The Brian Lehrer Show

Listeners from France or any other country call in and describe their home country's national holiday and how it compares to the 4th of July.

Caller Jean says in France, the Bastille Day celebration takes place in center of village w/music, dancing. Here it feels more separate.

Elaine in Queens on Jamaica's independence -- there's "a lot of merriment." But she thinks Americans go overboard - bc they can afford it.

Listener says 4th of July celebrates an event, independence, whereas Bastille Day celebrates an uprising against the oppressive monarchy.

Plus: A French army marching band covered of a medley of Daft Punk songs for President Trump and French President Macron:

A federal appeals court has overturned the corruption conviction of Sheldon Silver, former New York Assembly Speaker. Jimmy Vielkind, Politico New York's Albany bureau chief and New York State Senator Todd Kaminsky discuss the court's decisions and its broader implications.

State Sen @toddkaminsky: Silver's case "reveals a much larger gap in the state's ability to criminalize actions that people know are wrong."

@JimmyVielkind points out Gov. Cuomo "really did nothing" in the last session to push for ethics reform.

"The public anger will dissipate and nothing will happen." @JimmyVielkind to @BrianLehrer on Albany's endless scandals and coverups.

State Sen. @toddkaminsky says he's not advocating for a NYS constitutional convention.

Neera Tanden, president & CEO of Center for American Progress and former senior adviser to President Obama and Senator Clinton, talks about the latest developments in the Trump-Russia investigation and looks into the new health care bill.

"We are just at the tip of the iceberg of the Russia issue...I'm glad he's [the special prosecutor] investigating." --@neeratanden.

@neeratanden says "it strains credulity" that all of this is a massive coincidence.

@neeratanden on health care bill's Cruz amendment: if you need pre-existing conditions protection, you'll be priced out of the market.

Throughout this debate, Republicans seem to oppose the idea of insurance itself w/r/t pooling risk, etc. -- @neeratanden.

New York City mayor Bill de Blasio takes calls from listeners and discusses this week in NYC.

@NYCMayor says we definitely don't need a Robert Moses of transit; too much power for one person. Plus, Moses was "racist and classist."

yes! In undergrad urban planning classes we were taught "you don't have to like Moses, but you have to THINK BIG like Moses"

"I've got plenty of will to push the MTA," the Mayor tells @BrianLehrer in response to NYT editorial board & call for political will.

"dangerous concept" -BdB tells @BrianLehrer of letting courts instead of electeds reform property tax system. Says he'd do it term 2.

Danielle Ivory, reporter at The New York Times covering the Trump administration, and Robert Faturechi, reporter at ProPublica covering politics, discuss their investigation into the Trump administration's special deregulation team, led by hires with deep industry ties. And so far it has been no easy feat. Ivory and Faturechi are in the midst of investigating who is part of the teams trying to aggressively scale back government regulations. But the effort is being done with very little transparency.  

"We filed tons of FOIAs just to get the names of these folks," says @RobertFaturechi abt who is even on the special deregulation team.

Ivory and Faturechi's investigation is ongoing and they are asking for help: Got a tip? Email taskforce@nytimes.com or contact Danielle Ivory on the encrypted messaging app Signal at 917-280-2607. 

David Wallace-Wells, deputy editor at New York Magazine and Michael Oppenheimer, professor of Geosciences and International Affairs at Princeton University, discuss the scientific evidence laid out in Wallace-Wells' recent article, "The Uninhabitable Earth." After the article came out, Wallace-Wells got a lot of push back for being too alarming and focusing on the worst case scenario. However, Oppenheimer explains that talking about the extreme cases has value in educating the public. 

Jake Fisher, director of auto testing at Consumer Reports, talks about the latest innovations in car safety features. 

@CRcarsJake says the 2 big new safety features in cars are forward collision warning & automatic breaking.

"It’s not about protecting you in a crash...but it will sense what’s going on and react for you," says @CRcarsJake.

I didn't realize my car had "city braking" until it saved me from a minor accident. It has helped me many times but once caused a problem.

@CRcarsJake says 18% of people they surveyed said the safety features helped them avoid a crash.

We joke my new Ford Explorer has anxiety issues bc she is constantly warning me of impending doom. & yes her name is Dora.

True self-driving cars are not happening any time soon, "perhaps not even in our lifetime," says @CRcarsJake.

Paul McLeary, senior national security reporter for Foreign Policy, discusses the challenges that continue to plague Afghanistan and Iraq even with the recent expulsion of ISIS from Mosul, and how President Trump has begun to formulate a distinctive policy for the region.

Some in the Trump administration are pushing for increasing the use of private security forces, like Blackwater, in Afghanistan, which McLeary says would be unprecedented at this scale. Plus, companies like Blackwater guard US VIPS, and they pride themselves on never losing anyone they're guarding. But, McLeary says they killed a lot of civilians in the process in Iraq...if a car came too close to the person they were guarding, they'd "put a couple bullets in the front grill." 

And he says losing Mosul was a huge blow to ISIS -- to the concept of the Caliphate, and to their revenue and operations. 

Jesse Eisinger, Pulitzer Prize-winning senior reporter at ProPublica and the author of The Chickenshit Club: The Justice Department and Its Failure to Prosecute White-Collar Criminals(Simon & Schuster, 2017), tries to answer the question of why the Department Of Justice seems so reluctant to go after lawbreakers at the big banks.

@eisingerj says he thinks DOJ was worried about prosecuting banks bc of the fragility of capital markets. pic.twitter.com/3yeSpAKg1i

It's been 50 years since the Newark riots took place, sparked by white police officers beating a black cab driver. Rebecca Carroll, editor of special projects at WNYC and Junius Williams, director of the Abbott Leadership Institute at Rutgers Institute--Newark, attorney and author of Unfinished Agenda: Urban Politics in the Era of Black Power (North Atlantic Books, 2014), talk about the riots (or rebellion, the word Williams uses) and the effects they had on the city, and Karen Rouse, WNYC New Jersey reporter, discusses the mayors elected since the riots, and what their tenures tell us about the city's trajectory.

Junius Williams says people were both helped and hurt by the riots in Newark. Nobody wanted violence, he says, but the rebellion, as he calls it, did affect the power structure in Newark. Black people in Newark were able to gain some political and social power as a result of the rebellion.

It's a full house to discuss the 50th anniversary of the Newark rebellion: (l-r) @rouse_karen, @rebel19 & Junius Williams: pic.twitter.com/PvHaA2B3x9

Junius Williams says in Newark, in 1967: "People didn't have any other redress for grievance."

A caller reminds us it's about what happened *leading up* to 1967. "Newark was a powder keg...Newark was a segregated city."