We have a number of encouraging items on today's BradCast, believe it or not, regarding elections and campaign finance for a change.

But first today, after an emotional debate in South Carolina, the Confederate flag will finally come down at the state capitol on Friday - clearing the way for debate on stuff that may actually reduce gun violence, racism and terrorism. But in the U.S. House, it's business as usual as the GOP fails on a Confederate flag-related amendment.

After that, another reminder why Internet Voting would be a disaster, and a bit of Trump news (which I know you crave every single moment --- don't lie!), some very good news today from the Florida Supreme Court on redistricting and even more good news from the U.S. Court of Appeals in D.C. on campaign finance.

Hamline University professor of political science and law David Schultz --- author of last year's Election Law and Democratic Theory and the upcoming Presidential Swing States: Why Only Ten Matter --- joins us to discuss those cases and four important steps he's laid out which could be taken immediately to reform our nation's campaign finance embarrassment. The best news: none of the steps require either a Constitutional amendment or our broken Congress! (Though it might require the President of the United States to step up.)

Among those steps, the FCC, for example, could immediately require free airtime for candidates over our public airwaves. "About 60-70% of all the money that will be spent in Presidential elections will be spent on media advertising predominantly on television," Schultz explains. "Forty years ago, the average time that a candidate got on the national news to describe his or her position was about a minute. Now it's down to about ten seconds."

"Requiring that free air time would be perfectly Constitutional" in exchange for licenses granted by the FCC. "If the FCC can move on Net Neutrality, it can move on this." But that's just one of several executive agencies which the President could instruct to take action without the need for Congress or amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

Plus: Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report on the terrible climate position of the latest Democrat to enter the 2016 Presidential race and much more...

Download MP3 or listen online below...

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!)

I'm back on The BradCast today after a much-need July 4 weekend respite! My huge thanks to Nicole Sandler of RadioOrNot.com for filling in for me yesterday!

While Nicole covered some important items that might have otherwise disappeared into the holiday weekend news hole, there was at least one notable story that she missed, which a few folks in Wisconsin --- specifically, Gov. Scott Walker (R) and his allies in the state legislature --- had hoped nobody would notice: their blatant attempt to completely gut the state's beloved Open Records law.

"This was an effort by Walker and some Republicans in the legislature to undermine open government in the dead of night," my guest today, Brendan Fischer, general counsel at the Center for Media and Democracy tells me. And it was done, he suggests, in hopes of keeping piles of fresh baggage from making its way into the mainstream media as Walker --- whose entire career now seems to be predicated on secrecy and lack of transparency --- prepares to announce his candidacy for the GOP Presidential nomination in a week or so.

What the Badger State's Republican-dominated legislature tried to pull off over the weekend was extraordinary. "There was no public statement whatsoever," Fischer explains. "This was introduced, through this last minute budget amendment that was passed on the evening of the holiday weekend. There was no public debate. This was something they tried to do in the dead of night."

Fischer also catches us up on the status of several other cases now pending against Walker and/or his closest allies, including one that is set to face a crucial ruling shortly by the state's Supreme Court. That challenge in that case, known as "John Doe 2", is being brought by the largest financial supporters of both Walker's and several of the court's elected(!) Republican Justices!

Also today: We catch up after the holiday weekend on the latest developments in Greece and with Trump, marriage, the Confederate flag and more!...

Download MP3 or listen online below...

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, guest hosted by me, Nicole Sandler of radioornot.com...

Last week we saw two major news dumps! The first was Tuesday night at 9pm (!), the time the State Department thought was optimal for them to release the first batch of Hillary Clinton emails from her private mail server. Jason Leopold, "FOIA Terrorist" from Vice News, filed the FOIA requests that led to this release. He spent the Fourth of July weekend reading the damned things so we wouldn't have to, and he joined in for the last few minutes of the show.

The other big dump came Thursday night, on the eve of the Independence Day holiday, as the U.S. DoJ and five Gulf states announced a deal with BP representing a final settlement on the world's largest offshore oil spill in history in 2010. Oil industry expert/journalist Antonia Juhasz, who covered the deal at Rolling Stone, arguing that, though it's the largest such settlement in history, BP still "got off cheaply", gives us all the details.

