FEATURING BRIAN CONCANNON JR. – Mass protests in Haiti have rocked the Caribbean nation for weeks as resistance to President Jovenel Moïse continued. His loyalists recently accused coup plotters of conspiring to murder him and arrested dozens of people including a supreme court justice. At the heart of the conflict is President Moïse’s claim to his position even though his term ended. 

 Brian Concannon Jr., board member and co-founder of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti. 

Bitterly cold temperatures continue to plague the state of Texas even as warmer weather was finally on the horizon. Water shortages have now replaced power outages as the number 1 problem in the state. As of Thursday an estimated 13 million people were being asked to boil water for drinking and untold numbers are wondering how to deal with frozen and damaged pipes. On Friday morning about half the state’s residents were dealing with disrupted water supplies. Food stores are also dwindling as grocery store shelves have emptied out and food pantries were closing. Many residents are dealing with stored refrigerated food that spoiled during days-long power outages. Carbon monoxide poisoning cases are also on the rise as freezing Texans try to warm up by running car engines indoors. The situation inside Texas jails is even worse with horrifying reports of clogged toilets and freezing cells. Jailed people who have not been convicted of crimes are being held in intolerable conditions. There has been a total of at least 30 deaths so far linked to the harsh winter conditions across the state. 

Texas Senator Ted Cruz continues to be under fire for escaping the cold weather by taking his family on a luxury vacation to Cancun. Text messages from his wife to their neighbors were leaked to the New York Times on Thursday and revealed that the family planned a getaway from the inhospitable conditions that have thrown millions of Cruz’s constituents into a life risking situation. The texts undermine Cruz’s claim that he was only going to Cancun to drop his kids off and was trying to be a “good dad.” He has now admitted that his vacation was “obviously a mistake,” but many pointed out his hypocrisy considering that he has often shamed other politicians in the past for vacationing during crises. Many, including the Houston Chronicle have called on him to resign. While Cruz excused his behavior saying he didn’t know how he could help his constituents, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represents New York, raised two million dollars for Texas-based aid organizations using her social media platform. Meanwhile President Joe Biden, in stark contrast to his predecessor’s partisan political responses, approved new disaster declarations for Texas and authoriz...

FEATURING JEFF COHEN – Right wing radio talk show host and shock jock, Rush Limbaugh, known for his racist, misogynist and white supremacist rhetoric, has died. He was 70 and had complications related to lung cancer. Former President Donald Trump broke his silence to praise Limbaugh in an interview calling him “irreplaceable,” and that, “[h]e was with me right from the beginning.” 

But others, who remember his “AIDS Updates” celebrating the deaths of gay men, his coining of the phrase “Feminazi,” his dehumanization of immigrants, and his perpetuation of fake news, hailed an end to of one of the most destructive forces in American media.

Read Jeff Cohen’s 1994 FAIR article ‘The Way Things Aren’t – Rush Limbaugh Debates Reality,’ HERE. 

Jeff Cohen, media critic, writer and retired journalism professor at Ithaca College. He co-founded the media watch group FAIR, as well as the group Rootsaction.org. 

Texans are still struggling with a set of brutal and record-breaking winter storms that have left millions this week without power and now some without water. Although power was restored to most people on Wednesday, as of Thursday morning about half a million were still in the dark, trying to fend off the deadly cold. Residents received notices to boil their water because water treatment plants had gone offline, but the notices only applied to those lucky enough to have running water. The Texas Commissioner on Environmental Quality, Toby Baker announced that on Wednesday, “there were 332 local water systems reporting impacts in 110 counties across the state, 276 issued boil water notices.” Millions of Texans in major cities like Houston, Fort Worth, and Arlington were ordered to boil their water before drinking. Incarcerated people in Texas jails and prisons are particularly vulnerable as reports emerged of freezing indoor temperatures and no hot food or running water. 

