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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Weather disasters displaced 2.5 million Americans from their homes last year; Texas real estate prices plunge in wake of new flood risk disclosure law; Northeast sled dog race canceled due to lack of snow; PLUS: Chicago sues five major oil companies over climate damages... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): New research from Antarctica affirms the threat of the 'Doomsday Glacier,' but funding to keep studying it is running out; The industry 'scandal' that might completely upend how America builds houses; Chinese EVs have Detroit in the crosshairs, and by the shorthairs; Methane-spewing gas and oil drillers owe the US billions, in theory; Switching to electric vehicles could prevent millions of illnesses in US children by 2050... PLUS: Conservatives gear up for EPA revamp in 2025... and much, MUCH more! ...

Yesterday was a very good day for democracy in Wisconsin. On today's BradCast, we take a few minutes to celebrate. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

We have been covering the GOP's autocratic takeover of the state following the 2010 elections for some 13 years at this point. After the 2010 Census, state Republicans implemented one of the most extreme gerrymanders in the nation at both the legislative (state Senate and Assembly) level as well as for their U.S. House districts.

The gerrymanders were so extreme that, despite Democrats winning 14 of the past 17 statewide elections in the Badger State, Republicans have maintained super-majority or near super-majority control of both chambers of the Legislature for more than a decade. Meanwhile, WI's 8-seat U.S. House delegation includes just 2 Democrats in the very closely divided Presidential battleground state.

With no fear of losing their legislative majorities, Republicans ran wild. They stripped labor unions of their right to collective bargaining, loosened gun safety laws, suppressed voters, etc. over the past decade. But, as of last year, everything finally began to change when voters finally won back a progressive majority on the state Supreme Court. The day after the liberals 4 to 3 majority was seated, voters filed a challenge to the Constitutionality of the state's legislative gerrymanders and they won. The Court ordered that new maps must be drawn up in time for the 2024 elections.

On Monday, after declaring, "Folks, it's a new day in Wisconsin, and today is a beautiful day for democracy," the state's Democratic Governor Tony Evers signed legislation adopted by the gerrymandered Assembly and House last week, approving new fairer legislative maps that Evers' office itself had drawn up for the state. Those maps will now take effect for this year's elections and democracy may, at long last, be at least partially restored to the Badger State.

We're joined today by our old friend, longtime Wisconsin native and progressive journalist and author, JOHN NICHOLS of The Nation, to discuss all of this very good news --- not for Democrats, per se, but for voters and democracy itself.

"The Republicans tried everything" to prevent this from happening, he tells me. "They threatened to impeach one of the Supreme Court justices. They tried all sorts of stunts." But, on the verge of the high court handing down its own maps, which would arguably have been worse for Republicans, "the very wily Speaker of the State Assembly, Robin Vos, decided he had no options, so he passed the Governor's maps."

Those maps, notes Nichols, are "not a particularly good set of maps for Democrats. In fact, Democrats have a little hill to climb in order to win." He explains, however, that "if it's a good year for the Republicans, it's very likely the Republicans are going to control the legislature. If it's a good year for the Democrats, there's a decent chance that Democrats will control the legislature." That, of course, is how representative democracy is supposed to work, after all.

As Evers declared before signing the measure on Monday: "When I promised I wanted fair maps --- not maps that are better for one party or another, including my own --- I damn well meant it." He added, "Wisconsin is not a red state or a blue state --- we’re a purple state, and I believe our maps should reflect that basic fact."

Interestingly enough, Democrats in the Legislature voted against the Democratic Governor's maps...before celebrating their adoption. We discuss why. But, Nichols also notes this bottom line: "If the Democrats take both chambers of the legislature" this year with the Democratic Evers in the Governor's mansion, "they will be able to, in a matter of weeks, reverse" more than a decade of GOP power grabs and union stripping, not to mention the state's 1849 anti-abortion law and much more. "Every disappointment that Democrats have had over the last twelve, thirteen years could be undone," Nichols argues, and almost as quickly as Republicans implemented their regressive policies (even while they had to bulldoze the rule of law to do so.)

"Look to Michigan," advises Nichols. "Because Wisconsin is still in process. Wisconsin is still struggling to get there. Michigan got there. They got independent redistricting which drew fair maps after the 2018 election. In 2022 they had fair maps, finally, after a long process. They elected a Democratic state assembly [and] a Democratic state senate. On Tuesday, the laws officially went on the books eliminating their anti-labor 'right-to-work' law, expanding collective bargaining rights for teachers and graduate students, restoring all sorts of wage protections for construction workers. Michigan has now gone --- just a couple of years ago --- from being one of the more anti-labor states in the northern part of the country to having probably the best, or very close to the best, labor laws in the country. That's what you get when you don't give up. You get to actually transform it."

We also discuss who gets credit for this long-fought win in WI, from the state's indefatigable Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler who declared on Monday that "the long, dark night of ultra-partisan gerrymandering is over, and a new day for democracy now dawns in the Badger State," to the progressive grassroots activists who, says Nichols, deserve "the most credit."

And the lesson for other states to take from Wisconsin, as litigation continues in more than a dozen of them over both legislative and the U.S. House districts (including in WI, where that gerrymander could also soon be ended by the state Supreme Court): "Don't give up," urges Nichols, echoing the words, by the way, of the late Russian dissident Alexei Navalny.

ALSO TODAY:

• The U.S. Supreme Court rejects an appeal from Trump attorneys Sidney Powell and six others, of the $150,000 in legal sanctions they were forced by a judge to pay for abusing the court system in Detroit via Powell's sham, post-2020 "Kraken" lawsuit, challenging the results of MI's election that year.

• A bedtime story to help you understand the propaganda now coming from Trump supporters claiming there were "no victims" in the New York civil lawsuit against Trump and his company and two eldest sons for inflating the value of their assets to the tune of more than $2 billion each year over the past 11, to receive better rates on bank loans and lower taxes. Last Friday, NY Superior Court Judge Arthur Engoron ruled [PDF] Trump and his eldest sons must pay nearly $400 million in penalties for their decades-long fraud.

• And finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, to bunk our high over all of today's good news (as usual!) with some chilling reports on Florida's disappearing coral reefs; the plastics industry's 50-year recycling scam, and nearly half of the world's migratory species now in decline thanks to climate change, according to a new U.N. report...

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Okay. Now it's not just insane. It could also be criminal, as a leak of actual voting system software at MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell's three-day, so-called "cyber symposium" in South Dakota may have imperiled the security of the Gubernatorial Recall election now under way in California. We've got some exclusive details on today's BradCast. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

First up, before the details on what appears to have happened at Lindell's bizarre circus show in Sioux Falls, some very quick news, on the Census Bureau's release of 2020 data today and the GOP's plans to use it to gerrymander themselves into a U.S. House majority; U.S. plans to evacuate the embassy in Kabul as the Taliban retakes much of Afghanistan; Support from national teacher's unions to mandate vaccination or testing for the nation's school staff; and Rightwing radio host COVID and vaccine deniers findings themselves dead and/or hospitalized...with COVID.

Then, it's on to the 2020 "stolen election" Crazy Train still unfolding in MAGALand.

On Wednesday, a U.S. District Court judge appointed by Donald Trump, ruled that Dominion Voting Systems' $1.6 billion defamation lawsuits against Trump attorneys Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and, yes, Mike Lindell, may proceed. Judge Carl J. Nichols' 44-page ruling [PDF] denied all parts of the defendants various Motions to Dismiss. Suffice to say it did not go well for them, on any front, leading former crack-addict and current phony stolen-election addict Lindell to declare the ruing "the worst decision a judge has made in the history of this country." (Which someone named Dred Scott would likely dispute.)

