On today's BradCast, the COVID-19 crisis worsens in the U.S. as it improves in Europe and Asia, it's another fraught Election Day in several states, Trump threatens to sicken Arizona even more, and man-made global warming threatens everything. [Audio link to show follows below.]

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

• What goes around comes around, as EU is now considering a travel ban against U.S. due to surging coronavirus infection rates in this country --- mirroring same denial, downplay, infection surge failures in Brazil and Russia.

• Rising rates in many GOP-controlled states tied to premature openings for Memorial Day;

• Phoenix Mayor urges Trump to wear mask at local campaign rally as crisis grips state. But, don't worry! Phoenix church hosting Trump rally today has a miracle scheme to "kill 99.9 percent" of the COVID-19 virus!;

• Problems at polls on Primary Election Day in New York; Kentucky may overcome poll closure concerns, thanks (at least in part) to mail-in balloting;

• And finally, Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report, as record heat blows past 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Siberia(!), Trump makes new pretend claims about wind power while rolling back protections for birds, UK builds world's largest liquid air battery...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Months-long Arctic heat wave delivers all-time record high --- in Siberia; Extreme heat now kills more Americans than hurricanes or floods; Trump Administration rolls back decades-old protections for migratory birds as Trump lies about wind again at his sparsely attended Tulsa rally; PLUS: U.K. builds world's largest liquid air battery... 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): Big Oil is scared shitless; Slip-up reveals Chevron ties to architect of climate attack; Epidemic of contaminated medical waste is following the coronavirus; Record plume of Sahara Desert dust aims at Southeast U.S.; Long-simmering water battle comes to a boil in CA; Utility ransomware attacks becoming more sophisticated, new 'honeypot' operation finds... PLUS: Capitalism is destroying 'safe operating space' for humanity, warn scientists... and much, MUCH more! ...

On today's BradCast: We're gonna need a bigger front page in this country, given all the huge news that only served to cancel out all of the other huge news this weekend. All of which, we suspect, is just the way Donald Trump likes it. But don't worry. The most important news of the weekend --- the first failed attempt and second successful attempt by corrupt U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr to fire the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (likely unlawfully) is the eventual focus of today's show, with our guest, a former Deputy Asst. Attorney General herself. [Audio link to show is posted at end of summary.]

But first, some of that other news that only served to crowd out all that other other news over the weekend. After a few quick words and warnings about tomorrow's primary elections in New York and Kentucky (expect very long lines) and some new news on Los Angeles County's new and already failed touchscreen voting and electronic pollbook system (which we'll have to offer in detail on another day), we take a look at the still burgeoning COVID-19 crisis. Despite Trump's attempts to pretend it away, infection rates are still increasing in at least 23 states, holding steady in 10, and only decreasing in 17 --- if, in fact, it's actually even decreasing in those states. All of this after many states reopened for business far earlier than health experts advised would be safe.

Then its on to Donald Trump's embarrassingly fizzled return to the campaign trail on Saturday, when his campaign's promise of more than 1,000,000 tickets registered for his "Great American Comeback Celebration" rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, turned into just over 6,000 supporters at the indoor venue/coronavirus super-spreader event. The arena was barely half full, if that. Trump was reportedly furious, according to much of the brutal news coverage of his rambling, nearly two-hour remarks on Saturday, during which he admitted that he told his "people, 'Slow the testing down, please!'" Yes, the President of the United States, during a global pandemic, actually ordered his staff to try and test fewer people for the deadly disease in hopes that it might make him look like less of a failure. It has done just the opposite.

It also did not help the 6 members of his own campaign advance team in Tulsa who tested positive for COVID just before the event, or the two that have tested positive since. We should have expected as much from the guy who told reporters last week that "over one million people" were planning to attend and that "we expect to have like a record setting crowd. We've never had an empty seat and we certainly won't in Oklahoma." Even as he boarded the helicopter on the way to the Tulsa event Saturday, he lied to reporters that the "crowds are unbelievable" in Oklahoma. "They haven't seen anything like it." The operative word there is "unbelievable."

All of that, however, helped to obscure the remarkably corrupt and seemingly unprecedented events that took place very late Friday night when AG Barr falsely announced that Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, had resigned. Turned out he hadn't, and he said as much in a stunning statement minutes later, declaring that he'd only learned of his own "resignation" via Barr's press release.

Berman, a 2016 Trump Campaign donor and member of his Transition team, said he refused to step down until he was replaced by a Senate-confirmed nominee. Since he was not appointed by the President, but by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (the Senate would have had trouble approving him), he cannot be removed by firing without cause. According to law, a USA appointed by the courts can only be replaced by a Senate-confirmed nominee. Berman's U.S. Attorney's office at SDNY is known for its independence from Main Justice. It has prosecuted allies of Trump and was believed to be investigating more of them, including Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and the Trump Organization itself. After Berman's brief overnight stand against Barr, he agreed to stand down on Saturday morning, after he said Barr agreed to allow Berman's Deputy to replace him as Acting USA (as is the normal practice), rather than install the U.S. Attorney from New Jersey (as Barr had announced in his false statement on Friday), which is decidedly not normal practice.

