As noted on Thursday's rollicking year-end BradCast and occasionally hopeful Green News Report, we will be standing down this week and next over the holidays, after a grueling year and before a likely more grueling one (or four) arrives.

Barring any surprises, or itchy trigger fingers, I suspect The BRAD BLOG will be mostly silent during that period, though I may not be able to avoid a bit of Sunday Tooning for the new year...we shall see. Also, the best social media (by far!) on which to find both Desi and me hanging out these days is Bluesky. I am @TheBradBlog, Desi is @GreenNewsReport!

To all of those who have supported us over the past year --- via reading, sharing, listening, writing, guesting on our show, calling in and, in particular, donating so that we may continue all of our independent work on both your public airwaves and Internets --- thank you! To all who have not...well, you likely won't see this message anyway. But, since its the holiday season, I'll be uncharacteristically nice.

Until we're back, please enjoy the AI graphic above, made for me when I requested an image of "peace on Earth at night", and ponder the many ways that it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Not unlike our actual Earth, made with actual intelligence!

From all of us, to all of you: Happy Holidays! May they be safe, warm and peaceful. We'll be back soon! (If not before.) Like it or not. --- Brad

Today, on our last new BradCast of 2024: It's beginning to look a lot like failure, everywhere you look in D.C. It's already getting pathetic before either the new majorities are sworn in to Congress or the new Administration officially takes over the White House. But we're all here for the GOP fiascos today! [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

FIRST UP... A state appeals court panel in Georgia ruled 2 to 1 on Thursday that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis must be disqualified from the racketeering indictment she filed against Donald Trump and 18-conspirators for their failed attempt to steal the state from Joe Biden in 2020. The case itself, however, may continue. The court cited an "appearance of impropriety" related to Willis' romantic relationship with a former Special Prosecutor assigned to the same case. She quickly filed an appeal to the ruling today, but it could be the end to this criminal case against the convicted felon who will be sworn in as President, even though today's ruling could still be overturned by the state Supreme Court or Georgia's Prosecuting Attorneys' Council could reassign the case to another prosecution team.

THEN... If you're looking for an idea of what next year may be like in Congress, when Republicans in the U.S. House will have an even slimmer majority than they do now, and when Donald Trump will be "running the ship" in the White House, look no farther than the clusterf__k that has unfolded over the past 24 hours in the House. A bipartisan, bicameral deal to avoid a Government shutdown on Friday, just before Christmas, was effectively nixed by... Elon Musk, the unelected South African who appears to have purchased not just the Presidency, but the entirety of the U.S. Government with his $277 million investment on Trump's behalf in the 2024 Presidential election.

After a few of Musk's tweets against it yesterday --- despite clearly never even having read a single page of the three-month Continuing Resolution meant largely to keep the government operating until a full budget deal could be reached in March --- the bill was pronounced dead. Then Trump jumped in, late in the game, to say that he too --- just like Elon! --- was against the bill! Even though he could have rung in to kill it or change it any time long before yesterday. Musk, the richest man in the world, and perhaps the most clueless (at least when it comes to how government and legislation works) now seems to be running the GOP ship in D.C., despite having no clue how to run a D.C. ship.

Trump then began demanding an end to the very idea of a Debt Ceiling despite the Debt Ceiling having nothing to do with this week's must-pass legislation. (His newfound objection to it is apparently because he doesn't want to have the raise the Debt Ceiling on his watch, so he'll be free when he does to blow up the national debt with new, enormous tax cuts for his wealthy pals...like Elon!) This afternoon a new bill was cobbled together that Trump claimed to support. But, minutes after we got off air, that measure failed, as Democrats were no longer interested in helping Speaker Mike Johnson --- or Trump or President Musk --- out of their own mess.

Of course, that's not all that's happening at years-end. And we've got two of our good friends and fan faves here to try and make sense (or not) of much of it. We're joined once again today by fellow old-school bloggers, HEATHER DIGBY PARTON of Salon and Digby's Hullabaloo blog, and DRIFTGLASS, author of his own eponymously-named blog and co-host of the weekly Professional Left Podcast, for an end-of-year roundtable, of sorts.

As usual, they've both got keen insight on the idiocy unfurling in D.C. today and much more, including such topics as...

• DRONES over New Jersey!!! (Also: Who cares?)
• Elon's buffoonery and Trump's diminishment.
• Mike Johnson's likely brief future as House Speaker.
• Consequences and dangers (for voters, for January 6th, for Inauguration Day) of a GOP holiday government shutdown and a GOP failure to elect a House Speaker.
• Corporate CEOs kissing Trump's ass, for some reason.
• Will we be targeted by the new Administration?
• Should Joe Biden offer preemptive pardons to people like Liz Cheney?
• Do Dems really need to reinvent themselves, as some claim, after narrowly losing the Presidency and picking up a seat in the House in November?
• Did the Dems blow an opportunity by not elevating superstar Rep. AOC to Ranking Member of the Oversight Committee?

...And what are Digby and Driftglass most worried about --- and most hopeful for --- in the new year, as a new Republican majority takes over Congress and either Trump or Musk take over the White House?

FINALLY... Desi Doyen is here for our last Green News Report of 2024, as the Biden EPA grants California's waiver to phase out sales of new, all-gasoline cars by 2035; A disturbing new study on microplastics and cancer; And Biden's Dept. of Energy finds that GOP plans to expand natural gas exports will hike up prices for Americans...

