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...

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

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

Today on The BradCast: He hasn't even been sworn in and he's already violating federal law. Surprised? In this case, the law that he's violating is one that he himself signed into law in 2019. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

The flood of wholly-unqualified appointments to cabinet level posts and other top appointments, since Donald Trump barely won a plurality (not a majority) of the national popular vote two weeks ago, continues. You're probably well familiar by now with the nominations of alleged child sex trafficker Rep. Matt Gaetz for U.S. Attorney General, the nation's top law enforcement official, and of Fox "News" weekend host Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary.

Neither have any experience leading huge organizations (or even medium-sized ones) with millions of employees --- or even any experience at all at the organizations they have been tapped by Trump to lead. And Hegseth, who was disqualified from serving in the National Guard during Joe Biden's 2021 inauguration as a potential "insider threat" due to his White Supremacist tattoos, was also revealed over the weekend by Washington Post to have paid off a woman to settle her accusations of sexual assault. He reportedly denies the rape allegation, if not the settlement.

The Trump Transition team claims they knew nothing about any of it when they selected Hegseth to head DoD. That should give you chills. Perhaps that's because the Transition team hired a private firm to vet Trump's nominees, rather than rely on the FBI, as they would be doing, had Trump complied with the bipartisan amendment to the Presidential Transition Act that he himself signed into law during his first term.

The measure also requires Presidential candidates to sign agreements with the White House and General Services Administration by October 1 before an election to begin the transition process with a publicly disclosed ethics policy and a public statement of how the future President plans to avoid conflicts of interest while serving, if elected. It allows for FBI vetting of incoming officials to grant access to classified documents and other material from the previous Administration at the nation's 438 Executive Branch agencies that they will control. Signing the agreement, as required by law, also includes a vow that Transition teams may take no more than $5,000 from any one person for certain transition costs, and that they will publicly disclose the names of those donors, among other things.

Donald Trump has, so far, refused to sign any of those agreements, alarming ethics, national security and legal experts as he begins defying federal law (again) even before taking office for a second term as President.

Joining us to explain the national security and other serious consequences and ramifications of all of this is LISA GRAVES. She is uniquely qualified to discuss these issues, given her service in all three branches of the federal government, as a Former Deputy Asst. Attorney General at the U.S. Justice Dept.; former Chief Counsel for nominations in the U.S. Senate; and former Deputy Chief for the Article III Judges Div. of the U.S. Court system. She now heads up the government watchdog and political research organization, True North Research.

We've got a lot to discuss with Graves today, beginning with what alarms her most about Trump's refusal to sign the Presidential Transition Act agreements. She identifies the avoidance of the FBI background investigation process as a "huge red warning flag."

"He does not want his cabinet appointees to go through the regular clearance process. The FBI background process is a long-standing part of the process," she tells me. It's "designed to help look at whether you have any issues that could made you blackmailable. That's part of it. For people who are seeking access to our most sensitive information, there are additional national security assessments. The investigators are looking at: do you have stability, trustworthiness, reliability, discretion. Do you have good character and judgment, honesty, and unquestionable loyalty to the United States to ensure that people who get positions of trust, with access to our most sensitive information, have unquestioned loyalty to the United States and not a foreign power."

Graves argues that "many" of Trump's nominees "have serious deficits in more than one of those categories." She also tells me that Trump's own "track record would raise serious concerns about his trustworthiness, his reliability, about his fitness for having access to information."

As to Trump's plans to force the U.S. Senate into recess, so that he may avoid the Constitution's mandate for "advice and consent" on top-level appoints, she describes the scheme as "un-American, unconstitutional, and unprecedented."

Tune in for much more insight from Graves on all of this on today's program.

FINALLY TODAY... A few more items related to the U.S. House Ethics Committee's ongoing deliberations into whether to release their report on the alleged paid sex trafficking by Gaetz of at least two different 17-year old girls. And then Desi Doyen joins us for details on Trump's newly announced nomination of fracking company CEO and climate change denier Chris Wright as the next chief of the Dept. of Energy. She also has some thoughts on Trump's Interior Dept. nominee, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, and on former Rep. Lee Zeldin who has been nominated to head the EPA, and how ALL of those men spell very bad news for our world's quickly-worsening climate crisis...