Yes, the Barr/Trump authoritarian strongman move is all at least as corrupt and unprecedented as it sounds. Thus, we are joined today by a guest with no small amount of insight into just how wildly corrupt and unprecedented all of this is. LISA GRAVES is a former Deputy Asst. AG at the U.S. Justice Dept., a former Chief Counsel for nominations in the U.S. Senate. She is also a former Deputy Chief for the US Court system. She is now Founder of True North Research, a good government watchdog group "researching the forces distorting our democracy."

Graves describes the Barr/Trump/Berman mess as "a debacle in terms of rule law." Ironic, she notes, coming from a man claming to be running for re-election as the "Law and Order President".

"This all smells. It reeks," she tells me. "It's really a terrible crisis for the Department of Justice, for the US Attorney's office in New York, and for the very rule of law. You cannot have a President who fires people who are investigating him or who are investigating his associates. You have to have a President who is as far away as possible from even appearing to interfere in that sort of investigation or any investigation that might touch on him."

As to what can be done about it and whether or not Barr actually broke the law himself with his initial attempt to remove Berman --- and whether Trump actually fired him on Saturday morning, as Barr contends (only to be contradicted by Trump himself) --- and who would prosecute Barr if, in fact, he did violate the law...well, you'll have to tune in to find out what Graves says about all of that and whether we will ever be able to restore justice to the Department of Justice after Donald Trump is eventually gone...

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On March 3rd's Super Tuesday primary elections, Los Angeles County's new, $300 million, 100% unverifiable touchscreen Ballot Marking Device (BMD) voting systems and electronic pollbooks failed catastrophically. The disaster resulted in hours-long lines to vote at new Voting Centers in the nation's most populous voting jurisdiction leaving untold thousands unable to cast a vote at all.

It was all completely predictable. In fact, I had been predicting --- and warning --- about such a disaster like that with this system, dubbed Voting Solutions for All People (or VSAP) by the County, for pretty much the entirety of the 10 years it had been in development.

Few seemed to care until just before the March election, after we reported that the system had failed certification testing by the state on more than 40 points.

Following the March 3rd disaster, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors, pretending to be furious about it, ordered L.A. County's Registrar-Record/County Clerk Dean Logan (the system's brainchild, who stopped coming on The BradCast or even answering any of my questions about the new system in the months before Election Day), to investigate himself and create a report on what when wrong and what needs to be done about it.

Logan's 135-page report is posted here [PDF].

In short, it says: "Here's what we think went wrong and here's how we're gonna fix it for next time. We'll take care of it by November 3rd. Trust us! Just like you did last time!"

What it should say, is: "We're sorry. We screwed up. We wasted $300 million in tax-payer dollars, so we're gonna trash the incredibly complicated, flawed, and wholly unverifiable voting system and vulnerable electronic pollbooks that disenfranchised thousands of L.A. voters on March 3rd, restore the thousands of precincts we foolishly shut down in favor of 'Voting Centers', and move back to a simple, inexpensive, verifiable hand-marked paper ballot system at all community-accessible polling places for this year's critical general election."

Why the L.A. County Board of Supervisors isn't now demanding that, I couldn't tell you. Why California Sec. of State Alex Padilla isn't demanding the same, I couldn't tell you either. Except that all of them had been all-in for years with Logan on the new VSAP system. Nobody, apparently, is accountable for anything.

Instead, L.A. County voters will once again serve as guinea pig beta testers for Logan's obscenely expensive, already-failed new computer voting system during another LIVE election again this year, which just happens to arguably be the most critical in the nation's history. What could possibly go wrong?

One saving grace may be that the Governor has ordered all active registered voters to be mailed absentee ballots before this November's election due to the COVID-19 crisis.

In the week's prior to the March 3rd election, I was interviewed by CBS2-LA's David Goldstein about the new system. When he asked me how much confidence voters should have in it, I answered bluntly: "None." Logan was also interviewed in the same report and was asked the same question. His answer: "Voters can have a great deal of confidence."

You can decide who called that one correctly. Goldstein called me up again on Thursday afternoon to ask me to join him for a quick follow-up interview via FaceTime regarding Logan's postmortem report on what went wrong. CBS2 ran their follow-up report on Thursday night. Their story is now here. Goldstein's follow-up video report from last night's 6:00 news is posted below. (He called me just before airtime for my radio show, so please pardon the lack of shaving and really bad iPhone sound on my end!)...

On today's BradCast: There is one thing that Donald Trump excels at: screwing up. Despite his promises to his nativist racist base to end the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, even his stolen U.S. Supreme Court had to concede his attempt to do so was unlawful and unconstitutional [Audio link to full show is posted below]

It was the second such defeat for the haters this week, after Trump's own appointee, Justice Neil Gorsuch, found it unlawful in his 6-3 majority opinion to fire someone simply because they are gay or trans, as had been legal in most states before this week's landmark ruling. Today's defeat for our feckless President was found in the 5-4 majority opinion [PDF] authored by Chief Justice John Roberts who, with the Court's four Democratic appointees, held that, in Trump's haste to end the program that protects from deportation nearly 800,000 people brought here by their parents as children, the Administration did so in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act (APA).

