Politics

City Councilman Bill Henry is sponsoring four charter amendments that would shift the balance of power in Baltimore.  We ask him what they would do.

Then, Regina McCarthy takes us through the history of winemaking in Maryland, all the way back to the catawba vines planted by Thomas Jefferson's friend John Adlum in the early 19th century.

And on the 11th anniversary of the terror attacks, Tom Hall takes a tour of the Maryland 9/11 memorial at Baltimore's World Trade Center in the Inner Harbor.

With President Obama and GOP challenger Mitt Romney neck-and-neck this presidential election, the swing vote is more coveted than ever. Linda Killian, political journalist and senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, says 40 percent of all registered voters are independents. But exactly who makes up this massive bloc?  In “The Swing Vote: The Untapped Power of Independents,” Killian focuses on how Virginia, New Hampshire, Ohio and Colorado figure in the national election and why independents in those states feel alienated from the two-party system.

Baltimore City has what’s known as a “strong mayor” form of government, in which the executive branch has powers that far outweigh those of the council.  Now, one of the councilmembers is sponsoring a package of four charter amendments that would shift that balance of power. 

A look at the role first ladies play in presidential politics with culture commentator Sheri Parks, associate dean and associate professor of American studies at the University of Maryland College Park, Maryland.

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.

Well, it’s not quite the oratory of, say, Daniel Webster or Henry Clay. But it’s how Congress communicates these days.

Here to talk about the 2012 election and all things social media is our monthly guest Nathan Jurgenson, a sociology Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland. His co-guru P.J. Rey will be back next month.

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.

We check in on the Republican National Convention, in its third day and after speeches by Ann Romney and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Tuesday night. With Dave Schwartz, Maryland State Director of Americans for Prosperity, Heather Olson, 2nd Vice Chair of the Prince George's County Republican Central Committee and Jill Homan, incoming RNC national committeewoman for Washington, DC who is attending the convention.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Donald Barlett and James Steele say Congress and the federal government is complicit in the destruction of American manufacturing and the secure jobs that once fueled our economy. They say it helped dismantle private pension systems while cutting taxes for the wealthy. Bartlett and Steele, who have been reporting on U.S. economic and political issues for more than 30 years, are authors of “The Betrayal of the American Dream.”

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