Extreme wildfire crisis now most destructive in L.A. history; 'GNR' forced to evacuate; Climate change intensifying extreme fires; PLUS: Biden designates two new nat'l monuments...
New year, new punishing extreme weather; 2024 was hottest year in human history; Biden bans new offshore drilling; PLUS: Jimmy Carter, one of the greatest conservation Presidents...
Congress certifies felon Trump's election without incident, future Prez to be sentenced Friday; Also: Vegas attacker a Trump fan; Carter's climate legacy; Callers ring in...
ALSO IN THIS SUPER-SIZED NEW YEAR EDITION: Tech Bros v. MAGA ... RIP: Jimmy Carter ... and some disturbing Tooning News, in our first collection of 2025!
THIS WEEK: Lots of Santa ... Lots of Naughty ... (And a Little of Bit Nice) ... Hark! The tooning angels sing! Glory to this year's collection of the best Hanuchristmaka toons!...
Biden EPA grants CA waiver to phase out all-gasoline cars; Microplastics linked to cancer; PLUS: GOP plan to expand natural gass exports would drive up U.S. prices...
Felony charges dropped against VA Republican caught trashing voter registrations before last year's election. Did GOP AG, Prosecutor conflicts of interest play role?...
State investigators widening criminal probe of man arrested destroying registration forms, said now looking at violations of law by Nathan Sproul's RNC-hired firm...
Arrest of RNC/Sproul man caught destroying registration forms brings official calls for wider criminal probe from compromised VA AG Cuccinelli and U.S. AG Holder...
'RNC official' charged on 13 counts, for allegely trashing voter registration forms in a dumpster, worked for Romney consultant, 'fired' GOP operative Nathan Sproul...
So much for the RNC's 'zero tolerance' policy, as discredited Republican registration fraud operative still hiring for dozens of GOP 'Get Out The Vote' campaigns...
The other companies of Romney's GOP operative Nathan Sproul, at center of Voter Registration Fraud Scandal, still at it; Congressional Dems seek answers...
The belated and begrudging coverage by Fox' Eric Shawn includes two different video reports featuring an interview with The BRAD BLOG's Brad Friedman...
FL Dept. of Law Enforcement confirms 'enough evidence to warrant full-blown investigation'; Election officials told fraudulent forms 'may become evidence in court'...
Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL) sends blistering letter to Gov. Rick Scott (R) demanding bi-partisan reg fraud probe in FL; Slams 'shocking and hypocritical' silence, lack of action...
After FL & NC GOP fire Romney-tied group, RNC does same; Dead people found reg'd as new voters; RNC paid firm over $3m over 2 months in 5 battleground states...
After fraudulent registration forms from Romney-tied GOP firm found in Palm Beach, Election Supe says state's 'fraud'-obsessed top election official failed to return call...
IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT:'GNR' Special Coverage: 2016 Republican and Democratic Presidential candidates talk climate, energy, and the path forward --- or not... 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): Blowing Smoke: Report Says Violations Belie Chem Industry Rhetoric; After historic flooding, Death Valley gears up for 'a long, hard recovery'; G20 Nations Spend $452 Billion a Year Supporting Fossil Fuels: Study; Fire Chiefs, White House See Climate Change Impact on Wildfires; Paris Climate Talks Not Just Hot Air, France Tells U.S; Montreal Sewage Dump Proceeding as Planned; Arizona Copper Smelter to Slash Emissions, Pay $163M; BP Oil Spill Dispersants Hindered Rather Than Helped, Study Says... PLUS: Native Americans Oppose Stripping Protection From Yellowstone Grizzlies... and much, MUCH more! ...
Our analysis attempts to both decode the dog whistles and debunk the nonsense (and there was a lot of both!) from last night's Republican Presidential debate on the Fox Business Channel in Wisconsin. My guests will help you understand everything that the GOP-friendly Fox and Wall Street Journal moderators didn't bother to help viewers understand...and much more! (And, we also spend a bit of time trying to figure out what the hell the Democrats must be thinking by not holding debates and/or hiding them from the public on weekends!)
It's a very lively BradCast today, live from our flagship KPFK/Pacifica Radio studios in Los Angeles! Enjoy!...
Download MP3 or listen to complete show online below...
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Did someone or something flip election results last week in Ohio's statewide ballot initiative Issue 3 to legalize marijuana? We try to get to the bottom of that question --- and many others --- on today's BradCast. (Audio is linked below.)
As initially reported by Ohio's Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, and later by Steve Rosenfeld, screenshots captured from several different media outlets on Election Night last week show what appear to be impossible results on both Issue 3 and on Issue 1, a ballot measure for redistricting reform in the Buckeye State.
