Leid Stories – 12.04.15

What A Week! Share Your Thoughts About It on ‘Free Your Mind Friday!’
It’s the best open forum on the planet—a gathering place for the exchange of information, opinions and ideas. Share your thoughts about this week’s programs, major news issues and events, or any subject you consider worthy of further consideration and debate.
Call in (888-874-4888) and add your voice to the mix.

Leid Stories – 07.07.14

Talking Things Over, Talking Things Through

Yay! We’re reconnected, PRN having accomplished its move into brand-new studios.

To make for time lost on our regularly scheduled “Free Your Mind Fridays,” Leid Stories devotes today’s program to listeners’ thoughts and opinions about current issues and events.

Leid Stories – 07.03.15

Whose Independence?: The Fourth of July and What It Really Means

Leid Stories wraps up its series on systems of white supremacy and their centrality to practically all aspects of life in the United States with two history lessons.

Dr. Gerald Horne, the John J. and Rebecca Moores chair of history and African American studies and professor of diplomatic history at the University of Houston and author of The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America, explains the War of Independence as a counterrevolution by the power elite against the inevitability of the abolition of slavery by Britain.

The prescient words of Frederick Douglass still ring true. The late actor and activist Ossie Davis gives voice to “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” Douglass’s speech to the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, N.Y., on July 5, 1852.

Leid Stories – 06.30.15

U.S. Supreme Court Decisions 2015: ‘Not All Settled Law’

The U.S. Supreme Court has wrapped up its term with a bumper crop of history-making decisions. The court may have settled several controversial matters of law, but it also has triggered questions about the politicization of the justices and their seemingly limitless authority as the last word on laws enacted by Congress and presidential action.

Josh Blackman, an assistant professor of law at the South Texas College of Law and an expert on constitutional law, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the intersection of law and technology, discusses key decisions of the court’s term.

Author of Unprecedented: The Constitutional Challenge to Obamacare, Blackman deconstructs the court’s decision on the Affordable Care Act.

Leid Stories – 06.19.15

The Charleston Massacre: Playing with Our Minds and History

The massacre of nine members, including the pastor, of Emanuel African American Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., two days ago during a prayer meeting has gripped the nation and prompted a wide-ranging discussions on how and why it happened.

But media discussions and reports generally are deliberately avoiding the historical context for the mass murders and uniformly are reporting the carnage as a “hate” crime.

Leid Stories explains how and why our collective reality is being distorted.

Leid Stories – 06.10.15

Here We Are; We Are Here: A Reality Check on ‘Reform’ in America (Part 3)

In the third installment of this weeklong series, Leid Stories discusses power and powerlessness in America, and logic and illogic of power.

Leid Stories – 06.08.15

Here We Are; We Are Here: A Reality Check on ‘Reform’ in America

Claims of “progress” made and of “reforms” toward social, political and economic justice in America have fallen far short of the realities that confront us and the deep-seated issues that continue to haunt us as a nation. Yet, even the oppressed appear to have accepted the myth of “change.”

Leid Stories explains that social and legislative palliatives are designed to maintain, not change, America’s rigidly race-based culture.

Leid Stories – 05.04.15

Baltimore: A Legal Primer on Cop Indictments in Freddie Gray Case

Baltimoreans rejoiced last Friday after State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby announced the indictment and arrest of six police officers allegedly connected to the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old local man, while in their custody after an illegal arrest April 12.
Gray, who suffered a severed spinal cord and crushed voice box among other injuries, died a week later. His death touched off a series of protests locally and nationally, including a rebellion in Baltimore that was quashed by martial law.
Indictment of the police officers, however, is no guarantee of convictions in the case, says our guest, “Attorney at War” Alton H. Maddox Jr. There are major legal obstacles to overcome, he says, noting that the Baltimore Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3, the officers’ union, has already asserted that the officers did nothing wrong.
Maddox, an expert on police-brutality and wrongful-death litigation, provides a legal primer on the case.