Santa, according to my guest today on The BradCast, is a "democratic socialist". Sarah Palin, on the other hand is...well...Sarah Palin, and she has decided to "un-quit politics." [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

Before we get there today, however, a bit more on the grim news coming out of Ukraine this week, as independently documented evidence of horrific war crimes by Russia continues to mount. On Tuesday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed the U.N. Security Council from Ukraine and charged that if the U.N. is unable to remove Russia's veto, as a permanent member of the Council, then they might as well dissolve it entirely. He has a point.

Then, before we get to Sarah and Santa...The news that shouldn't be news at all. Three Republican Senators have now announced they intend to vote in favor of Joe Biden's nominee, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, perhaps the most qualified jurist every nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court. On Monday night, Utah's Mitt Romney and Alaska's Lisa Murkowski declared they will support Brown's confirmation, joining Maine's Susan Collins who did so last week. None of that should be news at all, but in the Republicans' twisted, hyper-partisanized world, voting for a SCOTUS nominee tapped by a Democratic President apparently it is. During Monday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, South Carolina's Lindsey Graham (who voted for Jackson's appointment to a federal Appeals Court seat just last year, but refuses to vote for her this year) said the quiet part out loud when he declared that if Republicans win back the Senate in November, none of Biden's nominees are likely to be seated to the federal bench.

In other insane GOP Congressional news, Michigan Rep. Fred Upton announced today that he will not seek re-election. He is the fourth of 10 Republican House members who voted in favor of Donald Trump's second impeachment (for inciting the January 6th insurrection) to retire instead of run for re-election.

Meanwhile, way up north in Alaska, more than 40 candidates are now running in the upcoming June Special Election to fill the state's one U.S. House seat, which had been held for 49(!) years by Don Young, the 88-year old Republican Congressman who died suddenly last month.

Donald Trump has chosen his favorite candidate in the race, the one my guest today describes alternately as "The Quitter" and the "former half-term Governor", Sarah Palin. The failed 2008 Vice Presidential candidate is emerging from Alaskan and rightwing media obscurity in hopes of finding relevance again in the far-right wingnut world she helped create during her 2008 run, just before quitting politics halfway through her first term as Alaska's Governor. Palin signed up to run for the Special Election and regular general election primaries --- both to be held on June 11th --- on the final day to qualify, last Friday on April Fools Day. (Seriously.)

We're joined today by one of the nation's foremost Palinologists, JEANNE DEVON, who made a name for herself as "AK Muckraker", helping to introduce Palin to the world in 2008 at her award-winning The Mudflats blog. She has since gone on to co-write a NYTimes best seller, Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin - A Memoir of Our Tumultuous Years, and served as Press Secretary for Alaska's state Senate Democrats and as Communications Director for the state's Democratic Party. (She is currently working with FX to develop a television series based on her book, The Blood of Patriots, which she co-wrote will Bill Fulton about the Alaska militia movement.)

Before we get to Palin and the potentially insane way that Alaska is about to run its Special Election, Devon offers some thoughts on the decades long legacy of the late Don Young who, though "he didn't have that much power anymore" after being stripped of Congressional committee assignments due to "blatant corruption," was still "an institution, and Alaskans like their institutions."

While some in the media have been regarding Palin as the front-runner to fill Young's seat, Devon seems less convinced. "Palin's approval rating and likeability has been underwater since she quit [in 2009.] She is not a popular figure in the state anymore." Devon cites a comment she saw at today one of the "hardcore fringey rightwing" Facebook groups she sometimes drops in on, suggesting those folks do not appear to be fans. "Very hard pass," she reports one commenter as writing, adding "she quit once when the going got tough. And in my mind that defines her entire political career."

A lack of popularity is not all Palin will have to contend with. There are more than 40 candidates running in both the Special and regular primaries, which will be held on the same day. Palin has signed up for both. But in addition to several progressive candidates Devon cites, with impressive resumes and following, she seems most excited about one candidate on the ballot with at least as much "name recognition" as Palin: Santa Claus!

Yes, Claus is "actually a member of the North Pole City Council" and "literally on the ballot". He represents what Devon describes as "one of the most conservative towns in Alaska" and "he is a democratic socialist --- of course --- because he's Santa!"

Devon notes, however, that "Santa Claus has also said he will not run for the next full term. He will just run to finish the end of Don Young's term. Because we are now faced with two elections."

As to those two elections, they will be run under a new scheme in the state. For the first time, anybody who wants to run for office can simply sign up to run, no petition gathering necessary. (Thus, the 40+ candidates!) The top four vote-getters in the primary will then go on to the general election, which will use Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) --- a confusing and difficult to both count and oversee method of voting, allowing voters to rank their choices for the office. (As I explain to Devon, when and if Alaska tires of RCV, as many jurisdictions do after using it, when they discover that neither voters nor candidates understand it, they may wish to look into the simpler Approval Voting method, allowing voters to choose Yes or No for all candidates on the ballot. Easier to understand, to count and to oversee, since computers and centralized counting aren't needed for the complicated math and many rounds of tallying necessary under RCV.)

Of course, Devon has much more insight on what is likely to be a fascinating and/or hilarious race, with both Palin and Clause on the ballot. Additionally, there are six Democrats on the Special Election ballot. Among them, she cites "Christopher Constant, who was the first openly gay person to be elected to the Anchorage Assembly --- and remember, Anchorage is half the population of the state. Then there is Mary Peltola, who long ago served 12 years in the legislature. She's an amazing Native leader who is also an expert in fisheries, which is important up here. And there's a sitting legislator from Fairbanks named Adam Wool. So all of these are Democrats who could certainly fill that slot."

She also has some thoughts to share on Sen. Murkowski, who is up for re-election this year as a Republican --- after voting to remove Trump from office in his second impeachment and declaring her support for Ketanji Brown Jackson this week. Will that doom her chances of re-election? Tune in to find out what Devon has to say about that race --- which will also be run as a top-four primary contest with an RCV general, in a state which has a history of plenty of election and tabulation controversy in recent years.

Finally, after that amusing segment, Desi Doyen joins us to ruin all the fun, as usual, with our latest Green News Report, including special coverage of the U.N. IPCC's latest report warning that Planet Earth is likely to blow past the climate targets set by the Paris Climate Accord, even though, as the scientists note in their report, it is still not too late for the nations of the world to institute mitigation efforts to avoid catastrophic global warming in our all-too-near future...

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Today on The BradCast: While this week will be seen by history as a shameful one for American democracy --- or, more specifically, for 50 Republican Senators and 2 Democratic ones --- it may also eventually become a celebrated week for all of the encouraging criminal accountability news that is now coming in on what seems like an hourly basis for our disgraced and failed former President. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

Among the many stories covered today...

• After a year-long kabuki drama, played out only for the benefit of obstructionist Democratic Senators Joe Manchin (WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), both have decided to include themselves in American history's hall of shame by siding with segregationists, anti-democracy activists and Republican authoritarians in the U.S. Senate to block much-needed protection for voting rights and American democracy. While claiming to support the critical, combined Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act --- which would have helped to standardize voting rights for all, combat the GOP subversion of election results, ended dark money in campaigns, blocked partisan gerrymandering in all 50 states and restored what SCOTUS broke in the Voting Rights Act in 2013 --- the two both voted to ensure none of it could happen. They chose to embrace the Senate's undemocratic filibuster rule instead, just as opponents of civil and voting rights have done over decades of American history. We put a bow on the year-long saga today, share parts of Wednesday night's maddening debate, and join Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) in his vow from the Senate floor to keep coming back "again and again and again" until the job of protecting and saving American democracy is won.

• In far less grim news today, the very very bad week for the Trump Crime Family continues to worsen. After Wednesday's devastating loss at his own packed and stolen U.S. Supreme Court, documents from the Trump White House regarding January 6, 2021 have reportedly begun flowing from the National Archives to the bi-partisan U.S. House Select Committee investigating the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol and Donald Trump's attempt to steal the 2020 election. We review a few interesting points of note from the High Court's crushing 8 to 1 ruling [PDF] rejecting Trump's claim of Executive Privilege in his failed effort to block the release of thousands of documents to the Committee, including what could be some very incriminating video tape.

• With hopes of hiding behind Executive Privilege all but dashed by SCOTUS, the ability of Trump's henchmen to avoid subpoenas for documents and testimony by the Jan 6 Committee is quickly fading as well. On Thursday, Ivanka Trump became the first family member to receive an invitation --- not yet a subpoena --- from the House Committee to answer a number of key questions about her role in January 6th, and her various reported contacts with her father that day and in the days prior. The letter from Committee Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) makes clear that the Committee already has a great deal of information. It will be tricky for Trump's daughter, who served as a White House advisor, to avoid speaking with them. It will be a crime if she lies to them.

