Not that I hope to tip off our degenerate authoritarian oligarchy on today's BradCast. But if the Republican Party still believes in math (and it's unclear if they do), there was more very bad news for them in Tuesday's elections this week. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Unapologetically progressive Democratic candidate Aftyn Behn appears to have lost the Special Election race for the U.S. House in Tennessee's very "red", GOP-gerrymandered 7th Congressional District to stalwart Trump Republican Matt Van Epps on Tuesday. Unofficial numbers suggest she lost by about 9 points.

Sounds like a rout. But, in fact, it really wasn't. Trump won the district last year by 22 points, meaning there was a 13 point shift toward Democrats on Tuesday, precisely the average shift that we have seen toward Dems in all of the Special Elections for U.S. House this year. There are 14 counties in TN's 7th CD. Everyone of them shifted towards the left on Tuesday. That, after Republicans were forced to dump a lot of money into what should have been an easy contest on Tuesday.

While House Speaker Mike Johnson pretended not to be concerned about any of this --- "They were really trying to set the scenario that there's some sort of wave going on. There's not. We just proved that there's not." --- actual math really does suggest trouble ahead for the GOP in next year's critical 2026 midterm cycle.

With that average 13 point shift toward Democrats in special elections this year, we do a little bit of mathing on today's show. For example, last year, in the 2024 U.S. House general elections...

• 28 Republicans won their races by 10 percent or less.
• 64 of them won by 12 points or less.
• And a whopping 92 Republicans won by just 15 percent or less last year.

With a razor-thin 3 vote advantage heading into the new year, no wonder several GOP-controlled states are attempting panicked mid-decade gerrymanders, and that the corrupt Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court are likely to help them. But new maps may ultimately make their problems worse, not better, if this year's elections are any indication. Safe Republican districts made less safe with new gerrymanders to steal districts from Democratic voters may end up backfiring. Of course, I won't dismiss Democrats' ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory between now and next year. But when Johnson says, "This doesn't concern me at all," he is either lying, in denial or incredibly stupid. And he's not all that stupid.

"This is one of the biggest flashing red light warning signs we've seen yet for Republicans," a far more realistic GOP strategist observed last night. Much more on today's show.

As if that's not enough, in a stunning runoff election on Tuesday in Georgia, the Democratic candidate easily unseated the incumbent Republican Mayor in the suburban city of Roswell, outside of Atlanta. She will be the previously deep "red" city's first Democratic Mayor in nearly 30 years. But don't worry, Mike. All's well!

Also today, our disgusting racist President said a whole bunch of disgusting racist things at the White House on Tuesday about Somalia and the American Somali population in Minnesota and elsewhere, repeatedly describing them as "garbage", "people who don't work," and people who should "go back to where they came from." Where many of them came from is a war-torn nation in Africa, with thousands seeking refuge here in the 90s. Most of them are now American citizens, with many living in Minnesota, where Trump's degenerate federal jack-booted immigration thugs will reportedly be targeting them, specifically in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region, with upcoming raids.

State Governor Tim Walz --- who Trump last week described as "retarded" --- as well as the Minneapolis Mayor, its Chief of Police and many other officials and immigration advocates are vowing not to roll over to Trump's racist immigration hooliganism. Similar raids are reportedly being launched this week in New Orleans, where residents are also hoping to push back against Trump's increasingly unpopular thuggery however they can.

Finally today, Desi Doyen has our latest Green News Report (after we had to preempt yesterday), with news on the end of disappointing U.N. climate talks in Brazil; the rising death toll following two simultaneous climate change-fueled typhoons in Southeast Asia; and the Trump Administration's latest plans to pollute your air and poison your drinking water...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I can't believe we're covering any of this. But, on today's BradCast, we're sounding twin alarms about the President of the United State's explicit threats of wars against both Venezuela and...yes...Chicago. There must really be some bad shit on him in those Epstein Files! [Audio link to full shows follows this summary.]

You would think that when Donald Trump posts on social media on Saturday morning that "Chicago [is] about to find out why it's called the Department of WAR" with a photo of him in battle fatigues in front of attack helicopters, a burning Chicago skyline and the phrase "Chipocalypse Now" in the style of 1979's Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now, that the nation's major newspapers might report on it in their print editions on Sunday. But, nope. Apparently a threat by the U.S. President to invade another major U.S. city no longer even merits a notice in either the New York Times or Washington Post the next day.

Moreover, you'd think ten U.S. warships ordered down to Central America within missile range of Venezuela --- just days after Trump violated all international (and U.S.) law by bombing a speed boat he claims to have been filled with "narco-terrorists" carrying "massive amounts of drugs" (there is no public evidence of either) that we'd see screaming ALL CAPS front page headlines about a pending U.S. war in Central America across all of the nation's papers. I guess blatant war crimes admitted to by a President of the United States and the threat of an impending U.S. attack on yet another sovereign nation just doesn't spark the outrage from the "liberal media" that it used.

So, here we are. The guy who those same papers described as an "anti-war" Presidential candidate is still playing them all like chumps as he threatens to unleash new wars both foreign and domestic.

Whatever is actually in those Epstein Files that he is refusing to release --- after promising to do so while running for President --- must be really really bad for him. And while everyone is looking for just two more Republicans with the courage to sign on to a Discharge Petition to force a vote in the U.S. House on the release of the criminal files on sex traffickers and Trump pedophile pals Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, perhaps they should look at the Democrats who are likely to win two upcoming Special Elections this month instead. Signatures from those two Democrats, once seated in the House (unless somehow blocked by Republicans from doing so), would be enough to trigger that vote. Could be a very interesting month.

We cover all of that and more on today's show, and open the phones to a bunch of listeners with their own thoughts on all of this madness.

Please tune in and let me know if you can make any more sense of this moment than I can. I welcome all the help and good sense you can offer. God knows ain't any Trump supporters calling in to defend him anymore. So make of that what you will...