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As usual, the incoming President has almost no clue what he's talking about. Not that he cares or that it matters. That's especially true, as discussed on today's BradCast, when it comes to elections and voting laws. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

FIRST UP... It's another one of those fire-hose news days akin to what we experienced, day after day, during the first Trump term. We can only cover what we can cover. So, we start with the news, as reported by CNN today, that the House Ethics Committee voted in secret earlier this month to release the report from their years-long investigation of allegations against now-former Rep. and now-former Attorney General nominee Matt Gaetz. The report, which Republicans on the bipartisan panel voted against releasing in November, is said to focus on allegations of Gaetz' salacious sexual misconduct with minors, illicit drug use, and other crimes, potentially included bribery and more. CNN says the Committee has decided to make the report public "after the House's final day of votes this year" unless they "change course now that it has voted."

NEXT... In an update to a story we've been following since last month's election, the North Carolina State Board of Elections has decided it will not order a full hand-recount in the election for State Supreme Court between the incumbent Democrat, Justice Allison Riggs, and her Republican opponent, Jefferson Griffin. The original computer-reported tally from the November 5 contest found Riggs defeated Griffin by 623 votes out of more than 5.5 million ballots cast. A Griffin-requested machine recount widened Riggs' lead to 724 votes over the Republican challenger, who then requested a hand-count. State law allows a small number of precincts in each county to be hand-counted before ordering a full hand-count in the event that the smaller audit is way out of line with the computer recount. In the hand-count samples in all 100 counties in NC, both candidates picked up votes (Riggs gained 70, Griffin picked up 56), but it was not enough to trigger a full, statewide hand-count. With Riggs declared the certified winner, Griffin is also seeking to toss some 60,000 ballots out entirely, claiming those voters, including military and overseas voters, were either not entitled to vote or to have their votes counted. The matter is expected to end up at the state Supreme Court. Presumably, Justice Riggs, one of just two remaining Democrats on the seven-person High Court, will recuse herself if that happens.

THEN... Donald Trump has been vowing and/or threatening to end Joe Biden's "EV mandate" on "Day One" when he takes office, even though there is no Biden "EV mandate." A week or so ago on Meet the Press, Trump reiterated his plans to sign Executive Orders to "end the electric mandate immediately for the cars" and for "ending a lot of the environmental things that were ridiculous that hurt our country very badly and didn't do anything for the environment...ya know, standard things." This week, Reuters has an exclusive report on the specific plans from the Trump Transition team for those "standard things", including what the news outlet describes as "sweeping changes to cut off support for electric vehicles and charging stations" and to redirect that funding to "national-defense priorities." The plans also involve reversing California's (and twelve other states') emission standards that save lives and reduce energy prices for residents, and doing away with the Biden administration's $7,500 consumer tax credit for EV purchases, a policy expected to harm U.S. automakers like General Motors (if less so for Tesla, whose CEO spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump elected). But all of those things may be easier said than done, certainly on "Day One", as Desi Doyen explains.

FINALLY... Speaking of easier said than done, Donald Trump has also been demanding changes to voting and election laws, most prominently after he began falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Earlier this month, he declared at a Fox "News" event, once again, that "we want to have paper ballots, one-day voting, voter ID, and proof of citizenship" among other changes to election law that he has repeatedly called for. He doesn't seem to understand most of the things he's demanding, nor care about the fact that some of the measures would disenfranchise millions of Americans.

We're joined today by JOSHUA A. DOUGLAS, election law professor at the Univ. of Kentucky College of Law; author of a number of recent books on American democracy, and now the host of the Democracy Optimist podcast and companion newsletter.

This week, at Washington Monthly, Douglas explained why Trump, in truth, will have "little official power to implement the new rules he supports," given that the U.S. Constitution gives most power regarding elections to the states. While Congress has certainly adopted a number of landmark federal voting laws over the years, Douglas tells me today, "it's really a process of local control. The President himself cannot issue an Executive Order or some sort of decree that elections should be changed one way or the other without states being the ones to pass those laws --- or Congress, but that's a difficult path, as well."

"The President doesn't have any power unilaterally to dictate election rules," says Douglas, while recognizing that Trump will have both the bully pulpit to muscle Congress and states into adopting new laws and rules, along with the power to appoint members of the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) and Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and, particularly in Trump's case, to direct his Dept. of Justice to enforce certain laws and ignore others. "But the President, under the Constitution, doesn't have any formal powers to regulate elections, beyond signing or vetoing a Congressional law."

We step through some of the specific measures Trump has been demanding, such as "paper ballots" (which the vast majority of voters already use), "one-day voting" (ending absentee and early voting), Voter ID (already mandated by most states and, under federal law, already required when registering voters in all 50 states), and the point that most concerns Douglas, "proof of citizenship" when registering to vote. If actually adopted at the federal level, he argues, it would likely disenfranchise tens of millions of voters and become "a real logistical nightmare for election officials."

The efforts by Republicans to change election laws on the state level, are a different matter, as Douglas explains as well. But, bottom line, there is no "magic wand" for Trump to use to undermine elections by himself, much less on "Day One". And there are quite a few things that YOU can do, to stop him and anyone else who would try to restrict our right to vote.

Given recent events, is Douglas still the "democracy optimist" he was when he originally named his podcast and newsletter earlier this year? Tune on in to find out...

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On today's BradCast: The unspeakable corruption of the Trump 2.0 era is already under way, even before the 2024 election has even been finalized. So what are we all gonna do about it? I've got a few thoughts. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among our coverage today...

• The Biden Administration's Federal Trade Commission finalized its new rule today banning bait-and-switch junk fees for concert tickets, hotels, vacation rentals and more. The only vote on the FTC against the new rule? The man just named as Trump's incoming Federal Trade Commission Chair, of course.