• But that's not all. After New York State Attorney General Letitia James detailed evidence of years of bank, insurance and tax fraud by the Trump family this week, on Thursday, Trump's bad week became still worse. Fulton County (Atlanta) District Attorney Fani Willis asked a state Superior Court Chief Judge today to impanel a special grand jury in her nearly year-long probe of the apparent criminal conspiracy by Trump and many others (including WH Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Sen. Lindsey Graham, Rudy Giuliani and more) to harangue, harass and threaten state election officials into reversing results of the Peach State's 2020 Presidential election, won by Joe Biden, in favor of Trump. Willis has said she will decide in the first part of this year whether or not criminal indictments are warranted for "potential violations of Georgia law prohibiting the solicitation of election fraud, the making of false statements to state and local government bodies, conspiracy, racketeering, violation of oath of office and any involvement in violence or threats related to the election’s administration.” Uh, oh.

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, covering the likelihood that Biden's Build Back Better bill, also blocked by Joe Manchin, will now have to be broken up into smaller chunks; the devastating volcano and tsunami disasters in Tonga; smashed heat records in the Southern Hemisphere; and Exxon's new ploy to pretend they give a damn about climate change...

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Of course they knew they were lying at the time. The pathetic thing is, their supporters who they continue to dupe, still believe the lies even today! But just in case anyone needs actual proof of Team Trump's attempt to use a Big Lie to try and steal the 2020 election, new evidence discussed on today's BradCast has been unearthed via the discovery process in one of the many defamation cases now filed against the Trump Campaign and their lawyers, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. [Audio to full show is posted at the end of this summary.]

According to a report from the New York Times today, a memo written by the Campaign in November, included in a recent motion filed by former Dominion Voting Systems employee Eric Coomer, reveals that even while Trump's attorneys were lying to the public about Dominion having stolen the election (so they could try and steal it themselves) via an insane, evidence-free conspiracy theory involving hacked voting machines, George Soros, China, Cuba, Venezuela and its dead President Hugo Chavez (among others), the Campaign knew it was all nonsense.

None of it stopped their attorney from continuing to try and steal the 2020 election anyway, nor from defaming Dominion (which is suing a bunch of them, along with Fox "News" and other far-right outlets) nor Coomer, its former director of product strategy and security, who they falsely claimed to have been key to Dominion's non-existent strategy to hack the election for Joe Biden. Oh, and the Trumpers also falsely claim that Coomer revealed the whole plot while on a recorded conference call with "antifa", with whom he was supposedly a "member," according to the ridiculous MAGA mob claims....even though there is no such actual organization (and, apparently, no such actual recording. Go figure!)

The Dominion/Venezuela/Hugo Chavez part of the story - which also involves another company named Sequoia, which is suing for defamation as well, and has even LESS to do with any theft of 2020 --- is somewhat our fault. The Powell/Giuliani lies about Venezuela and Chavez and Dominion and Smartmatic were spun from a twisted and bastardized version of my exclusive, investigative reporting from 2008 to 2010. (Reporting that was well-sourced, accurate, independently verifiable, and which happily still stand by.) Thus, we spend some time unpacking the latest revelations in this story for you today, as twisted as it all is.

That story, in turn, helps us kick off a host of fresh accountability-related stories today that are unlikely to end well for any of the Trumpers. Among them...

• Republican Senators (and Trump lackeys) Lindsey Graham and Mike Lee also didn't buy the bogus fraud narrative that the Trump White House and Campaign were selling, according to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa's new book, Peril. Not that that prevented Graham from tossing in with the criminal conspiracy in Georgia with Trump, Giuliani and others, to try and steal the election in the state. That criminal conspiracy is currently being investigated by Atlanta's Fulton County District Attorney.

• During a routine scheduling hearing in New York state court, the lawyer for Allen Weisselberg, the Chief Financial Officer at the Trump Organization, who has been indicted along with the company on several felony charges related to an alleged, long-running, tax fraud scheme, described as "sweeping and audacious" by state prosecutors, revealed that new indictments may be coming in the case. Little more was offered as far as who might be indicted and on what basis the attorney made his claims, but there ya go. In the meantime, the judge has pushed the next hearing to July of next year to allow Weisselberg time to review some 6 million pages of documents submitted as evidence in the case, pushing any trial to August or September of 2022 at the earliest. That, of course, presumes Weisselberg, who has worked at the Trump Organization for five decades, doesn't decide to flip on his boss before then to avoid huge fines and years in prison.

• As to fines (and legal fees) that Trump and/or his businesses may have to cough up, given all of the ongoing legal battles they are defending against, that could become a very big problem for the disgraced former President as well. According to new reporting, occupancy rates are plummeting at Trump's properties, including his headquarters Trump Tower in New York and his tower in Chicago. A $100 million loan for the Fifth Avenue building in NYC has now been placed onto a "debt watch list" by the loan's master servicer, Wells Fargo, due to the quickly falling occupancy rate in the building since the end of last year. And that comes as Trump is reportedly personally on the hook for loans up to $400 million coming due in the next couple of years.

• And, if you think it's time for us to move on from Trump accountability coverage since he's no longer in officer, well, we've got some bad news for you. We haven't even given up yet on George W. Bush accountability news! Happily, he faced a bit of accountability this weekend for his years of unprosecuted war crimes, courtesy of a U.S. Iraq war vet this past weekend in Los Angeles. We've got the play-by-play.

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with good news and bad (mostly bad) as the U.N. General Assembly meets this week in New York and much more. Also, remember when the Trump Administration moved the Bureau of Land Management headquarters from D.C. to Grand Junction, Colorado in 2019 to try and pretty much kill the federal agency? Well, that largely worked, with nearly 300 experts, scientists and other employees who chose to resign or retire rather than move their lives across the country for no legitimate reason. Now the Biden Administration's Interior Department is moving the BLM back to D.C.

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It's an old cliche by now that every bad disaster movie begins with a scientist's warnings being ignored. We'll continue to hope, on today's BradCast, that California's Gubernatorial Recall election, with voting under way right now and Election Day next Tuesday, doesn't turn into a bad disaster movie...now that CA's Democratic Secretary of State seems to be ignoring the urgent warnings from a whole bunch of the nation's top computer scientists. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

Several weeks ago, polling of likely voters in the GOP's sleazy attempt to oust Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom from office in a special recall election, suggested a dead heat on the question of removal for the otherwise popular progressive Golden State Guv. Today, more recent polling suggest Newsom is up by more than 10 points among those considered to be likely voters, according to 538's average of recent surveys, and by about 8.5 points in RealClearPolitics' round-up. That, after the very Trumpy, far-right Republican radio host, Larry Elder, has emerged as Newsom's likely replacement if the Governor loses on the ballot's first question as to whether he should be recalled.

In the meantime, as we have been highlighting over the past month, California's state election officials should be very concerned about a new security threat to the election itself following the theft of Election Management System (EMS) software made by Dominion Voting Systems. The vendor's systems are used to run elections in nearly 60% of California jurisdictions. Copies of its EMS software were apparently purloined in the middle of the night by a far-right County Clerk in Mesa County, Colorado last May before being released to the wilds of the Internet during MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell's phony "cyber symposium" last month. That release now poses "critical new risks to the recall election," according to eight of the nation's top cyber security and voting system experts. They sent a chilling, 3-page warning letter [PDF] to CA Sec. of State Dr. Shirley Weber late last week, advising her to mandate a statewide Risk-Limiting Audit (RLA) as the "one critical action" she can and should take immediately to try and mitigate against this "serious threat" which, the experts argue, warrants "emergency action" on the part of state officials.

One of the authors of that letter, DR. DUNCAN BUELL, Chair Emeritus in Computer Science and Engineering at University of South Carolina, joins us on today's show to explain the letter, the threat and the need for the SoS to take action now, rather than waiting until after Election Day.

"If the results are known first and then somebody says 'let's audit', there will always be some skepticism and some conspiracy theory that the reason for the audit is because the result came out different from somebody in power who wanted it to be a different result," Buell tells me. "You've got to mandate the audit before you have the result so the voters know that this is being done specifically for the right reasons."

He goes on to explain how the EMS software, which can now be downloaded and explored for vulnerabilities by anyone with an Internet connection, is "absolutely central to everything" when it comes to running elections on computer systems. "The EMS is almost certainly going to be configuring ballot styles --- even for hand-marked [paper] ballots, where the bubble is to be filled in, in terms of position on the page --- and it's going to be the system at the end of the day that does the tabulations. So anything that is that central is really critical."

When I ask if it's an overstatement to refer access to the EMS software as "the keys to the kingdom" when it comes to computerized voting and tabulation systems, Buell confirms: "I don't think that's an overstatement at all. That's very much the case."

