I’ve been asked to sit in on the national Thom Hartmann Program this Thursday, July 8. The show is live on most affiliates noon-3pm EDT and 9-noon PDT and streams live at www.ThomHartmann.com
One topic we will definitely cover is the sneaky tactics used by the House leadership to pass more funding for the war and escalation in Afghanistan. Will one of the progressive House members who played along with this game be willing to talk about it? We’ll see.
Gov. Don Siegelman on Supreme Court ruling; David Swanson on sneaky House vote for war funding. Gov. Siegelman may benefit from the recent Supreme Court ruling for ex-Enron CEO Jeff Skilling, which invalidated the “honest services” statute. The Court has since returned the Siegelman-Scrushy convictions to the 11th Circuit for review. Siegelman tells how Karl Rove and friends framed him, how Elena Kagan backs prosecutors over the wrongfully convicted, and his prospects for justice in the next legal rounds. Swanson, author of Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union is a tireless progressive activist and the cofounder of After Downing Street Coalition. He deconstructs the bizarre tactics used by House leaders to fund the escalation in Afghanistan without leaving fingerprints. Read his excellent article about it here. We run down the list of members who voted against the tactics and the bill for the right reasons–and can only identify 8. While many Dems spoke out against the war and escalation, only those 8 had the courage to actually vote against it–a new low. We describe the strange politics of this moment–Republicans, who all support the war, voted against the funding, while most anti-war Dems voted for it. And now, Obama threatens a veto over the part of the bill intended to stop teacher layoffs.
Stem Cell Clinical Trials; Commentary on Kagan Confirmation; movie review: Mother and Child. Dr. Eva Feldman of the University of Michigan has exciting news on clinical trials of stem cells on ALS (Lou Gherig’s disease) patients. States like California and Michigan bypassed Bush-era restrictions on stem cell research, and we are seeing real promise for halting deterioration in ALS patients. Dr. Feldman is quite impressive, and explains the science and procedures simply and vividly. Please share this interview with families struggling with ALS and other diseases like Parkinson’s and diabetes. Prof. Marjorie Cohn offers smart comments from a progressive perspective on Elena Kagen and the “vapid” process (Kagan’s words) of Supreme Court confirmation. Most troubling to Prof. Cohn is almost-Justice Kagan’s brief to deny habeas corpus rights to prisoners at Bagram in Afghanistan, even those not picked up in Afghanistan. And Gary Chew has a summer movie review of Mother and Child and a song from the movie, Little One by Lucy Schwartz. For easy access, the Kagan segment starts at 31:00 and the Chew-review is at 56:00.