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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Crews gain ground against L.A. Fires, as long road to recovery begins; Trump's Dept. of Energy nominee, a fossil fuel executive, calls for more domestic energy production; PLUS: President Biden urges Americans to hold the line on climate action in farewell address... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): FDA bans Red Dye No. 3 from food; For LA water issues, misinformation spreads nearly as fast as the wildfires; As climate risks mount, homeowners far beyond California face soaring insurance bills; Standoff in South Africa ends with 87 miners dead; Biden approved L.A. wildfire aid. But Trump will control spending; More Americans than ever are living in wildfire areas. L.A. is no exception; EPA warns of 'forever chemicals' in sludge fertilizer... PLUS: Biden administration withdraws proposal that aimed to save whales off East Coast by slowing ship speeds... and much, MUCH more! ...

I suspect it's gonna get much uglier before it's all said and done. And we're here for it! A "MAGA Civil War"? Count us in on The BradCast! [Audio link to full show follows below this summary.]

But, first up, some other news today...

• Repeated "wildfire weather" warnings from the National Weather Service for Los Angeles, predicting "a life-threatening, destructive windstorm," with wind gusts as high as 100mph(!) from Tuesday afternoon through Wednesday morning, after months of dry weather appear to have been prescient. The day started here with a neighbors huge tree limb blowing over to crush our backyard canopy amid the gusty winds. By shows end today, tens of thousands being evacuated from a quickly growing wildfire in Pacifica Palisades, on the coast. It has gotten much worse since we got off air today, with hundreds reportedly abandoning their cars on the Pacific Coast highway to flee encroaching flames.

• In what counts for Trump criminal accountability court news these days, his favorite federal Judge/tool, Aileen Cannon in Florida, who was seated at the very end of his first term after he lost the 2020 election, , is working hard for her promotion to SCOTUS. On Tuesday, she exercised dubious authority to block the release, at least for now, of Special Counsel Jack Smith's report on Donald Trump's two different, now-abandoned federal felony indictments for stealing thousands of pages of highly classified national security documents upon leaving office, and for his failed attempts to steal the 2020 election. We'll see how long her ruling stands.

• Meanwhile, in New York, an appeals court on Tuesday rejected Donald Trump's attempt to stay his criminal sentencing, still scheduled for Friday, in the case in which he was found guilty of 34 felony fraud counts related to his hush money payments to a porn star to help him cheat to win the 2016 election. Barring any surprises, the sentencing is still on for this week, though the judge in the case has indicated he is unlikely to issue any jail time, given Trump's re-election. But, even with an "unconditional discharge", he will still become the nation's first convicted felon to be sworn in as President.

• On Monday in New York, in federal court, former NYC Mayor turned disgraced Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani was found in contempt of court for failing to lawfully respond to the $148 million defamation judgement against him won by Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, who Rudy and Trump both falsely claimed had committed fraud during the 2020 election. If only Rudy could have figured out how to become President and make all of his crimes go away like Donny did.

• Then, we're joined by RYAN COOPER, Managing Editor of The American Prospect, on the emerging (and hilarious) dust-up between the broligarchs who control Trump, like richest-man-in-the-world Elon Musk (and his sidekick Vivek Ramaswamy), and his hardcore MAGA cultists like Laura Loomer and Steve Bannon. Cooper's article on the matter is headlined "President Musk Declares War on American Workers".

  Just before the turn of the new year, sparks started flying when the duped MAGA cultists learned that Trump was going to continue the H-1B visa program that allows skilled tech workers to come to the U.S. and take less money to work longer hours than American citizens. After facing criticism for the Silicon Valley billionaires' favorite work visa scheme (the South African-born Musk came here himself on an H-1B), Musk took to the social media site he purchased and declared war on Loomer and any other MAGAs who dared oppose him, declaring: "The reason I'm in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B," before he added, "Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend."

  The self-proclaimed "free-speech absolutist" then proceeded to downgrade and demonetize Loomer's account on Twitter/X, along with dozens of other MAGAs who dared call out Musk and the H-1B program.

  Today, Cooper explains tells me why the Silicon Valley broligarchs are so fond of the H-1B program, which, he says, they wield as a "weapon of class warfare" that "provides a pool of exploitable labor" that must do as you say or get sent back to their country. We also discuss Musk and the Right's actual position on "free speech" ("Tthey get to say whatever they want, and you get to shut up."); who appears to really be calling the shots now in Trumpland (Hint: its the guy who controls the "still depressingly influential social media platform that all the Republicans are on"); and how this nascent war between the two major factions of Trump's MAGA cult/coalition is likely to shake out in the days ahead.

  "We are in the realm of syphilitic emperor history books," Cooper tells me. "You've got Trump, who is 78 and clearly has lost MANY steps from when he was a young man. But Elon Musk is also incredibly erratic and impulsive. With these two megalomaniac narcissists with giant fevered egos, typically you'd see a massive falling out over something." And yet, so far, Trump is standing with the richest man on Earth and pretending he even knows what the H-1B program is. Meanwhile, says Cooper, about "Trump and his toadies, the minute they become inconvenient for him, he just throws them over the side. Which, for some reason, doesn't seem to affect the supply of people lining up to get thrown over the side the next day."

