Five years ago Bill Clinton promised to end welfare as we knew it.

Republicans cheered, liberals jeered, but in the end politicians of all stripes joined the welfare reform parade. While the legislation was all about work, the assumptions driving it were about motherhood, namely that working mothers are better citizens, better role models and ultimately raise better children. Five years later, millions of women are off the rolls and in the workforce and most say welfare reform is a rousing success

Others say that by making work a moral imperative for poor women, we’ve ransomed a whole generation of children, and that when you scratch the surface of the welfare reform miracle, you find a messy world of exhausted women in dead end jobs who don’t have time to be mothers. Welfare reform and the politics of motherhood.
(Hosted by Jack Beatty)

Guests:

Ron Haskins, co-director of Beyond Welfare Project at the Brookings Institution

Randy Albelda, economist at the University of Massachusetts-Boston;

Jason Deparle, reporter with New York Times.

“The left is the side of the heart as the right is side of the side of the liver,” George Santayana said, laying out the physiology of politics.

Tip O’Neill had the biggest heart in House of Representatives. At 6 foot three 300 pounds, the Speaker of the House who fought Ronald Reagan to a draw embodied tax and spend liberalism. His heart bled your money for widows, orphans, dwarfs, the knock-kneed, the mentally challenged, people in trouble, you or me, pending divorce or accident or death. The waning of our sense of solidarity with the less fortunate, the “we of me,” accounted, O”Neill felt, for the rise of modern conservatism.

The New Deal created the middle class; and the after the 1960’s the middle class said thank you very much, turned on the poor, and embraced the orthodoxy of the liver. We are being politically unfashionable with a giant, Thomas P.” Tip “O’Neill, Paleo-liberal.
(Hosted by Jack Beatty)

Guests:

John Farrell, author of “Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century.”

Let’s begin with a snobbish Parisienne writer Estelle.

Give her a petite, sophisticated daughter named Anne-Sophie. Have Anne-Sophie uneasy about her sex life just weeks before she is set to marry Tim, l’ American fiancee. Make Tim infatuated with fellow-American former actress Clara Holly, who is married to recluse French filmmaker Serge, who is obsessed with Delia. Who is having an affair with Gabriel. Who is hiding from the FBI. But that’s later. Meanwhile, set it up so Clara’s falling for an older politician, who says he can’t respond because he fears infidelity at all costs

And at this rate, wouldn’t you? Anyway, throw in some stolen documents, an early morning arrest, a U.S. cult, property rights, your garden variety murder at a Paris flea market, some wit, some panache, some command of le stylo, and voila! you have writer Diane Johnson’s most recent novel, “Le Mariage.”
(Hosted by Jack Beatty)

Guests:

Diane Johnson, Essayist, Social Critic, Biographer, Novelist.

The Living wage. Progressive policy? Moral right?

As the most lucrative period in American history recedes, we’re still paying our workers $5.15 an hour. For the past 20 days, students at Harvard University have been asking simple question: Shouldn’t the minimum wage be enough to live on? They’ve besieged the President’s office, trying to get the world’s richest university to cough up 10.25 an hour , almost twice the federal minimum. The administration says it’s about collective bargaining and benefits, about education

But the students have the support of citizens around the country who’ve already fought the fight for higher wages, and brought a so-called living wage to cities across America. But is the living wage really going to help American Workers in the long run? And who decides how much it costs to live anyway?
(Hosted by Jack Beatty)

Guests:

Barbara Ehrenreich, Social Critic and author of the book, “Nickel and Dimed;”

Harold Meyerson, LA Weekly

Gregory Mankiw, Professor of Economics at Harvard University

David Neumark, Public Policy Institute of California and Professor of Economics at Michigan State.

It’s part of the educational lexicon – written by a polymath named Peter Mark Roget in his retirement years as an attempt to organize the supreme kingdom of language.

But when we look at the Thesaurus, us non-polymaths, we just see pages of words listed alphabetically and next to them, their synonyms, right? Wrong. There’s the problem, argues Simon Winchester, there’s no such thing as an exact synonym. And Roget would be rolling or undulating or rising and falling in his grave if he knew his book were being thumbed thru by students exchanging the word “mad” with “round the bend.”

Roget, Winchester says, was a good person who was moved by the complexities of the world. His Thesaurus was in part a way for him to categorize ideas and share them with society. But somewhere along the way, Roget’s dreams and our modern realities forked, and his treasured tome is our quick fix method to word substitution. Are our habits dumbing the whole English language down?
(Hosted by Neal Conan)

Guests:

Simon Winchester, author of a new article in this month’s Atlantic Monthly entitled “Roget and his Brilliant, Unrivaled, Malign, and Detestable Thesaurus.” He’s also the author of The Professor and The Madman.”

