Government

A look at the DNC and President Obama's re-election campaign, with political writer and analyst Brian Wendell Morton and Kimberly Moffitt, assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and co-editor of "The Obama Effect. Plus calls to Charlotte for on-the-floor analysis with C. Fraser Smith, WYPR senior news analyst, and Ken Ulman, Howard County executive and 2012 convention delegate.

As the deadline looms for the massive budgets cuts put in place by Congress last year to end the stalemate over the nation's debt ceiling, Pulitzer Prize-winning economics writer David Wessel describes the people and the politics behind the federal budget, and why it is on an unsustainable course. Wessel is the author of In Fed We Trust and Red Ink: Inside the High-Stakes Politics of the Federal Budget.

For about two years, from June 2010 until May of this year, our show held a series called the Maryland Morning Screen Test.

Libowitz web extra.mp3

Maryland’s electric utilities are preparing to review their response to the derecho storm six weeks ago. A series of public hearings this week will let customers weigh in on BGE’s performance. We'll talk to a top BGE official, and to Public Service Commission chairman Douglas Nazarian.

Then – remember that Life Magazine cover photo from the end of World War II – a sailor kissing a woman in Times Square?

A new book identifies the woman as a resident of Frederick. We talk with her…and the sailor!

Yesterday, the Maryland General Assembly convened for a special session to take up legislation about gambling.

In the first hour, a look at poverty on the national scale. Is the economy really to blame for the increase? What is happening to our safety nets? W

AARP says the number of older Americans seriously delinquent on loans jumped more than 450 percent in the last five years. Some 3.5 million older homeowners are underwater on their mortgages.  Older African Americans and Hispanics are the hardest hit. A look at how the mortgage crisis has effected the country's senior citizens and left millions of them fiscally vulnerable in retirement.

Journalist, commentator and long-time Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. argues that Americans can’t agree on who we are because we can’t agree on who we’ve been, or what it is, philosophically and spiritually, that makes us Americans. In “Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent,” Dionne tours American history, from the Founding Fathers to Clay and Lincoln and on to the Populists, the Progressives and the New Dealera. He provides an analysis of our current politics that shatters conventional wisdom.