It's a jam-packed show today, as we try to fit as much in as we can for our last BradCast until after the Thanksgiving holiday. Yes, we're taking a much-needed week off next week. But we've got some advice for all of us on today's program on how to (try and) survive the holidays with MAGA friends and family members and, perhaps, pave the way for a better tomorrow. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among our coverage today...

• Minutes after the Gaza Health Ministry announced that 44,000, mostly women and children, have been killed during Israel's 13-month long war following the October 2023 Hamas attack that killed 1,200 in Israel, news broke from the International Criminal Court. Warrants have been issued by the ICC for the arrest of Israel's far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyau, his former Defense Minister and Hamas' military chief on charges of crimes against humanity and other war crimes. We explain what that means and doesn't.

• Police in Monterey, California on Wednesday night released a 22-page report [PDF] on the 2017 sexual assault allegations filed by the organizer of a Republican women's event against Pete Hegseth, a featured speaker at the forum, Fox "News" weekend host and Donald Trump's nominee to be the next U.S. Defense Secretary. The police report includes disturbing and seemingly damning details, as well as corroborative statements and texts from a number of witnesses and medical personnel. Police had recommended the case to the Monterey County District Attorney's Office for review at the time. Hegseth, who says the tryst was "consensual" and denies allegations of drugging the victim and preventing her from leaving a hotel room, paid a cash settlement to her last year to avoid a lawsuit. Somehow, the Trump Transition team claims to have known nothing about these charges and, in the meantime, Hegseth remains Trump's pick to head the U.S. Dept. of Defense.

• Fellow accused sexual miscreant, Matt Gaetz, however, is no longer Trump's nominee to be the nation's top law enforcement official. He withdrew from consideration to be the next U.S. Attorney General on Thursday morning, following daily revelations of new evidence supporting claims that the former Florida Congressman paid thousands of dollars for sex with 17-year old girls, trafficked the underage minors across state lines, used illicit drugs and other activities which would be disqualifying for the job of the nation's top cop in every Administration but Trump's. Gaetz resigned from Congress last week, on the same day he was tapped by Trump, just one day before the House Ethics Committee was to consider releasing their report on all of these allegations. His resignation letter reportedly stated that he did "not intend to" take the oath of office in the new Congress following his re-election on November 5. Don't be surprised, however, if he shows up anyway to take the oath of office on January 3rd, when the new Congress is sworn in. Telling the truth about anything has never been Gaetz' strong suit. (Moments after we got off air, former Florida A.G. Pam Bondi --- who declined to investigate allegations against Trump after he made a donation to her campaign --- was tapped as Trump's new nominee to lead the U.S. Justice Dept.)

• We've got still more evidence today about the polluted "information environment" that many, including myself, have blamed for the re-election of Trump over Kamala Harris on November 5. In this case, a new survey finding that some 74% of voters had heard about Harris' non-existent "plan" to "protect the rights of transgender people," thanks to $37 million in ads citing the false claims about the Democratic nominee, and a failed media environment --- corporate, social and independent --- simply unable (or uninterested) in accurately informing the electorate to the contrary. (In related news, both Desi and myself are now on Bluesky! Please follow us there! She is @GreenNewsReport.bsky.social. I am @TheBradBlog.bsky.social.)

• Then, we're happy to once again be joined today by RICH LOGIS, Founder and Executive Director of Leaving MAGA, a non-profit formed to help others, like himself, escape what he describes as the "Cult of MAGA". Logis spent years as a Republican pundit turned dyed-in-the-wool Trumper, having voted for the disgraced former and future President in both 2016 and 2020, before finally coming to the difficult realization that he'd been taken in by a dangerous cult leader.

  Logis contributed to the Democratic National Convention this year with video testimonials from fellow former MAGA members and worked on behalf of the Republicans for Harris campaign.

  Today he joins us to discuss, among other things, what he's learned over the past year from his series of podcast interviews with fellow former MAGA cultists; what he attributes Trump's victory to (hint: he agrees me with about the polluted "information environment" in which Trump supporters are no longer able to distinguish truth from lies); and how he recommends non-MAGA Americans deal with their MAGA family members and friends over the upcoming holidays.

  "Donald Trump's toxic superpower is lying," Logis tells me today. "The rightwing in the Republican Party lie about everything. So I succumbed to mis- and disinformation. When I realized that I had, by diversifying my news and information sources, it set me on the pathway to leaving MAGA."

  Logis believes, as I do, that there will be more --- not fewer --- people looking to leave MAGA in the months and years ahead, as the reality of Trump's next clown show takes shape. The time to start helping them to do so is now, he argues.

  While conceding that it might sound "very naive", he advises progressives and other non-MAGA folks to try and "make some dinners politics-free this year." But, if that can't be done, he recommends attempting to "extend the olive branch and say, 'I would like to have more of the kind of relationship that we may have had before 2015 and 2016.'"

  Logis makes the case that, even while recognizing that many MAGA opponents will not feel like it's their duty to take that step. "It's a way to reopen opportunity, reopen that door," he asserts, so when those folks are finally ready to leave MAGA, hopefully in the not-too-distant future, they will know there is space and an exit ramp for them to do so.

