The Brian Lehrer Show

Coming to America

Peter Steinfels, religion columnist for the New York Times, co-director of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University, and the author of A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America, previews the Pope's visit to New York. He's joined by Deacon Jorge Gonzalez, director of deacon formation in Brooklyn and Queens.

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Where Are You?

New cell phone technology incorporates GPS to read your location, telling friends where you are. But who else has access to that same information? We discuss cell phone technology and privacy issues with Wilson Rothman, technology writer and features editor at Gizmodo and Kevin Bankston, Senior Staff Attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

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Ouch

Steven Greenhouse, labor and workplace reporter at the New York Times and author of The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, talks about stagnating wages, the end of job security, and the decline of benefits.

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Bitter Pill

Barack Obama's recent comments in San Francisco have caused a stir. Some have referenced a similar Bill Clinton quote. Here are the two:

Obama (2008) But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Bill Clinton (1991) You know, he [Bush] wants to divide us over race. I'm from the South. I understand this. This quota deal they're gonna pull in the next election is the same old scam they've been pulling on us for decade after decade after decade. When their economic policies fail, when the country's coming apart rather than coming together, what do they do? They find the most economically insecure white men and scare the living daylights out of them. They know if they can keep us looking at each other across a racial divide, if I can look at Bobby Rush and think, Bobby wants my job, my promotion, then neither of us can look at George Bush and say, 'What happened to everybody's job? What happened to everybody's income? What ... have ... you ... done ... to ... our ... country?'

Compare and contrast the above two quotes. What do you make of the controversy? Comment below!

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Meeting Adversity

Jared Sandberg, Cubicle Culture columnist at The Wall Street Journal, talks about the good, the bad, and the refreshments, of meetings. Photographer Paul Shambroom looked at meetings in the public sphere when photographing local town council meetings. A survey of his work is out: Paul Shambroom: Picturing Power (Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, 2008).

Do people protest too much about meetings? What have you seen work to make meetings effective? Comment below.

Watch a slideshow from Paul Shambroom's Meetings.

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