• Finally, Desi Doyen has our first Green News Report of the new year, with much to catch up on after our long holiday break, including the brutal, climate change-fueled weather across much of the country this week; President Joe Biden's last-minute ban on new offshore drilling across most U.S. coastal waters; the environmental legacy of the late President Jimmy Carter; and much more...

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We're back on today's BradCast after our holiday break! And just in time for today's completely peaceful January 6th certification of the 2024 Electoral College results during a joint session of Congress. It sure is fun how peaceful things are when Republicans aren't pretending the election was stolen from them, eh? [Audio link to full show follows below this summary.]

But that doesn't mean 2025 hasn't started off with a bang, unfortunately, as discussed along with a whole bunch of stuff today as we begin to get caught up on some news we missed over our break and the news that continues to break now that we're back.

Before opening up the phones to listeners in the second half of today's show, here are links to just some of the stories cited in our coverage today...

• Blogger and activist Jeff Tiedrich offers perhaps the best ever journalistic description of the "cognitively-impaired rage-baby" who, over the weekend, "melt[ed] down into saddest sad ever" over flags to be flown at half-staff in memory of President Jimmy Carter during the rage-baby's second inauguration two weeks from today.

• Our factoids of the day on Jimmy Carter's environmental legacy, as the long goodbye to the 37th President of the United States continues before he is finally laid to rest in Plains, Georgia later this week at age 100.

• In her capacity as President of the U.S. Senate, Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost the 2024 Presidential election to Donald Trump, oversaw the certification of the Electoral College results today during a peaceful joint session of Congress. It was carried out without challenge, incident, death, insurrection or terror attack on the U.S. Capitol, as previously incited by the former President (now official President-elect) four years ago today.

• Criminal felon and rage-baby Donald Trump continues to rage this week following the ruling [PDF] last Friday by the judge in his New York hush money trial, where he was found guilty of 34 counts of felony fraud related to paying off a porn star to help him cheat to win the 2016 election. Justice Juan Merchan ordered that Trump would be sentenced this coming Friday, ten days before his second inauguration. But the judge also signaled Trump was unlikely to face any jail time and will instead receive an unusual, "unconditional discharge" for his many crimes. Nonetheless, Trump continues to rage and appeal and, so far, lose all of those appeals. Despite that likely lack of any actual punishment at all, the news now means Trump will almost certainly be sworn in to office as the first convicted felon to enjoy that great honor.

• Also today, a few words about the terror attacks by two U.S. citizens last week on New Year's Day, one in New Orleans on Bourbon Street, one in Las Vegas outside of a Trump hotel in a Tesla Cybertruck, The latter was carried out by a hardcore Donald Trump (and Elon Musk and Bobby Kennedy Jr.) supporter, even though that aspect of the attack has been virtually ignored by the corporate media.

Then we open the phones to listeners for the first time in the new year, To discuss the news of the day along with hopes and fears for what lies ahead this year. In addition to one of our favorite Trump trolls, we also hear from a caller who says that he went to school with Elon Musk in South Africa. What he tells us happened at that school, if true, may explain a whole lot about Elon Musk...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Among our stories today...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Okay. The best way to take in today's BradCast is simply to listen to it. That is almost always the case, but especially today. The stuff you are tuning in for is likely right up front today. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

I have been hearing from a lot of listeners of the show and readers at The BRAD BLOG since the election, especially on the heels of our coverage last week of a letter sent to Vice President Kamala Harris by a group of top-flight computer scientists and cybersecurity and voting system experts, explaining to her why they are strongly urging her to seek hand-recounts of ballots in several battleground states. I covered their 5-page letter [PDF] in detail on our show last Thursday, along with my interview with longtime University of South Carolina computer science professor and voting system expert, Duncan Buell, one of the signatories.

Around the same time, a longtime financial services security expert, Stephen Spoonamore, who I've known for many years, also begin describing his own concerns about the reported results of the November 5th Presidential election, and has now sent two "Duty to Warn" letters to the Vice President (here is his latest) also recommending she ask for hand-recounts in several battleground states.

While the group of experts cite well-documented evidence of Trump supporters unlawfully breaching proprietary voting systems, copying its software and distributing it across the Internet following the 2020 election, in states including Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Colorado (for which several have been charged and/or convicted with felony crimes), Spoonamore's worries are a bit more speculative. He is concerned by his analysis of a reportedly high number of what are known as "Bullet Ballots", which include one single vote (in this case, for Trump for President) and for no one else on the ballot. He augments that concern with what he fears could be a related bevy of hoax bomb threats in largely Dem-leaning jurisdictions on Election Day, said to have come from Russian email domains, as well as the use of Trump supporter Elon Musk's Starlink Internet system in a number of places.

My opening monologue today speaks to all of those concerns, as shared by many Harris supporters who --- not unlike Trump supporters in 2020 and Clinton, Sanders and Kerry supporters in years past --- are suspicious of the reported results of the election. I try to offer some much-needed clarity about what Spoonamore, somewhat misleadingly, described originally as Bullet Ballots, cast at a suspiciously high rate in some battleground states, but not in immediately neighboring states, as well as his other allegations.

