Episodes
Friday Aug 28, 2015
Leid Stories – 08.28.15
Friday Aug 28, 2015
Friday Aug 28, 2015
It’s Your Special Day, “Free Your Mind” Friday!
Celebrate the joy of free thinking on “Free Your Mind Friday,” an open forum for the exchange of information, opinions and ideas. It’s the best in “talk” radio!
Add your intellectual flavor to this delicious brew. Share your views about the news events or issues of the day, or about anything you think is worthy of consideration.
It’s your call—at 888-874-4888.
Friday Aug 28, 2015
Leid Stories – 08.27.15
Friday Aug 28, 2015
Friday Aug 28, 2015
My Cab Ride From Hell: A Political Metaphor
A harrowing cab ride home one rainy night is recalled as a perfect metaphor for where we are as a nation: Relegated to the back seat as mere passengers, we’re in the hands of a government that can’t see where it’s going but won’t take directions.
In the real-life story about the cab ride, Utrice makes an inspired decision and gets home. Politically speaking, she asks, are we as a nation prepared to do the same?
Thursday Aug 27, 2015
Leid Stories – 08.26.15
Thursday Aug 27, 2015
Thursday Aug 27, 2015
Mass Incarceration USA: Ending It, and What Started It
With 2.4 million people in its prisons, jails and detention centers—and an additional 5 million people under state or federal supervision through probation or parole—the United States leads the world in incarceration.
The United States accounts for only 5 percent of the world’s population, but nearly 22 percent of the world’s prison population, says Amnesty International. The nation’s prison population has grown 500 percent in the past 30 years, says The Sentencing Project.
Our guest, Carl Dix, a national spokesperson for the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, has been working to stop mass incarceration since the mid-1990s, and in 2011 played a key role in starting the Stop Mass Incarceration Network. He discusses the nationwide human-rights campaign to end mass incarceration—which, he says, has had devastating impact on communities of color and the poor.
Michelle Alexander, associate professor of law at Ohio State University and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, discusses in a presentation at the University of Tennessee the policies that produced mass incarceration.
Tuesday Aug 25, 2015
Leid Stories – 08.25.15
Tuesday Aug 25, 2015
Tuesday Aug 25, 2015
Israeli President Affirms Zionist ‘Right’ to Build in West Bank
A ‘Fresh Start’ for Ferguson’s Court System, But Is It Justice?
A month after Israeli extremists firebombed a Palestinian home in the West Bank village of Duma, killing a father and his 18-month-old son, President Reuven Rivlin yesterday affirmed to leaders of the settler movement that, contrary to international law, Israel had a “right” to build settlements, as “a basic fact of modern Zionism.”
Mark LeVine, professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of California-Irvine and distinguished visiting professor at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden, addresses Rivlin’s assertion and related issues.
Five months after the U.S. Department of Justice skewered the police department and criminal-justice system in Ferguson, Missouri, for targeting blacks and treating them largely as source of revenue for the city, newly appointed Municipal Court Judge Donald McCullin yesterday announced a series of changes—chief among them dropping all arrest warrants for minor crimes and infractions issued before December 31, 2014.
It’s a good sign, says Leid Stories in a commentary. But is it justice?
Monday Aug 24, 2015
Leid Stories – 08.24.15
Monday Aug 24, 2015
Monday Aug 24, 2015
St. Louis Police Killing of Mansur Ball-Bey: We Reveals New Details
Party Pooper?: Biden’s Possible Run Confirms Hillary Clinton’s Vulnerability
Mansur Ball-Bey, 18, was shot dead by police Aug. 19 during a house raid. Two police officers involved in the shooting say he aimed at them with a gun and they fired in self-defense. Witnesses, however, have said the Ball-Bay was not armed. The killing has reignited tensions locally and nationally about police use of force.