• The Presidential Electors selected by popular vote in each state met today to officially cast their votes in the 2024 Presidential election in each state capital. And, though I didn't have time to mention it on air, 13 of the Republican Electors who cast votes for Donald Trump today in the Electoral College, in three different states, are currently facing felony charges for fraudulently declaring themselves to be official Electors in the 2020 election. But carrying out official duties as either alleged or convicted felons now seems to be a feature of the Republican Party.

• Convicted felon Donald Trump saw his motion to toss out his 34 state felony convictions rejected by New York Superior Court Justice Juan Merchan late on Monday. The judge, who oversaw Trump's trial for the filing of false business records as part of his hush money payoff scheme to porn star Stormy Daniels to help him cheat to win the 2016 election, denied every argument Trump's attorneys presented in their motion citing the recent ridiculous ruling by corrupt Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court that Presidents enjoy immunity for all crimes committed while carrying out official acts as President. The hush money scheme, however, took place before Trump became President, and evidence submitted by NY prosecutors during the trial regarding any official acts during Trump's first term as President was not enough to overcome the "overwhelming evidence" of his guilt presented by prosecutors, according to Merchan, who "held the line" on the rule of law, at least for now. It is now all but certain, for the first time in U.S. history, that a convicted felon will be sworn in as President of the United States on January 20th.

• But the corruption and abuse of power on display last week at a major cryptocurrency conference in the United Arab Emirates, as headlined by keynote speaker Eric Trump, the incoming President's son, is almost unfathomable. He hobnobbed with convicted criminals and others currently under investigation for financial crimes, and made clear that his family's new cryptocurrency platform, World Liberty Financial, is now open for business...wink, wink. Wanna buy off the next President of the United States? Here's a perfectly "legal" way to do so, to the tune of however many tens of millions or billions of dollars you'd like to give to the incoming felonious President. The New York Times offered mostly good coverage last week, even as few other media outlets seemed to pick up on the gob-smacking report --- and even as the "paper of record" managed to normalize this unprecedented abuse of power by the Trump Family with one of the greatest understatements of all time: at one point in their story they describe Donald Trump's new crypto-pipeline for bribery, payoffs, money laundering and political favors as little more than "a more relaxed approach during this new administration to business ethics"(!!!)

• So, what to do about all of this? Is there any way to push back? Or is this just the end of the rule of law and American democracy as we know it, as some "militant pessimists" (to paraphrase Josh Marshall in a more family friendly way), have been arguing since Trump's recent election? On that, and on all of our roles as The Opposition, I've got quite a bit to say --- more than I can possibly summarize adequately here. So, please tune in at least for that. It's important.

• Finally, Desi Doyen, who knows quite a bit about overcoming militant pessimism in her 15-year beat on the climate front, joins us for our latest Green News Report, as an "apocalyptic" cyclone unfolds in the excessively warm Indian Ocean; Malaria is on the rise again thanks to climate change; an historic ski resort in Switzerland is forced to call it quits; and, as the Biden Administration, still pushing out historic renewable energy action to the very end, its EPA succeeds in the long-overdue banning of several cancer-causing chemicals...

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Still trying to make sense of it all on today's BradCast. But at least we've got confirmation today on a few different stories that we've been yelling and screaming about for years now. [Audio link to full show follows below this summary.]

Among our stories today...

• A hand-count of ballots in Ashtabula County, Ohio last week found that two contests on the ballot --- one, a tax levy to fund city schools, the other, to fund a cemetery district --- were actually adopted by voters on November 5th, after previously being reported, inaccurately, as having failed. The hand-count in the contests took place after errors were discovered in the tabulation for all County Issues on the ballot during a hand-count of a fire district levy, which also flipped from NO to YES, thanks to the hand-count.

  Tomorrow, the 2024 Presidential Electors, chosen by the popular vote in each state, will meet in each state capital to cast their vote in the Electoral College. A majority of those votes will be cast for Donald Trump, based on the computer-tallied results in each state. Those results either accurately reflect the intent of the majority of the electorate --- or they do not. Without the publicly-overseen hand-counts that cybersecurity and voting system experts were strongly recommending this year in particular (we think it's a good idea for every election), Americans are unlikely to ever know one way or the other if Trump actually defeated Kamala Harris. At least in Ashtabula they now know that their levy issues were tallied as per voter intent, and the local high school which saw its roof collapse in early December under five and a half feet of snow, will now be able to afford to fix the damage.

• Former FBI informant Alexander Smirnov pleaded guilty on Monday to lying to federal agents about a supposed $10 million in bribes he falsely claimed were paid by Burisma, an energy company in Ukraine, to Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Those lies, which Smirnov said were peddled to him by members of Russian intelligence, were at the center of House Republicans' failed attempt to impeach President Biden, after they and Trump and his other supporters laundered that disinformation from Russian intelligence operatives into the American media and chambers of the U.S. Congress.

• Over the weekend, CNN reported that nearly three dozen of Donald Trump's nominees for his incoming Administration were donors to his campaign or to "outside" groups supporting him. Eight of Trump's nominees to Cabinet positions, so far, donated more than $37 million dollars. That doesn't even include the $277 million dollars spent by Elon Musk to help buy Trump's Presidency and his position of power within it. Musk has been named to head up Trump's so-called "Department of Government Efficiency." Compare that to the seemingly paltry $100,000 in donations to the 2020 Biden Campaign or super PACs supporting him, from a dozen members of Biden's Cabinet. As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) noted this weekend on Meet the Press, "Never before in American history have so few billionaires, so few people, had so much wealth and so much power. And never before, in American history, have the people on top had so much political power. We can't go around the world saying, 'Oh, well, in Russia, Putin has an oligarchy.' Well, we've got an oligarchy here too!"