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We've got another mix of good, horrible and hilarious news for the world and the nation today. Ya know, just another day on The BradCast. [Audio link to full show follows summary.]

Tune in for the juiciest of details, as I'm short on time this evening, but among our stories today...

• The U.N.'s International Court of Justice (ICJ), sometimes known as the world court, issued a landmark climate change-related ruling on Wednesday. The unanimous decision --- finding, among other things, that a healthy environment is, indeed, a human right --- comes in response to a lawsuit brought by the island nation of Vanuatu. The tiny South Pacific state is already facing an existential threat from a convergence of brutal, climate-driven forces, including quickly rising seas, flooded coastal communities preparing to migrate inland, saltwater contaminated drinking water, a dying coral reef system and multiple Category 4+ cyclones in recent years. The ICJ determined that wealthy countries, and the private companies within them (which those nations are accountable for), must abide by international commitments to curb planet warming gasses or risk having to pay restitution and compensation to poorer nations that are not responsible for the consequences of decades of unfettered burning of fossil fuels. The surprisingly good unanimous ruling, confirming again the existential threat of climate change, is likely to be cited in thousands of climate-related lawsuits currently working their way through courts in some 60 nations around the world.

• Back here in the U.S. --- historically the world's largest emitter of climate warming gasses through the burning of fossil fuels --- the Trump Administration is currently in the process of undermining the Biden Administration's transition to cheaper, clean, renewable energy as called for by the IJC. Making matters even worse, this week, Trump's FEMA rejected Maryland's application for about $16 million in federal disaster aid following extraordinary flooding caused by climate-driven extreme rainfall in May. Trump's rejection of disaster assistance to a state which voted for his opponent in last year's Presidential election, came the day after the petty little tyrant approved FEMA aid to four other states that did vote him. For the record, the most affected counties in MD, are heavily Republican-leaning.

• Donald Trump's ham-fisted attempted cover-up of his longtime friendship with the late sex-trafficking pedophile Jeffrey Epstein continues to drive the news out of D.C. this week. We've got a lot to cover on this particular beat today, as we catch up with a deposition from 2010 in which Epstein was asked about whether he and Trump "socialized" with girls under the age of 18; as the Wall Street Journal reports that Trump was informed by his Attorney General in May that he was named "multiple times" in the "Epstein Files" (which he directly lied about to reporters just last week); as several MAGA Republicans in Congress vote to subpoena the DOJ for Epstein documents and convicted Epstein accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, for testimony; and as Trump sends his criminal defense attorney turned #2 at DOJ down to speak to Maxwell in Florida...for some reason. We've got a ton of stuff on all of that and related news today, as we try to explain what is and isn't going on, and set expectations for where things are likely headed in this matter.

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with more on Wednesday's landmark world court ruling; new U.N. analyses finding that cheap, clean, renewable energy is booming and at a tipping point around the globe, if not yet here in the U.S. thanks to a Trump Administration working hard to Make America Polluted Again...

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We've got a bit more religion-related news than usual on today's BradCast. But it's not to celebrate the new Papal Conclave underway as of today at the Vatican. It's because rightwingers in the U.S. are using phony claims of "religious bias" to rewrite Constitutional rights, freedoms, and the specific intentions of the Framers who wrote it. [Audio link to full story follows this summary.]

First up, before we get to our guest, some quick news, including some election news...

• After six months of trying to undermine democracy and invalidate tens of thousands of lawfully cast votes in North Carolina from last November's election, Republican Judge Jefferson Griffin has finally conceded, giving up his post-election challenge against Democratic incumbent Justice Allison Riggs who defeated him in last year's election for state Supreme Court by 734 votes. Just two days after a Trump-appointed federal judge declared Griffin's challenge --- attempting to change the rules of an election after the election --- to be unconstitutional, while giving him seven days to decide if he wanted to appeal, Griffin gave up the ghost. We've been covering the contest over the past six months and revisited its ugly details on yesterday's BradCast on the heels of Monday's federal court ruling. It took a while --- and revealed a lot of villains in the Republican Party and on the NC Supreme Court --- but Democracy has won this round, at least, in the last unsettled race of 2024.

• Speaking of Republican losers, despite an endorsement from the Vice President of the United States, J.D. Vance's half-brother, Republican Cory Bowman, was trounced on Tuesday by Aftab Pureval, the incumbent Democratic Mayor of Cincinnati in the city's mayoral primary. Pureval defeated Bowman by nearly 70 points (82.5% to 12.9%) in the three way race. As the top two vote-getters, however, both will go on to compete head-to-head in November's general election. Cincinnati hasn't elected a Republican Mayor since 1967 and they don't seem ready to do so again any time soon.

• On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court let its cruelty and corruption shine once again, by barring trans service members from serving in the military even while challenges are still underway in lower courts, despite many of those members serving openly and with distinction for years. That the Trump-packed SCOTUS would go along with his cruel mandate is not all that surprising. But the fact that they did so on an "emergency" basis, on the so-called "shadow docket", without explanation or briefing or oral argument, even as trans service members had been suing --- and winning --- at the lower court level, is particularly galling and cowardly. All three of the Court's liberal Justices dissented.

But, speaking of galling news from the High Court, last week, SCOTUS heard oral argument last week in Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, a case engineered by rightwingers to challenge --- really, to tear down --- the Constitution's First Amendment establishment clause meant to protect the separation of church and state.

The case involves a wannabe remote charter public school called St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. It would be run by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City in "deep red" Oklahoma. The state's Charter School Board narrowly approved its application for public funding, despite its plans for "the evangelizing mission of the Church," including "that God created persons male and female" and that those who reject the Holy Trinity will "end up in hell". That approval would mean that, as a certified public school, it would receive taxpayer dollars in support of that "mission" whether taxpayers agreed with it or not.