Even with the recent shift in polling, suggesting a possible lead for Newsom in the Recall, Buell notes, "I don't necessarily think either side should be breathing a 'sigh of relief' because the problem really is that the election system needs to be secure, and the election process has to be done in a transparent way that voters can trust and understand. With the release of the [EMS] software, it's hard for anyone to really feel that what's going to happen is what ought to happen unless there is a statistically sound Risk-Limiting Audit conducted after the fact, just to make sure things got done right. This is a question of confidence, transparency, and the fact that we don't get to do elections over."

He offers much more insight on all of this during our conversation today, as based on his many years of experience with voting systems as both a Professor and expert witness in voting system related cases and challenges across the country. We discuss the lack of response the eight top experts have so far received from Sec. Weber in CA, and a dismissive --- and arguably naive --- statement given by her office to AP last week following the release of the letter.

"I have seen well-meaning election officials with too little skepticism and too much hubris," Buell warns. "I think that's a problem. We don't know what the results are going to be, so we don't know ground truth for what's going to come out of this recall election in California. We can't do it over. This means that, yes, all of the processes have to be rock solid. But it also argues that there needs to be a way, after the fact, to make sure that the outcome that you think you got is the outcome that you should have gotten. That's what one of these RLAs, Risk Limiting Audits, will do."

He also observers that California is lucky, in that the inventor of the RLA protocol, Philip Stark of U.C. Berkeley, is right here to help. Stark is also a signatory of the letter to Weber. He joined us on the show several weeks ago, just after the stolen Dominion EMS software was released, to explain the serious concerns at that time --- well before the national media had noticed any of this, and before CA's SoS got around to seemingly ignoring the warning and advice of the nation's top experts in the field.

Given that Donald Trump is already falsely and predictably claiming that the CA Recall is "a rigged election", as is Fox "News", it's even more imperative that Weber mandate a professional, publicly witnessed, statewide post-election audit now (as opposed to the type of scammy, secret, "audit" theater recently carried out by inexperienced, partisan, conspiracy buffoons in Maricopa County, Arizona, for instance) before the computer-tallied results of next week's critical Recall Election are known.

Speaking of fraud and conspiracy buffoons, we have a bit of fresh news this week about the slow, but still "ongoing" criminal investigation by Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fanni Willis into the conspiracy led by Donald Trump to try and strong-arm Peach State officials into stealing the election on his behalf last year. That probe could also end up targeting fellow conspirators Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Rudy Giuliani.

And then we close with the really really dumb comments from MyPillow conspiracy buffoon Mike Lindell, in which he recently seems to have thrown himself under the bus on his own streaming video channel, in regards to the $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit he is currently facing from Dominion Voting Systems...

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On today's BradCast: Maybe we've been too quick to say that Republicans no longer have any governing philosophy or legislative agenda. They do. And it's being carried out. Just not be elected officials. [Audio link to full show is posted below.]

But first up today, following 'good' news for Alabamians on yesterday's BradCast, as the state's corrupt, lying, homophobic, vote suppressing Republican Sec. of State John Merrill was publicly revealed as the sleazy, cheating, liar that he is (joining a very long line of corrupt, lying, cheating top Republicans in the state, as we break down today), some less good news today for workers in the state.

The unionization vote at Amazon's warehouse in Bessemer, near Birmingham, apparently lost by a nearly two to one margin, after millions were spent in a campaign by the company to scare and misinform its workers. The union is crying foul, charging that the nation's second largest private employer violated labor laws in its campaign to propagandize workers at the facility. They vow to challenge the company's "lies, deception and illegal activities" with the National Labor Relations Board.

"We won’t rest until workers' voices are heard fairly under the law," the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) President railed in a statement on Friday after results were announced, claiming the company illegally interfered with the vote. "When they are, we believe they will be victorious in this historic and critical fight to unionize the first Amazon warehouse in the United States."

For their part, Amazon disputes all of the union's charges, asserting that their "employees heard far more anti-Amazon messages from the union, policymakers, and media outlets than they heard from us." That, even after Amazon posted anti-union messages, literally, inside of bathroom stalls at their Bessemer fulfillment facility and forced workers to sit through hours of seminars on the evils of unionization.

Meanwhile, at the White House today, Joe Biden announced his new Executive Order to form a bi-partisan Presidential Commission to examine potential reform of the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as the federal judiciary overall. The declaration makes good on a 2020 campaign promise in response to calls for expansion of the GOP's stolen and packed Court. A report is expected in six months, following a series of public hearings by the Commission. Of course, any actual reforms to SCOTUS would likely require ending or modifying the Senate filibuster, which Lord Joe Manchin has expressly prohibited at this time.

As our guest notes today, that all works out great for the Republican Party who, at first glance, appear to no longer have any actual party principles, governing philosophy or legislative agenda, beyond suppressing voting rights in order to keep themselves in power.

But that's not actually true, argues our guest, Supreme Court expert IAN MILLHISER, Senior correspondent at Vox.com and author of the new book, The Agenda: How a Republican Supreme Court Is Reshaping America. He details in both the book and his recent New York Times op-ed that the GOP does, in fact, have a legislative agenda. But it's not being carried out by either of the elected branches. "Its agenda lives in the judiciary," he explains, "and especially in the Supreme Court."

Millhiser runs down the extraordinary agenda that activist jurists at SCOTUS have accomplished on behalf of Republicans from 2011 to 2020, and warns there is much more to come as "the Supreme Court is now the locus of policy-making" while GOP lawmakers in Congress have halted the passage of pretty much any actual legislation.

"We are basically at the end of a lost decade in Congress," he tells me. "From 2011 when Republicans took over the House, until 2020 when the pandemic happened and doing nothing really wasn't an option, Congress did a lot of nothing.  They passed the Trump tax bill, but there was very little major legislation enacted." During that same period, however, the Republican-dominated activist SCOTUS was exceedingly busy.

"They severely weakened the Voting Rights Act. They basically dismantled much of our campaign finance law. They permitted states to opt-out of the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. The Supreme Court created this new religious liberty doctrine that allows people with religious objections to the law to diminish the rights of other people. They weakened sexual and racial harassment laws. They expanded something called forced arbitration, which allows your boss, or really any company you deal with, to force you to sign away your right to sue them. They undercut public sector unions. They effectively eliminated the President's recess appointments power. They halted Obama's Clean Power Plan," Millhiser summarizes.

He goes on to preview more of what the Court has in store, particularly when it comes to voting rights, noting that this Court has been "attacking democracy in two ways --- by preventing the people in office from governing, and then also by harming the process that we use to pick who our leaders are."

So, how can this mess be turned around? Millhiser warns it's unlikely to be correctly quickly. But, until it can be, Americans must continue to vote in large enough numbers to ensure there are lawmakers in office who actually want to protect democracy rather than destroy it and, ultimately, reform our broken judiciary.

Finally, we leave on a slightly more upbeat note, with more from former Republican House Speaker John Boehner's new book in which describes his own party as "unrecognizable" now; says he was wrong to go along with the impeachment of Bill Clinton; calls out the rightwing media echo chamber for poisoning our politics; blames Donald Trump for sowing "chaos" and inciting the "bloody insurrection on January 6th" by "claim[ing] voter fraud without any evidence", while reserving his greatest contempt for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

Why is that a "more upbeat note"? Because it gives us the chance to close today with a new song from national treasure Randy Rainbow about how much America loves to hate on both Senators Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham. Enjoy!...

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If nothing else, the thing to remember from today's BradCast is that not one single Republican in either the House or Senate voted for Joe Biden and the Democrats' remarkably robust, progressive and equitably written American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion COVID rescue and relief package that history may someday regard as the long-overdue end of the four-decade old Reagan Era.

The President signed the sweeping bill on Thursday, which our friend David Dayen at The American Prospect described today as "maybe the largest pure economic uplift bill in U.S. history." GOPers may come to rue the day they didn't vote for it. Especially in 2022 when some of the key provisions --- like lowered health care premiums and monthly checks amounting to up to $3,600 per child, per year --- will expire unless those provisions are made permanent.

We discuss today a number of the less reported pieces built into the ARP, most of which --- unlike previous stimulus and rescue plans over the past several decades --- are crafted to benefit the poor and working class, and actually help lift many of them out of poverty. That is, by contrast, with the Trump/Republican 2017 tax cuts which also cost about $2 trillion, but overwhelmingly benefited corporations and the already wealthy.

All Republicans in both house of Congress voted against a nearly $2 trillion measure meant to largely help the middle class and the poor. Yet all Republicans in both houses of Congress voted in favor of the nearly $2 trillion measure to help the rich and corporations, which were already enjoying record profits at the time. Got it? Please keep that in mind --- and share it with your friends, family, neighbors and co-workers, in case they are lied to about all of this --- when 2022 rolls around.