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

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

Computer scientists, cybersecurity experts and voting systems experts are concerned following last week's election. One of them joins us to explain on today's BradCast. Also, some personal recollections today, for reasons you will learn if you haven't already, of rightwing conspiracy-monger Alex Jones. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

As our friends at the nonpartisan government watchdog Free Speech for People announced on Wednesday, "A group of computer security experts have written to Vice President Kamala Harris to alert her to the fact that voting systems were breached by Trump allies in 2021 and 2022 and to urge her to seek recounts in key states to ensure election verification." The well-respected experts are hoping she will use her standing as candidate for President to seek hand recounts of paper ballots, or at least smaller so-called Risk Limiting Audits, to assure the results reported from the November 5, 2024 election are accurate as per voter intent. The vast majority of results reported at this time, and prior to certification, are tabulated only by computers --- either correctly or incorrectly. It's impossible to know without a hand examination.

The scientists and security expert concerns, as they explain in their 5-page missive [PDF] to the Veep, spring from the fact that Donald Trump supporters, following the 2020 election, unlawfully breached proprietary voting systems in a number of states, then copied and distributed the software to an unknown number of people.

We have reported here in great detail on a number of those breaches over the past several years, including most intensively in Coffee County, Georgia. There, a number of Trump supporters unlawfully accessed the statewide voting systems beginning on January 7, 2021 --- the day after the attempted U.S. Capitol insurrection --- and, as one of the participants noted on a recorded phone call, "scanned all the equipment, imaged all the hard drives and scanned every single ballot." Several members of that effort, including Trump attorney Sidney Powell, were eventually charged with felony crimes as part of Fulton County's sweeping racketeering case filed against Trump and 18 co-conspirators.

As the security experts explain in their letter to Harris, "Possessing copies of the voting system software enables bad actors to install it on electronic devices and to create their own working replicas of the voting systems, probe them, and develop exploits. Skilled adversaries can decompile the software to get a version of the source code, study it for vulnerabilities, and could even develop malware designed to be installed with minimal physical access to the voting equipment by unskilled accomplices to manipulate the vote counts. Attacks could also be launched by compromising the vendors responsible for programming systems before elections, enabling large-scale distribution of malware."

Following the discovery of the Coffee County breach in Georgia, the state's voting system vendor, Dominion, issued security patches, which the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) strongly urged jurisdictions around the nation which use those same systems to apply immediately. GA's Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger, however, refused to do so before the 2024 election.

"In the light of the breaches we ask that you formally request hand recounts in at least the states of Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania," the security experts request in their letter, while clarifying for those who may try to confuse them with Trump's "Stop the Stealers" who falsely claimed fraud in the 2020 election: "We have no evidence that the outcomes of the elections in those states were actually compromised as a result of the security breaches, and we are not suggesting that they were. But binding risk-limiting audits (RLAs) or hand recounts should be routine for all elections, especially when the stakes are high and the results are close. We believe that, under the current circumstances when massive software breaches are known and documented, recounts are necessary and appropriate to remove all potential doubt and to set an example for security best practices in all elections."

They urge Harris to move quickly because, while post-election audits of varying quality are carried out in a number of key states, many will be conducted only after certification and after the window to seek recounts that could affect election results has closed.

We're joined today by one of the seven letter writers, Professor DUNCAN BUELL Ph.D., NCR Chair Emeritus in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Carolina. Buell has been studying and serving as an expert on computerized electronic voting and tabulation systems for decades now.

"It's crap software," Buell tells me bluntly about systems made by ES&S, the nation's largest vendor, whose software he has studied most closely. "We know that most of the ES&S system has been exported to the web and is available to any and all bad actors. We know for sure that the Dominion system has been exported and is available. And we know from studies of both systems that they fail to provide the kinds of security issues that would prevent bad things from happening," he says.

"Given what we know, that all of this horrible software has gone into the wild, the prudent election director will take absolutely every possible method to verify that the results are, in fact, correct." But, Buell explains, unless ballots are examined by hand, "we don't know that the results we are seeing are actually the results."

He describes the software in question --- as Georgia's Attorney General did prior to the revelation of the Coffee County breach --- as "the keys to the kingdom" and argues that it is "absolutely bananas" that the tabulation of ballots and programming of the software is not verified.

