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Part One:
Sex, Lies, & Hubris. We talk about all three with Mark Joseph Stern, Slate’s reporter on law and the courts. Corey Lewandowski, Pres. Trump’s former campaign manager, struck a new low in the category of lying under oath. He astonished Congress and many others by proclaiming that he has no obligation to tell the truth while testifying before Congress.
After firing Obama’s Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Board (CFPB) and instead appointing a Director devoted to killing the Board’s enforcement efforts, Pres. Trump is now asking the Supreme Court to hold that the CFPB’s structure is unconstitutional, that in fact he should not have been allowed to appoint a new Director two years ago. How do you spell hubris?
And what about sex? The NY Times has published new allegations that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted another woman classmate when they were students at Yale. There is also evidence that the White House forbade the FBI to fully investigate either this new charge or the previously-disclosed charge that he waved his penis in the face of Deborah Ramirez.
Part Two:
Politics upside-down. Our guest is “Dr. Politics,” Steffen Schmidt, professor of political science at Iowa State University. He describes an interesting survey that his university conducted. Instead of asking which presidential candidate voters preferred, the survey asked the opposite: which candidate do you most strongly feel should *not* be the Democratic nominee for president.
And the winner? Joe Biden, by a long shot. Both he and Bernie Sanders were on the “no” list for one-third to one-half of all Iowa democrats. The information elicited by this survey may be just as important as voters’ statements about which candidate they *do* prefer. (By the way, Elizabeth Warren is now the #1 preference of Iowa democratic voters, with 25% of the votes.)
Trust-busting, 2020 style. We discuss the calls for breaking up the mega-corporations that dominate the tech industry. We note that it was Teddy Roosevelt — a mainstream Republican, not some socialist Democrats — who argued that powerful corporations were bad for America, bad for our economy, bad for our people. The anti-trust fight that Roosevelt led in the early twentieth century is now being revived and targeted toward tech giants like Amazon which has certainly gained an eyebrow-raising amount of monopoly power, to the detriment of many consumers, small businesses, and working people.