But the real madness has been unfolding in South Dakota this week, at Lindell's three-day "Cyber Symposium" that was promised to reveal "absolute proof" that the 2020 election was stolen through a massive, sophisticated cyberattack by China (I think.) Lindell's promised "proof" of the steal was so unimpeachable that it was to result, he's been declaring for weeks, in an immediate 9 to 0 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate Trump to the White House this Friday the 13th!

It may not work out that way, however. The far-right newspaper Washington Times published a gob-smacking story on Wednesday, in which a cyber expert hired by Lindell himself to examine and explain the super-secret 37 terabytes of data --- said to have been captured from Internet transfers just days after the November election, revealing that China flipped millions of votes --- told the paper that the data and claims about them were illegitimate.

It's a simply coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs story --- again, from a Rightwing outlet --- detailing how none of Lindell's claims appear to be real, and seem to be sourced to a former Government contractor who was also the source of (false) claims that the Obama Administration wiretapped Trump Tower in 2016. But, as Lindell's own experts explained to the Washington Times, the data doesn't show what it is supposed to show...but that may only be because the source dude supposedly had a stroke the day before the symposium!

Lindell's expert, who says there still could be some evidence of something anyway in the data they did examine, told the paper: "We were handed a turd. And I had to take that turd and turn it into a diamond."

But now the loony toons story takes a potentially much darker turn, albeit a somewhat confusing one. Mother Jones' AJ Vicens does a fine job attempting to make at least some sense of what has happened with this part of the story over the last several days. It seems to involve an election official named Tina Peters, County Clerk of Mesa County, Colorado (who is now apparently being investigated by state law enforcement authorities), a guy named Ron Watkins, widely thought to be "Q" of the infamous Q-Anon MAGA conspiracy world, and potentially a former campaign manager for Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO). See Vicens for that part of the story.

The upshot is that duplicate images said to be of stolen hard drives containing actual, proprietary Dominion Voting System software, seemingly from Mesa County, was released at Lindell's Cyber Symposium and is now said to be out in the wild, as it was made available for download to pretty much anybody with the technical know-how to grab it.

This afternoon, we confirmed with legendary Finnish cybersecurity and voting systems expert Harri Hursti, who is at South Dakota conference, apparently serving as an analyst for a news outlet, that the hard drives do, in fact, contain Dominion's Election Management System (EMS) software, though not its source code, as some have reported via Twitter. As Dominion explains on its website, the EMS "Drives the entire election project through a single comprehensive database...From election definition to results reporting." It is, in short, the heart of the entire Dominion election system suite.

"What was shared were 3 different images of installed EMS systems," Hursti told me via email from Sioux Falls. "I can confirm that those were circulated for copying. It [isn't] source code as such, but part of the code is interpreted code, there is human readable and editable things there."

Hursti is well known in the voting system world, where his most notorious "white hat" hack of a Diebold voting system was revealed in HBO's Emmy-nominated 2006 documentary, Hacking Democracy; He was also featured in their 2020 Emmy-nominated Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America's Elections; and, in what may have been Hursti's first American film interview, my own with him in 2010's award-winning Murder, Spies and Voting Lies: The Clint Curtis Story. He also heads up the infamous DefCon Voting Village in Las Vegas each year, and most recently was tapped by the state of New Hampshire to oversee a very thorough, professional and transparent post-election audit to determine why the Diebold optical-scanners in the town of Windham miscounted several hundred votes in a State Representative race last November.

In other words, his credentials here are impeccable. Though what the dangers of the release of Dominion's software into the wild may be is still less than clear. Particularly as it pertains to the September 14th Gubernatorial Recall election now underway here in California. It's something that I am still trying to dig into. Dominion's EMS software is used in a number of large jurisdictions in the state, including San Diego County, San Francisco and Riverside Counties.

Earlier this week, I spoke on The BradCast with cybersecurity and voting system expert Rich DeMillo, founder of Georgia Tech's School of Cybersecurity and Privacy, about serious vulnerability concerns that have recently emerged [PDF] in a long-running federal lawsuit seeking to ban Dominion's touchscreen vote systems across the state of Georgia. How this new security breach may now come into play in either that case, here in California, or in any of the other many jurisdictions which use the same software across the nation, is unclear at the moment. One expert I spoke with this afternoon, however, said it does seem to prove yet again that "security by obscurity" (attempting to keep vulnerable software safe by keeping it a secret) doesn't actually work, especially when it comes to voting systems.

More on this story, I suspect, in the days ahead.

Finally, we close today with Desi Doyen and our latest Green News Report, as Senate Dems move forward with critical climate legislation in their $3.5 trillion reconciliation package, even as deadly, climate change-fueled wildfires, heat waves and floods continue to wreak absolute havoc around the globe this week...

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Among the many sad legacies of the awful Donald Trump years, is how angry everyone has become in its wake. For always-angry Trumpers, ticking off "the libs" is a feature, not a bug. For progressives, however, while there is much to be justifiably angry about, we are wise to hold our outrage for points that actually matter...and happen to be true. We've got plenty of both on today's BradCast. [Audio link to full show is posted at end of this summary.]

First up, shortly before airtime today, the Dept. of Justice arrested and charged Trump's longtime friend, advisor and top fund-riser, Tom Barrack, who chaired the disgraced former President's corrupt Inaugural Committee in 2017. Barrack was charged on seven federal counts, including using his access to Trump to lobby for the United Arab Emirates and lying about it to federal agents. As an unregistered agent for the UAE, Barack allegedly lobbied both the Trump Campaign and Administration on their behalf, joining a growing list of Trump friends, officials and associates found to have unlawfully lobbied the so-called "America First" Administration on behalf of foreign nations like Turkey, Ukraine and the UAE, before lying about it to the FBI.

In other news out of Joe Biden's Dept. of Justice, Attorney General Merrick Garland, on Monday, issued a new policy prohibiting federal prosecutors from seizing phone, text and email records from journalists, with a few reasonable exceptions. While the Obama Administration did some of that, the Trump Administration took it to new heights, secretly spying on reporters at Washington Post, New York Times and CNN --- as well as Democratic members of Congress, their aides and even their family members --- all considered (by Trump) to be his political enemies. Freedom of Press advocates applauded Garland's "historic" Monday memo [PDF], as the A.G. also called for federal legislation to buttress the new DoJ policy.

That rather important story was somewhat overshadowed on Monday, however, by outrage from the progressive Left over a misreported story about the DoJ's failure to file charges against Trump's Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross who, the agency's Inspector General found, lied twice to Congress about his roll in unsuccessfully attempting to add a question on immigration status to the 2020 U.S. Census. After the IG's investigation, which began in 2019, the office referred the matter to the DoJ for criminal prosecution.

Progressives were up in arms yesterday after it was inaccurately reported by several legit outlets, including Government Executive and AP, that Biden's DoJ, under the direction of A.G. Garland, had declined to prosecute Ross. However, as both outlets later acknowledged with corrections to their stories, it was actually the Trump DoJ which refused to prosecute Ross. He was at least the fifth Trump Cabinet member to have been referred for criminal prosecution to Trump's corrupt DoJ. (The others include his Interior Dept. chief Ryan Zinke, his HHS Secretary Alex Azar, Trump's second Secretary of Veteran's Affairs Robert Wilkie and his Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, who happens to be Mitch McConnell's wife. They all skated.) Whether Biden's A.G. can or will revive those recommendations to bring charges is a separate matter --- and there is plenty of other stuff to be disappointed and/or outraged about regarding some of Garland's seemingly inscrutable decisions since taking the helm at the Department --- but the outrage on Monday from progressives over the declination to charge Ross appears to have been both premature and misdirected.

Next, speaking of fact-checking and going off half-cocked (or, in Trump's case, fully-cocked), late last week, Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, the rightwing, conspiracy-promoting company contracted by the Arizona state Republican Senate to carry out a post-election "forensic audit" of Maricopa County (Phoenix)'s 2.1 million ballots cast last year, offered public testimony on the progress of his three-month (and continuing) efforts to date.

