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Part One:
We speak with Daniel Cusick, a reporter covering climate adaptation for Climatewire and at E&E. He discusses a small community in a rural Louisiana floodplain, where impoverished sharecroppers have experienced 17 floods in 17 years. They have no option to move because their home values have fallen essentially to zero and they have no money to purchase new homes elsewhere. For years, FEMA has refused to insure them because of their history of flooding damage.
At long last, the State of Louisana, working with HUD, FEMA and private parties, has developed a combination of loans (forgiveable in 5 years) and grants to enable these 40 families to move to new homes that won’t be chronically flooded. Yes, the government sometimes rises to the occasion and provides real help to ordinary, needy people.
Part Two:
We check in again with “Dr. Politics,” Steffen Schmidt, professor of political science at Iowa State University. We discuss Robert Mueller’s public statement yesterday, and note his emphatic findings that a foreign country, Russia, interfered with our presidential election in 2016 and Mueller’s deep concerns that the Trump administration is not taking sufficient action (if any) to prevent similar interference in our future elections.
We note that Mueller made it clear that his investigation “does not exonerate Donald Trump” — as the president has falsely claimed. “Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards,” Mueller’s team found itself “*unable* to reach [the] judgment” that Trump did *not* obstruct justice. If his team were able to exonerate Trump, “we would so state.”
We also analyzed the increasing difficulty that voters have in evaluating presidential candidates and deciding for whom they will vote. Fake news, misrepresentations and propaganda are rampant and very hard for voters to detect. Only a few voters actually get a chance to see candidates in person, to ask them questions and assess their answers. How, then, can voters evaluate a candidate’s character or honesty, much less parse the specifics of a candidate’s policy proposals? One answer is that the media could cover entire conversations and not merely the most sensational sound-bite. Alternatively, candidate debates could include knowledgeable questions that probe (from all points of view) a particular candidate’s scripted general policies, the way legal trials allow cross-examination to probe beneath the surface and claims of any narrative.
