Patt Morrison for Monday, August 8, 2011

PATT MORRISON SCHEDULE

Monday, August 8, 2011

1-3 p.m.

 

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1:06 – 1:30

When ‘Yes, we can’ becomes ‘No, we didn’t’: Obama’s tough road to re-election

How does President Barrack Obama win a re-election campaign given the state of the economy? The Republicans are sure to attack him on jobs and the economy and his friends on the left may not be as supportive of him because he refused to play hard-ball with Republicans on the budget deal, climate change and financial regulatory reform. A spokesperson for the Obama campaign claims that our commander and chief prevented the U.S. from sinking into a depression, but Republicans counter that his policies only made things worse.  There’s plenty of blame to go around on an economy that started to fall apart under a Republican president (George W. Bush) but the man at the top usually bears ultimate responsibility for when times are good and bad—it worked against George H.W. Bush in 1992 and for Bill Clinton in 1996.  While the Obama reelection theme has already started to take shape, portraying the president as a steady and reasonable leader, in the short term his campaign is happy to portray his potential Republican opponents as hapless.  Mitt Romney, in particular, has been an early target of Obama’s surrogates.

 

So how can Obama win a re-election campaign? Will the American people be in the mood for rhetoric about hope and affirmations like ‘yes, we can!’ with so many out of work?  If you voted for him in the last election, will you vote for him again, or is the honeymoon over?

 

Guests:

TBD

 

 

 

1:30 - 1:58:30

Academic cheating in the age of the Internet – impossible to stop?

Obsolete are the sitcom and movie standards of academic dishonesty. A forearm cheat sheet discretely covered with a flannel sleeve, test answers scrawled on the inner side of a water bottle, a system of coughs and subtle body language correlating to the options of a multiple choice answer – antiquated relics of a bygone time. In the age of iPhones, Androids and other pocket bound super-computers cheating has entered the digital era and professors are struggling to adapt countermeasures. There are some tools available to catch the cheater, like Turnitin.com. When students submit their papers, this automated service will canvass the internet, searching key phrases as well as maintaining a backup of submissions on the chance the submission itself could become plagiarized. But some who have embraced technology as a means to fight fire with fire found themselves unhappy with the results. For example, New York University professor Panagiotis Ipeirotis vowed never to use technology again to aggressively police students because it poisoned the atmosphere in the classroom and consumed too many hours of his time, time which detracted from teaching. But what is the answer? With the Internet putting almost unlimited information at our fingertips, the temptation to click and copy can be irresistible to the busy student. In response, some advocate a new model for education - one where students give class presentations that are graded by peers, shifting judgment into the hands of a community rather than a single professor. But would this really solve the problem of cheating? Aren’t we just talking about the mechanics and ignoring the ethical violation of stealing someone else’s work and presenting it as our own? 

 

Guests:

Donald McCabe, professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School

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Gregory Washington, president of the Cal State Student Association (CSSA), which represents the CSU’s 412,000 students to the legislature, federal government and CSU Trustees; student at CSU Fullerton.

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Claudia Magna (mah-GAHN-yah), president of the University of California Students Association

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2:06 – 2:19

Arctic oil drilling is back: domestic oil exploration after Deepwater Horizon

The push and pull of the debate over drilling for oil in the United States, especially since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year, has created complicated choices.  Oil and gas prices are high, to the point of crippling economic growth but the same environmental concerns over oil exploration remain.  Oil companies are chomping at the bit to get back to drilling at locations throughout the U.S., and industry workers are happy to have the jobs, but criticisms over the safety of drilling platforms remain.  Caught in the middle is the Obama administration, desperate for new jobs, desperate to bring down gas prices, desperate to maintain its credibility with environmentalists.  Under this cloud last week, the Department of Interior granted Royal Dutch Shell conditional approval of its plan to begin drilling exploratory wells in the Arctic Ocean next year.  New permits for exploration in the Gulf of Mexico are also being approved, all against the opposition of many environmental activists who warn that the lessons of Deepwater Horizon have not been learned.  The Obama administration says that these permits are just preliminary and there are still a number of secondary permits that must be awarded before holes are to be drilled, and looming over all of this is the threat of lawsuits by interests as varied as ecologists to Alaskan fishermen.  Balancing the need to bring down energy prices and develop new jobs with the clear environmental risks of oil drilling, which direction is best for the country?

 

Guest:

Brendan Cummings, senior counsel, Center for Biological Diversity, they are suing to stop drilling in the Chukchi Sea west of Alaska

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2:21:30 – 2:39

OPEN

 

 

 

2:41:30 – 2:58:30
The Triple Agent: The al-Qaeda Mole who Infiltrated the CIA
From the author of the book behind the acclaimed film Syriana comes another thriller about what’s been called the CIA’s biggest disaster since 9/11. Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Joby Warrick tells the “harrowing and heartbreaking, fascinating and frightening” story of the al-Qaeda mole who infiltrated the CIA a year and a half before Osama bin Laden was killed. It all exploded (literally) in December 2009, when CIA’s top agents gathered at a secret base in Khost, Afghanistan, to greet the Jordanian man who they believed who would lead them to bin Laden: Humam Khalil al-Balawi. Al-Balawi was a double spy who had infiltrated the highest ranks of al-Qaeda and had been reporting shocking accounts of the inside to the CIA for months. To the shock of all, when al-Balawi stepped out of the plane, he had a thirty-pound bomb strapped to his chest, which detonated instantly, killing seven CIA agents on the spot. How did dozens of the highest CIA operatives all not see through al-Balawi’s facade? How did this ambush connect to the finding of bin Laden a year and a half later?

 

Guest:

Joby Warrick, author of The Triple Agent; covers national security for the Washington Post; winner of the Pulitzer Prize

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Jonathan Serviss
Senior Producer, Patt Morrison
Southern California Public Radio
NPR Affiliate for Los Angeles
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