Logan's remarks vividly demonstrated the dangers of hiring someone who knows absolutely nothing about elections or voting systems (or audits, for that matter) to carry out, in secret, what should have been a fully public exercise. It has been referred to as a "fraudit" and clown show by critics, including both Republican and Democratic state and county officials.

The former President offered three statements on Logan's remarks over the ensuing two days, the most detailed of which charged, falsely, that Logan's testimony "showed 168,000 fraudulent ballots printed on illegal paper (unofficial ballots), 74,000 mail in ballots received that were never mailed (magically appearing ballots), 11,000 voters were added to the voter rolls AFTER the election and still voted, all the access logs to the machines were wiped, and the election server was hacked during the election."

You'll be shocked to learn that absolutely NONE of Trump's claims are actually true.

Over the weekend, AP, CNN and others published lengthy fact-checks responding to the false claims by Logan and the wildly inaccurate nonsense from Trump. Today, we walk through some of false claims, detailing how both Trump and Logan got pretty much everything completely wrong, in the state where Joe Biden was certified by the Republican Governor to have defeated Trump by more than 10,400 votes last November. To date, there has been zero legitimate evidence to suggest otherwise in AZ or any of the other several states that flipped in 2020 from Republican to Democratic after four hellish years of the failed Trump Presidency.

Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with news on last week's catastrophic flooding in Germany and Central Europe, wildfires continuing to explode in the parched U.S. West, and disturbing news regarding both the Amazon rainforest and the near future of high-tide flooding...

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On today's BradCast: We've got a lot of news to catch you up on from over the weekend --- and from today alone --- before we open the phones to listeners to ring in on Joe Biden's first 100 days in office. [Audio link to full show is posted below.]

First up, today's news...

• Over the weekend, Biden officially declared the killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire beginning in 1916 to have been a "genocide". U.S. Presidents from both parties have declined to do so for decades, largely out of deference to Turkey, now a major NATO ally. Biden just went ahead and did it, after declaring his intention the day before to the Turkish President. Yes, it's a 100 year old story, in one respect, but not to the Armenian community which has sought such a declaration on the atrocity from a sitting U.S. President for years.

• The U.S. Supreme Court announced on Monday that it would take up an NRA-backed case next term on the Constitutionality of the right to carry weapons outside of the home, a direct challenge to a century-old New York gun law. Similar statutes are on the books in a number of other states, including Maryland and Massachusetts. Given the news we discussed on last Friday's BradCast about the appalling 6 to 3 opinion issued by the GOP's stolen and packed SCOTUS last week --- and, in lieu of Democrats figuring out how to reform the Court to expand and unpack it --- today's news likely comes as a foreboding sign for gun safety advocates.

• The U.S. Dept. of Justice on Monday announced a sweeping new "patterns and practice" probe of policing by the Louisville-Jefferson County Metro Government and Louisville Metro Police Department in Kentucky, following the middle-of-the-night 2020 police killing of 26-year old Breonna Taylor in her own home during a no-knock raid. The warrant was approved as part of a narcotics investigation which turned up no drugs and for which the City of Louisville has already agreed to a $12 million settlement after the police killing of the African-American emergency medical technician last year.

• The Biden Administration is announcing the launch of an historic $12 billion summer food program to feed lunch to more than 30 million low-income children, as part of the recently passed $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. The USDA plan, according to experts who study childhood hunger, will go a long way towards feeding children who face food insecurity during summer months, when free school lunches are not available. The initiative comes on the heels of not only a hunger crisis amid the COVID pandemic, but after years of cutbacks to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and other programs to combat hunger by the Trump Administration. Another upside: Money spent on SNAP goes directly into local economies.

• In news that broke just before airtime today, the U.S. Census Bureau released its first tranche of new numbers from the 2020 decennial survey revealing that Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Colorado, Montana and Oregon will each pick up Congressional seats in the once-a-decade redistricting process before the 2021 mid-term elections. New York, Ohio and, for the first time in its 170 years of statehood, California, would each lose a seat in the U.S. House. In fact, Texas is picking up two seats, while it, Florida and North Carolina have redistricting processes that are entirely controlled by Republicans, allowing them to gerrymander their states even further than they already are. Many of the Dem-controlled states picking up seats have processes in place that share power with Republicans for redistricting, or have a process controlled by independent commissions to determine new maps.

• In some news that broke during today's show, California officials have announced that Republicans hoping to unseat the state's Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom in a recall election, have obtained the requisite number of verified signatures needed to hold the recall election for the first-term Governor this fall. More on that story, undoubtedly, in the days ahead.

• And lastly, before we turn to callers ringing in on Biden's first 100 days, a word about the unusual, ongoing post-election hand-count in Maricopa County (Phoenix), Arizona, where the Republican-controlled state Senate is using tax-payer money to pay a private company named Cyber Ninjas, run by a Trump-supporting IT expert with no experience in elections, to recount the County's 2.1 million ballots from the 2020 election. The count is examining only the results of last year's Presidential race, reportedly won by Biden, and the U.S. Senate race, won by Democrat Mark Kelly. In both cases, it was the first time in decades for Democratic victories. While we are normally in favor of any and all attempts by citizens to oversee the results of their own elections, the Maricopa count is disturbing on several levels.

  For one, it is being paid for by tax-payer dollars, but run by a Trump supporter who, in addition to having no knowledge of elections or election technology, has a record of promoting demonstrably false claims about the election having been stolen by election system vendors, a number of communist counties, and allies of Joe Biden. The company heading up the count is also not using accepted hand-count practices established by the state. And they also refuses to disclose the amount or additional sources of dark money funding that it is receiving to carry out the hand tally. Moreover --- and most disturbing as of now --- is the fact that the tax-payer funded organizers are barring both media and the general public from overseeing the examination of the ballots from the 2020 election (which should, theoretically be protected and remain in state custody, under federal law, for 22 months.)

  I am in close touch with some of the folks who are working as observers on the count --- the ones with actual experience in post-election audits and recounts, unlike the Republicans in charge of this scheme --- and hope to have more information for you on this in the days ahead. There is no rush, apparently. At the rate of counting being carried out by the paid-for counters --- who not only counting, but examining ballots for signs of fraud --- it could take about 15 months to tally all of the ballots, according to one experienced election integrity advocate closing tracking the process.

• Finally today, in advance of President Biden's first address to a joint a session of Congress on Wednesday night, his 99th day in office, media are rounding up their various assessments of the Administration's first 100 days and grading the President on his performance to date. It seems his bold actions have taken many in both the media and public --- who had previously regarded old Joe as an establishment, institutionalist centrist --- by surprise. We open up the phones to callers to do a bit of the same temperature taking today, to find surprisingly positive reviews for the new President from our usually somewhat cynical and progressive listener base here in Southern California (and, in Minneapolis, Chicago and elsewhere today.)

Enjoy!...

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It's beginning to feel like the beginning of the end on today's BradCast. And while there remains plenty to be concerned about and lots of work ahead...it's beginning to feel just a little bit better all the same. [Audio link to show is posted below summary.]

Among the many stories covered on today's show...

