Hopping Mad With Will Mcleod & Arliss Bunny

11 January 2016 - Ever since the Black Lives Matter hashtag rose to prominence I have found myself on a steep learning curve. Our guest for this show is Dr. Lawrence Brown an Assistant Professor at Baltimore's Morgan State University School of Community Health and Policy. Dr. Brown is a rising national voice spreading the word that Jim Crow never died and the kind of hyper-segregation seen in Black communities, like that in Baltimore, has shocking and far reaching public health and societal consequences far more pervasive than are initially apparent. Dr. Brown clearly conveys the implications of policies, both historical and current, which have been imposed on Black communities. In doing my pre-show research I read many of Dr. Brown's articles but the one that really knocked me back is one I recommend that you read as well. Down to the Wire: Displacement and Disinvestment in Baltimore City encapsulates many of Dr. Brown's points and should be required reading for everyone seeking greater unde

14 December 2015 – We were so fortunate this week. Instead of our usual show, we decided to invite some other lefty podcasters to join us and we just opened it cup for a free-range discussion. JM Bell, of The LEFT Show, was with us from Utah along with Travis Rosen and Rachel Hutcheson, from Irreverent Testimony. The LEFT Show and Irreverent Testimony are both podcasts I never miss and are wildly different from one another. Please check them out as they are examples of smart, well-informed and funny people doing good work. Many Hoppy Carrots of the Season! – Arliss

7 December 2015 - We are back with an all new show including a first-rate interview with Police Chief David Hewitt. For eleven years Chief Hewitt has been running a small town, Midwest department which is known for its considered approach to law enforcement. His thinking on social justice, the militarization of policing, use of force and the pressures being placed on law enforcement to fill gaps which are not being met at the source are all well worth hearing. Listen to him saying "You can't arrest your way to" a solution. If he could tell all departments across the nation one thing he said, "You can't take that bullet back." Every department is not Chicago or Ferguson. It's important to hear from a Chief who thinks deeply about the challenges and solutions in modern policing. Will reassures us that Turkey and Russia are very unlikely to go to war no matter what all the various talking heads are saying. These are nations which do not now and have not ever had an alignment o

23 November 2015 - The news just doesn't ever seem to get any easier to watch, does it? With the horror of terrorism and the insanity of our nation quaking in fear at the prospect of extending our hearts to the very people who have fled the terrorists we so despise, it has been a long week. So much for that whole "...home of the brave..." thing, right! Maybe it's just me but I do find it helps me to be able to cope when I can put it all into political, historical, economic and religious context. Middle East expert Landon Shroder (@LandonShroder on Twitter) is back again this week to help us with that. The on-air interview is just the beginning. There is more than an hour of additional insight in the Extra Mad (extended) podcast version. Having lived in Iraq for a number of years, Landon has lived with this war and his personal experience and expertise is exceptional. This week, as promised, I am talking about taxes - how they work, what they can do and what they really, truly, factually

21 November 2015 (for 16 November show) - I should begin by apologizing for not having posted here this past Monday. My family experienced a serious (and ongoing) family emergency. As we all learned again this week, be it via media or in person, life can be completely and utterly changed in just a moment. That being said and in the lee of the attacks in Egypt, Beirut and Paris, Will was left to handle the podcast alone with no notice so he soberly took a look at world events and ran our first interview with Middle East expert, Landon Shroder. When we ran it initially, the first part of the interview was on-air and the rest was available only via the Extra Mad (extended) podcast version. This past week Will ran the full interview on-air. Will also took a moment to pull some rumor weeds out by the roots. Post-Paris attacks separating fact from fiction is essential and something you can be sure will not be the natural default of the GOP. For anyone who expected me to be talking about taxes in this podcast, s

9 November 2015 - Today on Hopping Mad, Arliss was unavailable to record the intro, but was still able to cover her usual financial beat, explaining the power of a fiat currency. Will covered Comcast's Data Caps, and our guest was Professor Francis Boyle, Human Rights Lawyer and International Law Expert. He explained that the Hawaiian situation is unique, as the laws which apply to Native Americans apparently do not apply to Native Hawaiians. Unfortunately, his time was limited, so there is no Extra Mad section this week. But the good news is that we're now on both Stitcher and iTunes! For those of you who prefer the direct RSS feed it is https://www.buzzsprout.com/50892.rss. Thanks for listening, Everyone. I promise I'll write a bio portion for my part of the site soon. -Will

2 November 2015 - This week we interviewed an expert on Common Core and, seriously people, she was incandescent. Even if you don’t have kids in school, you REALLY want to listen to this interview. Debra is a teacher-consultant of the National Writing Project and the California History Project, a school district Director of Libraries and Literacy leader, with a PhD in Language, Literacy and Culture from UCBerkeley. She has 25 years classroom teaching experience and provides professional development for teachers. So, clearly, she’s a rock star. What is especially revelatory about this interview is that Debra talks about Common Core from so many different perspectives. She has been on the front lines of Common Core since years before it made it into classrooms and she has the kind of insight that can only come from depth of experience. Will is talking about bird and bat guano this week. What!?! You think I’m making that up? He is covering the Spratly “Islands” and the claim made to them by China. The diplomati

