Living in the USA

The legendary journalist Howell Raines reports from Alabama on the continuing Republican support for Roy Moore, the Senate candidate accused of molesting a 14-year-old and sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl. Meanwhile, his Democratic opponent, the heroic civil-rights attorney Doug Jones, is running “the most vigorous Democratic campaign that’s been waged in Alabama in at least 30 years.”
Also, the president and the bomb: We’re hoping the generals keep Trump from doing anything crazy, like starting a nuclear war with North Korea—but the system is set up to give the president control over nuclear weapons, rather than the military. Adam Shatz explains–he wrote about Trump and the bomb for the London Review of Books.
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Trump Year One: The Resistance and the ACLU.  David Cole reports–he’s the ACLU’s National Legal Director, and he discusses voting rights, the travel ban, and the essential role played by citizen activism.
Also: Our Washington Report with Harold Meyerson, executive editor of The American Prospect: the House passes the GOP tax bill, and Al Franken apologizes for unwanted sexual acts.
Plus: historian Steve Ross talks about his new book, ‘Hitler in L.A.: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots against Hollywood and America.’
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The Democratic triumph in Tuesday’s Virginia election and its implications for 2018–Harold Meyerson comments, also: what the Democrats should do on tax policy.
Plus: Katha Pollitt on anger management, one year after Trump was elected;
And: New York City–it’s Trump’s home, and it’s also the antithesis of Trump. Comment from Mike Wallace–he won the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1999 for “Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898” and has authored a follow up, it’s called “Greater Gotham: A History of NYC 1898-1919”.
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11/9/2017

Amy Wilentz joins us live in-studio to talk about the Trump family troubles around the indictments: will Paul Manafort flip and testify not only against Donald Trump, but also against Don Jr. and Jared?
Plus, John Nichols talks about what’s in the House tax bill:  It’s not good.
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Ai Weiwei, the most famous political artist in the world, talks about his new documentary on global refugee crisis. It’s called “Human Flow” –it opens in LA on Friday Oct 20.
Plus: Amy Wilentz on ‘The Children’s Hour’: Ivanka, Jared, and Don Jr. and their history of legal problems.
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Is Trump Crazy? 27 Psychiatrists speak in “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” edited  by Bandy Lee, MD — Amy Wilentz comments, and asks the question, do psychiatrists have a “duty to warn”?
Plus: Trump and the NRA after the Las Vegas shootings: George Zornick comments.
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Sasha Abramsky talks about Trump and the triumph of fear — his new book is “Jumping at Shadows: The Triumph of Fear and the End of the American Dream.”
Also: Pundits say the three former generals on Trump’s staff are “the adults in the room” who will block him from doing his worst. John Nichols isn’t so sure about that — the generals are featured in his book “Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse.”
And, for something completely different: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. One of the darkest days at the end of what we call “the sixties” came on Sept. 9, 1971, after 1,300 prisoners at the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York rebelled — to protest years of mistreatment. The true story of what happened at Attica was covered up by officials for decades. but now, 47 years later, we finally know the true story, thanks to Heather Ann Thompson.
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Sarah Leonard of The Nation says Hillary’s campaign memoir “What Happened” has its enjoyable parts, but fails to recognize the populist forces that explain what happened.
plus Bob Dreyfuss on the Robert Mueller’s coming indictment of Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort —
and Todd Gitlin replies to critics of Ken Burns’s Vietnam series on PBS — it’s a powerful portrayal of the reasons the war was a disaster, he argues.
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Hillary’s book about what happened in her loss to Donald Trump – called ‘What Happened” — doesn’t really explain what happened, says D.D. Guttenplan of The Nation, and is significant mostly for what it says about her role in setting the agenda for the future of the Democratic Party.
Plus: the horrible Betsy DeVos – billionaire opponent of public schools, and now Trump’s Secretary of Education: David Dayen comments on her work on behalf of the student loan “servicing” industry, and for-profit colleges.
Also: the Republicans’ last and final attempt to repeal Obamacare is underway; Harold Meyerson reports–along with news about the California legislature declaring the entire state a sanctuary for undocumented people.
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