PAO: That boy culture came in around 2008, when people stopped going to Wall Street and the people who wanted to make big money fast wanted to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. And they all came out to Silicon Valley instead. PAUL SOLMAN: So you are at Kleiner Perkins. You are making a lot of money there, right? ELLEN PAO: Yes, more than I could spend. PAUL SOLMAN: So, what is happening there that is upsetting you? ELLEN PAO: I was getting blocked. I wasn’t being invited to meetings. One of the women at the firm also actually mapped out investments for the women and investments for the men, and showed that the women’s investments were doing significantly better. We have more experience. We have more education on average. And we’re not getting promoted. And, as a group, most of the men got promoted. PAUL SOLMAN: And you weren’t getting promoted because? ELLEN PAO: Because we were women. And there was some kind of belief that the men were better, despite all the results and the record. SALLIE KRAWCHECK, CEO and Co-Founder, Ellevest: There is actually research that shows that women are better investors, that they are more risk-aware. PAUL SOLMAN: But despite that, says former banker Sallie Krawcheck, who now runs a mutual fund invests in female-focused firms, men are better self-promoters. SALLIE KRAWCHECK: If it were just about intelligence or effort, we would have much more diverse teams. My experience has been that the gentlemen are more likely to come and ask for the promotion, and that the women are less likely to do so. ELLEN PAO: They were more assertive, and they did things exactly the right way, while we were, you know, too aggressive or not aggressive enough, to loud or too quiet or we were too competitive, we weren’t team players. And, you know, this was an endless slew of impossible things to fulfill. PAUL SOLMAN: When you confronted that reality, did you think, I am in the wrong place, this is the wrong world for me? ELLEN PAO: I actually tried to quit in 2007. I said, this culture is not — you know, it’s not my culture. And they told me they wanted to change their culture, that the things that I was bringing up were things that they didn’t want to be. It wasn’t until I really saw, like, I cannot succeed, or any other women in the firm, that was really the catalyst for me litigating. PAUL SOLMAN: So, you felt it was your duty to sue? ELLEN PAO: Yes, I would say that. I felt, if I didn’t do it, then who would do it? So, I sued for sexual discrimination and retaliation. PAUL SOLMAN: So what happened? ELLEN PAO: Oh, you’re going to take me to the dark days. They hired a crisis communications firm that launched a campaign around, you know, that I was a poor performer, that my case had no merit. PAUL SOLMAN: That you don’t get along well with other people. ELLEN PAO: Right. PAUL SOLMAN: And the verdict? ELLEN PAO: I lost on both counts. PAUL SOLMAN: Why? ELLEN PAO: I think people weren’t ready to believe that tech was this really biased and unfair culture. PAUL SOLMAN: Or that Pao, who had turned down a million-dollar settlement offer, had been unfairly treated. Taking the role of devil’s advocate, I asked if she could have played along, and, if so, how. Would you have become more of a sports buff? It sounds ridiculous, and yet… ELLEN PAO: Yes, but those were the things that I would have had to do. It was to become one of the guys. PAUL SOLMAN: Yes, but if — I’m thinking of myself now as one of these guys, OK? ELLEN PAO: Yes. PAUL SOLMAN: Much younger, sort of not reflective, making a lot of money. And if you are there, and are you not playing along, you are making me a little uncomfortable, maybe. ELLEN PAO: Well, I think if playing along means participating in sexist and racist jokes, that expectation has to change. It can’t be on the women to — or, you know, the people of color or the older people to try to make everything better. And I think, now that, you know, this year, with all these people coming out, and with the press and the public being so much more receptive to their stories and being able to take them at face value, instead of going through the same process I went through, where, oh, you are not a perfect victim, oh, you are kind of crazy, oh, you are a fraud, oh, you shouldn’t have done this, oh, why did you do that, like, all of that has kind of dissipated, as people see, wow, this is a huge problem. PAUL SOLMAN: Ellen Pao, thank you very much. ELLEN PAO: Thank you for having me. The post How Ellen Pao realized women ‘cannot succeed’ in Silicon Valley frat boy culture appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Watch Video | Listen to the AudioJUDY WOODRUFF: But first: the dangers of domestic terrorism, extremism and efforts to counter its use of social media. The attack in Charlottesville underscored just how real this is. As Miles O’Brien explains, experts who study the psychological and technological underpinnings of extremism say neo-Nazis and Islamic terrorists are cut from the same bitter cloth. It is this week’s Leading Edge and a co-production with PBS’ NOVA. HUMERA KHAN, Muflehun: We want to make sure that people can openly talk. MILES O’BRIEN: At the University of Illinois-Chicago, on this summer morning, a small group of determined people gathered in a classroom to figure out what they can do about terrorism. HUMERA KHAN: My name is Humera Khan. And your name? MILES O’BRIEN: Humera Khan was schooled as a nuclear engineer. She holds four degrees from MIT. But now she is doing something perhaps more complex, and most certainly less predictable, than splitting atoms. In sessions she calls viral peace, she tries to find ways to battle extremism online using social media to counter the narrative. HUMERA KHAN: The idea is teaching them how to recognize when they are being manipulated, and then teaching them the skill sets for how to respond, should they respond, when should they respond, and using social media to come up with their own campaigns. MILES O’BRIEN: She thinks stories effectively told on social media can motivate people to turn away from violence. Participants identify flash point issues and underlying causes of extremism. The problems are posted, sifted and prioritized. Then they work on their own campaign. The winner gets $1,000 to implement the idea. But this is not just about Islamic terrorism. It’s about all kinds of hate and extremism. CHRISTIAN PICCIOLINI, Former White Supremacists: My name is Christian Picciolini. I’m the co-founder of Life After Hate. MILES O’BRIEN: Christian Picciolini is a former white supremacist skinhead, who was the lead singer in a racist heavy metal rock band. He ran an organization focused on identifying white supremacists who might be convinced to walk away, de-radicalization. CHRISTIAN PICCIOLINI: Big place for people who are involved in hate groups to leave. I think it’s tough for us as a country to hold a mirror up to ourselves, to address a problem that’s inherent in our own population and our own citizens. PROTESTERS: Jews will not replace us! MILES O’BRIEN: The ugly scene in Charlottesville made it difficult to avoid that mirror. PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Charlottesville is a great place that has been very badly hurt. MILES O’BRIEN: President Trump was reluctant to blame white supremacists and neo-Nazis for the violence, and offered support for their protest march to save a statue of Robert E. Lee. PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP:  I think there’s blame on both sides. MILES O’BRIEN: Former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke said he was thrilled by what the president said. CHRISTIAN PICCIOLINI: What’s scary about Donald Trump and what’s happening is not that he’s creating racists. I don’t believe that. I believe that these people existed. He’s created a safe place for them to now vent. MILES O’BRIEN: And he has retweeted messages from neo-Nazis, giving them a global audience. J.M. Berger is a fellow with the International Center for Counter-Terrorism. JM BERGER, Terrorism Analyst: If you are somebody who believes that white people are being subjected to genocide, and, you know, that desperate measures are required to preserve the existence of the white race, and you get Donald Trump to retweet your content, then, suddenly, you have an audience of millions of people that you didn’t have before. MILES O’BRIEN: Berger studies the links between extremism, terrorism and the Internet. He has carefully tracked the rise of online recruitment and propaganda created by Islamic terrorists. JM BERGER: Social media has inherent advantages for extremists that mainstream movements don’t have. And ISIS is only the first group to realize this. And we’re going to see many others. I think we’re in for a decade or more of significant instability that can be attributed to the interconnectedness of the world. MILES O’BRIEN: Social media companies have had some success thwarting the online threat from ISIS, because the message is so extreme and so violent. JM BERGER: It is easier for these companies to step on them. White nationalists, while they are marginalized in our society, they are still very much embedded in our society. And they are currently enjoying a pretty good run of mainstreaming some of their beliefs. If they are not advocating for violence directly, it’s a much harder problem. CHRISTIAN PICCIOLINI: And until we can classify white extremists as terrorism, it won’t have the same resources, it won’t get the same priority, and won’t get the same funding to fight it. MILES O’BRIEN: The Trump administration has gone in the opposite direction, killing a $400,000 grant for Christian Picciolini’s Life After Hate Group. PROTESTERS: You will not replace us! MILES O’BRIEN: It was part of a broader effort to cut federal funding for campaigns against domestic terrorism. But should the Trump administration treat white extremism differently? Not according to University of Maryland psychologist Arie Kruglanski. ARIE KRUGLANSKI, University of Maryland: There’s a universal process that prompts people to the extremes, prompts them to deviate from the mainstream and move to the fringe. And the same process applies to neo-Nazis in