Episodes
Friday Aug 30, 2013
Leid Stories - 08/30/13
Friday Aug 30, 2013
Friday Aug 30, 2013
LEID STORIES PROMO -- Friday, Aug. 30, 2013
Hello Casey, here is the promo for Leid Stories today:
Advice and Consent: Decision on Syria Points Up Dramatic Difference Between U.S. and Britain on Democracy
The British Parliament yesterday (Aug. 29) rejected a motion by Prime Minister David Cameron to join an allied military strike against Syria’s Bashar al-Assad for allegedly using chemical weapons in rebel strongholds that have killed hundreds of civilians and injured thousands more in a civil war that has been raging since April 2011.
What is instructive is the process that produced the vote – a vigorous, free-wheeling open debate, with the prime minister alternatively making his case and being called to account, and with equally vigorous challenges from the opposition and splinter parties.
President Obama, his administration and Congress, on the other hand, are contemplating possible U.S. involvement – and have already mobilized the military -- behind closed doors, shutting out public scrutiny of the process.
Leid Stories illustrates the difference between government by the people and for the people and government isolated from and insulated against the people.
Thursday Aug 29, 2013
Leid Stories - 08/29/13
Thursday Aug 29, 2013
Thursday Aug 29, 2013
Obama Flips the Script: ‘Progress Is the People’s Responsibility’
The occasion being the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Justice, you’d think a sitting (even if lame-duck) president would have a lot to say about what he’s doing to deliver on … jobs and justice.
Well, you’d be wrong if that’s what you’re thinking.
With a faux preacher’s cadence, President Obama rambled through a metaphor-riddled speech (clearly written by someone culturally out of touch trying desperately to rival Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream”) that (a) ignored the reasons then and now for the march; (b) became a treatise on King and his speech; and (c) revised the historic 1963 black-led protest over the plight of the nation’s black folk into a twisted evangelical mission to save the “middle class.”
Leid Stories explains how and why Obama flipped the script.
Wednesday Aug 28, 2013
Leid Stories - 08/28/13
Wednesday Aug 28, 2013
Wednesday Aug 28, 2013
Education Apartheid in America / Republicans Pledge Racial Allegiance
When newly elected Gov. George Wallace in 1963 defied the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 and refused to desegregate Alabama’s public schools, his vow of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever,” which he recanted decades later, was nonetheless prophetic.
Fifty years after the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom – including the right to equal education – the nation’s public schools remain bastions of apartheid, says Richard Rothstein, a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and senior fellow of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at the University of California (Berkeley) School of Law.
The Democrat-dominated 50th-anniversary March on Washington commemoration has not stifled the Republicans’ desire to be known to African Americans as “the party of freedom.” At an RNC luncheon in Washington, D.C., Rep. James Sensenbrenner vows to restore Voting Rights Act provisions struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, and party chairman Reince Priebus commits to aggressively “telling [the party’s] story” to African American voters.
Tuesday Aug 27, 2013
Leid Stories - 08/27/13
Tuesday Aug 27, 2013
Tuesday Aug 27, 2013
Speak Your Mind! Say What You Gotta Say!
It’s Open Forum on Leid Stories.
Speak your mind. Say what you gotta say. Take the conversation wherever you want it to go. Share your thoughts about news and issues of the day, or chart a different course entirely and take us for a philosophical spin.
Whatever you choose, expect to be questioned closely, even challenged – with love and respect, of course!
Monday Aug 26, 2013
Leid Stories - 08/26/13
Monday Aug 26, 2013
Monday Aug 26, 2013
Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nuthin’!
James Brown nailed it in 1972 with the two-part funk commentary he dedicated to “politicians who were running their mouths but had no knowledge of what life was like for a lot of people in [the United States]” and “some of the cats on their soapboxes … who were telling the people one thing while manipulating their emotions for personal gain.”
Both types were in abundance at this past weekend’s 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the Rev. Al Sharpton as convenor in chief.
Leid Stories reveals the true motives behind the event – which should remove any lingering doubt about the Democratic Party’s willingness, interest or capacity to respond to the unique needs of its staunchest supporters.
Friday Aug 23, 2013
Leid Stories - 08/23/13
Friday Aug 23, 2013
Friday Aug 23, 2013
Chaos In the World and At Home, and We’re Talking to Ourselves
If in fact the left-of-center community has ideas that are alternatives – or, better yet, workable solutions -- to the madness that surrounds us, why isn’t it engaged in direct action? Why is it content to remain above the fray when it should be shoulders-deep in it?
Leid Stories explores the contradictions within this political sector, which is besotted with knowledge and ideas but seemingly reluctant to test their merits in the real world of politics.
Thursday Aug 22, 2013
Wednesday Aug 21, 2013
Leid Stories - 08/21/13
Wednesday Aug 21, 2013
Wednesday Aug 21, 2013
Take the Wheel. You Drive. It’s Open Forum!
It’s Open Forum on Leid Stories – which means you take the conversation wherever you want it to go. Share your thoughts about news and issues of the day, or travel a different course entirely and take us for a philosophical spin.
Whatever you choose, expect to be questioned closely, even challenged – with love and respect, of course!
Tuesday Aug 20, 2013
Leid Stories - 08/20/13
Tuesday Aug 20, 2013
Tuesday Aug 20, 2013
Detroit: The Killing of A City; Extreme Urban Warfare
A contentious legal battle over whether the City of Detroit legally can declare bankruptcy will become even more so in the coming weeks. Aug. 19 was the bankruptcy court’s deadline for objections, and Judge Steven Rhodes will hear arguments on the city’s right to file bankruptcy on Oct. 23.
Leid Stories contends that Detroit’s dire money woes are to be seen in the context of an extreme kind of urban warfare, the principal aim of which is to kill a city in order to “reinvent” it under social, political and economic paradigms designed by a confluence of interests that envision a “different” America.
We get the discussion started with an orientation by Dr. Thomas Sugrue, David Boies Professor of History and Sociology, and director of the Penn Social Science and Policy Forum at the University of Pennsylvania, and contributions from listeners.
Friday Aug 16, 2013
Leid Stories - 08/16/13
Friday Aug 16, 2013
Friday Aug 16, 2013
The NSA ‘Privacy’ Hypocrisy / A Reprieve, But Not Yet Justice, for Tawana Brawley
We’ve been waterboarded yet again with a new Edward Snowden inside-spy story – this one doled out to Jeff (Amazon.com magnate) Bezos’s soon-to-be-acquired Washington Post – about the U.S. government’s insatiable appetite for minding our business without us knowing. A different riff on the same tune.
The grandpappy of all ironies is, Snowden’s drip-by-drip “exposés,” given such dramatic play by compliant media outlets he selects for dissemination of the purloined material, should actually spark a conversation not only about government’s privacy abuses, but how his tech world and its oligarchic leaders are no different; in lockstep capitalistic cooperation with government, they have given us the gift that keeps on taking: “industrial-intelligence complex.”
Plus, a personal reflection on a Virginia circuit court ruling dismissing a defamation claim against Tawana Brawley by Steven Pagones, a former assistant district attorney from Dutchess County, N.Y., said to be one of four white men who kidnapped and sexually assaulted the then-15-year-old over a four-day period in November 1987.
The court’s ruling is the latest legal development in the case, which Brawley and her attorney, Alton H. Maddox Jr., have been blocked by state officials from bringing to trial for 26 years.