No, Roberts isn't turning into a liberal squish, despite the blustered outrage from rightwingers today. The APA statute requires a reasonable explanation for overturning Executive Actions by previous Presidents, and the Roberts majority determined --- as with Trump's botched attempt to add a citizenship question to the Census last year --- the Administration couldn't even muster up one.

We're joined by SARAH PIERCE, policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, to describe the "surprise", if narrow, opinion, that protects DREAMers for now, but allows Trump to try again if his Administration can figure out how to do it legally. "No one expected the Supreme Court to rule against the Trump Administration and how it went about ending DACA. We're all extremely surprised by this decision --- and happy, because this is a large group of young people we're talking about in the United States that contribute a lot to our country, and society, and economy. So it's good news all around," she tells me.

In addition to the good news that these folks --- some 20,000 of whom are now working in the health care industry during the pandemic, many others in the U.S. military, many more now married with U.S. citizen children --- will not be ripped out of their communities and sent back to countries they don't remember or even speak the language, the economy will also not have to suffer another $300 billion blow. That is just one of the costs cited by Roberts in his opinion as unlawfully ignored by the Administration when they violated the law in trying to reverse DACA.

Naturally, Trump played the victim, describing this week's two SCOTUS verdicts that did not go his way as "horrible & politically charged decisions" and "shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives." He then pitifully asked: "Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn't like me?" No. But pretty much nobody else does.

For his part, President Obama lauded the decision, citing DACA as having "protected young people who were raised as part of our American family from deportation." He called for Joe Biden to be elected with "a Democratic Congress that does its job, protects DREAMers, and finally creates a system that's truly worthy of this nation of immigrants once and for all."

As Pierce explains on today's show, Congress has, for years, been on the verge of passage of an immigration bill to protect DREAMers. Those efforts, however, are inevitably scotched by Trump and the GOP, who seem to prefer a political issue they can raise money on to an actual permanent solution to the problem.

"We've always gotten a lot of mixed messages on this, not only from Donald Trump's statements but from his actions, as well," says Pierce, referencing his 2017 tweet when he asked: "Does anybody really want to throw out good, educated and accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military?," followed by his tweet two years later when he referred to some DREAMers as "far from 'angels" and "very tough, hardened criminals."

"Both the Senate and the House took time to seriously consider passing legislation on DREAMers," Pierce notes. "And the White House really torpedoed that, both times, by adding a bunch of demands that were just unsuitable for Democrats to take on. So we have them moving one step forward, clearly with the interests of DACA recipients interests in mind, and then taking two steps back. They're all over the place."

Whether these failures harm or hurt Trump's reelection chances remains to be seen. He is already demanding "more Justices or we will lose our 2nd. Amendment & everything else." But, of course, as his former National Security Advisor John Bolton's new book makes clear --- according to reporting on copies obtained by media before next week's official publication date --- everything Trump does, every decision he makes as President, is not based on how it might help Americans, but on how it might help his reelection chances. That includes an attempted quid pro quo scheme, according to Bolton, to lift U.S. sanctions against China in exchange for their purchase of soybeans and wheat to help voters in the Midwest that Trump believes he needs to win in 2020.

The conversation described by Bolton between Trump and Chinese President XI Jinping mirrors the extortion scheme with Ukraine's President that resulted in Trump's impeachment last year. Shamefully, though Bolton would have bolstered the Democrats' case against Trump in the impeachment trial, he chose to hold his revelations for his new book. Please don't buy that book, even as everything so far described from it regarding Trump's failures and fecklessness as both a President and a human being sounds 100% plausible.

Finally, we're joined by Desi Doyen for our latest Green News Report, as the corporate person known as California utility company PG&E admits guilt to 84 counts of manslaughter (don't worry, despite all the deaths they admit to causing, nobody will actually go to jail); as new analyses find the nation could move to 90% renewable electricity in just 15 years and save money doing it; and as the 2020 wildfire season sparks up with an ominous beginning...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: 2020 wildfire season lights up with an ominous start; California utility PG&E pleads guilty to 84 counts of manslaughter; We can hit 90 percent renewable electricity by 2035 --- and save money; PLUS: New Jersey Governor vows to make state the nation's first offshore wind industry hub... 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): 'Historic First': Nebraska Farmers Return Land to Ponca Tribe in Effort to Block Keystone XL; World's Largest Liquid Air Battery Will Help the UK Go Carbon Neutral; Trump team prepares $1 trillion infrastructure plan to spur economy; Climate Models Underestimate CO2 Emissions from Permafrost by 14 Percent, Study Finds... PLUS: As Meat Plants Stayed Open to Feed Americans, Exports to China Surged... and much, MUCH more! ...