While the state's Republican Governor and Superintendent of Public Schools support the idea of publicly funding religious charter schools, both the state's Republican Attorney General and its Republican-majority Supreme Court decidedly do not. The state Supremes blocked St. Isidore's charter, citing both the First Amendment of the Constitution and state law which prohibits the expenditure of public money on any "sectarian institution" and requires that public schools be "free from sectarian control."

That, in a state which has, in recent years, reduced some K-12 schools to just four days a week for lack of public money in the wake of GOP tax cuts. If SCOTUS reverses the state Supreme Court, as appeared likely during last week's oral argument, money from secular public schools will be diverted to religious education. In fact, as my guest explains today, states across the nation are likely to be mandated to approve and pay for such religious institutions --- even schools indoctrinating children into religions that today's proponents of St. Isidore may not wish to see funded by taxpayer dollars.

We're joined today by DANIEL MACH, Director of the ACLU's Program for Freedom of Religion and Belief, which is supporting opponents of this radical assault on 250 years of American separation of church and state. The ACLU's coalition includes Oklahoma faith leaders, parents, and public-education advocates, including national charter school advocate associations which object to turning public schools into Sunday schools.

"Oklahoma officials are not just blurring these lines separating church and state," Mach wrote when sending up alarm bells about this case back in 2023, "they’re attempting to completely eviscerate them." Our friend, legal journalist Mark Joseph Stern of Slate argues that this case is likely to "bury what remains of church–state separation, forcing every American to subsidize the indoctrination of children into faiths they may not share. And it would further enfeeble secular public education, diverting billions of dollars away from inclusive public schools toward religious academies that openly discriminate against those outside their faith."

But there is hope. A little. Justice Amy Coney Barret has recused from the case, meaning that if Chief Justice John Roberts --- the only Justice who appeared to be at least moderately uncertain of his final verdict last week --- decides in favor of the Oklahoma Supreme Court, then SCOTUS would be tied 4 to 4 and the Oklahoma high court's ruling would stand.

"This was a strong decision by the Oklahoma Supreme Court," Mach tells me today, explaining that their opinion "wasn't even close", pronouncing the Charter Board's decision as "so far beyond the pale...so far beyond what we have decided as a country that our government should and should not be doing" that even a Republican high court in a very Republican state had to say no to it.

"It's an interesting moment," says Mach, "because we have a conservative movement and an extremely conservative U.S. Supreme Court that supposedly cares about states' rights. But a ruling for the Catholic school here would be giving no weight to Oklahoma state statutes, the Oklahoma constitution, the Oklahoma Republican Attorney General, and the state Supreme Court, which interpreted its own state law. All of which made absolutely clear that charter schools in Oklahoma are public schools."

There is much more in my conversation with Mach today that you'll want to tune in for, much of which defies conventional wisdom about all of this...even if it may not be enough to prevent the corrupted U.S. Supreme Court from further undermining the Constitution and the original intention of its Framers. That, he says, would be not just a "seismic shift in the law", but "a ground-breaking disaster"...

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Well, we're back live on today's BradCast, like it or not. With so much going on we've got no choice but to run right into the middle of the freeway and pray for the best. The result? Not a bad show, if I say so myself. [Audio link to full show follows this tweet.]

After a quick round-up, needed for context today, of just some of last week's madness while we were otherwise off for a much-needed break, we pick up with...

• The opinion [PDF] of the very conservative Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, who, last week in the case of the mistakenly-deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia warned that the Trump Administration's refusal to bring the man home to Maryland from a gulag in El Salvador "should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear." Judge Wilkinson goes on to warn, among other things, that "The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order," and that "If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?"

• But Donald Trump's tyranny is now here, in full flower, which one Republican U.S. Senator admitted recently has all of her colleagues "afraid", even if most are still too afraid to say as much out loud.

• SCOTUS was literally forced to awaken from bed over the weekend to issue an extraordinary, 7 to 2, middle-of-the-night order PDF to the Trump Administration, clarifying that no Venezuelan migrants being held in Texas may be deported under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 "until further order of this court." (If you're wondering who were the two Justices in favor of sending migrants to foreign gulags without benefit of any Constitutional due process, that would be Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas, of course.)

• And, by the way, Washington Post reported over the weekend that the 18 intelligence agencies comprising Trump's own National Intelligence Council concluded in an assessment earlier this month that the Venezuelan government is not directing an invasion of the U.S., as Trump has lied about in unlawfully invoking the Alien Enemies Act to deport migrants without due process.

• Trump's fiscal policies continue to be disastrous as well. The U.S. stock market plummeted yet again on Monday in response to Trump's tariff and trade war and his new threats of firing his own Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who Trump is now blaming for the fact that he crashed the U.S. economy with his own dumb trade war that few if any countries are apparently willing to negotiate with Trump about.

• Pope Francis, the world's first Latin American pontiff and a great champion of progressive causes including the fight against climate change and for environmental justice --- as Desi Doyen details today --- died on Monday at the age of 88 after a months-long illness and a brief meeting with Vice President J.D. Vance on Easter Sunday.

• That's not all we cover today, but it gives you an idea before we open up the phones to callers, callers, callers. Lot of them, including some with some very interesting thoughts and questions! Please tune in!...

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This one is really a debacle. It's likely criminal as well, on several levels, according to today's guest on The BradCast. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

You have likely heard by now about the group text chat that The Atlantic's Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg was somehow invited to over the commercially-available mobile phone app called Signal, in which top-level Trump Administration cabinet officials, including Donald Trump's Defense Secretary and former Fox 'News' weekend host, Pete Hegseth, discussed specific U.S. attack plans for bombing Yemen,

Goldberg detailed on Monday (free link) how he was invited into the group chat by Trump's National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz. Classified information was discussed in the conversation. But, while Goldberg knew better than to publish specifics, he explained: "What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing."

