White House in the cross hairs; Democrats at a crossroads. As questions mount about the Bush Administration’s pre-war intelligence, from Al Qaeda links to aluminum tube discoveries, some political strategists and White House watchers say the time is right for Democrats to make political hay of a White House in overspin.

Spotlight the exaggerations of the Iraqi weapons threat. Highlight the potential deception that drew the nation into war. And seize on popular support, and future votes, in the process. Not everyone in the party feels that way. Don’t rehash what Bush knew and when he knew it, they say. Whether Americans were misled or not, the Dems need more than missing weapons as ammunition for 2004.

Guests:

Peter Beinart, Editor of The New Republic

Jeremy Rosner, Democratic pollster and Vice President of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research in Washington, DC.

Last week, a California teenager learned that he will live, and die, in prison. He is 14 years old, convicted of the attempted murder of a police officer. He didn’t receive the death penalty. The judge sentenced him to spend the rest of his years behind bars, with no chance of parole, ever.

The natural life term, as it’s called in criminal justice jargon, applied to just 12,000 American prisoners a decade ago. Today, more than 31,000 men and women are locked up forever. For judges and juries, a natural life sentence is an appealing alternative to the death penalty, a way of providing finality without firing up the electric chair.

But prisoners’ advocates say that even the most violent criminals deserve a chance to redeem themselves, and a chance at freedom.

Guests:

Daniel Bergner, author, God of the Rodeo: The Quest for Redemption in Louisiana’s Angola Prison

Dan Levey, President, National Organization of Parents of Murdered Children

Roger Thomas, Deputy Warden of York County Prison in York, Pennsylvania

A smoky cafe, dueling guitars, clacking castinettes, and a red dress. The essential ingredients of flamenco, or are they? How about Tom Waits, a Goya painting and a six thousand seat theater?

The creative force of la Compania Maria Pages has caused a tectonic shift in the world of flamenco. With her bold choreography and musical adventures, Maria Pages has done more than any other bailaora to bring flamenco to the public eye. But she has also raised some eyebrows; purists who contend that the gypsy traditions are not to be fiddled with. But Pages dances undaunted. The sine curves of her arms wave to the dance’s Andalusian history all the while welcoming in the modern influences that make what she does, a living, breathing dance.

Guests:

Maria Pages, dancer and choreographer

Walter Clark, professor of musicology at the University of California, Riverside

Less than two years ago, Mexico’s new reform-minded president, Vicente Fox, was received with open arms and much fanfare at the Bush White House. The two presidents shared a passion for the cowboy life and a vision for a more robust Mexican-American alliance.

The press dubbed them “the two amigos,” and much was made of their plans to open the border between the two countries. Then came September 11th. Suddenly, letting in more foreigners seemed like a very bad idea, no matter where they came from.

As Mexico’s hopes for more of its citizens to work legally in the United States withered, so did the leaders’ friendship. Today, they barely speak. Two countries. One border. And the geopolitical consequences of a friendship fallen by the wayside.

Guests:

Ruben Navarrette, Editorial Writer and Columnist, Dallas Morning News

Ana-Maria Salazar, former Clinton Administration Senior Policy Advisor on the Americas

Watch out survivor. Watch out Homer Simpson. In a world without borders, Latin American soap operas, the telenovelas, are spreading around the globe. Millions of Russians, Egyptians, Malaysians, and North Americans are hooked.

And for the life of them, some people just can’t understand why. They dismiss telenovelas as tacky, stereotype-laden sendups of Latin American culture. But for others, the maid running off with the millionaire plots are more than simplistic melodrama; they’re modern day fairy tales about love and loss, failure and redemption. Universal themes that translate in any language, no matter how overwrought the soundtrack. Wild rides and happy endings. A Latin American export’s surprising appeal.

Guests:

Catherine Benamou, Latino and film studies, University of Michigan

Antonio C. La Pastina , Department of Communication at Texas A&M University.

