There are a lot of ongoing --- even worsening --- nightmares right now. But, before this past remarkable weekend recedes into the annals of history, let's at least offer one BradCast over to celebrating the joy of Saturday's coast-to-coast protest rallies seeking to make America good again. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Even prior to 7 million turning out for last weekend's "No Kings" rallies in some 2,700 cities and towns, instances of individual folks standing up to make America good again abounded.

For instance, our judicial system --- at least below the U.S. Supreme Court level --- continues to hold, by and large, as we saw in last week's ruling blocking Donald Trump (for now) from unlawfully firing some 4,000 federal workers during the ongoing federal government shutdown. U.S. District Judge Susan Yvonne Illston called out the Trump Administration, charging that they have "taken advantage of the lapse in government spending and government functioning to assume that all bets are off, the laws don’t apply to them anymore." But, as the Judge made clear, "The activities that are being undertaken here are contrary to the laws. You can’t do this in a nation of laws.”

We also saw the grand jury and regular jury system holding firm last week, as Trump's U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, former Fox "News" host Jeanine Pirro, was unable to attain even a misdemeanor conviction after three different federal grand juries had rejected her attempt to indict a D.C. protester which the Administration falsely claimed had assaulted federal officers. After defendant Sydney Reid's acquittal last week, she declared in a statement: "This verdict shows that this administration and their peons are not able to invoke fear in all citizens. Correctly describing Trump as "a crazy person who's in charge of the most powerful nation," Reid added: "Knowing that I can stand in front of 12 of my fellow citizens and be found not guilty for standing up for basic human rights makes me feel like, despite the scary times we live in, we have hope for the future."

That "hope" was on display across the nation over the weekend, in cities and towns, large and small, "red" and "blue", by joyous, peaceful protesters, young and old, black, brown, white and everything in between. Even one of our grumpiest listeners and occasional callers, Ron, rang in to today's show to note that attending a protest rally in Venice over the weekend, here in Southern California, "really changed my head."

"I have felt like a voice in the wind," he told me. "I know other people feel like I do. I had no idea it would be this much of a wave." Fighting back emotions, he notes: "It just completely knocked me out. It gives me a whole lot of hope. It's like these bastards aren't gonna get away with it. And I feel really good about that."

It wasn't "the left" which proved to be angry and dangerous on Saturday. There were virtually zero arrests despite the enormous crowds that turned out. These weren't "Hate America" rallies as House Speaker Mike Johnson and fellow Republicans falsely characterized them with lies in advance last week. As callers attest on today's program, they were attended by happy, patriotic warriors, banding together to fight like hell to save our country and Constitution from a tyrant and his enablers. Exactly like the nation's first No Kings protest, on July 4, 1776.

The President of the United States, however, was busy shitting on the nation on Saturday --- almost literally, albeit via AI --- and its peaceful protesters exercising their First Amendment rights to speak out against being ruled by a monarch. Trump published a particularly childish (even by his standards) and disgusting artificial intelligence video showing himself as the pilot of a fighter jet, wearing a crown, and dumping tons of excrement on thousands of peaceful protesters in Times Square. The President of the United States actually posted that video to social media on Saturday night. I am told that none of the major Sunday network news shows mentioned it. Other than that, this wildly unpopular President wasn't bothered at all by the massive protests against him, as he claims...right?

Tune in for today's program. I think you'll enjoy it. It is, as you'll note from the very opening, a joyous and defiant celebration of democracy, free speech and all that is good, from a nation of people just like you and me who are standing up to declare that we're not gonna take it anymore.

And, unlike Trump's federal immigration goons, we're not afraid to show our faces in public when declaring as much in thousands of cities across this still-great land...

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I was hoping for at least some optimism from my guests on today's BradCast regarding the future of the landmark Voting Right Act of 1965. I'm sorry to say, I didn't get much in that regard. But I learned a lot. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

The corrupted U.S. Supreme Court held a nearly three-hour Oral Argument this week after the activist Republican Supremes actually asked plaintiffs from a case last year in Louisiana to come back this term and argue something else entirely: Essentially, whether one of the last standing sections of the Act barring discriminatory election practices, Section 2, somehow violates the Constitution itself.

The case is Louisiana v. Callais. Its origins are complicated, though one of our guests explains it quite simply today. Basically, following the 2020 Census, the Republican legislature in Louisiana drew a U.S. House Map that all but ensured no less than 5 Republican Congressional Districts and just one that might be won by Democrats, because it has been packed with a large majority of the state's Black voters. But Louisiana's voting population is more than 30% Black. So voting rights advocates sued for a second majority-minority district under Section 2 of the VRA. They won. But now a group of White voters in the state (several of whom didn't even know they were listed as plaintiffs!) are attempting to turn the VRA on its head, arguing --- as Mark Joseph Stern summarizes it, that "it's racist to remedy racism" --- by claiming that minority voting opportunity districts amount to an unlawful racial gerrymander violating the rights of the white voters under the 14th and 15th Amendments of the Constitution.

By way of reminder, those Amendments, in brief, bar discrimination against voters on the basis of race, and allow for Congress to adopt laws enforcing the Amendments by protecting all voters. Almost a century after the Amendments were ratified, Congress finally passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965 to do exactly that. Republicans, including now Chief Justice John Roberts, have spent the better part of the last five decades or so trying to roll back the protections for minority voters afforded by the VRA and the post-Civil War Amendments.

After working for the Reagan Administration in the early 80s (unsuccessfully) to try and weaken the Act, in 2013, John Roberts, as Chief Justice, wrote the Shelby County v. Holder Opinion that gutted Section 5 of the VRA. That Section mandated that jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination at the polling place must preclear all new election-related laws before they went into effect to make sure they were not discriminatory. In 2019, in a case known as Rucho v. Common Cause, Roberts' Opinion for the Court's majority held that gerrymandering for partisan purposes was perfectly legal under federal law, leaving only racial gerrymanders protected against. Now, he and the rest of the far-right activists on the High Court are gunning for Section 2, which is meant to protect voters in all 50 states, including from racial gerrymanders of the kind that Louisiana was found to have engaged in after the 2020 Census.

We're joined today by two experts in election law and redistricting, from both the legal and political sides to try and make sense of all of this. Professor JOSHUA A. DOUGLAS teaches election law at the University of Kentucky College of Law. His latest book is, appropriately enough, THE COURT v. THE VOTERS: The Troubling Story of How the Supreme Court Has Undermined Voting Rights. DAVID DALEY is a Senior Fellow at FairVote.org, whose latest book, appropriately enough, is ANTIDEMOCRATIC: Inside the Right's 50 Year Plan to Control American Elections.

In addition to breaking down Wednesday's oral argument, we discuss why this case is being heard again the first place; how it demonstrates how much Section 2 of the VRA is still very much needed; why there is no specific time-limit after which legally-mandated, race-based solutions to discriminatory violations of the law and Constitution must be ended (as Justice Kavanaugh and others suggested); what is likely to happen if Section 2 is killed or merely eviscerated (at least a dozen minority members of Congress will almost certainly lose their seats in short order); and both if and, crucially, when the Court may issue its Opinion in this matter.

We dig into a lot of details and angles on all of this, so I'm not even going to try to summarize our conversation here. Please tune in for that. You'll be much smarter in the bargain. But, suffice to say for now, Daley, who has written several books on Rightwing gerrymandering, notes that, if Section 2 is struck down, it "would be an electoral bonanza for the Republican Party." He characterizes what will follow as an "unprecedented Gerrymander Armageddon".