Other Signal accounts participating in the group included those for JD Vance (Vice President), Marco Rubio (Secretary of State), Tulsi Gabbard (Director of National Intelligence), Scott Bessent (Treasury Secretary), John Ratcliffe (CIA Director), Stephen Miller (Deputy White House Chief of Staff), Susie Wiles (White House Chief of Staff) and Steve Witkoff (Special Envoy to the Middle East). That, as NPR reported today, the Signal app was cited in a Dept. of Defense email last week to all Pentagon employees, warning of a "vulnerability" exploited by "Russian professional hacking groups" that makes the app unsuitable for use by the military, even for non-public UNclassified information.

As luck would have it, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee had a hearing already scheduled for today, with witnesses including Gabbard and Ratcliffe --- both members of the Signal chat in question --- and Kash Patel, Trump loyalist and wildly-unqualified FBI Director. While most Republicans on the Committee were interested in discussing anything but this matter, Dems were rightly laser focused on it, including the fact that Witkoff was apparently at the Kremlin for a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin this month when the text list, detailing plans to bomb Houthis in Yemen and reportedly revealing the identify of a senior CIA officer, were discussed.

We're joined today by our friend and longtime independent national security journalist MARCY WHEELER. In her piece today at Emptywheel.net, she detailed "Seven Reasons Trump's Entire National Security Team Should Resign in Disgrace" following the signal debacle. We step through each of those reasons with her today.

Wheeler was amazed that, even though the identities of everyone in the group were available to all members, nobody seemed to notice, or be troubled by, the inclusion of a journalist. Especially a journalist who Hegseth would go on to try and smear as "a deceitful and highly discredited, so-called journalist whose made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again." That, after Hegseth revealed classified war plans to him in the Signal chat and the White House has already confirmed the matter.

Wheeler charges that Trump's entire national security team in the group appears to have potentially violated Section F of the Espionage Act, which, in her words from her today, "makes it a crime to so negligently mishandle National Defense Information that someone not authorized to receive it does receive it."

"If you are so stupid as to share attack plans on a Signal thread that a journalist happens to be accidentally added to, that may be criminal," she tells me today, detailing how Section F of the Act bars the sharing of National Defense Information "through gross negligence", etc. "In other words, Pete Hegseth shares information about this attack with somebody not entitled. Because Pete Hegseth is so stupid, that might get you to [Section F]. And you had the entire national security establishment just sitting there watching Pete Hegseth do that!"

There is also the matter of violating both the Presidential Records Act and Federal Records Act by setting comments in the chat group to automatically delete after a week. Moreover, she observes, the fact that Trump claimed on Monday afternoon to know nothing about the matter, even after the story was published in The Atlantic, means that either critical NatSec information was withheld from the President, or he was simply lying when he claimed to have known nothing about it when asked for comment by a journalist at the White House. Wheeler argues that's "not plausible, because if he hadn't been told in advance, he would be firing [group chat member and Chief of Staff] Susie Wiles right now. He'd be firing Mike Waltz right now. JD Vance. He would be firing everybody who knew this was going to come out and didn't warn him. He hasn't fired any of them, so we have to assume he was lying when he pretended he didn't know anything about this." She goes on to add: "But if he didn't know anything about it, it means that he can't trust anyone around him. That all the people who are running his national security are not keeping him in the loop."

Also, the fact that Witkoff was in Russia, at the Kremlin, as a member of the group chat means that all of the accounts of other members on the list may also be compromised. "You bring a phone into Russia, they are going to compromise the phone. Sitting in the Kremlin with Vladimir Putin is really close to the top of the list of stupid things you can do with a phone when you're planning war strikes," says Wheeler. "The timing on it is quite clear. He was in the Kremlin when that list was started. Was his phone compromised? And if so, what else was on his phone? That's, to my mind, one of the most pressing questions Democrats should be asking every minute."

Tune in for much more on all of this from Marcy, including the outrage that FBI Director Kash Patel claimed during his Senate Intel Committee testimony today that he only just learned about the matter himself late last night, and that Trump's Attorney General, Pam Bondi, is likely too busy doing Fox "News" hits to be troubled with enforcing the rule of law against fellow members of the Trump Administration, no matter how much danger they may have placed the country in with their negligence and/or incompetence.

ALSO ON TODAY'S PROGRAM: Desi Doyen is here with our latest Green News Report, covering a new round of wildfires in the very dry, very windy Carolinas this week, as Trump dismantles FEMA; a new warning about dwindling fresh water supplies thanks to disappearing glaciers as the climate continues to warm; and the fossil fuel industry calling in IOUs from Congress to block liability lawsuits from being filed against them for their roles in knowingly causing our worsening climate crisis...

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At the Oval Office on Friday between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the whole world saw a President clearly terrified of Vladimir Putin and Russia. But it wasn't President Zelenskyy, it was clearly President Trump. Before we get there today, however, some alarming news on today's BradCast on what appears to be enormous planned and/or threatened cuts at Social Security. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Last week, our friend DAVID DAYEN, investigative financial journalist, author and Executive Editor of The American Prospect, was first to break the news of the Trump Administration making plans to cut the Social Security Administration (SSA) by half. That would mean, at a minimum, layoffs of tens of thousands of employees at the notoriously efficient agency which has never missed or even had a late payment since its founding in 1935 and whose administrative expenses are less than 1% of their total budget.

To achieve the type of massive cuts the Administration is actively devising, according to emails obtained by Dayen, it would likely have to include the closure of SSA field offices around the country, which service about 120,000 visitors each day. That includes signing up beneficiaries for various SSA services that amount to checks sent to some 73 million retired and disabled Americans who receive about $126 billion in social safety net payments from the agency each month.

On the heels of Dayen's reporting, most of the corporate media outlets have now confirmed plans by the Trump Administration to cut at least 7,000 workers. Dayen, who joins us on today's program, however, is standing by his reporting on the efforts being drawn up to slash much deeper and wider than that. The cuts, according to experts --- including the SSA's former Commissioner under President Biden --- could, within the coming months, result in much-needed payments to beneficiaries being delayed, at a minimum.