Germany, Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers, Muslim extremism, or the militia, the far right in the United States. MILES O’BRIEN: Kruglanski says extremist groups thrive during times of uncertainty, offering simple black-and-white answers in a world filled with many shades of gray. Their messages, transmitted via Twitter, Facebook and the like, offer something they crave, certainty. The psychological term is cognitive closure. ARIE KRUGLANSKI: At the psychological level, it’s the very same dynamic that gives us ISIS, because ISIS also thrives on a very clear-cut ideology that promises the world and promises order and fame and structure, and that’s what Trump promises as well. MILES O’BRIEN: Terrorism expert J.M. Berger believes the Internet is hastening the polarization of our society, and he says there is no easy way to stop it. JM BERGER: I don’t think that there’s a solution is going to come around soon. I think it’s going to take quite a while, and I think that identity-based extremists are going to get the most benefit out of these technologies. And I think that we’re going to see the things we have seen with ISIS with other groups. MILES O’BRIEN: But the proliferation of the Internet and social media cuts in both directions. And that is what has brought these people together in Chicago. CHRISTIAN PICCIOLINI: While there is a lot of misinformation and a lot of recruitment to extremism happening online, it also serves as a wonderful platform for counternarratives, for people to reach others with an alternate message to what the extremists are proposing, and also to link the facts, so people can do their own homework. MILES O’BRIEN: Humera Khan strongly believes in promoting a counternarrative, stories that can motivate people to turn away from violence. HUMERA KHAN: We are talking about a minuscule, less than a percentage, which means we have the numbers on our side, if we can actually mobilize them to actually do good, not just watch, but actually step up and say, OK, I have a role, and I will do it. MILES O’BRIEN: Extremists have always been among us, and they have always been small in number, but, these days, everyone owns a global megaphone. HUMERA KHAN: Because anyone can have a role in bringing others in to the community. MILES O’BRIEN: In Chicago, I’m Miles O’Brien for the PBS NewsHour. Additional Footage Provided By Ford Fischer / News2Share The post How to fight extremist psychology with social media appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Watch Video | Listen to the AudioJUDY WOODRUFF: Puerto Rico, prostrate. The U.S. territory’s cries for help grew louder today, and echoed all the way to the White House. P.J. Tobia begins our coverage. P.J. TOBIA: The desperate plea of an island in distress painted on a rooftop. Nearly a week after Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico, most people don’t have enough food or drinking water, and few have electricity. Today, under pressure to do more, President Trump defended the federal recovery effort so far. PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We have shipped massive amounts of food and water and supplies to Puerto Rico, and we are continuing to do it on an hourly basis. But that island was hit as hard as you can hit. P.J. TOBIA: The president announced he’s expanding the aid, and will visit the territory next week. PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP:  I grew up in New York, so I know many people from Puerto Rico. I know many Puerto Ricans. And these are great people, and we have to help them. P.J. TOBIA: The hard part, how to get the help there. The White House sent out Brock Long, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, this afternoon. BROCK LONG, Administrator, FEMA: We don’t just drive trucks and resources on to an island. So, with the damage, you had extensive damage to the air traffic control systems, which meant sequencing life safety flights into the area, into the one airport that we could get open, San Juan, initially, is incredibly difficult. You can’t mobilize ships and just send them in, because there has to be port space, the port has to be safe. There’s all types of things that we have to bring in. P.J. TOBIA: But six days into the recovery, more than three million people are struggling from one day to the next. Grocery stores that have managed to open are rationing supplies, with no way of knowing when they might be restocked. DAVID GUZMAN, Supermarket Manager (through interpreter): We hope to receive more merchandise soon so we can provide to all our clients. We are restricting so we can give something to everyone, to extend what we have left. P.J. TOBIA: In this battered town in southwest Puerto Rico, volunteers have been handing out food to hard-pressed police. Medical care is also spotty. At this San Juan hospital, emergency tents are set up outside to handle the influx of people seeking help. DR. JUAN NAZARIO, Emergency Room Doctor (through interpreter): There has been a growing number of patients coming to our emergency room, because other services aren’t available to