For example, according to screenshots from Dayton's WHIO-TV website, as published in the Fitrakis, Wasserman and Rosenfeld articles, Issue 3 reportedly had 969,662 "Yes" votes with 39% of precincts reporting. But later in the night, with 45% of precincts, there were only 614,866 "Yes" votes on Issue 3. That's a seemingly impossible drop of more than 300,000 votes in the initiative that is said to have ultimately failed, according to the unverified election night results reported by the OH Sec. of State.
Similarly, screenshots of results on Issue 1, which ended up reportedly passing, saw "No" votes drop impossibly from 990,555 to 486,596 later in the evening.
What explains these numbers? I spoke to Matt McClellan, Communications Director for Ohio Sec. of State John Husted (R) earlier today. He says that WHIO and the other media outlets whose screenshots were cited by Fitrakis, Wasserman and Rosenfeld, were all Cox Media outlets and "the problem was on their end."
"Someone was manually entering data," McClellan told me. "When they noticed the mistake, they made a correction." He went on to say that the Secretary of State's website had no such discrepancies or irregularities throughout the evening. His office does not take their own screenshots throughout the night, so we can't confirm that either way, at the moment, though McClellan says the office "went back and double-checked to make sure" after the issue was initially reported.
In response to the Sec. of State office's assertions (we offer more detail on them during the show), Fitrakis shared pre-election tracking poll results with me, that suggest the marijuana initiative should have passed, rather than lost, by a 2 to 1 margin. "Tracking polls suggest more that [results] were flipped than not flipped," he told me today. Fitrakis was is skeptical of the explanation from Husted's office, while adding that if Cox is manually entering results on the fly on Election Night, "then they need to stop, because it's absurd."
For the record, our calls to try and confirm the OH SoS' claims with WHIO and/or Cox Media have not yet been returned. But, again, much more detail during the program.
Finally on today's show, Desi Doyen joins us with the latest Green News Report on the fossil fuel industry's no good, very very bad week...
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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: A very bad week for fossil fuels: Obama rejects Keystone XL pipeline; Peabody Coal caught lying to the public about climate change; Exxon Mobil facing investigation for what it knew and when it knew it; PLUS: Second hurricane hits Yemen in one week and Sea World finally responds to critics... 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): What critics of the Keystone campaign misunderstand about climate activism; Exxon, Keystone, and the Turn Against Fossil Fuels; More Oil Companies Could Join Exxon Mobil as Focus of Climate Investigations; A Texas Utility Offers a Nighttime Special: Free Electricity; Poll Finds Global Consensus on a Need to Tackle Climate Change ... PLUS: Commercial Dungeness Crab Season Delayed After Tests Find High Levels of Toxins... and much, MUCH more! ...
On today's BradCast, the power of protest and organization.
We start at the University of Missouri after African-American players on the football team there used their power over the weekend to collectively and courageously support a student hunger strike in a protest to force university system President Tim Wolfe to resign amidst a series of racially charged incidents on the Columbia, MO campus. The leverage used by the players is another great reminder of how smart and courageous protest can succeed in making substantive change --- even against some of the world's most powerful entities. Go Tigers!
Speaking of which, my guest today is, once again, Douglas Hughes. You may recall him as the 61-year old Florida postal worker who landed his homemade gyrocopter on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol in a dramatic protest last spring. He was our guest back in April, just days after the incident where he had hoped to bring attention to the desperate need for campaign finance reform.
He was, at the time, arrested and charged with six felonies that might have netted him more than 9 years in jail for his attempt to deliver an important letter to all 535 members of Congress. Now, he has struck a plea deal with federal prosecutors and joins us to discuss the deal, why he took it, the latest developments in his case, and whether he feels his protest was ultimately worth the extraordinarily high cost.
Hughes tells us today that he has "no regrets" for having "stomped on the dragon's tail", despite losing his job at the Post Office, facing enormous fines, jail time, and even the loss of his ability to vote as a "felon".
"I stomped on the dragon's tail and I knew it was going to turn around and come after me," Hughes tells me. "And it has, and I have no regrets."
He credits the flight with helping to broaden the discussion about the need for reform, and says, despite the extraordinary cost, he'd do it again "in a heartbeat" as he continues his call for a "voters rebellion" to help "get the money out of politics so everybody that's in Congress knows they've got to answer to us."
Though Hughes was reluctant to mention it, he has a GoFundMe page where folks can donate to his legal defense fund and other needs as he is now struggling to survive day-to-date until his Social Security finally kicks in. Please consider helping him out if you can!
