It's NICOLE SANDLER, back in to give Brad and Desi a Labor Day break, guest hosting today's BradCast.

Just when you thought Donald Trump had reached rock bottom, he goes even lower. This time, in his efforts to invalidate the upcoming elections (because he knows he's going to lose badly), he actually suggested his supporters vote twice-- once by mail and once in person. As bad as that is, I could easily come up with another dozen or so infractions that would make any sane person cringe.

Although there's a policy within the American Psychiatric Association that says a doctor cannot diagnose the psychological condition of someone they've never examined personally known as the Goldwater Rule, in this case it doesn't apply. That's because we know more about Donald Trump than any other president in history, thanks to the 24/7 news cycle, Trump's proclivity for talking incessantly about himself and his Twitter addiction.

Today, I spoke with DAN PARTLAND, Producer/Director of the new film, Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump. The documentary opened Tuesday everywhere; it's available now on virtually every streaming channel available. It makes the case (as if you didn't already know) that if there's one person for whom the 25th Amendment was likely written, it's Donald J. Trump...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Environmental champion Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) wins tough primary challenge; Trump Administration racing to dismantle even more environmental protections; PLUS: Sign of the times --- ExxonMobil dropped from the Dow... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Arctic wildfires emit 35% more CO2 so far in 2020 than for whole of 2019; The Sitting President Has No Climate Plan. Why Isn’t That Headline News?; House Democrats Demand Climate Be ‘Centerpiece’ Of 2020 Presidential Debates; Will Clean Energy Projects Face Troubles That Have Bedeviled Pipelines?; UN Urges Probe of Trump Arctic Drilling Plan for Human Rights Abuses... PLUS: To solve everything, solve climate: A conversation with Varshini Prakash, leader of the Sunrise Movement... and much, MUCH more! ...

On today's BradCast: The gears of American democracy continue to grind and wheeze toward November 3rd. On Tuesday, Massachusetts held its late season state primary elections featuring at least two noteworthy races. One, a somewhat bizarre challenge by an ambitious 39-year old Rep. Joe Kennedy III for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination against incumbent, 74-year old progressive climate champion Sen. Ed Markey. The other, a challenge by the 31-year old progressive Mayor of Holyoke, Alex Morse, against powerful, 16-term establishment Democratic Rep. Richard Neal in the state's 1st Congressional District. One progressive won, the other lost. Both races were fascinating for different reasons. [Audio link to show follows below.]

To help us understand both races and more, we're joined once again today by HOWIE KLEIN, creator of the enduring "Down With Tyranny" blog and co-founder of the progressive BlueAmericaPAC. He's been helping us in recent weeks to make sense of results from a number of key, late season primary races. (There are still three states left to go --- Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Delaware --- over the next two weeks.) The Markey/Kennedy contest, however, was one of the most curious this season.

Markey, who has served in the House and Senate for some 45 years, remains one of its most progressive and beloved lawmakers as a supporter of Medicare for All and the Senate sponsor, with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the House, of the landmark Green New Deal proposal. Kennedy's attempt to unseat Markey, as endorsed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, unsettled a number of Democrats and appeared, for a while, that it might have been successful. Alas, Markey appears to have won the day, and fairly easily, on Tuesday against the first Kennedy to ever lose an election in Massachusetts.

Klein explains why Kennedy was running in the first place and why he ultimate lost.

He also walks us through the challenge against Neal, a long-serving Democratic corporatist in the House who faced criticism from many Dems for slow-walking the Congressional attempt to review Donald Trump's tax returns. As the powerful Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, Neal has the exclusive, statutory right to review the tax returns of any American in the nation. He took months, however, after Democrats regained the majority in the U.S. House in 2018, to even begin the process. Bu that's hardly the only critique of Neal by progressives, as we discuss today with Klein.

Nonetheless, Neal easily defeated Morse in Tuesday's primary, after what appear to have been dubious, if ultimately effective, charges of sexual misconduct whipped up against him by questionable sources. Klein explains that ugly campaign, as well as why his BlueAmericaPAC decided not to endorse Morse or either of the two progressive candidates running in the crowded field for the nomination to fill Kennedy's vacated seat in the state's 4th Congressional District.