Douglas, who also has a podcast and newsletter titled "Democracy Optimist", is not much more optimistic. "I think we are going to see a lot more states engage in this so-called mid-decade redistricting. We're already seeing some states do this in response to President Trump trying to make sure that he doesn't lose the House in the midterm elections," Douglas explains. "I think you're going to see a lot more states, Louisiana included, redraw their maps. And what this is going to mean is that you're going to have a much more partisan skew. It is going to be even that much harder for Democrats to take back the House in 2026, just because race and party are so closely aligned in many states, particularly in the South."

Daley believes a ruling is likely to come as early as January, in time for states largely in the old Confederate South, to rewrite maps before the 2026 primaries begin to prevent Black voters from being able to elect a candidate of their choosing next year.

Douglas, a self-described "glass-half-full kind of person" sees the potential for a bit of wiggle room on both the release date of an Opinion, and how it might be tempered by the ongoing Gerrymandering Wars already underway, thanks to Trump's desperation to avoid a humiliating loss of Congress next year.

FINALLY TODAY... Breaking news, mid-show, as Trump's former National Security Advisor turned Trump critic John Bolton is indicted on 18 federal charges related to his alleged retention of classified documents after being fired by Trump in 2019. And Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, as the cost of Trump's cuts to the National Weather Service begin to turn deadly...

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As our corrupted U.S. Supreme Court begins its new term this week, its Chief Justice has a lot of explaining to do. Don't hold your breath for that explanation. At least from John Roberts. Our guest on today's BradCast, however, just wrote a book about him and has plenty to explain about him, what has happened under his leadership to our High Court, and the long road ahead toward reforming it. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Our guest today, the great LISA GRAVES, knows a thing or two about the Supreme Court, from her experience in all three branches of the federal government. She has served as a Deputy Asst. Attorney General at the U.S. Dept. of Justice, the Chief Counsel for nominations on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, and as the Deputy Chief for the Article III Judges Division of the U.S. Court System. She has also exposed a lot of the corruption of the current members of the High Court, as a longtime researcher and as founder and Executive Director of True North Research.

Her brand new book is called WITHOUT PRECEDENT: How Chief Justice Roberts and his Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights. (Check out an excerpt here.)

In her most recent news letter, Graves argues that "we are in the midst of an unprecedented set of constitutional crises." She asserts that while Donald Trump's "belligerent and erratic orders --- and his appalling musings --- are shaking the foundations of our nation, it is the U.S. Supreme Court with John Roberts at the helm that is recklessly and aggressively emboldening him."

We begin there, after a long summer of the Roberts Court largely granting Trump's wishes, at least temporarily, in case after case after case on the Court's Emergency Docket (better described as its "Shadow Docket"), allowing him to largely get away with everything, no matter how radical, unlawful or unconstitutional. That, in unmistakably stark contrast to the Court's rightwing majority blockade of far less cataclysmic executive actions attempted by the Democratic Biden Administration when, for example, President Biden was barred by SCOTUS from offering about ten thousand dollars in school loan forgiveness during the COVID pandemic (as specifically allowed by law) or when attempting to regulate deadly emissions by power plants, despite the federal Clean Air Act's mandate to do exactly that.

Where the Roberts Court has allowed Trump to ignore the law and Constitution alike, the same corrupted majority blocked the Democratic President time after time, declaring a newly discovered "Major Questions" doctrine in the Constitution. It was apparently sitting right next to their invented "Presidential Immunity" clause they discovered last year, just in time to get Trump off the hook from very real crimes both retroactively and prospectively.

"If [Kamala] Harris had won, I don't think this Court would be bending over backwards to allow every new initiative of a Harris Administration," argues Graves. "What we saw when Biden was President, was the Roberts Court going out of its way to invent whole new magical phrases to try to stop signature initiatives of the Biden Administration, that were modest in themselves, and were even more modest when compared to the radical, reactionary, destructive actions of Donald Trump."

We've got a lot to speak to Graves about today, including all of that, as well well as the lies told by "documented liar" Justice Brett Kavanaugh about so-called "temporary" decisions made by the Court on the Shadow Docket; how Robert's nomination 20 years ago last month kicked off the full industrialization and weaponization of Republican Dark Money invested in seating Justices who would turn the Court, its precedents and our Constitution on their collective head; and how, even during his nomination hearings, John Roberts, a longtime anti-democratic, anti-Voting Rights Act Republican activist, was already playing the American people.

Graves also explains today what she sees as a long but viable path toward Court reform. "If we don't do so, it is at our peril. Because the Roberts Court and John Roberts is acting with such supreme arrogance in enabling Trump and in decimating our rights," she asserts. "It will continue to take blow after blow against our freedoms, against statutes that were passed to protect our rights, including efforts to mitigate climate change and so much more, until we reform this Court and pass laws to restore rights we've lost, and even expand upon them."

"So it's really a moral duty. It's a moral imperative that we not give in to hopelessness," she says, citing decades-long Civil Rights Era struggles. "Just because we can't do it this year, it doesn't mean we can't be building it. And, in fact, we must be building forward, to demand that we have representatives who are going to support reforming the Supreme Court, to protect our rights and to undo the damage that has been done by this packed, stacked and captured Court."

"The damage that has been done is done to us. We the people. So we have an obligation to work together to move those reforms into law in the years to come. Each year that we go forward, we hopefully will have the opportunity to have elections that will allow us to hold the people accountable who are advancing this extreme agenda and repel it. And in repelling it, have the opportunity to pass meaningful, real reform, the reform that's needed as well as the substantive restoration of rights, and expansion of rights, that is every American's rightful inheritance."

ALSO TODAY... U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi is not just a Trump sycophant and corrupted tool. She is also a horrible human being, as she demonstrated over and over again today in obnoxious testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in her first oversight hearing as U.S. Attorney General.

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As detailed on today's BradCast, the cost of healthcare for tens of millions of Americans is likely to skyrocket as of January 1. It is likely to be far worse than you've heard. Congressional Dems are fighting to prevent it. Republicans, including the President, seem to be just fine with it. Those are basically the terms as we barrel toward a likely federal government shutdown next week. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

We dig into the details, stakes, and positions of the two sides on that shutdown deadline (October 1) and the new costs for health care set to explode after December 31 with our guest today who knows a whole lot about all of the above. But first, a bit of news...

• Jimmy Kimmel returned to our public airwaves on Tuesday night, after a week-long suspension following threats by Donald Trump and his FCC Chairman, Brendan Carr, to revoke broadcast licenses from ABC affiliate stations if they didn't nix Kimmel. In the wake of public outrage (and cancelled streaming service subscriptions), Disney, which owns ABC, buckled and invited Kimmel back on air. To the hilarious despair of Trump, Kimmel received enormous ratings last night, and delivered a heartfelt, emotional, blistering, funny, courageous and important monologue. We play an extended portion of it today, given that tens of millions of Americans in dozens of major markets were not allowed to see it thanks to the Sinclair and Nexstar corporations, the nation's two largest local TV station conglomerates, which are refusing to reinstate the program.

• Democrats continued their winning streak in Special Elections on Tuesday by, once again, outperforming themselves by enormous margins as compared to last November. In Georgia, for example, in a special election for the State Senate in a very Republican district, while the Democratic candidate lost, she picked up about 18 points for Dems in that district as compared to last November. In Arizona, Adelita Grijalva easily defeated her Republican opponent in a special election to fill the U.S. House seat left vacant by the death of her 12-term progressive Democratic father, Rep. Raul Grijalva. But where Raul won reelection by 26 points last November, his daughter, on Tuesday, won by nearly 39 points. That's a 13-point swing for Dems. If you compare her Tuesday victory to the Presidential results in that same District last year, Dems improved by 16 points. Adelita has also vowed to sign the Congressional discharge petition to force a vote in the U.S. House on releasing the Epstein Files. Her signature is the last one needed to achieve a majority of House members signing on. That should allow the vote to finally proceed.