We cover much more in our conversation, including a number of large, if still-unexplained tabulation errors (that were luckily discovered during canvassing) in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan; questions about a reportedly, unusually large number of so-called "bullet ballots" featuring just one single vote in last week's election, but only in battleground states; and several ways to improve the systems in the future to allow more oversight of election results to the public.

ALSO TODAY....

• Rightwing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' Infowars website, archives, equipment, studio and more have been obtained through auction by the beloved satirical website, The Onion. The purchase is part of a judge-ordered liquidation of Jones' assets following a hard-fought, nearly $1.5 billion judgement against him won by the families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, which Jones spent years decrying as a "hoax". I take the opportunity today to share a few of my own personal recollections of my run-ins with Jones in years past.

• And finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, as New York and New Jersey grapple with record drought and autumn wildfires, as climate advocates from around the globe seek solutions at the latest U.N. Climate Summit in the wake of the election of climate change denier Donald Trump, and his vows to roll back progress from the last four years...

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

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

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"...

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

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

Today was our first chance to open the phone lines to listeners on The BradCast, in the grim wake of last week's disastrous elections for the nation, the planet and democracy itself. It was, to say the least, a very lively show today, FWIW. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Before getting to callers today, a few items of note...

• First, an update on outstanding Senate races still to be determined. Though AP called Pennsylvania's U.S. Senate race for Republican hedge-fund CEO David McCormick last week against three-term incumbent Democratic Sen. Bill Casey, other outlets have not yet called it. McCormick is currently said to be leading Casey by about 40,000 votes out of nearly seven million cast, or just over one half of one percentage point. If the gap falls to less than half a point, with provisional and overseas ballots still being tallied, a recount will likely happen under state law. For the record, about 175,000 votes were reportedly cast in that race for third-party Senate candidates, including about 65,000 for the Green Party candidate.

• Over the weekend, media outlets called the U.S. Senate race in Nevada for the incumbent Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen, who appears to have defeated Republican challenger Sam Brown by about a point and a half.

• The last uncalled U.S. Senate race is in Arizona, where Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego leads Trump-endorsed election denier Kari Lake by a little more than two points. Republicans have flipped at least three Dem seats overall this year in the Senate, so far, and will have a majority of at least two seats in the upper chamber over the next two years to allow all of Donald Trump's appointments --- to his cabinet, other executive agencies and, of course, lifetime appointments to the federal judiciary --- to sail through for his second term in office. Many more details (and concerns) about the tabulation of those races on today's show

• As many have been writing in to ask about voting system concerns and various reported anomalies since last Tuesday, I take a few minutes today to discuss just some of the incidents currently of most note that I have been looking into and speaking with computer scientists, election integrity advocates, and folks on the ground about over the past week.

  For the moment, I don't see many signs of anything that could possibly change the results of the race, at least for President. Though I am looking at several incidents in several different swing states that deserve both explanation and a broader look to see if similar anomalies, still unreported, may have occurred elsewhere. For example, I have been eyeing whatever happened in both Centre County, Pennsylvania and Battle Creek (Calhoun County), Michigan, where some absentee ballots inexplicably, for now, failed to upload properly to the central Election Management System (EMS) server after being scanned by tabulators without incident.

  Yes, I am also looking at a host of other reported incidents and concerns, including the use of Elon Musk's Starlink system for Internet connectivity in some jurisdictions. Though, in theory, that would only effect Electronic Pollbooks at voting precincts, rather than ballots themselves. As noted on today's program, rest assured that I and others are still watching and digging where we can. And, my usual reminder here that sometimes it takes a while for tabulation errors to come to light after an election. Your problem reports that you believe I may not have seen are welcome in comments below, as always.

• Lastly, before we get to a lot of listener phone calls today, from all sorts of political perspectives, a few thoughts of my own about the unspeakable failure by our nation's media --- mainstream corporate media, social media, independent media --- to adequately inform voters about actual facts regarding this election. Facts including why it is that Donald Trump now poses an exponentially more acute threat to the nation and the world than he did during his first term. (I discuss several such reasons, including that his corrupted U.S. Supreme Court majority has, since his previous term, issued a ruling that Presidents may commit any crime they like while in office, and can never be held to account for it.) And how, if voters claimed they were voting for Trump in response to the economy and inflation under the Biden-Harris Administration, they were obviously wildly uninformed, misinformed and, too often, purposely disinformed about the facts on which they claimed to have voted, given the success of the Admin's record on the economy, versus the inflation and debt that is promised by very few economic policies that Trump promised during the campaign. Yeah, I've got a word or two to get out on all of that today. (And will, almost certainly, have many more in the future.)

