Month: February 2023

Background Briefing: February 28, 2023

Bombshells in Unsealed Deposition Have Murdoch Revealing Biden’s Ads and Debate Strategy to Trump

We begin with Rupert Murdoch’s testimony in the deposition that was unsealed in the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit seeking $1.6 billion in damages from Fox News and speak with Adele Stan, an independent journalist who is a longtime chronicler of the right wing of U.S. politics. A winner of the Hillman Prize in Opinion & Analysis Journalism, her work has appeared in Mother Jones, The Nation, and The American Prospect as well as on the op-ed pages of The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. We discuss the explosive revelation that Murdoch gave Jared Kushner a preview of Biden’s 2020 campaign ads and debate strategy which has Congressman Ted Lieu suggesting “these actions by Rupert Murdoch seem illegal. At the very least, it would appear to be a campaign contribution of significant value, well over federal campaign limits.”

 

Republicans With Shaky Standing Urge the Supreme Court to Kill Biden’s Student Debt Relief

Then we look into today’s oral arguments before the Supreme Court in Republican efforts to prevent Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan from going forward to give debt relief to 40 million Americans. Joining us is Barmak Nassirian, the Vice President for Higher Education Policy at Veterans Education Success where he develops and executes the organization’s higher education policy priorities. He has worked on the last three congressional reauthorizations of the Higher Education Act, including multiple rounds of negotiated rulemaking with the U.S. Department of Education, and has testified before congressional committees on various higher education topics.

 

The Deeper Structural Failures to Deal With the Coronavirus Pandemic

 Then finally, with renewed tension with China over intelligence reports raising suspicions that a lab accident caused the coronavirus pandemic, we look further into failures to deal with the pandemic due to the decades-long structural decline associated with putting profits ahead of people that gutted U.S. public health. Joining us is Rob Wallace, an evolutionary epidemiologist who has consulted with the Food and Agriculture Organization and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Currently a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota and a member of Pandemic Research for the People, he is author of Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Influenza, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science, Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19 and his latest book, just out, is The Fault in Our SARS: COVID-19 in the Biden Era.