Also today: The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has announced it is taking up a case filed by the state Democratic Party seeking to expand and clarify the state's new mail-in ballot law amid the coronavirus pandemic. The Trump Campaign and state Republicans are challenging absentee voting in the battleground by, for example, suing to prevent the use of secure drop-boxes for absentee ballots.

And, in Texas, a federal judge has, for the second time, found the state in violation of the National Voter Registration Act for refusing to make online voter registration available along with online drivers license applications as required by the NVRA. And, in another court case, Texas' Republican Sec. of State and Attorney General are now suing the Harris County (Houston) County Clerk to prevent him from sending out absentee ballot applications to the county's more than 2 million registered voters...

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We've got a lot to get to on today's BradCast, as voters in Massachusetts go to the polls today with a couple of very interesting primary races (results tomorrow!), and as the rest of us are now counting the days (63 of them), until general Election Day, with both hope and trepidation. [Audio link to show is posted below summary.]

Among the mountains o' stuff covered on today's program...

• After years of our reporting on the very successful, perhaps irreversible, decades-long effort by the Right to brainwash its followers, we open today with a few thoughts about a similar, if not quite as successful (though it's getting closer), effort to brainwash those on the Left. That effort to brainwash the Left, like the scheme on the Right, is also carried out by folks on the Right or those who support them. (And yes, that means we have a few words today about the still-misreported facts regarding the Hillary/Bernie race from 2016);

• We have more evidence of attempts to manipulate the Left in today's announcement from Facebook that, based on a tip from the FBI, the social media outlet has shut down several fake accounts created to support a Russia-related propaganda scheme targeting the Left in hopes of undermining Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The operation reportedly included a phony media outlet calling itself "Peace Data", in hopes of appealing to progressives in advance of this year's election;

• Information of that sort, as we discuss, is --- or should be --- useful to voters. Nonetheless, with just over two months until Election Day, with Donald Trump's top intelligence officers having recently warned that Russia is taking active measures, once again, to undermine the Presidential election in support of Trump, his recently-appointed Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe notified Congress over the weekend that he will no longer offer in-person briefings to lawmakers regarding foreign attempts to interfere in the election. The claim, offered by Trump himself without facts to back it up, is that members of Congress were illegally leaking certain information from the intelligence community, and that the information leaked was also "wrong". No evidence was given to support that charge, and while Trump claimed the decision to end intelligence briefings to Congress was made by him and Ratcliffe, evidence suggests that it was, instead, a directive from Trump himself. For some reason;

• Speaking of the November 3rd election, the dirty tricks are now underway, as revealed by a new robocall to some Democratic-leaning Michigan voters falsely warning that signing up to vote by mail will result in voters contact information being added to a database for tracking down arrest warrants, credit card debt collection and "mandatory vaccines". None of that is true. Though you should expect much more of it in the weeks ahead;

• Also in Michigan, the state's Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, recently won a court case filed by rightwingers attempting to prevent her from sending absentee ballot applications to all of the state's 7.7 million voters. The ruling --- in a state which Trump is said to have won by just over 11,000 votes in 2016 --- comes in the wake of his misfired threat to withhold federal funding from Michigan in a tweet in which he falsely claimed the "rogue Secretary of State" was planning to send out actual ballots (as opposed to applications) to all voters;

• And while Trump and his minions have been suing in state after state in (usually failed) efforts to make voting more difficult during the global pandemic that he failed to control --- even attempting to block the use of secure absentee ballot drop-boxes in key battleground states like Pennsylvania --- another newly elected Democratic Sec. of State, Jena Griswold in Colorado, announced today that her state will offer "at least 368 mail ballot drop boxes for the General Election, an increase of 49% since I was elected in 2018!";

• Also today, a somewhat bizarre comment from a reader/listener in response to our coverage yesterday of L.A. County's disastrous, unverifiable new touchscreen voting system, in which the commenters offers several odd allegations amid of my nearly 20 years of critical coverage of e-voting and asks "whose side are you on?";

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report in the wake of catastrophic week for the climate and the Republican National Convention...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Long road to recovery for Louisiana after Hurricane Laura's devastation; California and Colorado burn, while Phoenix bakes; PLUS: Amid multiple record-breaking weather disasters, Republicans ignore climate change at Republican National Convention... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Hurricane Laura and the California Fires Are Part of the Same Crisis; An Oil Giant’s Wall Street Fall: The World is Sending the Industry Signals, but is Exxon Listening?; Trump E.P.A. Relaxes Rules Limiting Toxic Waste From Coal Plants; Trump administration proposes easing oil and gas permitting in national forests; US South could save money by cleaning up its power grid; Microplastics in Farm Soils A Growing Concern; Big Oil Is in Trouble. Its Plan: Flood Africa With Plastic... PLUS: Sea level rise from ice sheets track worst-case climate change scenario... and much, MUCH more! ...