This bill marks a fundamental progressive change in the way our federal government has been doing business for the past four decades since the so-called Reagan Revolution. And it comes not a moment too soon, as we discuss today.

Today also marks the one year anniversary since the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus to be an official pandemic, when I stated on the program (to the surprise of, at least, Desi Doyen) that America was "shutting down". We share a clip of that somewhat breathtaking historical moment today.

More than 2.5 million have since died around the world, but the U.S., under Donald Trump's horrifically failed leadership, saw more deaths than any other country, with more than half a million lost here and still counting. That, even as we represent only about 5 percent of the world's population.

It is also the 10th anniversary of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster that struck Japan in 2011. We remember that still-ongoing disaster as well today, and the nearly 16,000 lives that were lost that fateful day.

In somewhat brighter news...As Republican state lawmakers around the country are moving hundreds of bills in more than 40 states to try and disenfranchise voters in a way not seen since the end of Reconstruction, according to a new analysis by Washington Post, it may be Donald Trump's attempted election fraud that could be the biggest news in coming weeks. It appears he may be in even more trouble than it previously appeared in the state of in Georgia!

A new recording of his phone call to the top Georgia state election investigator, made during a post-election audit in Cobb County prior to Christmas last year, was released Wednesday night by the Wall Street Journal. We share the full, gob-smacking conversation, in which our then President is heard buttering up the investigator and telling her, among other things, that "when the right answer comes out, you'll be praised."

The newly released 6-minute recording with the Georgia Secretary of State's chief investigator Frances Watson, can't really be heard in any other way than Trump hoping to encourage her into finding "fraud" where none existed. The recording is now undoubtedly part of the growing body of evidence being examined by Fulton County, Georgia's District Attorney, Fani Willis. The Democratic prosecutor is investigating "the solicitation of election fraud, the making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies, conspiracy, racketeering, violation of oath of office and any involvement in violence or threats related to the election's administration" after the 2020 Presidential election in the Peach State.

Willis has reportedly hired a racketeering and conspiracy expert for her grand jury probe, which could ultimately rope in Trump, his former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, his attorney Rudy Giuliani and even Sen. Lindsey Graham, who are all known to have tried to encourage state officials to change the results of Georgia's 2020 Presidential election after Trump lost. That alone is a state felony punishable by a year in jail. With added charges for racketeering and conspiracy, those convicted under those state felony statutes could face 20 years in jail!

Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with more on the 10-year anniversary of the still-ongoing disaster at the Fukushima Daichii nuclear plant and several much brighter and more hopeful pieces of news...

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On today's BradCast: The Donald Trump Crazy Train keeps chugging along. And its getting crazier, and seemingly farther off the tracks with each passing hour as the outgoing President's days in the White House continue to diminish and his likelihood of facing criminal accountability grows nearer and nearer. One of the biggest remaining questions is how many of his supporters are still to get run over by that train.

Among the many stories we cover today...

• Before we dive deep into The Crazy, some very grim milestones in the COVID crisis which, turns out, wasn't a hoax at all, as both Donald Trump and Senator Ted Cruz "guaranteed" us before the election. On Wednesday, there were more than 200,000 new cases, more than 100,000 hospitalizations and more than 2,777 deaths confirmed from COVID. All of them single day records, as the pandemic will continue to get far worse in coming months before it begins to get better. All thanks, in no small part, to idiots like Trump, Cruz and whole bunch of other Republicans who sadistically sacrificed their constituents' lives in dashed hopes of seeing Trump re-elected;

• Following Attorney General Bill Barr's comments to AP earlier this week that, "to date," the Dept. of Justice has "not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election," Trump, as expected, reportedly blew a gasket. It resulted in a two and half hour meeting for Barr at the White House and Trump said to be considering whether he will now fire his second AG, despite his years of covering up and lying for the President and his unprecedented directive to dozens of Asst. U.S. Attorneys to investigate bogus claims of "massive fraud" before and after the election;

• On Thursday, the rightwing Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected the Trump Campaign's latest attempt to toss out hundreds of thousands of votes in a state that Trump lost. Of note, as has been the case in every suit they've filed (by way of contrast to what they say publicly to the chumps and suckers who believe in them), Team Trump offered zero evidence of fraud in their complaint. Rather, they complained about absentee ballot procedures that have been in place since before the 2016 election, when Trump is said to have won the state, as well as during this year's primaries. Apparently they forgot to claim that WI's absentee voting laws were illegal in those past elections. The suit was rejected today, however, because the court ruled it needs to be filed in a lower state court first before it can be heard by the state Supremes. The Campaign also filed another federal case in the state on Wednesday. It does not argue their was fraud in this year's election either;

• It's become so embarrassing that even top Trump sycophant Sen. Lindsey Graham is taking to Fox "News" to tell the Trump legal team that they need to provide proof of their fraud claims in court. "Doing a video is not proof," he said, shortly after Trump released a 46-minute video on Wednesday, falsely claiming (without evidence, naturally) that he actually won virtually every state in the union this year;

• Lack of evidence of fraud, however, has not stopped the Rudy Giuliani Traveling Dog 'n' Pony Show. After making presentations to GOP state legislators in "hearings" held in rented hotel banquet rooms in Pennsylvania and Arizona this week, the Republicans of the gerrymandered Michigan state legislature opened an actual hearing room in the state capital to the Rudy Show. It did not go well. We share the testimony from Melissa Carone, of one of the "witnesses" that Rudy hauled up to the stand. It's something to behold;

• Meanwhile, down in Georgia on Wednesday, a huge "Stop the Steal" rally at the Peach State capital, headed up by self-disgracing attorneys and Trump Crazy Train Conductors Sidney Powell and Lin Wood (who may actually be mentally ill), likely drove the what's left of the actual GOP crazy. Wood attacked the very Trumpy Republican Governor Brian Kemp, resulting in "Lock him up!" chants from the QAnon brain-poisoned crowd, before instructing the misinformed throngs that they should absolutely not vote for incumbent Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler or David Perdue in the upcoming January 5th runoff elections that will determine partisan control of the U.S. Senate;

• Finally, we close with some helpful words, believe it or not, from far-right, not insane Trump supporter Erick Erickson. In a Twitter thread this week, the former Editor-in-Chief of the rightwing RedState blog, finally seems to have had enough of the madness of GOP conspiracy theorists who now believe that Trump's own DOJ, FBI, CIA, Attorney General, and the Republican Governors of states like Georgia and Arizona, not to mention others, have all teamed up to steal the election for Joe Biden. "Maybe…and I know this might just blow your mind…but maybe what if you've been lied to the whole time. There is no conspiracy. There is no theft of the election," Erickson unloads, suggesting that "maybe, just maybe" the problem is Trump and supporters who can't understand that "ultimately it is really you who are the problem because you so willingly got played and even now want to be played because now you're emotionally invested in a cause and a candidate and to admit you were played and he lost and there was no deep state conspiracy or theft of the election would actually make you look bad. So it's better to double down on the lies and bullshit and blame everyone else."

Sounds about right. Thanks, Erick. You can stop blocking me on Twitter now.

Buckle up and/or pop a bucket of popcorn or two for today's BradCast...

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On today's BradCast, we open with the breaking news about the longest serving Senator in Congress. 87-year old Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley from Iowa has tested positive for the coronavirus. We wish him well, as the COVID crisis explodes across the nation because Grassley's party and President failed to even try to combat the deadly pandemic that has, so far, killed almost a quarter of a million Americans, and may kill as many more by the time Donald Trump mercifully leaves office in January. The rest of today's show is moderately less infuriating. [Audio link to show follows below.]

We start off today with good news/bad news stories regarding both the incoming President-elect and the definitely, whether he's man enough to say it out loud, soon-to-be-former outgoing President. Unfortunately with 64 more days until he's out, by law, the increasingly unstable Trump still has his finger on the nuclear button. The bad news is, as the New York Times reports, he is attempting to launch an attack on Iran his final days. The predicate is a recent report from the the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) finding that --- thanks to Trump reneging on the hard-fought, successful 6-party deal struck under President Obama that prevented Iran from being able to build a nuclear weapon --- the nation is once again rebuilding its nuclear stockpile. The good news is that there are apparently just enough not-insane top officials left in the White House and Pentagon that they were reportedly able to talk our deranged President out of sparking WWIII on his way out the door. For now.