  Anyway, as usual lots more in my conversation with Logis today. And he does have some cred here, as he once again felt it necessary to apologize for his part in "helping Donald Trump divide our country, pitting complete strangers against each other, tearing asunder friendships, families, communities and places of worship." He explains that his work in creating Leaving MAGA "is a way for me to make amends."

• Finally today, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report and last before our Thanksgiving break, with news on the back-to-back, climate change-fueled monster storms that slammed the Pacific Northwest over the past several days; a new report on how the climate crisis intensified every U.S. hurricane in 2024; the discovery of a huge cache of "rare earth" elements in a surprising location in the U.S.; and New York's Governor changing her mind, yet again, about congestion pricing in NYC to help reign in both traffic and air pollution while bringing in a ton of much-needed dollars to the city...

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Will he ever face any punishment for his many crimes? That is among the many issues covered on today's BradCast. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

FIRST UP... The fight over Donald Trump's absurd selection of alleged statutory rapist Matt Gaetz as the next U.S. Attorney General continued in Congress today, as Republicans on the House Ethics Committee appeared to block the release of the report from a years-long investigation into the former Florida Reps' well-documented record of alleged sex trafficking of minors, paying some $10,000 for sex, and illicit drug use, among other (previously) disqualifying issues for someone tapped to head the Dept. of Justice as the nation's top law enforcement official.

THEN... The clown show of other Trump appointments to key government posts has continued over the past 24 hours with the selection of pro-wrestling's WWE co-founder Linda McMahon to head the Dept. of Education (which Trump has previously vowed to shut down) and TV doctor/snake-oil salesman Dr. Mehmet Oz to head up the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.

But one of Trump's picks this past week has received much less attention than it deserves. Brendan Carr, author of the chapter on the FCC in Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 [PDF], was selected over the weekend to become Chair of the Federal Communications Commission, even though Trump pretended during the campaign that he wanted nothing to do with Project 2025 and the people who created it. Carr quickly took to his friend Elon Musk's Twitter/X after his nomination on Sunday to declare a war on "censorship" by Big Tech companies, before subsequently appearing on Fox "News" to suggest the FCC must review broadcast licenses granted to news outlets like CBS. During the campaign, Trump called for the censorship or complete shutdown of almost all broadcast and cable news outlets that are not rightwing propagandists.

It must also be noted that Project 2025 specifically calls (see p. 279) for reviewing the broadcast licenses to Pacifica Radio Network, which has dozens of affiliate stations across the country that air The BradCast every day, including KPFK, our flagship station here in Los Angeles.

NEXT... The New York state justice system is in completely uncharted waters at the moment, with the election of Donald Trump following his conviction earlier this year on 34 felony counts of fraud related to his hush money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. Sentencing in the case had been scheduled for November 26. But this week, prosecutors from the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg informed Justice Juan Merchan they were willing to pause sentencing to litigate Trump's assertions that, following his election this month and the U.S. Supreme Court's absurd "Presidential Immunity" ruling over the Summer, he can never be sentenced at all and the case must be dismissed in full. NY prosecutors, however, disagree and argue he should still be sentenced even if, in a worst case scenario, it must wait until after Trump is out of office.

We're joined today to help us make sense of this mess by George Washington University law school professor RANDALL D. ELIASON, who previously served as chief of the U.S. Justice Dept.'s Fraud and Public Corruption section in D.C.. Over the weekend, Eliason argued in an article at The Atlantic that New York must proceed with sentencing of Trump before he is sworn in to office next January.

"At this point," he tells me today, "it's almost less important what the actual sentence is. But I think it's important for the justice system to see that this case gets concluded, and doesn't just kind of dangle out there for the next four years. The case has already been tried and we already have a jury verdict. And it could be sentenced before he even takes office. That's not going to 'chill' him from doing anything as President, because it's over, and it's not going to take any of his time because appeals are handled by the lawyers."

While conceding "we don't have any precedent for any of this" and that a prison sentence certainly can't happen while he's in office, Eliason argues that it's "important now that A sentencing happens," even if it "can't be that meaningful or consequential. But I think it should take place just as a matter of the justice system completing this prosecution, honoring the jury's verdict, and having an official judgment of conviction entered on the record that he is, in fact, a convicted felon. Then the appeals can proceed in the normal course."

In addition to much more on that, we also discuss...

• The "extremely concerning" appointment of Matt Gaetz as U.S. Attorney General, who, the longtime DoJ veteran Eliason describes as "completely unqualified for the job" with "his only connection to the Justice Department, as far as I can tell, as the subject of a criminal investigation";
• The likelihood of Trump using recess appointments to push many of them through without Constitutionally-mandated Senate oversight. "How much Trump can get away with is going to come down to whether Senate Republicans have any backbone at all, and are willing to stand up for their Constitutional role for advice and consent." (Uh, oh);
• Whether the sprawling racketeering conspiracy case against Trump can continue in Georgia against his 18 indicted co-conspirators even if the ringleader of the attempt to steal the 2020 election in the Peach State is now either let off the hook entirely or is allowed to defer the trial until after he is out of office;
• How Eliason would like to see Special Counsel Jack Smith end the two federal indictments against Trump for his attempt to steal the 2020 election and his theft of hundreds of pages of highly classified national security documents the last time he left office in 2021;
• And whether Trump will still have to pay his civil penalties no matter what happens, including the $355 million fraud verdict against him in New York State and the $83 million jury award in the sexual assault case against him won by writer E. Jean Carroll...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ALSO TODAY...