the public, as people take to the streets to perform recovery efforts and suffer accidents or other incidents. P.J. TOBIA: The hospital’s resources are being stretched to the brink. And badly needed medical procedures are delayed. ESMERELDA RIVERA, Sister of Hospital Patient (through interpreter): My brother had an accident two days before Maria hit, and he is waiting for surgery. He injured his back and his spinal cord, though he is waiting. Because of electricity issues and other systems, they are slower. P.J. TOBIA: Satellite images show the extent of the electricity issues, above, before the storm hit, in July, and below, an island plunged into darkness. Many who can leave are doing just that. Planes carrying passengers from Puerto Rico arrived in New York, and family members who had waited days for any news tearfully embraced them. They left behind a mammoth job of recovery, compounded by a long-running financial crisis. The president tweeted about the problem last night, saying the island’s huge debt will slow efforts to rebuild. That drew fire from some Democrats. REP. NYDIA VELAZQUEZ, D-N.Y.: If you don’t take this crisis seriously, this is going to be your Katrina. The people of Puerto Rico deserve better from our government. P.J. TOBIA: After Mr. Trump’s remarks today, Puerto Rico’s governor said he believes the president does care about the island. For now, FEMA the federal emergency management agency says it’s coordinating a response by some 10,000 government workers across the Caribbean. For the PBS NewsHour, I’m P.J. Tobia. JUDY WOODRUFF: The speed and adequacy of the federal response was indeed under more scrutiny today. As you just heard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is coordinating much of it. And for more on that, I spoke with Daniel Kaniewski, FEMA’s deputy administrator for protection and national preparedness, a short time ago. I started by asking about reports that FEMA is not doing enough. DANIEL KANIEWSKI, Deputy Administrator, FEMA: Well, this is a disaster response, and we’re very focused on the current needs of the population there, which for right now it still very much is an active response for lifesaving and life-sustaining missions. JUDY WOODRUFF: They say — what we’re hearing, Mr. Kaniewski, is that it’s not just matter of getting around the island, getting to the island. It’s just that there’s not enough help there. DANIEL KANIEWSKI: We have nearly 10,000 federal responders on the ground there, and millions of meals and other types of commodities that are there for this lifesaving mission. We have active rescues under way right now. We’re providing commodities to those people in areas that might not be easily accessible. It’s taken several days to get to some of these outlying areas. And to the extent we still can’t access them, today, we have helicopters overhead dropping in supplies, including food and medicine, to make sure that these people who are in need are getting the help that they deserve. JUDY WOODRUFF: Was there a delay getting ships and supplies to the island in the first place? DANIEL KANIEWSKI: I wouldn’t say there was any more delay than a situation involving a location over 1,000 miles away from the U.S. mainland. Before the disaster, before the hurricane came in, we pre-staged those types of assets, whether it be equipment, commodities and personnel, in the area, so that there would be a fast response. Obviously, that response needed to grow over time, and demands are not shrinking. They’re increasing. So, today, we have taken very decisive action with our federal partners, including the Department of Defense, to make sure that we have a robust sustainment effort under way, that we know we’re going to be here for the long haul, providing these — this assistance that frankly here in the continental U.S. might only be for a couple of days. It’s going to be for weeks, given the location of this disaster on the island. JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, we’re hearing and seeing reporting on so many different aspects of this crisis, not just the leftover damage from the flooding, people not having homes, but we’re hearing hospitals, what is it, only 11 of 69 hospitals on the island are open. How long is it going to take to get them reopened, and what about the patients? DANIEL KANIEWSKI: Yes, again, right now we’re focused on that lifesaving, life-sustaining mission. We have disaster medical assistance teams that have been deployed there by the Department of Health and Human Services that are providing medical services whether or not the hospital is open. These medical teams are using to working in austere environments. And they’re providing that medical care to those in need. JUDY WOODRUFF: And part of that story, and I’m sure you’re aware of it, are patients who rely on dialysis machines… DANIEL KANIEWSKI: Correct. JUDY WOODRUFF: … for — frankly, to save their lives. Some of them are in places where the generators have run out of diesel fuel. How are you addressing that? DANIEL KANIEWSKI: Well, we’re using a combination of approaches. One is evacuation. We