On today's BradCast: More bad news on the spread of the coronavirus and more bad news for Donald Trump --- though at least the latter is potentially very good news for America! [Audio link to full show is posted below summary.]

Vice President Mike Pence continues to beclown himself on behalf of Donald Trump, writing in the Wall Street Journal yesterday that "We are winning the fight against the invisible enemy" and that the Administration's response to the coronavirus is "a cause for celebration". That, as the U.S. has now seen over 2,000,000 infections and the COVID-19 death toll in our nation is at least as high as 119,000...and climbing.

On the same day Pence's op-ed was published, there was a record spike in cases was seen in at least six states on Tuesday, including Arizona, Florida, Oklahoma (ready for Trump's campaign rally on Saturday?), Oregon, Texas and Nevada. The Republican Governors of most of those states are either in denial or simply lying to their constituents about the deadly impacts of the virus in their states, suggesting that it's due to increased testing, while ignoring the record surge in the percentages of positive tests (Florida, Oklahoma) and hospitalizations (Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma). Oregon has a Democratic Governor, but their outbreak appears tied to 200 cases from a crowded Pentecostal church service held in late May, in violation of state restrictions. The other states all appear to have reopened for business far too early, as their Governor's downplayed the risk of the virus and the need for simple safety measures.

Democratic and Republican Mayors of the six largest cities in Texas have written an open letter begging Governor Abbott to allow them to mandate masking in their cities, pleading with him to "restore the ability for local authorities to enforce the wearing of face coverings in public venues where physical distancing cannot be practiced." Infectious disease epidemiologists (such as the University of Arizona's Dr. Purnima Mahdivanan, who we interviewed on yesterday's show) argue masking is one of the easiest, cheapest and most important ways to help stem the spread of the coronavirus. Abbott, however, is disallowing local municipalities to do so, even as he is blaming the increased infections on residents under 30 who, he says, are not wearing masks.

And yet, "we are winning," argues Pence, as he prepares to join Trump for his campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma on Saturday after new cases rose in the state by some 68% over the past week. In all, at least 17 states saw a rise in new cases over the past week, giving new meaning to Trump's May 2016 remarks at a rally in Billings, Montana, when he said: "We’re going to win so much, you’re going to be so sick winning!"

In the meantime, while Americans are sick and getting sicker, Donald Trump appears to be badly losing, not winning, in a number of key battleground states across the country. New state polling finds him losing to Joe Biden by double-digits in both two new polls in several new polls in Michigan and Florida (where his 22% advantage in 2016 over Hillary Clinton among voters 65 years of age and older has plummeted some 31% since(!), resulting in a 9 point lead for Biden among that group in the Sunshine State.) Formerly "red" Arizona now also appears to be falling into the Biden column, with the latest poll finding the former Veep up by about 4 points. Even Georgia and Iowa, both traditionally solid Republican states are now polled as toss-ups, with Biden up by 2 in GA and Trump up by just 1 in IA. We dig into some of the details from those polls.

That said, Trump has come back from bad poll numbers before. Our guest today, Roosevelt University political scientist DAVID FARIS, however, tempts the gods by arguing in his latest column at The Week that "This time is different for Trump". Why does he believe that? He joins us to explain --- and to take a few challenges from me on that point...

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This is about far more than the fate of Michael Flynn.

Last week, in an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief [PDF], former federal prosecutor John Gleeson, a retired federal judge, together with a number of renowned attorneys and constitutional scholars, offered a scathing condemnation of the William Barr-led Department of Justice. Gleeson denounced the DOJ's "corrupt" and "politically motivated" effort to dismiss the long-running case against Flynn, Donald Trump's former National Security Advisor, who, the brief describes as a "political ally of the President."

The issue at stake in this case is not only on a matter of accountability for Trump's disgraced former National Security Advisor. It also entails a question of whether the corrupt political influence the President has exerted over an ethically compromised Attorney General will now flow into and compromise a co-equal branch of government, the federal Judiciary...

On today's BradCast: President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence are ramping up efforts to pretend, lie and try to distract their way out of the coronavirus crisis in advance of their re-election rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma on Saturday. The virus doesn't care. As our guest today notes, "the virus is non-partisan." [Audio link to full, must-listen show is posted below.]

Even as COVID-19 cases are spiking around the country --- including in OK, where new cases surged 68% in the second week of June and where Tulsa's top health official and major newspaper are both begging Trump to call off this Saturday's planned campaign rally --- both men are now lying about both the growth in infections and in hospitalizations since states have begun reopening for business over the past several weeks.

They are both falsely explaining away the rise in confirmed infections in more than a dozen states as due to increased testing. It isn't. What epidemiologists are worried about is the rise in the percentage rate of positives tests, no matter the increase or decrease in the number of tests performed and about rising hospitalization rates, which are the best indicator of the increasing virulence of the pandemic in various parts of the country.

Pence reportedly instructed Governors, during a phone call on Monday, to lie about both matters, stating "the magnitude of increase in testing" explains the rise in positive cases and that increased hospitalizations are only because "people are going back to hospitals and elective surgery." But hospitalizations for elective procedures are decidedly not what infectious disease specialists are worried about, nor are they included in the spiking and often record rates of hospitalizations being seen right now for COVID-19 infections.