Many more details in the show, right up at the top, if you want to give it a listen. But, the long and short is this: It doesn't matter what one's reasons may be for a lack of confidence in the reported results, as currently tallied almost entirely by computer tabulators, either correctly or incorrectly. The only way to answer those concerns, and to determine if the results were tabulated accurately, is with a public hand-count of ballots, either in whole or even in a smaller audit of a random sampling of precincts to ensure computer-reported results accurately reflect the intent of voters.

That has been true for the two decades that I have been reporting on these issues and similar concerns --- sometimes justified, sometimes not (again, it doesn't matter) --- whether they come from Republicans or Democrats or third-party voters. Publicly hand-counting paper ballots (hopefully hand-marked paper ballots!) is the only way to possibly gain confidence among those in the electorate who are suspicious, rightfully or not, about reported results. Public hand-counts remain the Gold Standard for democratically conducted elections --- no matter how many in the media, or even in the "elections industry", misleadingly suggest otherwise.

When you really REALLY need to know who won the closest of elections, you publicly hand-count the ballots. Doing so, by the way, is not always dispositive. There are still sophisticated ways to defraud even a publicly hand-counted election. But it's the best and easiest place to begin.

As noted, there is much more specific detail in my coverage of all of this today, including, for example, news on a hand-counted audit of several precincts this week in Centre County, PA, following a still-unexplained problem uploading absentee ballots into the County's tabulator system on Election Day. So, for those who have touched base with me about any or all of these related concerns, please tune in today!

ALSO TODAY...

• Speaking of counting votes in Pennsylvania, hedge-fund CEO and Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dave McCormick currently leads three-term Democratic Senator Bob Casey by about 17,000 votes, or about one-quarter of one percent, out of nearly seven million votes tallied in the contest. A recount is set to begin shortly, and Counties may choose to count ballots either by hand (please do!) or by a different computer-tabulator than those used to tally them originally. But all of that is taking place amid a legal battle that has stretched on for years, concerning whether absentee ballots, which are known to have arrived on time, but with missing or incorrect dates on their outer envelope, should be counted. A number of counties led by Democrats say yes, they should be counted and that the dates are meaningless. That is true and almost everybody --- even many Republicans, including McCormick who sued to include such ballots in the count when he narrowly lost a 2022 GOP primary --- agree! But, in response to lawsuits filed by 2024 Dave McCormick joined by the Republican National Committee, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled on Monday that, no, those votes may not be counted this year, since (terrible) state law mandates they may not be. More details, as usual, on today's program.

• Yesterday on The BradCast, we discussed the importance of full and proper FBI vetting of nominees to top Presidential Administration posts with former Deputy Asst. Attorney General and former Chief Counsel for Nominations in the US Senate, Lisa Graves. Instead, Donald Trump's team has hired a private firm to vet potential nominees. Graves explained how such background checks are critical for ensuring that top government officials do not have leverage that may expose them to blackmail, etc. Well, new details now coming out about the allegations of sex trafficking of 17-year old girls by Trump's nominee for U.S. Attorney General, Matt Gaetz serve as a reminder of how important that is. The fact that files said to detail evidence and testimony on some of the most illicit and disturbing charges against him were reportedly hacked from a law firm on Monday puts a huge, blinking, screaming red flag next to that point!

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report as Trump nominates climate science deniers and fossil fuel profiteers to top environment-related cabinet posts, and as President Biden visits the Amazon Rainforest to tout some of his landmark achievements taking on climate change...before Donald Trump returns to office and works to reverse much of that critical progress...

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It's going to get much darker and more ridiculous, before it begins to get better. But it is not "The End", despite a suggestion of same here and there throughout today's BradCast. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among our coverage today...

U.S. House race updates from California where, this week so far, one seat has flipped from "red" to "blue", another that had been expected to turn "red" will likely stay in Dems hands (the seat formerly held by Democratic Rep. Katie Porter), and another longtime "red" seat (since 1980!) appears on the verge of flipping to Democrats. Even so, as of airtime, Republicans are now just one seat away from narrowly winning majority control of the lower chamber of Congress.

Donald Trump lost his first political battle with his upcoming Republican U.S. Senate Majority on Wednesday morning, as South Dakota Sen. John Thune, a Mitch McConnell deputy, was selected by the Caucus as its new Majority Leader. MAGA enemy McConnell is set to retire and Florida Sen. Rick Scott, loudly lobbied for by MAGA, was defeated in the contest to replace him.

Another wave of stooges, corporatists and/or unqualified buffoons were named for key Trump Admin roles since yesterday's program. And the latest wave includes some real humdingers!...

• 'The Ultimate Corruption': Richest-man-in-the-world and major government contractor Elon Musk and failed GOP Presidential nominee Vivek Ramaswamy were named to head up the "Dept. of Government Efficiency" (DOGE! Get it?), even though, as AP notes there is no such government agency.
• 'Who the f--k is this guy?’: Trump's nomination of Fox "News" weekend host and former National Guard major Pete Hegseth's nomination for Defense Secretary --- to oversee an $800 billion annual budget and nearly three million troops and civilian employees --- stuns the military world.
• A Gift for Vlad: With no experience at all in the field, jilted Democratic Congresswoman/Presidential nominee turned Republican Putin propagandist and Trump fan Tulsi Gabbard is named to be the next Director of National Intelligence.
• 'Uniquely Awful': Florida Congressman and MAGA insurrection supporter Matt Gaetz, long investigated for the alleged sex trafficking of minors, is named to be Trump's U.S. Attorney General.

