Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, available 24-7 at Background Briefing.org.

I'm Ian Masters, and today we'll examine a number of stories and issues in the news.

We begin with the jailbreak in the House, where four Republicans broke ranks to join with

the Democrats in a discharge petition to save the Affordable Care Act, going around Speaker

Johnson, who faithfully follows orders from Trump.

Joining us to discuss the mad and fact-free diatribe, Trump spewed forth to

the nation last night, telling us how bad Biden was and how great he is, is Mike Lofgren, who

formerly spent 28 years working in the Congress as a Republican aide, 16 of which as a senior

analyst on the House and Senate budget committees.

He's the author of the New York Times bestseller. The party is over.

Our Republicans went crazy, Democrats became useless, and the middle class got shafted.

His latest article at Ceylon is,

Trump regime isn't fascist, claims leading intellectual.

It just looks that way. Then with

Trump announcing a naval blockade of tankers exporting Venezuelan oil and the

Venezuelan Navy now escorting these tankers with the US Navy on the horizon

poised to strike, we will discuss what could go wrong with Francisco

Rodriguez, a senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and a

faculty affiliate at the University of Denver's Joseph Corbill School of International Studies.

A native of Venezuela, he's also the founder of Oil for Venezuela, a non-profit organization

focused on finding solutions to Venezuela's humanitarian crisis. His latest book is The Collapse

of Venezuela, Scorched Earth Politics and Economic Decline, 2012 to 2020. And he has an article

...