Midday

It has been a week in which the Asian American community has been in the news for reasons both triumphant and sorrowful. Sunisa Lee, the 18 year old Hmong-American gymnast, won an Olympic gold medal yesterday in Tokyo. On Tuesday, the man who murdered eight people in metro-Atlanta spas was sentenced to four life terms in prison in four of those murders. Seven of his victims were women of Asian descent.

Today on Midday, conversations about the continuing problem of anti-Asian racism. As of May, the group Stop Asian American Pacific Islander Hate had reported 6,600 incidents of anti-Asian racist acts in the last year, several of which have been captured on horrifying videos.

Anti-Asian incidents have spiked during the pandemic, with prominent political leaders and media personalities disparaging China in particular as a malicious actor in the pandemic.

According to a Gallup Poll released yesterday, just 46% of Americans are satisfied with the way Asian people are treated, a 14% drop from last year. Before 2016, Gallup found more than seven in 10 Americans were satisfied with the way society treated Asian people.

Tom's first guests today are two artists who are co-founders and co-executive directors of the Baltimore Asian Pasifika Arts Collective (APAC), a nonprofit organization that uses art to advocate for representation of Asian Americans and Pacific Indigenous Americans and to build cross-community relationships.

Catrece Ann Tipon is a photographer and choreographer who is also a nurse.

Cori Dioquino is an actress and producer, the owner of the Dioquino Acting Studio here in Baltimore, and a force behind the brand campaign, Unapologetically Asian.

Then, Tom speaks with Dr. Charissa Cheah. She’s a developmental psychologist who studies immigrant families and their experience of discrimination and identity. Dr. Cheah is a professor of Psychology and an affiliate faculty member in the Asian Studies Department at the University of MD Baltimore County. She’s also the Director of the Culture, Child and Adolescent Development Lab at UMBC.

In November of last year, Dr. Cheah and several colleagues published an article in the Journal of Pediatrics about anti-Chinese racism experienced by Chinese American families since the advent of the Coronavirus. That research continues.

Dr. Charissa Cheah joins us on Zoom from her home in Ellicott City.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Donald Trump continues to cling to the fabrication that he won the 2020 election, and his embrace of this pernicious and outrageous lie has cost him nothing. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R, Calif.), thirsty to regain power, is shunning Liz Cheney (R, Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R, Ill.) as “Pelosi Republicans,” a truly bizarre bit of oxymoronic branding by a Trump sycophant who wants Nancy Pelosi’s job. McCarthy has completely retreated from his original position faulting Trump for not acting more swiftly to quell the insurrection at the US Capitol in January. But Trump’s behavior is as consistent and predictable as it is disgusting.

As Michael C. Bender reports in his new book, "Frankly, We Did Win This Election": The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, Trump went into election day being told by his staff that he would win, and he has not given up that fantasy since. He has, as some are wont to say, “doubled down” on his fictional claim, and he has remained oblivious to the harm his claim is causing to the very foundations of our democracy.

Bender’s book is a page-turner best-seller that chronicles Trump’s losing effort in the 2020 campaign. Mr. Trump spent twice as much in 2020 than he did in his 2016 election effort, and he garnered 10 million more votes the second time around, more votes than any other candidate in history, except one: Joe Biden, who won the election by more than 7 million votes, and a solid majority in the electoral college.

Michael Bender is the award-winning senior White House reporter for the Wall Street Journal. He has covered the former president since the 2016 election, and he is with us for the hour today to talk about his new book. Michael Bender joins us on our digital line from Washington, D.C..

Mr. Bender will be reading from and discussing his book with his Wall Street Journal colleague Julie Bykowicz tonight (July 29) starting at 6pm on the Back Patio at The Ivy Bookshop, located at 5928 Falls Rd., Baltimore, MD 21209. For more information and to register for the free, one-night event, click here.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Yesterday, during nearly three and a half hours of raw, emotional, and often irate testimony, four police officers who were on the front lines of the January 6th battle with pro-Trump rioters at the US Capitol gave the House Select Committee investigating the insurrection detailed accounts of their harrowing experiences on that fateful day.

Their remarks were punctuated by video montages that demonstrated the unrelenting and vicious violence that greatly outnumbered law enforcement personnel encountered.

The videos showed an unhinged crowd that was brutal and relentless in their attack, animated by their belief in the fiction that the election of Joe Biden was illegitimate. Officer Harry Dunn repeated, verbatim and unfiltered, the hateful, racist vitriol that the rioters spewed at him.

