We lost our planned guest this afternoon for today's BradCast to either COVID or flu. (A good chance to remind you: get your shots!) But that afforded us the opportunity to dig into a few important items/warnings we've been hoping to get to. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

As of Monday afternoon, Washington Post has reportedly lost more than 200,000 digital subscribers --- described as a "colossal number" or about 10% of its subscriber base --- following billionaire owner Jeff Bezos' cowardly decision last Friday to spike the legendary paper's planned Editorial Board endorsement of Kamala Harris just days before this year's Presidential election.

While the cost to the already-struggling paper's bottom line comes at an enormous price to journalism, its Amazon-founder owner --- whose aerospace company also has huge contracts with the federal government --- is likely to simply write off those subscriber losses as pocket change. His real goal, according to virtually all coverage of the sad affair, was likely to stay on the right side of a vengeful, petulant, former, and perhaps near-future, President of the United States in Donald Trump.

In fact, the whole sordid affair (coupled with the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times doing the same thing last week at around the same time), probably worked to the political benefit of Vice President Harris. But the shockwave warning it sent to all of us --- as also discussed on yesterday's program --- regarding how it revealed to American voters "what life under a dictator would feel like" remains impossible to ignore. It also offered a repeat of the valuable lesson from Yale's Timothy Snyder, an expert on tyrannical regimes, who warns "Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do."

Longtime Russia expert, and former Trump Administration official, Fiona Hill adds to those warnings today, in a detailed interview with Politico Magazine, explaining how great nations slip into authoritarianism when control of newspapers and other media outlets is taken over by billionaires who behave more like oligarchs, as they try to please strongman leaders. It explains why both Trump and Twitter/X owner Elon Musk are now reportedly in regular contact with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, and why cowards like Bezos (and Musk and L.A. Times' owner Patrick Soon-Shiong) seek to be in the incredibly exclusive oligarchic club approved by --- and at the beck-and-call of --- "the big guy".

None of it, Hill also warns, ends up working out well for the "ordinary people" who supported the strongman in the first place, as a perceived solution to perceived woes, as "ordinary people" are subsequently broken down into various categorical groups (by religion, social status, professions, etc.) who are then set against each other by the strongman.

"In Russia," explains Hill, "for many years, there was a general feeling that Putin was leaving ordinary people alone. The ordinary person is not being left alone anymore. They're being sent to war. They are being repressed. Somebody who supports Trump today and thinks that he's their champion could very easily be on the other end of the spectrum tomorrow --- they could go from being a supporter of Trump to somebody who Trump sees as an opponent, just by being in the wrong category of people, or by saying or doing something publicly that he doesn't like."

"Speech that now seems free and unfettered on X [Twitter], or anywhere else on the internet, or even privately to a friend, could easily be turned against you. That's happened over and over again in Russia and in many other settings," she says, before Politico asks: "How close are we to that in the United States?"

Hill's chilling answer: "We're one election away."

The cowardice of the Post and LA Times' owners today (as well as the last minute loss of our guest), also affords an excuse to highlight the piece from the New York Times Editorial Board which was not forced to pull their punches over the weekend. They published a stark, must-read, multimedia editorial headlined (as splashed across the entire front page of their Sunday Opinion section): "DONALD TRUMP SAYS HE WILL PROSECUTE HIS ENEMIES ORDER MASS DEPORTATIONS USE SOLDIERS AGAINST CITIZENS ABANDON ALLIES PLAY POLITICS WITH DISASTERS BELIEVE HIM."

Today, we step through the case they make as to why American should believe him on each and all of those points, based not only on his behavior during his first term in office, but what we have learned, and what he has learned --- and what he has repeatedly promised --- since then.

Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with still more on the choice that voters face this year in the Presidential election, in this case as it pertains to environment and energy policy of the two major candidates, and the crushing cost to the U.S. economy that will come with Trump's promised "brown new deal"...