Little wonder then that House Speaker Mike Johnson has instructed Republicans to stay home next week, even though without a deal with Democrats to keep the Government open, it will shut down on Wednesday, the first day of the new federal fiscal year.

To that end, Democrats are desperately working to strike a deal with Republicans. But they are standing firm (so far) in demanding a permanent expansion of the enhanced premium subsidies for more than 25 million Americans who receive access to health care via the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or Obamacare) exchanges. Monthly premiums --- and health care in general for everyone, thanks to Trump's tariffs --- are set to go through the roof at the end of the year, without an extension. This will adversely affect millions of Republican constituents across the country, as well as Democrats and independents.

But where Democrats are trying to strike a deal, Donald Trump, who had agreed to meet with Democratic leaders to negotiate this week, abruptly cancelled the meeting on Tuesday night, citing all kind of false and, frankly, batshit insane phony reasons for chickening out of his first face-to-face meeting with Democratic Leaders since retaking office this year.

There is a lot on the line in the days (and weeks ahead), which could, in addition to scrambling politics in D.C. and putting government employees out of work, result in millions of Americans losing their access to health care.

We're joined today to break all of this down by CHARLES GABA, a longtime independent healthcare data analyst, who first began his work on this as a hobby in the early years of Obamacare. He is now regularly cited as a source by mainstream media. Most recently, Gaba has been publishing state-by-state breakdowns of how much ACA customers can expect to see their monthly premiums rise next year, if Republicans refuse to extend the enhanced premiums temporarily enacted by Democrats after Joe Biden took office in 2021.

"Basically," he tells me, some 25 million Americans are "kind of screwed" beginning next year, unless Republicans come around to extending the subsidies. "I am one of those," explains Gaba, whose family --- including himself, his wife and his child --- enjoy access to healthcare thanks to the ACA. "If they are not extended, then starting January 1st, if we are in the same policy that we are today, we'd be looking at around an $11,000 increase in our premiums next year. That's on top of what we're already paying."

Gaba's state-by-state analyses leads him to expect "90-95% increases on average" for monthly premiums next year without a renewal of federal subsidies. He underscores that that is an "average", and that while some might see less, "there are also going to be other households that are going to see their net premiums increase 200%, 300%. In theory they could be looking at going five or six times what they are paying now, which of course, nobody could possibly afford. A lot of people at the more extreme ends are going to have to drop their coverage entirely."

While Republicans have teased the idea of extending subsidies temporarily, for another year, Gaba, one of the first to warn about this potential healthcare-pocalypse, tells me today why he is rallying Democrats to allow the Government to shut down, if necessary, unless Republicans agree to expand the ACA subsidies permanently, roll back their recent massive cuts to Medicaid and include provisions in any budget agreement that would prevent Trump from simply rescinding any of the spending agreed to by Congress.

And, oh yes, all of this is likely causing huge problems health care company actuaries trying to set pricing for the Open Enrollment period beginning November 1. "I'm sure they are going through Pepto-Bismol and Tums by the bottle-full right now. The insurance companies, they actually started crunching their numbers back in March. This is a multi-month process. The final contracts [with state regulators] are supposed to be signed usually sometime in mid-September." And yet, on CNN today, Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune called for a seven-week Continuing Resolution to keep the government open at current spending levels, kicking the can down the road to figure out whether ACA subsidies will be extended beyond the end of the year.

Tune in for insight on the very high stakes, potential horrors, and almost certain chaos that awaits over the next few days and weeks, even while few Americans have even noticed any of this just yet...

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So much Team Trump criming, so little time to cover it all on today's BradCast. But we try. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Over the weekend, MSNBC broke the news, followed by confirmation from New York Times, that Donald Trump's so-called 'Border Czar', Tom Homan, was caught on tape last September accepting $50,000 in cash --- in a takeout food bag --- from undercover law enforcement officials posing as businessmen. The sting came about after the target of a separate corruption probe tipped off officials that Homan was accepting bribes in exchange for lucrative border security contracts in a new Trump administration, presuming he won last year's election.

After Trump took office, he tapped Homan to oversee his mass deportation of migrants, a scheme that, they had promised, would focus on removing "the worst of the worst" criminals. Instead, the majority of deportees have no criminal record, but the guy running the program has apparently been caught on tape accepting a cash payoff before returning to office.

The investigation into Homan, which reportedly began in the summer of 2024 under the Biden Administration's DOJ, was summarily closed after Trump returned to power by Trump's former criminal defense attorney turned Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche, and his FBI Director, Kash Patel. One of Trump's other personal attorneys, Emil Bove, who served as a top DOJ official until recently being confirmed by Republicans in the U.S. Senate as a federal judge, also reportedly had a hand in shutting down the probe of Homan.

A DOJ spokesperson described the investigation as "blatantly political" and an effort to target "President Trump’s allies rather than investigate real criminals and the millions of illegal aliens who flooded our country," claiming the investigation "found no evidence of illegal activity."

Over the same weekend that story broke, Trump sent what appears to have been meant as a private message to his Attorney General Pam Bondi, effectively ordering her to bring criminal charges against three of his top political foes, New York Attorney General Letitia James, former FBI Director James Comey, and California U.S. Senator Adam Schiff. The message addressed to "Pam", seemingly meant to be private, was instead posted publicly by Trump on his own failing social media website.

We're joined today for insight on all of this by RANDALL D. ELIASON, former chief of the DOJ's Fraud and Public Corruption Section at the U.S. Attorney Office in the District of Columbia. He now teaches white collar crime at George Washington University Law School and pens the Sidebars Blog newsletter.

Is there any reason to believe the DOJ and FBI were right to drop the bribery probe against Homan, in which it seems he was caught dead to rights taking a cash bribe according to multiple reports?

"It's really impossible to know without knowing exactly what's on the tape. It would all come down to what he said and what he agreed to do in exchange for the cash," Eliason tells me today. "But I will say that accepting $50,000 in cash in a fast-food bag is kind of an indication of corrupt intent, that the recipient knows something shady is going on. So you've got to say at a bare minimum, there's a substantial basis to conduct additional investigation." Reportedly, that's exactly what DOJ was doing until Team Trump shut it all down.

"This line coming out from the White House and the DOJ that there was no evidence of any criminal wrongdoing, that doesn't hold water," he argues. "There's clearly something fishy going on here when you're taking fifty grand in cash in a Cava food bag. So there's certainly some smoke there." But, he further explains, "the Supreme Court has made the federal bribery statute so narrow" there are a number of ways Homan could get off the hook. Of course, the fastest way is to have friends at the DOJ willing to corruptly dismiss the entire matter.

We discuss that in detail, along with what Eliason describes as an extraordinary break from decades of norms and tradition with Trump's "private" message to his A.G. regarding bringing charges against his perceived political foes.

"Trump sees the Justice Department as a tool that he can use to punish his enemies and reward his friends," charges Eliason. "And this historical, very important norm that politics is kept separated, that the Justice Department is kept independent from the White House because we don't want politics to influence criminal investigations and criminal prosecutions, has just been flipped completely on its head and thrown out the window. It doesn't exist anymore under this administration."

"He is trying to use the Justice Department to go after his political opponents. And he also uses it to reward his friends. Whether it's Homan, or [Mayor] Eric Adams in New York City, or all the January 6 rioters, pardoning all of them. It's one of the most discouraging things that is happening in this administration --- the complete gutting of the law."

"This is really scary stuff," adds Eliason. "This idea that the President can order a prosecutor to bring criminal charges, and if he doesn't, he'll fire you and put someone in place who will. It's unthinkable to anyone who has worked as a federal prosecutor. It's directly contradictory to the mission and ethical obligations of a federal prosecutor. It would have been completely unheard of before now."