Then, we're joined by longtime national security and accountability journalist MARCY WHEELER of Emptywheel, to walk through the post-election status of the four different criminal felony indictments (and 34 convictions) of the incoming President of the United States.

Donald Trump's cases at the federal level --- for stealing national security documents and inciting the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Government as one of several failed attempts to steal the 2020 election --- will now, most likely, just go away. Though Special Counsel Jack Smith is reportedly putting together final reports in those cases for potential release in advance of Trump taking office.

"The cases are going to end, but I suspect Jack Smith was already thinking about what he would do if Trump won, and the way in which to leave the best record available," Wheeler tells me, suggesting that he may do it soon enough that there could be public hearings on those indictments in the U.S. Senate, while Dems are still in majority control.

The two cases at the state level --- in New York, where he was convicted on 34 felony counts of fraud related to hush-money payments to help him win the 2016 election, and in Georgia, for trying to steal the 2020 election --- are a bit more complicated. It's less clear what will happen next in both cases, as sentencing is currently pending in NY and appeals are continue in GA where Trump's 18 co-conspirators, including his disgraced lawyer Rudy Giuliani and former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, may be tried without him.

We also discuss what happens to Trump's civil verdicts where he was found liable for $355 million for fraud in New York, and for $90 million in the E. Jean Carroll sexual assault case.

Wheeler also discusses the pending fraud charges against Trump buddy Steve Bannon; the outrageous nomination of Matt Gaetz as Attorney General ("All of these Jan 6ers are going to be released, probably including the seditionists."); whether A.G. Merrick Garland could have done anything to bring any case against Trump to a trial, much less a conclusion, before this year's election; and how "the Republican Party, as a whole, has decided that they do not believe in rule of law anymore"...

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On today's BradCast: Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein would be weeping in their graves --- but they're still alive and joining many of us in calling out WaPo's cowardly billionaire owner today for kowtowing to a wannabe dictator who's not even in office yet. Thus is the shameful price --- and cost to American democracy and Freedom of the Press --- of American Oligarchy, 2024-style. [Audio link to full show follows below.]

Among our stories today, before opening up our phone lines for listeners to "endorse" the Presidential candidate of their choosing, just one week before Election Day in arguably one of the most critical elections in U.S. history...

• Last week, more than 20 absentee ballots were burned in an apparent case of arson inside of a U.S. Postal Service collection box in Phoenix, in the battleground state of Arizona. Today, hundreds of ballots were burned in a ballot drop-box in Democratic-leaning Vancouver, Washington as well as Democratic-leaning Portland, Oregon. The FBI is investigating and local law enforcement report they have identified a "suspect vehicle" thought to be connected to the incendiary devices used in both cases in the early A.M. hours on Monday.

• Last week, Donald Trump-supporting billionaire Elon Musk, the richest many on Earth, kicked off a "lottery" where registered voters in battleground states who sign his pledge would become eligible for a one million dollar give-away each day before next Tuesday's Election Day. The DoJ subsequently warned Musk that the stunt was likely an unlawful vote-buying scheme under federal law. On Monday, the Philadelphia District Attorney sued Musk for running what he is describing as an unlawful lottery in violation of Pennsylvania law.

• On Friday, the Washington Post --- with the now-laughable tagline "Democracy Dies in Darkness" --- announced it would not be making an endorsement in the Presidential race for the first time in nearly 50 years. It's billionaire owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos --- whose space travel company has billions of dollars of contracts with the federal government --- was reportedly behind the decision that undercut the legendary Watergate paper's own Editorial Board that was set to endorse Kamala Harris. The decision came just after the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times --- who happens to be a close friend of Elon Musk --- forced that paper to do the same. It is what noted U.S. fascism expert Timothy Snyder describes in his landmark 2017 book, On Tyranny, as "obeying in advance," which he strongly warns against as "Lesson One" when fascists threaten to take power. Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer also has a few thoughts in response about the "billionaire cowards" at the two papers who are already "showing what life under a dictator is really like", even before Donald Trump's becomes President again (if he ever does.)

• With all of that in mind --- and a few more stories of note here or there --- we open up our phones for listeners to make their own endorsements today on air in this year's election. That, because The BradCast and our many affiliate stations --- many associated with the Pacifica Radio Network, founded in 1946 to, specifically, stand up against then-rising fascism --- are not owned, run or controlled in any way by billionaires or their corporations. The result: a lot of calls today, with endorsements for Harris, Trump and --- because our live-listener base largely draws from KPFK, our very left-ish flagship station here in Los Angeles --- for the Green Party's Jill Stein, as a protest vote against the Biden-Harris Administration's position on Israel. (Never mind how much worse a Trump Administration would be on the same issue...which leads to a few very lively conversations with listeners today!) Please tune in!...

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It is nothing short of reckless, from the perspective of national security, to allow any individual or private corporation to maintain monopoly ownership and control over a global Internet satellite communications system.