Former SSA Commissioner and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley told CNBC over the weekend: "Ultimately, you’re going to see the system collapse and an interruption of benefits. I believe you will see that within the next 30 to 90 days." He advised that "people should start saving now."

Citing the fact that the agency is already under-staffed and operating with with 7,000 fewer employees than just a decade ago, Dayen tells me "there's about a 50-year low in terms of the number of employees at the Social Security Administration."

"Even before Donald Trump was inaugurated, people would say [SSA] was in an operational crisis from a lack of manpower to do the large and important work that needs to to be done. Every day in America, 10,000 people turn 65. The needs on the disability front have gone up year after year after year. There simply aren't enough people to process systems, many of which are still manual."

"Republicans have refused to fund the system whenever they get into power in the government, in even a small way. They force these cuts. It's a one-way ratchet, where the number of the workforce never gets rebuilt," Dayen explains, alluding to "lies" by folks like Elon Musk and House Speaker Mike Johnson who claim, without evidence, that SSA is a hotbed of "waste, fraud and abuse."

When these cuts are put in place, and field offices shut down, beneficiaries may be forced to travel hundreds of miles to have an in-person meeting or hearing regarding their benefits. Even phone services are likely to be cut. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump's Acting SSA chief has "proposed using [private, for-profit] call center employees to replace SSA workers who staff an 800 number for beneficiaries."

"It sounds like Privatization 101, doesn't it?," quips Dayen. "This is what is done when privatizers get in power. They cut spending. They cut the workforce to make it look like they're slimming down the federal government. But those tasks still have to be performed, and they're usually performed by outside contractors who are more expensive than if you would do the actual activity in house."

Much more on all of that from Dayen today. Please tune in.

NEXT... We dive into Friday's shameful televised Oval Office meeting between President Trump, Vice-President Vance and Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, where Trump and Vance berated the heroic Ukrainian leader for not being grateful enough to them. Or something. In what devolved into a shouting match, at least on Trump and Vance's part, both of the American leaders took to echoing Russian propaganda and talking points at Zelenskyy after he'd flown to the U.S. to sign an agreement (incredibly enough) to give away half of his nation's natural resources to the U.S. in order to repay previous military support. All in the hopes of eventually coming to a peace agreement with Russia.

But, the Ukrainian President insisted, the U.S. needed to offer security guarantees if his country was to agree to any sort of ceasefire, given that Vladimir Putin had violated such agreements dozens of times in the paste, including the 1994 agreement when Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons arsenal after the fall of the Soviet Union. In exchange, the pact between Ukraine, Russia, U.S., U.K., Germany, France and China guaranteed that Ukraine's sovereign borders would remain protected and secure. That is just one of many agreements broken by Putin. Thus, any such deal with Russia's belligerent strongman would require security assurances from Ukraine's allies...which the U.S., at least until Friday, has long been.

Shortly after Trump's televised Oval Office spectacle, Zelenskyy was sent away from the White House, which cancelled the planned signing of the resources agreement between the U.S. and Ukraine.

It was, as the New York Times' conservative Brett Stephens described it, "A Day of American Infamy", as Trump seemed to officially change sides in the war to support Russia and Putin...for some reason...after 80 post-WWII years of an unbreakable alliance with Western Europe.

Callers ring in today with thoughts on Friday's spectacle and more. But, of course, those listeners who, in recent years, were willing to call in to blame the U.S. and Ukraine for Russia's invasion, were nowhere to be found...

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On today's BradCast: A spotlight on Trump's latest scheme to make election crimes --- specifically his own, but Elon's too --- unaccountable again. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Last Friday, the Chair of the Federal Election Commission, Ellen Weintraub, a Democrat, posted a letter she received from the White House informing her that she had been fired. It was the first time in the FEC's 50 year history that any Commissioner had been fired by a President. It is, also illegal. Weintraub, appointed by George W. Bush in 2007, is challenging the unlawful firing. She has, in the meantime, been locked out of her office, her email, her work computer and banned from the FEC building where she has worked without incident or scandal for 18 years. There is a legal way to replace Commissioners. This is not it.

Today we are joined by former FEC Chair ANN RAVEL, appointed by Barack Obama, she served on the Commission with Weintraub from 2014 through 2017. She also served as Deputy Asst. Attorney General at DoJ and is a professor at UC-Berkley School of Law.

Over the weekend, Ravel told me via email that she thought Trump's attempt to fire Weintraub was "insane" and saw it as one more indication that the President has "no moral compass". Today, she offers more details on just how outrageous and unprecedented this effort is. We also discuss why Trump would want to make sure there was no Democrat in charge of the FEC, which had a 3 to 2 imbalance in favor of Republican members before Weintraub was theoretically removed last week.

"There were approximately 20, maybe more, complaints that had been filed against Trump at the FEC," Ravel explains today. "There were dozens of complaints related to the 2024 elections --- not only against Trump and Musk, who spent nearly $300 million dollars to help the President get elected --- but also complaints that Trump had filed himself against Kamala Harris, media outlets and the like. And that is undoubtedly the reason why Trump wanted to eliminate the chair."

"The FEC is not a biased commission," Ravel argues. "It is balanced in terms of party, and there's always been adherence to the law at the FEC, given that it was established during the Watergate scandal. That's the reason for the bipartisan structure."

The Commission's usual 3 to 3 partisan make-up has, in recent years, resulted in tie votes where no action is taken by the FEC. She tells me today that there were no instances, during her tenure, of a Republican Commissioner crossing party lines to vote with Democratic appointees, though the reverse was not unusual. Despite all of that, Ravel says she still believes in the institution even if it could benefit from reforms --- though not like this.

