Month: September 2015

This week, The Politics Guys talk about how John Boehner was hounded out of office by the radical Republicans in his caucus and why it matters, using football *and* baseball analogies. The second big Republican quitter of the week was Scott Walker, an early favorite for the GOP presidential nomination whose campaign ran out of money at the same time his SuperPAC had millions in the bank. Mike explains how SuperPACs work and why Walker’s SuperPAC couldn’t save him. Mike is a big fan of China’s announcement that they’ll be instituting a cap-and-trade system to clean up their air starting in 2017, pointing out that this is a policy that Congressional Republicans rejected when President Obama tried to enact it. Jay is more skeptical about the announcement, calling for a ‘wait and see’ approach. Both Mike and Jay agree that the agreement between Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping about cybercrime may not amount to much, thought it’s better than nothing. The Guys next get into the VW emissions cheating scandal, drawing very different lessons from it: Jay sees it as an example of poor management at the EPA (which needed outside help to catch the violation) while Mike says it’s the inevitable result of years of Republican budget cuts to regulatory agencies. Finally, Mike and Jay discuss PETA’s attempt to secure intellectual property rights for a monkey.

The Politics Guys return from their summer vacation tanned, rested, and ready to dive into the free-for-all that is the 2016 GOP Presidential Contest. Mike and Jay agree that modern debates are ridiculous, which may be why the ridiculous Donald Trump seems to be doing so well. Turning to something that’s not actually ridiculous, they discuss what the Federal Reserve didn’t do this week – raise their benchmark interest rate – and why that’s a good thing. Things get heated when Mike and Jay get into the GOP move to defund Planned Parenthood – Jay has major ethical issues with fetal tissue donations (which he doesn’t really think are ‘donations’), while Mike feels that it’s better to donate the tissue to science rather than dispose of it as medical waste. Finally, the Guys discuss a former Nobel Committee member’s comment that giving the Peace Prize to President Obama was a mistake, and look into the effect that climate change may be having on the global Bigfoot population.