On today's BradCast: We make short work (for now) of several breaking news stories from over the weekend and into today. Then its straight on to our main story today, which you will hear nowhere else in the media. [Audio link to today's full show is posted below summary.]

In January, we broke the news here on The BRAD BLOG and The BradCast that Los Angeles County's brand-new, unverifiable, $300 million, 10-years-in-development touchscreen polling place voting system had failed to meet more than 40 different California Voting System Standards, according to independent certification testers hired by CA's Secretary of State Alex Padilla. Despite critical security issues that alarmed voting system and cybersecurity experts, the machines were nonetheless "conditionally certified" by Padilla just prior to the March 3rd Super Tuesday primary in the state. The new machines (known as Ballot Marking Devices or BMDs) and the electronic pollbooks that are required to work with them, both failed spectacularly. Voters were disenfranchised by the "Voting Solutions for All People" or VSAP system, as many across the nation's most populous voting jurisdiction were either turned away or forced to wait for hours in line to vote.

It was well after midnight before all of those still in line finally cast their votes on Super Tuesday. It was, of course, impossible to know if any of those votes were tallied as per any voter's intent, because BMD systems print out a computer-marked paper ballot which may or may not reflect the actual intent of any voter. It's impossible to know if results are accurate in any election that uses BMDs for the majority of voters. Recent studies [PDF] find that more than 90% of voters do not notice when a BMD has misprinted one or more of their votes on the paper printout.

After the March 3rd disaster in L.A. (which we had warned about long in advance, to little interest from media or public officials, even from the L.A. County Supervisors, much less Sec. Padilla) the system's brainchild, Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan, was allowed a mulligan. He promised to fix what didn't work before the November election and told us all to simply trust him. Next time would be better. Many in the media then lost whatever interest they had as it was just weeks after Super Tuesday that COVID pandemic struck hard.

Well, now Padilla has recently posted the new certification testing results from Logan's mulligan, VSAP 2.1. The results do not inspire confidence, as many of the same problems with the system originally --- such as paper jams and misprinted QR Codes {PDF] --- still exist, according to testers. Now Padilla must decide in the next two weeks whether or not to certify them again. In truth, he has little choice as Early Voting is now just weeks away. While the state's decision to send every active voter a Vote-by-Mail ballot may help to ease many of the potential log jams at the county's new Voting Centers, ballots cast on the new systems --- as opposed to verifiable hand-marked paper absentee ballots --- are still vulnerable to manipulation and can never been known to reflect voter intent after the polls close.

However, there are some things that Padilla could require to be done to mitigate some of the worst dangers of the system if it is to be used for this year's critical November election. Several dozen election integrity and activist groups, along with a number of esteemed cybersecurity and voting systems experts, recently signed on to an excellent public letter led by the California Clean Money Campaign, demanding Padilla implement a number of the mitigations before certifying the updated voting systems.

We're joined today by LULU FRIESDAT, co-founder of SmartElections.us and ROBIN GIBSON, longtime Los Angeles Election Integrity advocate, to discuss those potential mitigations and the one-and-only public comments hearing held today online before Padilla's pending decision to certify. They report that Padilla did not bother to attend, though Logan, apparently, came by near the end of the session to claim that everything is now working fine. "Our registrar got on the call and dismissed two hours of worried voters, and said he had tests that said it was fine," Gibson explained. "It was like 'I win, nah, nah, nah.'"

As Friesdat and Gibson explain, the citizen advocates and experts are asking in their letter for the ballot boxes attached to each touchscreen tablet system to be removed, so that the computer-printed ballots don't have to pass back through the same printer heads after they've been (theoretically) verified by each voter. Experts warn [PDF] that sending the ballot back through the same printer path after verification is a major security risk, allowing the system to change voters votes, without their knowledge, after they have supposedly already approved their printed ballot. Instead, the group is urging that the attached ballot boxes be removed, and that ballots be deposited manually by voters into a separate ballot box at the polling place, for tabulation later.