have already evacuated a number of dialysis patients and other critical-needs patients that our medical experts on the ground felt it was in their best interests to be moved out. For those patients, we can’t move or don’t have the ability to move because they might be in remote areas, or it’s in their best interests to stay there. So, some critical patients, you don’t want the move, you want the keep there, but they need proper support. They need obviously electricity and medicine and proper medical care. We’re doing everything we can to make sure that those in need are getting that care. JUDY WOODRUFF: What is your main focus right now? You were saying this could take weeks, even longer, and, frankly, some people are saying months before this island is even close to getting back to a place where people are safe. What is the greatest need? DANIEL KANIEWSKI: So, right now, our priorities are, one, people, making sure we’re getting emergency responders on the ground. Again, we have 8,000 on the ground right now, closer to 10,000 now. We also need equipment. We have to have generators. We need fuel. We need commodities like food and water. All of those are there. In fact, as far as food goes, we have over four million meals, and water, over 6,000 liters. But just because it’s there doesn’t mean it’s in people’s hands. And I think that’s an important distinction. We have pushed as many commodities and as much support as we possibly can. Now we need to work with the local officials and our responders on the ground to get that distributed to those in need. And in some cases, they can only be reached by helicopter, and it might involve us airdropping that in. JUDY WOODRUFF: Deputy FEMA Administrator Daniel Kaniewski on the dire situation in Puerto Rico, thank you very much. DANIEL KANIEWSKI: Thank you. JUDY WOODRUFF: Let’s hear now from one of those very concerned about the federal response. She is Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, a Democrat from New York state. She traveled to Puerto Rico after the hurricane. And she joins us now from the U.S. Capitol. Congresswoman Velazquez, thank you so much for talking with us. You were quoted today as saying the response in Puerto Rico has been totally inefficient. What did you mean? REP. NYDIA VELAZQUEZ, D-N.Y.: Well, it has been six days since Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico. And I was there on Friday with the g

Watch Video | Listen to the AudioJUDY WOODRUFF: Meantime, it’s time for our Politics Monday team to look at not just the Affordable Care Act, but what we have been talking about earlier in the program, the feud between the president and the National Football League. Joining us now, Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report, Tamara Keith of NPR, Politics Monday. Amy, you just heard Lisa’s report. Apparently, the Republicans’ effort is dead once again. AMY WALTER, The Cook Political Report: Yes. And the question beyond do they have the votes is, what would happen if they actually passed this? Also over the weekend, there were a number of polls that came out showing that this bill is not particularly popular. People don’t know much about it, which goes to the question about how hard the president himself and Republicans were selling it to the public, which is, the answer is not a lot. But even on the question about whether people like Obamacare, you heard Senator Tim Scott saying people really hate Obamacare, we need to do something about it. When the ABC poll asked voters, if you had a choice between Obamacare or this Republican proposal, 56 percent said they would rather stay with Obamacare, 33 percent said they would go with the Republican proposal. So, even if something passed, Republicans would then have to spend a whole bunch of time defending it, defining it, and talking about it, and trying to get people to like something that right now they’re not particularly interested in. JUDY WOODRUFF: So, maybe they’re better off without it, Tamara. (LAUGHTER) TAMARA KEITH, NPR: Well, I won’t be the one to decide that. (LAUGHTER) AMY WALTER: No. TAMARA KEITH: I think that Republicans want something. Clearly, the president wants something, anything. He was on a talk show this morning in Alabama, mostly to talk about the Senate race, but was also talking about the repeal and replace effort. And he wasn’t kind to his fellow Republicans. He said they were posturing, that he was just totally upset with John McCain. But he also — who has said that he would vote no on the measure, and on a previous version did the thumbs-down that President Trump found very upsetting. And he talked about that. But, you know, he wasn’t making a hard pitch for the legislation. And he also just didn’t even seem that optimistic. Now, there have been times where this White House has said, it’s going to pass at this point in the process. And they aren’t saying that this time. AMY WALTER: Yes, Republicans have been saying — we saw some reporting on this over the weekend — their greatest fear was that, because they haven’t been able to pass this, donors are getting very upset