• Of course, it's not just those hoping to abuse positions of power in Trump's next Administration. Over the past week, Amazon founder (and Washington Post owner) Jeff Bezos and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg each announced their companies were giving $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund. And over the weekend, ABC News --- owned by the Goliath, $200 billion Disney corporation --- announced they were settling a defamation case filed against them and George Stephanopoulos after the ABC anchors' on-air assertion that Donald Trump "had been found liable for rape" in the lawsuits filed against him by writer E. Jean Carroll, in which juries found Trump liable for some $88 million dollars after guilty verdicts for sexual abuse and defamation. The case they chose to settle would likely easily have been won by ABC for a number of reasons, including the fact that the Judge in Carroll's defamation case against Trump told the jury that the jury in the sexual assault case found Trump was indeed found guilty of what "many people commonly understand the word 'rape'" to mean. Instead of fighting, however, the Disney-owned company bent the knee, agreed to issue an apology, give $15 million to Trump's future Presidential Library fund as a "charitable contribution", and $1 million to his law firm. Why would they do that? Josh Marshall offers an excellent explanation, citing how legacy media outlets like ABC News and Washington Post (along with CNN, NBC, MSNBC and others) amount to a drop in the bucket to the major corporations which own them. While those corporations are willing to sacrifice their money-losing news outfits, they are willing to pay tribute to the "King" to help dissuade him from abusing his power to go after the rest of their multi-billion dollar corporations that are far more vulnerable to abuses of power by a corrupt President.

• Finally, we open the phone lines to listeners on all of the above --- or whatever else is on their minds today --- in what is likely to be our last call-in show of the year. And, for reasons I cannot explain, they were all suspiciously kind today. Hmmm....

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Lots of news today on BradCast, though not all of it terrible. It also features not one, but two song and dance men, though only one of them is not a horrible person. Either way, we promise to leave you singing on your way out of the theater. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among today's stories of note...

• In the largest single-day act of clemency in modern U.S. history, President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of some 1,500 people today who were released from prison to home confinement during the COVID pandemic. As discussed, he also promised "more steps in the weeks ahead."

• The Dept. of Justice's Inspector General released a long-awaited report [PDF] today on the FBI's preparation for what became Donald Trump's January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Despite years of false claims by MAGA Republicans, including members of Congress, that undercover FBI employees somehow instigated the attack, the I.G. report finds, among other things, that none were present at the Capitol that day.

• Inflation and, specifically, high prices at the grocery store have been cited by many as the reason for Donald Trump's apparent election victory last month. In fact, he ran on promises of lowering prices at the grocery store "very quickly" throughout the campaign. In September, for example, he declared: "Vote Trump and grocery prices will come tumbling down". In October, he promised to "bring your grocery bill way down." And, in an interview that aired on NBC this past Sunday, he attributed his victory, in part, "on groceries" and said again that "we're going to bring those prices way down." Rarely did anyone in the media throughout the campaign press him on how he would lower the cost of groceries. So it seems voters were misinformed enough to believe him and vote for him. And yet, in an interview with Time before Thanksgiving just published today, Trump admits he has no actual plan to lower prices at the grocery store. "It's hard to bring things down once they're up," he told the magazine. "You know, it's very hard." We'll see how long it takes, if it ever does, for MAGA buyers remorse to set in.

• But you know who did help keep your grocery prices low? The Biden Administration's Federal Trade Commission. Biden's progressive Chair of the FTC, Lina Kahn, led a lawsuit against the proposed 2022 merger of grocery giants Kroger and Albertsons, arguing the $20 billion deal would raise prices for consumers and lower pay for the company's 700,000 union workers. This week, a federal judge agreed with the FTC and blocked the merger, at least for now. In the meantime, Trump's nominee to Chair the FTC, Andrew Ferguson (a former clerk for corrupt Justice Clarence Thomas), vows to abandon Khan's tough standards for mergers between powerful American companies.

• North Carolina Republicans took a beating in statewide races in November, losing the contests for Governor, Lt. Governor, Attorney General, Sec. of State and Superintendent of Public Instruction. They also lost their gerrymandered supermajority in the state legislature. So, while they still have the power to do so in their lame-duck session, Republican lawmakers, passed a massive bill under the guise of disaster relief for Hurricane Helene (which simply shifted already existing funding from one account to another) and used the next several hundred pages of the bill to strip many of the key powers from all of the incoming Democratic statewide officials. The outgoing Democratic Governor vetoed the obvious power grab. But, last week, the GOP-controlled Senate used their supermajority to override the veto and, despite an outpouring of protest from voters at the state capital, the GOP-controlled House did the same last night. Nonetheless, I suspect this fight ain't over.

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report on, among other things, the wildfire in Malibu, California that led to the emergency evacuation of thousands of residents, including film and TV legend Dick Van Dyke, who turns 99 on Friday. Also, on the effort by environmentalists to add Endangered Species Act protections to the quickly disappearing Monarch Butterfly. As Des mentions at the end of today's show, you can leave a public comment here in favor of the Fish and Wildlife Department's effort to protect the butterflies.