The group is also asking Padilla to do away with the unverifiable QR Codes that are printed on each ballot. It is that code --- which can't be verified as accurate by any voter --- that is actually read by the optical-scan computer tabulators to tallly each ballot, rather than the human-readable text print out that voters may or may not have verified! "It is not secure to have the vote encoded in a QR code," Friesdat joins cybsersecurity experts in warning.

Moreover, the groups are calling for real, hand-marked paper ballots to be made available to any and all voters at Voting Centers for voters smart enough to want to cast a verifiable vote. "This is basic," Friesdat insists. "Hand-marked paper ballots are the gold standard that security experts recommend. It's not hard to provide them, and voters should be encouraged to use hand-marked paper ballots if they're able to mark by hand."

They also uge Padilla and Logan to finally release the source code to this supposedly County-owned and developed system. The money appropriated by tax-payers was done on the basis, advanced by both Padilla and Logan, that it would be a fully "open source" system, 100% publicly owned. All of that is also important because elections officials in other states and counties across the country have expressed interest in adopting this exact system if it ever actually works in L.A.

Friesdat and Gibson detail many of their own concerns, as well as others who offered public comment today before we open up the phone lines to listener questions about this terrible new system, just 64 days before Election Day and mere weeks before early voting is set to begin in Los Angeles County...

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On today's BradCast: Never mind the lawlessness of it all. Personally, I'm still having trouble today getting over the creepy, grotesque scene of thousands jammed shoulder to shoulder together on the White House lawn for Donald Trump's viral super-spreader event in celebration of his acceptance speech to run for a second failed term as President. But maybe that's just me. [Audio link to today's upbeat show after a very grim night follows below.]

We're joined today for our Republican National Convention Week-in-Review by HEATHER DIGBY PARTON, award-winning opinion journalist at Salon and Hullabaloo, and RICHARD "RJ" ESKOW, longtime progressive columnist and host of The Zero Hour show on radio, TV and podcast.

It was a bizarre and stunningly dishonest week from the GOP, to say the least, capped off by the mother of all Lie Fests from the President of the United States himself. His droning, 70-minute long attempt to gaslight the American people by lying about his record and trying to scare the hell out of them about Joe Biden, did not disappoint, at least on the dishonesty scale. We make short work of a few much-needed, monster fact-checks at the top of the show before we get to the central question of the day.

Setting aside the lies and the hypocrisy of breaking countless laws while use the White House ("the People's House") to declare himself the "Law and Order President", did Trump's false, fear-mongering speech, and all the same that came before it this week from every other RNC speaker, accomplish what Republicans and Trump needed them to?

Parton and Eskow (and Desi Doyen and me) all have plenty of thoughts on that question and many others in today's lively round-table at the end of another long convention week and as we prepare for the nightmares to come in the general election season, debate season, and, undoubtedly, the boatload of October Surprises and dirty tricks that lie ahead...

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On Wednesday night at the Republican National Convention, the GOP's candidate for the vacant seat in North Carolina's 11th Congressional District offered some strange remarks. Today, on The BradCast, his Democratic opponent joins us to offer his response. [Audio link to full show follows below.]

Retired U.S. Air Force Colonel MOE DAVIS has a distinguished, 25-year career in the military that includes a boatload of awards and honors. As Chief Military Prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay, he pushed back against the George W. Bush Administration, refusing to use evidence obtained through torture against accused terrorists. When forced to do so anyway, he resigned. Later, while serving as a national security expert for Congress, he penned an op-ed critical of Obama's use of prosecutions at Gitmo. He was fired.

Now he's running for Congress as a Democrat in a NC District where Donald Trump reportedly won by 57 points in 2016, for the vacant seat previously occupied by Trump's latest Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows. But there are new court-ordered Congressional maps this year in North Carolina, after the previous Districts were found to have been unlawfully gerrymandered by state Republicans. The old maps allowed Republicans to hold 10 of 13 U.S. House seats over the past decade in one of the most closely divided states in the nation. Davis (and other experts) contend that while his District may still lean Republican, it is now much less so.