"I feel really strongly about the disclosure that is required by the law at the Federal Election Commission, because it's very important for the American public, when they are voting, or just generally, to know who is behind the campaigns. Who is spending billions of dollars in trying to influence certain things," she tells me. "I really do think that he was trying to subvert the FEC at a critical moment, because of all of the campaign finance violations relating to Trump and his supporters."

Tune in today for much more from Ravel!

Also today, after my discussion last week with financial journalist David Dayen about the Administration's efforts to kneecap the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, things got much worse for the embattled federal agency over the weekend. The CFPB was created in 2008 in response to the sub-prime mortgage scandal that crashed the economy. As the only federal agency whose prime mission is working on behalf of consumers, the Bureau has held Big Banks and sleazy Payday Lenders to account over its short life, returning tens of billions of dollars to ripped off customers in the bargain. So, of course, Republicans have been trying to shut it down since its inception.

Over the weekend, its new Acting Director, Russell Vought --- Trump's newly-sworn in Director of the White House Office of Management Budget (OMB) and a key architect of Project 2025 --- ordered "all" activity by the Bureau to cease, including "all supervision and examination activity." He has also killed the CFPB's web page (which now reads "File Not Found"), and ordered their D.C. headquarters closed as of today. Only an act of Congress can lawfully shut down the CFPB, but the lawless Trump Administration is trying to do so anyway.

In response, the union which represents some 1,600 workers at the CFPB filed two lawsuits on Sunday night. But will Trump follow the orders of any court that issues rulings he doesn't like? A post to Twitter/X by Vice President J.D. Vance on Sunday night suggested he might not. A federal District Court judge in Rhode Island on Monday found that the Administration has already failed to comply with "the plain text" of his previous "clear and unambiguous" order to release billions of dollars in federal grants and other funding that the OMB had attempted to freeze two weeks ago.

I hope ya'll are ready for a very real, very serious Constitutional crisis in the days ahead, when the Administration simply decides to stop following the orders of any court. Because it sure is starting to feel like that is exactly where this nightmare is ultimately going...

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CORRECTION, 10:05pm PT: On the show posted above, my guest Ann Ravel mentioned that she had heard FEC Chair Ellen Weintraub had been removed from her office by U.S. Marines, by force, after her unlawful firing by Trump. In fact, though Weintraub is challenging the removal, that story of her being physically removed from her office, appears to be entirely fake, circulated by Rightwingers who also claimed, in this false telling, that Trump had discovered Weintraub had committed massive election fraud in 2020 and 2024. Ann told me she hadn't seen that part of the false claim, but apologized a few hours after airtime via email for being "sucked into" the disinfo regarding the Marines removing Weintraub from the building. In fact, she touched base with Weintraub directly to confirm that that that part of the story was completely false. My apologies for the error!

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On Day 2 of the second corrupt Trump Presidency, we catch up on today's BradCast with the destruction he wrought (or attempted to) on Day 1, just hours after he became the first convicted felon, adjudicated rapist and adjudicated insurrectionist to be sworn in as President of the United States. And it all just happens to come, coincidentally, on the 15th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's horrific 2010 Citizens United decision, which helped make so much of this day possible. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Given Donald Trump's "flood the zone" strategy, including scores of Executive Orders, Actions, Directives and Memoranda signed on Monday (much of it for show, some of it dangerously real) we try to cover a lot in a very short time on today's program. I'll do my best to quickly summarize at least some of it here...

• Since MLK Day was largely preempted by yesterday's Inauguration (and our 2025 Inauguration Counter-Programming Special --- thanks to many for the kind words about it!), we begin today with a piece of Martin Luther King's 1967 "Blue Print" speech to a group of students in Philadelphia that, surprisingly, served as inspiration for us today!

• Please note: It has now been more than "24 hours" since Trump was sworn in (and since he was elected in November, since that was the original, oft-repeated promise) and Russia's horrific war on Ukraine is still raging anyway.

• Trump signed scores of orders on Monday night, though the most immediately substantive was his "full, complete and unconditional" blanket pardons for about 1,500 January 6, 2021 insurrectionists and seditionist --- including the leaders of the far-right paramilitary groups Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who were found guilty and sentenced to more than a decade in prison for Seditious Conspiracy, in their treasonous (if failed) attempt to help Trump steal the 2020 election. Many of the violent domestic extremists who were released from prison today attacked law enforcement officers on that awful day at the U.S. Capitol, "armed with firearms, stun guns, flagpoles, fire extinguishers, bike racks, batons, a metal whip, office furniture, pepper spray, bear spray, a tomahawk ax, a hatchet, a hockey stick, knuckle gloves, a baseball bat, a massive 'Trump' billboard, 'Trump' flags, a pitchfork, pieces of lumber, crutches and even an explosive device." But all is now, apparently, forgiven with Trump's pardons, despite the assertion on Fox "News" just one week ago by then Vice President-elect J.D. Vance that "Obviously, if you committed violence on that day, you shouldn't be pardoned." But that was a week ago, and this is now, when, with today's release of the January 6 terrorists, Trump now has his own domestic paramilitary if and when needed. And those who testified against them originally, including law enforcement officers, are now, understandably, very concerned for their own personal safety.

• Trump signed an Executive Order declaring a "national emergency" and "invasion" at the southern border, where there is no such emergency or invasion. But now he has a pretext to invoke the military wherever it may be needed to round up, arrest, detain, imprison and deport undocumented migrants and asylum seekers, among other things.

• Trump signed an Executive Order claiming to end the 14th Amendment's Constitutional right to birthright citizenship, even as historian and tyranny expert Timothy Snyder helpfully reminds us: "A president’s executive order cannot undo a law or a Supreme Court decision, let alone a provision of the Constitution. Forget that and you do have a dictatorship on day one." That EO is already being challenged in court by 24 states.