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

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

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

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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...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: New York and New Jersey grapple with record drought and autumn wildfires; Republicans win U.S. House majority, and the power to reverse Biden climate action; PLUS: U.N. climate summit (COP29) kicks off with very high stakes... 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): Amid Earth’s heat records, scientists report another bump upward in annual carbon emissions; Cop29 could change the financial climate for the world’s wealthy polluters; Oil industry asks Trump to repeal major climate policies; Extreme weather cost $2 trillion globally over past decade, report finds; Dutch appeals court overturns landmark ruling against Shell Oil... PLUS: How will offshore wind fare under a second Trump term?... and much, MUCH more! ...

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

Among our coverage today...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What should be done --- what can be done --- to shore up advances made in recent years in the fight against climate change before "a climate denier Fascist-in-Chief" takes office? And what can be done to slow down his promised destruction thereafter? Those are just some of the questions discussed on today's BradCast. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

FIRST... A few updates on some key races still being tabulated and/or called, unofficially, by media...

• Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego has been called as the winner over Republican election denier Kari Lake for the U.S. Senate seat in Arizona.
• Republican hedge fund CEO Dave McCormick's lead over incumbent three-term Democratic U.S. Senator Bob Casey has narrowed to about 30,000 votes out of seven million cast in Pennsylvania. Crucially, that gap is currently less than one half of one percent, meaning it would trigger an automatic recount in the Keystone State if it holds.
• As of now, if the current numbers become official in all "called" races, Republicans will hold at least 52 seats in the U.S. Senate majority next year, and Democrats will hold at least 47.
• Majority control of the U.S. House is still up for grabs, with 16 uncalled races (depending on who you're asking) , though Republicans need just four more seats to win what, as of now, appears likely to be a very narrow majority in the lower chamber of Congress next year. A smaller one than even the thin majority they've been embarrassingly wrestling with over the past two years.

THEN... Donald Trump's nominations to key Executive Branch posts are coming very quickly now. Among them, as of airtime today...

• Florida Rep. Mike Waltz, a former Green Beret and China hawk for National Security Adviser.
• Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, "Li'l Marco" as Trump derisively used to call him, as Sec. of State. He has already reportedly said he would not call for a ceasefire in Gaza.
• Puppy killer and South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem as Chief of the Dept. of Homeland Security.
• John Ratcliffe, Trump's former Dir. of National Intelligence is tapped to head the CIA.
• Trump's first-term acting Director of ICE and family separation supporter, Tom Homan tapped for "Border Czar", after telling 60 Minutes last month that he intends to lead the mass deportation of millions of immigrants and that it can be done without separate families: "Families can be deported together," he said.
• Former New York Rep. Lee Zeldin, who voted against a raft of environmental protection laws in Congress, is named to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

NEXT... All of that as Trump's transition team at EPA, led by a former oil lobbyist and a former coal lobbyist, prep to reverse every single piece of Joe Biden's climate agenda as possible, including, as the New York Times reports (gift link), "withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement, eliminating every office in every agency working to end the pollution that disproportionately affects poor communities and shrinking the size of national monuments in the West to allow more drilling and mining on public lands."

This comes on the same week that climate advocates from around the globe are gathering in Baku, Azerbaijan for the 29th annual U.N. Climate Summit (COP29) and vowing to continue the global trajectory toward clean, inexpensive, renewable energy to replace the fossil fuels that are heating the globe toward ever-quickening disaster. They claim "they're ready for Trump 2.0" after facing a similar challenge in 2016. But that may be easier said than done.

We're joined today by JEAN SU, Senior Attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity and Director of their Energy Justice Program to discuss the Biden Administration's legacy, including success and failures; what his Administration can now do before leaving office to shore up its successes; and what groups like hers can do to stop, or at least slow down, the destructive attacks on the environment promised by a second Trump Administration.

"What we'll be seeing happening with the Trump Administration is that it is a total, unfettered giveaway to oil and gas. He does not care about clean energy. He does not care about the communities, at all, in any of the places that fossil fuels are being produced or shipped," says Su, whose organization vows "unprecedented resistance".

"I'll be really honest. It is just, truthfully, a dark moment at this time, in terms of our federal work. We are basically facing a trifecta of monopolization of all three branches of government under a climate-denying fascist," she tells me. "We have our Executive Branch taken over by a climate denier Fascist-in-Chief, Donald Trump. He has vowed to 'drill baby drill' with no relief for any clean energy or any care for climate. And he will strip the Environmental Protection Agency [and] the Civil Rights Division of the Dept. of Justice, an entire administrative apparatus entirely smothered, stripped bare, and not functional in any way in terms of actually protecting our environment and our health and safety."

But, she also explains, there are a number of actions that the Biden Administration can still take before leaving office; actions that legal organizations like hers can take after Trump comes in; and actions that the states must take as soon as possible to, at least, mitigate the worst of the damage as long as possible.

