The Ron Show

Rev. Senator Raphael Warnock was among those who got to pepper DHHS secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr ., yesterday, and he zeroed in on comparisons RFK of the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Nazi camps and Catholic child sex abuse. Senator Ron Wyden also cornered RFK on his role in the deadly Samoean measles outbreak and Hawaii Governor Josh Green later dubbed RFK a liar....

The White House federal funding "freeze" mandate on Monday through a lot of the nation for a loop - just another chaotic day in a Trump presidency - before a federal judge put the brakes on it. I'm trying to figure out why Republicans in Congress are just rolling over and ceding the legislative branch's equal power to this particular President. They're just ... letting him do...

Dr. Anthony (Tony) Lemieux is a professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta and an investigator with the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Response to Terrorism (START) . He joined me today to discuss the very real, very stark dangers that exist in the aftermath of the sweeping pardons of violent insurrectionists -fomented via the rhetoric of President Donald Trump - by Trump...

The avalanche of Trump-related egregious acts are seemingy too numerous to keep tabs on, but there seems to be bipartisan agreement on his pardoning J6ers ... that it was a bridge too far. Don't get it twisted - Republicans won't actually do anything about it, but they do seem to agree it sends an awful message. On Sunday's 'Meet The Press,' Senators Adam Schiff (D) and Lindsey...

Jay Bookman is a gem of a journalist and opinion writer, and Georgia Recorder is lucky to have him - as am I, on occasion and today is such an occasion. He joined me to discuss his latest - "Stacey Abrams’ political aspirations bookended by bad timing" - to discuss the 2026 Georgia gubernatorial field as it may (or may not) shape up to look like, along with a few other topics - like Dona...

By now many have seen the "two-minutes" version of Bishop Mariann Budde's fourteen-plus minute homily at Washington's National Cathedral yesterday. You know, the one where she spoke directly to President Donald Trump, pleading for mercy towards the LGBTQIA+ and the undocumented immigrant. She later explained further the intent to CNN's Erin Burnett. First, there's the aud...

The second Donald Trump term began as the made-for-TV event you know the former reality TV star sought it out to be, and while "reality TV" is largely fictitious scripting, Trump's inauguration day was very real - with real-life consequences for justice, law & order and both undocumented and DACA status immigrants. To help e understand how real (or not) a threat Trump's focus...

What a confluence of events to dwell on today, of all days. Late last week, as Atlanta prepped for the influx of visitors for tonight's College Football Playoff Championship game, a ⁠ homeless Atlanta man was crushed to death ⁠ by a bulldozer clearing an encampment. I spoke with Sylvia Broome, a program lead/instructor with ⁠ Remerge ⁠ , who knew Cornelius personally, to ⁠ learn more about him...

It's easy to not notice the routine 'state of the state' address Georgia Governor Brian Kemp gave, and t he response from state Democrats '- by Senate minority leader Harold Jones Jr., when a MAGA hissy goes down in the hallway just outside the House chamber before the joint session. Naturally, that tantrum - and subsequent arrest - of state Senator Colton Moore got all the media o...

President Joe Biden's final address from the Oval Office was - of coruse - bittersweet, but also came with warnings similar to Dwight D. Eisenhower's "industrial complex" foreshadowing, only for Biden, it was attached to oligarchs and "big tech." Doing a little "open tab" cleanup, I realized I hadn't gotten around to sharing this (too late now) narrative b...

With just five days before the inauguration of a second Donald Trump term, the trans community in Georgia (and throughout the U.S.) has had to weather a storm of antir-trans sentiment; some of it put to use by the Trump campaign. We check in with Jeff Graham, executive director for Georgia Equality , to get a sense what their activism can accomplish with a decidely-conservative state legislature a...

Jay Bookman wrote a blistering-yet-sobering piece last week for the Georgia Recorder where he spells it out plainly: Republicans pick on the trans community because 'it works," writing "Because transgender Americans are an unpopular, powerless and almost friendless subgroup, which makes them the perfect target for politicians willing to leverage that unpopularity into votes." See, legislating for...

