Beyond Politics

Congressman Steve Cohen tells us what's going on inside the right-wing Freedom Caucus-infused Congress, including the dramatic moment that Marjorie Taylor Greene confirmed that she's nuts, what Jim Jordon is doing with his gaslighting investigations, and what does George Santos do with his day?

The military shot down it's fourth object flying over our skies in eight days yesterday.  This raises a ton of questions: what are these things, where do they come from, and why are there so many right now?  Underlying them all is the big one: could it actually be aliens?  That is why we wanted to share our earlier interview with Mick West, who is the preeminent explainer of UFO videos in the world. He's widely cited by journalists, highly respected, and highly respectful. He takes a rational, scientific approach to breaking down incidents like these and providing explanations, and there's a lot we can learn from him about how to approach these questions. 

This is the hidden story of how Russia invaded America -- not with soldiers, but with a mind-bending web of money. They briefly infiltrated and bent the highest levels of our politics, and then seemingly stopped.  Or did they? Dr. Ruth May is a business professor at the University of Dallas, now retired, and an expert on the economies of Russia and Ukraine. She wrote an article for the Dallas Morning News in 2018 called How Putin's Oligarchs Funneled Millions into GOP campaigns, and she joins us to trace the fascinating history, and future, of the great Russian financial invasion that law enforcement and the media seems to have forgotten.

The panel describes what a State of the Union Speech is like behind the scenes, and what do members of Congress and both parties try to achieve on one of the biggest nights in American politics? Also, is the Chinese balloon episode meaningful in some way, or just plain stupid? And Matt admits that he was wrong, and Alicia was right, about one critical issue. 

The past week brought new revelations about Supreme Court conflicts and millions of dollars flowing through right-wing groups and Russian fronts into our politics.  That's why we wanted to bring you this recent interview with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island into what we know -- and dangerously, what we don't know -- about dark money, judicial influence, right-wing activism, and foreign influence including from Russia. 

New prosecutions on the cusp for Donald Trump, but is this Lucy and the football all over again, and will anything actually bring him down.  The answer is...yes, quite possibly, but it won't be a prosecution.  Also, will anything change with police killings in the wake of Tyre Nichols' murder?

Russia has infiltrated American politics, mostly through the Republican Party, largely through Donald Trump.  We know this,  and yet we’ve somehow all been gaslighted, exhausted, or tricked into sending it down the memory hole. Today, a reminder of how the KGB begin recruiting Donald Trump in the early 1980s and about how all of his behavior since confirms that, whether he’s aware of it or not, he is very much an asset of Russia and has created a conduit for Russia to manipulate and control senior Republicans. Our guest is author Greg Olear who writes Prevail on Substack and hosts the Prevail podcast.

Republicans are fighting over what direction they should take, with a big vote coming this week.  But the panel discusses how they are blaming all the wrong things for their problems.  Also, another drip falls in the Biden classified documents story. And the Republican "debt ceiling" crisis gets re-branded as the Republican "stupidity bomb."

The "debt ceiling" is actually a stupidity bomb: a dumb way for politicians to wreck our economy and send us into a recession. Celebrated economist Mark Zandi is often on television and in Congress explaining economics as clearly and directly as he can to decision-makers, and he joins us to explain why the debt ceiling standoff is so perilous, and why the underlying argument is merely a setup for disaster.

There are some suspicious ties (see the 60 second YouTube summary here). Plus, more Biden classified documents emerge, so is there more to this story now? And, Chris Sununu is gearing up for a Presidential run, along with other Republicans.  WHY?  Is it realistic? Does it matter?