Also, if you ever wondered why Brad uses the theme song he does, I've got the "exclusive" on that. Plus, South Carolina legislator really embarrasses himself over marriage equality, and we're happy to help him...

Download MP3 or listen online below...

As the Confederate flag falls, once again, across the South, in the wake of the Charleston AME church terrorist attack, flag expert Annie Platoff of the North American Vexillological Association (yes, there is such a thing!) joins us to a question I've had all week on The BradCast: Why so much passion about a piece of colored cloth?!

I understand why people want the Confederate Battle Flag taken down. But I have much less understanding of why people are so passionate and emotional about wanting it, or any other flag, to be raised in the first place --- at least outside of a military context.

Platoff, who, in addition to being a flag expert is also a librarian at UCSB, explains the history of flags, their symbolic importance, and why they inspire such passion --- both for and against. She also tells us about the Apollo mission flags, which are still on the Moon, and about which wrote a paper when she worked as a lunar/Mars librarian at NASA. (She's also an expert on Russian flags and discussed their history and use in more recent context, both after the fall of the Soviet Union and during the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.)

Also on today's BradCast: A whole lot of breaking news on a whole lot of stuff, including Donald Trump's surge into 2nd place in the GOP 2016 race in New Hampshire (told ya so!); Listener/callers weigh in on the controversial Confederate flag and more; Plus: Desi Doyen with the latest Green News Report!...

Download MP3 or listen online below...

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!)

Fallout continues --- much of it surprisingly encouraging, thankfully --- following last week's racist terrorist shooting at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston.

In its wake, I spoke to Sean McElwee of Demos on today's BradCast about his new study comparing the racist views of white Fox 'News' viewers versus white non-Fox 'News' viewers, and self-identified "conservative" Fox 'News' viewers with "conservatives" who don't watch Fox.

He describes the findings as "a deep indictment of the way that Fox News portrays the news." The analysis also examines whether regular viewers of Fox' The O'Reilly Factor are more racist than Fox 'News' viewers who do not regularly watch O'Reilly. The results, as they'd say on The Factor, will shock you! (Or not.)

"It's very clear that Fox News is playing on the racism and the latent racial resentment of many whites in the country," McElwee tells me. "You can see that on their coverage of the 'ground zero mosque'. You can see that on their coverage of the Trayvon Martin case. It's very clear." But does that racist coverage rub off on their viewers or vice versa? We discuss, you decide.

Also on today's show, several Senate Democrats help Republicans and President Obama move "Fast Track" authority for TPP and other trade deals forward in Congress; FEC Commissioners are not 'persons', according to the FEC; And an update on the federal case against postal worker Douglas Hughes, who landed his gyrocopter at the U.S. Capitol in April (our interview with him at the time is right here) in hopes of bringing attention to the need for campaign finance reform...

Download MP3 or listen online below...

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!)

News events are now moving very quickly following the terrorist shooting last week at Charleston, SC's Emanuel AME Church. On today's BradCast, we do our best to bring you up to date if you made the mistake a taking a few minutes off over the weekend!

Politicians (Republican ones, particularly those running for President --- but even one or two in the Obama Administration) are now being forced to flip their previous positions at lightning speed, even as the state's Republican Governor Nikki Haley announced today that she is calling for the South Carolina legislature to remove the Confederate Flag --- a long time symbol of slavery, rebellion, divisiveness and hatred --- from the grounds of the state capitol.

But we'll get you up to speed on the rapidly "evolving", all-new positions from Jeb Bush, Rick Santorum, Lindsey Graham, Ben Carson and many others.

In the bargain, Fox 'News' and all of the politicos and pundits who swear allegiance to it, now find their ideological walls closing in on them, after years of being mired with "pathological denial" on all of the very topics the SC shooting tragedy highlights (and many more.) Eric Boehlert of Media Matters for America joins us to talk about it all on today's BradCast.