"The bright spot in all of this, the place where we are going to see any movement on climate is at the state level," Su argues. "What we've been hearing from different people on the ground is that the initiatives that are happening at the state level are things that people can feel. They are able to see how some climate initiatives will generate the jobs that they need in their own backyards. That gives us a bright spot of actual work to be done." She also cites local efforts to reform electricity regulators, elected Public Utility Commissions and monopoly utility companies. "Those monopoly utilities are stifling rooftop and community solar, and digging in on more fossil fuels. That's an area that is ripe for intervention and organizing. Those are the bright spots that we're going to see the most movement in climate."

Much more in lively my conversation with Su today!

FINALLY... As the U.N. announces 2024 will be the hottest year on record on Planet Earth (surpassing 2023's previous record), Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, focusing on some of those "bright spots" on the ballot last week, where progressive climate-related ballot initiatives --- in "blue" and "red" states alike --- were received very well by voters, even as many of those same voters voted for candidates who oppose them...

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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...

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I'm writing today's BradCast summary much quicker than usual, as polls are now beginning to close with unofficial results coming in momentarily. But we've got a lot packed into today's show no matter when you tune in, that may help you make sense of what will happen tonight and over the next several days (and weeks and even months!). [Audio link to full show follows below.]

Among our coverage today....

• Not much help on who's gonna win from the voters of first-in-the-nation Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, the first town in the nation to both open and close their Election Day polls just after midnight last night. Their six total voters tied 3 to 3 between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. But four of those voters are registered Republicans and two are independent. So it might actually tell us more than originally appears.

• Polling guru Nate Silver's final forecast model for the 2024 Presidential election, which ran 80,000 simulations just after midnight, based on the latest pre-election polling and other noteworthy data, finds that Kamala Harris won precisely 40,012 of them. Or 50.015% of the time! Not much help there either. We may have to wait for actual, ya know, votes to be actually, ya know, counted before we can find out if all the polls telling us that everything is "tied" are actually right. (I wouldn't bet on it.)

• There were a number of problems for voters around the country today, though not widespread, so far, and, thankfully, not violent (so far) as some had feared. There were bomb threats in Georgia, said to have come from Russian sources. But most of the issues that have come to light so far were with voting systems, of the type we've seen many times in the past. Hand-marked paper ballots that failed to scan in a very Republican-leaning county in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, where polls were ordered to stay open an extra two hours to accommodate. Print-on-demand ballot printers that failed in a very Democratic-leaning county in battleground Arizona, leading to long lines for Native American voters. Similar isolated problems in a Democratic-leaning Louisville in Kentucky, as well as in parts of Alabama and Iowa. Thankfully, in most cases reported so far, voters were able to continue voting on hand-marked paper ballots, even if they will be tallied later --- and, in some cases, by hand --- as opposed to by computer tabulators at the polls. In some cases, lines grew longer as the problems were worked out, and judges ordered polls to stay open a bit longer tonight in the bargain. While rain drenched parts of several states, reports today suggest that voters were happy to tough it out with raincoats and umbrellas in long lines in order to cast their votes in the most critical Presidential election in U.S. history.

• We run down what is now expected to lie ahead over the next few hours, days, weeks and even months, particularly in the event that Kamala Harris is declared the winner by the media either tonight or over the next few days, and how Donald Trump will likely declare victory tonight no matter what.

• Relatedly, longtime election data researcher and author Richard Hayes Phillips helps us break down the battleground states likely to offer a "red mirage" in their reported results beginning this evening. That is where initially reported results misleadingly suggest a Republican win before more Democratic-leaning results come in because of various factors, including absentee ballots taking longer to tally in states where officials are not allowed to begin processing them until Election Day. He advises to be on the lookout for that "red mirage" effect tonight --- and to not panic when it inevitably does! --- particularly in the critical battleground states of Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Many more details on that in today's show.

• And, while we wait...a couple of somewhat related moments out of television's "Golden Years", including a 1958 western featuring a conman actually named Trump (seriously!) who is trying to terrify a town into paying him for a wall(!) to protect them from what he warns will otherwise be complete and total destruction. (Yes, seriously!) We played this clip originally back in 2019, but hauled it out again today in hopes that it might be the last chance for it to be relevant ever again. (Wishful thinking?)

• And, some thoughts from TV's 98-year old legendary icon Dick Van Dyke who, yesterday, endorsed Kamala Harris and, along with it, included a video in which he reads a speech he initially delivered at an event with Martin Luther King, Jr., as written by Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, in Los Angeles in the Spring of 1964, just before passage of the Civil Rights Act. "Hatred is not the norm," Van Dyke reads from the 60-year old speech this week, during a moment in history that, he says, makes the speech "mean as much today, if not more, than it did then."

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our Election Day Green News Report, as wet weather complicates voting after October was one of the driest on record in almost every state; as a new tropical storm threatens the Gulf Coast; along with a boatload of actually very positive climate news for the U.S. as President Biden begins to wind down his term in office amid landmark climate achievements...

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The contrast and choice for American voters, as discussed on today's BradCast, couldn't be more stark, now less than a week before the most consequential Election Day in modern American history. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Last night, in the nation's capitol, on the Ellipse in front of the White House, on the very same spot where, on January 6, 2021, the now convicted felon and former President of the United States urged his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol in a desperate last gasp effort to steal the 2020 election, Vice President Kamala Harris delivered her "closing argument" to what her Campaign described as more than 75,000 supporters.