Nonetheless, today, courtesy of launch licenses issued by the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA), the world's richest man, Elon Musk --- net worth $273.5 billion --- has amassed monopoly control via Starlink, a global Internet communication system that owns and operates more than 6,300 satellites.

Haven't we --- almost literally --- seen this movie before? And does it ever end well?

The scope of this non-fictional threat is by no means confined to the enormity of Musk's wealth. As The Atlantic's Marina Koren astutely observed in "Elon Musk Has the 'Off Switch'", the combination of ownership and control over X (formerly Twitter) and Starlink has enabled Musk to wield "unprecedented power." And we've already experienced an instance in which Musk, who reportedly "regularly communicates" with the Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin, has utilized that "unprecedented power" to undermine a core component of U.S. foreign policy...

If you find you today's BradCast informative, entertaining or helpful, please let folks on Twitter know. I suspect we won't otherwise get much traction over there today for some odd reason. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

It's amusing how, in April of 2023, not long after he purchased Twitter, Elon Musk was asked by Tucker Carlson about "New Twitter's" role in the 2024 election. His response: "The goal of new Twitter is to be as fair and even handed as possible. So, not following any political ideology."

That. Was. Darling! Just over a year later, Musk has leveraged his site almost entirely on behalf of Donald Trump, flooding his nearly 3 million followers with out and out false claims, often echoing the disgraced former President, including blatant, evidence-free lies about election fraud by Democrats.

That's in addition to the, at least, $100 million that the world's richest billionaire has plowed into political action committees to support a second term for Trump. One such Musk-funded group is called Future Coalition PAC. It is currently running a wildly cynical set of ads targeting Arab and Muslim voters in the battleground state of Michigan, claiming that "Kamala Harris Stands With Israel". The very same Musk-bankrolled group is simultaneously running ads targeting Jewish voters in battleground Pennsylvania with the message "Two-Faced Kamala Harris Stands With Palestine".

Another of Musk's PAC's recently created a website called Progress 2028, tailored to look like an official Harris Campaign page, while pushing decidedly false messages. ("Let's remove barriers for undocumented immigrants who are undocumented!") Apparently, all of that is legal. Though the group is also sending out false text messages, seemingly impersonating the Harris Campaign, pushing voters to the Progress 2028 website. That may not be legal.

But it was on behalf of yet another Musk dark money super PAC, the one he calls America PAC, in which he's invested at least $75 million, that, he announced over the weekend, that he will be giving away $1 million dollars to one lucky person each day --- so long as the person is registered to vote in a battleground state and signed his petition in support of the 1st and 2nd Amendments. Noted election law professor Rick Hasen, following the first big, lottery style check Musk handed out on stage Saturday during a rally in Pennsylvania, details how what Musk is doing is "clearly illegal vote buying". That's right. While using wild lies to make the evidence-free case that Democrats are committing election fraud, Musk is committing actual election fraud on behalf of Trump, each and every day between now and Election Day. (Anyone home, DoJ?)

His million dollar giveaways to encourage voter registration (a violation of 52 U.S.C. 10307(c), barring "offers to pay...either for registration to vote or for voting") began on the same day that Musk lied to attendees at a weekend rally in PA about Dominion Voting Systems somehow stealing the 2020 election for Joe Biden. (Similar lies cost Fox 'News' more than three-quarters of a billion dollars last year in a record settlement with Dominion to end the voting technology company's defamation suit against the rightwing propaganda outlet hours before the trial was to begin.)

We're joined today by the perfect guest to discuss all of the above and more. EDDIE PEREZ was formerly a longtime official at Hart-Intercivic, one of the nation's few major voting machine companies. He then went on to work as the chief of Twitter's Civic Integrity unit, back before Musk bought the social media site...when they still had a Civic Integrity unit! Perez is now on the Board of Directors at the nonpartisan, nonprofit, Open Source Election Technology (OSET) Institute and penned an oped for MSNBC last week headlined: "I ran Twitter's civic integrity team. Elon Musk has no idea how elections work."

In addition to debunking a number of Musk's false claims (no, Dominion doesn't even have voting systems in Philadelphia, for example!), Perez speaks to how Twitter (now ridiculously renamed X) has changed since Musk's takeover, turning it into a den of far-right conspiracy theories, hate speech and other dangerous nonsense.

"The degree to which the entire platform has obviously fallen off the deep end is incredible," he tells me. "I think it's fair to say Musk has thrown out the window any kind of commitment to having actual facts about the reality of how elections are run. What we have right now is basically a referendum on whether billionaires and oligarchs are going to shape the public's understanding of how elections are run. Are they going to do that by spreading false rumors and flooding the airwaves? Or are we going to listen to election professionals? And are we going to have standards and journalistic facts to educate the American people about how their elections are actually run with integrity?"

What would Twitter have done in the old days, before Musk purchased it, if someone like Musk had spread the disinformation he is now using the platform to spread? "Twitter took it seriously," says Perez. "What would have happened is there are different ways we would redirect users to actual, credible information. You do that not through censorship, not through taking things down. If you had a post that made an obviously false claim about some election process or voting, you might see a label on that Tweet saying, 'Here's some more information' [with links to credible sites, like the National Association of Secretaries of State]. They took it seriously. We're not going to slash and burn and taken people's posts down. But if we see an opportunity to send them to good information from trusted sources, why not do that? That helps voters. That helps democracy."