• The world crossed a new, tragic COVID milestone. 2 million dead. That's the equivalent of 10 jumbo passenger jets falling from the sky every day for the past year. In the U.S., with more deaths by far than any other country thanks to Donald Trump's delinquent efforts, and the rate quickly rising, well over 390,000 are now dead --- or 2 jumbo jet crashes every single day for the past year;

• Joe Biden's Chief of Staff, Ron Klain, predicts we may see as many as 500,000 COVID deaths in the U.S. before the end of next month. Therefore, it is very good to see the President-elect unveil a comprehensive, $1.9 trillion plan to both fight the virus and revive the economy --- and even raise the minimum wage to $15/hour at the same time! Republicans will oppose it, naturally. But almost everything in Biden's plan, save for the minimum wage increase, says The Prospect's David Dayen, can be adopted in the U.S. Senate with a simple majority vote...presuming all Dems are on board;

• The nation is certainly on board for the Biden Presidency at this point, with Joe's approval rating up since the election and Trump's plummeting to an all-time low on his way out the door, according to a new survey out today from Pew Research;

• Biden's Inauguration rehearsal has reportedly postponed due to security concerns following last week's Trump-incited Capitol Insurrection, and a warning from U.S. intelligence agencies that his "Domestic Violence Extremist" supporters may be planning more attacks, thanks to Trump's continuing, false, evidence-free claims that the election was stolen;

• In a court filing, federal prosecutors said that Capitol Insurrectionists hoped to "capture and assassinate elected officials". Late today, they began to walk back that claim;

• After a Congresswoman and former U.S. Navy pilot Mikie Sherril (D-NJ) charged this week that some insurrectionists were given "reconnaissance" tours of the Capitol by Republican lawmakers the day before last week's deadly riot Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA)'s Chief of Staff reports that all of the panic buttons in the Congresswoman's office were found to have been mysteriously removed prior to assault;

Then, as moving vans begin hauling the remnants of the Trump Administration away, the outgoing President is reportedly angry and increasingly isolated. (Sad!) But as our long national nightmare will soon come to a close, his legal and financial nightmares may be just beginning. Even that, however, comes with threats to the security of the nation.

We're joined today by the great HEATHER DIGBY PARTON of Salon and Hullabaloo.  She's been writing about Trump's crumbling corporate empire both before, but especially in the wake of his failed Capitol Insurrection and the security concerns his financial woes pose to the nation. She explains why on today's show.

We also discuss the fallout from Trump's second historic Impeachment and how the U.S. Senate will proceed with the trial even as Biden takes office and hopes to see his cabinet confirmed and agenda enacted. And then there's the question of what we should expect as the "Ghost of Trumpism" lingers --- and continues to rot --- the soul of the Republican Party after he mercifully leaves office on Wednesday.

Finally, we close with some good news that got somewhat lost in the stampede of this week's instant Impeachment proceedings. Following a report from the Commerce Department Inspector General, the Census Bureau has now been instructed to abandon Trump's almost-certainly unconstitutional Executive Order scheme to withhold undocumented immigrants from apportionment data to be sent to Congress. Thus ends the Republicans desperate --- and now failed --- attempt to use the Constitutionally-mandated decennial federal Census as a means to shift political power from urban, Democratic-leaning areas of the country, to white, rural Republican districts...at least for another 10 years.

And with that good news, I wish you a great holiday weekend!...

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On today's BradCast: You thought your work was done after you vote? Think again! [Audio link to show is posted in full below summary.]

But, first up, a quick rundown of today's disturbing headlines to serve as a reminder that the only thing that matters between now and November 3rd is the general election now already under way, in which more than 26 million have already voted. Have you? We've got some useful tips on how to maximize the chances of your ballot being counted as cast in this pandemic year.

Then, a 3-judge panel of Republican appointees to the Michigan state Court of Appeals has overruled a lower court judge who had extended the deadline for mail-in ballots to arrive in the key battleground state, given U.S. Postal Service slowdowns. The lower court judge had previously determined that ballots postmarked by November 2 (the day before Election Day ) should still be counted if they were received by election officials up to two weeks after Election Day. The 3-judge panel, however, overturned that ruling and says that ballots must now arrive by Election Day. That's disturbing, given that some 6,400 ballots were tossed for arriving late after the state's August primary, in a state that is said to have elected Donald Trump by fewer about 11,000 votes in 2016.

Meanwhile, after technical problems with the voting systems caused hours-long lines for voters in parts of Georgia and Texas last week during their first days of Early Voting, the website for the Supervisor of Elections in Orange County, Florida --- yes, another key battleground state --- was not available today during the first day of Early Voting in the Sunshine State. The SOE's office blames a private vendor for incorrectly renewing the office's website domain.

With all of the problems expected in this election --- even more than we usually see (and that is saying a lot!) --- public oversight of the election, before, during and after Election Day, will be critical this year. To that end, we're joined today by EMILY LEVY, longtime election protection advocate and now founder of Scrutineers.org, a nonpartisan online community of people working to protect US elections.

Levy details how you can get involved with the group and help oversee our election processes from many different angles in your own community. The courts, clearly, cannot be counted on to protect our votes and, as the best elections officials in the nation will tell you, elections officials are not to be trusted! Only public oversight by the citizenry can guarantee a fair election.

Levy explains a number of the groups ongoing projects, including a (free!) Zoom training session this Friday for their "Poll Tapes Project", detailing how citizens can photograph and/or video tape the voting system results tapes that are printed out at the end of the night at polling places when they close. Reviews of those tapes are often helpful in discovering anomalies in the results eventually reported by county headquarters or the state.

She also discusses the group's "Candidate Caution Letter" campaign, requesting that candidates do not concede their races until all votes are tabulated and confirmed to have been done so accurately; an effort to train poll workers to keep an eye out for certain concerns that regular poll worker training generally does not cover; and how to be a polling place election monitor on Election Day and an observer at county headquarters as votes are being tallied and/or examined during post-election "audits" (at least in the very few jurisdictions that do any sort of post-election spot check of ballots to make sure that tabulation computers were counting accurately.)

Scrutineers is "a place where people can learn about the issues starting from scratch, if that's their beginning place, or get more advanced help if they've been working on these issues for awhile, and talk to each other, coordinate with each other to set up projects in their local communities, find the resources they need and ask questions of people who have been doing this work for a long time," Levy tells me.

"There's quite a wide variety of things to choose from," she says, including things that can be done from home. "Everybody can do something, and I hope that everybody will."

While campaigning and GOTV (Get Out the Vote) work that many people do "kind of ends on Election Night, that's when a lot of the activities that we're training people to do begin," Levy notes. "We're really hoping to see a huge influx of those dedicated people who want to make sure that everyone gets to vote, [are then able to] turn that dedication into making sure all those votes they worked so hard to get actually get counted accurately!"

Finally, we take a few quick calls today from listeners on how THEY plan to vote this year and some of the worries they have as Election Day is now just two weeks away...

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On today's BradCast: A good answer to the question of how the hell we got here. We have an FCC that appears fully captured by the very (rightwing) corporate entities it is supposed to be regulating while overseeing control of our public airwaves. [Audio link to show follows below.]

But first, before we get to our main story today, which is a scoop you probably haven't heard about elsewhere, Donald Trump's own FBI Director Christopher Wray testified in the U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee on Thursday that he is unaware of any evidence to suggest widespread absentee ballot fraud is underway. That runs completely contrary to the President of the United States' continued, persistent, repeated, evidence-free claims that Democrats are running some kind of massive absentee ballot fraud scam to steal the election from Trump.

On the other hand, Donald Trump was and is trying to steal the U.S. Census from the people of the United States. But on Friday, a federal judge ordered a stop to it, based on testimony and email from Census Bureau officials revealing that the Commerce Department's order for the Constitutionally-mandated decennial head count to be prematurely ended this month would result in fatally flawed headcount data. The Trump Administration has been trying to complete the tally in time to turn it over to the President for final approval by the end of this year, to avoid the current deadline of April 2021 when Joe Biden could be in office to approve it instead. The attempt to force an under-count, according to critics, would bastardized U.S. House seat apportionment, as well as thousands of state legislative seats and the distribution of some $1.5 trillion in federal spending for the next ten years. It would also result in the under-count of minorities and the shifting of political power to white, rural Republican districts.