She summarized her many policy prescriptions to help boost young and struggling Americans and the middle class, underscored her calls to restore reproductive freedoms stolen from American women, accurately characterized her opponent as a threat to democracy itself, and promised to work to end the hateful divisiveness that he has turned into his singular political bludgeon.

Her remarks came just two days after Donald Trump offered his own "closing argument" in his old home town of New York City, before a packed house at Madison Square Garden, the site of a notorious 1939 American Nazi rally. The historic parallel was made impossible to ignore.

His six-hour raucous event was chock full of crude, racist and misogynistic attacks on his opponent, with mostly male speakers characterizing Harris as a prostitute, a "devil", and the "Antichrist," among other things. A comedian opened the affair by describing Puerto Rico as a "floating island of garbage", along with demeaning jokes about Black people, other Latinos, Palestinians and Jews. Trump, when he finally took the state, made no effort to disassociate himself from any of his fellow speakers who, by yesterday, he had characterized as taking part in a "love-fest".

These are the two major choices for President of the United States now before voters in a contest that pre-election polling averages, if you believe, describe as a virtual tie. "On November 5th," quips a popular social media post making the rounds in recent weeks, "it’ll be as if the whole world is waiting for the results of a biopsy to come back."

That is where we are. And that is why I needed to hear today, for the last time before Election Day, from our old and always very smart friends and fellow old-school bloggers, HEATHER DIGBY PARTON of Salon and Digby's Hullabaloo blog and 'DRIFTGLASS, who writes at his eponymously-named blog and co-hosts the weekly Professional Left Podcast from his home in "Flyover Country, Illinois."

I've got much to ask them both about today, as we try to make sense of this moment before the storm likely to be unleashed --- no matter who is ultimately announced to be the winner --- as early as next Tuesday night. Though Driftglass sagely warns today: "This election is not going to be over once the votes are counted. This election will be over in January, when hopefully Madame President is sworn in."

Hailing from Abraham Lincoln's birthplace in Springfield, IL, Driftglass explains why Harris' remarks on Tuesday led him to recall the Gettysburg Address. "Nobody can be Lincoln," he acknowledges, before observing that while his most famous speech "didn't end the Civil War, it changed the terms under which the war was being fought." He details a number of parallels with Harris' speech at the Ellipse on Tuesday, including: "The opening was about honoring the people who had fallen defending liberty --- the bastards who charged the Capitol --- and how we have to reinvent the country, how we have to come together. I think it was a very deliberate choice of venue and style, drawing explicit connections between what has happened on this ground, and what we need to do next."

Parton, for her part, characterized Trump's "fascist" rally at MSG as a "a hate-fest, not a 'love-fest.' The fact that he even said that is hilarious. They made it clear what they were doing. They were trying to gather the faithful through hatred, bigotry, racism and homophobia. This is something they did on purpose. They want to reach their low-propensity voters --- the 'Bro Vote' --- who basically don't pay attention to politics."

"By having all these other people say all these awful, ugly things, Donald Trump gets a pass on that stuff," she explains. "This wasn't him saying this stuff, this was all the people he lined up at his rally. That has an effect."

But, she argues, and Driftglass concurs, he may have made a fatal error in a contest that is purportedly this close by allowing that racist attack on Puerto Rican voters, who number nearly half a million in the battleground state of Pennsylvania alone.

We've got much more than that, of course, to discuss with them today, including...

• Why this election is reportedly so close and if it really is that close.
• If so, where all of these Trump voters coming from, given the number of Republicans --- and female voters --- who have abandoned him in favor of Harris.
• How Trump "cracked the code", as well as the media, in how to run for President as a Republican.
• How Harris is being "held to impossibly high standards" while Trump is "being held to no standards at all."
• What Trump's "little secret" with GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson might be, and how easily Democrats are "panicked" by it.
• How Trump and Johnson promise to dismantle the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) if Republicans win the White House and Congress, even as some 50 million Americans --- including millions of Republican voters (who either don't notice or care?) --- now have health coverage thanks to that landmark legislation.
• And whether we are all victims right now of the greatest mass gaslighting in world history.

Before they go today, both Digby and Driftglass offer their own "closing argument" for our listeners who may still be either undecided, considering voting for Trump or a third-party candidate, or who may be thinking of not voting at all...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Destructive hurricanes could increase property insurance premiums across the nation; Small Business Administration's disaster loan fund runs dry; PLUS: U.S. Supreme Court allows EPA to enforce new limits on power plant emissions --- for now... 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): Global water crisis leaves half of world food production at risk in next 25 years; After hurricane, with no running water, residents organize to meet a basic need; Microplastic pollution is everywhere, even in the exhaled breath of dolphins, new research finds; Tech giants bring big bucks for small nukes; What's causing the recent spike in global temperatures? ... PLUS: La Nina could soon arrive. Here’s what that means for winter weather... and much, MUCH more! ...

When it rains, it pours on today's BradCast. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among the muck we wade through today...