Perez also offers a number of pieces of advice on how listeners and voters can push back against the even larger avalanche of lies that is absolutely going to begin spewing forth shortly, in the event that Kamala Harris defeats Trump this year.

"They need to get their answers from their local elections office. You need to check your ballot before casting it. If you have a by-mail ballot and you haven't returned it yet, I recommend turning it in to a drop-box. And when you see inflammatory images [on social media and elsewhere], ask yourself, 'What's the story behind this? What's the context?' And find out where it came from" before blithely passing it along to others.

We've got a lot to learn from Perez today! Please tune in for a very lively, informative and, yes, at times, maddening BradCast!

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Step with us through the bizarre Fox 'News' looking glass on today's BradCast, where we try to make sense of all the stuff that the disgraced former President, his beclowned running-mate, and their television and social media propaganda partners really hope you don't make sense of at all. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among our stories today...

• The string of good news rulings continue from state judges in Georgia. Last night, just after airtime, yet another judge issued a ruling striking down new rules recently instituted by the MAGA-majority on GA's State Elections Board. Democrats, Republicans and voting rights advocates alike charge that the SEB's new rules are unlawful, might result in chaos, and could be used to try and delay or even block the certification of votes at the County level in the critical battleground state. The judge in this challenge, filed by a Republican, found seven of the Boards new rules to be "illegal, unconstitutional and void." As we've reported in recent weeks, some of the new rules actually make sense. But instituting them this late, while voting is already underway, is likely a very bad idea. Apparently, according to the judge in last night's state court ruling, they are also unlawful.

• Unlike Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for President does not appear to be afraid of adversarial interviews by real journalists --- or even by Bret Baier of Fox 'News'. The full, 26-minute interview from Wednesday is here. We share a clip or two including the moment when Harris clapped back hard against Baier's attempt to whitewash Trump's recent threats to use the U.S. military against his perceived domestic political opponents, who he has been repeatedly describing of late as "the enemy within".

• Meanwhile, as Donald Trump continues to completely avoid or otherwise wilt during any real interviews outside of his rightwing fantasy world --- due to his cowardly inability to handle real questions from real journalists who don't play along with the imaginary dystopian Biden-Harris hellscape he and Fox have created for their brain-poisoned followers --- his Vice-Presidential running mate continues to stick his neck out for Trump in the real world. And, somewhat understandably, he's making an utter hash of it, because it's all built on Big Lies and nonsense. J.D. Vance, after weeks of trying to change the subject while being pressed to answer if he believes Trump lost the 2020 election, finally answered the question yesterday. His answer is "no". So, apparently Trump won the 2020 election?! Well, yes, Vance explains, because of "Big Tech companies" who, in 2020, "engaged in industrial scale censorship backed up by the federal government" to block the "real scandal" of Hunter Biden's laptop costing the Trump-Pence ticket "millions of votes". You remember that, right? Back when Trump, not Biden-Harris, was actually in charge of the federal government? It's complicated. We explain. We also explain how Trump and his $75 million benefactor and Twitter/X owner, Elon Musk, really are --- literally --- working together to engage in industrial scale censorship to block distribution of Trump Campaign documents hacked by Iran and to ban journalists who link to it. (Contrast that with Trump singing the praises of hacks and other election interference by Russia back in 2016 and 2020. As noted, it's complicated.)

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, amid the costly cleanup of recent climate change-fueled hurricanes which are now raising everyone's insurance rates, not just for those who live in hurricane zones; as the U.S. Small Business Administration's disaster loan fund has now out of money, thanks to said hurricanes, with Congressional Republicans refusing to refill the coffers; and as our corrupted SCOTUS, curiously, chooses NOT to block the Biden EPA's new emissions limits for power plant...for now...

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Two organizations representing the Haitian Diaspora filed a civil Complaint [PDF] in the U.S. District Court in Miami on Friday on behalf of the terrorized Haitians who legally reside in Springfield, Ohio.

The named defendants include Republican candidates for President, Donald J. Trump, for Vice President, J.D. Vance, and Ohio U.S. Senate candidate Bernie Moreno. The other named defends include Donald Trump, Jr., Ohio's Republican Attorney General Dave Yost, X (formerly Twitter) owner Elon Musk, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) and the State of Ohio.

The Complaint alleges that the defendants, with full knowledge of falsity, not only spread dangerous defamatory lies --- the false claim that Haitians were stealing and eating pet dogs and cats --- but have also engaged in hate speech, a contention, plaintiffs allege, that is bolstered by a federal judge's determination, in Segat v. Trump (2019), that then President Trump's decision to terminate Temporary Protected Status for Haitians was likely influenced by racial animus. The court based its conclusion in that case, in part, upon Trump's reference to Haiti as a "shithole country" and the former President's false claim that Haitians migrants were bringing AIDS to the U.S.

In addition to defamation per se, the Complaint alleges that the Defendants have engaged in a conspiracy to violate their civil rights, including the 14th Amendment right to Equal Protection under law. It goes on to allege defendants incited, aided and abetted violence against the Haitian residents of Springfield...