And speaking of politically captured federal agencies, earlier this week at The BRAD BLOG, award-winning journalist turned media reform activist SUE WILSON broke the story of a "Petition to Deny" license renewals filed against three broadcast television stations in the Baltimore market. The petition, filed by longtime, D.C.-based Republican communications attorney and former FCC official ART BELENDIUK, charges that the giant, rightwing corporate TV station owner Sinclair Broadcast Group is unlawfully violating the Telecommunications Act [PDF] by secretly owning or controlling three stations in the Baltimore market, when they are only allowed to own one.

Belendiuk and Wilson join me on today's program to explain how the far-right Sinclair, which own Baltimore's WBFF, also secretly controls the ownership of Cunningham Broadcast, which nominally owns WNUV and Deerfield Media, which holds the license to WUTB in the same market. Belendiuk explains how that violates federal restrictions on media ownership, while noting that his "Petition to Deny", filed in Baltimore in hopes of blocking the stations' licensing renewals, is just the first such Petition, given that Sinclair is pulling the same corporate shell game scam with stations all across the country.

"You can have relationships with other stations in the market, but they're carefully regulated by the FCC," Belendiuk tells me. "But Sinclair has gone way beyond that, down to the point of setting the salary of the president of Cunningham. That's not the kind of thing you do at arm's length. Cunningham, which is the main partner of Sinclair, has twenty stations in twenty different markets and they're all paired with Sinclair. So this isn't a Baltimore problem, it's just that the petition had to be filed in Baltimore because of FCC reasons. The first place you could file was in Baltimore."

Wilson detailed in her recent report how, under the FCC's regulation of the Telecommunications Act, "In a single local broadcast market, one company may apply to own two stations --- if there are nine or more stations in that market. [But] Baltimore has just eight stations, and three of them are actually owned by Sinclair."

Sinclair, which officially owns almost 200 hundred TV stations across the county in more than 100 markets, largely in the South and Midwest, first came to national prominence when they mandated their hundreds of otherwise trusted local TV news anchors to read a script on air about "fake news" being a threat to democracy, back in early 2018. As their stations are affiliated with various networks such as ABC, Fox and The CW, local viewers often have no idea they are actually watching a Sinclair station, with a far-right corporate owner controlling the local station's newsroom.

"What's really at stake here are the diversity of voices that we the people get to hear on our local TV stations," Wilson explains. "Local television news is really the medium that most of us trust more than any other today for our news. This is really cutting away at that kind of trust, when you allow one company to own so many stations." She says "the law is clear," but the FCC, whose chairman Ajit Pai was appointed by Donald Trump, is failing to enforce it, even though the details of the sham ownership of the stations and companies controlled by Sinclair were discovered in both FCC and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) documents, according to Belendiuk's petition

"The commission is aware of this," Belendiuk insists. "Enough is enough. it's time for the FCC to stop looking the other way."

The self-described "political conservative" also shares the progressive Wilson's concerns about the dangers of the lack of diversity over our public airwaves. "In many markets --- take Columbus, Ohio --- they own two major network affiliates, Fox and I believe an NBC station. That means every day at 6 o'clock there are two local newscasts going out holding one political view. That's not what the Communications Act intended. The Communications Act intended that there should be a diversity of views. If there's a Sinclair with a clear rightwing view, there should be another station that has a middle-ground view, and one that maybe has a leftwing view. There shouldn't be one voice."

He goes on to discuss the serious "impacts" all of this has on our politics and elections. "It really, really matters to the people of Columbus, Ohio. And they're being deprived of the information they need to vote for the candidate of their choice. Whether you're voting Republican or Democrat, that vote should be an informed vote. When you control the local news, which is really what I see as the problem, then I'm no longer getting that kind of information that I need to make an informed decision."

Belendiuk notes that station license renewals, which come up every eight years, will also be happening soon in other markets around the country where, he says, "any citizen can file a petition saying why they don't serve --- and this is in the Communications Act --- 'the public interest, convenience, or necessity'," before he details how Sinclair has been repeatedly fined by the FCC for other violations over the years when they were found to not be acting in the public interest as mandated.

Sinclair has until October 1 to respond to the Petition, after which the matter will either be decided by the FCC or, if they ignore or attempt to whitewash the complaint, by a federal Appeals Court, Belendiuk vows.

There is much more on all of this in today's show, including information on how you can reach him and take action locally if you feel, like he does, that "enough is enough".

Finally today, because this week has been more than "enough", we end with the overdue return of one of our favorite Trump-era musical satirists! Randy Rainbow sends us off into the weekend with a tune that we dare you to get out of your head after you hear it...

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On today's BradCast: the COVID crisis continues to get worse, Americans wise up on reopening schools, potential hope for Kansas, and Donald Trump becomes a laughing stock. Again. [Audio link to full show is posted below summary.]

Last week, during his rambling, wildly political Rose Garden "press conference" (it was really a political rally), Trump promised that over the next eight weeks, we would be seeing "things that nobody has even contemplated, thought about, thought possible," and that "nobody's ever going to see eight weeks like we're going to have." While, I think it was meant as a rallying cry for a bunch of initiatives he plans to pretend to invoke during desperate days in advance of the November election, it sure sounded like a threat to me. Either way, we suspect he's right about what we will see. He suggested he would be "taking on immigration, taking on education" and that it all would start "some time on Tuesday."

On Tuesday, Trump unveiled something that had to do with immigration, which we discuss with our guest today (see below). As to "taking on education", that part remains somewhat less clear. But if it has to do with insisting that school kids go back to in-person classes next month in the middle of a deadly and worsening pandemic, the American people are decidedly not with him on that one. A new poll out today from AP/NORC finds that just 8% of Americans believe K-12 schools should reopen this Fall for normal, in-person instruction. Nonetheless, Trump is still threatening to take away federal money for special ed to those schools who do not obey his command.

That command is still in place --- and being ignored by most of the nation's largest school districts --- as more than 1,000 Americans died from COVID-related illnesses on Tuesday alone. It was the first time since May that that has happened, as mountains of evidence --- including 59,000 hospitalizations on Tuesday --- underscore, yet again, that the U.S. is headed in decidedly the wrong direction in dealing with the crisis. These will be a very difficult eight weeks indeed. There are fifteen weeks until the November 3rd Presidential election.

And, speaking of elections, state primaries are still ongoing, with statewide contests in Arizona, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri and Washingtonstate coming up on August 4th. We take some time to focus on Kansas today, where notoriously failed GOP "voter fraud" fraudster and the state's former Sec. of State Kris Kobach is running for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, in hopes of filling the seat being vacated by Republican Sen. Pat Roberts. It has been an embarrassing few days for Kobach, after his friend Rep. Steve Watkins was indicted last week on 3 felony counts and 1 misdemeanor charge related to voter fraud. As we reported last week, Watkins was charged for doing precisely what Donald Trump did. He unlawfully registered to vote at an address where he did not live, and then he unlawfully voted in an election using that unlawful address. Watkins has been indicted in Kansas. Trump is still a Florida voter fraud criminal at large at this hour.

Kobach, who built his entire two-term career as Sec. of State by promising to stamp out rampant "voter fraud" in Kansas by Democrats and non-citizens, was able to bring only 15 prosecutions during his eight years in office, obtaining convictions on fewer than 10 of them, with nobody receiving any jail time. Virtually all of the convictions were against people who voted twice in two separate states, because they owned homes in both, with many not realizing that was against the law. Nonetheless, Kobach prosecuted people who did the same thing that Watkins (and Trump) did. But, when asked by the Kansas City Star for comment after Watkins' indictment, Kobach offered a bizarre reason why he disagreed with the charges.