As we have been explaining on the show in recent days, as rates rise in Texas and Florida and Arizona (all three hit records for single day increases today) and elsewhere since Governors in those states prematurely reopened and are now seeing skyrocketing rates of illness since doing so, there is still no treatment, no cure, and no vaccine for the coronavirus. Lifting lock-down orders, failing to wear masks, and ignoring social distancing as many have now done, is little different than had we all done so in March and April as the virus first emerged.

In fact, as one of the very conservative COVID models --- one cited by the White House --- was adjusted today to predict more than 200,000 deaths in the U.S. by the first of October, our guest today explains why she believes "we are in a worse situation now" than we were back in March and April.

"We have a lot of infectious people in the community that we didn't have earlier on," notes DR. PURNIMA MADHIVANAN, infectious disease epidemiologist and Associate Professor at the University of Arizona's Zuckerman College of Public Health. "I would say it's Phase 2 in that regard. We have a lot more people who are infectious, who are shedding the virus, than when we had started earlier on."

Describing ICU beds, particularly in Phoenix, at near-capacity rates just one month after reopening, Madhivanan, Director of her school's Global Health Training Program, says the state of Arizona is in "crisis mode. We need to be doing something, like, yesterday." That, as Republican Governor Doug Ducey --- who abruptly announced reopening plans early last month on the same day as a visit to the state by Donald Trump --- continues to downplay the state's worsening predicament, despite a 76% increase in cases since the end of May and records of new cases and hospitalizations being consistently topped in recent days.

Madhivanan tells me she sees the state running out of ICU space within a week. "We have a crisis situation right here in Phoenix. And if [Ducey] were smart, he would close off the borders to Phoenix yesterday." This is not a so-called "second wave," she cautions. "We haven't even peaked with the first wave yet. We are number 42 among all states in terms of testing rates. So we haven't even gotten to the level where we can say our testing rates are good. And we've not even mentioned contact tracing yet. That's practically non-existent, and a huge concern."

It didn't have to be this way, Madhivanan explains, but for Ducey's abrupt reversal in early May. "What we had actually projected and predicted was we would get to the peak around the end of June, if everything had gone the way we had predicted with all the physical distancing in place, stay-at-home orders. But when the stay-at-home orders were not followed through, that peak came much, much earlier, and we are still continuing up on that wave. We have not come down yet."

This is an important, must-listen, detailed conversation which extends well beyond Arizona. I couldn't even begin to adequately summarize it here. We discuss the denialists and claims from mostly non-epidemiologists and ideologists who charge that lock-downs have made the situation worse, asserting that allowing for "herd immunity" to develop would have been a smarter strategy. She details why she strongly disagrees, explaining that it would have taken years and resulted in exponentially more deaths, in the millions, here in the U.S. Madhivanan further says containment, unlike during the SARS crisis of 2003-2004, became impossible "because we have an uncoordinated and poorly managed COVID response" at the federal level.

That means the only option left is shutdowns, mask wearing (which, she argues, makes a huge difference in mitigating spread of the virus), hand-washing and physical distancing. But, she laments, there is now very little, if any, of that being done in her state. Ducey has never mandated masking, for example, even as "masks are our lowest-hanging fruit and one of the most economical interventions. If all of us did it, we can dramatically bring down the number of infections."

She warns things are going to get much worse before they get better anytime soon. "If we had used the period of the shutdown to put comprehensive testing and tracing protocols in place, this investment would have paid off in the long run. But we failed to do that. So we only delayed the day of reckoning for us."

"At some point people need to start believing in science, is all I can say. We have the data, we have the evidence, and the science is pretty clear about this. We were not ready and we should not have opened," Madhivanan insists.

Finally, after a bit more news on the 28 states in the U.S. where infection rates are decidedly NOT falling, no matter how hard the Administration and his supporters are still trying to pretend it all away, we've got a bit of breaking news that came just before air time on Donald Trump hoping to sue John Bolton's upcoming new book away.

Then, Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report. That, of course, as usual, includes nothing but lots of much-needed sunshine and flowers! (Hey, if Trump and Pence can lie about absolutely everything, we can too, right?)

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: U.S. Supreme Court clears the way for controversial fracked natural gas pipeline; Microplastics are raining down on our national parks; Trump plans to open up Florida for offshore drilling --- after the election; PLUS: Administration accelerates resource extraction and cruel wildlife hunting practices on the public's lands... 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): Trump’s EPA balks at a chance to save black lives; A war against climate science, waged by Washington’s rank and rile, protecting their jobs; Trump administration blocks tribes from protecting their waters; Americans increasingly understand that climate change harms human health; Scientists warn against Trump's consumer protection nominee... PLUS: Love is Blind: How Germany's Long Romance With Cars Led to the Nation's Biggest Clean Energy Failure... and much, MUCH more! ...