• Hurricane Milton walloped much of central Florida after coming ashore as a Cat 3 om Wednesday night, just south of a worst-case-scenario direct hit on Tampa Bay. But, as we've learned since covering Hurricane Katrina way back in 2005, it's best never to say "they dodged a bullet" too early.

• Just in case your favorite media outlets featuring wall-to-wall wind-whipped reporters foolishly risking their lives by standing outside in multi-colored rain slickers to fulfill your disaster porn needs forgot to tell you that man-made climate change exacerbated Milton's awesome destructive power and signals an even grimmer future for us all, Desi Doyen has you covered today.

• While Donald Trump has been lying to you about FEMA and the Biden-Harris Administration's response to both Hurricane Milton this week and Hurricane Helene last --- and putting his own brain-poisoned supporters at grave risk in the bargain --- three points worth noting today: 1) Everything out of Trump's mouth on these subjects is a lie. (But you knew that, right?) 2) All of the Republican Governors in all of the effected states have lauded the response from FEMA and Joe Biden. 3) Since they're all on the ballot this year, it's worth noting that a whole bunch of Republican Congressmembers from Florida voted against funding FEMA at all this year just DAYS before Helene made landfall, even as many of them are now demanding more money for FEMA. As you or someone you know may be voting in the Sunshine State soon, you should know the names of those hypocrites. They are: Reps. Aaron Bean, Gus Bilirakis, Kat Cammack, Byron Donalds, Matt Gaetz, Laurel Lee, Anna Paulina Luna, Cory Mills, Bill Posey, Mike Waltz, and Daniel Webster.

• As Donald Trump continues to line his pockets (his own, not his campaign's!) in a seemingly desperate, hopefully Going Out of Business sale --- Shitty golden sneakers! Cheap silver coins! Worthless NFTs! $100,000 diamond-encrusted watches! (They make a perfect off-the-books Christmas bribe from your favorite foreign autocrat!) --- his $59.99 Trump-endorsed, Lee Greenwood-branded "God Bless the USA" faux-leather bound bibles may be his sleaziest scheme yet. But that hasn't prevented Ryan Walters, the MAGA Superintendent of Public Schools in Oklahoma, from trying to force state tax-payers into buying 50,000 of them to place in every classroom, even while all but ignoring a year-old, already-funded state mandate to purchase emergency asthma inhalers for schools. (He'll get to it, okay? He's busy with the Trump Bible thing right now! Never mind that child who died at school for lack of one!) Oh, and as long as we're on the topic, AP did some digging this week to find that Trump's "God Bless the USA" bibles are actually "printed in a country that the former president has repeatedly accused of stealing American jobs and engaging in unfair trade practices --- China." In reality, AP discovered, they actually cost less than $3 a piece to print. But, don't worry, while Bible experts say it's crap, you can still buy a version hand-signed (or so the website says?) by Trump himself for the low-low price of just $1,000 if you act now!

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us to help mop things up with our latest Green News Report on Milton's landfall, Republican disinfo on FEMA and its funding shortages, and President Biden's landmark rule that will now, officially, finally replace every toxic lead water in America! (Sure, but does he have overpriced, crappy, Chinese-made bibles to sell?)

All that before I close the show with an offer you can't refuse! God bless the USA!...

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

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

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

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

The stakes seem high enough on every level that it remains remarkable, as we muse at one point on today's BradCast, that mainstream corporate media barely mentions, much less reports on any of it. [Audio link to full show follows below this summary.]

Kamala Harris has clawed back a lot of ground that voters were initially giving to Donald Trump when it came to the question of who they trusted most to handle the economy. Recent polling finds the two largely tied on the issue, despite the fact that, under the Biden-Harris Administration, GDP is at record highs, unemployment at 50-year lows, there has been record job creation (above and beyond the restoration of jobs lost during the pandemic), middle-class wages are rising substantively for the first time in decades, inflation is largely back to pre-pandemic levels, interest rates are finally being lowered by the Fed, energy prices are dropping and major Wall Street indexes continue to meet and beat all-time record highs.

Sounds like a pretty good economy. You'd think the incumbent Administration might be rewarded for it. But, oh, well. Trump says nobody can afford to buy back anymore. So there's that.

Harris has already put forward a host of new economic proposals [PDF] in her campaign, including $6,000 child tax credits for families with newborns; $25,000 to help first-time home buyers afford down payments; increasing the amount that new, small businesses can deduct for startup costs from $5,000 to $50,000. She detailed still more plans for what she describes as her "Opportunity Economy" in Pittsburgh today.

By way of contrast, Trump wants to give another trillion dollar tax break to the wealthy and huge corporations, institute and enormous national sales tax for consumers on all imported goods, adopt some gimmicky, ill-defined schemes such as "No Tax on Tips" (which Harris favors as well) and otherwise "Drill, Baby, Drill" to pay for it all (even though oil and gas drilling, for good or ill, is already at record highs under Biden-Harris). I'd link to those proposals but they don't appear to be detailed anywhere, other than, perhaps, in Project 2025.

Corporate mainstream media does a lousy job of highlighting economic facts and the starkly different visions of the candidates. But they do an even worse job when it comes to educating the electorate about some of the landmark legislation that the Administration was able to get through extraordinarily narrow Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, all of which are transformational for the American economy, American jobs and the global climate.