• Trump, who miserably failed to handle the COVID pandemic, which killed more than a million Americans, signed a declaration withdrawing> from the World Health Organization.

• Trump signed an Executive Order revoking Joe Biden's landmark 2023 Executive Order on AI safety.

• Trump signed Executive Orders "protecting women from radical gender ideology" and declaring there are only two immutable sexes: male and female, as determined by whether they are born with eggs or sperm.

• Trump revoked a 2021 Biden Executive Order calling on federal agencies to promote voting access and expand voter registration. Trump and Republicans will have none of that! What do you think this is, a representative Constitutional democracy or something?!

• Trump also rescinded a Biden era Executive Order that had repealed an Executive Order from Trump's first term that attempted to game the U.S. Census for partisan gain by, among other things, attempting to exclude non-citizen residents of the U.S. from the count of the "whole number of persons in each state", as per the 14th Amendment, for the first time since the very first Census was carried out in 1790.

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our first Green News Report of the second Trump era, with more on his Day 1 efforts to use Executive Orders to undermine the climate, the health of Americans, the livability of the planet, and the U.S. economy along with it. Trump signed Executive Orders declaring a "national energy emergency" (which is not a thing that actually exists); to stop all off-shore wind projects (what happened to that "national energy emergency"?!); and to join with Iran, Libya and Yemen by withdrawing (yet again) from the landmark, voluntary Paris Climate Agreement, a move that could end up costing the U.S. hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars via lost leadership, technology and manufacturing of clean, renewable energy...

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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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Tick-tock. Time is running out for all of the Trump scams, as detailed on today's BradCast. Unless, of course, he wins on November 5th --- or has more success stealing the Presidential election this year than he did in 2020. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among the Trump scams, rackets and accountability for having fallen for them on today's program...

• Melania Trump, according to her new book, is virulently in favor of abortion rights. According to her publisher, she also wanted $250,000 to be interviewed by CNN.

• You know about many of Donald Trump's legendarily failed rackets from the old days: Trump University, Trump Steaks, Trump Water, Trump Vodka, Trump Casinos, just to name a few. More recently, during the time he's been running for President again, there's been Trump Sneakers, Trump Bibles, Trump Digital Trading Cards, Trump Coins, Trump Cryptocurrency and, introduced just last Friday, "Swiss-made" Trump Watches. He's selling them for $100,000 a pop! Even though, according to experts, they appear to be Chinese-made crap, if they even exist, and appear just as likely to be an open invitation to foreign influence peddling and money laundering. We explain.

• All of the above enumerated rackets, by the way, are private rackets. Any profits from them do not go to his Presidential Campaign, but straight into Donald Trump's pocket. And so --- according to the new 165-page filing [PDF] by Special Counsel Jack Smith, unsealed by U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan on Wednesday afternoon --- was Trump's attempt to steal the 2020 election. New evidence in the filing from prosecutors in his 4-count federal indictment in D.C., further details how the disgraced former President and convicted felon was fully aware that he'd lost the election in 2020, but didn't care. He was going to fight to steal it anyway. He also knew he had put Vice President Mike Pence's life in grave danger on January 6th, 2021. His response: "So, what?" And all of that, as prosecutors argue in their brief, was done in Trump's capacity as a private candidate for office. It was not done as part of his official duties as President. Smith's motion is meant to make that case in hopes of preventing the corrupted U.S. Supreme Court from dismissing the case on the basis of their absurd, anti-American, anti-Constitutional, made-up-from-whole-cloth ruling in Trump v. U.S. declaring criminal immunity to sitting Presidents for crimes committed as part of their "official" duties.

• In Colorado today, a state judge unleashed a brutal, if accurate, take-down of disgraced former Mesa County Clerk, Tina Peters during her sentencing hearing. Once a MAGA superstar, she is now a convicted felon on charges related to a criminal scheme to breach voting system software in her own County, based on false claims that fraud software was implanted in them to flip votes from Trump to Biden in 2020. The judge told Peters today: "I am convinced you would do it all over again if you could. You’re as defiant as any defendant this court has ever seen. You are no hero. You abused your position and you’re a charlatan." He called out her continuing claims of evidence-free fraud as "just more lies. No objective person believes them. No, at the end of the day, you cared about the jets, the podcasts and people fawning over you." He then sentenced her to nine years in prison before she was handcuffed and hauled out of the courtroom to immediately begin serving her time. See ya, Tina! May she be the first of many.

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, as the deadly disaster in six states continues to unfold in the U.S. Southeast following Hurricane Helene, which at least succeeded in finally helping to bring the issue of climate change to the top of Tuesday's Vice Presidential debate between Democrat Tim Walz and Republican J.D. Vance...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: After another climate disaster, climate change was finally front and center at the Vice Presidential Debate; PLUS: Ongoing climate disaster Hurricane Helene, now the second deadliest hurricane in modern U.S. history... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Two separate climate studies find that fossil fuel pollution intensified Hurricane Helene rainfall; Helene isn’t the first time Trump inserted politics into a natural disaster; At what price will oil shale drillers stop drilling?; Hurricane gives Democrats a climate opening in Florida; 'Everything is dead': Ukraine rushes to stem ecocide after Russia poisons river; American dams weren't built for today's climate-charged rains and floods... PLUS: Who will care for Americans left behind by climate migration?... and much, MUCH more! ...

We have, of course, Special Coverage on today's BradCast of Tuesday night's one and only Vice Presidential Debate, likely the last direct face-off between the two tickets before Election Day. [Audio link to full show follows below.]

It was somewhat disorienting to watch a Presidential ticket debate that didn't include name-calling, one-liner zingers and direct personal attacks. But with "Minnesota Nice" Democratic Governor Tim Walz taking on Ohio's Republican U.S. Senator J.D. Vance, who has an historically low favorability rating and a desperate need to improve his likeability among the electorate, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that the debate ended up coming across more like an olde tyme, pre-Trump Era (even pre-Rove Era) 1990s Presidential debate.

