Tonight's guests are
Daniel Schulman on the Daily Show and
David Boies & Theodore B. Olson on the Colbert Report.
Daniel Schulman is an author who has written about this nation's Koch problem in Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty
Not long after the death of his father, Charles Koch, then in his early 30s, discovered a letter the family patriarch had written to his sons. "You will receive what now seems to be a large sum of money," Fred Koch cautioned. "It may either be a blessing or a curse."
Fred's legacy would become a blessing and a curse to his four sons-Frederick, Charles, and fraternal twins David and Bill-who in the ensuing decades fought bitterly over their birthright, the oil and cattle-ranching empire their father left behind in 1967. Against a backdrop of scorched-earth legal skirmishes, Charles and David built Koch Industries into one of the largest private corporations in the world-bigger than Boeing and Disney-and they rose to become two of the wealthiest men on the planet.
Influenced by the sentiments of their father, who was present at the birth of the John Birch Society, Charles and David have spent decades trying to remake the American political landscape and mainline their libertarian views into the national bloodstream. They now control a machine that is a center of gravity within the Republican Party. To their supporters, they are liberating America from the scourge of Big Government. To their detractors, they are political "contract killers," as David Axelrod, President Barack Obama's chief strategist, put it during the 2012 campaign.
For those who follow the Kochs and their political activities, “Sons of Wichita” does not provide major revelations about how they operate. But Schulman lays out a cogent narrative of Charles Koch’s political evolution, starting as a member of his father’s John Birch Society. When an acquaintance visited the family home in the 1960s, Charles Koch blanched when he saw him carrying a worn copy of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises.” Hemingway “was a communist,” Charles explained to the guest, who had to leave the book on the stoop outside.
Washington Post Book review: ‘Sons of Wichita’ by Daniel Schulman
Schulman has a blog at Tumblr called
Kochology where he posts documents relating to the Koch family.
David Boies & Theodore B. Olson are lawyers who fought to overturn California's prop 8 banning gay marriage. They have written the book Redeeming the Dream: The Case for Marriage Equality documenting the case.
Redeeming the Dream is the story of how David Boies and Theodore B. Olson—who argued against each other all the way to the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore—joined forces after that titanic battle to forge the unique legal argument that would carry the day. As allies and not foes, they tell the fascinating story of the five-year struggle to win the right for gays to marry, from Proposition 8’s adoption by voters in 2008, to its defeat before the highest court in the land in Hollingsworth v. Perry in 2013.
Boies and Olson guide readers through the legal framing of the case, making crystal clear the constitutional principles of due process and equal protection in support of marriage equality while explaining, with intricacy, the basic human truths they set out to prove when the duo put state-sanctioned discrimination on trial.
Redeeming the Dream offers readers an authoritative, dramatic, and up-close account of the most important civil rights issue—fought and won—since Brown v. Board of Education and Loving v. Virginia.
They are America’s odd couple: two superlawyers, one Democratic, the other Republican, who teamed up to overturn Proposition 8, California’s ban on same-sex marriage, in a Supreme Court ruling which made civil-rights history.
David Boies and Theodore B. “Ted” Olson are living proof that bipartisanship is not (yet) dead and buried in Washington. Back in 2000, they faced off in Bush v. Gore, which decided the election. Nine years later, they set aside their party allegiances in favor of a common principle: that equal rights for gays and lesbians to marry was not a liberal or conservative issue. It was a basic human-rights issue.
vanityfair.com
This Week's Guests
THE DAILY SHOW
We 6/18: Kevin Hart
Th 6/19: Hamid Al-Bayati
THE COLBERT REPORT
We 6/18: Katty Kay & Claire Shipman
Th 6/19: Jay Carney
Next Week's Guests
THE DAILY SHOW
Mo 6/23: Bill Maher
Tu 6/24: Jennifer Esposito
We 6/25: Keira Knightley
Th 6/26: Melissa McCarthy
THE COLBERT REPORT
Mo 6/23: John Green
Tu 6/24: Edie Falco
We 6/25: Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton
Th 6/26: Paul Rudd
I should be able to post tomorrow. I have a meeting but it should not run too late.
I saw this little guy on a walk today.