The good news/bad news regarding President-elect Joe Biden is that, according to sources who spoke with NBC News, he is disinclined to seek accountability for the many crimes committed by Trump and his administration over the past four years. Yes, it's an echo of Obama's failed "look forward, not back" policy regarding George W. Bush Administration crimes after the Democrat took back the White House in 2008. As we've long argued, that lack of accountability paved the way for the rise of Donald Trump and other GOP miscreants. The good news (good-ish, anyway), is that Biden also says, according to advisers, that he hopes to restore the important separation between the White House and the Department of Justice upon taking office. That means that prosecutors will be free to follow the law and investigate and prosecute as they see fit. Much of this, therefore, rests upon whoever Biden names as Attorney General, though none of this will protect Trump from criminal accountability at the state level, especially in New York.

Then, it's back to Election 2020 Crazy Land, where...

• Trump must decide by Wednesday if he's gonna cough up $7.9 million dollars for an almost certainly futile "recount" in Wisconsin;

• Trump crony Sen. Lindsey Graham appears to have tried to convince Georgia's Republican Secretary of State to toss out lawfully cast ballots in the state, according to the woeful and embattled Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger. That could amount to any number of both state and federal crimes committed by the man who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee, as we explain;

• Amid Raffensperger's ongoing quasi-audit, quasi-recount, quasi-recanvass in Georgia --- an otherwise wholly-meaningless and extra-legal exercise invented by Raffensperger to try to kiss up to Trump and the other Republicans who are being mean to him because Trump lost Georgia --- nearly 2,600 untallied ballots were discovered in GOP-leaning Floyd County. With those ballots added to the current totals, Trump will pick up some 778 votes on his approximately 14,000 vote deficit against Biden in the Peach State;

• In Pennsylvania, the crazy is almost too much to keep up with today. On Sunday, Team Trump revised its baseless federal lawsuit by removing a demand to toss some 680,000 ballots. That leaves only a complaint regarding Democratic-leaning counties which lawfully allowed voters who cast mail-in ballots that were deficient in some way (missing a signature or the secrecy ballot) to come in and "cure" the deficiency before Election Day. Republican-leaning counties, for unknown reasons, didn't bother. Either way, there are reportedly nowhere near enough such ballots to overcome Trump's current deficit of more than 73,000 votes.

  But the amusing part is that almost the entire legal team representing the Trump Campaign in the Keystone State withdrew from the case entirely by Monday, leaving one poor GOP schmo with a rightwing radio show representing Trump as his attorney on the case. (Just days after Election Day, the same schmo also told his listeners on air that "no bombshells are about to drop that will derail a Biden presidency," that "litigation will not work" and "will not reverse this election.")

  After a federal judge denied the schmo an extension for Tuesday's emergency hearing, so he could bone up on the case, Trump sent Rudy Giuliani to rescue him, even though Rudy hasn't appeared as an attorney in a courtroom since 1992. We had no news from today's hearing by airtime, but we have since heard it did not go well.

  But just before airtime, we did get word out of the PA Supreme Court on a separate case, in which Team Trump lost yet again. This time, on their counter-factual claims that Republican observers were not allowed to properly oversee counting in Philadelphia. The state Justices found that they were allowed, as per state law, and that the claim was false. That brings Trump's losses to date in his election related challenges to something like 25 out of 26 cases nationally. But don't worry! He's totally gonna "win" this thing any day now!

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report as Hurricane Iota slams Nicaragua (the record-smashing 30th Atlantic storm of the season, and the most powerful to date in 2020); the Trump Administration rushes to sell off drilling rights in the previously-pristine Alaska National Wildlife Refuge; and President-elect Biden meets with business and labor leaders to begin moving forward again on both the economy and climate...

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On today's BradCast: SLAP-SLAP! Wake up, people! Joe Biden is the next President of the United States! [Audio link to today's show follows below.]

But first, in not wholly unrelated news: Ya know that widespread systemic election fraud that Donald Trump has been lying about by falsely accusing Democrats of stealing the election from him by "casting votes after Election Day"? They aren't. But, as it turns out, we now have hard evidence that the Trump Campaign and Republican Party actually are doing exactly that! Or, at least trying to do so in Pennsylvania. We've got both the audio and email evidence to prove it today, via the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Beyond that: Hey, Media! Hey, Democrats! Wake up! Yes, Joe Biden should have already been declared the winner of Tuesday election!!! By the standards the corporate media usually apply to such things, the state of Pennsylvania should already have been called by the media, as of Friday morning, for Biden (if not sooner), based on the unofficial vote counts there, where the former Veep has now surpassed Trump and continues to increase his totals over the soon-to-be-former President at this point. Biden continues to do so today at a similar rate to that which we've seen in the Keystone State since the day after Election Day.

With Pennsylvania's 20 electors, that means --- very conservatively speaking, even without the other currently uncalled states where Biden is also leading, including Nevada, Arizona and Georgia (where Biden also overtook Trump in the vote count on Friday morning) --- the former Vice President now has 273 electoral college votes under his belt. Only 270 are needed to win the Presidency.

In any other Presidential election in any other year, all of the media would already have banner graphics up describing Joe Biden as the "PRESIDENT-ELECT" and characterizing him as the 46th President of the United States! We know why Fox "News" is not doing so (thanks to CNN's Brian Stelter), and while there may be (weak, pathetic) reasons for the media to pull their punches (because they are cowards who kowtow to fear of Republicans), what is the Democratic Party's excuse at the point?!

Hell, Donald Trump and the Minority Leader of the U.S. House, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, have already declared that Trump "won", even though he absolutely hasn't! Meanwhile, all available evidence shows beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Biden actually has won. Dems should be dancing in the streets at this point, but they aren't. Lord knows, had the tables been turned, they would have conceded as of Friday morning.

(Note: As an election integrity advocate, I have historically objected to the media or any candidate declaring victory --- or even conceding a loss --- before all votes are counted and, where possible, votes counts are verified as accurate. But, the cowardly double-standard being displayed by the media in this case and the political malpractice being exercised by Dems right now is a separate matter.)

So, what's actually going on here and why? Well, for answers on that we turn first to a few words of wisdom from Josh Marshall at TPM and, for many more such words, to our guest today, HEATHER DIGBY PARTON of Salon and Digby's Hullabaloo, who --- at least since the day Trump descended that escalator at Trump Tower to call Mexicans rapists and announce his candidacy for President --- we have been checking in with at landmark moments during his Presidency. Today, as Trump should be declared a loser by everyone, is certainly such a moment.

Is it still PTSD from 2016 that is keeping Democrats in their stupor today? Is it because Trump has some completely unknown, but super-genius scheme to overturn the Electoral College somehow? Or is it because, no matter the results of the Presidential race, Dems appear to have under-performed expectations when it comes to both U.S. Senate and House races this year?

Beyond all of that, we also discuss with Digby what all Democrats should be spending their time working on and discussing right now, including how Dems and Joe Biden will have to figure out how to govern even if they are unable to win a still-possible longshot bid to pick up enough Senate seats to win back a majority there. And how best to begin processing whatever lessons, so far, can be gleaned from what happened on Tuesday and from the last four years of the Trump Era.

Lots to talk about today! But, hey people! You WON! Start acting like it! Cause you know Republicans certainly would be in the exact same scenario and, in fact, they LOST, but are still acting like they won anyway! Snap out of it, people!!!

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Last week, Trump's new "sham" nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court appeared to not know if voter intimidation was even a violation of federal law. This week, as we report on today's BradCast, Trump and his henchmen find themselves facing a federal lawsuit over exactly that. [Audio link to show follows below.]

Among the many stories covered on today's show...

• First up, Joe Biden has finally stated his position on expanding the U.S. Supreme Court. That position? A bi-partisan commission to study reforms for the federal court system, to offer recommendations after six months...if Biden wins the White House and Dems take the Senate. We discuss what is probably a pretty smart political position for the former VP to take right now, considering that corporate media can't stop using the words "court packing" to describe long-overdue reforms after years of actual court packing by the GOP.

• Speaking of which, the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, led by South Carolina's increasingly vulnerable Sen. Lindsey Graham, broke their own rules today to ram through the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett without a single Democrat present, after Dems refused to allow a quorum for today's vote. If she is confirmed by the full Senate on Monday, as Republicans currently plan, it will be one of the shortest confirmation processes and the closest to a Presidential Election Day for the seating of a Supreme Court Justice in the nation's history. That, after just 4 years ago Republicans blocked a Democratic SCOTUS nominee entirely for a full year, while vowing that a new Justice should never be seated during a Presidential election year. Republicans also changed the rules in the middle of that game as well, when they killed the filibuster for SCOTUS nominees after failing to get enough votes to pack Neil Gorsuch, Trump's first nominee, onto the Court. Over the past five years, Republicans have succeeded at completely delegitimizing the U.S. Supreme Court.