30 years ago, a cardigan-clad President Carter told America to adjust to the energy crisis by turning down the thermostat. Which may be one reason Jimmy Carter served just one term.

This week, Vice President Dick Cheney took the political lesson to heart and issued what’s essentially a supply side anthem: power to the people. Even if that means building a power plant a week, every week, for the next twenty years. Conservation, he suggested, is a pipe dream. There is already an energy crisis in California, and the blackouts may be rolling their way east.

The conventional wisdom is that Americans regard cheap and plentiful power as a fundamental right, whether that’s fuel for our SUVs or electricity for the air conditioning. Gas and guilt, power and priorities are the topics of this Connection.
(Hosted by Neal Conan)

Guests:

Sue Tierney, energy consultant and former energy and environmental official in Massachusetts and in the Clinton adminstration.;

David Nye, professor of American Studies and author of Electrifying America.;

Nick Driver, reporter for The San Francisco Examiner.;

He’s often thought of as the saint who talks to birds, the brown-cloaked bearded guy standing in a valley.

He’s the patron Saint of Italy, the patron Saint of ecology, perhaps the most beloved saint of all time. Francis of Assisi, 13th century beggar, prayer, preacher and pilgrim, visionary, ascetic, devotee of Christ. There’s a new book out describing his short life. Written by an atheist and inspired by the frescoes of the Renaissance. It starts with his death and weaves backward in time: vignettes of the Crusades, the conversion and the stigmata, seen in part through the eyes of his followers, dotted with his words.

“Man has as much knowledge as he puts to work,” said the 5 foot 3, radical and recluse, and perhaps no one worked for God harder than him. Centuries later we still consider his legacy.The Salvation and Seduction of Saint Francis is here.
(Hosted by Neal Conan)

Guests:

Valerie Martin, author of “Salvation: Scenes from the Life of St. Francis”;

Brother John-George of St. Elizabeth’s Friary in Brooklyn, New York who is also professor of social work at Columbia University and Washington University, St. Louis.

The CIA gets all the ink, but the NSA is the country’s largest, most powerful, most expensive, and most secretive intelligence agency.

Almost twenty years ago, investigative journalist James Bamford published an expose called “The Puzzle Palace,” and was threatened with prosecution…now, he’s written a new book with the co-operation of the National Security Agency. Body of Secrets describes spectacular success, dangerous disaster, and outrageous excess. It reveals new information about the U-2 Incident, the North Korean attack on the Pueblo, and the Israeli Attack on the USS Liberty.

The NSA also mounted a long pattern of provocative reconnaissance flights near, and sometimes over both the Soviet Union and China. The most recent was the EP-3 that collided with a Chinese fighter last month.
(Hosted by Neal Conan)

Guests:

James Bamford, author of “Body of Secrets”;

Caspar Bowden, Director of the Foundation for Information Policy Research.

If you write it, they will come.

A month into the season, the daily pleasures of the summer game have returned to their proper place in the rythym of our lives, and the Mudville bookstore is busy stocking its shelves. Books on baseball are one of the rites of spring as novelists, biographers, historians, analysts and poets step up to their word proccesors and take their cuts at our souls, and our wallets. Why we care about the lives of ball players, real and imagined. Why some of the best American writers spend so much time at the ballpark, what the game and its scribes tell us about ourselves.

So get yourself a library card and a metaphorical bag of peanuts, some of the best in the business are warming up in the bullpen, for books on baseball, here.
(Hosted by Neal Conan)

Guests:

Don Zimmer, baseball legend and author of “Zim: A Baseball Life”

Eliot Asinot, author of “Eight Men Out”

Elinor Naven, editor of “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend: Women Writers on Baseball”;

Timothy Wiles, Research Director at the Baseball Hall of Fame.

When George Bush began his campaign for president, he couldn’t remember the names of most heads of state.

100 days into his administration, Bush has shown why the names of heads of state didn’t matter to him. He doesn’t talk to them too much. Since he took the oath of office, Bush foreign policy has been disengagement: full of tough rhetoric and mild threat. Where the garrulous Bill Clinton pushed dialogue, in Korea, the Middle East, and China, Bush has instead pushed his weight around. He bombed Iraq, sold arms to Taiwan, provoked Korea and Jiang Ze min, and, just yesterday, announced that National Missile Defense was a “go” no matter what the Russians say.

It’s still early to tell what waves he’ll make, but other countries have felt the sea-change. Even if George W. Bush doesn’t know they exist.
9Hosted by Neal Conan)

Guests:

Robert Watson from the BBC

Rusten Safronov, journalist at Kommersant and BBC Russia

Sulaiman Al-Kahtani, Washington correspondent, Al-Riyadh newspaper, Saudi Arabia.