All of which helps underscore the fact that the fraud Kobach --- after losing to a Democrat during his 2018 run for Governor in Kansas --- is now hoping to secure the GOP nomination for the Senate. He is running in a field of 11 candidates seeking the honor and we completely endorse him! So, apparently, does his presumptive Democratic challenger, Barbara Bollier, who, in the second quarter of this year, according to AP, "raised almost $1.3 million more than the top-tier Republican primary candidates combined."

Could a Democrat actually flip the Kansas Senate seat from "red" to "blue" this year for the first time since 1932? Bollier was a moderate Republican until she became so embarrassed by Trump and her own party that she became a Democrat at the end of 2018. We'll will find out in about 15 weeks. But a Kobach win in the August 4th primary would certainly help, as Kobach is far "too conservative" for Kansas.

Finally, back to Trump's promise to "take on immigration" on Tuesday, when he unveiled an Executive Memorandum (not an Executive Order, but a memo...not sure if he knows the difference), declaring it to be the position of the United States that immigrants in this country should not be counted when determining the next Congressional apportionment that is to occur after the completion of the 2020 Census. That, despite the very plain language of the 14th Amendment which reads: "Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state".

We're joined today by Constitutional law expert THOMAS WOLF of Brennan Center's Democracy Program, where he specializes in the Census, redistricting, and immigrant rights. He tells me, quite bluntly, that "the memorandum [issued by Trump] is not worth the paper its printed on. The Constitution's plain text is very clear: every person counts. 'Persons' means persons and 'persons' means everyone. That means that everyone is to be counted."

Even Bill Barr, when he was Attorney General the first time, back in 1989, agreed!

"The memorandum that President Trump issued yesterday," Wolf continues, "assumes that President Trump has the power to decide who counts and who doesn't. Unfortunately for him, but fortunately for the rest of the country, the Constitution has already made that decision for him, and the Constitution decided that all people count."

In case he was unclear about that, Wolf adds later: "From the top, there is no legitimacy to this order." But, if so, what was the point of Trump issuing the memo that obviously tries to reverse the 14th Amendment adopted during Reconstruction to do away with the Constitution's previous clause declaring that some people in America --- slaves --- were to be counted by the Constitutionally-mandated decennial Census as three-fifths of a person? Wolf offers insight and answers to that question, as well as how to help counter Trump's plan which, as he notes, "is so patently unconstitutional, it's astonishing."

(Hint: One of the ways to counter it, argues Wolf, is to "Get counted! That's how we push back against this." If your household has yet to do so, please go and fill out a Census form today at 2020Census.gov!)

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Desi Doyen is on the money at the end of today's BradCast when she cites a Twitter user who recently asserted: "The GOP has become a virus: it now exists solely to replicate itself." If you've yet to notice, the 160 days between now and the critical 2020 Presidential election will be about little more for Republicans than a desperate attempt to suppress certain voters; to game the results of those who do manage to vote; and, of course, to do anything possible to distract from the fact that more than 100,000 Americans have now tragically died on Trump's watch over just the past 3 months, tanking the economy in the bargain, thanks to his disastrously failed response to the coronavirus. We discuss all of those things on today's program. [Audio link to the full show is posted below.]

First, Trump today is pretending to be furious about the fact that Twitter placed a very polite "Get the facts about mail-ballots" link under two of his misleading tweets on Tuesday about absentee voting fraud. He is feigning outrage, claiming the company is biased against Republicans and that he has the power to shut them down. The RNC and Trump's campaign, of course, are all playing along with the phony fury, because they love playing both victim and strongman at the same time, and because it all helps distract the media from his ongoing unspeakable failures as President.

In fact, not only did Twitter do him a favor by placing those links on his tweets, helping to bring attention to his disinformation (which can also been seen as instructions for his followers on how to defraud the November election), but the company didn't even bother to label his most offensive recent tweets, such as the ones in which he accused MSNBC's Joe Scarborough of murdering a staffer who tragically died in the then-Florida Republican Congressman's office in 2001.

At the same time, Facebook is allowing the Trump Campaign to run hundreds of paid, false political ads making the same misleading claims, as that social media company simply allows false paid-for propaganda ads from politicians, even if they are meant only to disinform, distract and undermine the 2020 election itself.

It should also be noted anytime any media outlet reports on Trump's false claims about absentee voter fraud, that he is a voter fraud criminal himself, after voting by absentee in Florida where he has no legal permanent residence, in violation of state law.

As to voter suppression and Florida, we reported yesterday on the excellent ruling by a federal judge who gutted the GOP state legislature's new poll tax law over the weekend. The measure was enacted to undermine a Constitutional Amendment adopted by state voters in a 2018 mid-term landslide. Despite the enormous bipartisan voter support for Amendment 4, which could allow some 1.5 million former felons to vote in the Sunshine State for the first time, Gov. Ron DeSantis (who barely won his election that same year) has now announced plans to appeal the court's ruling that gutted the poll tax passed by Republicans in hopes of countering Amendment 4.

Florida, however, is hardly the only state in the union with GOP-controlled legislatures attempting to undermine recent bipartisan ballot box landslides. In Missouri, on the heels of the adoption of a landmark state Constitutional Amendment in 2018 meant to end extreme partisan gerrymandering in the Show-Me State, the gerrymandered GOP state legislature is rolling out what our guest today describes as REDMAP 2.0.

We're joined by FairVote senior fellow DAVID DALEY who, literally, wrote the book on the GOP's successful plan to take control of state legislatures in 2010 to implement crippling partisan gerrymanders during redistricting after that year's decennial Census. Now, as Daley detailed in a recent New York Times op-ed, MO Republicans are rolling out an even more invidious scheme to undermine the voters' intent with another Constitutional amendment on this November's ballot.

He describes the plot --- which includes an unprecedented plan to count only voting age citizens during redistricting --- as a "dress rehearsal" for GOP-controlled states in the rest of the country. The plan, which would "dramatically" shift voting power from Democratic-leaning urban areas to white, Republican-leaning rural areas, is being adopted for nationwide roll-out by the rightwing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), he reports.

"It changes the definition of representation and it overwhelmingly tilts this in the direction of conservatives and Republicans," he tells me. "Total population has been the guiding standard that everybody has used for a long time. If you were to change this to say that the baseline that we're going to count is not everybody, but only citizens who are over the age of 18, then what you are doing is eliminating huge numbers of people. You are curating and manicuring an electorate that is older, more rural, more conservative, and of course, whiter."

As Dems are finally trying to win the last battle by rolling back what happened in 2010 a decade later, Daley argues they need to get ready --- immediately --- to figure out how to counter the GOP's newest ugly war on this front.

"I don't think Democrats are paying enough attention to this," he says. "This is a Presidential election year. Democrats are thinking about the White House, about the Senate, about holding on to the House. But there's so much more at risk in this election. This is the last election before these maps are going to be drawn for another decade. ... The Republicans are going to have a 2020 'REDMAP 2.0' plan, and if Democrats are not equally focused on playing offense and defense, they are going to get check-mated."

We also discuss Daley's newly published book, UNRIGGED: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy', documenting recent, critical (and successful!) citizen-led efforts to restore democracy across the nation...

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While surfing the web I came upon an article posted on Christmas Eve by Jason Hopkins, of the rightwing outlet called "The National Interest." It cites a "study" by another rightwing outlet, the Center for Immigration Studies, as cause for alarm.

The article and the cited study falsely claim that the counting of illegal immigrants in the 2020 Census will result in a loss of 24 Congressional seats in states that voted for Donald Trump in 2016 --- Ohio (3), Pennsylvania (2), Michigan (2), and one each in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. The only blue states to lose Congressional seats, according to the outlet's characterization of the "study", would be Minnesota (1) and Rhode Island (1).

The article also falsely claims that 19 Congressional seats would be gained by states that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 --- California (11), New York (4), New Jersey (2), Massachusetts (1), and Illinois (1). The only other states to gain Congressional seats, they report, would be the "red" state of Texas (4), and the swing state of Florida (3).

