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Episode 54: Disaster Prone: What you get may depend more on where you live than what you lost Oct 03, 2014

Show notes

This week on the DecodeDC podcast we’re talking to Scripps national investigative reporter Lee Bowman about his story on the disaster behind federal disaster aid.
When your house or town gets destroyed by a hurricane or a tornado, you may expect the federal government to step in and help. But whether you get money from the feds may depend more on where you live than on the extent of the damage.
The original idea behind federal disaster aid was to help only when the damage and scope of an event exceeded state and local resources. Now we have something called “disaster inflation” – many smaller storms that used to be handled by state funds are getting the national disaster label and the dollars that come with it.
The boom in federal disaster declarations by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama is stretching resources at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and costing taxpayers billions. These two presidents are responsible for 38 percent of all disasters declared since the federal aid programs began in 1953 – and it’s not because the weather is getting that much worse.
FEMA has come under fire for distributing aid disproportionately, as some see it, often disqualifying serious emergencies in large states while giving cash to more routine events in smaller states. And with so many more national disaster declarations – and with the agency stretched thin – sometimes FEMA spends more to run an operation then delivering aid for the disaster.
But politicians love to say yes when it comes to spending money to help people at home. So don’t expect any campaign slogans calling for less federal disaster aid or any changes in how the money gets distributed.

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Episode 53: Exit Interview: Rep. Henry Waxman reflects on 40 years in Congress Sep 25, 2014

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On April 14, 1994, the top executives of America’s seven largest tobacco companies filed into the hearing room before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health and the Environment. Before speaking, the CEOs took an oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth – as most witnesses before Congress do. Each man then proceeded to testify that cigarettes and nicotine are not addictive. It was a moment that would change America’s relationship with tobacco.
On March 17, 2005, six of the most important Major League Baseball players at the time sat side-by-side before the House Government Reform Committee: Alex Rodriguez, Jose Canseco, Curt Schilling, Rafael Palmeiro, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. With fans, kids, and reporters watching, most of the players refused to admit they were aware of the illegal use of steroids in baseball, or downplayed the breadth of the problem, until the question was posed to Jose Canseco. He told the assembled congressmen that a “large number of players” were using drugs, and that the trainers, managers and even team owners knew about it. It was a moment that would turn around Major League Baseball’s response to rampant drug use.
The work of one individual congressman was critical to both of these historic hearings: Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. In both cases it was Waxman’s vision of bringing together the most important people at a sweet-spot in history that led to major changes in American culture.
After a four-decade career in Congress, Waxman announced this year that this term would be his last. As part of DecodeDC’s “Exit Interviews” series, podcast host Andrea Seabrook talks to Waxman about his career – and about mastering the art of the congressional hearing.

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Episode 52: The Vicar of Baghdad Sep 19, 2014

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He is called the Vicar of Baghdad, though his life couldn’t be more different from the average English vicar.
The Reverend Canon Andrew White leads St. George’s Church, the last Anglican church in Iraq. He also runs a clinic that sees thousands of patients a month, and a food program that feeds hundreds every week – regardless of their beliefs or religious affiliation.
But though this work is much admired, it is not what has made Rev. White famous. As president of the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East, White has forged personal relationships with the heads of opposing Muslim groups in Iraq. He is one of the precious few people in the world who has the trust of both Sunni and Shia leaders.
Because of this, and because of the gritty humanitarian aid he extends to Iraqis, White says he is a danger to terrorists, especially ISIS, the brutal group ruling over large swaths of Iraq and Syria.
“I do not allow them to maintain their own extremist positions, and I do not allow them to say, ‘look, we have got to fight against the other’,” White says.
In this week’s DecodeDC podcast, host Andrea Seabrook sits down with Rev. White in the Library of Congress. He describes the danger and difficulty of continuing his work in Baghdad, and what keeps him going. White says he is driven to go deeper into the conflict, and tells Seabrook:
“You do that by listening to those who might be against you. Who is my enemy? It is the person whose story I haven’t heard. And so you listen to their story, you get to know who they are, and you befriend them. You eat with them, you become their neighbor. And then you can bring about change.”