It is all of a piece, he explains, with "many things that are going on at the Justice Department that just breaks the hearts of those of us who worked there and love it."

Finally, breaking news just before airtime today on Trump's FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's outrageous threat last week against Disney/ABC and their affiliate stations to take away their broadcast licenses unless they cancel Jimmy Kimmel's late night show after comments Kimmel made that they didn't care for regarding the recent murder of Republican activist Charlie Kirk. After enormous public blowback against Disney following last week's "indefinite suspension" of Jimmy Kimmel LIve, news broke late today that Kimmel will now be returning to air as of Tuesday night. Looks like public pressure, a torrent of cancelled Disney+ subscriptions and the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment may have won this round, at least partly...at least for now. Since getting off air, Sinclair Broadcasting, a rightwing outlet that owns more than 35 ABC affiliate stations and is seeking favors from the FCC, has announced they plan to air news programming instead of Kimmel's show beginning on Tuesday night...

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Today on The BradCast (my last until next week, see "NOTE" below), a full week after the awful murder of Republican activist Charlie Kirk, the political ramifications --- and opportunism --- is becoming quite clear. And it all has a very familiar echo to those of us, including my guests today, who were around and paying close attention 24 years ago this month. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Back then, an unpopular President in the first eight months of his term saw his political fortunes reversed in the aftermath of the horrific terror attacks on September 11, 2001, as much of the nation "rallied around the flag" in support of that President, in response. His Administration, however, ran way too far with its presumed mandate in subsequent months and years. Innocent Americans themselves came under suspicion and paid a price (sometimes large, sometimes small) for their words and their political beliefs. The nation ended up committing itself to (at least) two, years-long, unwinnable foreign wars. And actions taken against Americans in the name, supposedly, of national security would bend norms, laws and Constitutional rights beyond recognition at times.

Charlie Kirk has yet to be buried. And yet, his most powerful ally, a very unpopular Donald Trump, his Administration and their supporters are already targeting their fellow Americans for retribution --- for a crime they had nothing to do with.

After years of describing Democrats as "fascists" and "the enemy within", Trump now claims that Kirk's death was the "tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree...in the most hateful and despicable way possible." In making his case, he cites "radical left" "scum" and unnamed "leftist organizations" as being responsible, vowing to target, prosecute and defund them for a crime that nobody other than the shooter seems to have carried out.

On Monday, Trump's Vice President, J.D. Vance, declared "left-wing extremism" was to blame and that "the data is clear" it is "not a both sides problem." It is "people on the Left" that are to blame for rising political violence. That, after the Trump Dept. of Justice removed a National Institute of Justice report from its website that finds white supremacist and far-right violence "continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism" in the United States. The study (now archived here) was there on the day that Kirk was killed. It was disappeared by the Trump Administration thereafter.

Speaking to Vance on the very same show on Monday, Trump's top White House political czar, Stephen Miller, furiously vowed "to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks" and to "use every resource we have at the DOJ, Homeland Security and throughout this government to dismantle and destroy these networks."

Of course, there are no known "networks", at this time, tied to Kirk's murder in any way. But that's okay. Trump's Attorney General, Pam Bondi, promised on Monday to "absolutely target" anyone who uses "hate speech" that she doesn't like in the wake of Kirk's death. When asked about Bondi's remarks by an ABC News reporter on the White House lawn, Trump accused him of having "a lot of hate in your heart" and threatened: "Maybe I'll come after ABC."

(Shortly after we wrapped today's program, news broke that ABC was "indefinitely" pulling its popular late-night show, Jimmy Kimmel Live!. The announcement came after Trump's FCC chair threatened to "take action" against ABC and its owner Disney, and suggesting he might pull broadcast licenses from affiliate stations. The threats were apparently in response to Kimmel's charge on Monday that MAGA was "doing everything they can to score political points from" Kirk's death. Today, it seems, they scored another point. Though, to be fair, Trump said back in July, after taking credit for the recent cancellation of Stephen Colbert's top-rated late night show on CBS, "I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next." So, obviously all of this is just opportunism.)

Oh, and Rep. Clay Higgins, Chair of the Federal Law Enforcement subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee, sent a letter this week to the CEOs of six social media companies, (falsely) instructing them that they are required, by law, to remove comments regarding Kirk's assassination that Higgins and his compatriots might find offensive. He claimed the "restriction of public statements...is not an oppression of free speech [but] the protection of free speech." [Emphasis added for Orwell's sake.]

All of this sounds both familiar and chilling to those of us who lived through the aftermath of 9/11, including my guests today, HEATHER DIGBY PARTON of Salon and Digby's Hullabaloo and the notorious 'DRIFTGLASS' of the Professional Left Podcast.

"This isn't surprising," says Digby. "They've been telegraphing this since Donald Trump started running back in 2022, that they were going to go after 'the Left' and his enemies, 'the enemies of the state.' After the Kirk shooting there were MAGA people who were saying out loud, 'This is our Reichstag Fire,' looking for that moment they could use as an excuse to do what they were always going to do anyway."

"They have to start targeting people online who they said were insufficiently reverent toward Charlie Kirk, and getting them fired. So much more free speech. But that's the first step you take in this," she adds, citing similar threats from Republicans in the George W. Bush Administration back in 2001.

"I would like to thank the Reichstag Fire comparators for acknowledging they are Nazis," quips Driftglass, "because that's what the Reichstag Fire was. Way to go, guys!"

Citing similar blowback against those who disagreed with Bush and his wars after 9/11, Driftglass adds: "This didn't start with Donald Trump. They have been demonizing the Left as responsible for everything wrong with this country for at least the last 35 years. And the rhetoric has finally caught up with actual action being taken at the highest level of the White House."

"In Neuromancer by William Gibson," Driftglass observes, "he coined a phrase called the 'consensual hallucination.' That's what they [MAGA] are all engaged in. They have hallucinated into existence a vast leftwing conspiracy, sneaky liberal media, lots of awfulness that justifies everything they do. This has been set up for 40 years now, that the Left is always worse, always a threat, and always a justification for escalation against the 'enemy within.'"

There is, of course, much more on all of this on today's show, as both Digby and Driftglass join us for the full hour, including their insights on Trump's apparent attempt to start a war with Venezuela; his apparent attempt to start a war with Chicago; his laughable $15 billion defamation lawsuit against the New York Times and much more...

[NOTE: 'The BradCast' is off tomorrow due to an unavoidable medical appointment, though we hope to get a Green News Report out beforehand! Otherwise, see ya on Monday!]

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We're lucky to have a guest on today's BradCast who is able to offer a smart perspective on a whole bunch of legal stories breaking over the past 24 to 72 hours, because there has been a whole bunch of those stories tumbling in, regarding our crumbling court system and the Trump Administration's unrelenting assault on the Constitution and rule of law. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

We're joined today to discuss all of them by KEITH BARBER, former lifelong Republican and attorney who now writes on legal matters at the progressive Daily Kos. I had initially asked him to join us to discuss his latest coverage of on an adverse ruling for the Trump Administration late last week in U.S. District Court.

In that case, the lower courts had previously put a hold on the Administration's attempted firing of thousands of government workers across dozens of federal agencies. The temporary injunction on the layoffs issued by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) was meant to allow time for the lower courts to fully hear and try the challenge to the firings, as filed by several employees and their unions. But the injunction was overturned earlier this year by the Supreme Court, without explanation, on their "Emergency Docket", known by critics as the "Shadow Docket".