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Sometimes, when faced with an insidious canard, it isn't enough to either expose the true source of a conspiracy theory or the absence of any facts to support it. In order to thoroughly demolish it, one can identify a reductio ad absurdum --- "a form of argument in which a proposition is disproven by following its implications to absurd conclusions".

It is indeed important that, throughout the recent public impeachment hearings, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) referred to allegations that CrowdStrike and the Ukrainians hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC) server in 2016 as a "debunked" conspiracy theory and that none of the State Department and National Security Counsel (NSC) officials who testified during the impeachment hearings could identify any evidence that would support that "debunked" theory. It is also important that, in her opening statement, Dr. Fiona Hill, Trump's own former NSC Senior Director of Russian and European Affairs, proclaimed that Russian intelligence agencies were the source of that "fictional" canard.

While there is ample evidence to support the conclusions offered by Dr. Hill and Chairman Schiff, one can deliver the coup de grâce to the baseless but insidious theory that Ukraine and CrowdStrike hacked the DNC by asking "why" they would do that?...

On today's BradCast: A few holiday morsels that we hope may come in handy over your Thanksgiving weekend with friends and family. [Audio link to show follows below.]

Donald Trump, along with his cowardly Republican apparatchik and dishonest rightwing media machine, have all been busy pretending over the past several days that the first two weeks of public impeachment hearings in the U.S. House Intelligence Committee were somehow "a disaster for Democrats." Even mainstream corporate media have been helpful in spreading that fake news.

Polling, however (among other things), suggests the opposite --- unless 50% majority support for impeachment and removal of the President of the United State from office, according to CNN [PDF], and steadily increasing support for impeachment over each week of public hearings, according to Reuters/Ipsos, is somehow "a disaster for Democrats".

By way of comparison, at the height of Bill Clinton's impeachment in 1998, support for the GOP effort among Americans was never higher than 29%. And yet, 50% want Trump out already, after just two weeks of public testimony. (It took nearly a year of impeachment inquiry before the worst evidence against Richard Nixon even became apparent, by the way.)

At the same time, even since the first round of hearings concluded last week, there has been a constant drip, drip, drip of increasingly damning information against the President, shoring up an already overwhelming amount of evidence that Trump directed a quid pro quo bribery scheme against Ukraine by withholding a White House meeting and hundreds of millions in military aid in exchange for the announcement of a Ukraine investigation into his 2020 political rival Joe Biden and a debunked, nonsensical theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Hillary Clinton, not Trump.

In just the few hours since our previous BradCast, newly released testimony from a top official in the White House Office of Management and Budget reveals that two OMB officials quietly resigned over the summer due, at least in part, to their concerns about the legality of Trump's order to withhold Congressionally-allocated military aid to Ukraine for personal political purposes.

Also, the New York Times has reported that Trump had been briefed about the complaint from the whistleblower that kicked off this impeachment inquiry before he finally unfroze military aid for Ukraine in September. Moreover, that report helps to explain Trump's strange insistence to his EU Ambassador that "there is no quid pro quo!" long before the phrase had even made it into the public discussion of the matter.

So, as things get worse for the President, somehow it's "a disaster for DEMOCRATS"?

As many Americans today are heading home for the holidays and may have to discuss all of this with their Trump-lovin' relatives over the holiday table, we thought it'd be helpful to supply a bit of (non-lethal) ammunition. While various blockbuster revelations from witnesses received most of the attention over the first two weeks of lengthy public hearings in the House, the closing summations each day and at the end of the series of hearings by Intelligence Chair Rep. Adam Schiff received far less attention. That's a pity, as the Congressman --- a former prosecutor who served as Asst. U.S. Attorney in the Los Angeles U.S. Attorney's office before being elected to Congress --- gives one helluva closing summation.

Today, we share two of those closing arguments, as they nicely wrap up both what this impeachment is about, how damning the evidence already is against the President, and what the stakes are for the country.