• Finally, a bunch of callers ring in to let it all out on whoever and whatever they'd like to blame for what happened, or to discuss why they still seem pleased with their votes for third-parties (one caller supported RFK, Jr., who wasn't evening running!), or to simply call in, in the case of at least one Trump supporter, to gloat. Today was the day to let it all out with, likely, many such days to come --- along with the suffering and misery that awaits all of us now. Yes, even the Trump and RFK supporters, sadly, who seem to have no clue how bad this is all going to get...thanks to our failed media...

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

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

On today's BradCast we're hoping to help you get acclimated to the tsunami of "fraud" claims --- both real and fake, and what they mean and don't --- that are most likely about to come our way over the next few days and weeks...at least if Donald Trump loses to Kamala Harris in 2024 as he did to Joe Biden in 2020. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Pardon us, however, for beginning with a brief victory lap following our L.A. Dodgers' big World Series win last night, and a related sidebar as to what history tells us (or doesn't) about who is going to win the Presidential election based on who won the World Series.

Then, as to the coming "fraud" storm...among the many stories cited along the way today...

• A Minnesota woman this week was charged with three felony counts of voter fraud after forging her dead mother's signature on an absentee ballot to vote for Donald Trump.

• Six people were charged over the summer for submitting nearly two dozen fraudulent absentee ballots on behalf of a Republican City Council candidate in New York. How they got away with it and how they got caught. The candidate's 19-year old daughter was among those charged.

• In the battleground state of Michigan, election officials in August indicted four voters who allegedly voted twice --- first by absentee and then again at the polls --- in the state's Presidential primary earlier this year. Once again, as in all of these cases, they were caught and charged thanks to safe-guards built into the system. Of the more than 11.7 million votes cast in the state over the past several elections, according to Michigan's State Auditor General, 99.99% of ballots cast were NOT from double voters.

• In Mesa County, Colorado this week, officials announced they blocked an effort in the very Republican-leaning county to cast about a dozen absentee ballots, apparently stolen out of mailboxes in the Vote-by-Mail state. The state's signature-matching procedures uncovered the fraud scheme, though three fraudulent ballots slipped through the system before the crime was discovered. Mesa is the same county where former County Clerk, Tina Peters, was earlier this month sentenced to 9 years in prison on felony charges related to helping her MAGA friends break into the County's voting systems in the middle of the night after the 2020 election to copy proprietary software and distribute it across the Internet to other Trump supporters.

• Last month we reported on the story out of Arizona where both the RNC and the state Republican Party went to court to argue against the removal of some 98,000 voters from the state voting rolls who, due to a years-old glitch in Maricopa County's voter database, had no record of presenting Proof of Citizenship with their registrations, as required by state law. In that case, Republicans opposed the systematic voter purge that the state's Democratic Sec. of State didn't want to do, but felt he had to under state law. The Republicans correctly argued to the AZ Supreme Court that such purges, within 90-days of an election, were in violation of federal law. They made that argument after the SoS revealed that the majority of the potentially "non-citizen" voters to be removed were registered Republicans.

  Yet, this week, on Wednesday in Virginia, after a U.S. District Court Judge and federal Appeals Court last week blocked an attempt by the state's Republican Governor to purge some 1,600 registered voters under the premise that some might be non-citizens, the corrupted Republican U.S. Supreme Court majority allowed the unlawful systematic purge, ordered by Gov. Glenn Youngkin, to move forward. All three Democratic-appointed SCOTUS Justices dissented. One of the purged Virginians, a U.S. citizen who has lived there her entire life, called it "a very bad October surprise."

All of these stories today help us understand the difference between real and fake fraud claims; the difference between voter fraud and election fraud; how easily most such penny-ante fraud is caught and often prevented before it happens; and how Republicans this year, from Donald Trump on down through his minions and back up through his corrupted SCOTUS, are hoping to use phony or exaggerated fraud claims to help sow the seeds to steal the election, if necessary, as of Tuesday night.

