Dr. Bob goes solo as his co-host is unavailable this week, and plays the three longest rock songs he could find - Alice's Restaurant, In-a-gadda-da-vida and Thick as a Brick.
Listen live at 11pm Friday, January 31 streaming at wgrn.org or on the radio at 91.9FM
and
Monday at 2pm streaming February 3 at wcrsfm.org or on the radio at 92.7 or 98.3FM
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Before I start I want to express sympathy for the people who have died in a plane crash in Washington, and I want to condemn Trump’s disgusting proposal to kidnap people and lock them up in Guantanamo.
I’m very happy to be in Cuba. I feel closer to Cuba than I do to people in the United States with red hats reading MAGA. Cuba is, in fact, closer to the continental United States than is Hawaii or Alaska or any of the U.S. colonies in the Pacific or about 916 of the United States’ 917 foreign military bases. The people of the U.S. and Cuba have managed, against the odds, to share a great deal of culture and good will, poetry, music, food, and drink. But we sure are divided by governments.
I just searched the internet in the United States for the words “free Cuba” and discovered that it means the overthrow of the Cuban government. I tried searching for “Cuba libre” and learned that it means a drink. But what if I want to search for “a Cuba free of hostile actions by the U.S. government”? The internet is of no help.
Even those of us who have long emphasized the importance of the Palestinian people’s voice, experience, and collective action in Palestinian history must have been shocked by the cultural revolution resulting from the Israeli war on Gaza.
By cultural revolution, I mean the defiant and rebellious narrative evolving in Gaza, where people see themselves as active participants in the popular resistance, not just mere victims of the Israeli war machine.
President Trump made illegal immigration a major issue during during his campaign in 2024. But is it really as bad as he claims? He acted as though the INS, ICE, and the border patrol weren't doing their jobs, but is that really true?
The facts are that there are lower crime rates among the immigrant population than among Americans as a whole. The facts are that more people were deported under Biden than during Trump's first term. The president often uses hate, fear, and outright racism to promote his false claims. He said these statements to energize his far right base to get elected and his lies apparently worked.
Many immigrants have legitimate reasons for fleeing for their home countries. Most of them are not drug mules, rapists, or murderers as the president falsely claims. Many of them don't even come because of employment opportunities, although many of them do menial work that no American would want to do.
After Wednesday night’s devastating airplane crash, President Trump opened his White House Press Briefing by turning straight to DEI as the cause of the collision and directing each of his secretaries to come up and also blame programs focused on increasing diversity in the workplace. Trump’s instinct to instantly turn the biggest aviation disaster in two decades into a political rally is the new standard and a clear example of how his second administration will continue to pursue these kinds of disasters.
Trump’s quick jump to blame DEI efforts was not just bad because he has turned a national incident into a political talking point, but also because he uses DEI as a disguise to attack minority groups in an official role as president. In the White House press conference, he singled out Pete Buttigieg, the nation’s first gay department head, and his “diversity” as the reason that this crash happened. Following his criticism of Buttigieg, Trump then listed out groups of people who he believed had been hired under previous programs that corrupted the intellectual integrity of the department, including “dwarves” and “people with severe mental disabilities.”