By Tom Ashbook.
Soul-singer Irma Thomas has been known for years now as the Soul Queen of New Orleans.
When New Orleans gets the blues, so does she.
Last month she won a Grammy for her post-Katrina album “After the Rain”. They call her voice “dark honey”. Sweet, strong, deep and knowing.
This hour On Point: [...]

By Tom Ashbrook
Besieged is the word slapped on the White House this week. Its Iraq push under attack as the Senate now votes for targets for withdrawl.
The president’s Attorney General, Alberto Gonzalez, all but called a liar by his own resigned chief of staff.
Across the pond, old ally Tony Blair looking helpless as Iran [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The Prohibition years, from 1920 to 1933, were simultaneously a wild and buttoned-up era in American history.
Moral crusaders smashed beer bottles and barrels of whiskey. Millions of Americans resisted an intrusive law, in speakeasies and nightclubs and everyday life. And mobsters made fortunes as rum-runners and moonshine boys kept the [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
You might not guess it from the “Made in China” tags that seem to be on everything these days. But even now, in the era of off-shoring jobs and hyper-competition from overseas, the good old USA does still know how to manufacture at home and sell abroad.
Last year saw the biggest [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
There has never been anything quite like ABC TV’s hit drama “Lost.” Yes, there was “The Twilight Zone,” “The X-files,” “Planet of the Apes,” and for that matter “Robinson Crusoe” and “Gilligan’s Island.”
But for sheer mystery and complexity woven around island castaways, “Lost” sets the bar. And that’s even before you add [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It’s tough out there for US Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez. Yesterday in Chicago he ran from a press conference after three minutes as questions rained down on the political corruption of the Justice Department.
Former top attorney Sharon Eubanks threw another big rock in the pond last week. She led the department’s giant [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
If you’re a teenage or twenty-something American male, it may be the catchphrase of the year, drawn from ancient history and a new Hollywood blockbuster.
“Spartans, tonight we dine in hell!” is the campy call drawn from the box office hit “300.” It’s the buffed-up version of the Battle of Thermopylae. [...]

Guests:
Susan Neuman,Professor in Educational Studies at the University of Michigan, former U.S. Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education under President George W. Bush, author of forthcoming book: Changing the Odds: Breaking the Bleak Cycle of Poverty and Disadvantage for Children at Risk
Josh Lerman, Senior Editor at Parenting Magazine
TBD

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Decades after America became a nation of two-income households, American families are still up against the issue of what happens with the kids when mom and dad are on the job.
The biggest study ever of child care kids this week brings us this headline: Bad Behavior Linked to Time in Day [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
Salt Lake City mayor Rocky Anderson is a making a big noise against the Iraq War and President George Bush from the heart of one of the conservative states in America.
Utah is Republican and strongly Mormon. Salt Lake City’s mayor is lapsed Mormon and fiery Democrat. Now, from the deep Mountain [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
California’s rough and ready spiritual seeker Anne Lamott grabs her many fans and followers where they live — in the midst of messy relationships, family crises, bad habits and a stubborn yearning for grace.
Her essay collections have become dog-eared Bibles for an army of readers looking for God, for solace, for wild [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
So, it’s confrontation time this week in Washington. Congressional Democrats are casting votes on Iraq war funding with pullout dates attached. Authorizing subpoenas for top White House officials, including Karl Rove, in the US Attorneys inquiry. Lining up — at least rhetorically — with Al Gore on warnings [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
So, you want to write the great American novel, or read the greats again with a more knowing eye? Francine Prose is your guru and guide.
A dozen novels into her own enviable career, she says the secret to great writing is great reading and its inspirations. Homer for plot. [...]