Get ready! Because that is coming --- if Harris is declared the winner.

Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with horrific "welcome to the future" news out of Spain this week, where extreme drought was followed up with a year's worth of rain and deadly flash flooding this week that swept through one town in a matter of hours, killing more than 150 so far; and some words of warning about Tuesday's election from Sen. Bernie Sanders regarding our climate changed future in the event that Trump is allowed back into the White House in January...

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

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

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!...

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

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

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...

On today's BradCast: Finally! Some real and tangible justice for two of the 2020 election heroes who were grievously harmed by the disgraced former President's insidious lies, and other important news just weeks before your final chance to vote in arguably the most critical election in U.S. history. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among our coverage on today's program...

• We're now less than two weeks out from Election Day, your last chance to vote --- and help others to do the same --- in the 2024 election. Have you voted yet? Are you doing all you can to help and encourage others do so? Will you feel good ten years from now about however you decide to vote this year?

• In New York on Tuesday, a federal judge ordered [PDF] former Donald Trump lawyer and disgraced federal prosecutor Rudy Giuliani to turn over, within seven days, his NYC penthouse apartment (valued at around $5 million) and most of his valuable luxury items to Shaye Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman, the Atlanta, Georgia election workers who the disgraced former NYC Mayor (along with Trump himself) repeatedly defamed following the 2020 election. Late last year Giuliani was found liable for defaming the mother and daughter by using racist attacks to falsely claim they had tampered with ballots during tabulation in Fulton County, GA. A jury awarded them $150 million. They are about to collect a sizeable portion of that award. It's a small price to pay by Rudy, who ruined his own life while endangering and ruining the lives of others, all in service to Trump's Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. These are just a few of the countless lives ruined by the man who is running again for President for the sole reason that he needs stay out of prison.

• A strong signal was sent to all 2024 election officials in Arizona and around the nation on Monday, with the guilty plea [PDF] from an elected Republican Supervisor and MAGA election denier in rural Cochise County who had attempted to block the certification of results in the state's 2022 midterms. Peggy Judd pleaded her felony charge down to a misdemeanor after she and a fellow Republican Supervisor, who still faces trial in January, raised doubts about the accuracy of the county's computerized vote tabulators. The plea agreement, announced by AZ's Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes, comes just days after a state judge in Georgia made clear that certification of election results is a mandatory, not optional, duty, even if officials may have questions about fraud or the accuracy of results. But, wait! Haven't we questioned the accuracy of computerized voting and tabulating systems in the past? Yes, we have! But there is a right --- and lawful --- way to do it, as discussed on today's show. And the way for candidates, elected officials and other voters to legally challenge results is in open court after the certification of results. That is particularly true in a County like Cochise where all voters are allowed to vote on verifiable hand-marked paper ballots.

• The Georgia Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld last week's lower court rulings that blocked new, last-minute polling place rules instituted by the MAGA-majority on the State Election Board. Opponents of the new rules argued they could be used as a pretext to bollocks up and/or delay certification [PDF] of this year's election results in the critical battleground state.

• In another critical battleground state, North Carolina, Donald Trump has apparently decided that changes made in 2020 to help voters safely cast their ballot in the middle of a pandemic were great after all! Well, Trump has decided they are great this year, anyway. At least for voters in the western, heavily Republican-leaning part of the state following devastation from Hurricane Helene just weeks ago. New procedures instituted to make voting easier for those affected by the deadly storm are just fine, apparently, according to the disingenuous, hypocritical, flip-flopping Trump. That, after he'd previously declared many of the very same or similar voting accommodations in 2020, after more than 230,000 Americans had died on his watch before the election, to be a "big scam" because he thought it might help Democratic voters.

• But, before we give Republicans in North Carolina too many plaudits for doing the right thing, CBS News finds that an 1,800-member strong group of self-proclaimed "election protection" activists in the state (read: Republican election deniers, in this case) are targeting those with "Hispanic-sounding last names" in a campaign to challenge certain voters on the rolls. Lee County, NC Republican Party Chair and head of the so-called North Carolina Election Integrity Team, James Womack was caught on video tape explaining how such voters may be "suspicious", as part of an eight-state effort to suppress the vote, headed up by longtime GOP "voter fraud" fraudster and Trump attorney Cleta Mitchell.