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Episode 51: Does the United States have a responsibility to act against ISIS? Sep 12, 2014

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On this week's DecodeDC podcast, host Andrea Seabrook talks to three experts about a deceptively simple question: What responsibility does the U.S. have, if any, to respond to ISIS?
Many Americans have been surprised in recent weeks by the brutal takeover of large regions of Iraq and Syria by the fundamentalist regime as it threatens men, women and children who don’t comply with its violent form of strict Sharia law with the most atrocious consequences -- massacres, beheadings and crucifixions.
Earlier this week, President Barack Obama outlined his plan for military action against the group and announced the country would be working with a coalition of partners to degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIS.
The experts we spoke with -- Bruce Hoffman, the director of Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies; Justin Logan, the head of Foreign Policy Studies at the libertarian think tank The Cato Institute; and Jim Wallis, a public theologian and activist -- disagree on what action the U.S. should take against ISIS.
But they do not differ on these two facts: Americans are exhausted and war-weary. And they are desperate to return to a world where terrible threats don’t interrupt their lives with violent images.
By all accounts, this brutal form of Islamic fundamentalism and the terrorists who propagate it are not fading. The question is what could -- or should -- the United States do about it.

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Episode 50: The Political Ad That Changed Everything Sep 05, 2014

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It aired only once. A one-minute spot during “The NBC Monday Night Movie.” But it changed every political ad that came after -- as well as the entire field of advertising.
The Daisy ad aired during the height of Lyndon B. Johnson’s re-election campaign, on the night of Sept. 7, 1964.
Republican Barry Goldwater, LBJ’s challenger, had said in speeches and interviews that he would be willing to use nuclear weapons to better America’s position in the Vietnam war.
The ad was the Johnson campaign’s attempt at exploiting Goldwater’s aggressive military stance. And it worked.
Johnson would go on to win re-election by a landslide.
The ad itself has a long-lasting legacy as well. Its mastermind was a man named Tony Schwartz, a young writer at a new kind of ad agency (one that would later be the inspiration for the AMC hit TV show, "Mad Men").
Rather than focusing on a candidate’s policy statements or plans for the future, as almost every political ad before it had done, Schwartz honed in on the viewers and their emotions. His aim was to create ads that evoked feelings the audience might already have, to “strike the responsive chord”, as he called it.
On this week’s podcast, host Andrea Seabrook talks to Joe Slade White, now one of the most sought after political consultants in American politics, and David Schwartz, chief curator of the Museum of the Moving Image in New York.
Their conversations range from the history and importance of the Daisy ad to the psychology that underlies it. It is critical background for the educated voter, especially in these times of political ads saturating the airwaves.
You can view political ads through U.S .history at The Museum of the Moving Image’s archive of political ads, The Living Room Candidate.

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Episode 49: Why more Americans are carrying guns in more places than ever before Aug 28, 2014

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Americans can carry more guns in more places than ever before. Across the country, grassroots movements in states and on college campuses are demanding that gun regulations be relaxed -- and lawmakers are meeting those demands.
This is one, major trend reported by News21, an eight-month project in investigative reporting that brought together top journalism students to study one issue: Guns in America.
Here at DecodeDC we’re featuring many of the News21 stories, from the prevalence of women carrying guns to the refusal by some local authorities to enforce gun control laws. And last week’s DecodeDC podcast focused on the evolution of the political debate surrounding guns, and a smaller microcosm of that debate: Colorado.
This week, host Andrea Seabrook talks to News21 reporters Kate Murphy and Wade Millward about the sweeping trend they found through their reporting: Americans are reacting to continuing gun violence in a new way. Whereas a few decades ago, a shooting might cause citizens to demand tighter gun control, today they demand more leeway to defend themselves.

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Episode 48: The Changing Front Lines in the Battle Over Guns Aug 22, 2014

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It has been twenty years since Congress passed federal gun control legislation. That’s two decades in which America has seen some of the most horrific massacres in our nation’s history.
But despite DC's gridlock on the issue, America’s debate over gun rights and gun regulations has gained energy. Just not in Washington.
That’s just one conclusion of an in-depth, eight-month reporting project by this year’s News21 team. Student journalists tackled the issue of guns in America, turning out dozens of stories from the new, changing front lines of the debate.
We here at DecodeDC have featured several of their stories, from funding of gun rights groups to the problems with our national background check system and state efforts to nullify federal gun laws.
Today, we’re featuring them on the podcast. Host Andrea Seabrook talks to News21 reporters Justine McDaniel Jacy Marmaduke, getting a broad overview of the current state of the gun debate in America, and then looking at a single state that is both a microcosm of the national debate, and a crucible for activists’ tactics.