26 October 2015 – This week we were fortunate enough to have Landon Shroder (@LandonShroder on Twitter) join us for the interview. Landon spent seven years living in Iraq representing Royal Dutch Shell, the last five of which as Shell’s head of intelligence and assessment. Now he is writing for Vice News and continuing to cover the region as a journalist. Landon gave us an incisive interview for the broadcast show but the podcast version, below, contains the additional Extra Mad portion of the interview and it is exceptional. Truly. In his block Will covered the new version of crazy in the UK which is so poorly conceived that it may actually lead to the devolution of the UK itself. It’s called English Votes for English Laws or EVEL (pronounced “evil”). You can make of that acronym what you will. I’m going back to do the first of what will be several segments on basic concepts. This week I’m talking about how fiscal policy comes in to being. Also, in response to multiple requests from loyal fans, we finally

19 October 2015 – We started out simply this week with a big tip of the carrot to Whole Foods in thanks for their decision to no longer sell bunny in their freezer section. Rabbit Americans everywhere join me in collective relief. Will and I are both reading unusually good books this week. I’m reading the magical, Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights Nights by Salman Rushdie. I’ll be the first to admit that I never managed to struggle to the end of The Satanic Verses but Rushdie’s new book is in the style of 1001 Nights and is truly a book that has transported me. Will is reading The Discovery of Middle Earth, by Graham Robb. Robb traces the history of the Celts using the results of recent archeology and research. He brings a potentially new slant to the history of a tribe with much greater reach than most realize. After the break Will told us about some of the more recent revelations by Edward Snowden and the realization by British MPs that they too are the subject of surveillance despite the rep

12 October 2015 – It’s true, over the past eight years the Supreme Court has been steadily chipping away at citizen access to Federal courts for civil actions. Not only is the bar to individual access almost impossible to surmount, climbing the mountain of barriers put before those attempting to gain certification for a class action is very nearly impossible. Corporations are people and welcomed into the courts but actual people…not so much. Armando, who is a lawyer, frequent contributor to Daily Kos Radio Kagro in the Morning with David Waldman and a Daily Kos front pager, joined us to walk us through the foundation of citizen access (which was the Sherman Act) the later clarification to access (Conley v Gibson) and then the Roberts’ Court efforts to tear access down through Ashcroft v Iqbal, Bell Atlantic v Twombly, Wal-mart v Dukes and AT&T v Concepcion. I’ll be honest with you, until I hopped on a Twitter link which took me to an article in The Nation, I had absolutely no idea things had become this

5 October 2015 – We realized something this week. While we must maintain a tight 58 minute schedule for the version of our show which airs on Netroots Radio (at 8AM Eastern on Mondays) we have no such limitation for the version which posts here. Joe Firestone, who joined us to talk about his new book, “Who Needs Balanced Trade? Who Needs a Balanced Budget?” was so fascinating that we simply had lots more to ask…so we did. The version of the show here on the site adds an additional 25 minutes of the interview with Joe and you must listen because Joe really had time to dive down and give us some detailed answers to our questions. While we could have called the extended version either, “Extended” or “Directors Cut” we took the path less travelled and went with, “Extra Mad!” because why not have a little fun with it, right? The show starts off with a few minutes on the crazy things happening in Indiana Congressional District 6 / Indiana House District 68. Basically, Jud McMillan needs to keep his pants on and st

28 September 2015 - This podcast was tough. The combination of our learning curve and strange technical issues was exhausting. Eventually, both Will and I ran out of time. We also ran over time. If you heard the podcast when it aired on Netroots Radio you immediately noticed that the introduction was trimmed, there was no interstitial music, there was no opening chatter between Will and I and Will’s comments on the Catholic church were both fascinating and lightening fast. Will, who handles the editing, had to cut seven minutes out so everything not absolutely necessary got thrown overboard. Obviously, we made rookie mistakes. The good news is that it’s a podcast (and does not air live, for now) so I was able to do a new edit on Friday night. (It would have been done much earlier in the week but I have a demanding job and Will spent his week at the dentist…don’t ask. Ouch!) The “extended” edit (Director’s Cut, lol) has returned our full opening, the chatter we recorded but did not use in the podcast that a

21 September 2015 - We survived the launch! It would have been better had it not taken us about eight hours to record the show only to later discover that we still had a strange audio problem in a couple of places but all-in-all we are still in one piece and we are downright hoppy with the result. It’s hard to be anything but thrilled with the end product because we had such a wonderful time talking with SUNY professor and Daily Kos feature writer, Denise Oliver-Velez. I think it’s obvious that Dee is basically a progressive rock star. She answered questions about hope, Puerto Rico, the Latino get-out-the-vote effort and education. I especially loved the conversation about the fact that the Moral Mondays platform and the Black Lives Matter platforms are putting forward issues that are not “new” which is contrary to the commentary by mainstream media. Dee, with her wealth of perspective on progressive movements closed out by commenting on the difference between getting out the word in the 1970s versus the soci