Politics and Reality Radio

This week, Donald Trump repeatedly called for arming teachers. It's his Big Idea to contain gun violence, despite the fact that all mass shootings, on and off of school campuses, represented only around 3 percent of gun homicides last year. We kick off our show by talking to someone who knows a thing or two about facing off against armed bad hombres, and who says the idea is nothing short of silly. David Chipman served as a member of the ATF's Special Response Teams  -- the agency's equivalent of SWAT -- and now serves as a senior policy advocate at the Giffords Campaign.     Then we'll speak with Topher Spiro, senior fellow for health policy at the Center for American Progress, about CAP's new proposal for a universal health care system called Medicare Extra for All.   Finally, we'll be joined by Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, to discuss corporate America's efforts to pay Republicans back for the windfall it received in the tax bill with a wave of propopaganda designed to hoodwink the public into thinking that the cuts are trickling down into their paychecks.   Playlist:Gorillaz: "Fire Coming Out of the Monkey's Head"Earl: "Tongue Tied"The Beatles: "Hello Little Girl"Moby: "Down Slow"

This week, author and researcher Sean McElwee joins us to push back on some deeply embedded conventional wisdom about the supposed battle for the "heart and soul" of the Democratic Party. Everyone wants to believe they're engaged in a grand ideological dispute, but McElwee argues that after years of leftward movement within the coalition, it's really much ado about very little.    Then we'll be joined by Cara Stewart, an attorney with the Kentucky Equal Justice Center, to talk about a lawsuit that she and her colleagues filed this week challenging the Trump regime's guidance allowing states to impose new restrictions on Medicaid that threaten to strip insurance coverage from tens of thousands of low income workers in the Bluegrass State.    Playlist:Ennio Morricone: "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly Theme"Elvis Presley: "King Creole" 

This week, Joshua Holland talks about the #TrumpShutdown.    Then we're joined by Richard Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry and director of the Psychopharmacology Clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College, who says that speculation about Trump's mental health miss the point given that anyone can see he's unfit for office.    Then we welcome Mark Godsey, a legal scholar at theUniversity of Cincinnati School of Law and co-founder of the Ohio Innocence Project. Mark discusses his new book, Blind Injustice: A Former Prosecutor Exposes the Psychology and Politics of Wrongful Convictions.    Playlist:Southern Culture on the Skids: "Nitty Gritty"Eek-a-Mouse: "Long Time Ago"The Wedding Band: "Lonely Hearts"

It's a two-book show!   This week, we're joined by The Guardian's Luke Harding to talk about his new book, Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win. We recorded this interview a day before we learned that Trump's former National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and is cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.    Then we welcome the I-Fund's Gary Rivlin, co-author, with Michael Hudson, of Wall Street's White House: How Gary Cohn Wrecked the Global Economy and Parlayed It Into a White House Job. The fact that Trump surrounded himself with Goldman Sachs vets highlights the degree to which his populist rhetoric about "America first" and "good jobs" was always just a giant grift.    Playlist: The Paragons: "The Tide Is High"Rickey Nelson: "Lonesome Town"

This week, Joshua Holland offers a brief rant about one of the more prominent strawmen that's been deployed to downplay the issue of Russian meddling in the 2016 elections.    Then we're joined by Madawi Al-Rasheed, a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, to talk about Mohammad bin Salman, also known as "MBS" -- the brash, young Saudi Crown Prince who consolidated an enormous amount of power in recent weeks by detaining over a dozen of his royal rivals and other senior Saudi officials. Al-Rasheed will help us understand not only what's going on within the kingdom, but also the larger regional context of MBS' dangerous power play.     Finally, we'll speak with Gabriel Zucman, a professor at UC Berkeley and author of The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens, about the so-called "Paradise Papers" -- a treasure trove of leaked documents that reveal the tax avoidance strategies of the upper crust of the elite -- and what they reveal about how tax havens screw the rest of us.    Playlist:The Shins: "New Slang"Rostam: "Bike Dream"Manu Chao: "Bongo Bong"  

This week, we kick off the show with a discussion of the GOP's plans for "tax reform" with Frank Clemente, director of Americans for Tax Fairness. Spoiler alert: Bad economics + staggering hypocrisy about deficits = a muddled mess.    Then we welcome Sam Berger, a senior policy advisor at The Center for American Progress who's been tracking the Trump regime's efforts to undermine the Affordable Care Act. You've no doubt heard talk of "sabotage," but it's probably worse than you thought.    Finally, Salon columnist Amanda Marcotte joins us to consider whether the outpouring of revelations of sexual harassment and other abuses that have followed Harvey Weinstein's fall signal a paradigm change or just a bump in misogyny's long road.    Playlist:Brave Combo: "Jeopardy"Mozart Heroes: "Mozart's Symphony No 40/ Metallica's Enter the Sandman"College Humor: "The Beatles vs. Joan Jett vs. Cypress Hill vs. House Of Pain vs. Rage Against The Machine Mashup"John Lurie National Orchestra: "Let's Get Ready to Rumba"  

This week, we'll be joined by Sharona Coutts from Rewire News, who will tell us about a new analysis that found a significant overlap on social media between prominent white supremacists and the religious right.    Then we'll talk about Stephen Bannon's war on the Republican "establishment" -- and the grifters who are coming along for the ride -- with American Prospect columnist Eliza Newlin Carney.    Finally, we'll speak with rock star and Crooks and Liars founder John Amato about Donald Trump's latest public battle with a Gold Star family, and consider whether Niger is really "Trump's Benghazi."   Playlist:Spearhead and Zap Mama: "To My Ba-Bay!"Southern Culture on the Skids: "Country Funk"Nightmares on Wax: "You Wish"Otis Redding: "These Arms of Mine" 

This week, we'll get our wonk on with Austin Frakt. He's a man of many affiliations -- health care economist at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and an associate professor at Boston University and visting scholar at Harvard. Austin tells us about "all-payer" rate-setting, and how it could provide another option for progressive health care reform in the coming years.     Then Crooks and Liars managing editor Karoli Kuns will join us to vent about Donald Trump, and some of the terrible things he'd done of late. There's no normalization of that guy on this show.   Finally, we'll speak with David Dayen, who wrote a piece this week for The Intercept about how Congress just gave the suffering people -- US citizens -- of Puerto Rico yet another huge middle finger.    Playlist:The Kinks: "Big Black Smoke"Doc Gynéco: "Dans Ma Rue"Iggy Pop: "Candy"U2: "In a Little While"

This week, we begin with Jeffrey Swanson, a professor of Psychiatry at Duke University, who will talk about an eye-raising study that he and his colleagues published in 2015 which looked at the number of Americans who display signs of impulsive anger and have ready access to a firearm. There was a subgroup among them that should be especially alarming.    Then we’ll be joined by Heather “Digby” Parton to talk about the media’s obsessive desire to draw parallels between Harvey Weinstein, a sleazy Democratic donor, and Donald Trump, a sleazy reality-TV host whom the Republican party nominated to run for president of the United States and who is now far more popular among the party’s rank-and-file than most elected officials who didn’t confess to being serial sexual harrassers.   [...]