Moreoever, Davis will be running in November against a dashing 25-year old Republican kid --- and apparent Nazi-enthusiast --- by the name of Madison Cawthorn. You may have seen him speak from his wheelchair during Wednesday night's RNC. Col Davis joins us today to respond to some of Cawthorn's somewhat bizarre remarks (in which he incorrectly claimed that James Madison signed the Declaration of Independence when he was 25 --- though Madison did not sign the Declaration at all) and other elements of Cawthorn's apparently made-up resume.

Davis notes that his opponent was recently thanked "for his service to the country" on television by a Fox "News" anchor who apparently associated his wheelchair with military service. In fact, he was paralyzed in a car accident during a Spring Break trip to Florida when he was 18. "He didn't correct her," says Davis. But facts and telling the truth are no longer required in the Republican Party. In fact, both are apparently frowned upon. So Cawthorn could be the party's next superstar! "He plays fast and loose with the truth," charges Davis. "And I guess if you're on the side that 'alternative facts' are acceptable, then he's got a whole bag full." But, Davis concedes, Cawthorn "always gives you a good show. He's a handsome young man, very charismatic and articulate," before adding: "There's a lot of sizzle there but not much beneath the surface."

He says Cawthorn had promised to finally offer proposals for things like climate change and health care during his RNC speech, but instead argued simply that "conservatives" must "win the argument on both health care and the environment." He didn't bother to offer any actual argument, however. That on a night that a monster hurricane was speeding toward the Texas/Louisiana border --- the second one in a week --- while huge wildfires burned out west, after 3 nights of the RNC in which not one speaker seems to have uttered the words "climate change" even once.

"Mr. Cawthorn's plan for addressing health care is that we need more insurance companies," says Davis, who describes that as "laughable...If you're out of work, having more insurance companies isn't going to help you. That's his fresh new plan for the Republican Party.

For his part, Davis explains his own positions on several of these issues and others affecting some of the more rural (Republican-leaning) parts of his District. After the recent court-ordered redistricting in the swingiest of swing-states, the 11th District is now believed to be more Democratic, as it includes much more of Asheville. Davis notes that many describe the progressive city as "the Berkeley of the Blue Ridge....A big blue dot in the middle of a sea of red." He offers confidence that he'll be able to flip this previously "deep red" district to "blue" this year. He also shares his thoughts, as a law enforcement official himself, on calls from the Left for police reform amid continuing protests against systemic racism and a rightwing vigilante who murdered two peaceful protesters in Kenosha, WI on Tuesday night. And we discuss what he thinks about Donald Trump's pretend opposition to the Iraq War and threats to fill up Guantanamo Bay again, after it was nearly emptied during the Obama Administration.

Also on today's show: Desi Doyen joins us for details on the devastating damage wrought overnight by the monster Hurricane Laura in Louisiana and the bizarre, dangerous Night 3 of the RNC where Vice President Mike Pence gave his Presidential-sounding keynote address. He warned that violence in the streets under the Trump Administration is actually what we can expect, ironically enough, from "Joe Biden's America" --- to a maskless crowd filled with vulnerable elderly war veterans. Hopefully the event does not turn out to have been a COVID-19 super-spreader event, or Pence's closing promise to "Make America Great Again...Again" may never come to pass...again.

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On today's BradCast we head back to Georgia --- yes, again! --- for yet more new evidence highlighting the state as offering arguably the worst --- and most racist --- voting system in the nation. But we begin with breaking news today. Too much of it. [Audio link to full show is posted at bottom of summary.]

First up, Hurricane Laura is now a monster storm, currently a Category 4, and headed for landfall near the Texas/Louisiana border. The National Hurricane Center warns it will be "unsurvivable" and could submerge entire towns near the coast, with a storm surge as high as 20 feet and a menace to cities as far as 200 miles inland. A massive evacuation is now under way in both states, though avoiding the COVID pandemic in evacuation shelters may be very tricky, even as some areas in the storm's target zone have recently seen high positive test rates.

In Kenosha, Wisconsin, where protests continued for a third straight night following the outrageous police shooting, caught on tape, of African-American father Jacob Blake, two protesters were killed by a gunman on Tuesday. The alleged shooter, according to police, is a white 17-year old police fan boy from across the border in Illinois. Tuesday's shootings were also caught by cell phone video, not long after the suspected gunman was seen on video with a group of armed vigilantes being thanked by local police for their presence. After he had shot at least three protesters and was identified to police by others, the cops reportedly allowed him to walk right past them, assault rifle in hand, as they focused on the victims instead. The man was arrested today in Illinois.