Clearly, the blame for California's current, deadly (perhaps worst-ever) wildfire lies at the feet of (checks notes) Governor Gavin Newsom, L.A. mayor Karen Bass and D.E.I. and not wild climate shifts, (aka 'hydroclimate whiplash' ) parched dry vegetation and hurricane-force winds fomenting a wildfire out of New Year's Eve fireworks . Oh, or 20th century sprawl and a water system not designed to f...

A mid-December article in the New York Times focused on a Rome, Georgia family soon to be ripped apart by a looming second Trump presidency and the promies of mass deportations. Jaime Cachua has lived in the U.S. all but the first ten months of his life, and yet because he wasn't born here and because three-plus decades of politicial futility in Washington has led to no permanent solution for DACA...

Mark Zuckerberg announced earlier this week that Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Threads) is getting out of the "fact-checking" business - just eight years after allowing itself to be a useful tool for Russian and pro-Trump disinformation left unchecked. Noteworthy that they're rolling this out "only" in the United States (to start with, anyway, he says ...) and on the heels of Donald Trump's t̶h̶r̶e̶a...

Friend of the show, Marilyn Marks - executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance - joined me for a wall-to-wall conversation on election integrity in the state of Georgia. First, on the day President Carter left Georgia to be eulogized in the nation's capitol, Marilyn shared a story from Carter's political launch when he overcame a party "boss" ballot-stuffing on behalf of Carter's stat...

I wanted to share the touching tributes from President Jimmy Carter's friends and loved ones today, and told myself that's what I'd do, yesterday. Then I awoke today realizing the date - January 6th - and I couldn't do it. We're 23-plus years removed from 9/11 and it feels as if too many of us lost as much track of January 6, 2021 in just four years as we have that fateful day nearly a quarter cen...

In the wake of the terror attack on New Orleans' famed Bourbon Street, President-elect Donald Trump made the (il)logical leap to tie the Biden administration's border actions to the carnage. Nevermind that it took mere hours for investigators to learn the murderous thug was an American-born former Army veteran who grew up Baptist but converted to Islam before being radicalized. Did Donald Trump do...

Today we're just coming to grips with the horror levied on dozens of revelers on Bourbon Street in the early hours of New Year's Day, and I found it notable that Ken Suguira, a sports writer with the Atlanta Journal Constitution penned - in my mind - one of the more poingant pieces of journalism from the scene . There to cover the University of Georgai's football game, he was, instead, thrust into...

The New York Times released an 11-minute video with never-before-seen footage of a conversation between President Jimmy Carter and the Times in 2006. A rather solid summation of Carter's perilous four-year, one-term presidency and the decision he made to contiue pursuing his ideals, domestically and globally, after leaving office. Let's eavesdrop a little. Politico's politics editor David Ciders c...

When I'd heard of the passing of President Jimmy Carter, I knew right away the two conversations I wanted to have - and I'm grateful both guests had the time for me. Georgia WIN List executive director Melita Easters was a reporter on the ground in Plains, Georgia the night a triumphant Carter returned as "President-elect" and brings a wealth of anecdotes, background and insights into Carter's lif...

Atlanta Journal Constitution opinion writer Bill Torpey minced few words; in fact, he may have over-flowered a bit. Nonetheless, his summarizing the aftermath of a Georgia Appeals Court ruling that Fani Willis and the Fultono County DA's office has to cough up the Trump election interference case lays bare all that Willis and Nathan Wade did to potentially ruin (my opinion) the most rock-solid cas...

Friend of the show Jay Bookman penned a piece chonicling how unpopular taxpayer funded private school vouchers are with conservatives and liberals - red and blue states. He also deftly explained what's happening in Georgia as a program set to aid maybe 6% of the state's student population attend a private school - with 1% of its education budget - suddenly appears to be available to nearly 20% of...

Bill Maher's made a quite comfortable living pointing out how Fox News & right wing talk radio has manipulated a bloc of voters - in his brand of comedic political satire from "Politically Incorrect" to "Real Time" to ... well, now, this era where he doesn't sound all that awfully different than Joe Rogan, honestly. Rogan, of course, is also a white male whose political views are actually very...

As I'd mentioned Monday, I did a lot of reading over the weekend, and was struck by two pieces that offered two Democratic congressional reps offering differing rationales for why Democrats lost control of Washington. What's funny is, they almost actually sound the same, despite one being a blue collar district moderate, the other the new chair of the Progressive caucus .