• The GOP's already-stolen Supreme Court on Wednesday sided with Alabama's dishonest, lying, somewhat deranged, unlawfully Twitter-blocking, Republican Sec. of State John Merrill to nix curbside voting in counties that wished to use it to help keep disabled voters safe during the COVID crisis, as recommended by the CDC and approved the U.S. Dept. of Justice as a way to prevent violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). All three remaining Democratic appointees on the Court dissented, siding with the U.S. District Court and federal appeals court which, after a three day trial, found the now-scrapped accommodation to be a "modest" and "reasonable" way to avoid a potentially fatal illness for some voters.

• In recent days, Democratic voters in Florida and several other battleground states have been receiving threatening warnings via email, instructing them to "Vote for Trump or else!" The body of the emails, which appear to come from a Trump-supporting extremist group, cite the recipient's name and addresses and promise to "come after you" if they do not change their party affiliation to Republican and vote as instructed. Incredibly, and with zero supporting evidence, Trump's "partisan hack" Director of National Intelligence John Ratclifffe hastily convened an absurd press conference on Wednesday night to declare that Iran was actually behind the threatening emails to Democrats. He claimed they were designed to "damage President Trump". He also muttered something about Russia. But, again, no actual specifics and no actual supporting evidence for his claim that both countries accessed voter registrations systems to obtain the data (most of which is publicly available without actually hacking into election-related systems). Suffice to say, I believe absolutely nothing from this Administration at this point, about any of it, and, short of independently verifiable information, neither should you.

• Then, we are joined by the Legal Director at Free Speech for People, RON FEIN, to explain the federal lawsuit his non-partisan good government organization filed on Wednesday on behalf of the Latino civic engagement group Mi Familia Vota Education Fund and several voters, charging that Donald Trump, Attorney General Bill Barr and Acting Sec. of Homeland Security Chad Wolf are violating federal laws against voter intimidation.

  The complaint [PDF] and accompanying request for a preliminary injunction, as Fein details, alleges defendants have exhibited a pattern of intimidation against voters that violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, and the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

  As FSFP explains in their announcement of the suit, the complaint is "based on the defendants’ violent suppression of public protests opposing police brutality, the encouragement of white supremacist 'vigilantes,' threats to send 'sheriffs' and other law enforcement to the polls, the undermining of mail-in voting, and the rejection of the peaceful transfer of power, which, the complaint alleges, constitute illegal voter intimidation."

  Fein offers more details on what he describes as a "threatening pattern of conduct stretching over the past few months," that has resulted in the suit. "People understand what it means when the President talks about sending law enforcement...When he tells the Proud Boys to 'stand by,' people understand what that means...This is not one piece of conduct, one isolated statement. This is a months-long pattern that the President and his top officials have been involved in, that has the purpose and effect --- hopefully not successfully --- but it certainly has that effect, of intimidating people from voting either in person or by mail."

  Explaining the relief sought by the complaint, he tells me: "First of all, we want relief prohibiting the defendants from deploying armed federal agents at or near polling places; from ordering federal agents to block the delivery of ballots or interfere in the counting of ballots; from taking any actions that could limit with the speed or reliability of mail delivery. And specifically to Trump, prohibiting him from encouraging his supporters to bring weapons to polling places, block access to polling places, to question voters, or from using official government public communications channels --- which now includes his Twitter account --- to suggest that lawful votes will be scrutinized or challenged."

  He also discusses a somewhat related federal case also filed this week by FSFP on behalf of the Minnesota chapters of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and League of Women Voters against a private mercenary contractor who has posted job listings, reported recently by the Washington Post, seeking to hire and deploy armed former special ops troops to patrol polling sites in the state.

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with news on yet another record hurricane in an already-record season; the death of half of Australia's Great Barrier Reef and the return of the Hummer, this time as an all-electric "supertruck"...

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There are all sorts of reasons for Democrats to be feeling pretty good about their chances this year. But there are almost as many good reasons to remain very cautious. We discuss a lot of each on today's BradCast! [Audio link to show follow below.]

Among the good news/bad news today...

• Former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele joins a ton of former GOP officials, Governors, lawmakers, military officials and others to endorse Joe Biden for President, after the RNC has "bent the arc of the party towards the baser motives of one man, who is neither a Republican nor a conservative";

• USA Today's Editorial Board, which has never endorsed any Presidential nominee, does the same. Their reasons are many, including Trump's "shambolic response to the coronavirus pandemic [which has] inflated a national death toll that is equivalent to the crashes of more than 1,000 Boeing-737 jetliners";

• Florida joined several other battleground states on Monday when it "shattered its opening day record for in-person Early Voting," after also more than doubling its absentee vote-by-mail numbers from the same time frame in 2016. That certainly seems like good news for Democrats, but is it really? Is it due to enthusiasm? If so, for Biden or Trump? Or is it just fear of COVID? Or concerns about slow-downs by the U.S. Postal Service? We discuss a number of the key caveats to these widely reported numbers and one anectodal suggestion that likely voter models this year could ultimately be "all shot to hell";

• The gobsmacking 3rd quarter fundraising numbers for Democratic Senate candidates in key races this year appears to be undeniably encouraging news for those hoping to see the Party regain a Senate majority. We offer some reason to deny the encouragement nonetheless;

• On yesterday's program we reported on the disturbing news from a 3-judge panel of Republican appointees on the Michigan Court of Appeals who overturned a lower state court judge's ruling in the key battleground state that mail-in ballots postmarked by November 2nd (the day before Election Day) would be counted if they arrived up to two weeks after Election Day. Not long after we got off air Monday, a 4 - 4 decision by the Republicans' stolen U.S. Supreme Court upheld a ruling by Pennsylvania's Supreme Court, allowing for the counting of mail-in ballots that arrive up to three days after Election Day. Most Dems saw that as very good news. And it is --- at least for the very short and narrow term. The intrusion by four SCOTUS Justice's, however, into a state court ruling on a state constitutional matter, regarding that state's constitutional "right to vote" is actually quite foreboding news. And it's about to be made much worse with the addition of Amy Coney Barrett on the high court. We explain.

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for another good news/bad news edition of our Green News Report, with bad news about the continuing record wildfires in the West and some very good news about renewable electricity...

Enjoy! Or don't...

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On today's BradCast: It's full speed ahead for Senate Republicans' desperate attempt to further pack the U.S. Supreme Court while they still have the chance. And it's anything but feel speed for voters forced to wait in hours-long Early Voting lines in Georgia. [Audio link to show follows below.]

The Peach State could very well turn "blue" this year, according to Nate Silver at Five Thirty Eight, in both the Presidential election and not one, but two U.S. Senate races there this year. But voters will have to work like hell to make that happen. The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports today that the state's new voting check-in computers --- needed to operate the state's new unverifiable touchscreen voting machines --- appear to be the main cause of intolerably long lines for voters since Early Voting began on Monday. Some voters have reportedly left without voting, others waited as long as 12 hours to cast their votes. Now that AJC has identified the check-in computers to be a main bottleneck, Georgia's terrible Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger --- who previously attributed the hours-long lines to "voter enthusiasm" --- has apparently told the private software vendor responsible for those check-in computers at Voting Centers to increase network bandwidth to speed up the process. Early reports in Atlanta suggest the expanded bandwidth may be helping to speed things up, but we'll see.

In the meantime, as voters in Georgia must now navigate at least 4 different computer systems (programmed by private companies) to cast their one vote, the FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a division of the Dept. of Homeland Security, are warning they are aware of "some instances" in which malicious actors (most likely foreign, they suggest) have obtained "unauthorized access to elections support systems." They quickly note, however, they have "no evidence to date that integrity of elections data has been compromised." Feel better?

Our guest today, Slate's great legal reporter, MARK JOSEPH STERN, is definitely not feeling better after a week of hearings in the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, meant to further pack the Republicans' already-stolen Supreme Court with Amy Coney Barrett before Election Day. The hearings revealed little or nothing about Donald Trump's third far-right nominee to the highest court in the land, Stern reports. "It was a terrible week. It was one of the worst on record," he tells me, describing the proceedings as a "deranged power grab" and the nominee as establishing a new low for such hearings.

"Amy Coney Barrett has established a new rule for Supreme Court confirmations, which is that the nominee doesn't just have to be kind of evasive or squirrelly. The nominee can literally say nothing of substance and simply announce a rule at the outset that she won't say anything of substance, and then just swat down questions that try to get her to say anything meaningful."

Barrett refused to (or couldn't?) answer even simple, non-political questions and matters of basic federal law, such as whether it is illegal to intimidate voters at the polls. (It is.) "I don't understand why we all had to go through this entire experience. It was a psychic wound, it was demeaning to all of us. She won't even say whether this federal law exists, whether it is real," Stern observes. "Will she acknowledge that gravity exists?"

