How Will the Bombshell Pay to Play Corruption Report on Senator Susan Collins Impact the Maine Senate Race?
We begin with the bombshell report from ProPublica which details how Maine’s US Senator Susan Collins was at the center of what the FBI called a “sprawling pay-to-play operation” involving a Hawaii-based defense contractor funneling campaign cash in exchange for lucrative federal contracts. Joining us to discuss how this breaking scandal will impact a key senate race is Amy Fried, a Professor Emerita and former Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Maine. She is the co-editor of More Than Blue, More Than Yankee: Complexity and Change in New England Politics and author of Pathways to Polling: Crisis, Cooperation, and the Making of Public Opinion Professions and At War with Government: How Conservatives Weaponized Distrust from Goldwater to Trump. She writes the Substack Political Sightlines.
A Report on Today’s UN General Assembly Speeches With Trump Threatening to “Annihilate” Iran
Then we go to the UN General Assembly meeting today which President Trump addressed, threatening to “annihilate” Iran, and speak with Dr. Nancy Okail, President & CEO of the Center for International Policy. A scholar and advocate of human rights, justice, peace and equity, she has over 20 years of experience working on these issues across the Middle East and North Africa region, as well as globally, and she provides policy recommendations to senior government officials in the U.S. and Europe.
How Trump’s Mentor Roy Cohn Brought the GOP Back From a Political Wilderness and Shrunk the Democratic Left For Decades
Then finally we speak with Kai Bird about his new book on Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn, American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump and discuss how important the Red Scare was to the Republican Party which brought them back from a political wilderness into control of the House, Senate and presidency in 1952. By hoisting the lie that anyone who is a progressive on domestic issues is aiding and abetting the Soviet enemy, the GOP shrunk the Democratic majority and put them on the defensive to distance themselves from anything resembling socialism.