The poorly-named bill called the Inflation Reduction Act, while including some measures for lower inflation, is also the largest ever single investment in climate action in world history, clocking in at as much as $1.2 trillion in size. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, offers about $500 billion to upgrade our rail and road systems, build out a national EV charging network, upgrade the electric grid and much more. The CHIPS and Science Act authorizes $280 to onshore manufacturing factories and jobs in high-tech industries. All of which, though they are just barely getting started, will amount to millions of new jobs and a cleaner, renewable, electrified future that will slash global warming emissions in half by 2030 and reach net-zero by 2050...if they stay on the current trajectory.

Trump has promised to end that trajectory and kill as many of those programs as possible, despite the cost to the economy, jobs and a livable climate for all.

We're joined today by RYAN COOPER, Executive Editor of The American Prospect, to discuss the economic and climate stakes of this year's election, as he recently reported on for The Prospect, as our two potential futures are now starkly divergent, with trillions of dollars, millions of jobs (in all 50 states) and a clean, renewable energy future hanging in the balance.

As Cooper explains at The Prospect, a recent independent analysis comparing best-case scenarios for Harris versus Trump and his Project 2025 plan find that by 2020, "she would actually beat the 50 percent emissions reduction target slightly (and hit net zero by 2050), add 2.2 million jobs, save $7.7 billion in yearly household energy costs, increase GDP by $450 billion per year, and prevent 3,900 early deaths from air pollution."

"For Trump, they estimated that by 2030, he would stall out emission cuts (meaning an increase relative to Harris by 1.75 billion metric tons [of climate choking emissions] per year), destroy 1.7 million jobs, increase household energy spending by $32 billion, decrease GDP by $320 billion per year, and increase early deaths caused by air pollution by 2,100."

And yet, according to pre-election polling, the two candidates are largely tied when it comes to who voters believe will best handle the economy!

Cooper says blame not only falls on mainstream corporate media, but on Democrats who "really haven't been selling" their climate and economic agenda. Also, he tells me, I may be "imagining a much more rational and grounded political party in the Republicans than actually exists. This is a cult of personality," he emphasizes, with members who are "brain-poisoned" at this point. Despite the "overwhelming popularity" of federal government programs that help assure clean air and water, "the idea that [millions of renewable energy and manufacturing] jobs are going to cause a realignment among Republicans against liberal, clean energy, Toyota Prius-type stuff, is somewhat wishful thinking. Maybe in five or ten years it may be a different story."

These are, in fact, enormous, economy-shifting projects that take time to fully play out and integrate into society and the American psyche. "Under Biden, only about 17 percent of the $1.6 trillion authorized in his climate bills and the American Rescue Plan had gotten out the door as of this April," Cooper reports at The Prospect. "More has been done since then, but much more remains."

Despite those obstacles, the media really are failing to educate the electorate on this, failing to explain the extraordinary breadth of the Biden-Harris climate achievements which would likely be exceedingly popular if Americans fully understood them. "Nobody wants their air and water polluted outside of hard-core 'rolling coal' truck owners. Nobody wants to give their kid brain cancer so a chemical company can make more money," Cooper says, chalking up much of the lack of understanding among the electorate to "the incredibly biased information space in political media. Ordinary people are just not hearing about this stuff. When you tell swing voter panels about this stuff, most of them refuse to believe you!"

"We are talking about the industries of the 21st century," he stresses. "The whole world is re-gearing everything around renewable energy --- the cheapest energy in most of the world that has ever been produced. The whole industrial supply chain, everything, how we live, is being transformed. It's significant. I think it will be seen as the Industrial Revolution was."

True. Unless America elects Donald Trump, who has promised to gut it all. There is much more worth tuning in for in my conversation with Cooper today.

ALSO TODAY... Speaking of Trump's Project 2025, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) explains how Team Trump's promise to "dismantle the administrative state” includes dismantling and/or privatizing dozens of federal agencies, putting as many as one million jobs at risk; Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) cites the menace of Project 2025 in a U.S. House subcommittee hearing on whistleblowers today; And Jason Kravits wraps it all together in a brilliant Schoolhouse Rock-style satirical tune to end today's BradCast on a high note...

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Today on The BradCast: Rachel Maddow is an excellent broadcaster. But, boy, did she fall --- along with a bunch of other mainstream corporate media outlets on Friday --- for a wildly misleading spin on a new rule adopted last week by the Georgia State Board of Elections in advance of this November's elections. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Before we get to an expert to help set the record straight on this matter today, to explain how virtually everyone from WaPo to New York Times to Atlanta Journal Constitution to, yes, Maddow got it wrong...a few quick news items of note...

• It's possible, with Hurricane John about to slam into the West Coast of Mexico in the Pacific, and a different storm to be named Helene quickly spinning up in the Atlantic, that by week's end --- if John crosses the Mexican peninsula and enters the Gulf --- we could have two major hurricanes, both threatening landfall in the Gulf of Mexico at the same time. Climate change is wacky fun, in't?

• Nearly 500 are confirmed killed and more than 1,000 injured near Lebanon's border with Israel on Monday, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the deadliest barrage on Hezbollah since the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war. All of which is meant to extend the Israeli PM's time in office and out of jail on corruption charges filed well before his war on Gaza --- and even war crimes charges that are likely to come his way if and when he is ever finally removed from office. Hezbollah reportedly fired thousands of rockets in return at Israel.