Also, we begin to catch up on a few items we've had to push off due to last week's breaking events...

Download MP3 or listen online below...

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!)

Remember that 2009 Dept. of Homeland Security report about Rightwing Domestic Extremism that Republicans forced the Obama Administration to retract?

We do --- once again --- on today's BradCast, particularly in the bloody wake of this week's domestic terrorist attack at Charleston's Emanuel AME Church. For some reason, Rightwingers don't want to remember that report, much less describe this week's attack at "terrorism". Wonder why. And so does Jon Stewart.

Then, speaking of extremist Republicans, the state of Texas has overruled a voter-approved ban on fracking in the city of Denton and declared such local control illegal. TX Gov. Greg Abbott actually says, with a straight face, that, in fighting for fossil fuel industry profits over people, he's protecting private property rights from the "heavy hand of local regulation." (Yes, he actually said that.)

Adam Briggle of FrackFreeDenton.com joins us to discuss how Denton hopes to fight the GOP's Big Government attack on democracy, local control and private property rights across the state --- ya know, all that stuff Republicans like to pretend they believe in.

"The industry went to the legislators that they have bought and paid for, and they wrote a new law for them to change the rules," Briggle tells me. "They just bought a new law that changed the standards by which you evaluate the constitutionality of local ordinances."

Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report, on the Pope's climate encyclical and Donald Trump's global warming denialism...

Download MP3 or listen online below...

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 start today's BradCast with the latest grim news out of Charleston, South Carolina after Wednesday night's horrific gun massacre at the historic African Methodist Episcopal Church --- and word that the suspected gunman has now been apprehended.

Then, things brighten up a bit with our coverage of the landmark encyclical on the environment, as issued today by Pope Francis, who calls for "a bold cultural revolution" in response to the moral imperative of fighting climate change "due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases released mainly as a result of human activity."

My guest to discuss it is Rev. Mitchell C. Hescox, President and CEO of the Evangelical Environmental Network.

Hescox, a Republican who has testified before Congress and spoken at the White House, offers his key takeaways from the Pope's historic 184-page teaching letter and explains his organization's fight for climate action, and how other evangelicals and fellow Republicans must once again join the fight. "We see ourselves as a bridge between many Republicans," he tells me, "to help them understand that climate change is not about polar bears. It's about our children. It's not about a future event. It's about what's happening now."

"We do have to have a price on carbon," Hescox explains. "There is no ifs, ands or buts in anybody's mind that the fossil fuel industry has put the cost of fossil fuel energy into the lives of each of our children and they've taken the profits. And, as a conservative, that's not fair. That's not even true market economics."

He believes "a Republican cannot win the White House unless he talks about climate change" and that it's "something which the Republican Party has to deal with." Hescox tells me he hopes ("prays", actually) that the Pope's encyclical "will be another step forward in empowering the world to act together to solve what we like to say is the greatest moral challenge of our generation."

Plus: After Rush Limbaugh pathetically attempts to smear Pope Francis as a "Marxist" for hoping to save humanity, we offer definitive, irrefutable, water-tight evidence that the extremist rightwing radio host is an unrepentant liar and hypocrite on the topics of both climate change and "Marxism"...

Download MP3 or listen online below...

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!)

Six-term Republican Congressman Bob Inglis (SC) was my guest on today's BradCast, fresh off of being honored with the John F. Kennedy Foundation's Profile in Courage award earlier this week.

After 12 years in the U.S. House, the very conservative Rep. Inglis was primaried out in 2010 by the Tea Party after he dared change his position from being a climate change denier to wanting to take action after consultation with scientists and even his own children.

Inglis has since founded the Energy and Enterprise Initiative at George Mason University, "guided by the conservative principles of free enterprise and economic growth, limited government, liberty, accountability and reasonable risk avoidance to solve our nation's energy and climate challenges."

