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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Trump EPA announces plans to Make America Polluted Again; Trump Energy Secretary vows to reverse U.S. climate progress; PLUS: Climate whiplash is hammering major cities around the world, study finds... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): The Arctic is in trouble. The consequences will be felt around the world; Microplastics are messing with photosynthesis in plants; EPA eliminating environmental justice jobs; Birds face weakened protections under Trump move; Trump cuts target world-leading greenhouse gas observatory in Hawaii... PLUS: Water officials knew that opening dams to meet Trump’s wishes was ill-advised. Here’s why it happened anyway... and much, MUCH more! ...

This is our final BradCast of the Biden Era. We've got a lot of mixed emotions on today's program, as you'll discover when you tune in. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among our coverage...

• Vile Congressional Republicans, such as Alabama's Sen. Tommy Tuberville, Kansas' Roger Marshall and many of their far-right media pals are targeting the victims of the Los Angeles Fires as part of their latest reprehensible political strategy. They're calling for "conditions" and "strings attached" before agreeing to aid Americans who have lost everything out here in these horrific, ongoing fires. They are whipping up disinformation echo chambers to convince themselves that it was something other than climate change-fueled dry weather and hurricane force winds to blame for the past week's unspeakable disaster and death. I've got a word or two in response on today's program, including some thoughts about the fact that California gives five times more to the federal government in tax dollars than we receive back in return. You're welcome, Senators --- and all of your loser MAGA buddies banging that same pathetic, loathsome drum.

• Speaking of fossil fueled climate change deniers, Donald Trump's nominee to head up the Dept. of Energy, fracking company CEO Chris Wright, doesn't believe wildfires have anything to do with climate change. And Trump's pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, former Rep. Lee Zeldin of New York, used to call for reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. Now tapped for Trump's EPA, he's singing a different tune, as Desi Doyen reports today in her coverage of Zeldin's U.S. Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday.

• In what suffices for good news today, you may recall that, just before Christmas, President Biden, who vowed during his 2020 campaign to end the federal death penalty (he didn't), mercifully and morally commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal Death Row to life in prison without the possibility of parole. (He should have done the same for the other three, as reprehensible as they may be. The Government shouldn't be in the business of killing its own citizens.) But on Wednesday, according to a scoop from LAW DORK's Chris Geidner, Attorney General Merrick Garland officially withdrew federal approval for the use of single-drug lethal injections of pentobarbital in federal executions. That may slow down, at least, another killing spree by Donald Trump, who ordered the executions of 13 federal Death Row inmates during the final six months of his first term in office. That, after a total of just three people had been executed under all previous Presidents from the years 1975 through 2020.

• And, speaking of warnings of what is coming --- or already here --- in a 17-minute prepared speech (transcript) from behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, President Joe Biden issued his Farewell Address to the American people on Wednesday night. He briefly touted his Administration's substantive (and, so far, wildly under-appreciated) record, noting that "It’ll take time to feel the full impact of what we’ve done together, but the seeds are planted and they’ll grow and they’ll bloom for decades to come." He then went on to issue a series of dire warnings that echoed President Eisenhower's 1961 Farewell Address, in which he famously warned of the menace of the then-burgeoning Cold War Military-Industrial Complex. In this case, Biden warned of the dangers of a Tech-Industrial Complex and explained that "an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead." He hearkened back to the push-back against the Gilded Age of the robber barons over a century ago, while charging that Americans are now "being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power." We share an extended excerpt of those warnings and others --- "the existential threat of climate change", unchecked A.I. development, our corrupted U.S. Supreme Court, a "crumbling" free press --- from Biden's final Oval Office address before Monday's Inauguration of the first convicted felon, adjudicated rapist and adjudicated insurrectionist to ever be sworn in as President of the United States.

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report with more on the L.A. Fires and the long recovery ahead; more on Trump's Energy Secretary nominee; more on Joe Biden's encouragement to Americans in his Farewell Address to hold the line on climate action in the years ahead...

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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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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!)