Before the injunction was blocked by the corrupted Supreme Court majority, it was meant to avoid irreparable harm to the workers by maintaining the status quo until a full trial on the merits could determine whether the firings were lawful in the first place. Late last week, as Barber reports, the court ruled [PDF] against the Administration, describing the government's case as a "sham" based on "fabricated" arguments and "chicanery". That said, thanks to the High Court's earlier ruling, lifting the lower court's injunction, last week's ruling comes largely too late to restore workers who lost their job. Many of the agencies in question have either removed those jobs since then or have been shut down entirely while the case made its way up and back down the judicial system.

The OPM case is just one of dozens like it, where lower court rulings --- meant to temporarily pause the Administration's unprecedented and seemingly unlawful actions until the merits of challenges could be heard --- were "temporarily" overturned by the High Court without explanation on the Shadow Docket as the cases proceeded below.

This same scheme has played out dozens of times in the eight months since Trump returned to office. Over mass firings of government employees, to very specific firings of decades-long experienced agency personnel for obviously (and unlawful) political reasons; to the complete or near-complete shutdowns of entire federal agencies and departments; to attempted Administration takeovers of supposedly independent federal Commissions; to attempted rescission of billions, if not hundreds of billions of dollars in already appropriated spending by Congress; to mass roundups and deportations of migrants by federal agents; to the deployment of U.S. military into American cities against the wishes of state and local authorities. That's just to name a few of the major, unprecedented upheavals and attempted upheavals allowed to "temporarily" proceed by the corrupted Supreme Court majority, almost always in contradiction to lower U.S. District and Appeals Court rulings.

Many of those cases are now completing their full trials on the merits and/or being heard by appellate courts, with inevitable trips ahead back up to the Supreme Court for final rulings. As Barber details today, however, we can be almost certain that if the Supremes choose to take up those cases, they will most likely do so in order to overturn a lower court ruling on the merits against Trump. Otherwise, given the number of cases they must choose between hearing each year, they are likely to simply allow favorable rulings for Trump in the lower courts to simply stand as is. We' find out in the coming months.

Either way, Barber explains all of this by concurring with the argument I have been offering for quite some time. "We have a corrupt Supreme Court," he asserts. "Donald Trump corrupts everything he touches, to include the United States Supreme Court."

I had hoped to dig into related aspects of the OPM mass firing case (in which the Administration falsely claimed that the thousands of fired workers were laid off due to "poor performance") and what it portends in the months ahead. But a whole bunch of other legally related issues came tumbling in today and in recent days, which I was also able to discuss with Barber on today's program.

Among our additional topics for discussion today...

• Longtime federal prosecutor Maurene Comey filed suit against the administration on Monday for her recent firing. She argues it was solely (and unlawfully) due to a political vendetta by Trump. Comey is the daughter of James Comey, the former FBI Director famously fired by Trump during his first term in office.

• Attorney General Pam Bondi's recent vow to "absolutely target" anyone who dares use "hate speech" she doesn't like in the wake of Charlie Kirk's murder. For the record, Kirk would have disagreed. "Hate speech does not exist legally in America," he posted on social media last year, adding "ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment." Bondi also recently vowed to prosecute businesses who choose not to print posters of Kirk, despite the 2018 SCOTUS ruling that a religious baker in Colorado could not be forced to bake a cake for a gay wedding.

• Terrorism charges were dropped today by a judge in New York court against the 27-year old man accused of murdering the CEO of UnitedHealthcare last December.

• In a 4 to 3 split ruling, the Georgia Supreme Court declined on Tuesday to hear Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis' appeal to a lower court ruling removing her and her office from prosecuting the sprawling racketeering indictment against Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants for their alleged efforts to steal the 2020 Presidential election in the state. While a state commission may now assign the case to a different prosecutor, they may choose not to do so or the chosen prosecutor may choose to drop the election interference case entirely. Willis' removal stems from a lower court ruling which determined she had had an inappropriate romantic relationship with a fellow prosecutor on the case.

• On Monday, Donald Trump announced his latest laughable defamation lawsuit against a major media outlet. This time, it's a $15 billion case against the New York Times for reporting which Trump, apparently, doesn't like. Barber describes the 85-page suit [PDF] as absurd. "I honestly think that Saturday Night Live or somebody should do a comedy sketch where the whole thing should be read out loud," he tells me. "It's nuts." That said, so were the ridiculous defamation suits against ABC News and CBS News, both of which chose to settle with Trump at the insistence of their corporate parents. The Times, however, has no such corporate parent. "I hope they don't settle this," says Barber. "I would expect that not only would they prevail, but they'd also get back all of their legal expenses."

And finally today, we close with Desi Doyen and our latest Green News Report on our newly endless summers (no, it's not just your imagination); billions of taxpayer dollars being spent on new subsidies set for the fossil fuel industry, thanks to Trump and the Republicans' newly passed budget bill; and the surging success of renewable energy, lead by China, pretty much everywhere across the globe...except in the U.S...

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Today on The BradCast: Charlie Kirk was a racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, Islamophobe. He also did not deserve to be killed for any of it. Prove me wrong, as Kirk liked to say, on either of those points. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

I'd have otherwise been happy to move on from the topic at this point, but for the inappropriate lionization of Kirk by, not just the Right, but the mainstream media in the days since his horrific murder in Utah last week, allegedly by a 22-year old man from a religious, Republican family from the state. Kirk no more deserves to be lionized than he deserved to be shot and killed by a longtime firearm aficionado.

It's also difficult to move on given the way the President of the United States and his Administration and his supporters are using Kirk's death --- lying about it --- as a weapon to declare war on their perceived political enemies, on civic democracy and on the Constitution itself.

Donald Trump has now repeatedly blamed "radical left" "scum" for Kirk's murder, despite any evidence yet to support such a claim. Despite being the worst demonizer to ever lead the American government, Trump claims the attack on Kirk is the "tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree, day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible."

He has now promised to use the federal government to go after those people and organizations that he believes to be organizers and "funders" of the "radical left", which he has repeatedly referred to (again, without evidence) as "fascists", "Marxists", "communists" and "worse". Despite the countless, recent, deadly attacks by Trump supporters against elected Democratic officials --- and despite his own Vice President (Vance) and HHS Secretary (Kennedy), comparing him to Hitler --- Trump insisted on Sunday that "the problem is on the left. It’s not on the right."

Kirk's killing took place, however, on the very same day that a 16-year old boy in Colorado --- who authorities claim to have been "radicalized" by an "extremist network" and obsessed with antisemitism, Nazis and Holocaust denial --- went on a gun rampage through his Evergreen, CO high school (near Columbine) before taking his own life.

Oddly enough, Trump has yet to mention one word about that incident, to my knowledge, even though it sent teenage students to the hospital in critical condition. Nor has he called for those who encouraged and funded and radicalized that shooter to be brought to justice, for some reason.

And, while Kirk is being lauded for championing free speech (he did, hateful as it may have been, at least at his personal appearances), he also organized a nationwide effort to tape and target school teachers and college professors for firing for not using the right kind of speech. With Kirk's death, that effort has now kicked into overdrive, as teachers, random Americans and even members of the media are being fired for merely quoting Kirk's actual, often wildly offensive words on social media.

All of this, I would argue --- the attack on the First Amendment by the Right --- a convenient way for them to avoid their very serious problem with political violence against their perceived enemies on the non-Right and a way to not have to deal with the nation's worsening gun violence epidemic which they, like Kirk before he died, continue to countenance through their words of support and lack of actions.

As Kirk would say, prove me wrong. We opened the phones up in the second part of today's show to allow listeners to do exactly that. How do you think it went?...

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Even if nothing else was taking place at this perilous moment, the September 8 SCOTUS decision to temporarily suspend both a presumption of innocence as well as the right, previously guaranteed by the 4th Amendment, not to be seized absent a reasonable suspicion of unlawful status, is deeply disturbing. Taken in context of recent events, the Court's decision on the "shadow docket" poses an ominous threat.

