Stay ConnectedAn inside-the-beltway show that’s truly for beltway outsiders. Each week the HuffPost Politics team offers an entertaining alternative to the Sunday shows you’ve stopped watching. Along with their outside the beltway guests, join Arthur Delaney and Elise Foley as they analyze the news of the week and explain why it should matter to you.
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So, that happened. This week, Donald Trump fired James Comey. And that's been the implacable news event of the week, so much so that we are just going to surrender to it entirely. This single decision is the apotheosis of Trump. It has everything: a stumbled over decision that landed with a kersplat on the news-cycle, constantly shifting rationales that change by the hour, massive leaks from the White House, the usual concerns over temperament, and the unalterable impression that the White House is either strategically engineering a cover-up, or too impulsive to govern in a sane way. Or both! We even have White House press secretary Sean Spicer hiding among the bushes on the White House grounds. It's well and truly bonkers.We'll try to piece through the most troubling aspects of this decision, beginning with the implausible reason we've been told guided Trump's decision. Former Department of Justice spokesman joins our own Sam Stein, to offer an insider perspective on the matter. And we'll deal with the...
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So, that happened. This week, the House of Representatives voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with a bucket of garbage, placing the lives of some 24 million people at risk. Quite a spectacle really. We'll have fifteen minutes of flabbergasted gasping for you to enjoy.Meanwhile, for some reason we'll also talk about other things. For example, just how populist is the Trump White House going to get? The new head of the SEC will be Goldman Sachs' bailout lawyer, Jay Clayton, so it's sure not looking good for that whole "drain the swamp" project. But maybe we're wrong. Joining us to figure this out is our pal Alexis Goldstein from Americans for Financial Reform.Finally, Donald Trump is hoping to appoint Tennessee State Senator Mark Green to the position of Secretary of the Army. This is his second attempt to place someone in that job, and based upon Green's litany of bizarre statements and strange positions, there is a not insignificant chance that he'll need a third. With that in mind,...
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So, that happened. This week, we've reached the end of Trump's first 100 days. How will it be remembered? In many ways, it's been like watching someone's body reject an organ transplant. Somehow, Trump has managed to hit the century mark at the threshold of a government shutdown fight with his own party. Nevertheless, some things never change, and 100 days into the Trump presidency we can report with confidence that everything remains really, really great for people who are really, really rich.Meanwhile, we are taking a look in at the mayoral race in Omaha, which would normally be a sleepy race focused mainly on things like potholes. But the Democratic nominee, Heath Mello, has become one of those totemic candidates in 2017 -- a test of post-2016 Democratic Party strength. And so Democrats made a big investment in raising his profile, only to discover that he was not with them on a key issue: reproductive rights.Finally, our guest today is Jonathan Taplin, a filmmaker and author who used to be a tour...
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So, that happened. This week, President Donald Trump issued another one of his patented executive orders, this time endeavoring to bring jobs back to America through a "Buy American, Hire American" policy. Trump immediately went back out on the campaign trail to signal that great changes were now afoot in the land, but are they really? We've dug down into the details and discovered that it's a blend of activity masquerading as achievement. And guess what: it's a trend.Meanwhile, the conservative media universe played a big role in boosting Trump to the White House in 2016. But in 2017, there's a growing sense that the favor will not be returned in kind. This week, Fox News' top talent Bill O'Reilly was pushed out of a perch that was once pretty secure, owing to a litany of past sexual harrassment transgressions that finally came home to roost. Meanwhile, in Texas, Trump enthusiast Alex Jones is in the middle of a custody battle with his ex-wife, and Jones' legal counsel has asserted an interesting...
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So, THAT happened! Remember all that stuff about draining the swamp and taking down the Washington establishment? Well, President Trump talked to some guys from Goldman Sachs and has decided to be Jeb Bush instead. HuffPost reporter S.V. Date joins us to discuss the latest contours and convulsions of the Trump presidency.But some things never change, including The Democratic Party, which just blew a chance to pick up a House seat in deep-red Kansas. Party leaders -- they actually said this and appear to believe it -- they told reporters they thought the best way to win the election ... would be to not try to win. Amanda Terkel helps us break down why Democrats are still bad at politics.Speaking of bad, for-profit colleges exploit people desperate for higher education thanks partly to political rhetoric about how college is the only way to have a good life. We interviewed Virginia Commonwealth University Professor Tressie McMillan Cottom about her new book on the great college swindling of America's...