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Episode 47: Meet the Marketer of Ideas, Arthur Brooks Aug 14, 2014

Show notes

This week’s podcast is a conversation with Arthur Brooks, who runs the American Enterprise Institute, a big conservative think tank in Washington and our chief Washington correspondent Dick meyer. It didn’t turn out to be the podcast we expected.
Brooks is a very smart, very passionate, very articulate guy. He always has a take on things that is fresh so we wanted to hear his thoughts on the world of Washington think tanks. We in the news business use the phrase “think tank” all the time but we rarely look inside them as Washington players worthy of examination. We call their experts for quotes, wisdom on deadline and TV bookings.
But now a couple of the big think tanks – notably the Heritage Foundation on the right and the Center for American Progress on the left – have set-up separate organizations to do lobbying, electioneering and advocacy.
Think tanks, under the tax laws, are research and scholarly organizations that don’t get involved explicitly in elections and lobbying so this new development that has drawn a lot of criticism. Generally, many believe the policy parlors have gotten just as polarized as the rest of political Washington.
We asked Brooks if he thought the world of think tanks and policy analysis has gotten more partisan and politicized in recent years, less authoritative and independent. His answer surprised us.
Sure, Brooks agreed, some of the players have become pretty hard-core politically. So what? Brooks’ take is that more is better -- more loud, intense, passionate political voices are good. It’s okay if the tenor of Washington is a little more obnoxious or fractious. We’re not so fragile that we can’t take it.
In a nutshell, his argument is similar to those who think the Internet is going to facilitate real, positive change in the world – eventually.
Yes, it might appear that the web has created a lot of trivia, time wasting, irritating social media and obnoxious behavior. It has also undermined the business models of important areas of the economy – like news, music and books.
But it has also connected virtually all the information in the world; it gives people access to the public domain without a printing press or TV station. Confusing, revolutionary, unpredictable: the Web Utopians think it will lead to great things.
Brooks doesn’t deny that politics has become more polarized, partisan and boorish. But he seems to view it as a stage – and a small price to pay for a burgeoning of active and ornery citizenship and engagement.

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Episode 46: A "Border Crisis" Far from the Border Aug 08, 2014

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Tens of thousands of children have crossed into the United States this year, fleeing desperate conditions in Central America. The news media have dubbed it a “border crisis,” though none of these kids stays at the border for very long. And in Washington, Congressional leaders seem more focused on who to blame rather than what to do about it.
In this week's podcast, host Andrea Seabrook goes straight to the front lines of the crisis. No, not the border but an elementary school just a few miles from the U.S. Capitol.
Susan Holiday, the principal at Gladys Noon Spellman Elementary School, in Cheverly, Maryland doesn’t have the luxury of debating the politics of immigration, or playing the blame-game. With a third of her students unable to speak or read English, she and her staff focus on the practicalities: teaching young immigrants in a new language, a new school, and a new home.
"On their enrollment it will say you know, 'Date first entered the United states'," says Holiday. "Let's just say their first day of school is August 25, it might say August 20. That means they just got here."
Students like this have very different needs from American kids returning to school, she says. Some have just made an arduous trek through the desert, some without an adult. Many new immigrant students at Spellman school don't read or write in their native language, much less in English. And so Holiday and her staff reorganize classes, pair new students with bilingual ones, and make any accommodation they can to get those kids in class.
In the end, it doesn't matter what the politics are, and it's clear that this is much more than a "border crisis." The way Susan Holiday sees it, it's a practical problem. There's work to do. Now do it.

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Episode 45: How one bill passed in the aftermath of 9/11 is still shaping U.S. modern warfare Aug 01, 2014

Show notes

It was three days after the attacks —September 14th, 2001 -- that Congress gathered in Washington to respond to the vicious blow America had sustained. Every member of the House and Senate, save one, voted to give President George W. Bush the authority to capture or kill those responsible. The bill they passed that day is called the AUMF -- The Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Terrorists.
Many predictions were made that day, of the coming war, the stamina and depth of the commitment it would require of American citizens. But what no one knew, what no one could know, is how the AUMF would anchor the country to that moment, and drag it back there again and again during the longest war in the nation's history.
On this week's podcast, DecodeDC host Andrea Seabrook tells the story of how it happened, and what many think should come next.

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