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If you’re anxious about the dinner topics during the holiday season, Decode has your back. We hope to help you navigate your way through the Turkey dinner with our political guide to surviving Thanksgiving. So, for your listening pleasure we are releasing snippets, sneak-peeks, giblets—if you will of our upcoming Thanksgiving episode: Politics around the Turkey. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you’re anxious about the dinner topics during the holiday season, Decode has your back. We hope to help you navigate your way through the Turkey dinner with our political guide to surviving Thanksgiving. So, for your listening pleasure we are releasing snippets, sneak-peeks, giblets—if you will of our upcoming Thanksgiving episode: Politics around the Turkey. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you’re anxious about the dinner topics during the holiday season, Decode has your back. We hope to help you navigate your way through the Turkey dinner with our political guide to surviving Thanksgiving. So, for your listening pleasure we are releasing snippets, sneak-peeks, giblets—if you will of our upcoming Thanksgiving episode: Politics around the Turkey. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Some politicians slide into Congress after a boring, predictable, easy win as the predestined candidate. Others practically stumble — like Congressman Bill Owens, who was the last man standing in the dust of a political nuclear war back in 2009. In this week’s podcast, host Andrea Seabrook sits down with the Democratic congressman from upstate New York as part of DecodeDC’s Exit Interview series. Owens announced his retirement in January of this year. Congressman Owens is one of the most endangered species in Washington—the rational pragmatist. “My view of the world is that there is a band of rational thought that we should all act in. I’m not saying that there is nothing you should be passionate about. But I think ultimately you have to go back to a thought-process that is fact-based and analytic,” Owens said. But to understand how a lawmaker can be so rational, let’s take a look at how he got to Congress. It was a special election in upstate New York that came at the end of President Obama’s first year in o

There was a time when Americans weren’t so intensely divided as we are today. In fact, says journalist and writer Bill Bishop, from World War II to the mid 1970s, Americans’ attitudes about culture, family and politics grew more alike. Then things started to change, says Bishop. Politics split us up, became harsher and more polarized. At the same time, economic forces and rising standards of living sparked a huge increase in people’s mobility; it’s no longer common to spend your life in one town, one church or one company. That new mobility added to Americans’ separating political views, as people moved to regions, cities and neighborhoods in which they felt comfortable -- surrounded by people of a similar world view. Bill Bishop outlines this process in his book, “The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart.” This week on the DecodeDC podcast, Bishop brings a fresh perspective on the polarization of politics, suggesting that, rather than point fingers at Washington, we ought t

There’s really only one story to tell about the 2014 midterm elections, right? Only one story, that is, if you rely on the constant stream of chatter from 24-7 cable TV, election-obsessed political rags, and the twitterverse for your news. The story? Republicans won – BIG TIME. And it’s true. Not only did the GOP swoop in and seize more than enough seats to take control of the Senate, in the House they likely* increased their majority to a margin Republicans haven’t enjoyed since Harry Truman was in the White House (*likely because vote-counts aren’t complete in a handful of congressional districts). But that’s not the only story the midterms have to tell. “On one level, they (the Republicans) were the big winners of the night,” says DecodeDC’s Senior Washington Correspondent Dick Meyer. “But you scratch deeper and you see this anger towards Washington, and I think even more importantly, you see a profound pessimism about the future, about the future of the economy, about the direction the country is going in

Next Tuesday Americans across the country will participate in one of the most basic civic duties: voting. For many, that means taking time off work, driving to a designated polling place and casting their ballot through standalone voting machines. But what if the process of voting could be vastly different? Today we can do almost anything on the Internet from banking to ordering take-out, so it only feels natural that we should be able to vote that way too. In this week’s podcast, host Andrea Seabrook and Decode DC reporter Miranda Green delve into the benefits and road blocks to online voting and try to see into the future of elections. Not all elections experts think going online is a great idea. But Thad Hall, a professor of political science at the University of Utah, is ready. “You know it’s kind of the ultimate easy, convenient way to vote. And I don’t have to have a piece of paper, I don’t have to mail it back, I can send my ballot instantaneously. If Hurricane Sandy comes, I don’t have to worry about

Tis the season for elaborate costumes, anonymous boogiemen and masked pranksters. That's right, it’s election season. Across the country, races for the House, Senate, governors and state legislators are being haunted by nasty attack ads. In this week’s podcast, host Andrea Seabrook takes a deep dive into dark money groups, responsible for some of the nastiest ads . As the co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, Michael Franz tracks political ads on TV stations across the country and collects data on interest groups and their spending. What makes dark money groups so ominous, Franz explains, is they are not required to disclose any information about who their donors are. So it is unclear who exactly is funding them. “You could Google American’s for America and maybe find their P.O. Box or something, but you wouldn’t necessarily find anything else really about them. And I think that from a simple standpoint of what we know when making decisions [that] this is a troubling development,” he says. And when dark