While Texas Governor Greg Abbott has been blaming renewable energy sources like wind turbines for the power outages, there has been push back even in mainstream news sources pointing out that the state’s deregulated energy grid that failed to prepare for winter conditions is to blame and that natural gas and oil pipelines have frozen. Gov. Abbott is now facing calls to resign. Texas Democratic Party chair Gilberto Hinojosa released a statement saying, “Millions of Texans are without power in freezing temperatures, many of them for the last 60 hours. At least 21 Texans have died. Their blood is on Abbott’s hands.” Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas is also facing calls to resign after a journalist posted a photo of him traveling to Cancun. Cruz confirmed his trip and released a statement saying he was only “wanting to be a good dad,” in flying to Cancun with his children and that he would be returning to Texas in the face of public outrage. And, former Texas Governor and Donald Trump’s Energy Secretary Rick Perry is under fire for suggesting that Texans would be willing to sacrifice their lives in order to prevent their failing energy system from being overseen by the federal government. He said, “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.”  

Other parts of the United States are also struggling with extreme cold weather, including Oregon where about 150,000 people were without power, heat, internet and other necessities.

FEATURING DUNCAN MEISEL – Millions in Texas remain without power for several days now after a massive winter storm dumped snow over the state and triggered power outages. With more snow coming Texans are being pushed to breaking point. And their governor wants you to know it’s all the fault of wind turbines and proof that a Green New Deal would be deadly. 

Gov. Abbott earlier this year vowed that he would, “protect the oil and gas industry from any type of hostile attack from Washington,” seems to have little responsibility to protect Texans from oil and gas. Another Texas Republican elected to office, Tim Boyd, just resigned from his position as mayor of Colorado City after insisting that the government had no responsibility to protect and those struggling without electricity and water were just too lazy to make arrangements for their families. 

Read the article he co-wrote with Jamie Henn in The Independent called ‘Why on earth would right-wing people with connections to the fossil fuel industry lie about ‘frozen wind turbines’ in Texas?’ HERE. 

Duncan Meisel, campaign director for Clean Creatives, a campaign that’s taking on the fossil fuel industry’s PR and advertising machine. He was previously a communications advisor to the Sunrise Movement and a lead digital campaigner for 350.org. 

FEATURING JOHN FEFFER – The coronavirus pandemic has been a devastating blow to countries, societies, communities, families, children, the elderly, and everyone in between. With nearly half a million deaths in the past year in the United States alone, the crisis is akin to a “near-death” experience for our society. Assuming we survive, should we not take stock of what needed to happen in order to minimize the damage so that the next time we’ll be better prepared? Or better yet, shouldn’t we ensure there is no “next time?”

In a new book called Pandemic Pivot, my guest John Feffer has culled together the work of a group of global progressive thinkers and experts who examined how our current systems failed and what we can do to fix them.

John Feffer, director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. He is the author of Aftershock: A Journey into Eastern Europe’s Broken Dreams and the Splinterlands trilogy. His new book is Pandemic Pivot: A report from the Institute for Policy Studies, the Transnational Institute, and Focus on the Global South. 

Millions of Texans are still waiting for their electricity coverage to resume after 3 days of a brutal winter storm that is pushing the state to breaking point. To make matters worse, more snow is expected in a fresh storm on the horizon. Describing the state of emergency, the New York Times wrote, “Pipes froze and burst across the state, icicles hung from kitchen faucets in Houston, ambulances in San Antonio were unable to meet the surging demand and the county government in coastal Galveston called for refrigerated trucks to hold the bodies they expect to find in freezing, powerless houses.” As is usually the case, the power outages have hit residents in minority neighborhoods disproportionately harder and black and brown residents were among the first to lose electricity. Experts say they will likely be among the last to see their power restored. About 4 million people are still without power across the southern and central part of the nation and at least 30 people have died in Texas as well as Missouri, Louisiana, and Mississippi. 

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has blamed wind turbines freezing in the cold temperatures for the power outages saying on Fox News, “this shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America… it just shows that fossil fuel is necessary for the state of Texas, as well as other states.” But critics pointed out this was not true. According to the Washington Post Abbott’s own energy department reported that “most of Texas’s energy losses came from failures to winterize the power-generating systems, including fossil fuel pipelines.” Meanwhile Tim Boyd, the mayor of Colorado City, Texas, resigned after publishing a lengthy Facebook post in which he blamed residents for being too lazy to arrange for their own electricity and water in the crisis and that it was not the government’s responsibility to ensure basic necessities. Boyd took down the post after public outrage and resigned.