about this and sitting on their wallets, which impacts the candidates up in 2018. JUDY WOODRUFF: Yes. AMY WALTER: It may not affect President Trump, but it certainly impacts his party. JUDY WOODRUFF: So, you mentioned Alabama, Tam. I will use this to turn to that. The president was there on Friday. He made news for a whole lot of reasons. But what does that race look like right now between Luther Strange, who is the appointed senator, and Roy Moore? TAMARA KEITH: Well, it is a fascinating race that — and we talked about this a little bit last week, but it really pits President Trump, who has supported Luther Strange, who is the appointed sort of fill-in for the senator who left to become the attorney general, it pits President Trump’s candidate against basically all of President Trump’s people. You have got Steve Bannon, you have got Sarah Palin, you have got all of these Trump allies campaigning for Roy Moore, who, according to recent polls, seems to have an advantage. Yes, we — I was talking to one Republican analyst who said, you know, you have got people that went to this rally that President Trump had for Luther Strange, put on their make America great again red hats, and probably walked out and planned to vote for Roy Moore. AMY WALTER: It is — this debate and this sort of intraparty fighting between the establishment/anti-establishment has been going on for years, right? We remember this starting in 2010. The difference this year is that, in 2010, it was Republicans as the out-party. They were frustrated with their own party, saying they weren’t fighting hard enough against President Obama and Democrats in Congress. So, they were trying to figure out who they were and how to define themselves. Now here we are, Republicans have the White House, they have the House, they have the Senate. The intraparty rifts are as strong as ever. And even the president, while he did go down to endorse Luther Strange, of course, said, well, maybe I shouldn’t have done this in the first place, that Roy Moore, he is actually a pretty good guy. So, you know, his stamp of approval isn’t necessarily helping to heal this rift. And I think we’re going to continue to see this. We had already started to see primaries start to emerge among Republican senators up in 2018. It will be curious to see if we see an increase if Roy Moore does win, of these intraparty fights on the Senate and the House side. TAMARA KEITH: And let me just say that, if Roy Moore wins, President Trump is going to find a way to turn it into a victory for himself. AMY WALTER: Absolutely. TAMARA KEITH: President Trump doesn’t take defeat. He finds victory in defeat. JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, the other news that the president made in Alabama, of course, was going after the National Football League, the players who have been protesting during the national anthem. Amy, we — it’s become a huge topic of conversation over the weekend. It was at every professional game yesterday. What does the president gain politically by doing this? AMY WALTER: Yes, I think he is just — this has been true since he was a private citizen, since — as a candidate and now as president. Getting into the culture piece, whether we call it the culture wars or the divide on some of these issues, is a much more comfortable place for him than getting in debates about policy. And that’s where he likes to sit. It’s where he feels the most confident. And, remember, all through 2016, he took these positions that a whole bunch of folks, even on his own side, said, don’t get involved in those, they are going to be politically damaging, you can’t recover from this. And, of course, he won. And so he trusts his gut and he trusts instincts on these issues. They play to people that show up at his rallies. And I think that’s the other piece to remember. He loves getting the applause and adoration of the folks who show up at the rally. Having a 90-minute speech about health care and taxes wasn’t going to get people riled up. JUDY WOODRUFF: Is it helping him? TAMARA KEITH: This is a base-feeding feud, and he keeps picking these feuds. He’s done it again and again and again. And they — it excites his base. Now, you know, these protests were originally about protesting racism and police brutality. But now the president and the White House say, this isn’t about race. They say it’s about patriotism and the flag. And President Trump, on many occasions, has turned and said, patriotism. It has — whatever this is, whatever it is, whatever the fight is, he makes it about patriotism. JUDY WOODRUFF: So, we watch. But, for the time being, Amy, it seems to be splitting the country. AMY WALTER: It absolutely is. It will be curious to see when polls come out, though when we looked at polls from when this first started, it was definitely split, especially among racial lines, not surprisingly. JUDY WOODRUFF: Yes. Amy Walter, Tamara Keith, Politics Monday. Thank you both. AMY WALTER: You’re welcome. TAMARA KEITH: You’re welcome.   The post What does Trump gain politically by attacking NFL players? appeared first on PBS NewsHour.