Then --- after still more breaking news that the NBA's Milwaukee Bucks were boycotting their playoff game today to protest the shooting of Blake, leading the NBA to cancel all of tonight's playoff games --- we get to what necessarily became our truncated coverage of Day 2 of the Republican National Convention.

It was a stunning evening, in which one law after another was proudly broken or flaunted as the White House, U.S. Marines, the Acting Sec. of Homeland Security, a tax-payer funded trip by the Sec. of State to Israel, and the Presidential Seal were all used for political purposes, during the convention itself, so that Donald Trump could ironically be declared "the Law and Order President" by one hypocritical speaker after another.

Among the speakers were Trump's daughter Tiffany, his wife Melania and his son Eric who followed former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi making the case --- with a straight face --- that Joe Biden's family members were involved in some sort of criminal nepotism. Trump's son Eric, who serves as Executive Vice President for his father's company, was sued this week by the New York State Attorney General for failing to respond with documents and testimony to a lawful subpoena amid an investigation into bank and tax fraud by his father and the Trump Organization where Eric works. All of that as Trump's senior economic adviser Larry Kudlow pretended that the COVID pandemic --- which has so far killed at least 178,000 Americans, including more than 1,100 on Tuesday alone --- was over, thanks to Donald Trump's quick response.

As usual, all of these nightmares underscore the need to prevent Trump from winning a second term. But it won't be easy, as we learn again today with yet another story of targeted voter suppression out of Georgia. We have spent a disproportionate amount of time in recent years on this program reporting on the disastrous state of voting in Georgia. It is thought possible that the battleground state could finally flip to "blue" for this year's Presidential election and its TWO U.S. Senate races, but it continues to feature arguably offer the worst voting system in the nation.

By way of very quick summary of just a few data points to back up that allegation:

• In 2016, after a huge purge of voters from the roles, we would learn after the Presidential election that Georgia's then Republican Sec. of State, now Governor, Brian Kemp, left the entire voter database and passwords to its voting systems unprotected online for download by anyone. When caught, he lied about it and wiped the entire server despite an ongoing lawsuit.
• In 2018, a federal judge found the state's nearly 20-year old, unverifiable, easily-hacked touchscreen voting systems, mandated for use at the polling place in every county, to be outdated, insecure and unverifiable.
• In that year's election, overseen by Kemp himself, he was narrowly found (by those same failed systems) to have "won" the Governor's race in a contest that his Democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams, regards as illegitimate due to, among other things, the purges and disproportionate rejection of absentee ballots cast by African-Americans.
• Also in 2018, some 250,000 votes in the Lt. Governor's race inexplicably disappeared in black precincts.
• In 2019, the federal judge ruled the state's voting system so insecure and unverifiable that they were, in fact, unconstitutional. She banned them from further use and ordered the system to be replaced by a new one.
• In 2019, the new Republican Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger ordered new, similarly unverifiable, easily-hacked touchscreen voting systems to replace the old systems found to be unconstitutional, rather than move to a cheaper, VERIFIABLE, hand-marked paper ballot system recommended by voting and computer experts. The new $130 million systems failed in their first outing late last year and again during primaries this year, leading to hours-long voting lines in the Peach State, once again, largely in minority areas.
• And we would also later learn that the new digital optical-scan computers used to tally hand-marked absentee ballots in the Peach State had skipped counting unknown thousands of votes during the June primaries, due to a software setting that allows election officials or the private voting system vendor or even hackers to dial up or down the sensitivity setting to determine which votes are counted or not.

All of which brings us to this week, as the Georgia chapter of All Voting Is Local unveiled a new analysis of rejected vote-by-mail ballots from the June primary elections in the state. You'll be shocked to learn that in the three counties they examined, the mail-in ballots from black voters were rejected at disproportionately higher rates than others. For example, in the Atlanta suburb of Cobb County, Black voters submitted 24 percent of the absentee ballots requested but accounted for 38 percent of mail-in ballots rejected by the County.