Our mission, as journalists, is to help educate and inform the electorate. That's not easy these days in a post-truth world full of fake news, a lying President, and still far too much corporate media hackery. We hope today's program might help you to help ALL of us find our way out of this otherwise very dark hour in American history. We ALL must play a part in that, right now, if our republic is to survive this unprecedented attack.

Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving. Somehow...

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Hmmm....That's interesting. With all of those pro-Trump callers we had last week after Week 1 of impeachment hearings, there were none willing to call in to today's BradCast to defend the President after the bombshells of Week 2. I wonder why. [Audio link to show follows below.]

Before we get to those calls today, a few other news headlines of note that we've been trying to get to for several days (and hope to cover more in coming days), but for our impeachment coverage over the past week. Among those stories...

• Georgia's new Republican Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger is attempting to intimidate election integrity and computer science experts by announcing official state investigations of their activities. The recently announced probes are of prominent experts, several of whom have appeared on The BradCast as guests multiple times. They have been critical of Raffensperger for installing new, hackable, unreliably and 100% unverifiable touchcreen Ballot Marking Device (BMD) voting systems across the state before 2020, despite the new systems' disastrous performance failures in the counties which pilot tested them in the recent 2019 off-year elections;

• The inventor of the Risk-Limiting Audit (RLA) protocol, used by some jurisdictions to (supposedly) assure that computer tabulators correctly tallied voter intent when reporting election results, has resigned from the previously well-respected voting system watchdog group Verified Voting. Prof. Philip Stark of UC Berkeley has been critical of the group on which he served on their Board of Directors, for helping to validate what he describes as "meaningless" [PDF] post-election audits in jurisdictions --- such as Georgia and Philadelphia --- where unverifiable BMD systems are used to mark paper ballot summaries. He argues that only hand-marked paper ballots can be known to reflect voter intent, and that RLA's of computerized ballots is likely to offer a false sense of security in results produced on such systems. Stark sent a dramatic resignation letter over the weekend, blasting VV for "providing cover for inherently untrustworthy voting systems --- and the officials who bought them, the companies that make them, and any officials who might contemplate buying them in the future --- by conducting 'risk-limiting audits' of untrustworthy paper records, creating the false and misleading impression that relying on untrustworthy paper for a RLA can confirm election outcomes (and debasing the meaning of "RLA" in the process)";

• In related-ish news, but far more hopeful news, the New Jersey Assembly voted to restore voting rights to some 83,000 people on parole & probation. The measure would overturn a law adopted in 1844, but must still be approved in the state Senate and sighned by the Governor;

• And, in breaking news just as today's show began, a federal court judge has ruled that Donald Trump's former White House Counsel Don McGahn must respond to a lawful U.S. House subpoena for documents and testimony related to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe, during which McGahn testified that Trump attempted to obstruct justice at least 10 different times. While the ruling is likely to be appealed by Trump's Dept. of Justice, the order to testify would also likely apply to a host of top Trump officials who have refused to answer Congressional subpoenas in the Trump/Ukraine affair for which he is currently facing an impeachment inquiry, after the Administration has claimed "absolute immunity" from Congressional oversight.

Speaking of which, we summarize last week's explosive impeachment hearings today, and cover a number of new, related stories which broke over the weekend before opening the phones to callers. Last week, when we did same after Week 1 of public testimony in the U.S. House Intelligence Committee, we heard from a number of callers who remained strongly opposed to Trump's impeachment and removal. Today, however, when we opened the phones to listeners to take their temperature after the several blockbuster revelations of Week 2, those callers were nowhere to be found...Go figure!

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On today's BradCast, After a dizzying two weeks of damning testimony against Donald J. Trump in his ongoing impeachment inquiry in the U.S. House Intelligence Committee, we thought we'd check in on how the hours and hours (and hours) of public hearings might be playing in "real America", as they are reported back to the electorate on late night comedy shows --- where many Americans get all of their news.