We discussed whether he has any regrets about how things worked out in Congress; about his appearance in the new documentary Merchants of Doubt, which exposes how the denial industry works (and how the same sleaze merchants who denied the harm of cigarette smoke in previous decades on behalf of Big Tobacco are now using the very same tactics today. Watch the trailer.); why Republicans have become science deniers and whether he is optimistic that will change any time soon; and his plan for a revenue-neutral carbon tax to fight global warming by both reducing emissions and correcting what he (accurately) describes as the "market distortion" that allows polluters to socialize the cost of pollution and, essentially, pollute for free.

"One of the key philosophical underpinnings of conservative thought is that humans are responsible moral actors," Inglis told me. Yet, he says, the fossil fuel industry is being allowed to get away without taking responsibility for the damage they are causing to both people and the planet. "That's where we are on climate. We're allowing people to socialize their soot and they will get away with it as long as we let them get away without accountability." He says that was is currently lacking is "accountable transparent marketplaces."

"If we could get through the denial and get to the debate," it would be a good thing, explains Inglis, who describes global warming as a "crucial issue, vital to the future of our children and grandchildren" as he offers a surprisingly optimistic outlook for the future. How optimistic? He even believes some non-denier Republicans may enter the 2016 Presidential primary race! I'm dubious --- but we'll see. It was a fascinating conversation.

Also on today's show: even Fox "News" is now turning against the obnoxious organizers of the deadly anti-Muslim event in Garland, TX over the weekend; CO2 reaches a new and horrible milestone; another oil bomb train explodes in ND; and some very very good news for progressives folks in Alberta, Canada (and maybe for environmentalists down here!) after last night's election there...

Download MP3 or listen online below...

While we'll be posting The BradCast here everyday, and you can hear it across all of our great affiliate stations and websites, to automagically get new episodes as soon as they're available sent right to your computer or personal device, subscribe for free at iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or our native RSS feed!

Well, that was cowardly. But I suppose it's better than hearing the cases and churning out another twisted, activist justification for discrimination.

Rather than hear appeals from cases in Utah, Indiana, Oklahoma, Virginia and Wisconsin where marriage equality bans were struck down, the U.S. Supreme Court shocked court watchers today by deciding to avoid the issue of marriage equality as a Constitutional right entirely for the time being. Effectively, that means the lower-court rulings stand in each of those states, so freedom, liberty and the conservative Constitutional value of equal justice for all wins the day in each of them.

Evan Wolfson, founder and president of Freedom to Marry, a national organization dedicated to the fight for equality in all fifty states, said after today's Supreme Court punt: "This decision by the Court is a huge step forward --- and a clear green light for full-speed ahead --- but it needlessly postpones the national resolution that together we've been working so hard for. Freedom to Marry is committed to finishing the job."

Couples in six other states where the Circuit Court of Appeals' decisions will likely also apply include Colorado, Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, West Virginia and Wyoming.

With the addition of those 11 states, the list of states where marriage equality for all will soon be recognized will jump to 30, continuing to beg the question of which state will disgrace the Union as the very last one to allow equality, in this measure, for all of its citizens.

Hey! Great news! Just in time to practice up your hacking skills before the 2014 mid-term elections, you can now buy your very own ES&S iVotronic touch-screen voting system from eBay!...

Yes, the very same voting systems that are so incredibly sensitive and vulnerable to tampering (and which have failed so often in so many states and in so many elections) that both election officials and Elections Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S) have long attempted to keep them out of the hands of the public, can now be yours for just $499.99 or "Best Offer" via eBay! And that includes Free Shipping!

And, oh, look! One of them is already sold!...

"True the Vote" (TTV), the Orwellian-named Republican "voter fraud" front group with a long and sordid history of deception and fraud won't take 'no' for an answer. Release the hounds.

The group has filed a formal notice of appeal [PDF] of U.S. District Court Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos' recent refusal to permit TTV to intervene as a party defendant in the U.S. Justice Department's (DoJ) federal legal challenge to SB-14, the Texas polling place Photo ID statute.

Judge Ramos found that the interests of the organization --- which masquerades as an "election integrity" group in order to actually advocate for voter suppression --- were already adequately represented in the lawsuit by the state of Texas itself.