Lastly, it's wingnut v. wingnut over at Fox "News"! So, bust out the popcorn!...
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On today's BradCast, breaking news on President Obama's final Keystone XL pipeline decision and more fallout following the completely unverified results of Tuesday's Gubernatorial election in Kentucky. (Audio link to complete show is below.)
On Keystone: Obama finally rejects TransCanada's application to build the controversial tar sands pipeline from Alberta down to the Gulf of Mexico. Our producer and green news expert Desi Doyen joins us to help separate fact from fiction on the long-awaited decision, and to offer long-overdue kudos to those citizens who organized, activated, advocated and otherwise successfully took on the most powerful interests in the history of civilization to block the project in the name of the environment.
On Kentucky: Several new developments following the completely unverified results of Tuesday's Gubernatorial election in Kentucky, where pre-election polls all predicted the opposite of the 'landslide' reported by the state's computer tabulators. Among those developments: A KY newspaper fires their well-respected pollster rather than bothering to find out if the polls were right and the results were wrong; Another reminder of why hand-marked paper ballots like those in KY are swell, but only if you bother to actually count them; We weather a few attacks from progressives who charge us with forwarding conspiracy theories and don't think we should bother to count ballots; And, new information out of Pima County (Tucson), AZ to remind us why citizen vigilance and oversight is needed to assure the survival of democracy.
Also today: The Koch Brothers tell MSNBC they are champions of the environment and MSNBC doesn't bother to correct them --- so, we do. Plus, a few other pieces of important news at week's end...
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Yes, there is a U.S. House Committee that is even worse than the Benghazi Committee, argues my guest on today's BradCast.
But, first, we follow up yesterday's disturbing show with a few more concerns about the accuracy of the 100% unverified results of Tuesday's Gubernatorial election in Kentucky and state Democrats' ability (or interest) in understanding the dangers of computerized vote tabulation systems. In short, they don't get it. Not by a long shot --- at least if my conversation with folks at the state Democratic Party today are currently any indication.
Next up today, David Robertsof Vox.com joins us to discuss the McCarthyesque behavior of Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), Chair of the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, as the Republican assault on science continues. Smith, Robert's reports, is wielding unprecedented new subpoena powers in an unyielding attack on scientists and public institutions researching climate change and more.
"In the almost two years since he's run the Science Committee, Lamar Smith has issued more subpoenas than all previous chairs of the committee, going back some fifty years," Roberts explains. "He's newly empowered and he's going nuts with it."
Roberts details three different cases in point, as laid out in his recent article at Vox, including extraordinary demands being made on a number of different, largely unknown scientists, who had the temerity to study and speak out about findings on global warming.
"Our politics are so crazy these days that it's hard to register anything as particularly extreme or outrageous because there's such a flood of extreme, outrageous stuff happening all the time," Roberts tells me. "But, honestly, the head of a Science Committee accusing the head of a government scientific research body of deliberately falsifying data in order to support a political effort to pass climate policy is really a serious accusation. It shouldn't just be part of the daily noise of politics. This is a serious deal."
Roberts says this amounts to little more than an effort to keep scientists from being able to do their work, to frighten them away from reporting their findings and, hopefully, find something --- anything --- that can be taken out of context in hopes of embarrassing them somehow. "Everybody knows why they want" all these personal emails, he tells me. They want to "look for bits and pieces that, if you yank them out of context, look suspicious, and selectively leak those emails to reporters --- who, history shows, will credulously eat it up. For all the incompetence and haplessness of the current GOP right now, one thing they're really good at is they've figured out how the media ecosystem works."
Making the case that this is all worse than what the ridiculous Benghazi Committee is doing, Roberts explains: "[Hillary Clinton], at least, has the power and the resources and the wherewithal to defend herself. But these individual scientists, they don't know anything about politics. They don't know how to play this game. They don't have money for lawyers. So the damage that this threatens to do to the open practice of science in the U.S., I think, is worse than the danger posed by these more high-profile political committees. The damage that they're doing to the practice of science in the U.S. is much deeper and more disturbing than whatever the ebb and flow of who's up and down in electoral politics."
Finally today, some late breaking news on a story we've been following closely for several months now, as New York's Attorney General files subpoenas against ExxonMobil concerning what the company knew about climate change, when they knew it, and how much they may have worked to obscure that information from the public (and their own investors)...