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us today for our latest Green News Report, after Cuba is hit by an island wide power outage followed by a hurricane; Deadly deluges strike New Mexico, France and Bangladesh; Scientists declare the largest, longest coral bleaching event on record; And oil industry lobbyists prepare to reverse Joe Biden's landmark regulations if Donald Trump wins or steals the Presidency this year...

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

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

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!

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

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

We've got a number of encouraging news items on today's BradCast regarding both this year's elections in battleground Georgia and accountability for still more of those who lied about the 2020 contest there on behalf of the disgraced former President. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among our stories today...

• The Biden-Harris economy continues to fire on all pistons, far outpacing that of Donald Trump when he was in the White House, no matter how little those facts seem able to break out above the noise of his increasingly authoritarian threats and related madness. Moreover, many major financial firms and experts have determined that Kamala Harris' economic plans will result in far more growth (higher GDP), lower inflation, more job creation and much lower government deficits and national debt than Trump's economic proposals. All of that is true no matter how little attention it receives from our corporate mainstream media. But we try to give that at least a bit of attention today, with some help from Rachel Maddow, as voting is now underway across the country and Election Day just three weeks away.

• Given all the attention Donald Trump is, paradoxically, enjoying for so many of his outrageous lies and threats of late --- not only against migrants in the country, but now to American citizens that the disgraced former President regards as "the enemy within" --- it's about time that the Harris Campaign (via ads) and Harris herself (during rallies) is calling him out for it. Especially now that he has begun vowing to unleash the National Guard and U.S. military against Americans if he is allowed back into the Oval Office.

• The parade of former top aides from the Trump White House speaking out against him and endorsing Kamala Harris this year continues to grow. On Monday, Trump's former Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Matthews joined several of her former colleagues in endorsing the Democratic Vice President in order to help "ensure that Donald Trump never steps foot in the Oval Office again." She joins Trump's former Comms Director and Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham, his former White House Director of Strategic Communications Alyssa Farah Griffin, and Cassidy Hutchinson, the top aide to Trump's former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, among others, in putting country over party to sound the alarm about the dangers of a second Trump term.

• Donald Trump's longtime buddy and former Fox 'News' reporter Geraldo Rivera has also now joined other previous pals and supporters of the former President, like billionaire Mark Cuban, to endorse Kamala Harris this year. Rivera charged, in a detailed Twitter post on Monday night, that Trump is a "sore loser" and that if you are a Republican who believes in his "Big Lie" that the 2020 election was stolen from him, "Donald Trump has made a liar of you."

• As noted, we've got several seemingly good pieces of news out of Georgia, where today's first day of Early Voting is, according to the Sec. of State's office, breaking 2020's record. The same officials also stated that absentee ballots have gone out in good order and were not adversely impacted by the recent hurricanes. That is good news for voters smart enough to take advantage of the ability to cast a verifiable hand-marked absentee paper ballot in the battleground Peach State. Those who vote at the polls, unfortunately, will still be forced to vote on the state's insecure, 100% unverifiable touchscreen voting system. But please don't let that stop you from voting, no matter what, if it's your only option!

• A state judge in Fulton County, Georgia on Tuesday issued a no-uncertain-terms ruling [PDF] that county election officials must certify results before the deadline set by state law, which is at 5pm on the Monday following the Tuesday election. Certification, the judge made clear, is a ministerial duty, not a discretionary option. It is required even if a County election official may have concerns about fraud or error in the tally, or has not received certain public records which they may seek prior to certification. Questions about such results are to be adjudicated in open court after certification, not via private deliberations of county election officials. The unequivocal ruling comes in the wake of a number of new rules recently instituted by the newly-seated MAGA majority on the Georgia State Election Board that have alarmed a number of Democrats who worry the new rules may be used as a pretext by MAGA election officials at the county level to block the certification of results they don't like this year in the critical battleground state. Presuming the judge's very clear ruling today is not overturned by a higher court, it should put some of those concerns to rest, even as there is still much to be concerned about when it comes to GA's elections this year.