On today's BradCast: You've almost certainly heard by now about Georgia's disastrous primary election last week, when new computer voting systems, shuttered polling places and thousands of absentee ballots that never arrived to voters resulted in hours-long voting lines, disproportionately in heavily-minority areas of the state. You may not have heard, however, that the new computer scanners the state's Republican Secretary of State forced all counties to use to tally hand-marked paper absentee ballots on June 9th appear to have failed to tally potentially thousands of votes across the state. We're joined today by the woman who first discovered the gob-smacking --- and still unexplained --- failure in GA's new, failed, statewide voting systems last week. [Link to audio of full show is posted below.]

But first up, a few noteworthy breaking news items today...

• The FDA has revoked emergency use authorization of the drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19, finding the serious and potentially deadly dangers of the drugs outweigh any potential, unproven benefits. These are the drugs that non-health expert Donald Trump (and Fox "News") repeatedly encouraged Americans to take, pressuring the FDA in the early days of the coronavirus to approve for broad use. Trump repeatedly declared, "What do you have to lose?" in taking it. The answer: potentially your life, according to the FDA and the National Institutes of Health as of today;

• The coronavirus still continues to spread across the U.S., with infection rates and hospitalizations spiking in many places across the nation, particular where businesses have been allowed to reopen too early. Texas, for example, has continued to break its own hospitalization records, day-after-day over the past week. All of that since GOP Gov. Greg Abbot allowed many business to reopen on Memorial Day weekend and for Phase III of the state's reopening plan (allowing some restaurants to fill up to 75% of capacity) to go into effect on Friday, despite the deadly and continuing surge of new cases and hospitalizations;

• Stunning and great news on Monday, shockingly enough, from the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled 6-3 that employers may not discriminate against LGBTQ people. Republican-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority(!), said that firing gay or trans people because they are gay or trans amounts to unlawful discrimination on the basis of sex. That is forgidden by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The ruling is a huge victory for the civil rights community and those of us who believe in freedom and liberty and the rule of law;

• More good news from the Court today. SCOTUS declined to hear about a dozen different cases appealed to the Court by gun rights activists hoping to further broaden the 2nd Amendment.

Then, a bit of very rare good news out of last week's disastrous GA primary: Overall turnout was way up as compared to 2016's primary, and especially among Democrats where three times as many voted in the state's U.S. Senate primary than did so four years ago. Moreover, curiously enough, many more Republicans voted in last week's uncontested GOP U.S. Senate primary for Sen. David Perdue than voted for Donald J. Trump in his own uncontested Presidential primary in a state that many believe could flip from red to blue in November for the first time in decades. But that's the end of the "good news" out of Georgia's horrific election last week.

With voters (mostly in Democratic-leaning areas) forced to wait in hours-long lines at the polls, where the final votes was cast well after midnight on Wednesday, election integrity advocates have now learned that things are even worse than previously known.

During mandated bi-partisan county reviews of ballots identified by the state's new absentee ballot computer scanners as having potential over- or under-votes, our guest today discovered that the computer tally systems were failing to count votes at all in certain races on an untold number of ballots. Election Integrity advocate JEANNE DUFORT, was reportedly the first to notice that the digital computer scanners were simply failing --- inexplicably --- to count completely countable votes on ballots she reviewed while serving on a bi-partisan three-person review panel in her county. Dufort has served as a plaintiff in a number of successful legal complaints brought by the non-partisan Coalition for Good Governance, challenging the horrific computerized voting and tallying systems (both old and new) forced on all 159 counties in the state by its Republican Secretary of State.

After first spotting the apparently uncounted votes, she says on today's program, "we checked the audit trail. The computer said, 'unvoted.' But we're looking at a voter mark. No confusion that it's a vote." The same problem was subsequently discovered on a huge proportion of ballots reviewed in DeKalb, Clarke and Cherokee Counties. According to voting systems experts, the uncounted votes are likely to be found in every county in the state, since they were all forced to use the same new systems this year. (A system which, by the way, even the state of Texas refused to certify for use there, finding it to be "fragile and error prone.")

Despite rates of anywhere from 5 to 10% of ballots discovered in the initial four counties to have had valid untallied votes on them, DuFort says that while the votes on ballots they reviewed were added to the results, Morgan County's Board of Elections voted against an examination of the county's other 3,000 absentee ballots. She describes that vote by the Board as a "huge disappointment," telling me that "head in the sand is not a good strategy when a problem materializes." But that appears to be the state of Georgia's strategy on just about everything these days. The Secretary of State's office initially denied there was any problem at all, dismissing DuFort as a partisan "activist". In fact, while she serves as the 1st Vice Chair of the Morgan County Democratic Party, she works with the Coalition for Good Governance whose Founder and Executive Director, Marilyn Marks, is both a frequent guest on The BradCast and a registered Republican.

Since the discovery and confirmation of the massive computer counting flaw --- which could affect untold thousands of votes across the state --- the Coalition has called for a "thorough transparent investigation and correction of the vote count [which] must be immediately undertaken and completed prior to certification of the election results." DuFort, however, tells us that "so far, the state has not shown an interest in investigating it. It's shown an interest in denying there's a problem."