From darkness to light on today's BradCast. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

FIRST UP... As an increasingly panicked Team Trump continues to find new depths in which to sink and new, more dangerous lows to drill down into --- Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world turned virulent Trump supporter, has gamed his increasingly rightwing social media site (which we still call Twitter) to force his obnoxious, dangerous, wildly false political commentary even beyond the nearly 200 million followers he has. All while turning off the very limited, crowdsourced fact-check system, for himself, even as it is supposed to apply to everyone else on the increasingly trash-filled site.

Among the results, a tweet of his this week that suggested someone should try and assassinated Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. It became a rare incident where even he decided he had gone too far and deleted the tweet after tens, if not hundreds of millions, had already seen it. (And, upon deleting it, going to on to blame everyone else for not appreciating his brilliant sense of humor).

That came after dozens and dozens of tweets this year, which have reached billions of people, falsely claiming that Democrats are bringing non-citizens into the country to vote in this year's election. The Washington Post, last week, did a deep dive into how Musk's false tweets have translated into very specific threats against elections officials around the country. "He's by no means unique," Maricopa County, Arizona's Republican Election Recorder told WaPo. "He just happens to have a very, very large microphone."

He's not the only one.

Donald Trump and J.D. Vance have spent the last week endangering the residents of Springfield, Ohio by spreading false claims about legal Haitian immigrants there (who they falsely describe as "illegal") destroying the town and eating the pets of other residents. The results of those lies: dozens of bomb threats that shutdown City Hall, schools, hospitals and has turned the Republican-run city into somewhat of a police state, as OH's Republican Governor was forced to deploy state law enforcement officials to protect town residents.

Kamala Harris, who doesn't utter falsehoods that threaten the lives of Americans, was asked about all of this madness during an forum with the National Association of Black Journalists this week. We thought her answer to that question was worth sharing in full today. It ends with this assertion: "This is exhausting and it's harmful. And it's hateful. And grounded in some age old stuff that we should not have the tolerance for. So, let's turn the page and chart a new way forward and say 'You can't have that microphone again.'"

THEN... Despite all of the above, there remains a huge number of Americans who regard themselves as very religious and yet appear dead set on voting again for the most un-religious person who has ever run for the White House.

Recent polling, however, shows that at least some of Trump's support from the religious community may be falling, even as other polling makes clear that the thrice-married, philandering and felonious former President still dominates the white Christian evangelical vote. At least the male voters who describe themselves as such.

But, according to our guest today, a white evangelical pastor himself, it doesn't have to be that way. And he is devoted to changing it. We're joined today by DOUG PAGITT, Executive Director and co-founder of Vote Common Good, a non-profit focused on "energizing and mobilizing people of faith to make the common good their voting criteria."

In a recent opinion piece for MSNBC, Pagitt detailed how his group's bus tour through battleground states this year is helping Christians to understand they don't have to vote Republican, while helping to teach Democratic candidates how to reach those voters, particularly in swing-states and counties.

So how did we get to such a place in this country, where a guy like Trump --- who has never been seen attending a regular religious service, either before, during, or after his Presidency --- would be the preferred candidate for a huge part of the religious community? Pagitt has a bunch of thoughts on all of this today.

"What's really going on is that the Democratic Party has had a pattern and reputation for not wanting religious voters," he tells me. "Kamala Harris is changing that. Joe Biden was changing that. Barack Obama worked to change that. But what Donald Trump exploited was this idea --- you hear him say, 'Democrats hate you religious people' --- somehow making out evangelicals to be both the rightful heirs of this nation as Christian Nationalists, but then also the persecuted minority. And somehow they get to hold both of these views."

Pagitt asserts that many Christians have, just by dint of birth, become Republican voters over the years. Because, as he says, "We don't know how to talk about faith in politics in the United States. We've been struggling with it since the founding of the country. We've never been good at it."

"But it doesn't have to be that way," he says. "Forty-four years ago, Jimmy Carter was an evangelical pastor from Georgia. He got 60% of the evangelical vote. In a lot of ways, the Democratic structure said to Republicans, 'You can have the religious white voters, we'll take the other voters.' That would be fine with me if we didn't keep electing someone like Donald Trump."

"The only reason we are out here, trying to get faith voters to consider voting for a Democrat for the first time in their life, is because this country cannot stand having Donald Trump have the power of the Presidency in his hand ever again."

Pagitt and his group have arguably made inroads. They are able to show deeply religious communities where they spent time in 2020 that swung radically in favor of Democrats after voting for Trump in 2016. He tells me that he believes their work can be critical in helping to do that again elsewhere, including in some of the most religious communities, where winning over a small subset of the electorate may be key to winning in marginal races for Congress and even the Presidency.

"There's an awful lot of people who have been told their whole life that Democrats are the enemy, and they're realizing they're not. But behavioral change is extremely slow," he explains today. "We know that three things always have to be in place when someone makes a behavioral change, whether that's doing a new diet or changing your voting habits."

"You have to take in some kind of new information that makes you think, 'Maybe I should do something different.' You need someone to invite you to actually behave differently based on that information. And then you need a community to participate in where people like you do that new thing. So many of these people, they don't have that. So we try to create that for them and let them know it's okay. It seems so rudimentary, but I've watched people with tears in their eyes when we say to them, 'If you choose to vote for a Democrat, first of all, it doesn't make you one. But even if it did, you're going to be okay. Your faith is still going to be alive.'"

