'Alternate Shots'
New episode. Recent developments.
For those of you who are new to News Items, ‘Alternate Shots"‘ is a weekly podcast featuring Richard Haass, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and yours truly, founder and editor of News Items and Political News Items.
Richard has a Substack newsletter called “Home & Away”. That’s the basic idea of the podcast as well.
‘Alternate Shots’ focuses on domestic and international politics, conflicts, trends, ideas, signals and noise. At the end of each podcast, we talk about something from the world of sports. This week we talked about the new quarterback for the Indianapolis Colts, Philip Rivers. Mr. Rivers is 44 years old and has a grandson. He supposedly means there’s hope for us all. This is delusional, but sweet. Pathetic, but touching.
Research shows that the average commute time in the U.S. is 35 minutes. So we try to keep the running time of ‘Alternate Shots’ at ~30 minutes.
In this (our tenth) episode, Richard and I discussed the National Security Strategy document, the “Donroe Doctrine”, Trump’s domestic political woes, trading with China when (eventually) China has everything it needs, and a truly odious visa proposal from U.S. Customs (which reports to the Department of Homeland Security).
To listen to Episode #10, click on the forward arrow below:
(‘Alternate Shots’ podcast with Richard Haass/John Ellis, recorded 12.10.2025. Produced by Dale Eisinger.)
If you prefer, you can listen to ‘Alternate Shots’ on the major podcast platforms. Links to this episode and all previous episodes can be found at APPLE, AMAZON, SPOTIFY and iHEART. ‘Alternate Shots’ is also available on most of the other (smaller) podcast platforms as well.