Thus, we're happy to present today's BradCast 'Late-Nite' Comedy Impeachment Hearings Week-In-Review Special!, featuring testimony from key witnesses to Trump's Ukraine bribery scheme over the past two weeks, in clips (and songs!) from Seth Meyers, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Samantha Bee and Trevor Noah!

There's just one thing that ya need to know: Trump said "Do us a favor, though!"

Enjoy!...

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On today's BradCast, we impossibly offer special coverage of both Wednesday night's Democratic 2020 Presidential Debate in Atlanta and Wednesday night and Thursday morning's blockbuster public impeachment hearings in the U.S. House. [Audio link to show is posted below.]

First up today: Wednesday's second session in the House Intelligence Committee featuring Laura Cooper, Deputy Asst. Secretary of Defense for Russia and David Hale, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, in which Cooper revealed that Ukrainian officials were aware of the Trump Administration's freeze on nearly $400 million in military assistance at least a month earlier than previously known. The claim undercuts GOP claims that the pressure campaign on Ukraine couldn't have been a quid pro quo because Ukraine didn't know their military assistance had been withheld. Both officials says they had no idea why the White House had frozen the funds. Their testimony also backs up the bombshell testimony earlier in the day from Gordon Sondland, Donald Trump's EU Ambassador, who charged that the scheme amounted to a clear quid pro quo by the President, as Sondland was assigned to take the lead in Trump's pressure campaign to force the Ukrainian President into announcing investigations of the 2016 election and Joe Biden in exchange for a White House meeting and millions of dollars in military aid approved by a bipartisan Congress.

And, on Thursday, David Holmes, political adviser at the U.S. embassy in Ukraine and Dr. Fiona Hill, who served as Trump's top Russia and Ukraine expert on the National Security Council under John Bolton, offered riveting testimony in the last of the Committee's scheduled impeachment hearings, for now. Holmes detailed the unsecured cell-phone conversation he overheard between Trump and Sondland at a cafe in Kiev, in which the President was eager to hear about the investigations into his political rivals on the day after his infamous July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Holmes said Sondland told him Trump didn't care about Ukraine, other than as it pertained to the President's personal reelection interests. Hill, a longtime non-partisan foreign service officer, shared gripping details on the Russia/Ukraine conflict, describing the Trump/Rudy Giuliani/GOP claim that Ukraine interfered with the 2016 election as a "fictional narrative" propagated by Russia. She detailed Bolton's description of Rudy Giuliani as "a hand grenade who’s going to blow everybody up," adding, "I think that’s where we are today." Hill also went on to explain Trump's pursuit of what she described as a "domestic political errand" that came at the expense of official American foreign policy.

Then, we move on to Wednesday evening's 2020 Presidential Debate featuring ten candidates --- Biden, Booker, Buttigieg, Warren, Sanders, Harris, Harris, Klobuchar, Steyer, and Yang --- in the 5th such forum of the year, this one sponsored and moderated by hosts from MSNBC and Washington Post. We're joined for insight and analysis on BOTH of our special coverage topics today by longtime political activist, reporter, author, broadcaster and documentarian DAVID BENDER, Political Director of Progressive Voices Network and journalist, producer and communications expert JACKI SCHECHNER, formerly of CNN and CurrentTV.

Among the many debate-related matters we discuss today: How Wednesday's forum, lead by four female journalists, differed from previous debates this year; whether Democrats are focusing too much or not enough on the dangers posed to the nation and the world by Donald Trump; whether the Democratic Party is adequately reaching out to the anti-war left (some of whom abandoned them for Trump in 2016); Joe Biden's frailty and Tulsi Gabbard's politics; and what if any effect Michael Bloomberg may have on the race if and when he finally enters --- as he continues to threaten...

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It’s NICOLE SANDLER again guest-hosting today’s BradCast. No worries, Brad and Desi will be back in time for the next episode!