  And, as she also discussed, that fantastic and charming and so, so sweet music video and interview with Van Dyke by Coldplay's Chris Martin, released just last week before the fire --- filmed at Van Dyke's Malibu home which, thankfully (as you'll be especially happy to hear after watching the video!), didn't burn down this week, can be seen right here. Never mind today's BradCast for the moment. Go watch that video. We'll be here when you get back. You'll thank us!

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Hey! Happy "Certificate of Ascertainment of Appointment of Electors" Day! I know, it seems like it comes earlier and earlier every election year doesn't it? We take the festive opportunity on today's BradCast to discuss a few related points, including a bunch of new state criminal filed charges in the GOP's 2020 fake Electors plot and whether the convicted felon who is now our incoming President actually won a governing "mandate" (or not) in 2024. [Audio link to full show follows this link.]

FIRST UP... The wildfire we discussed briefly yesterday out here in Malibu, California, amid exceptionally dry and windy conditions, expanded by nearly 40% overnight and was reportedly just 7% contained as of airtime. At least 7,500 structures are threatened and more than 12,000 people are under evacuation orders, including wealthy homeowners and celebrities such as Cher and Dick Van Dkye, students at Pepperdine University, and thousands of middle class and working residents in the community. The area is a geographic haven for such fires for a number of reasons discussed today, all of which has been exacerbated in recent years by our worsening climate crisis.

THEN... FBI Director Christopher Wray, who was appointed by Donald Trump after he fired James Comey for investigating Russia's interference in the 2016 election, has decided to "obey in advance" by announcing he will resign in January when Trump takes office again, three years before the official end of his term. The incoming President has threatened to fire Wray and replace him with loyalist stooge and avowed government weaponizer Kash Patel. Still, there are reasons to be critical of Wray's limp decision to "bow out in advance."

NEXT... Not all law enforcement officials are willing to roll over. In Wisconsin, state prosecutors added 10 felony charges each to three different Donald Trump accomplices who attempted to help him steal the 2020 election. The new criminal charges [PDF] were filed on Tuesday against 2020 Trump attorneys Jim Troupis and Kenneth Chesebro, as well as Trump's 2020 Election Day operations director Mike Roman as part of the failed fake Electors scheme in the state that year. Troupis and Chesebro are said to be the original architects of the plot. Each of the Trump dupes had previously faced just one felony count apiece, with their first court appearance set for Thursday. Now they will each face 11 counts and a potential 6-year prison sentence and/or $10,000 fine for each count if found guilty.

FINALLY... In the early morning hours following the November 5th Election, Donald Trump declared he had won an "unprecedented and powerful mandate." Members of his transition team subsequently claimed a "MAGA Mandate" and "historic mandate for his agenda." But, Trumpian hyperbole aside, did he actually win any such thing?

Now that all states have certified their results and officially declared which slate of Electors will vote in the Electoral College in each state capital on December 17 --- (remember, I told you today was the "Certificate of Ascertainment of Appointment of Electors" Day!) --- the final results, with all votes said to be tallied, reveal that Trump defeated Kamala Harris by less than 1.5 percentage points and that a majority of Americans voted for someone other than him.

That doesn't seem particularly "unprecedented" or "powerful", much less a "mandate".

But what is a mandate anyway? Today, we're joined by JULIA R. AZARI, Professor of Political Science at Marquette University, who happens to have written a book on that very topic, called Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate.

As Azari warned in a short article posted the day after this year's election, when Trump's margin over Harris appeared to be far larger than it actually turned out to be, "Be wary of anyone claiming an election mandate," given that "talking about mandates flattens public opinion, rather than lifting it up" and "elevates the president above the Constitution and gives him a popular power he was never meant to have." As she explains today, that goes for Republicans and Democrats alike.

"I've been pretty critical of the way that Presidents of both major parties have used that concept," she tells me. "Although I would also note that, in contemporary times, Republicans have been a lot more focused and ideological in their mandate claiming."

Azari argues, essentially, that voters vote for and against many different things in an election, and there is no clear way to establish that they have voted for any one particular policy, much less in an election with one of the narrowest margins in modern history and where the winner of the Electoral College actually received a minority of the popular vote.

When any President-elect declares themselves to be the winner of a mandate --- or when the media echo that claim --- "this gives the President a little bit of extra power, at least in their own minds, that they feel justified in taking," Azari says, "and it enhances that power over that of Congress, rather than thinking of Congress as a co-equal branch."

She also notes: "When that power is in the hands of somebody who isn't really keen on Constitutional constraints, we may see some serious consequences."

We've got much to discuss with Azari on all of those points today. But what about Presidents who actually do win a majority of the popular vote? Do they have justification to claim a governing mandate? How should media report on such claims no matter who makes them? And how have claims of mandates been expanding and changing over the years going all the way back to the first such President to do so, Andrew Jackson in 1832? Please tune in for all of that history, both past and present, and much more on today's BradCast!...

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Today on The BradCast: How "news deserts" are quickly expanding across the U.S. and how they played a disturbing role in this year's Presidential election. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

While finger-pointing continues in the wake of the stunning, if very narrow (less than 1.5%) popular vote victory of Donald Trump over Kamala Harris last month, we continue to focus on the many failures of the media that led to it, including corporate media, social media and independent media. And, in some cases, as discussed on today's show, a lack of local media in news deserts around the country.

According to the 2024 State of Local News report from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, "Since 2005, more than 3,200 print newspapers have vanished." They are now said to be disappearing at "a rate of more than two per week", with some daily papers becoming weeklies, and many ending their print editions entirely. "As news organizations continue to contract, news deserts --- areas that lack consistent local reporting that fills critical information needs --- continue to expand."