"We're calling on counties all over the state, before they certify, to do a human eyeball review to see what other votes are out there that are embedded in ballots that have just plain not been counted and should have been counted," she says about the problem that one panelist in a different county said was discovered "by sheer luck" during the review of ballots flagged by the computer system for other reasons.

DuFort suggests that some of the candidates who ran in last week's contested statewide Democratic Primary for U.S. Senate, for example, may be able to take legal action, since Georgia law "is clear on this" that votes must be counted. Citing several voting system and computer science experts who have verified the flaw, DuFort argues: "Folks who know about these things tell us that what we've seen with our own eyes is likely a bug. Bugs can happen. [In a] big, first-time statewide rollout, you can have a bug. Nobody's complaining that there's a bug. But you've got to be interested enough to go and find it and fix it. We've got a big consequential race coming up in Georgia in November, and you better learn from this experience and fix it before then."

Whether the state will learn anything or not remains to be seen as this story continues to develop and explanations are sought for what happened and how large the problem actually is. We will cover it, of course, as it continues to do so...

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On today's BradCast: It's the conversation that everyone in America who gives a damn about democracy needs to be having. And, not in the days just before this November's election --- when it will be too late to do anything about it --- but RIGHT NOW. [Audio link to full show is posted below.]

In Florida, the top Democrat in the state's House of Representative is sounding an "urgent" alarm. He says that absentee ballots in the perpetual swing-state could be gamed by the Trump Administration using the U.S. Postal Service to slow the return of ballots. In the Sunshine State, any ballots that don't arrive at County Headquarters by 7pm on Election Day may not be included in the results. Minority Leader Kionne McGhee is calling for barcodes to be added to absentee ballots so that voters can track whether they have been received by election officials, so that they may otherwise vote in person on Election Day if necessary.

While calling on the state's Republican Governor to take action that would also help Republicans (who voted at a higher rate by mail than Democrats in 2018), a Trump Campaign spokesperson dismissed McGhee's concerns as "an absolutely bogus conspiracy theory by Democrats." (And you know how Trump hates conspiracy theories.) Of course, Republican willingness to commit fraud, especially in Florida elections, is anything but a "conspiracy theory". In fact, Donald Trump himself, just this year, has already committed absentee ballot voter fraud in the state. So, apparently, has his Press Secretary Kayleigh MacEneny. Former GOP superstar Ann Coulter definitely did so. And so, it seems, did Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis cop charged with the murder of George Floyd. Chauvin, a property owner in Florida, where he is also a member of the state Republican Party, reportedly voted in the state's elections in 2016 and 2018, despite working and living in Minnesota, in what a Florida attorney and candidate for Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections this year describes as a third-degree felony.

Democrats, meanwhile, have been jailed for much less than what both Trump and Chauvin are accused of having done in Florida.

Presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden is similarly worried about what the current President and his party may do to undermine the 2020 contest, telling The Daily Show's Trevor Noah this week that his "single greatest concern" is that "this President is going to try to steal this election."

Stolen or not, despite Trump's plummeting favorability ratings, this year's critical general elections will be anything but a cakewalk for Democrats amid the added challenge of coronavirus. Tuesday's disastrous primary election in Georgia was just one example of how Republicans are able to disenfranchise tens, if not hundreds of thousands of votes through the use of overly complicated, faulty and unverifiable touchscreen voting machines and electronic pollbooks in combination with poll closures and mail-in ballots that never reach voters at all or fail to arrive back at county headquarters in time to be legally tallied.

Moreover, as a new study [PDF] out this week from the Center for Election Innovation and Research finds, new voter registration rates in 13 different states they examined --- many of them key battlegrounds --- have fallen dramatically since the virus emerged in March and April. After all of those states saw increases in registrations in January, as compared to the same month in 2016, the numbers fell over a cliff compared to the same months four years ago. With DMVs closed in many states, automatic voter registrations have also not occurred since the virus emerged, and many states still fail to offer online voter registration. At the same time, voter registrations by third-party groups have similarly all but vanished as organizations have been unable to carry out their planned spring outreach campaigns.

Longtime voting rights journalist and author ARI BERMAN of Mother Jones joins us on today's program to discuss all of this and much more. His latest article for the magazine, headlined "How the Coronavirus Handed the GOP New Ways to Squash the Vote," details some of the extraordinary measures that Republicans around the country, in state after state, are attempting in hopes of suppressing the vote in 2020. That, combined with the challenges of a global pandemic, could result in big trouble for voters of all stripes this year.

Citing the recent primary election disasters in Georgia, Washington D.C., Wisconsin and Nevada (where, he says, polling place consolidation resulted in the last vote being cast during last Tuesday's primary after 3am on Wednesday!), he warns: "If we don't figure out how to do Vote-by-Mail efficiently, and also how to vote in person efficiently, and also how to do this in a pandemic, we're looking at a possible and likely disaster in November."