The decision was handed down after the "dangerous sociopath", President Donald J. Trump, threatened to arrest California Gov. Gavin Newsom, one of his chief political rivals. More importantly, perhaps, it was handed down shortly after Trump threatened to use the U.S. military to invade Chicago.

If the same SCOTUS majority goes on to temporarily suspend the Order issued on September 2nd by U.S. District Court Judge Charles E. Breyer, that enjoined Trump's use of the military to engage in local law enforcement without the consent of State and local authorities --- an action that Breyer ruled to be in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act --- it could hasten a bitter end to federalism and to our constitutional republic…

Today on The BradCast: The corporate capitulation is worse than you think. And it strikes right at the heart of what this nation's founders saw as perhaps the most important protection for freedom from monarchs and tyrants. Ya know, like the one we ended up with anyway. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

First up, a few interesting results reported today from both special elections and primaries held on Tuesday in a number of local jurisdictions across the country, including Detroit, Seattle, Delaware and Rhode Island. In short, the news, as we have seen in elections virtually everywhere so far this year, was largely very good for both Democrats and democracy.

The news was less good out of D.C. last night, where the nation's embarrassing Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. --- a man with no professional background in either science or medicine --- announced the Department is now cutting $500 million in grants for the development of new mRNA vaccines of the type that recently, arguably miraculously, helped the planet emerge from the most deadly pandemic in a century.

Of course, if you either didn't hear about that disturbing news from HHS or had no idea how many people are now likely to die unnecessarily because of it, you may have your own favorite corporate media outlet to blame.

Following Donald Trump's gutting of the 80-year old Voice of America earlier this year, his and the Republican Congress' ending of federal funding for NPR and PBS a week or so ago, and the absurd $16 million dollar settlements of ridiculous defamation lawsuits filed by Trump against the corporate owners of Disney/ABC and Paramount/CBS, the largest media conglomerates in the nation continue to rollover in fear, in hopes of placating and/or currying favor with our press-freedom hating, tyrannical man-baby President.

All of that in strict contradiction with the intentions of the U.S. Constitution's framers, who specifically wrote protections into our founding document for just one industry: a free press. All of that is detailed in a new report published last week by FreePress.net entitled "A More Perfect Media: Saving America’s Fourth Estate from Billionaires, Broligarchy and Trump".

That report is meant as a companion to the nonprofit media watchdog's newly released "Media Capitulation Index", grading the independence --- or, far more often, lack thereof --- of the nation's 35 largest corporate media conglomerates.

We're joined today to discuss both reports and the chilling state of our formerly free press, by TIMOTHY KARR, Senior Director of Strategy and Communications at Free Press. We've got a lot to dig into, including how we might finally dig our way out of this disaster.

His group's Media Capitulation Index, amusingly, scores each of the 35 American media conglomerates examined by Karr's group from 1 to 5 Chickens, rating them from "vulnerable" to "compromising" to "capitulating" to "obeying" to "propaganda," respectively. There is one other possible score, a single Star representing "independent". Remarkably, only two of the 35 media giants examined received a Star. For the rest? A whooole lotta Chickens.

So, what distinguishes what we are seeing now under Trump from what we've seen these companies do in years past in hopes of currying favor with previous Presidents of both major parties? Karr explains that what we are witnessing now is of an entirely "different order" than anything we have ever seen in our nation's nearly 250-year history.

"Wealthy media companies were aligning themselves with an authoritarian-minded leader who had little regard for the First Amendment --- that he swore on the Bible to uphold and defend --- on January 20th," observes Karr. "This is capitulation of a different order. It's not a bending to prevailing political winds. It's a complete caving to an authoritarian, and abdicating their responsibility --- the responsibility protected under the First Amendment --- to act as a check against abuses of power, to speak truth to power. That has pretty dangerous consequences for democracy."

As we are now seeing those dangerous consequences play out, we've got a lot to discuss along that score, along with how might eventually emerge from this long national nightmare with even stronger protections for a free press. Perhaps even, with news organizations that might not find it necessary to bend over in order for their corporate owners to receive government approval in completely different industries in which the owner is massively invested. (Hint: Look to the states, not the federal government...for now.)

Anyway, far too much in our conversation today to adequately summarize here. So, I won't even try to go much further. I will urge you, however, to tune in to today's show if you value a truly independent media, and appreciate --- as our founders did --- how crucial that idea is in preventing the rise of a monarch of the very type they were hoping to break free from. (And, how did that work out?...)

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Today on The BradCast: Democratic state lawmakers from Texas are, right now, fighting for democracy for all of us, no matter where we live and which party we belong to --- or even if we belong to no party at all. So what can you and I do to help? [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Democratic members of Texas' state House of Representatives fled the Lone Star State on Sunday to deny Republicans the quorum needed in a special session of the state legislature to redraw U.S. House maps in the middle of the decade. The GOP hope is to steal five seats from Democratic-leaning voters by redrawing district lines. Governor Greg Abbott called the special session at the demand of Donald Trump, who clearly feels his agenda is on the ropes, as Dems appear set to retake the U.S. House majority next year. That, he fears, will put an end to his unfettered authoritarian agenda.

Republicans, apparently, don't feel they can win by offering policies that voters like. So they are going to cheat, to rig the 2026 midterm elections in their favor if they can. It is now easier than ever for them to do so, thanks to recent rulings by the corrupted, activist Republican U.S. Supreme Court majority. Partisan lawmakers are now allowed to rig elections by implementing partisan gerrymanders. SCOTUS has said that federal courts must not intercede in such matters. At the same time, the rightwing Supremes are now gunning to allow racial gerrymanders as well, despite its prohibition in the Voting Rights Act.

All of this has combined for a toxic mix of rightwing extremism that has opened the door for Republicans to simply rewrite Congressional maps to prevent Democrats from winning seats at all in states where the GOP controls both the legislature and governor's mansion. Texas is now trying to do it. Democrats in the state are trying to block them by leaving the state. And states controlled by Democrats are looking to respond in kind, if necessary.

Yet, as we discussed on the show a couple of weeks ago, it's not so easy for Dems to push back for a number of reasons. One of them is that many Democratically controlled states have implemented nonpartisan or bipartisan independent redistricting commissions. That means that partisan legislatures cannot simply game the maps as easily as Republicans can in states that they control.

I have fought against such undemocratic efforts for years, whether it is done by Republicans or Democrats. However, given the Republican capture of the High Court and their apparent determination to simply steal an authoritarian-friendly majority forever by gaming the state maps, it would also undermine democracy itself if Democrats failed to step up to meet the moment in response.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul now describes what is happening as a "war". She says she intends to rewrite state maps as well. But due to state constitutional restrictions she wouldn't be able to do so until 2027 earliest. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker --- who is helping to house Texas lawmakers who have fled their state to break quorum and avoid their Governor's threat of arrest and expulsion from the legislature --- is similarly exploring options to rewrite the U.S. House map in the Land of Lincoln before the 2026 midterms.

In California, with some of the most competitive districts in the nation --- thanks to our constitutionally mandated independent redistricting commission --- maps could be redrawn in a way that Democrats could almost certainly win all 52 seats in the state's U.S. House delegation. They currently hold 43 of them. California's Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom threatens to do exactly that if Texas Republicans are able to proceed with their partisan redistricting scheme. (Republicans in other states, such as Ohio, are threatening to to follow in Texas' footsteps with their own mid-decade gerrymanders.)

But in California, a vote of the people would be required to temporarily waive the U.S. House map drawn by the state's constitutionally-mandated independent redistricting commission. Newsom has said he preparing to push for exactly that in the first week of November this year if Texas stays on course.