Our guest today, 36-year former Washington Post media reporter PAUL FARHI, in an analysis of the Medill study with John Volk, finds that while Trump won the 2024 election "with one of the smallest popular vote margins in U.S. history", in 91% of news deserts he won by "an avalanche," by an average of 54 points in the 193 counties identified as news deserts where county-level results were available as of last week.

But, as Farhi and Volk note in their coverage, quoting Steven Waldman of the Rebuild Local News organization, "The wrong way to interpret this is ‘Oh, the rubes voted for Trump because they’re uninformed.’”

What is the right way? Well, that's what Farhi is here to discuss today.

He explains that those voters who live in news deserts --- usually rural, though not always Republican-leaning counties --- do have access to national media outlets such as CNN, Fox "News", the New York Times, etc. But, without local news outlets to add context to national issues, they may end up voting against their own best interests. Those voters, for example, may not realize that the Trump/Republican call for tariffs might end up raising local prices or result in the loss of local employment. They may not understand that access to healthcare and the right to abortion may be lost in their own community.

"These issues have local resonance," Farhi tells me, "but they don't if you have no access to understanding how they affect your local community. So what happens? The research that's emerging is that people frame their choice around their partisanship. 'I'm a Republican, I'm going to vote Republican. I don't need any local news to modify that behavior because I don't have any news to modify that behavior.' It increases the polarization and the partisanship of the electorate, because they have no information to weigh it against what's happening in their local community."

Beyond politics, Farhi notes: "In news deserts, because you don't have a watchdog, you have more political corruption on average. You have higher taxes on average. You have lower bond ratings. You have a certain kind of social alienation and loss of community, because no one is covering the high school sports, or obits, or the community events, or the things that are not major stories, but they kind of give a community some cohesion and coherence, and common knowledge. Those things, when they disappear, which they do in news deserts, are disproportionately affecting Trump voters."

The disturbingly fast expansion of news deserts may also be leading to a growth in ticket-splitting --- votes cast for a Republican at the top of the ticket, for instance, but no votes at all cast for Senator, Congress or in local races. That's because voters may simply not have enough local information to know how to vote. Ironically, that may have helped Democrats win some of those Senate and House races this year in states where Harris lost the popular vote to Trump.

It's a fascinating conversation. And a disturbing one. Also, given Farhi's 36 years as a media reporter at Washington Post until leaving last year, I asked him for his thoughts on the decision by the paper's billionaire owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, to nix the planned Editorial Page endorsement of Harris just days before the November election; how Bezos' ownership has affected the venerable news outlet; and whether he thinks it is a good or bad idea, for news in general, for people to cancel subscriptions to such outlets in protest. (More than 250,000 subscribers reportedly did exactly that just after Bezos spiked the paper's endorsement of Harris.) Please tune in for all of that and much more in our discussion today!

ALSO TODAY...

• The Dept. of Justice Inspector General released a report on the abuse by the Trump Administration's leak investigations that included spying on two members of Congress (Democrats Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell), along with 43 staff members of both Republican and Democratic lawmakers. One of the staffers secretly caught up in the 2017 probe, was Kash Patel, Trump's proposed nominee to head the FBI. He served as a staffer, at the time, to a Republican Congressman and only recently learned that the Administration abused DoJ policies to obtain his email and phone records. Suffice to say the report may add reasons for Patel to be angry and seek retribution, but not of the media or Obama or Biden Administrations, despite his vow to investigate and jail both members of the media and officials of both Administrations. His problems, it seems, may be much closer to home.

• Finally, as yet another apocalyptic climate change-fueled wildfire threatens celebrity homes and Pepperdine University in Malibu today, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with news on deadly back-to-back storms in the U.K. and Ireland; China's EV boom eroding the global demand for oil; and Donald Trump's plans to end Joe Biden's landmark loan programs to renewable energy companies and tax credits to consumers like you, for home improvements such as solar panels, weatherized windows and electric vehicles...

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It has been a very busy several days since we spoke with you last on BradCast! So it's another very busy show today. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among our coverage today...

• BREAKING before air: Law enforcement officials have arrested a "strong person of interest" in last week's Manhattan murder of UnitedHealthcare's CEO. A 26-year old man in Altoona, Pennsylvania --- said to have a gun like the killer's, a silencer for it, a fake ID and other related stuff --- has reportedly led police to believe they may have their man, though no official announcement has been made to that end as of airtime.

• Over the weekend, Romania's constitutional court nullified the results of the first round of voting in the NATO member nation's Presidential elections due to evidence of massive interference by Russia via tens of thousands of cyberattacks and a scheme to pay a coterie of TikTok users to post pro-Russia propaganda in favor of a longshot Presidential candidate. (Sound familiar?) The election will now be re-run. Imagine that. In the meantime, despite all manner of concern about Russian (and domestic) interference in the U.S. Presidential election this year, official certification of Electors in each state moves forward this week, without nary a hint of the hand-count or post-election audit that so many world-class cybersecurity and voting system experts have called for --- for very well-supported reasons --- following Donald Trump's reported victory on November 5th.

• Also, over the weekend, the Assad Family's barbaric, decades-long autocratic rule of Syria finally came to an ignominious end, following a lightning offensive by rebel groups at the end of a deadly, 12-year civil war on the long road to Damascus. Bashar Ashad and his family fled to Russia, Syria's top ally, seeking asylum and exile. Russia --- for its part, as President Biden noted during his remarks on the stunning fall of Assad's Syria on Sunday --- had been unable to come to the aid of its longtime ally, as they are stuck in their own quagmire following their invasion of U.S. and NATO-supported Ukraine. While Biden lauded the good news of the fall of Assad as "a moment of historic opportunity for the long-suffering people of Syria to build a better future for their proud country," he was more cautious about what comes next and whether those now claiming power --- tied in years past to al-Qaeda --- can moderate their politics to govern Syria responsibly. Time will tell.