As they were filing their notice of appeal, the disgraced GOP "voter fraud" front man, Hans von Spakovsky --- who also just happens to serve on the "advisory board" for TTV --- challenged the court's rejection of the groups Motion to Intervene in an article published at the right-wing National Review. His work there, as usual, represents a masterful example of deception, dishonesty and well-remunerated cherry-picking. That is, apparently, what Hans von Spakovsky does for a living.

He is amongst good friends in the Republican Fraud community this time out...

[This is article now been cross-published by Salon...]

This is nothing less than remarkable. The 7th circuit court judge who wrote the majority opinion in the landmark Crawford v. Marion County Election Board case, has now admitted he got it wrong!

"I think we did not have enough information," Judge Richard Posner said in remarks at HuffPo Live today. "If the lawyers had provided us with a lot of information about the abuse of voter identification laws, this case would have been decided differently."

Crawford is the Indiana polling place Photo ID restriction case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court where it was upheld in 2008. It is the case cited, usually inaccurately, by Republican advocates of such restrictions, who argue that such disenfranchising laws are not in violation of the U.S. Constitution. For example, it is the case cited (inaccurately) by TX Attorney General Greg Abbott, in his argument against the U.S. Dept. of Justice's current lawsuit attempting to block the Lone Star State's most recent attempt to institute that voting restriction at their polling places. "The U.S. Supreme Court has already ruled that voter ID laws do not suppress legal votes," Abbott said misleadingly in response to the DoJ's suit, as explained in detail last month by BRAD BLOG legal analyst Ernest Canning.

But, setting aside the misuse of SCOTUS' very limited ruling on Crawford, the remarkable news today comes via UC Irvine election law professor Rick Hasen, who transcribes remarks made today by Judge Richard Posner, author of the original 7th circuit majority opinion in Crawford, now completely recanting his original opinion on the case!

Read this from Hasen. It's amazing...

At the beginning of 2012, the Executive Director of the South Carolina State Election Commission demolished the claim, put forward by the state's Republican Attorney General, that some 953 votes in the state had been cast in recent elections by "dead people".

They hadn't, of course, and the claim was little more than a transparent ruse to try and "stuff the ballot boxes" in support of polling place Photo ID restrictions meant to disenfranchise largely minority, poor, elderly and student (read: Democratic-leaning) voters.

Unsatisfied with actual facts and stuff at the time, state Republicans tasked the State's Law Enforcement Division (SLED) with investigating the matter and, what do you know --- despite claims happily aired by Fox "News" from every Republican in the state, from the Governor to the AG to the party apparatchik last year --- it turns out zombie voters are still not voting in SC, no matter how many times the pretend claims are investigated.

After an 18-month probe, just before last week's holiday, when few suckers, chumps, pawns, stooges, Republican Fox "News" viewers might notice, SLED quietly issued a report recommending no further action, and closed its investigation into the completely bogus claims after concluding none of the accusations were true --- as MSNBC's Al Sharpton was kind enough to highlight...

There once was a day when the Republican Party actually fought for legislation concerning actual, real things, right? I seem to recall such a day, though it seems so long ago now...

In a remarkable display of judicial overreach, activism and legislating from the bench, the five Republican-appointed U.S. Supreme Court Justices, in a narrow 5-4 ruling today [PDF] have, in the words of dissenting Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, "demolished" the center-piece of the nation's beloved 48-year old Voting Rights Act, ignored the court's own repeated rulings, overridden a repeated and unambiguous mandate by the U.S. Congress (most recently, as led by two Republican chambers and signed by a Republican President), and made an absolute joke of the no-uncertain-terms directive of the U.S. Constitution's 15th Amendment.

In short, the nature of today's SCOTUS ruling, effectively gutting the central provision of what is arguably the most important Constitutionally-mandated and successful civil rights legislation in the nation's history, encompasses everything that the Republican Party has, in recent years, pretended to abhor when it comes to the judiciary --- everything, that is, but the partisan politics of its historic reach...