Ebola has killed nearly 5,000 people and put America and the world on high alert. In contrast, the world’s worst pandemic, AIDS, hit the U.S. three decades ago and was largely ignored. Because of that, hundreds and then thousands fell sick and died of AIDS before the U.S. government even mentioned it publicly. “The country had never had much of a discussion about homosexuality, they loathed us and feared us,” says long-time AIDS activist Peter Staley. In those bleak years, activists organized, staged dramatic protests, and demanded new procedures at the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health -- procedures that could help Ebola patients today. “The openness to using experimental treatments and vaccines is a legacy of the AIDS epidemic and AIDS activists,” says Mark Harrington, director of the Treatment Action Group, an organization founded at the height of the crisis. The lessons learned from AIDS are informing the world’s response to Ebola. But, says Harrington, it’s also clear the

A staggering number of young women are having babies today who say they didn’t mean to get pregnant. New statistics from the Brookings Institution show that, among American women under age 30, more than 70% of pregnancies are unintended. In her new book, “Generation Unbound: Drifting into Sex and Parenthood without Marriage,” Brookings fellow Isabel Sawhill tackles the hot-button issues of poverty, contraception and having children out of wedlock. DecodeDC host Andrea Seabrook talked to her for our latest podcast. Here’s an edited excerpt from their conversation: Andrea Seabrook: You have a couple of different prescriptions for what the government should do. One seems to focus on the fertility of women, that women who want to make it into the middle class or to break this cycle, should be on long-term birth control. Tell me a little bit about that idea. Isabel Sawhill: Right now, the amount of unintended and unwanted pregnancies we have in the United States is enormous. Fifty percent of all pregnancies in the

This week on the DecodeDC podcast we’re talking to Scripps national investigative reporter Lee Bowman about his story on the disaster behind federal disaster aid. When your house or town gets destroyed by a hurricane or a tornado, you may expect the federal government to step in and help. But whether you get money from the feds may depend more on where you live than on the extent of the damage. The original idea behind federal disaster aid was to help only when the damage and scope of an event exceeded state and local resources. Now we have something called “disaster inflation” – many smaller storms that used to be handled by state funds are getting the national disaster label and the dollars that come with it. The boom in federal disaster declarations by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama is stretching resources at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and costing taxpayers billions. These two presidents are responsible for 38 percent of all disasters declared since the federal aid programs

On April 14, 1994, the top executives of America’s seven largest tobacco companies filed into the hearing room before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health and the Environment. Before speaking, the CEOs took an oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth – as most witnesses before Congress do. Each man then proceeded to testify that cigarettes and nicotine are not addictive. It was a moment that would change America’s relationship with tobacco. On March 17, 2005, six of the most important Major League Baseball players at the time sat side-by-side before the House Government Reform Committee: Alex Rodriguez, Jose Canseco, Curt Schilling, Rafael Palmeiro, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. With fans, kids, and reporters watching, most of the players refused to admit they were aware of the illegal use of steroids in baseball, or downplayed the breadth of the problem, until the question was posed to Jose Canseco. He told the assembled congressmen that a “large number of players” we

He is called the Vicar of Baghdad, though his life couldn’t be more different from the average English vicar. The Reverend Canon Andrew White leads St. George’s Church, the last Anglican church in Iraq. He also runs a clinic that sees thousands of patients a month, and a food program that feeds hundreds every week – regardless of their beliefs or religious affiliation. But though this work is much admired, it is not what has made Rev. White famous. As president of the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East, White has forged personal relationships with the heads of opposing Muslim groups in Iraq. He is one of the precious few people in the world who has the trust of both Sunni and Shia leaders. Because of this, and because of the gritty humanitarian aid he extends to Iraqis, White says he is a danger to terrorists, especially ISIS, the brutal group ruling over large swaths of Iraq and Syria. “I do not allow them to maintain their own extremist positions, and I do not allow them to say, ‘lo

On this week's DecodeDC podcast, host Andrea Seabrook talks to three experts about a deceptively simple question: What responsibility does the U.S. have, if any, to respond to ISIS? Many Americans have been surprised in recent weeks by the brutal takeover of large regions of Iraq and Syria by the fundamentalist regime as it threatens men, women and children who don’t comply with its violent form of strict Sharia law with the most atrocious consequences -- massacres, beheadings and crucifixions. Earlier this week, President Barack Obama outlined his plan for military action against the group and announced the country would be working with a coalition of partners to degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIS. The experts we spoke with -- Bruce Hoffman, the director of Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies; Justin Logan, the head of Foreign Policy Studies at the libertarian think tank The Cato Institute; and Jim Wallis, a public theologian and activist -- disagree on what action the U.S. should take aga

