Everything Explained WAMC Northeast Public Radio

What do San Francisco, Chicago, and Albany, NY have in common? They’re sanctuary cities – among hundreds of other U.S. cities, states, and counties that have declared their support for immigrant populations, often by limiting their cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement – otherwise known as ICE.
Safe havens to some, crime-infested danger zones to others – sanctuary cities have become the topic of heated partisan debate. Particularly since President Donald Trump took office, promising to strip them of funding. (more…)The post What Are Sanctuary Cities? appeared first on WAMC Podcasts.

President Donald Trump’s promise of a border wall has divided many on both sides of the issue. This summer, the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy brought about the removal of thousands of migrant children from their parents to child detention centers across the United States. The move sent shockwaves throughout the country, but for many, it’s deja vu.

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Net Neutrality is a mess of divisive, confusing, and controversial opinion. And the clutter has only worsened over the last few months. After the Federal Communication Commission’s repeal of the Obama-era rules in December of 2017, chat forums, comment sections, and news articles about the repeal sprang up in every corner of the exact place that Net Neutrality was attempting to regulate – the Internet. Now, the beginning of the repeal process will start on April 23rd.
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What is Cambridge Analytica? The recent word that 50 million Facebook users had their personal information collected during the 2016 presidential campaign by a data analytics firm has brought new and intense scrutiny on Facebook and social media.
Posting privately to your friends, liking and disliking posts and pages may seem harmless enough, but that seemingly benign information can be mined, studied, analyzed, and transformed into political campaign ammunition. Everything Explained’s Brian Shields spoke with Prof. James Hendler, the Director for Data Exploration and applications at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy about the data giant.
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Electoral districts ebb and flow. The ever-changing population in different areas across the country creates the challenge of drawing the districts as close to accurately representative as possible. When drawing, the lines can get a little blurry, communities can become divided, and the way the edges of the districts are formed can determine the outcome of an election. At least, this is what legal teams across the country are trying to prove. The process of making the districts is called Gerrymandering. And today, we have an expert on the pod, to help us breakdown the fundamentals of the practice.
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Ruth Greenwood, a senior counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, litigates a variety of redistricting cases. Along with co-counsel, she represents the plaintiffs in two high-profile partisan gerrymandering cases (Gill v. Whitford and LWVNC v. Rucho). On a federal level, not every state has to deal with this issue, some smaller states, like Vermont for example, only have one U.S. Rep. seat for the entire state. Which makes the issues more centered around medium to larger sized states, like Wisconsin, North Carolina, Texas, California, and New York. So Ruth, to start off the conversation on an broad note, what is gerrymandering?
Credits:
Everything Explained is produced by WAMC Northeast Public Radio with assistance from Kristin Gilbert and Ashleigh Kinsey. Also we’d like to give a special thanks to Ruth Greenwood. I’m your host Patrick Garrett. As always we want to remind you to subscribe and leave a review because like everyone else in the “pod-realm” will tell you, it helps us to make more podcasts like this one.The post What Is Gerrymandering? appeared first on WAMC Podcasts.

If you live in New York state, you’ve seen the signs. Vote to elect. Vote to re-elect. Vote YES. Vote NO on the Constitutional Convention. But what is … the Constitutional Convention?
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