• The fallout from Georgia's 2020 election, when Donald Trump tried but failed to steal it from Joe Biden, continues. In good news out of a St. Louis, Missouri court last week, Fulton County, GA election workers Shaye Moss and her mom Ruby Freeman have struck a deal with the rightwing propaganda website called Gateway Pundit, its dopey, dishonest owner Jim Hoft and his dopey, dishonest brother Joe Hoft. The Hoft brothers had tried to avoid accountability for their defamatory lies about Freeman and Moss --- echoed by both Trump and his sleazy, disgraced attorney Rudy Giuliani --- that the women had committed fraud during the tabulation of ballots in 2020 at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta. Despite all related claims about them being quickly debunked by state officials, Gateway Pundit identified the two women by name and continued to lie about them for months and years after, resulting in death threats and the need for them to relocate from their homes. In July, an attempt by Gateway Pundit and the Hofts to shield themselves from the defamation lawsuit filed by Freeman and Moss by declaring bankruptcy was rejected by the judge in the lawsuit. The terms of the deal announced last week by the attorneys for both parties have not yet been disclosed. Freeman and Moss previously won a $148 million lawsuit against Giuliani and struck an undisclosed settlement with rightwing media outlet One America News which they had similarly sued for defamation.

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with the ongoing aftermaths of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, and some much better news about the long-overdue death of Old King Coal in the U.K....

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

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

Apparently, it's Disaster Month on The BradCast. And while they are, so far, nominally, "natural disasters", they are all made worse, more ferocious, more expensive and more deadly thanks to the global warming caused by the man-made burning of fossil fuels and the lawmakers who have, for decades, ignored and/or lied about both the science and the warnings. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Millions are (hopefully) fleeing Florida today as Category 5 Hurricane Milton bears down on its central Gulf Coast, with an "eye" toward landfall on Wednesday night in or near Tampa. A direct hit there could result in unspeakable damage. And it all comes just over a week since Hurricane Helene slammed the state before moving on to five others in the U.S. Southeast, leaving a trail of destruction and at least 230 dead in its wake.

The National Weather Service's warning about Milton today is terrifying, describing "potential impacts" of the storm surge, wind, and rainfall flooding as anywhere from "Devastating to Catastrophic" in several cities along the state's central West Coast. Yesterday, Tampa's Mayor Jane Castor was blunt when she warned residents: "If you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you’re going to die."

Like last week's Hurricane Helene, Milton experienced rapid intensification, spinning up from a Cat 1 to a Cat 5 in less than a day as it traversed record hot waters in the Gulf of Mexico, thanks to anthropogenic climate change. The monster system's sudden drop in pressure over the Gulf yesterday momentarily choked up NBC Miami's Chief Meteorologist, Jim Morales, as he described the " incredible, incredible, incredible hurricane," seemingly taking in what he was seeing, what it meant for millions in peril in the Sunshine State, and for everyone around the world who will now being seeing similar and worse in the years ahead. "I apologize. This is just horrific," he added as he composed himself.

We're joined today by "Climate Guy" GUY WALTON, a 30-year Weather Channel veteran who now tracks daily weather and climate extremes at his Guy on Climate website. He is also the author of "World of Thermo" children's book series on climate change.

"I think on top of this hurricane, [Morales] was thinking about hurricanes of the future, and how warm the water temperatures are getting around the planet. It's going to become the norm," Walton tells me. He predicts that the cost of a direct hit on the densely populated Tampa region --- which has not seen a direct landfall in more than 100 years --- could top historic storms such as 2005's Katrina. "It's going to be taking a path that could lead to being the most destructive hurricane, dollar-wise, in the US."

"Milton is going to bisect Florida in one of the most heavily populated areas, from Tampa to Orlando. We haven't seen a storm like this go right through Tampa since 1921. The destruction of this thing is going to be awful," warns Walton.

We discuss why rapid intensification of so many of these storms is now happening all over the world, and why it can be so dangerous. We discuss who's to blame for it. ("It's all our fault.") We discuss what Project 2025's threat to privatize the National Weather Service would mean to meteorologists like him, and how the one-two punch of Helene and Milton might affect this year's Presidential election.

"After Milton and Helene, which are both going to be attributed to being so bad because of global warming or climate change, I'm hoping that Democrats really pounce on the destruction and really point a finger at just about every Republican."

IN RELATED NEWS TODAY...