We're joined today by AKLIMA KHONDOKER, former ACLU attorney, now Georgia State Director for All Voting is Local, to explain her group's analysis and why the rates of absentee ballot rejection are so high for black voters in Georgia and, to a lesser extent, Hispanic and Asian voters as well. Khondoker warns that while the group only looked at three counties in Georgia --- finding similarly alarming statistics in each --- the problem likely extends not only to the rest of the state, but likely to many others around the nation.

"I don't think this is unique to Georgia. This is likely something we would see nationwide," she argues, citing the "institutional and structural racism that has led to the wealth of problems that we see in our elections. There is no way to cleave the two. Because we have a clear system that has always worked for one and not the other." She goes on to explain how this new analysis is just one more data point underscoring evidence that institutional racism "undercuts everything in our election systems."

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I'll be brief in today's BradCast summary, because I've got to head back into Day 2 of the bizarre dystopian nightmare known as Donald Trump's Republican National Convention. We're watching it so you don't have to. You're welcome. [Audio link to full show is posted below.]

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

• Two nightmare storms slamming the Gulf Coast in the same week as the biggest and more dangerous of the two, Hurricane Laura, is gunning for the Louisiana/Texas border, likely as a Category 3;

• A Florida judge puts the brakes on Gov. Ron DeSantis' demand that all public schools open five days a week for in-person classes by the end of this month. He says the state's plan "disregards safety" amid a still roiling --- if slightly easing (for now) --- pandemic in the Sunshine State;

• Highlights (low lights?) from Day 1 of the RNC, in which every speaker sounded as if their remarks were either written by the same person, or simply ripped straight off of Fox "News". As ridiculous as the evening was --- featuring enough dangerous lies about Trump's mishandling of the COVID crisis that MSNBC had to break in with a doctor for some serious fact-checking; a couple of accused felons warned Democrats will "“abolish the suburbs altogether"; a seemingly stoned Don Jr. and his seemingly insane former Fox "News" host girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle --- we determined that ridicule was the best was to cover it. So we called in Stephen Colbert for some assistance.

• Good news for voters in Indiana. A federal court struck down the state's latest attempt to purge voters from the rolls without bothering to contact them in any way first.

• Good news, for now, for voters in Pennsylvania. A Trump-appointed federal judge forced the Trump Campaign to make fools of themselves by demanding they present evidence of voter fraud via secure absentee ballot drop-boxes in Pennsylvania, where they are suing to prevent the use of the convenient devices during this year's general election. The plaintiffs were unable to to present any such evidence.

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report with more on the twin storms pummeling the Gulf Coast and the raging fires in California (both amid a global pandemic making evacuating shelters very tricky for social distancing), the Trump Administration puts a pause on it's approval for the controversial Pebble Mine in Alaska after Don Jr. and Fox "News" decide maybe they're against it after all, and a quick review of last week's virtual Democratic National Convention where Joe Biden and many others promised action on climate change...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Twin storms pummel the Gulf Coast and Northern California fires rage out of control during the coronavirus pandemic; Trump Administration abruptly pauses controversial Pebble Mine; PLUS: 2020 Democratic National Convention touts climate action... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Exxon Ends 92-Year Run on Dow Jones; Hedge Fund Collects $3 Billion in Bet on Wildfire Insurance Claims;
Dems’ Climate Plan Takes Aim At The Fossil Industry’s Political Power; Thousands Allowed To Bypass Environmental Rules In Pandemic; Climate Is Taking On a Growing Role for Voters, Research Suggests; Decades of Racist Housing Policy Left Neighborhoods Sweltering... PLUS: An Apocalyptic August in California... and much, MUCH more! ...

Everything is now happening all at once. So, we couldn't get through half of what we would have liked to have covered while still having enough time left to open phones on today's BradCast to thoughts from listeners on last week's Democratic National Convention and this week's GOP version. [Audio link to show follows below.]

So, before we opened the phones to a bunch of great calls, we covered, among other things...