One hundred and twenty two thousand words. That’s a lot of ink, and that’s what the British press spilled on Clare Short’s resignation from Tony Blair’s cabinet last month. And for good reason: ever since the working-class feminist from Birmingham was elected to Parliament 20 years ago, she has made a career out of candor.

Clare Short has spoken out on everything from the tawdry page 3 girls of The Sun newspaper and political donations from porn providers, to calling Tony Blair’s leadership “reckless.” But she’s never been more forthright than she was yesterday. In a House of Commons inquiry, Short claimed the Prime Minister had a secret deal with George Bush to go to war and that Blair lied about information he had on Iraqi weapons. The long and the short of this Anglo-American alliance

Guests:

Clare Short, Labour MP and former U.K. Secretary of International Development in Tony Blair’s cabinet

The exile, we know, is someone who lives apart, away from her own country, her home. And the exile’s writing offers that unique perspective of someone seeing with fresh eyes what is otherwise taken for granted. The Iranian writer Azar Nafisi says it’s time to expand the American definition of exile, to make room for those who, though born here, still cast an outsider’s gaze.

Azar Nafisi had to leave her own home in Tehran when the strict rules of the Islamic government turned her into an internal exile, so imagine her surprise at coming to the United States and discovering the writing of Zora Neal Hurston, a powerfully outspoken and articulate writer describing life in America for a black woman 80 years ago. When no place is home.

Guests:

Azar Nafisi, Director of the Dialogue Project and Visiting Professor of Culture and Politics at John’s Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS), author of “Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabokov’s Novels” and “Reading Lolita in Tehran.”

They wear powder blue helmets, and over the past 55 years, they’ve been welcomed and reviled around the world. Now the head of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, is talking about sending his peacekeeping troops into the Middle East.

He floated the idea in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. So far, not a lot of enthusiasm from the Israeli government, the Palestinian Authority, or the American administration, despite the current tatters of the so-called “road map” to peace. And it’s true, the United Nations’s peacekeeping record is decidedly mixed.

Even so, the UN’s newly appointed assistant secretary general for peacekeeping, Jane Holl Lute, still believes that the men and women in blue berets are a troubled world’s best hope for peace.

Guests:

Jane Holl Lute, United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Mission Support in the Department of Peacekeeping-designate

Robert Oakley, former U.S. Ambassador.

The writer Vladimir Nabokov once said: “I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.” Memory plays perhaps its greatest role in exile literature when its remembrance that keeps an individual’s story alive.

The Iranian writer Azar Nafisi knows exile. She was a professor in Tehran during that country’s cultural revolution. She was ultimately expelled from Tehran university for refusing to wear the veil. Now, she teaches in the U.S. and last month, joined us to discuss her memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran: a book that praises the power of fiction while contending with the loss of one’s homeland. So, who better to lead our two part series, Exile and Literature?

Guests:

Azar Nafisi, Director of the Dialogue Project and Visiting Professor of Culture and Politics at John’s Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS), author of “Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabokov’s Novels” and “Reading Lolita in Tehran.”

Dmitri Nabokov, son of Vladimir Nabokov, and translator of many of his father’s works. Dmitri is currently preparing a book of his
father’s poetry and writing his own autobiography.

When President Bush declared the end of “major combat operations” in Iraq on May 1st, many understood the statement to mean that the war was over. But since then, American military forces have faced increasingly harsh, increasingly organized resistance. Dozens of American soldiers have been killed in the past six weeks. Saddam loyalists have been blamed, and now they’re the targets of a renewed U.S. military crack down.

More than 100 Iraqis have been killed in the last few weeks. And while some say that the current resistance to American occupation is inevitable and manageable, critics claim that the U.S. underestimated the challenges its military would face in a post-war Iraq. Opposition and new objectives in the aftermath.

Guests:

Mike Vickers, Director of Strategic Studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments

Retired Army Colonel Robert Killebrew, a former Army planner.