• Why Project 2025's scheme to privatize FEMA and it's federal flood insurance program --- along with other agencies at DHS --- to "shift the majority of preparedness and response costs to states and localities instead of the federal government" (page 135), is both insane and anti-American.

• How years of Republican lawmakers in North Carolina over-riding vetoes of the state's Democratic Governor to massively weaken building codes on behalf of the construction industry --- amid increasing threats of a changing climate --- made Hurricane Helene far worse, far more expensive and more deadly for their own constituents than it needed to be.

• And, finally, Desi Doyen joins us for, you guessed it, our latest, very hurricaney, Green News Report...

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

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

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...

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

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

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...

Yikes. Busy day on The BradCast. Including some remarkable breaking news, both good and bad, throughout the hour. [Audio link to full show follows below this summary.]

Among the many stories, breaking and otherwise, on today's program...

• When the show began, the monster Hurricane Helene, barrelling toward a direct landfall near Tallahassee and the Big Bend region of Florida's panhandle, was already a dangerous Category 3. By show's end, it had become a terrifying Cat 4. As disturbingly, the storm began the day as a Cat 1! Thanks to record warm Gulf waters caused by man-made global warming, we have yet another case of deadly, rapid intensification for this storm. Experts also warn of an "unsurvivable" 20-foot storm surge on the Gulf Coast. The dangers beyond Florida, in already soaked southeastern states, are also quite serious and severe in the days ahead.

• After what Trump Republicans describe as Joe Biden's supposedly "weaponized" Department of Justice indicted and/or convicted Democratic U.S. Senator Bob Menendez (NJ), Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar (TX), and the President's own son Hunter Biden (twice) over the past year, federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment on Thursday against NYC's Democratic Mayor Eric Adams. The Mayor, who says he will not resign, was charged on five counts related to corruption on behalf of Turkey. If the Biden's federal government has been "weaponized" against Republicans, they sure have poor aim!

• But, you know who was actually very good at weaponizing the federal government against his political enemies? Yup, Donald Trump, as a deep dive from the NYTimes' Michael Schmidt (free link) detailed over the past weekend. Time and again, during his years in office, then President Trump demanded --- and often got --- criminal and civil investigations by DoJ and highly unusual and invasive audits by the IRS against his perceived political enemies, many of whom, if they worked in the government, were also improperly fired. Schmidt also summarizes (free link) how Trump unleashed his government against such perceived enemies as F.B.I Director James Comey and other senior FBI officials; Hilary Clinton and her 2016 campaign; Obama's Sec. of State John Kerry; his own attorney Michael Cohen; News organizations and reporters at CNN, WaPo and NYT; his own National Security Adviser John Bolton; and many others. And, as Schmidt reminds us, Trump has already stated this month that he plans to do it again if elected to another term.

• Looks like its a big day for corrupt NYC Mayors! Today the D.C. Court of Appeals permanently disbarred former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, after New York state also permanently revoked his license to practice law earlier this Summer. The disbarments are related to the disgraced former Mayor and federal proseuctor's false legal filings claiming election fraud, without actual evidence, following the 2020 election on behalf of the loser Donald Trump.

• In related news, even as jury selection was underway in a major defamation trial in Delaware pitting voting machine vendor Smartmatic against the rightwing propaganda outlet known as Newsmax, a last minute, still-confidential settlement was struck between the parties. As CNN reports today, "The settlement is the latest in a string of 2020 election defamation cases to reach an out-of-court agreement before trial. Fox News famously settled with Dominion Voting Systems last year for a record $787 million, and the far-right channel One America News settled with Smartmatic earlier this year." They also note that "Newsmax still faces a separate defamation lawsuit over similar claims that was filed by Dominion." As referenced during the show, here is one of BRAD BLOG's exclusive investigative reports from 2010 that disgraced former Trump attorney Sidney Powell cited (and bastardized) as part of her defamatory allegations against both Smartmatic and Dominion, as subsequently echoed by all the rightwing fake news outlets and discredited and now disbarred yutzes like Giuliani.

• Finally, as the deadly Hurricane Helene speeds toward Florida, Desi Doyen has our latest Green News Report, with news on both that storm and Hurricane John (which continues to pound Mexico); how global warming has made all of these storms much worse; and Joe Biden's promotion of climate action at both Climate Week in NYC and his final address to the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday...

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

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