We begin the show with a recap of the day’s news --- deposition transcript releases, subpoenas ignored, Roger Stone’s trial, and A Warning from 'Anonymous'…

My guest today is FREDERICK CLARKSON of Political Research Associates, who tells us about his latest reporting on Project Blitz and the audio of a 40-minute strategy call that reveals the latest plans of a Christian Nationalist campaign that is growing in organizational resources, and escalating rhetoric against opponents of its theocratic agenda.

Download MP3 or listen online below...

Our long road toward catching up with a month's worth of news continues on today's BradCast, with voting news out of Battleground Ohio, the latest on Trump's impeachment and chaos in Syria (and the thing that ties them together), as well as the latest environmental and climate news after a month away. [Audio link to show posted at end of summary.]

First up today: Some surprisingly good news for voters out of Ohio! The biggest surprise, perhaps, is that it comes, at least in part, thanks to the state's new Republican Sec. of State Frank LaRose, who had the good sense to check with voting rights groups beforewrongly purging some 40,000 perfectly active and eligible voters from the rolls who should never have been flagged for removal in the first place! Most of his fellow Republicans are likely not happy about that.

Then, we're joined by the great HEATHER DIGBY PARTON of Salon and Hullabaloo to discuss the latest impeachment news and Trump's deadly withdrawal of U.S. troops from northern Syrian.

The impeachment inquiry over Trump's attempt to withhold nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine in exchange for its President's trumped-up state investigation of Joe Biden and the 2016 election continues to gain steam, with half a dozen or more current and former Executive Branch officials now lining up to testify --- and not in favor of Trump or his lackey lawyer Rudy Giuliani --- to Congressional investigators. Trump's former Russia and Europe expert, Fiona Hill, testified for some ten hours on Monday, reportedly citing Giuliani's shadow foreign policy schemes meant to undermine U.S. foreign policy and personally enrich the President in some way.

According to reports of her deposition, her superior on the National Security Counsel, former National Security Advisor John Bolton, was so alarmed by Giuliani's efforts he described the former NYC Mayor turned Fox 'News' conspiracist as a "hand grenade who’s going to blow everybody up". Bolton reportedly tried to warn White House attorneys about Giuliani's many attempts to undermine U.S. Ukraine policy. Bolton himself, the unlikeliest of heroes in this shameful saga, may soon be called to testify to Congress in coming days, along with a long list of other State, Defense and National Security officials who now seem eager to defy the White House's strategy of denying both documents and testimony in the House Democrats' impeachment inquiry. "They're defying the White House telling them not to go testify," Parton observes, "That is a change. That is different than what we've seen. Suddenly that stonewall is crumbling."

We also discuss Parton's reasonable theory as to why this matter has finally resulted in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi giving full permission to her caucus to proceed with impeachment, where clear evidence of felony obstruction of justice from Robert Mueller's report and Trump's hush-money payoffs to porn stars to help win the 2016 Presidential election did not. "This is the same kind of stuff that Trump was accused of [in 2016], that we all suspected him of doing, colluding with a foreign government to sabotage his rival's campaign. Here he is [with Ukraine] doing it in real time. I think that's really what has made the difference."

In not-at-all-unrelated news, Parton goes on to discuss her latest Salon column in which she details how Trump's Syria pullout appears to be anything but an impulsive decision after a recent phone call with Turkish President Erdogan, as many in the media are still describing the disastrous move. She explains how the U.S. abandonment of our Kurdish allies with the U.S. withdrawal of troops from Northern Syria is of a piece with Trump's feckless Ukraine policy. In both cases, she explains, there is one unavoidable fact in common --- even for those of us who may not be Russia hawks: both actions, like so many other controversial policies of the Trump Administration, are in the clear and direct interest of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Finally, we close today with the long-awaited return of the Green News Report, which we had been forced to suspend over the past month due to my family emergency. Somehow or another, Desi Doyen manages to fit in a month's worth of green news into the latest GNR in just six minutes. Buckle up --- and stay that way!...

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