In other news, President Joe Biden during his televised townhall meeting this week on CNN said he was optimistic that Americans would have open access to COVID-19 vaccines by the end of July. The remarks follow from a more pessimistic tone last week when Biden warned about logistical and distributional challenges. Biden also emphasized that there would be more equitable distribution of vaccines to hardest-hit communities. The White House announced that states would begin receiving 13.5 million doses collectively per week, a large increase.

During his townhall appearance one attendee asked him about college debt forgive...

FEATURING COREY BRETTSCHNEIDER – Shortly after the United States Senate voted for a second time to acquit Donald Trump, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell on Saturday delivered a speech that sounded remarkably like that of his Democratic colleagues in his condemnation of Trump. McConnell issued his most public and visceral denunciation of the former President’s incitement of his supporters to commit violent acts at the Capitol building on January 6th. 

But then McConnell sharply veered from Democrats in claiming that his vote to acquit Trump was done in order to protect the United States Constitution because in his mind the Senate could not vote to impeach Trump once he had left office no matter how guilty he was. McConnell’s logistical gymnastics are indicative of the disarray within the Republican Party that wants to abhor and embrace Trump and Trumpism simultaneously. But what does this mean for the U.S. constitution and the power to impeach Presidents?

Corey Brettschneider, professor of political science at Brown University. He is the author of When the State Speaks, What Should It Say: How Democracies Can Protect Expression and Promote Equality. His latest books include The Oath and the Office: A Guide to the Constitution for Future Presidents, and On Impeachment.

FEATURING BRENDAN O’CONNOR – There are many post-mortems of Donald Trump’s presidency, arguably the worst 4 years in modern American history. Among them is a new book by writer Brendan O’Connor that distinctly makes the links between the resurgent white supremacist movement backing Trump and a fiscal conservatism fueled by billionaire elites. At the same time a resurgent left rooted in movements outside the Democratic Party is taking hold and is a critical piece of the historical backdrop to Trump and Trumpism.  

Brendan O’Connor,  journalist and writer in New York. He has written for The Baffler, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His new book is called Blood Red Lines: How Nativism Fuels the Right. 

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell is defending his acquittal vote for Donald Trump on Saturday which came just before he gave an impassioned speech denouncing the former President and drawing a clear line between Trump and the January 6th rioters. Democrats are not accepting McConnell’s continued claim that an impeachment trial for a departed President is not constitutional. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others cited that McConnell, as Senate Majority leader in Trump’s last days in office, refused to allow the Senate to take up the impeachment trial after the House voted. She said, “It was not the reason that he voted the way he did. It was the excuse that he used.” In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Monday McConnell continued an ardent defense of his acquittal vote saying, “the Senate’s ‘sole power to try all impeachments’ would constitute an unlimited circular logic with no stopping point at former officers.” But critics have pointed out that Trump was in office when he committed the crimes he has been accused of and was also impeached by the House while in office. The Senate then voted that it was indeed constitutional to try the President after he left office because not doing so would amount to a “January exception” for future presidents who might consider breaking the law just before leaving office. The final Senate vote tally of 57 to 43 to convict Trump fell 10 votes short of the margin needed for conviction but almost reflected the public’s sentiment. About 58% of Americans surveyed think that Trump should have been convicted. Meanwhile Speaker Pelosi has said there will be a 9/11-style commission to investigate the January 6th Capitol riot. 

House Homeland Security Committee chair Bennie Thompson of Mississippi has just filed the first of what is expected to be a wave of lawsuits against Trump over his incitement of violence. Meanwhile those Republican lawmakers who dared to vote against Trump in the House and Senate are facing censure in their home districts, including Representative Adam Kinzinger, Senators Pat Toomey, Richard Burr, Mitt Romney, and Susan Collins. Trump loyalists like Senator Ron Johnson are going as far as saying the January 6th riot was not really a big deal. Johnson said, “This didn’t seem like an armed insurrection to me.” 

Trump lawyer Michael Van Der Veen meanwhile has now claimed that House impeachment managers “doctored