• Congressional leaders have reportedly reached a deal to keep the Government open after the end of this month, as the new fiscal year begins on October 1. The deal would continuing funding the Government until at least December 20. The agreement to prevent a government shutdown just weeks before the Presidential election --- when every member of the U.S. House and one-third of the U.S. Senate will be on the ballot --- comes as House Speaker Mike Johnson gave up on a measure Donald Trump was insisting on to make it a crime for non-citizens to vote (which is already unlawful under federal law). We'll see if the agreement is finalized by both chambers, and whether Republicans will then send us over yet another fiscal cliff this Christmas.

• Newly released FBI data find violent crime in America, including murder, dropped precipitously from 2022 to 2023.

• The U.S. economy continues to outpace the rest of the developed world and the stock market remains at all-time record levels under the Biden-Harris Administration, even as Donald Trump's failing media company, which trades on the NASDAQ as DJT, plummeted another 10% on Monday to a new all-time low since going public, as the race is on to meet my prediction that his loser of a company could become a penny stock by Election Day!

• And, speaking of Trump grifts, it looks like Melania Trump, who has barely appeared on the campaign trail this season, was paid nearly $240,000 to speak at a political fundraiser at her own home in Mar-a-Lago last April. Who wrote the check to her remains unknown at this time.

And then, it's on to the story which has apparently freaked out Democrats and voting rights advocates since it was first misreported by pretty much everybody on Friday. That was the day that three Trump-supporting MAGA election denialists on the Georgia State Elections Board adopted a new rule requiring hand-counting at each precinct at the end of election night.

But the new rule requires only the hand-counting of the number of ballots cast at the precinct --- not the actual results on those ballots, as many have misreported --- before they are sealed up and sent to county headquarters.

Similar reconciliation of the number of ballots cast against the number of voters who signed in to the poll books or to the number of pages reported as scanned by the precinct tabulators, are carried out in many of other states without problem at the end of election night.

According to our guest today, an expert in Georgia's terrible touchscreen voting and scanning system, the process is likely to take anywhere from 15 minutes to a half an hour after the close of polls. But you wouldn't know that from the mainstream media coverage, with Democrats and Republican election officials alike in Georgia, screaming bloody murder that this new rule would lead to inaccurate tallies, delays in the count, and potentially add "months" to the time it will take to tally up results in the Peach State this year!

We're joined again today by the great MARILYN MARKS, longtime voting system expert and Executive Director of the Coalition for Good Governance. Her non-partisan organization is responsible for the federal lawsuit that ultimately banned Georgia's unverifiable, insecure touchscreen voting systems made by Diebold, only to see them replaced by Republican Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger with similarly unverifiable and insecure touchscreen systems made by Dominion. She is also the woman who discovered and exposed the MAGA breach, copy and distribution of statewide voting system software in Coffee County, GA that resulted in criminal charges against five people, including Sidney Powell, in the state's racketeering felony indictment against Donald Trump and many others.

As Marks explains today, the mainstream media outlets were misreporting on Friday's new hand-count of the number of ballots cast rule "out of hysteria for no good reason." She confirms that "it's simply a ballot counting rule that most states have," allowing them to "know how many ballots you have collected" and to confirm that number before ballots are moved anywhere. "That is a common-sense rule. It will take about 20 minutes at most to implement at most of the polling places in Georgia --- that's a rough estimate --- and it is a safeguard on a lot of different things."

"If there are major discrepancies," between the number of ballots and the number signed into the poll books, she says, "that's the time to figure it out, not after all the equipment and people get moved."

Many Democrats --- justifiably --- fear that, if Trump loses in the state again, some Republican officials on the election boards at both the state and county level are hoping to find ways to create havoc and chaos that could delay certification and ultimately place the actual election results in doubt, leading to challenges in Court or Congress on January 6th next year.

"We seem to be in such a hyper-partisan environment right now," says Marks, "that if we can throw some mud, true or not, on the other side, it's a way to build enthusiasm for our team." But that, she suggests, is short-sighted and unhelpful given the very REAL concerns about the election in Georgia (and elsewhere.)

We also discuss, some of the very good reasons that Democrats should be concerned about the reported results in Georgia this year, particularly given the software breach of statewide voting systems in Coffee County that Sec. Raffensperger has refused to mitigate in any way before the 2024 election, including with software patches distributed by Dominion.

Marks is concerned by the "chaos" that could be caused by someone exploiting the Coffee County caper. "It would be so easy for someone to shut down the system by just writing code that would shut down all the machines at 10am on Election Day," she offers by way of just one example. "There's nothing Georgia could do about it. They are not prepared." In response, I offer an even simpler and arguably more chilling scenario at how a tiny group of people can create utter havoc in the state by simply claiming that the state's touchscreen systems have misprinted their ballots --- whether that's true or not. There is no way, with the systems, to determine if they are telling the truth.

Tune in for more on those actually real concerns about GA elections, as well as Marks' tips for voters in both Georgia and other states, including North Carolina, California, and anywhere else that voters may be forced to vote on a 100% unverifiable touchscreen voting systems at the polling place this year...

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