We had a lot to talk about with Pagitt on today's show around all of this that I suspect you'll find enlightening. I know I did!...

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We're all over the place on today's BradCast, as things seem to be speeding up exponentially as Election Day draws near. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among our stories today...

• On Wednesday, the Dept. of Justice filed an indictment against two members of the Russia's state media outlet known as RT for their part in a scheme that covertly paid some $10 million to rightwing media influencers to help spread Russian propaganda via an American-looking website media company based in Tennessee. Among the willing dupes or useful idiots, take your pick, who profited from the scheme to the tune of millions of dollars: popular rightwingers like Tim Pool, Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin (who actually used to call himself a "progressive" when we worked with him years ago at The Young Turks!) Their Kremlin-approved-and-encouraged lies about Russia and Ukraine and much more were spread far and wide from them to Elon Musk, Donald Trump and many others (including far too many on the Left!), in a far-reaching plot meant to cause division in the U.S. and disrupt our electoral system to the benefit of Trump. It was all helped along by those who are apparently all too willing to sell out the U.S. in exchange for power and/or money and/or just to be one of the cool anti-establishment rebel kids out there. We break it all down for ya today.

• Lifelong rock-ribbed Republican conservative, former top member of House GOP Leadership, and daughter of Dick, Liz Cheney announced her intention in North Carolina on Wednesday to do the right thing by voting for Kamala Harris this year. I say "right thing" because, for those Republicans who truly oppose Donald Trump, if they really want to help keep him out of power, the best way is to cast their vote for Harris, as opposed to feebly writing-in Ronald Reagan or some such cowardly measure that only ultimately serves to help Trump regain power.

• Aside from standing up for democracy, the rule of law, and the Constitution by voting for Harris, Cheney might also have noticed that Kamala Harris popular economic policies are more likely to grow the economy than Trump's various schemes. His poor economic showing during his term in office makes that clear enough. But, if you need further encouragement that Harris' policies will be better for the economy than Trump's moving forward, check out what the economists at that lefty, pinko outfit Goldman-Sachs had to say about it this week. Turns out, "Comrade Kamala" (as Trump absurdly likes to call her), is the worst communist ever!

• The U.S. House returns from its August break on Monday for a short session before breaking again for the election. But they've got another "fiscal cliff" ahead of them, with a government funding deadline at the end of this month. Apparently, Donald Trump is encouraging House Speaker Mike Johnson to threaten another shutdown before the election, unless Dems agree to adopt the SAVE Act, a bill that would require proof of citizenship when registering to vote, despite the fact that it is already unlawful for non-citizens to vote in federal elections (and ID is already required for all voters who register in all 50 states under federal law). But, sure, go for it, Mike! I'm sure it'll work out just fine for you guys.

• Pretending there is massive voter fraud being carried out by non-citizens appears to be the GOP's fake news claim of this election year (helped along by all of those folks getting sweet sweet Russian money to lie to that end, and those who choose to believe them). In North Carolina last week, the state and national Republican Party filed yet another lawsuit in hopes of popularizing that claim, despite the complete lack of evidence for it. In this suit, they are claiming that some 225,000 voters in the state's voter registration database did not supply a driver's license or social security number when they registered and, therefore, might be "illegal aliens" voting. They want them all to be removed from the rolls and forced to re-register, even though the election is now just weeks away and Mail-in voting begins this weekend in NC. But there are a few (a whole bunch, actually) problems with their claims and suggested remedy, as we explain on today's program. That said, Republicans know about those problems --- and don't care. They aren't filing these lawsuits to win them. They are filing them to help them try and steal the election, if necessary, next January 6th.

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, amid a sweltering heat wave here in Southern California; a record heat wave in Phoenix; record humidity recorded over much of the rest of the country all summer long; and other both good and terrible climate and environmental news items, as usual...

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Marveling at the remarkably positive vibe emerging from the recent Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch observed:

That "new power dynamic" Bunch references is embodied in Vice President Kamala Harris' open alignment with the economic needs of the vast majority of Americans who make up the working and middle classes.

Whether or not the recommendation from Sen. Bernie Sanders, this nation's most progressive Senator, was a factor, it is clear that Harris' decision to pick one of the nation's most progressive Governors, Tim Walz of Minnesota --- a governor who gleefully signed a bill for free breakfast and lunch for all school children into law --- as her Vice-Presidential pick, reflects her commitment to progressive values.

As Georgia's Republican former Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan made clear during his DNC speech, there's no need for Harris to move to the right to attract voters from outside of the progressive realm. The threat to democracy posed by Donald Trump, Project 2025 and the MAGA cult, along with the Democrats' commitment to "freedom", "patriotism" and respect for the rule of law, will be enough to attract honest conservative voters irrespective of whether they still call themselves Republicans or now describe themselves as either former Republicans or independents.

By adhering to her progressive economic values --- whether it comes to support for organized labor, an increase in the federal minimum wage, the expansion of social safety net programs, tax increases on the wealthy, the expansion of accessible health care and a crackdown on corporate price gouging --- Harris can not only maintain authenticity but also take advantage of the fact that an overwhelming majority of the American electorate both want and need such progressive economic policy initiatives...