Tom begins the conversation today with analysis by Luke Broadwater, a longtime friend of Midday who covers Congress for The New York Times. In 2019, as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, Luke broke the story of the Healthy Holly scandal, which led to former Mayor Catherine Pugh and others being sent to prison. Luke and his Sun colleagues won the Pulitzer Prize and a George Polk Award for their reporting of that story.

Luke Broadwater joins us on our digital line from his home in Columbia, Maryland.

Then, Tom speaks with William Braniff. He is the Director of START, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism and a Professor of the Practice at the University of Maryland. He joins us on Zoom…

Listeners are welcome to join us as well…

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

In a series of three press events on Friday, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott unveiled his Comprehensive Violence Prevention Plan, which seeks to re-position violent crime as a public health epidemic, along with the health problems of COVID-19 and opioid overdose deaths.

It is organized around three pillars: a public health approach to violence, engaging the community and coordinating efforts of many city agencies, and accountability.

Scott has long contended that the strategies of the past, which he characterizes as having relied on policing, prosecution and prisons, have failed, and that the intractable levels of violence the city has experienced for many years can only be reduced if public safety is re-imagined. Scott’s ambitious goal is to reduce homicides and non-fatal shootings by 15% every year for the next five years.

Mayor Scott’s strategy includes expanding investment in community violence intervention programs. These programs engage violence interrupters, often people who themselves have been incarcerated, to concentrate primarily on preventing conflicts between individuals from spiraling into violence. Outreach workers for groups like Safe Streets and Roca identify people who may be at risk, or who may be inclined to commit acts of violence. The work is tricky and dangerous. This year, among the 193 people who have been victims of homicide in our city, two have been Safe Streets outreach workers: Dante Barksdale was murdered in January, and Kenyell Wilson was killed earlier this month.

Currently, there are 10 Safe Streets sites and 7 hospital-based partnerships. Roca has also been active for the past few years. Mayor Scott’s plan calls for those programs to be evaluated, and adding perhaps as many as 20 more sites.

The Mayor and some members of Maryland's congressional delegation spent the day Friday touring the city to introduce the new Violence Prevention Plan. The plan is distinct from the crime plan that was developed a couple of years ago by the Baltimore City Police Department. The Mayor characterizes that plan as a subplan of his strategy, which calls on a variety of city agencies to coordinate with federal and state officials to address the epidemic of violence, along with addressing the continuing problems the continuing problems of the COVID pandemic and opioid addiction.

Tom's first guests today are Rashad Singletary, the Associate Director of Gun Violence Prevention in the Mayor's Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (MONSE), the office charged with implementing the Crime Prevention plan; and Dante Johnson, the site director for Safe Streets in Belair-Edison, a neighborhood in Northeast Baltimore. They join us on Zoom.

Then Tom speaks via Zoom with the Director of MONSE, Shantay Jackson, who discusses the city's overall strategy for carrying out the new Violence Prevention Plan.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Tom's guest today is country music artist Brittney Spencer, a Baltimorean who is now making her mark on the Nashville country music scene. Online music platforms Spotify and Pandora call her an artist to watch. She’s been featured in national media, and her debut EP has garnered rave reviews.

Country music is all about storytelling. Brittney Spencer brings authenticity and openness to her stories of living and loving. This is an artist who says what she means and means what she says. That's clear in her new hit single, Sober and Skinny, a tune she co-wrote with the award winning singer-songwriter couple Nelly Joy and Jason Reeves.

Spencer’s songs hold up a mirror to the world, encouraging us to be as reflective and honest in our journey as she is with hers. Her powerful, intentional, and compelling vocal delivery have helped cement her spot as a country music star in-the-making.

Brittney Spencer made her debut at the Grand Ole Opry this past May. She is returning to that hallowed stage again tonight, and she joins us from Nashville for this hour today on Midday…

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Today, we go Back to the Garden with Carrie Engel, the veteran Greenhouse Manager and plant specialist at Valley View Farms Nursery in Cockeysville, Maryland.It’s been pretty hot lately, and despite a few torrential downpours, it’s been a dry summer so far. How’s your garden looking? What’s poppin’ and what’s floppin’? What are you planting and what are you planning for your fall harvest? And which house plants are all the rage this summer for our pots that stay indoors?

Carrie Engel joins us (on our digital line) to take your questions and comments today at 410 662 8780. You can send an email to [email protected], or you can Tweet us, @middayWYPR.

Join us as we go Back to the Garden!

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

It's time for another visit with Midday theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck, who joins Tom today with her review of Cockpit in Court Summer Theatre's new live production of And Then There Were None, an adaptation of novelist Agatha Christie's classic who-done-it.

Ten strangers are invited to attend a gathering on a remote island mansion and then, one by one, they are murdered by an unseen killer. The on-stage production is directed by Linda Chambers.