• Last week, Donald Trump claimed Joe Biden will "hurt God" if he's elected. But it seems that God may have already chosen sides in this year's Presidential election. As if the COVID crisis derailing Trump's plans for rallies and a national convention in two different cities wasn't enough, this year's record Atlantic Hurricane season continues with not one but two storms in the Gulf (Marco and Laura) at the same time, both gunning for Louisiana and/or Texas this week as the Republican National Convention finally gets under way. Desi Doyen joins us for the latest on that;

• Even Donald Trump's own family doesn't trust Donald Trump. We already know his niece, Mary Trump --- who recently released a best-seller about him --- thinks he's a lying, fraudulent, menace. But so too, apparently, does Donald's own sister, former federal Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, who is heard during secretly recorded conversations with Mary describing her brother, the President, as stupid, cruel, phony and a liar, among other nice things from a family member who knows him best. We share some of those audio recordings released over the weekend today;

• Also parting ways with Donald Trump today, more than two dozen former Republican Senators and Congressmen, including Arizona's former Sen. Jeff Flake, who announced their endorsement of Joe Biden just hours before the Republican National Convention was to get under way on Monday;

• That follows a group of more than 70 longtime national security officials who served under Trump and other Republican Administrations who issued an open letter on Friday endorsing Joe Biden and describing Trump as "dangerously unfit to serve another term";

• But, of course, all of this is just part of the GOP's long spiral into a party that believes in absolutely nothing at all other than clinging to power any way that they can and, of course, cult-worshiping Trump, as Politico Magazine's Tim Alberta details in a new piece today headlined "The Grand Old Meltdown: What happens when a party gives up on ideas?" As one longtime Congressional GOP stalwart laments in Alberta's piece, "Owning the libs and pissing off the media. That's what we believe in now. There's really not much more to it.";

• One thing that happens when a party gives up on ideas is they are unable to even craft a policy platform for their party. That is --- other than officially selecting a nominee for President --- the whole point of holding a national convention in the first place. But with a complete dearth of legitimate policy proposals, the RNC on Sunday essentially admitted as much by announcing they would not be producing a platform at all this year for the first time in....ever?;

• Then, after a few words about the ongoing fight against the attempt by Trump and his Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to steal the election by slowing down the mail during the largest Vote-by-Mail election of all time, we open the phones to listeners with their thoughts on all of the above and much more...

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Even if several multi-state legal challenges result in a federal court order directing Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to repair the damage wrought by his allegedly "illegal" sabotage of the U.S. Postal Service's mail delivery capabilities, absent significant additional funds, it's unlikely DeJoy could fully comply with that order.

The facts laid out in one of the recently filed cases and echoed in the others, along with subsequent developments, suggest that DeJoy was, at best, disingenuous when, in an August 18 formal statement [PDF], he claimed he was "suspending" his nationwide mail sorting, labeling and delivery changes until after the Nov. 3 Presidential Election.

The complaint describes how, pursuant to an Equipment Reduction Plan [PDF], Defendants removed, dismantled and/or destroyed 671 high-speed sorting and labeling machines that had a combined hundreds of millions of dollars in value. As a result, the States allege, "some major cities have already had their ability to sort mail reduced by hundreds of thousands of pieces of mail per hour." (Emphasis in original text).

On the same day that DeJoy issued his "suspension" statement, emails were submitted by Kevin Couch, the USPS Director of Maintenance Operations, informing Maintenance Managers that, irrespective of instructions from their plant managers, they must not reconnect or reinstall sorting machines that had previously been disconnected absent approval from USPS HQ.

Last Friday, while testifying before the U.S. Senate, DeJoy made it clear that he has "has no intention" of reinstalling the sorting machines, even as he claimed that election related mail would receive top priority from the Postal Service. Contrary to DeJoy's rosy predictions, however, the USPS's own Service Performance memo reflects a significant drop in overall performance which precipitated a USPS warning to 46 states that their deadlines for Vote-by-Mail ballots "might impede the timely delivery of mail-in ballots, possibly disenfranchising millions of voters"

While there's ample reason for a court to order reinstallation, absent significant additional USPS funding, which Trump opposes, it is doubtful that DeJoy could fully undo the damage even if he were ordered to do so.

VOTERS BEWARE: Do not be lulled into a false sense of security by DeJoy's "suspension" of changes at the USPS until after Election Day, or by his unsupported assurance that USPS can timely process and deliver every ballot. The wiser course, as laid out in our previously related article, is to deposit your mail-in ballots in secure, state-supplied drop-boxes (where available) or at designated drop-off locations. Check your local jurisdictions to learn what options may be available where you live. In some jurisdictions, voters can deposit their mail-in ballots at the polls either during early voting or on Election Day. In some jurisdictions, voters can link to election official websites to track the processing of their own ballots as well...