"We will go to the people of this state in a transparent way and ask them to consider the new circumstances, to consider these new realities," Newsom told reporters last week. "This is not going to be done in a back room. This is not going to be done by members of some private group or body. It's going to be given to the voters for their consideration in a very transparent way so they know exactly what they’re doing and they can go back in 2030 to original form with our independent redistricting intact."

So, will Golden State voters support such a move this November at the ballot box if it comes to pass? We open up our phone lines today to find out how our live Southern California listeners feel about it. The responses may surprise you as much as they surprised me. Tune in to find out why...

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News is coming in from every direction on today's BradCast, though there does seem to be a recurring theme throughout: a wholly corrupt Presidency. [Audio link to today's show follows this summary.]

Among today's delights...

• In the wake of another mass shooting yesterday in New York City, a Reuters exclusive finds the Trump Administration's Dept. of Justice cancelled tens of millions of dollars in gun violence prevention grants last April, as established in 2022 under Joe Biden via the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. The DOJ has also cancelled tens of billions of dollars in grants for mental health programs. Thoughts and prayers are largely all that remain.

• Remember that tricked-out, $400+ million flying palace jumbo jet bribe that Donald Trump accepted (in violation of the Constitution's foreign emoluments clause) from Qatar to use as a "free" Air Force One? Looks like that "free" plane --- which Trump plans to keep for himself after leaving office --- is costing U.S. tax-payers about a billion dollars to ready for His Majesty's use. And it looks like Trump is now stealing that money from funding previously appropriated for maintaining and updating America's dilapidated Cold War-era intercontinental nuclear ballistic missile stockpile.

• Senate Republicans this week are fast-tracking approval of a lifetime appointment for Donald Trump's personal criminal defense attorney turned senior DOJ official, Emil Bove, to become a federal appeals court judge. That, after a third whistleblower came forward this week with yet more evidence regarding Bove's corruption at DOJ, including dismissal of corruption charges against the NYC Mayor, and Bove's instruction to DOJ prosecutors to violate court orders if necessary to advance Trump's unlawful mass deportation agenda. [Update: After airtime, just as I was getting ready to hit publish here, despite whistleblowers and scores of former judges warning against his appointment, Senate Republicans confirmed Bove for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench.]

• The great satirical song writer Tom Lehrer died this week at the age of 97. We take the opportunity to enjoy a momentary respite from the rest of the day's madness to enjoy a couple of his wildly clever --- and often still timely --- tunes today.

• Today, just as Project 2025 called for, Trump's EPA Chief Lee Zeldin officially submitted a corrupt proposal to the White House for overturning the EPA's landmark 2009 "endangerment finding". The 2009 scientific finding currently serves as the legal underpinning for virtually all federal regulations meant to curb the greenhouse gasses that are warming the atmosphere at an alarming pace and creating deadly climate chaos. This is a very big deal, as we discuss today. Though I'm hoping to get into more of the legal ramifications of this move on tomorrow's program.

• Finally, Desi Doyen has our latest Green News Report documenting just some of the latest deadly effects around the world hastened by the unfettered burning of fossil fuels and the endangerment it causes the public, thanks to emission of climate warming gasses such as CO2 and methane. Oh, and Donald Trump (because he believes they mess up the view from his golf courses) is killing both clean, renewable wind energy projects and the tens of thousands of jobs that go with them...

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We appear to be heading toward a Republican-generated health care crisis cliff in the U.S. that neither the media nor the Democrats are talking about, for some reason. So, we do on today's BradCast. [Audio link to today's show follows this summary.]

You may be familiar with the more than one trillion dollars in cuts to Medicaid that Republicans have now enacted in Donald Trump's so-called "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" (OBBBA). That provision will take health care away from at least 10 million people beginning at the end of next year, according to recent analyses, but will also gut health care services and shut down rural hospitals almost immediately. "We are already seeing them cut staff, cut services, and even shut down because of these Medicaid cuts, even though many of those Medicaid cuts aren't in place right now," my guest explains today.

But, it's not just Medicaid. It's also MediCARE. Due to the OBBBA increasing the national debt by almost $3.5 trillion dollars (in order to help fund $4 trillion in tax cuts mostly to the wealthy), a 2010 law called "Pay As You Go" will automatically kick in on October 1, the start of the 2026 fiscal year, that will cut $500 billion from Medicare over the next ten years, beginning with a $50 billion cut next year alone. Unless, that is, Congress passes a law to waive the PAYGO law and passes it quickly. Hold that thought.

It's not just Medicaid and Medicare. It's also the Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare). Because Republicans have failed to extend federal tax credits adopted by Joe Biden and the Democrats, which help lower monthly premiums and other costs, ACA enrollees across the country are about to see their out-of-pocket costs go up as much as 75% at the end of this year. Again, unless Congress passes a law to extend those subsidies.

In all --- without quick action from Republicans in Congress when they return in September --- we are about to see what could be an unprecedented health care coverage crisis in this country.

We're joined today by DAVID DAYEN, longtime financial journalist, author, and Executive Editor at The American Prospect. He has been flagging these issues for some time --- (here he is on the impending Medicare crisis; here he is last week on ACA) --- but it seems few in the media, or even the Democratic Party, are listening yet. They better start doing so, and soon. If nothing else, because Republicans need to be held accountable for this coming crisis.

He, like me, says he has yet to hear a peep about all of this out of D.C., where Congress is currently on summer vacation and otherwise consumed with Trump's continue Jeffrey Epstein scandal. But everyone seems certain to notice shortly, especially when some 30 million Americans using the ACA exchanges begin getting notices about premium increases in a month or so.

On the coming half trillion dollars in Medicare cuts, they are going into effect beginning in October if Congress doesn't act. "The interesting thing here is what Democrats are going to do about that," observes Dayen. "Because if you're going to get those Medicare cuts averted, you're probably going to need the support of [Republicans] to do that. So the question then becomes: are Democrats going to let Republicans lie in the bed that they made? Or are they going to act to protect seniors and avert the consequences of what Republicans put forward in this 'Big Beautiful Bill'?"

"Democrats will hold the key --- you need 60 votes to do it [in the Senate] --- so Democrats will hold the key to being able to waive those cuts. So what are Democrats going to say? 'Ok, you want to waive those cuts? What are you going to give me for that? Are you going to repeal some of the Medicaid cuts? Some of the food stamp cuts? What are you going to do in order for me to agree to help you out, to get you out of the mess, Republicans, that you have created with this bill?'"

He argues Dems should "exact a price for that," noting, "there are very few moments where they have had leverage in this Congress, and this would be one of them."

Unless action is taken on all of these front, Dayen asserts, he believes it "is going to cause a catastrophic situation for the health care system in general."

Much more on today's show. And, on the back half of today's program...

• Some good news from a U.S. District Court judge in Boston who has blocked the OBBBA's "unconstitutional" ban on Medicaid funding for patients who use Planned Parenthood health care facilities.
• Some surprisingly good news from SCOTUS (of all places!), which has, for now, blocked a lower court ruling that imagined up a reason for blocking private individuals and voting rights organizations from filing lawsuits under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
• And we open the phone to a few callers to round out the day...

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It is not some dystopian Orwellian future. It is now. Our wannabe-dictator President is --- successfully! --- assaulting and undermining free speech and press freedoms left and right, public and private. On today's BradCast we connect those dots and open the phone lines over your public airwaves (while we still have access to them!), to discuss all of that and what can be done about it. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Sure, discussing the fact that Donald Trump's name is likely all over the so-called "Epstein Files" is fun too. But, if all of the major news outlets which might report on that are systematically shut down or intimidated into pulling their punches, what then?