Cockpit in Court performances of And Then There Were None continue through July 25 at the Robert and Eleanor Romadka College Center (ROMA), in the F. Scott Black Mainstage Theatre, located on the Essex campus of the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC). Click the links above for more information.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Tom's next guest today is Dr. Gigi Gronvall. She’s an immunologist and a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Dr. Gronvall discusses the reasons for the rising COVID infection rates and the urgency of the campaign to persuade unvaccinated Americans to get their shots. She also addresses a technical point raised in the clip we play of a heated exchange between Dr. Fauci and Sen. Rand Paul (R, Ky.) at a Senate hearing yesterday.

And the Hopkins scholar notes the growing consensus among epidemiologists and infectious disease experts that the origin of the COVID-19 virus that has killed more than 4 million people in the past 20 months was an infected animal at the Wuhan Seafood Market, and not a Chinese medical laboratory.

Dr. Gigi Gronvall joins us on our digital line from her home in Baltimore.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

For 10 days in a row, the state of Maryland has been reporting more than 100 new cases per day of COVID-19. As we heard WYPR's Nathan Sterner report this morning, the state health department announced that Maryland has confirmed 244 new cases of the coronavirus since yesterday.

The last time the state recorded more than 200 new cases in a single day was on May 30th.

Maryland’s average testing positivity rate has ticked up to 1.65 percent, about where it was at the end of May. The state's positivity rate is still low compared to many other states, but it continues to creep upwards.

State health officials say the highly contagious delta variant of the virus accounts for most of the new cases. Nationwide, it accounts for 85% of all new cases.

In June here in Maryland, all of the deaths from COVID 19, 95% of the new cases and 93% of hospitalizations due to the virus were for patients who had not been vaccinated.

Today on Midday, we begin with an interview Tom Hall conducted last week (July 12) with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases and President Joe Biden’s senior medical advisor. The video of the interview has been posted on our website, but this is the first opportunity we’ve had to include it on a Midday broadcast.

When Tom and Dr. Fauci spoke a week ago Monday, Dr. Fauci thought that he and other government medical officials would be meeting with executives from Pfizer the following day to discuss the need for those who have received two vaccine doses to get a third, booster shot. That meeting actually took place, on-line, a few hours after Dr. Fauci's Midday interview. Tom also mentioned Dr. Fauci’s past disagreements with Sen. Rand Paul of KY. Just yesterday, Dr. Fauci and Sen. Paul had a particularly heated exchange during a Senate hearing, which Tom will discuss later in this program with Dr. Gigi Gronvall of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

In his 15-minute interview, Dr. Fauci describes the dangers posed by the Delta variant and other mutations of the COVID-19 virus that are spreading rapidly in the United States among large unvaccinated populations.

While he urges all Americans to get their COVID shots, Dr. Fauci concedes the difficulties of a federal vaccine mandate, and calls instead for local institutions, local businesses, schools and travel enterprises to develop ways to encourage, or mandate, that their patrons be vaccinated.

Dr. Fauci also says federal health authorities are studying whether booster shots for those already vaccinated might become necessary, based on new scientific data.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Today, a conversation about Nancy Pelosi, the most influential and powerful woman in American political history. Born and raised in a tight-knit Italian family in a home on Albemarle Street in the Little Italy neighborhood of Baltimore, Nancy D’Alesandro Pelosi is the daughter of a three-term Baltimore Mayor, and a politically savvy and adroit mother.

She learned politics early on, but she didn’t hold elective office until her mid-40s. First elected to Congress in 1987, she was elected Speaker of the House 20 years later; second in line to the Presidency, and the first woman to hold that position.

Her moral compass was shaped by her Catholic faith, and her political instincts were honed by her experience of motherhood. Democratic allies marvel at her mastery of the behind-the-scenes machinations of political sausage-making.

Republicans, not so much. In 2018, the GOP spent more than $65 million dollars in ads attacking her, and during the insurrection at the Capital this year, Trump supporters chanted her name and ransacked her office.

Speaker Pelosi is the subject of an assiduously reported, fascinating and best-selling book by Susan Page, the award-winning Washington Bureau Chief of USA Today. Page interviewed Pelosi in ten different sessions, and she spoke to more than 150 others to compile a portrait of the Speaker that is revelatory and insightful. The book is called Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power.

Susan Page will be speaking about the book this Thursday night in an on-line conversation with WYPR’s Sheilah Kast sponsored by the Ivy Bookshop. Follow the link for event details.

Susan Page joins us today on Midday on our digital line from Washington, D.C.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.