Leid Stories—Trump’s Blackboard Bungle in Arizona and Colorado; Pence Takes It to the Wall; Trump Pivots to Africa with Buhari’s White House Visit; Did Bill Cosby Get A Fair Trial? (Part 2)—05.01.18

A week into a strike by 50,000 teachers in Arizona over long-overdue salary increases and funding for basics like books and school supplies, and one doesn’t get a sense that this constitutes a state of emergency. Similarly, in Colorado, some 10,000 teachers walked off their jobs demanding pay hikes, facility upgrades and new textbooks for students. The state governments say they simply don’t have the money. Shouldn’t this be where Secretary of Education rides to the rescue and brokers a solution?

Vice President Mike Pence decided yesterday to keep the issue of “The Wall” going. He visited a wall-building project in Calexico, Calif., and used it as a backdrop to tell the media that President Trump will have his wall. Earlier in the day, about 150 people (most of them from Central American states) seeking to file for asylum in the United States were turned away at a border-crossing processing center in San Diego. We discuss why it was against both U.S. and international law to turn them away, and why the administration continues to conflate the issue of asylum with illegal immigration.

Listeners continue to share their views about the just-concluded Bill Cosby trial, in which a jury found the entertainer guilty of three counts of aggravated indecent assault for sexually assaulting a female basketball coach he had mentored in his Philadelphia home in 2004. Cosby, 80, faces up to 10 in prison on each count when he is sentenced in June.