Shortly after taking office, Trump unlawfully shut down Voice of America and its sister networks. They are funded and mandated by Congress --- by law --- to broadcast "accurate, objective, and comprehensive" news and information around the globe in dozens of languages to hundreds of millions of listeners, often in authoritarian nations without any other access to a free press. The truth about what is happening to our government must not get out to the rest of the world, apparently.

Last week, his Trump's cowardly Congressional Republicans took the rare step of rescinding $1.1 billion --- two years of previously appropriated, bipartisan funding --- from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which helps fund NPR radio and PBS television stations across the country. That loss of funding will be particularly painful to small stations in rural areas that perform critical, often life-saving functions for their communities. That, after Trump sought the Congressional rescission by lying about the CPB, describing the private entity as a left-wing "monstrosity". (Even if they were, which they are not, it would still be an outrageous violation of the Constitution's First Amendment freedom of the press mandates.)

That move came the week after CBS, currently owned by Paramount, agreed to a ridiculous $16 million settlement with Trump in a lawsuit he filed over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris last year. The suit would have been laughed out of court had it ever got there. But Paramount needs Trump's FCC to approve a buyout by a rightwing company named Skydance. And so, in Stephen Colbert's words early last week on CBS's The Late Show, Paramount agreed to give Trump a "big fat bribe" to make the absurd lawsuit go away.

Two days later, CBS announced The Late Show would be shutting down entirely after next season for "financial reasons". On Friday morning, Trump celebrated the "firing" of Colbert --- the nation's top-rated late night host and long-time Trump critic --- by crowing, "I absolutely love that Colbert got fired," before adding: "I hear [ABC's] Jimmy Kimmel is next." (ABC and its owner Disney previously settled a similarly ridiculous defamation suit with Trump for similarly cowardly and corrupt reasons.)

Skydance's purchase of Paramount should now go very smoothly with Trump's corrupt federal government. The company's CEO, a Trump supporter, met with Trump's FCC Chair last week and noted, according to documents filed by the company in support of the merger, that they "discussed Skydance’s commitment to unbiased journalism and its embrace of diverse viewpoints, principles that will ensure CBS’s editorial decision-making reflects the varied ideological perspectives of American viewers." That, just days after Skydance held early acquisition talks to buy a far-right media outlet.

While Trump is killing public media, in the form of the 80+ year old Voice of America and its Congressionally-mandated sister networks, as well as clawing back previously approved bipartisan federal funding for NPR and PBS (the tiniest drop in the bucket in a federal budget that, as of July 4, guts health care and food assistance to millions, while giving $4 trillion in tax cuts, largely to the wealthy, while exploding the national debt by $3.4 trillion), he is also taking down major commercial broadcast outlets, their newsrooms, and even their entertainment divisions that dare to tell the truth about Donald Trump.

Moreover, it's no longer only outlets perceived as "liberal" that Trump is abusing his power to target. On Friday, Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against Wall Street Journal, its parent company News Corp. (which also owns Fox "News"), its owner Rupert Murdoch, and two WSJ journalist who reported last week on a birthday card that Trump allegedly penned to his former longtime friend, sex trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday. The card is said to include a hand-drawn sketch of a woman, signed by Trump, along with comments about the “wonderful secrets” the two men purportedly shared. That, as Trump is taking fire --- even from MAGA --- for blocking the Dept. of Justice from releasing hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence and video recordings said to document the 2019 criminal indictment of Epstein, and an unknown number of references that may implicate his longtime bestie, Donald Trump.

This is not a warning about a potential attack and an attempted undermining of the American free press. It is a loud, blaring alarm that it is ALREADY underway, and is likely to go much further still , unless we all stand up against it. All of us.

In the second part of today's show we open up the phone lines --- and our public airwaves --- to callers on all of the above...

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Today's BradCast is best understood --- and felt --- by listening to it. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

But, in short, here are some of the topics we cover along the way...

• 27-year old White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who told Fox "News" yesterday that Trump "came up with" the "motto and foreign policy doctrine" known as "Peace Through Strength", is a living breathing monument to how much Donald Trump disrespects Americans, American values, and the Free Press.

• Trump's unlawful, unconstitutional bombing of Iran's nuclear cites over the weekend did not "completely and totally obliterate" them, as he lied to the American people on Saturday night. But it did set the use of those facilities back "a few months" according to an early, classified U.S. assessment reported on by several outlets today.

• Trump's self-declared "cease-fire" between Israel and Iran yesterday apparently never happened. So, he went "absolutely berserk" used the "f-bomb" to the media today instead.

• "Heatwave Shell", as veteran meteorologist Guy Walton has named it (he names heatwaves after Big Oil companies whose products have made heatwaves more and more deadly each and every passing year) is causing misery, and danger, across much of the eastern half of the nation this week.

• Among the locations hardest hit by Heatwave Shell today is New York City, which is also holding its Democratic Mayoral Primary today. Normally, such contests might very well determine who will become the City's next Mayor in the very Democratic city. This year, the politics --- a corrupt incumbent Mayor who plans to run as an independent in November, a disgraced former Governor who may do the same if he loses today, and two very progressive candidates who could win, but would cause freakouts from the Right and maybe even the supposed center --- could shake things up. Beyond the politics, however, we focus today on the voting method now used in NYC's Mayoral elections, specifically Ranked Choice Voting, how it works (and/or doesn't), its dangers (as I see them) to American democracy, and an alternative form of voting (Approval Voting) that solves many of the concerns that RCV proponents care about, without risking disenfranchisement and loss public oversight of election results. Tune in for this one, if you ever wondered what RCV was all about, liked the idea, or hated it.

• The corrupt Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court demonstrated their corruption and Republican activism again on Monday, by issuing an obnoxiously terse ruling --- without comment or explanation --- that not only allows the Trump Administration to endanger migrants by deporting them to countries from which they did not come, and which the State Dept. advises against traveling to, but also fails to mention a word about the Trump DOJ's repeated, lawless, intentional violation of lower federal district court orders in this and related cases. The three liberal Justices issued a blistering, 20-page dissent, while the corrupt majority couldn't be bothered to write a word to explain their full approval of "legalistic noncompliance" in yet another "disastrous" decision that undermines the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution itself.

• And with that corrupt ruling on the Court's emergency docket --- the so-called "Shadow Docket" --- nearly full-blown Authoritarianism arrives in the U.S. But I carefully use the word "nearly" because --- guess what? --- we in the media are still here, for now, and are still reporting on what the authoritarian tyrants are doing. Today's latest example...

• A hard-working migrant landscaper here in Southern California was descended upon by a bunch of masked and armed ICE and/or CPB goons on Saturday while trimming weeds outside of an IHOP. Narciso Barranco, as the viral video of his arrest revealed, was then pepper-sprayed, thrown to the ground, repeatedly punched in the shoulder and face, before being shoved into an unmarked van for detention and, presumably, deportation after some 25 or 30 years in the U.S. Barranco has no criminal history and is the proud father of three sons, all U.S. Marines. And no, as the video shows, he did not "assault" federal agents with his weed-whacker, as DHS lied in response to their shame after the video of his violent arrest went viral. He did, however, when he was finally able to speak from detention more than 24 hours later to his eldest son (who served in Afghanistan), ask him to go finish the landscaping job at the IHOP that he was unable to complete himself on Saturday.

• And finally today, speaking of the dangers to all of us by the tyrannical Right and their corporate sponsors, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with more on this week's heatwave; dangers now posed to the food supply, thanks to climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels; and the window for us to forestall the worst of our climate crisis quickly closing...

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MONTHLY BRAD BLOG SUBSCRIPTION	ONE-TIME DONATION
Choose monthly amount... $10 : $10.00 USD - monthly$20 : $20.00 USD - monthly$50 : $50.00 USD - monthly$100 : $100.00 USD - monthly	(Snail mail support to "Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028" always welcome too!)