But Vance's politeness was there only to try and mask his well-documented, far-right, autocratic MAGA policy preferences on everything from abortion to gun safety to climate change to health care to his running-mate Donald Trump's violent attacks on our democracy, leading to evasive answers to questions from both the CBS News moderators and Walz himself on whether he believed, for instance, that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. "Tim, I'm focused on the future," Vance said, refusing to respond. "That is a damning non-answer," Walz replied, adding: "He lost the election. This is not a debate. It's not anything, anywhere other than in Donald Trump's world." It wouldn't be the only direct question that Vance deflected.

While a nervous Walz stumbled through some of the early moments of the debate, he regained his footing thereafter and displayed a command of facts, data and reality on a host of topics raised by the moderators. The Yale Law School trained Vance also proved to be a competent debater, deftly smoothing over his extremist, hard-right record and former persona as a Trump-opponent, while doing his best to focus his fire on Kamala Harris whenever possible...facts be damned.

We're joined today, as we frequently are on such occasions, by longtime friends and old school bloggers, HEATHER DIGBY PARTON of Salon and Hullabaloo, and 'DRIFTGLASS' of his eponymous blog and The Professional Left Podcast for some help in making sense of whatever played out in the New York City studios of CBS last night. (Reportedly it was in the same studio that Captain Kangaroo was taped. Make of that what you may.)

Both Parton and Driftglass agree that the two Vice Presidential candidates "accomplished what they set out to do" and, as Parton added, "as far as the niceness thing", that should be chalked up to the fact that "Donald Trump wasn't there being a jackass."

"Vance needed to soften all of the ridiculous extremist policies of himself and Donald Trump, and present himself as something other than a full-blown King Cobra, which I think he managed to do," she says, referencing her coverage of the debate at Salon today, in which she described Vance as possessing "all the charm and warmth of a King Cobra." On Tuesday night, she explains today, "he sounded semi-sane. I'm sure most people who haven't been following him probably thought, 'Oh, well, he's not that bad.'"

Both also agree that they would have have preferred to see a more aggressive Walz, even if that might not have been what the MN Guv needed to do to reach whichever undecided voters still exist out there. Instant polling of debate watchers released shortly afterward, gave Vance the slimmest of edges over Walz and a big bump in favorability for both candidates, even as Walz' favorability remains far higher than Vance's.

"Clearly they are executing a strategy," explains Driftglass. "I wanted to see [Walz] come out there with a sword in both hands and just scream, 'Liar!' for 90 minutes," when what he needs, "tactically, is to go out there and be the nicest guy you ever met. I think for the people he is striving to reach, it worked."

On the other hand, he continues, Vance's job was to "polish up the turd" that Trump put on the ticket "to make him look like a human being so that he can go out there and be the nice guy." The result, says Driftglass, "was a festival of whatabout-ism and lying."

We discuss much of the sane-washing, whatabout-ism, lies and damning non-answers to a host of topics raised during the 90-minute debate on Tuesday --- and Walz' responses to them --- in our very lively Special Coverage today...

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Another BradCast necessarily, but not wholly, derailed today by our climate crisis. We were able to open the phone lines to hear from a number of callers with their thoughts in advance of Tuesday's Vice-Presidential Debate. [Audio link to full show follows below this summary.]

We sidelined our planned coverage of Kamala Harris' address late last week on border security and immigration reform in Douglas, Arizona --- and Donald Trump's appalling response, calling her "mentally impaired" and "mentally disabled", before going on to lie (again) about crime statistics, and the fact that violent crime has plummeted under the Biden-Harris Administration --- in order to focus on the unspeakable disaster that continues to unfold in much of the U.S. Southeast.

The devastation and tragedy continues today, following Thursday's monster, Category 4 Hurricane Helene. It came ashore in the Big Bend region of Florida's panhandle, the third major tropical storm to do so in 13 months, and the second over the past two months alone. But Florida was hardly the only state affected, as death and destruction overtook parts of Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina and North Carolina as well. The latter, perhaps, having weathered the most damage, to date.

With over one hundred killed and more still missing, millions of survivors in the Southeast remain without power today. Some, particularly in Asheville, NC, remain physically cut off from the rest of the world, as the County's water treatment facility has failed and may be down for weeks.

Desi Doyen joins us for insight on the impacts and government response, and how denial of climate change by many elected officials from these states has exacerbated the destruction they are now hoping to claw their way out of today.

Then, there is the question of how this will affect the ability of voters in the most damaged areas --- particularly in NC, but in a number of other states as well --- to be able to cast their vote in this year's upcoming Presidential elections. In battleground NC, the U.S. Postal Service announced the suspension of service in a bunch of areas, making delivery of vote-by-mail ballots to voters and back again to the county, a question mark right now. That's particularly disturbing since state Republicans killed the the three-day grace period for ballots that were postmarked by Election Day to arrive at County to be counted after Election Day.

All of this also comes after NC Republicans spent years fighting to implement draconian Photo ID restrictions, despite a federal court describing the effort as targeting Black voters in the state with "almost surgical precision". So, what happens to those voters whose IDs blew away or were washed away in the wind and flooding? We've got a few details on all of the above today, and will continue to monitor the situation voters in the days and weeks ahead.

Then, we open up the phone lines to listeners in advance of Tuesday night's upcoming Vice Presidential debate between Democratic candidate Tim Walz and Republican J.D. Vance, asking what listeners expect and/or hope for from what appears to the last face-to-face debate between the Harris-Walz and Trump-Vance tickets. (Harris has agreed to another debate in October but, so far, Trump has declined. Probably smart considering the drubbing he took at their first and, so far, only debate in early September.) The debate host, CBS News, has announced good news for the Trump-Vance ticket, their moderators will not be fact-checking the candidates, both of whom, unlike Trump, are actually pretty good debaters...

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

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