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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Koch Brothers claim they are environmental stewards; New legislation to stop all fossil fuel extraction on federal public lands; More bad news for Volkswagen; PLUS: US State Department rejects TransCanada's request to hit 'pause' on the Keystone XL pipeline... 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): The harm Exxon Mobil has done; NASA found a way to track ocean currents from space. What they saw is troubling; Scientists confirm their fears about West Antarctica - that it's inherently unstable; 50 Years After Warning, No Debate in Paris on the Science; Fracking: EPA Finding of No 'Widespread, Systemic' Problems Under Fire; Is the USDA Silencing Scientists?... PLUS: Powerful 'Gene Drive' Can Quickly Change An Entire Species... and much, MUCH more! ...
It is a primal scream of a BradCast today, following what happened --- once again --- on Election Day yesterday. We see, again, the nightmare scenario I've warned about for so many years: a U.S. election where all of the pre-election polls suggest Candidate X is set to win, but Candidate Y ends up winning by a huge margin instead and nobody even bothers to verify that the computer tabulated results accurately reflect the intent of the voters. (Audio link to today's full show is below.)
That's exactly what happened in Kentucky on Tuesday, where Democratic Attorney General Jack Conway was leading by a fair margin (about 3 to 5 points) in almost every pre-election poll in his race for Governor, but then ended up being announced as the loser to 'Tea Party' Republican candidate Matt Bevin by a landslide (almost 9 points) --- according to the state's 100% unverified computer tabulation systems.
As detailed on today's program with my guest Karoli Kuns of Crooks And Liars, there are a number of reasons to question the reported results. Among them, as Kuns points out today at C&L, the Democrats running in the down ballot races --- for Secretary of State, Attorney General (Conway's current job) and even state Auditor --- each reportedly received tens of thousands more votes than Conway did at the top of the ticket!
Bev Harris, of BlackBoxVoting.org, who I spoke with earlier today, described the higher vote totals in the down ballot races as a "significant anomaly". She tells me that, at least until more records are requested and examined, the KY-Gov's race "has to be looked at as a questionable outcome, particularly because of the discrepancies in the down ballot races. More votes in those races and not at the top...that just doesn't happen."
(Here is a link to a helpful Public Records Request toolkit [PDF] from Black Box Voting for those of you who may be interested in helping to try and obtain some transparency in this race, as we also discussed on today's program.)
There are many other reasons for supporters to question the reported results in the KY-Gov's race, as I detail during the show. Of course, the reported results could also be completely accurate. But, without public, human examination of the hand-marked paper ballots (which, thankfully, now actually exist across most of the state!) and other related records, we have yet another unverified, 100% faith-based election to leave supporters wondering if they really won or lost.
We've seen this before, of course. Too many times. We've seen malfunctioning paper ballot op-scan systems report losers as "winners" until a hand-count corrects the record. We've seen how easy it is for hackers to game election equipment. We've seen election insiders, even as recently as last week, breaking in to computerized central tabulators. And we've even seen high-ranking election officials in Kentucky (including County Clerks, Circuit Court Judges and School Superintendents!) convicted for decades of insider election fraud, including the manipulation of electronic voting systems.
We've seen both Democrats and Republicansalike fall victim to similarly anomalous and unverified results. And, while none of it bodes well for 2016 and beyond, neither does it bode well for those immediately and directly impacted by Tuesday's elections --- such as the 400,000 Kentuckyians who stand to lose health care under a new Republican Governor who has vowed to shut down the state's expansion of coverage under ObamaCare by the very popular if term-limited and outgoing Democratic Governor.
Also today: More election results from races around the country, from the attempt to legalize marijuana in Ohio, to campaign finance reform in Maine, to the recall of Koch Brothers-funded school board officials in Colorado...
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It's Election Day on The BradCast, so, naturally, that means voter disenfranchisement throughout the country. Early reports today find e-pollbook systems failing at polling places in a number of states, which means voters are being turned away. (And, for some reason in Ohio(!) folks who were registered are finding they no longer are...for some reason.)
But, with more Election Day problems sure to come to light soon, we turn for the moment to the obscenity that has become judicial elections in the U.S. --- on a day that finds a record $15.8 million has been spent on today's Supreme Court election alone in Pennsylvania.
Scott Greytak of JusticeAtStake.org joins us to discuss his new report --- Bankrolling the Bench: The New Politics of Judicial Elections 2013-2014 (with Brennan Center for Justice and the National Institute on Money in State Politics) --- on the record amount of cash now being spent, "legally", to buy judges and state Supreme Court Justices via elections around the country. Millions of dollars now flow in to these contests from outside interests and political parties as well as lawyers and lobbyists.
"This is something that's, unfortunately, unique to America," Greytak explains. "It's really the United States and one other country in the world that decides to elect their judges." What began as "a populist impulse" about 100 years ago, "when folks were trying to break up big machine politics, trying to attack corruption," has now become a nightmare in the post-Citizens United age.