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So, that happened. This week, we are joined by the host of MSNBC's "All In With Chris Hayes," who in case you haven't figured it out is named Chris Hayes. We'll be talking about his new book "A Colony In A Nation," which documents how white fear has led to America's frustratingly unjust two-tiered justice system -- where some get to live peacefully as citizens, and others get treated by the state as if they were under the bootheel of an occupying force.Meanwhile, have you been wondering how the next big world war would start? Well, wonder no more! It could all begin over the Baltic Sea, with a confrontation between an American spy plane and a Russian fighter jet, pushing the boundary of confrontation. But this isn't just some fantasy out of "Top Gun." The real story here is that all of the traditional mechanisms by which we've de-escalated conflict so many times in the past have deteriorated, and leaders on both sides who seem ill-equipped to lead the way back. The Huffington Post's David Wood joins us...
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So, that happened. This week, Washington lawmakers began crawling out from under the wreckage of the failed American Health Care Act, better known as the bill that finally emerged from the GOP's seven-year effort to repeal and replace Obamacare. The bill largely foundered because of deep divides within the House Republican caucus, with House Speaker Paul Ryan and establishment leaders on one side, and the insurgent House Freedom Caucus on the other. But now, they have a common enemy at least, in the form of President Donald Trump -- who has spent the last week lashing out at both sides, raising an obvious question, where does everybody go from here?Meanwhile, this week the president unveiled his Executive Order on Promoting Energy Independence and Economic Growth, a measure that would roll back steps taken by his predecessor to reduce carbon emissions and keep America on track to hit its climate change targets. Trump has framed this endeavor as one that would end what he calls the "War on Coal," and...
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So, that happened. This week, Neil Gorsuch made his confirmation hearing debut as Donald Trump's prospective Supreme Court nominee. And he came to DC with a long and concerning history of putting his finger on the scales of justice in favor of entrenched monopolies of money and power. What's really at stake here, is your money, and we're joined by law professor Zephyr Teachout, to explain what you stand to lose if Gorsuch is confirmed.Meanwhile, Donald Trump has promised to boost the military budget, bringing a considerable amount of your tax dollars into a Pentagon that already hardly wants for cash. But with all this money sluicing through the system, it might surprise you to learn how little of it makes it down to the grunts who do all the hard work, and whose lives are much more frequently on the line than Washington's dizzying array of defense contractors. We'll take a look at the working class military, with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Wood.Finally, we have a real cops and robbers...
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So, that happened. This week, President Donald Trump moved forward on a number of policy fronts. He also moved backward on a number of policy fronts. Very typical week, to be honest. But we now have the first Trump budget, and as you might expect, it really does a number on several high profile domestic policy projects. We'll lay out where negotiations with Congress are likely to begin. We'll also bring you up to speed with the Congressional Budget Office's evaluation of Trumpcare (it wasn't good) and the how the president's second attempt at a Muslim travel ban became another hilarious self-own.Meanwhile, our guest today is Ganesh Sitaraman, an associate professor of law at Vanderbilt University, who's written a new book titled "The Crisis Of The Middle-Class Constitution." In it, he goes back to our nation's founding, uncovers our founders' belief in the necessity of a strong middle class. That's a belief that persisted for much of our history. But in recent decades, the vitality of the middle-class...
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So, that happened. This week, House Speaker Paul Ryan finally released the Republican alternative to Obamacare plan from the sanctum sanctorum in which he'd been keeping hidden, and as soon as it was seen by the light of day it became something everybody from across the political spectrum instantly hated. Still, Ryan say it's the plan he's been dreaming about. What does this plan do, and how will he get it passed? We'll try to figure it out.Meanwhile, we are less than a week away from the implementation of the second version of President Trump's executive order banning Muslim travel into the United States. This time out, the White House believes they've got something that will survive legal scrutiny. Whether the tweaks they've made will be sufficient is unknown. What may be more important, is how these orders continue to reveal this White House's ideological beliefs where the Muslim world is concerned.Finally, we really can't let this week pass without mentioning some more of Donald Trump's lonely...
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