By guest host Bob Oakes:
President Bush set the terms: He would allow key aides to testify before a Congressional committee about the firings of eight federal prosecutors BUT not under oath, on the record or in public. Democratic Congressional leaders said NO WAY, arguing that THAT approach lacked transparency.
And yesterday Congress struck back. A [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
When online video-sharing sensation YouTube was a couple of scruffy founders and video clips of cats and karaoke, nobody cared in the canyons of old media big power.
But when new media mega-giant Google bought YouTube last year for 1.6 billion dollars, and put its big Google engines behind the start-up, Hollywood and [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Here’s the next big competition coming down the road: a $25 million dollar prize to the builder of the first commercially-viable 100 mile per gallon car.
The crew that mounted the $10 million dollar X Prize for the first reusable private spacecraft is now looking to America’s highways, at global warming, and [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
When you’re telling ghost stories, the twist is always key — the unexpected shocker that jumps out of the closet, the past, the dark. Debut horror novelist Joe Hill has loaded plenty of shockers into his new page-turner “Heart-Shaped Box.”
An aging rock star collects Goth groupies and a raft of morbid momentos: [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
For six decades, American policy in the Middle East was pretty clear: go with the strongmen and never mind the democratic niceties. Stability was what mattered.
Four years ago, George W. Bush declared an end to all that. Stability cannot be bought at the expense of liberty, he declared. [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Say “the tropics” these days, and history comes to mind. Kipling. Pith helmets. Somerset Maughm and gin tonics. Or, if not history, Club Med… Blue water. Travel brochures. Palmy beaches. The belly of the planet has booming industry; warming, rising seas; war and tsunamis.
But [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
These are tough days for the GOP. Scandal. Deficits. A brutal war. And war in its own ranks over where to go next.
The Republican Party that, it seems, only yesterday saw itself as the country’s “permanent majority” has lost both houses of Congress and now looks with mounting [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Poet Robert Frost never wanted to be honored only by an elite crowd. He wanted lots of readers to follow him into woods “lovely, dark and deep,” with snow and horse and farmhouse “and miles to go before I sleep.”
But the celebrated farmer-poet — the crusty, woodsy sage of primary school [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It’s been the week the news just keeps coming, and on many fronts. US Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez started the week on the defensive and ends it on the ropes, with e-mails tumbling out about “loyal Bushies” who would be kept on as US attorneys and others who would be fired. [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook
The country’s been in an uproar over Walter Reed and the treatment of wounded US soldiers coming home from Iraq. Meanwhile, 140,000 soldiers are still out there, still on the firing line, still on patrol.
They are fighting it out more than ever right now in Baghdad, where President Bush’s surge is [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook
If you’re interested, the ads are still running and the loans are still out there. Mortgage loans for one and all, the salesman practically say. No money down. No matter what your credit history. No matter what your income. No documentation required. Just come on down!
And [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Writer and environmentalist Bill McKibben has become a kind of folk hero in the backroads of Vermont and across the country, wherever farmers markets flourish and citizens rise in fear of global warming. Next month, in hundreds of towns and cities, his “Step it up” acolytes will rally to demand faster [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Up and down his Latin America tour, and especially in Mexico and Guatemala in the last two days, President Bush has been peppered with questions about US immigration policy. He’s promised Mexican president Felipe Calderon to push again this year for reform.
At the heart of Bush’s reform proposal has been an [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Americans are among the most religious people on earth, if you ask if they believe. But if you dig a little deeper and ask for a few details on their religion or anyone else’s, don’t expect too much. Surveys show only half of Americans can name even one of the [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
When it comes to oil and war, Halliburton Co., out of Texas, knows how to play big and tough. In the mid-’90s, it hired a former US Defense Secretary, Dick Cheney, as CEO.
When Cheney became Vice President and the US went to war in Iraq, Halliburton became the Pentagon’s biggest private [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Renegade husband and wife philosophers Pat and Paul Churchland met forty years ago in a college Plato class. Their instincts as philosophers — then and now — run outside the philosophy mainstream. Where most philosophers looked to reason and logic to apprehend the human mind, the Churchlands looked — and [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
