President Obama and the Affordable Care Act Saved My Life: How Jeff Jeans’ Question Revealed Why the Republicans Hell-Bent On Repealing Obamacare Are Not Your Friends.  Democratic Perspective’s Mike Cosentino speaks with Jeff Jeans, ex-libertarian, cancer survivor, and public health care advocate, about his experience confronting Paul Ryan at a CNN Town Hall with a question about health care insurance coverage that to this day no one in the Republican Party can honestly answer.

If the Nature Of Truth Is Conditioned By Our Prior Allegiances, What Are the Implications For Our Politics?  Democratic Perspective’s co-hosts Mike Cosentino and Steve Williamson ask Andrea Christelle, one of the founders of SPEX, the Sedona Philosophy Experience, how we should deal with the fact that, in terms of political efficacy, a well-told lie can seem functionally equivalent to the truth.

If the League of Women Voters Is Not a Partisan Organization, Why Does It Oppose So Many of President Trump’s Policy Initiatives? Barbara Litrell, President of the League of Women Voters of Greater Verde Valley, tells Democratic Perspective why the League’s consistently held positions on issues such as health care as a right, environmental sustainability, and equal rights for women, have forced it to lobby actively against a number of the Trump administration’s announced policy proposals, even though the League is, as it always has been, a non-partisan organization.

Never Mind the Tweets, Never Mind the Russian Connection: While Presidential Twitter Tantrums, Ill-Considered Executive Orders, and Russian influence Peddling Dominate the Daily News Cycle, Republican Wrecking Crews Are Quietly Dismantling What Little Remains of Effective National Government.  Democratic Perspective’s co-hosts Mike Cosentino and Steve Williamson are joined by guests David Brushwood and John ODonnell for a discussion of the radical Republican attack now underway in Federal agencies and the Republican-controlled House of Representatives on the public education funding, nutritional programs, financial reforms, and environmental protections a healthy society is so dependent on. While the national media behave like a deer caught in Trump’s headlights, Republicans are busily carrying out a brutal, mean-spirited assault on the needs of the 99% of us who go to work every day and hope for the best.

Trump’s Foreign Entanglements, Russian Edition: Is There a Bottom To These Stories, and If So, How Do We Get To It?  Democratic Perspective takes a critical look at the allegations concerning President Trump and his Russian connections. Who’s telling the stories, where are they sourcing them from, and how believable are they? Given the vested interests involved, and the level of public distrust of media sources in general, and those of our political adversaries in particular, this kind of analysis is difficult, and it invariably involves a level of uncertainty even when we’ve done our best to separate the lies, the spin, and the honest reporting. The thing to remember, though, especially when the muck is flying at its thickest, is that sorting through that muck is the price of an informed citizenry, one we have no choice but to pay if we truly value our democracy.

If Mar-a-Lago Sinks into the Atlantic, Will Donald Trump Concede that Abandoning the Paris Agreement Was a Mistake, Or Will He Blame Obama? Democratic Perspective takes on the latest idiocy from President Petulance. Keeping track of the lies, ignorance, and general misanthropy being Trumpeted from the White House these days may be an exhausting and thankless task, but our Mike Cosentino and Steve Williamson are, as ever, on the job.

Infotainment, Propaganda, and Self-Aggrandizing Media Empires: The Demise of What We Once Thought Of As Objective Journalism, and What It Means For the General Welfare.  Mike Cosentino and Steve Williamson ask Matt Goodwin, Professor of Philosophy at Northern Arizona University, and one of the founders of SPEX, the Sedona Philosophy Experience, for his take on the nature of truth, our journalistic traditions, and what it means for effective democratic governance when they both succumb to the economic uncertainties which threaten traditional media empires. Infotainment, press-release reporting, beat-sweetening, and disinformation campaigns by all sorts of interested parties are now the environment we all have to navigate if we want to know what’s going on outside the limits of our own personal experiences. The forces at work may eventually come to some sort of benign equilibrium, but in the meantime, caveat emptor seems to be the only defense available to us.

Alternative Facts and Philosophy: Sometimes a Lie Is Just a Lie. Democratic Perspective, in an effort to understand the gap between what Donald Trump says, and what we can see with our own eyes, welcomes Andrea Christelle, one of the founders of SPEX, the Sedona Philosophy Experience, to help us sort out the proliferation of modern glosses — alternative facts, fake news, disinformation, and Trump — on the deceptively simple and traditional categories of a) truth, and b) lies. Who is blowing all this smoke, and why? The answer, as we non-Republicans might expect, is complicated.

Sorting Out the Threads in the Middle East: Proxy Wars, Ethnic and Sectarian Alignments, Failed States, Realpolitik, and the Agony of Millions of Refugees.  Mike Cosentino and Steve Williamson welcome  Dr. Paul Lenze, Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Northern Arizona University, back to Democratic Perspective for a discussion of the tangled web of conflicts in the Middle East. Who are the players, what do they all want, and is there any prospect at all for peace and stability in the region?

The AHCA Has Passed the House: The Light At the End Of the Republican Health Care Tunnel Is an Oncoming Train. Democratic Perspective’s Mike Cosentino and Steve Williamson are joined via the magic of telephony by Silent Gary LaMaster for a discussion of the latest abomination from the Republican Congress. After seven years of yapping about the horrors of Obamacare — socialized medicine, death panels, mandates that take away our freedom of choice, etc. — the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives has finally voted to replace it with the so-called American Health Care Act. The AHCA’s main effects: reducing taxes on rich people, and taking away the coverage of an estimated 14 million low-income people who are currently covered under Obamacare. What a surprise! The bill now goes to the Republican-controlled Senate. Stay tuned.