While conceding that non-citizens cannot vote, the article warns that counting them in the 2020 census will result in more Congressional seats for high-immigration districts, thus reducing political power in districts where almost everyone is an American citizen.

Predictably, almost all the more than 2,000 public comments in the version of the article republished by Yahoo News (the original version at National Interest does not allow public comments) allege that Democrats favor open borders and allowing illegal immigrants to vote. Almost nobody noticed that there is no basis for the statistical claims made by the Center for Immigration Studies...

On today's BradCast, I'm back! It's Nicole Sandler, host of The Nicole Sandler Show at nicolesandler.com, doing the guest-hosting duties today.

My guest is former Senator MIKE GRAVEL, who's running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.... sort of. It's the most unusual campaign in that he's not trying to win. He just wants to get on the debate stage to pull the field to the left! He's very close to meeting the threshold to get in the CNN debate at the end of the month; the deadline to qualify is tomorrow.

Also today: Donald Trump finally gave up his quest to put a citizenship question on the 2020 census, though he still won't admit it. We have that story along with the rest of the day's news too. Enjoy!...

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On today's BradCast, Donald Trump's Attorney General continues to make extraordinary, unprecedented moves at the Dept. of Justice as he takes power for himself on all manner of things. And only some of those moves are receiving the attention they deserve. [Audio link to show follows below.]

But first up today, just two days after nearly 4 inches of record rainfall in one hour resulted in flash flooding and a number of high-water rescues in the nation's capital --- on the very same day Trump was delivering a ridiculous, rambling speech on his (horrific) environmental record --- an even worse downfall slammed New Orleans on Wednesday. What lies ahead this week for NOLA, however, may be far worse. A tropical storm spun up quickly off the Gulf Coast following the downpour, and now threatens to become a hurricane that could, as soon as this weekend, over-top levees that protect the city. The Mississippi River at New Orleans is already at 16 feet, just below flood stage, thanks to historic spring flooding in the central U.S. But Hurricane Barry could bring a storm surge of several feet of ocean water and as much as 18 inches of rain that could test the city's 20-foot high levees. The National Weather Service is now projecting the river could crest at that same height by Saturday, depending on which way the winds blow. That may happen despite the failure of science denier and corrupt fossil fuel swamp-dweller Trump to utter the words "climate change" during his environmental speech earlier this week.

Meanwhile, back in D.C., Trump's Attorney General and personal fixer William Barr continues to exercise extraordinary, unprecedented powers in his role as the nation's chief law enforcement official. So far, the federal courts have held off a fair amount of his attempted power grabs, including a federal court in New York which has, for the moment, blocked his latest move to replace all of the Dept. of Justice attorneys previously assigned to defend legal challenges to the Administration's effort to add a question on citizenship to the 2020 Census. Another federal judge in another legal challenge on the same matter in Maryland is now considering whether to block those replacements as well.

At the same time, however, Barr is also reportedly instructing former members of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team to not appear before Congress to give testimony next week on the same day Mueller is currently scheduled to do so.

But a recent, little noticed move over the 4th of July holiday week to grant himself the power to establish precedent on immigration laws, overriding decisions by immigration judges, needs much more attention. Last week, a federal court blocked Barr's decree to disallow bond hearings for asylum-seekers who successfully demonstrate a "credible fear" of return to their home countries. But for a ruling by the federal court in Washington state last week, Barr's decree would have resulted in immigrant asylum-seekers being held for months or even years in already horrific, overcrowded detention facilities as they await their official hearings in immigration court. U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman ruled that detaining asylum-seekers indefinitely is "unconstitutional".

The day before her ruling, however, Barr quietly signed yet another new regulation --- without the traditional public comment period --- that restructures the way immigration courts have handled appeals for years. Previously, while tens of thousands of decisions are made on cases by the Board of Immigration Appeals each year, only a small number of them, about 30 per year, are published in order to establish them as precedent. Under current law, unpublished decisions are not binding on the entire system and are only published if a majority of the 21 member Board votes to do so. But last week, relying on a public comment period from about 15 years ago concerning a regulation proposed (but rejected) by the George W. Bush Administration, Barr granted himself unilateral power to selectively publish any such decisions that he likes. The move, in effect, will allow him the authority as Attorney General to set immigration law precedent that must be followed during this Administration as well as future ones, at his own whim.

We're joined today by SARAH PIERCE, immigration attorney and Policy Analyst for the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute to explain both the encouraging news on Barr's temporarily blocked bond hearing rule, first decreed back in April, as well as his move last week to reign as king over U.S. immigration policy by using the abandoned "zombie regulation", as Pierce describes it, on appeals court precedents first proposed by the Bush Administration. She describes the latter as "alarming", noting that "under this new regulation, the Attorney General will have his pick of whatever issue he wants, and really, whatever plans on the issue he wants, when deciding whether or not to make some of these decisions precedent." Pierce warns that these could be "decisions on what kinds of crimes makes someone deportable from the United States," for example, adding that "the possibilities are really endless when he has so many decisions before him to choose from."

She argues that the way immigration courts are currently structured, under the control of the DoJ, not the Judicial Branch, results in unconfirmed and even unqualified people being appointed as immigration judges without Congressional confirmation or oversight. They all serve at the pleasure and whims of the Attorney General. "This is a huge problem with our immigration court that we have this political appointee who is in charge of effectively the legal well-being of our immigration system. That's a huge problem and a huge conflict of interest," she tells me.

We also discuss the mountain of recent reports of overcrowded, unsafe and unsanitary conditions at detention centers on the border; why we are seeing this influx of families seeking asylum in the U.S.; why this Administration is handling it all so poorly, despite the number of immigrants and asylum seekers being far larger during previous administrations; and how the system itself needs to be reformed, with immigration courts placed under an independent body.

Finally today, with all of the coverage in the media and focus by Democrats on the 2020 Presidential race, the need to win back a majority in the U.S. Senate no matter who wins the White House has taken a back seat, unfortunately. But Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer was able to claim at least one recruiting victory this week, with Marine combat aviator Amy McGrath, who narrowly lost a U.S. House race last November in Kentucky, declared her intention of taking on Republican Majority Leader and democracy villain Mitch McConnell during his reelection bid in the Bluegrass State next year. We share McGrath's announcement video and ponder why the hell more big name Democrats --- including many who have chosen to run for the Presidential nomination instead --- aren't stepping up to the equally-as-important task of winning back the U.S. Senate for their party in 2020...

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It's still unclear what it will take for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to allow her caucus to begin impeachment proceedings for the most impeachable President in history. But each day that goes by, each rule of law that Trump and his Administration undermine, each norm they violate, each tradition they shatter, each Constitutional clause they scoff at, seems to make her inaction more untenable by the day. But we press forward as the lawsuits pile up, subpoenas are defied, new ones are issued, and the American public wonders how we will ever find our way out of this mess. Those thoughts seem to underscore each of the many stories we cover on today's BradCast. [Audio link to show follows below.]

Among those many stories...