Judicial elections "which typically used to be pretty low-key affairs" are now being "targeted by politicians, legislators, or special interest groups that are hoping to shape the bench [or] targeted as sort of a referenda on big decisions that the court has heard or, more often, just opportunities for partisan groups to try and make political plays with these courts."
"It's deeply concerning," Greytak tells me. "Our data from this cycle found that about a third of all contributions to state Supreme Court judicial candidates came from lawyers and lobbyists. Another third came from business interests which, of course, are going to have cases that come in front of these courts, or have interests that come in front of these courts."
"When judges have to run for office, the folks who are closest to the courts, who know what's at stake, are often the lawyers and lobbyists who operate in them," he says. "So they turn and rely on the lawyers and lobbyists as a funding system. It becomes a reproducing cycle of conflicts of interests and this is what judicial elections has left us with."
With mostly Republican, but also Democratic groups spending millions in these races and using them as political bludgeons, jurists become vulnerable to offering rulings based on partisan interests rather than the rule of law. As discussed on today's program, what is happening in the state of Wisconsin right now has become a fantastic example of how judicial elections have become disastrous for those of us who believe in good government.
Finally today, big news in our latest Green News Report with Desi Doyen, as a hurricane heads to Yemen (of all places) and the Keystone XL pipeline is finally dead...for now anyway...thanks in no small part to unrelenting citizen activists and organizers who stood up to the most powerful corporate interests in the history of civilization!...
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As we've noted many times over the years, problems with voting systems on Election Day don't necessarily come to light until after Election Day --- sometimes months (or even years) after --- and they are frequently marginalized as little more than "hiccups, glitches, snags and snafus," by election officials and media alike when they do occur, rather than the outright failures that they actually are.
Today, however, in a number of states where elections are being held around the country, problems with electronic pollbooks, rather than voting machines themselves, seem to be popping up early and are resulting in voters walking away without having been able to cast a vote.
Here are a few examples today out of Virginia, Texas and Ohio, so far (emphasis ours)...
IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: First-ever hurricane for the nation of Yemen; Hillary Clinton comes out in support of an investigation of Exxon; Record warm oceans blamed for the collapse of Maine's cod fishery; PLUS: TransCanada calls time out on its controversial Keystone XL pipeline... 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): Scientists confirm their fears about West Antarctica — that it’s inherently unstable; 10 takeaways from UN report on national climate pledges; Coal not coming back, Appalachian Power president says; Washington’s Promising Pollution Story Starts With Oysters And Ends With Victory; China confronts the pain of kicking its coal addiction; Study Shows Extensive Coral Damage Related To BP Spill... PLUS: The Economic Cost Of Climate Change... and much, MUCH more! ...
Election Day is tomorrow in several states and many more local jurisdictions, but on today's BradCast, we've already got our first "irregularity".
My guest today is John Brakey, a longtime Election Integrity advocate from Pima County (Tucson), AZ. Last week, he caught an election official --- on video tape --- breaking the security seal on the county's new, central vote tabulator after party observers had left county election headquarters following pre-election "Logic & Accuracy" testing of the system.
"I looked at my screen,and I go: 'What is that guy doing? What's he doing over there? He's just opened the box up. Where's the Democratic observer?! Where's the Republican observer?!'," Brakey tells me about the incident on today's program.
He goes on to explain what happened, how he caught the guy, what the county did about it, and how you may wish to be concerned about the possibility for similar corruption with similar electronic systems in your home town.
Thanks to Brakey, the incident led to new L&A tests the next day, though the explanation for the entire affair from Pima County Election Director Brad Nelson (the original "Election Official Gone Wild", as seen in this 2006 video tape), remains questionable --- particularly since Nelson was in the room at the same time his subordinate was seen breaking into the system. We sought comment from Nelson, but he has yet to respond to our request.
For the record, Brakey is one of the stars of J.T. Waldron's riveting 2009 documentary film, Fatally Flawed: The Pursuit of Justice in a Suspicious Election which tells the remarkable --- and, at times, uplifting --- story of the years-long fight by Brakey and a transpartisan coalition of others in Tucson to obtain a recount of ballots from a questionable $2 billion 2006 bond initiative election in Pima County.
Also today: Obama "Bans the Box" that had required job applicants to reveal a criminal record before they've even had an interview on federal employment applications; The GOP's 2016 Presidential candidate/cry babies meet over the weekend to make new demands for networks holding GOP Presidential debates; Another candidate drops out of the 2016 Presidential contest; And, some quick tips (here are some more) on how to try and help protect your vote, and everybody else's, during tomorrow's elections around the country!...
Download MP3 or listen to complete show online below...
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