Among the many related points we discuss today...

• While Barrett allies herself with the great myth of the late Justice Antonin Scalia's so-called "Constitutional originalism," is she in fact "a legal lightweight"?;
• Do Republicans even care about her "remarkable paucity of experience"? (Stern charges: "I don't think that she's necessarily being picked on the merits of her own scholarship.");
• If SCOTUS nominees are now going to refuse to answer any question on virtually anything, have these hearings and the Advise and Consent clause itself become little more than a meaningless joke at this point?;
• Is Barrett's bizarre assertion that Roe v. Wade is not a "super-precedent" --- apparently meaning a ruling that cannot be overturned --- actually a real legal concept in any way, shape or form?;
• What, if anything, was the impact of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse's stunning thirty-minute detailing on Tuesday (video here, transcript here) of the decades-long, $250 million, rightwing dark-money court-packing conspiracy? And did it help Americans appreciate the insidious scam that wealthy rightwingers have been running with the GOP for years now to capture our entire federal judicial system? ("Amy Coney Barrett didn't just magically appear in that seat. She didn't just find herself nominated to the Supreme Court. She has been elevated, propped up, by this massive dark money machine," Stern notes.);
• Did Democrats do all that they could to highlight the outrage of how Republicans are undermining the very legitimacy of our federal courts, even as Dems have little or no way to stop it right now?;
• Will Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress have the courage to do the right thing for justice and the American people by expanding the Supreme Court to save cherished American rights and the court system itself IF they are able to win the White House and Senate majority this November?;
• And, why the hell was ranking Democratic Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) hugging the Judiciary Committee Chair, Sen. Lindsey Graham (maskless!), at the end of today's final day of hearings?

All of those questions asked and mostly answered on today's lively --- if maddening --- program...

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We begin today's BradCast with some good news from the courts, for a change, regarding voting rights in several states today, as the GOP's trench warfare to suppress the vote wherever they can continues, now 20 days out from Election Day. Then, it's on to the $250 million dark-money scheme that a closely interconnected conspiracy of mostly low-profile rightwing groups have orchestrated with Republicans in the U.S. Senate to pack the federal courts --- specifically the U.S. Supreme Court --- and push specific cases to them that are similarly rigged by "orchestrated amicus flotillas" to help achieve very specific results that just happen to benefit all of the well-moneyed interests involved in the well-orchestrated and well-funded conspiracy that made it all happen. [Audio link to show follows below.]

First, we go light before we go "dark". In Virginia, where a severed fiber optic cable knocked out online voter registration for the entire state on Tuesday, the last day to do so this year, a federal judge has granted an extra 48 hours for residents in the Commonwealth to sign up. You've now got until 11:59pm Thursday, Virginians! Get busy!

In Texas, where desperate Republicans are challenging absolutely every new measure instituted to make voting easier and safer amid the pandemic --- even going so far as to sue their own Republican Governor for extending early voting by one week --- a state court of appeals has tossed a case filed Monday by the GOP to block Harris County's plan for "drive-thru" voting. The case was filed just one day before Early Voting began in the state yesterday. Some 11,000 votes were reportedly cast from vehicles via curbside voting centers in Harris County's Houston on Tuesday, as implemented by the County's new, 34-year old County Clerk, Chris Hollins. Dem-leaning Houston has a population of 4.7 million and a geographical area larger than the state of Rhode Island. It is the nation's third most populous voting jurisdiction. A total of 10 drive-thru sites are planned for use during Early Voting. The court win comes as another too-rare victory for voters in the Lone Star State, where the GOP is desperately trying to block the demographic writing on the wall against them.

And, in Alaska, the state Supreme Court has upheld a lower court ruling that nullifies the state's witness signature requirement for mail-in ballots during the pandemic. The suit was brought by Alaskan Native Americans and voting rights groups who successfully argued that the requirement "impermissibly burdens the right to vote" while many Alaskans are quarantining alone during the crisis. The state's top election official, Republican Lt. Gov. Kevin Meyer, had appealed the lower court ruling all the way to the state Supremes...and has now lost. But voters have won.

Then, we head into the "darkness" following Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)'s remarkable, must watch revelations (transcript here) on Tuesday during the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee's appalling and hypocritical push to ram through the confirmation of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett before Election Day. In short, Whitehouse summarized the broad and insidious network of interconnected rightwing dark-money groups that select federal court judges for Republicans to nominate to the bench; quietly fund the PR campaigns to push for their confirmations; seek out specific cases to bring to those same judges for a desired outcome that enriches their well-moneyed interests; and then bury the Supreme Court with amicus briefs spelling out that desired outcome.

Whitehouse details the remarkable success that the groups have seen in recent years in not only packing the federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court, but in an 80 to 0 record of wins at the high court with partisan 5 to 4 victories in each and every case.

Teeing off the Senate Republicans' eagerness to push through Barrett's confirmation closer to any Presidential election in U.S. history --- despite vows from the party in 2016 that they would never support filling a Supreme Court seat during a Presidential election year until American voters have had a say in the matter --- Whitehouse observes near the beginning of his remarks that, in his "experience around politics, when you find hypocrisy in the daylight, look for power in the shadows."

Using charts and magic-markers to break down the sprawling case and evidence of the closely-allied, secretly-funded groups making up that "power in the shadows" --- from the Federalist Society (which promoted Barrett's nomination), to the so-called Judicial Crisis Network, to the Bradley Foundation to Donors Trust and the Koch Brothers --- the Rhode Island Senator neatly unfolds the very clear conspiracy that has successfully resulted in cases that benefit its dark-money funders to the tune of billions of dollars returned on their investments.

Much of Whitehouse's case cited evidence first revealed by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), a non-profit good government watchdog and research organization headed up for many years by LISA GRAVES, a former Deputy Asst. Attorney General at the U.S. Justice Department, a former Chief Counsel for nominations in the U.S. Senate, and a former Deputy Chief for the U.S. Court system. She still serves as President of the Board of Directors at CMD and is currently the Executive Director of True North Research.

With all of those qualifications, Graves is uniquely positioned to offer much more insight into Whitehouse's Tuesday revelations of the, yes, actual, decades-long GOP judicial conspiracy now in play; Barrett's qualifications for a lifetime appointment to highest court in the land; her performance during this week's confirmation hearings; and whether Democrats should expand not only the U.S. Supreme Court --- if they win both the Presidency and Senate majority in November --- but the lower federal courts as well.

Graves tells me that Whitehouse's remarks were "very, very important, because he was able to use this forum to shine a light on something that most Americans have no idea is going on, as part of this capture of our courts, which is really about changing our rights and doing it through judicial fiat." She explains that "that thirty minutes is really a class, a course, on understanding this puppet show that we're seeing with this nomination, of who is really calling the shots, and how this is happening."

She also offers a reaction to my own monologue from the top of yesterday's BradCast, in which I detailed the under-appreciated hypocrisy and judicial dishonesty of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, regarding his professed claims of "conservative" Constitutional "originalism" and "strict consructionism". Barrett worked hard during her opening statement on Monday to associate herself with Scalia's disingenuous judicial philosophy, citing the late rightwing extremist Justice, for whom she once clerked, as a model for own tenure as a federal jurist.

There is much ground to cover in all of the above with Graves, so I hope you'll tune in for this one!...

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On today's BradCast: The media are still falling for it. Happily, the American people (at least those who aren't fully brain-poisoned) don't seem to be playing that game anymore. [Audio link to full show follows below.]

Among the stories covered on today's show...