George Washington played the lottery. So did Ben Franklin. So did millions of Americans last week, when one multi-state jackpot soared to $390 million dollars. Georgia truck driver Ed Nabors isn’t driving a truck for a living any more after his take from that pot. But it’s not [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Heather Byer was eight years into a New York career — lugging her brief case, hitting her marks, doing the lunches, calming her boss — and hating it. It wasn’t rich enough, deep enough, real enough to be her life. Not nearly.
Then one day, Heather Byer — thirty-something, career woman, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It’s been a tough week for the president. Former White House power Scooter Libby is now a convicted felon. His Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez was threatened with early dismissal by Senate Republican Arlen Specter in the US attorney firing scandal. The Walter Reed fallout is still raining down. And [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
When Disneyland Paris opened its gates, French director memorably called the arrival of Mickey Mouse in Europe a “cultural Chernobyl.” When Michael Eisner launched Euro Disney on the Paris Stock Exchange, he was pelted with eggs.
But now, out of Paris, comes a big new art exhibit making a European claim on, of [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The White House hates to say it, but from Mexico to Argentina it’s the word: as George Bush flies south today to Latin America, the US president is, in effect, going nose-to-nose, mano a mano, with Venezuela’s fiery, oil-rich populist president, Hugo Chavez.
While Bush tours five Latin American nations, Chavez will [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Deep in the US Senate’s renewal of the Patriot Act was a nearly-unnoticed provision that let the White House replace US attorneys — the nation’s powerful, frontline criminal prosecutors — with no oversight from anyone.
Three months ago, the Justice Department headed down that road with a vengeance, canning seven US Attorneys in [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
January 28, 2003, in his State of the Union address, President Bush told the nation that Saddam Hussein had recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa. The mushroom cloud /WMD/nuclear threat was in play. Eight weeks later, America was at war.
The problem was the nuclear charge wasn’t true. When [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Poet, screenwriter and novelist Jim Harrison writes in the old style — of big appetites, big passions, earthy love, men’s men, and the woods. He did it in “Legends of the Fall,” the novella that put a young Brad Pitt on the big screen, wrestling the bear in the rugged Montana [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Three little words: alternative minimum tax. If you haven’t met it yet, you may soon. And it hurts.
In 1969, Congress designed the tax to catch zillionaires who were paying not a penny in taxes while the rest of the country dug deep to pay for the Vietnam War. Now, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
9/11 was a nightmare but security and political analyst John Mueller says we should have snapped out of it by now. As bad as terrorism is, he charges, America’s overblown reaction to it has been worse.
It has worsened our finances, with billions spent on defenses for sites that will never be [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It was all public hugs and hand-holding this weekend in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia as the tough-talking president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, made his first-ever presidential visit to the Saudi kingdom.
No big agreements but a tension-easing show of neighborliness between the big oil power and the big rising power in a region screaming [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
Seven centuries ago, in the pages of the great classic “The Decameron”, Italy’s Boccaccio sent 14th Century Florentines out to escape the plague and get bawdy telling fantastic stories in the hills.
They looked to survive a nightmare by laughing and loving and getting very human in retreat.
Flash forward to 2003, and Pulitzer prize-winning [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
China’s stock market fire drill had the world by the throat this week but, behind the wild downs and ups of the markets, there was a lot going out there.
Dick Cheney in earshot of the bomb blast in Afghanistan. A general out on his ear for the disgusting conditions facing wounded American [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
Being black in America can look pretty sweet these days - if you’re Dr. Dre, Beyonce, Tiger Woods, Oprah, Barack Obama and a whole lot more of the big winners in business or culture or sport.
But if you’re a regular black guy or gal in the world that novelist Michael Thomas paints, it’s [...]

By Tom Ashbrook
Al Gore took it in the teeth in the 2000 presidential race. A half million popular vote victory in the general election, and no White House for stiff Al Gore.
He went home to Nashville. He grew a beard. Taught a course. Put together a little slideshow on global warming and flew coach around [...]