• And, with still more bad news for authoritarianism, South Korea's opposition Democratic Party continues to have the support of the people as it pushes back against the rightwing ruling party and its President following last week's auto-coup via martial law declared by President Yoon Suk Yeol. The declaration was called off just hours later amid a popular uprising and members of both parties fighting their way past military troops to open the National Assembly to a hold a vote to end the martial law declaration. In the days since, Yoon now clings tenuously to power. His party, the People Power Party (or PPP), blocked an impeachment attempt by the Democrats over the weekend and demonstrators remain on the streets as South Korean officials announced a travel ban for the President, and the PPP declared the party and the nation's Prime Minister will take over all foreign and domestic business from Yoon until he leaves office earlier than planned. So, with no power, why is he still hanging around? And with no constitutional basis for this shift of President powers to a political party and a Prime Minister, the opposition Democrats are describing it as a second coup and vow to continue their impeachment attempts on a weekly basis through the end of the year or until Yoon is deposed.

• Finally today, the Biden Administration has reportedly been considering issuing broad, unprecedented, preemptive pardons to a number of Donald Trump's self-declared domestic enemies. That effort kicked into even higher gear with the incoming President's announcement that he planned to nominate Kash Patel to head up the FBI. Patel has been outspoken about investigations and prosecutions against a long list of Trump's perceived enemies, listing some 60 of them by name in his recent book, including Joe Biden himself, Vice President Kamala Harris, former Sec. of State Hilary Clinton, former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder, Trump's own Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley and dozens more. Over the weekend, during an interview with NBC News, Trump appeared to up the ante yet again by calling for the jailing of former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), Congressman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and other members of the bipartisan January 6 House Select Committee.

  So, should Biden use his Constitutional Presidential pardon power before leaving office to grant clemency to many of those who will likely be targeted by a weaponized Trump Administration? Or is it more important to maintain the polite "norms and traditions" that only Dems seem to follow as Trump and Republicans run rough-shod over them? My view is pretty clear: Offer them all pardons. If they want one, grant it. If they don't, they're on their own.

  We open up the phones to get the opinions from listeners on this matter and whether or not they would like to see Biden issue such pardons. Suffice to say, we remain a divided nation...

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The cruelty really does appear to be the point, as discussed on today's BradCast. [Audio link to full show follows below this summary.]

On Wednesday, the hateful creeps who have been fired up for years by Fox "News" and the Republican Party against trans kids, had their day at the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard some two and half hours of oral argument for and against the state of Tennessee's Big Government ban on safe, medically prescribed gender-affirming care for minors.

U.S. v. Skrmetti, as CHRIS GEIDNER of Law Dork, our guest today, pointed out in his coverage last night after sitting through the full hearing at the Court, should have been an "an easy case, in some ways." The actual legal question for the moment is whether the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld TN's cruel ban, applied the proper standards when hearing the case. If the law banning medical care for youths, as recommended by their doctors and approved by their parents, is based on sex, it should be subject to at least "intermediate scrutiny" by the court, meaning the government needs to prove "there is an important government interest and the law is substantially related to it," Geidner explains. "You need to have a reason" to adopt such a law that may discriminate on the basis of sex.

No such scrutiny was applied to TN's Senate Bill 1 when its challenge was heard and the law upheld by the lower court. The Biden Administration and the ACLU attorney representing the private challengers in the case made clear that the law is, in fact, based on sex and therefore should be remanded to the lower court to be heard under heightened scrutiny to ensure there us a legitimate governmental interest in enforcing the law which, plaintiffs argue, violates the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection clause.

That said, Wednesday's hearing became, at times, more of a culture war over trans rights in general, as 25 other largely GOP-controlled states have adopted similar bans in recent years. Their laws will be affected by whatever happens in this case currently at SCOTUS. That, as Donald Trump and his allies have vowed to roll back protections for transgender people at the national level after he takes office again next year.

The matter, in short, is very high stakes. But the stakes are the highest at the moment for the kids who will be --- and already are being --- unconscionably harmed by these insidious laws meant to help Republicans gain or hold power under the guise of keeping children safe. These laws do no such thing. They are actively harming children rather than help them.

Geidner breaks down what happened at the High Court on Wednesday; how a 2020 case (before the all-out GOP war on transgender people kicked into high gear) in which Republican Justices Neil Gorsuch and John Roberts actually joined the Court's liberals to protect trans rights may affect this case; and whether TN will be able to get five Justices to uphold their ban --- or if the challengers will find five that are willing to at least send the matter back down to the lower court for a proper hearing.

"All that DoJ and the ACLU, representing the private plaintiffs, were saying is that, 'The 6th Circuit got the wrong standard, and all that you need to do is say that this is a sex-based classification, and send it back for them to do the rest of this work'," says Geidner. The case, the challengers argued, is a Constitutional Equal Protection matter. But, as Geidner observes, "What we saw from Chief Justice Roberts and Justice [Brett] Kavanaugh was an attempt to come up with a way of resolving the case that would allow these laws to exist that isn't anti-trans. Which can essentially only happen by turning the Equal Protection clause on its head or rendering it virtually irrelevant." That would have a sweeping effect on all matter of legislation encroaching on Constitutional rights.