The deck’s getting stacked against Hillary Clinton. A campaign scrambling to hold itself together in the face of self-inflicted political wounds, the upsurge in Bernie Sanders’ popularity, a growing unease about her among highly placed fellow Democrats, and the wait-and-see attitudes of major endorsers is now rattled by the possibility that Vice President Joe Biden will run.
Leid Stories says that whether he runs or not, the mere discussion of a Biden candidacy confirms the Democratic Party’s recognition that Clinton is carrying way more baggage than it can carry.
Monday Aug 24, 2015
Leid Stories – 08.21.15
Monday Aug 24, 2015
Monday Aug 24, 2015
Don’t Keep It All to Yourself! Free Your Mind!
You have a treasure trove of great ideas, incisive opinions and sharp analyses of the issues of the day, but they’re all locked up in your head.
Liberate them! Give them a great place to go!
Leid Stories is a bridge between your brainwork and a community of thinkers who appreciate invigorating discussion and debate.
Monday Aug 24, 2015
Leid Stories – 08.20.15
Monday Aug 24, 2015
Monday Aug 24, 2015
Police Killings: The Problem That Won’t Go Away
Election 2016: Leid Stories Measures the Political Temperature
Leid Stories discusses the fatal shooting yesterday of a black teenager by white police officers in St. Louis, Missouri, which once again has ignited a firestorm over police use of force and the racial dynamic that persists in the policing of communities of color throughout the United States.
Eighteen-year-old Mansur Ball-Bey was shot and killed after fleeing a house where two white police officers were conducting a search, St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson said yesterday. Ball-Bey pointed a gun at them as he fled, Dotson said, of the killing, which prompted local protests that recalled the police killings a year ago of Kajieme Powell in St. Louis and Michael Brown in Ferguson.
A “poll” of Leid Stories listeners registers the political temperature of the 2016 presidential campaign.
Tuesday Aug 18, 2015
Leid Stories – 08.18.15
Tuesday Aug 18, 2015
Tuesday Aug 18, 2015
Israeli American Peace Activist Miko Peled Says Zionism, Like Apartheid, Must Be Dismantled
Israeli American peace activist Miko Peled, a former captain in the Israeli Defense Force whose grandfather, Avraham Katznelson, was one of the founders of the Zionist state, and whose father, Mattityahu Peled, was an army general who became a leading voice for a negotiated peace with the Palestine Liberation Organization, explains why Zionism must be dismantled.
Monday Aug 17, 2015
Leid Stories – 08.17.15
Monday Aug 17, 2015
Monday Aug 17, 2015
Detroit’s Home County Accepts State’s Plan to Avoid Bankruptcy
Horace Julian Bond: Remembering A Stalwart Soldier
Last Thursday (Aug. 13), Wayne County, the home county of the City of Detroit, avoided declaring bankruptcy. But just like once-vibrant Motor City, the county’s fiscal future is far from sound or settled.
Eight months after a federal judge approved a contentious, state-imposed bankruptcy plan to discharge an estimated $20 billion in debt, the Wayne County Commission voted 14-1 last Thursday to accept a “consent agreement” with the state, giving it direct authority to call the shots on drastic cuts the county will make to fund an annual $52-million debt.
Tom Barrow, an expert in municipal finance, former chairman of Michigan’s Board of Accountancy, and president of Citizens for Detroit’s Future, dissects the rippling effect of Detroit’s bankruptcy.
Julian Bond, a stalwart soldier in the continuing struggle for freedom and equality in the United States, died in Fort Walton Beach, Florida on Aug. 15. He was 75 years old.
In a speech Bond gave at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Bond discusses what creates change: “Ordinary women and men proving they can perform extraordinary tasks in pursuit of freedom.”
Friday Aug 14, 2015
Leid Stories – 08.14.15
Friday Aug 14, 2015
Friday Aug 14, 2015
It’s “Free Your Mind Friday,” Radio’s Best Open Forum!
Join the conversation, or start one of your own, on “Free Your Mind Friday,” radio’s best open forum. It’s where great minds gather to trade information, opinions and ideas.