• The U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York on Tuesday unanimously confirmed a lower court ruling that Donald Trump violated the Constitution's First Amendment by blocking followers on Twitter with whom he disagreed, since he uses his personal account for governmental purposes. We wonder if Alabama's Republican Sec. of State John H. Merrill, who blocked me and election law experts like UC Irvine's Rick Hasen and University of KY's Joshua Douglas on Twitter long ago, is ready to rethink his position, or if we can expect more crazy responses from Merrill by email and phone like the last time we asked about this when the lower court first ruled in favor of plaintiffs;

• Billionaire two-time, self-funding, third-party Presidential candidate Ross Perot, who first ran for President in 1992, has died at age 89;

• Billionaire self-funding environmental and impeachment activist Tom Steyer of California declares his run for the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination, after previously stating he wanted to focus on impeachment of Donald Trump instead. His announcement video released today describes the desperate need to get corporate money out of politics, but Steyer is also reportedly very unhappy with the speed with which Congressional Democrats are plodding toward impeachment of our scofflaw President;

• Similarly unhappy with the lack of accountability being brought by Democrats is now-former Tea Party Republican Justin Amash, Congressman from Michigan who, last week, declared he was leaving the GOP. Over the weekend Amash blasted Democrats, specifically Nancy Pelosi, for failing to take appropriate action to begin impeaching Trump. Until leaving the party last week, Amash was the only Republican in Congress to call for impeachment proceedings and he remains one of the best advocates for same from either major party. During his interview with CNN's Jake Tapper, Amash also said that high level Republicans had privately thanked him for his outspoken stance against Trump and that he remains open to the possibility of running for President on the Libertarian Party ticket next year;

• But if Democrats are still unwilling to play the type of hardball demanded by this moment in history, the Trump Administration isn't shying away from it. Following U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts' recent rejection of the Administration's "contrived" reason for adding a question about citizenship to the 2020 U.S. Census, the Dept. of Justice announced on Sunday that they would be replacing the entire legal team that had defended the Government in several different cases on the matter over the past year. Many of those career DoJ attorneys, it is speculated, refused to proceed after they already officially informed a federal judge that the Census was being printed, as of the July 1 deadline, without the question included. But that was before Trump tweeted that the official announcements from DoJ and the Census Bureau were "fake" and demanded that his Government find a way to include the question anyway. Former U.S. Attorney and Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal says we've "never seen anything like this", describing the DoJ move to replace all of the attorneys en masse as "the canary in the coal mine". But today, mid-show, after the ACLU challenged the nearly unprecedented removal of the DoJ legal team, a federal judge ruled the Government may not remove them from the case --- at least until they offer the court an explanation for the unusual move;

• And while it may not (yet) be impeachment, Congressional Democrats are moving ahead with their legal strategy to challenge the Administration in court. On Monday, they issued subpoenas to a number of Trump's businesses as part of discovery in a lawsuit alleging that Trump is in violation of the Constitution's Emoluments Clause, thanks to money received from foreign governments to his various businesses which he refused to divest from after being elected President. The DoJ, on Trump's behalf, is trying another extraordinary maneuver, in defiance of the lower court judge, by filing an appeal to block those subpoenas at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals before the case has even been resolved at the trial court level;

• And in the House Judiciary Committee, Democrats announced plans this week to authorize new Congressional subpoenas for a bevy of current and former high profile former Trump officials, including former Attorney General Jeff Sessions; former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn; former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly; former Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein; Senior WH advisor and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner; former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski; and the head of the company which owned the National Inquirer, David Pecker. The subpoenas, to be formally voted on by the Committee on Thursday, are in response to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report and hush-money payoffs made by the President, as well as Trump's border policies and reported promises of pardons to officials willing to violate the law on Trump's behalf;

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report, on the day after Washington D.C. received a record four inches of rain --- a full month's worth --- in a single hour, while Donald Trump actually gave a speech meant to tout his Administration's (horrific) environmental record...

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On today's BradCast, we open today with a quick review of as many of the noteworthy stories as possible from over the long holiday weekend, before moving to San Francisco's horribly, deadly scheme to --- yes --- promoting smoking! [Audio link to show follows below.]

Among the quick news stories covered first:

• Trump's celebration to himself with his 4th of July tribute to America's violent and deadly militaristic past, present and future on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial;
• The Dept. of Justice flipping its position on adding a question on citizenship to the 2020 Census after last week conceding in federal court they would NOT do so after their effort was blocked by SCOTUS. Now, the entire legal team handling the matter has been replaced following Trump's tweeted insistence that the question would be added anyway;
• Britain's ambassador to the U.S. is discovered having accurately referred to Trump in private cables as "inept", "uniquely dysfunctional" and with a Presidency that "could end in disgrace";
• The U.S. Women's Soccer team wins their second World Cup in a row despite Trump's personal attacks on them (and their loathing of him, in kind);
• Michigan's conservative "Tea Party" Rep. Justin Amash, the only Republican in Congress to call for Trump's impeachment --- and perhaps the most effective of any party in doing so --- announced he was leaving the GOP;
• Billionaire hedge fund manager and Trump pal Jeffrey Epstein was arrested and charged over the weekend with sex trafficking that included minors, dating from 2002, when Trump was quoted that same year by New York Magazine as calling him "a terrific guy", "a lot of fund to be with" and someone who "likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side". Epstein was arraigned and pleaded not guilty in federal court in Manhattan on Monday;
• Iran announced it has exceeded uranium enrichment levels beyond those set by the landmark nuclear agreement struck during the Obama Administration, but broken by Trump (so now broken, in kind, by Iran);
• Temperatures hit 90 degrees for several days in Fairbanks, Alaska(!);
• And, oh yeah, over the holiday weekend, we had two of the largest earthquakes here in Southern California to hit in more than 20 years, including one that hit 7.1 on the Richter Scale.

Then it's on to our guest today, DAVID PASCH of Voices for Vaping, an industry group sponsored by the Vapor Technology Association which, according to Pasch, takes no money from Big Tobacco and is dedicated to "bringing together Americans from all walks of life demanding access to the 21st century technology that will end smoking." He is with us today in response to an ill-considered new city ordinance signed last week by San Francisco Mayor London Breed, after unanimous passage by the City Council, banning the sale of all e-cigarettes and vaping devices --- via both brick-and-mortar stores as well as via mail order --- for everyone in the city.

The measure is certain to increase unnecessary deaths by making it much more difficult to quit smoking via e-cigarettes in a nation where half a million die each year thanks to cigarette smoking. A similarly troubling, if less draconian measure to restrict vaping is now moving through the California state Assembly, despite the proven health benefits of quitting smoking in favor of vaping, as touted by no less than UK's Royal College of Physicians as 95% safer than smoking.

Pasch, who formerly worked at the U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services and for various non-profits in the healthcare industry, discusses the deadly implications of San Francisco's ban, the dangers of California's proposed measure, and the idiocy of banning the sale of devices proven to help smokers quit smoking while allowing cigarette sales to continue in the supposedly progressive enclave unabated. He also speaks to the wholly unproven myth "that e-cigarettes are some sort of gateway" to tobacco for teens, while San Francisco's "proposed solution is to get rid of them and make sure that tobacco products like cigarettes are the only ones actually available still on the store shelves." He describes vapor technology and vapor products as "probably the most exciting public health innovation of my lifetime" with "the potential to end smoking as we know it."

Alas, he also notes, that he cannot explain how San Francisco, "a progressive beacon for the whole country and in many ways for the whole world" appears to be promoting "one of the biggest public health scourges in the country" through their recent action. "If you want to see what good, progressive, small-d democratic outreach and acceptance of this issue looks like," he points to the United Kingdom. "In England, they're not exactly known as a loose regulatory environment. They have totally embraced this. The National Health Service literally pays for advertisements showing how many doctors recommend their patients switch to e-cigarettes as a way to quit. You have vape shops that are literally being built in public hospitals in England right now. It's a totally different approach, that I think progressive Democratic leaders in the United States should be looking to follow."

Finally, after a few more quick news items --- including Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) dropping out of the Presidential race and billionaire environmentalist and impeachment activist Tom Steyer considering jumping in --- we open the phone lines to folks who really seem to want to talk about vaping! Both for and against it! My own personal journey --- quitting my own 30-year, 2-pack a day habit overnight, thanks to vaping --- was recently published as a Letter to the Editor in the Los Angeles Times. With the phones open, lively conversation ensues. Enjoy!

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