The matter, Geidner assess, now most likely rests upon decisions by Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Gorsuch who, Geidner notes --- after having written the majority opinion in 2020's landmark Bostock case that prevented discrimination against transgender people by their employers --- fell curiously silent throughout the entire hearing on Wednesday.

Most media coverage after the hearing on Wednesday suggested things don't look good for the challengers --- and for the children they are hoping to protect. Geidner concedes that may be the case, but he holds out hope and explains why today.

Also on today's program...

• A few words about the 7.0 magnitude quake in Northern California this afternoon, and the tsunami warning that briefly followed it, affecting some 5.3 million people on the West Coast. (For those who asked after the news broke today: We're fine! And nowhere near the quake down here in Southern California! But thanks for asking!)
• And, finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report on a North Carolina town suing Duke Energy for years of deception about climate change; how climate change has become the dominant cause of drought in the U.S. West; South Africa's High Court bans new coal plants; and small, imperiled island nations like Vanuatu and Kiribati, whose entire existence is now threatened by rising seas, are leading a courageous landmark fight for global climate action at the U.N.'s International Court of Justice...

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As detailed on today's BradCast, the avenues for massive corruption by the incoming Trump Administration are, shamefully, only beginning to come into view. The fact that our corporate media so utterly failed to make such possibilities clear --- or even to simply explain to the electorate what tariffs actually are and how they actually work --- is just one more indictment that we will spend decades paying the price for. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

FIRST UP... The final uncalled seat for the U.S. House in the next Congress, following the November 5th election, has finally been called. Republican Rep. John Duarte conceded on Tuesday night to Democrat Adam Gray in California's 13th Congressional district. It was the closest race in the House this year. As of air time, just 187 votes separate the two out of more than 210,000 cast, as Dems flipped a third seat in the Golden State this year. That leaves Republicans with one of the slimmest House majorities in history, holding just 220 seats to Dems' 215. That said, with the resignation of Matt Gaetz, and two other GOP members set to step down if confirmed to be in Trump's cabinet, the margin for passage of any of his legislative agenda may be in question in the lower chamber in the early part of next year. Just one or two defectors, or members who are out sick, could make it impossible for Republicans to get anything through the House.

THEN... We've debunked the long-ago, many times discredited 2000 Mules film --- supposedly documenting massive fraud by Democrats to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump --- over and over again in the past several years. Both state and federal law enforcement authorities have done so as well. Even the publisher and distributor of the documentary film and its companion book have pulled both from distribution and offered an apology. This week, so did the fraudulent film's director and rightwing pundit Dinesh D'Souza. He issued an apology to one of the people seen on surveillance video in the film, which claimed the man was committing a "crime" by depositing "fraudulent votes" into a drop-box near Atlanta in 2020. In fact, the man was dropping off his own ballot, his wife's and those of his adult children who lived with him --- all perfectly legal in Georgia. In his apology, D'Souza (who was pardoned for his own ACTUAL election fraud crimes by Trump!) appears to blame his partners on the film, a long-ago discredited GOP "voter fraud" fraudster group called True the Vote, for misleading him about the footage they supplied for his use in the film.

FINALLY... Donald Trump has been vowing for the past year or more on the campaign trail to institute massive trade tariffs on foreign nations of anywhere from 10% to 1000% depending on his mood on any given day at any given event. He has also, for years, been lying to the American public about tariffs, claiming they are paid by the nation whose products are taxed upon import into the U.S. In fact, as our guest today explains, they are almost always paid by the consumer in some fashion and are likely to inflate prices to boot.

We're joined today by DAVID DAYEN, investigative financial journalist, award-winning author and Executive Editor of The American Prospect magazine. He offers both a primer on how tariffs actually work (and/or don't), and how Trump plans to use them to muscle concessions and favors from other nations, beginning with Mexico, Canada and China, our three largest trading partners from whom we import some $1 trillion worth of goods each year.

"The heyday of tariffs was the 1890s," Dayen explains. "But the way that Trump is going about it, you've got to think of these tariffs as more like economic sanctions." Sanctions that could come back to bite the U.S. via a trade war if those nations decide to slap their own tariffs on our goods in return.

Trump has claimed that his recently promised 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada, and new tariffs of 10% on goods from China are meant to stop the "invasion" of migrants and drugs into the U.S. But that explanation, charges Dayen, is dubious at best. They are more likely intended as "simply leverage" in advance of renegotiations of the USMCA, the slightly modified replacement for the NAFTA trade treaty that was struck between U.S., Mexico and Canada during Trump's first term.

But, as Dayen reported at The Prospect last week, "there's a second piece to Trump's tariff strategy" that involves corporate importers and exporters, rather than nations. That, as he explains today, is where Trump's ability to give away tariff waivers is set to be a wildly lucrative scheme that will open the door to perhaps unprecedented corruption and payoffs from corporate interests hoping to avoid the economic pain of tariffed goods.

In his explanation, Dayen cites the famous "Cantillon Effect" which "comes down to whoever is closer to power is going to have better success in business." And now, between Trump's hotels and publicly-traded social media company and, perhaps most disturbingly, his new cryptocurrency venture --- (which a Chinese entrepreneur currently under SEC investigation for fraud, market manipulation and other violations of U.S. law just dropped $30 million into, three weeks after the election) --- it is going to be open season to buy favors and favoritism galore from the new President.

"This is what oligarchies look like," says Dayen. "This is what Russia looks like. If you're closer to the king, you're going to do better. The next four years are going to reflect this tendency."

And, yes, as he argues today, "the mind boggles at the potential for corruption"...

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