We discuss the "ridiculous law" in Texas that disallows voters under 65 years of age from citing fear of coronavirus as a lawful excuse for requesting an absentee ballot; the effort by Republicans in the Iowa legislature this week to prevent their own Republican Sec. of State from sending absentee ballot applications to all of the state's registered voters this November (in hopes of avoiding the very well run primary last week in which he did exactly that); and other ways in which the 2020 elections --- our last firewall against full-on authoritarianism --- could become the nation's latest nightmare. Berman tells me "litigation alone" by Democrats is "not going to be sufficient" to solve this perfect storm of problems.

"These conversations have to happen now," he cautions. "States are running out of time. They're running out of money. Coronavirus is increasing in a lot of places. So I'm really, really concerned," he says. Join the club, Ari. On the upside, Berman also discusses how you can help RIGHT NOW to overcome many of these shameful challenges.

Finally, after all of those pleasant thoughts, we end today with a much-needed song by satirist Roy Zimmerman about a "liar" who needs to be voted away. Of course, whether that is even possible remains to be seen. But the song should keep your humming for a while...

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On today's BradCast: Sometimes it's good news when bad news arrives. At least when it's a breath of reality in the Trump Era. [Audio link to today''s show is posted below the summary.]

We've been trying on this program to make some sense in recent weeks of Wall Street's alternative reality, as seen over the past 12 weeks or so while millions of Americans have become unemployed as states ordered shutdowns and business closures while the coronavirus wreaked deadly havoc across the country. The economy has, understandably, tanked in the bargain. But the stock market's major indexes have nonetheless surged some 44.5% between late March and this week. American billionaires, as discussed in detail on a recent show, have seen their fortunes rise by some $565 billion between March 18 and the first week of June, even as the economy has largely ground to halt and entered its worst recession since the Great Depression.

The irrational exuberance of Wall Street has continued week after week, for each of the past twelve, while millions of American have newly filed unemployment claims in record numbers that simply blow away any other downturn in our nation's history beyond the Great Depression. Major companies like Hertz and J.C. Penney are declaring bankruptcy, and yet the marketeers in the Wall Street casino continue to bid up the companies share prices. On Wednesday, the NASDAQ hit its all time high. Not its highest level during the pandemic, but its ALL TIME highest trading price.

It's as if the market and the reality of the economy exist on two entirely different planets. But they don't. That was made clear again today as yet another 1.5 million new jobless claims were reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, leaving anywhere from 20 to 40 million Americans out of work and Congress' expansion of unemployment benefits set to expire at the end of next month.

And yet, as Donald Trump becomes increasingly concerned about his reelection chances, he and his supporters are citing the booming stock market as if it's the same thing as the economy. It decidedly isn't. That reality finally appears to have hit home on Thursday --- at least for now --- as the Dow plunged some 1,800 points along with the other major market indexes which plummeted as well. Traders seem to have finally noticed that the coronavirus can't simply be pretended away. It is not only NOT going away anytime soon, but infections and hospitalizations are currently surging to record highs in at least 21 states on the heels of many of those states --- talking to you Arizona and Texas, among others --- dangerously "reopening" far too early.

Some have (wrongly) dismissed the reported increases in the number of confirmed infections as an byproduct of increased testing. That is not true. The increases of note are in both the percentages of positive tests and in hospitalizations in many areas around the U.S. That disturbing surge comes largely before we begin to see whether the past two weeks or nationwide protests over the killing of George Floyd substantively adds to the totals, as some fear.

Ultimately, today's market crash can be seen as "good" news, in that perhaps reality is finally catching up with the markets whose inflated value has helped to prevent Donald Trump and his Republican sycophants in Congress from taking the necessary actions needed to prevent both the economy and the health of the American people from becoming decidedly worse. I've got a rant or two about all of this on today's show.

But there was more heavily-qualified "good" news on Thursday as Trump's Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, Army General Mark Milley, made clear in a video-taped statement, that it was a "mistake" for him to have joined Trump for his obnoxious photo-op last week at St. John's Episcopal Church across from the White House after Trump ordered peaceful protesters violently cleared out of Lafayette Square.

And, in further encouraging news, protesters around the country have begun to take matters into their own hands in removing offensive monuments to Confederate traitors who rebelled against the United States and killed hundreds of thousands in the bargain, in hopes of preserving slavery in "the land of the free". On Wednesday, a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Richmond, VA, the former capital of the Confederacy, was pulled down, as other such statues --- many of them erected decades after the Civil War during the Jim Crow era, as segregationist policies further institutionalized white supremacy in the U.S. --- were defaced, decapitated or destroyed as well. Yes, I've got a thought or two on all of that today as well.

Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, in which major environmental groups are also taking action towards racial justice within their own organizations in the wake of nationwide protests, and as communities of color continue to be disproportionately harmed by pollution, climate change and other environmental issues. She also has a bit of good news regarding a newly coal-free Britain and some less good news on our latest new plague in the U.S. --- or, at least in Florida: giant toxic toads! Buckle up!

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