It aired only once. A one-minute spot during “The NBC Monday Night Movie.” But it changed every political ad that came after -- as well as the entire field of advertising. The Daisy ad aired during the height of Lyndon B. Johnson’s re-election campaign, on the night of Sept. 7, 1964. Republican Barry Goldwater, LBJ’s challenger, had said in speeches and interviews that he would be willing to use nuclear weapons to better America’s position in the Vietnam war. The ad was the Johnson campaign’s attempt at exploiting Goldwater’s aggressive military stance. And it worked. Johnson would go on to win re-election by a landslide. The ad itself has a long-lasting legacy as well. Its mastermind was a man named Tony Schwartz, a young writer at a new kind of ad agency (one that would later be the inspiration for the AMC hit TV show, "Mad Men"). Rather than focusing on a candidate’s policy statements or plans for the future, as almost every political ad before it had done, Schwartz honed in on the viewers and their emotio

Americans can carry more guns in more places than ever before. Across the country, grassroots movements in states and on college campuses are demanding that gun regulations be relaxed -- and lawmakers are meeting those demands. This is one, major trend reported by News21, an eight-month project in investigative reporting that brought together top journalism students to study one issue: Guns in America. Here at DecodeDC we’re featuring many of the News21 stories, from the prevalence of women carrying guns to the refusal by some local authorities to enforce gun control laws. And last week’s DecodeDC podcast focused on the evolution of the political debate surrounding guns, and a smaller microcosm of that debate: Colorado. This week, host Andrea Seabrook talks to News21 reporters Kate Murphy and Wade Millward about the sweeping trend they found through their reporting: Americans are reacting to continuing gun violence in a new way. Whereas a few decades ago, a shooting might cause citizens to demand tighter gun

It has been twenty years since Congress passed federal gun control legislation. That’s two decades in which America has seen some of the most horrific massacres in our nation’s history. But despite DC's gridlock on the issue, America’s debate over gun rights and gun regulations has gained energy. Just not in Washington. That’s just one conclusion of an in-depth, eight-month reporting project by this year’s News21 team. Student journalists tackled the issue of guns in America, turning out dozens of stories from the new, changing front lines of the debate. We here at DecodeDC have featured several of their stories, from funding of gun rights groups to the problems with our national background check system and state efforts to nullify federal gun laws. Today, we’re featuring them on the podcast. Host Andrea Seabrook talks to News21 reporters Justine McDaniel Jacy Marmaduke, getting a broad overview of the current state of the gun debate in America, and then looking at a single state that is both a microcosm of

This week’s podcast is a conversation with Arthur Brooks, who runs the American Enterprise Institute, a big conservative think tank in Washington and our chief Washington correspondent Dick meyer. It didn’t turn out to be the podcast we expected. Brooks is a very smart, very passionate, very articulate guy. He always has a take on things that is fresh so we wanted to hear his thoughts on the world of Washington think tanks. We in the news business use the phrase “think tank” all the time but we rarely look inside them as Washington players worthy of examination. We call their experts for quotes, wisdom on deadline and TV bookings. But now a couple of the big think tanks – notably the Heritage Foundation on the right and the Center for American Progress on the left – have set-up separate organizations to do lobbying, electioneering and advocacy. Think tanks, under the tax laws, are research and scholarly organizations that don’t get involved explicitly in elections and lobbying so this new development that has

Tens of thousands of children have crossed into the United States this year, fleeing desperate conditions in Central America. The news media have dubbed it a “border crisis,” though none of these kids stays at the border for very long. And in Washington, Congressional leaders seem more focused on who to blame rather than what to do about it. In this week's podcast, host Andrea Seabrook goes straight to the front lines of the crisis. No, not the border but an elementary school just a few miles from the U.S. Capitol. Susan Holiday, the principal at Gladys Noon Spellman Elementary School, in Cheverly, Maryland doesn’t have the luxury of debating the politics of immigration, or playing the blame-game. With a third of her students unable to speak or read English, she and her staff focus on the practicalities: teaching young immigrants in a new language, a new school, and a new home. "On their enrollment it will say you know, 'Date first entered the United states'," says Holiday. "Let's just say their first day of

It was three days after the attacks —September 14th, 2001 -- that Congress gathered in Washington to respond to the vicious blow America had sustained. Every member of the House and Senate, save one, voted to give President George W. Bush the authority to capture or kill those responsible. The bill they passed that day is called the AUMF -- The Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Terrorists. Many predictions were made that day, of the coming war, the stamina and depth of the commitment it would require of American citizens. But what no one knew, what no one could know, is how the AUMF would anchor the country to that moment, and drag it back there again and again during the longest war in the nation's history. On this week's podcast, DecodeDC host Andrea Seabrook tells the story of how it happened, and what many think should come next. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.