• The corporate mainstream media now know how they are being played by Trump, but they keep playing along anyway. We open with a short (or maybe not that short) rant about how to avoid being gaslighted by this President and his enablers, including his lying personal White House physician, the bought and paid for sycophants and psychopaths who work for the government or for his political party and lie on his behalf, and his brain-addled supporters who support his lies, even when he pretends to support things they all spent years previously pretending to oppose. And, of course, the media who still make all of those lies possible. Both Charlie Chaplin and off-shore oil-drilling make their way into this rant. You'll need to tune in to find out why;

• Facebook finally bothers to take down at least one lie posted by the President regarding COVID-19 and the flu, as scientists and infectious disease experts fume about Trump's dangerous lies regarding that and his own precarious physical (and mental?) health amid his infection and dubious treatment for it;

• In some brighter new, new polling finds Trump is receiving no "sympathy bounce" from his illness, as Americans have absolutely no confidence in his handling of the pandemic and believe he has only himself to blame for becoming sick;

• New national polling following Trump's embarrassing performance in last week's off-the-rails Presidential debate (yes, that was only last week!) is beginning to look devastating for his reelection odds. A potential outlier of a poll published by NBC News and Wall Street Journal over the weekend finding a 14-point lead for Joe Biden among registered voters (53% to 39% over Trump) appears not to have been an outlier at all. New polling from CNN today of likely voters (which should theoretically find a small margin between the two candidates), finds the former Vice President ahead of Trump by an extraordinary 16 points (57% to 41%). Of course, those are national numbers and we do not run national elections in this country. But Biden is currently leading or tied by similar, if smaller, margins in pretty much all of the swing-states now, and even in a number of states not previously regarded as swing-states;

• Trump's disastrous polling numbers also appear to bringing down his party's candidates in all sorts of areas of the country. Daily Kos Elections today shifted their ratings for 10 different House and Senate races all towards the Democrats. We focus today on two, specifically: The U.S. Senate race in Kansas (Kansas!) where former moderate Republican state Senator Barbara Bollier is giving her Republican opponent, Rep. Roger Marshall, a run for his money (and for the money the GOP would rather be spending elsewhere) in the contest for that state's open U.S. Senate seat this year. DKos Elections has now moved that race from "Likely R" to "Lean R". And in South Carolina (South Carolina!), where recent polling appears to now show a toss-up between disgraced three-term Republican Trump sycophant Sen. Lindsey Graham and his Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison. It's another race where Republicans are being forced to spend huge sums of money, while still being outspent by Harrison and his supporters. That race has also been conservatively shifted by dKos from "Likely R" to "Lean R", though it sure looks like Graham could be in real trouble....if voters in SC are allowed to vote...;

• It is, in no small part, because of that trouble for Graham in SC that Republicans had to go all the way to their stolen U.S. Supreme Court to overturn lower court rulings that had waived witness requirements for mail-in ballots, due to the pandemic. State lawmakers had waived the requirement themselves for the state's primaries earlier this year, but re-imposed it for the general election for some reason, now that the pandemic is even worse. The lower courts ordered it waived again for public safety reasons, but SCOTUS, on Monday night, reimposed it, claiming it was too close to an election to change the rules. (That is the so-called "Purcell Principle" which we explain again on today's show. You may be hearing that doctrine cited quite a bit in the coming days.) That, even though many voters may have already sent in ballots without witness signatures as previously allowed by the lower courts. While the Supremes allowed (only) two days from yesterday's ruling for witness-free ballots to arrive by mail and still be counted, three of the Court's rightwing Justices (Thomas, Scalia and Gorsuch) went on record to say that if it was up to them, they would have tossed out all of those already-voted ballots entirely;

• Finally today, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with some disturbing news about yet another monster hurricane heading toward Louisiana (the fourth storm this year to make landfall there, if it does, in an already record year); grim news about California's wildfires; but some great news out of Poland and some very cool news from European airplane manufacturer Airbus!...

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On today's BradCast: American democracy is far more broken than most of us realize. But we can't begin to repair it until we've corrected the GOP's stolen U.S. Supreme Court by expanding it and, as our guest today notes, "entrenching democracy". [Audio link to show follows below.]

But, before we get to that today, very quickly, we take note of the more than 200,000 Americans who have now been killed by COVID-19. As AP reports, that is the equivalent of a 9/11 disaster every single day for 67 days in a row. Or the entire city of Salt Lake City, UT or Huntsville, AL being wiped off the map. That horrific number likely under-counts the real total by tens of thousands and is expected to more than double to nearly 400,000 or more dead by the end of this year. The tragic landmark also comes the day after the President of the United States told his supporters at another shoulder-to-shoulder, largely-maskless campaign rally in Ohio on Monday night that the coronavirus "affects virtually nobody."

Meanwhile, Republicans in the Senate appear to have completed their hypocritical contortions of reality in order to declare they are now ready to vote to fill the U.S. Supreme Court seat vacated with the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg just four days ago. See? That was easy! Never mind all of those vows back in 2016 --- and even as recently as July of this year, in the cases of hypocritical Republican Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst of Iowa --- that they would never, ever support a new Justice being seated on the Supreme Court in the last year of a Presidential term! The "new rule", as Lindsey Graham dishonestly lied about it in 2016 (on video tape, asking for his words to be used against him if he ever acts otherwise), is now apparently the "old rule" and no longer operative. After his flip, Graham announced Monday night that whoever Trump's nominee is (to be revealed Saturday, before RBG is even buried), they "will be supported by every Republican in the Judiciary Committee and we have the votes to confirm the justice on the floor of the Senate before the election. And that's what's coming."

The news from Graham, who now chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, comes as Colorado's Sen. Cory Gardner agreed to support Trump's nominee, after saying in February of 2016, when Scalia died, that "I think we're too close to the election. The President who is elected in November should be the one who makes this decision.". It also comes as Utah's Mitt Romney, who voted just months ago to remove Trump from office during his impeachment trial, declared that he believes it's in keeping with "historical precedent" and a matter of "immutable fairness" to consider, ASAP, a third lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land by the man who he didn't even think should hold the job of President just seven months ago. Things change quickly around here.

For the record, Ernst, Gardner and Graham are all facing very tough re-election challenges this year from Democratic Senate nominees Theresa Greenfield in Iowa, John Hickenlooper in Colorado, and Jaime Harrison in South Carolina, respectively.

None of these nightmares, however, could even be happening, were it not for our broken system of democracy. One which has allowed not only one stolen Supreme Court seat back in 2016, but which allows a President who lost the popular vote and a Republican caucus in the Senate which received fewer votes than the Democratic Senators (yet still retains its majority) to break their own invented "precedent" in order to steal yet another seat on the nation's highest Court.

As our guest today characterizes the stolen SCOTUS majority after the GOP's FIRST stolen seat in his upcoming Harvard Law Review article on "The Degradation of American Democracy --- and the Court": "McConnell's stratagem was unprecedented: the theft of a Supreme Court seat. Even though Democrats have now won the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, a combination of the vicissitudes of the electoral-college system, the ability of most Justices to time their retirements, and McConnell's Machiavellian maneuver, has produced the most conservative Supreme Court since the 1930s. This is not how democracy is supposed to work."

But it's how it "works" now, apparently, even as that paragraph was penned before McConnell's latest "Machiavellian maneuver" upon the death of RBG. We're joined today by Harvard Law School legal historian, Prof. MICHAEL KLARMAN, to discuss our broken democracy and how to begin repairing it by expanding the size of the current Court to restore the liberal majority stolen from Democrats beginning in 2016. We last spoke with Klarman back in 2018, when he argued that if Democrats failed to do so when they next regained both the White House and the Senate majority, they would be committing "political suicide". Now, he argues, the case is even stronger and more urgent.

Klarman also clerked for the Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she served as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in the 1980s and shares some thoughts on both her passing and on his time working for the now-legendary late Justice at the top of our conversation.

"The argument for altering the size of the Court is very straightforward," Klarman goes on to explain. "The only argument against it is if Democrats do it, then Republicans will do it, and we'll be in a retaliatory cycle that will never end. But there are three different responses to that. One is the Republicans have already done it by shrinking the size of the court by one [for a year after Scalia died]. Second, the Republicans will do it, whether Democrats do it or not, the first time it appeals to Mitch McConnell to do it. Mitch McConnell has demonstrated in the last few days that he's just an utter and complete hypocrite. ... So if Republicans are going to pack the court anyhow, that's hardly an argument against Democrats doing it."

"The other argument is we need to break out of the situation we are in right now, which is a Republican Party and a President that are a threat to American democracy," Klarman warns, before going on to list the ways in which the GOP now "suppresses votes in a score of different ways at the local level --- with voter ID laws, with voter purges, shutting down mobile voting sites so college campuses can't encourage students to vote --- I mean, it's really quite extraordinary what the Republican Party is doing in order to steal elections."

Klarman tells me that any Democratic attempt to entrench democracy, should they win the White House and Senate, can be struck down by a Supreme Court that "will come up with some contrived Constitutional argument to strike it down."

"If you actually entrench democracy, and all Americans who wanted to vote could vote without obstacles, the Republicans Party understands they would never win another election until they start changing their policies so that they appeal to more Americans," he says.

Right now, Klarman argues, "The deck is stacked against Democrats. So Democrats get one chance to do this right [if they are able to win back the White House and Senate in November.] And if they don't do it, then you're going to have to give up on American democracy pretty soon, because this Republican Party supports an authoritarian President who doesn't believe in freedom of speech, freedom of the press, independent judges, who encourages violence, who pals around with autocrats around the world. The Republicans are fine with that. People don't seem to appreciate how alarming the situation is. We are on the cusp of losing our democracy. This is the most important election in American history, since the Civil War."

Finally, as if all of that is not disturbing enough, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report! Which, as usual, is filled with nothing but great news all around!...

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