We were forced to take a last-minute swerve once again for today's BradCast. Happily, for a change, it was for good cause this time. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

ICE Barbie, sometimes known as Dept. of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, was fired by Donald Trump today. The precise reasons are unknown. There are many potential culprits, from giving a huge, no-bid, $143 million DHS contract to her friends (to create DHS publicity videos starring herself); to her alleged long-term sexual tryst with her top "Special Government Employee", former Trump Campaign chair and alleged sexual harasser Corey Lewandowski; to her lack of oversight of out-of-control federal agencies such as ICE and CBP; to the Minneapolis murders by federal immigration thugs of Renee Good and Alex Pretti on her watch in January, after which she falsely described the two American citizens as "domestic terrorists" and has refused to apologize ever since.

Of course, pretty much all of those things would seem to win her favor with Trump. So, what exactly happened here? Still unclear. Of course, rather than fire her from the federal government outright, our FIFA Peace Prize winning President just made up a new, ridiculous sounding, pretend position for her to have (and you to pay for), called "Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas".

All of this comes after two days of Noem's testimony in brutal hearings in both the U.S. House and Senate, including angry questioning even from a few Republicans on the Committees, if you can believe it. We cover all of that, and some of the sharpest Committee exchanges today, along with a preview of what we might expect from Trump's appointment of Oklahoma's yahoo, former MMA fighter Senator Markwayne Mullin to fill the role of DHS chief, heading up the government's third largest Cabinet department with a budget well in excess of $100 billion. It should all go very well!

With another trenchant reminder of just how horrible Noem's reign of terror and error has been at DHS, we share a story today from former Republican attorney Keith Barber at Daily Kos. He breaks down a stunning ruling this week from a Trump-appointed federal judge who cites the "abhorrent and illegal practices" --- not to mention "laws of human decency [that] condemn such villainy" --- of the Trump Regime, in the case of a legal resident who came here from Honduras 15 years ago when he was just 9 years old. He was granted protected status and has been a model resident ever since. We share the harrowing story of his unlawful arrest by ICE, as told by Barber and the judge, and the judge's blistering ruling [PDF] in Hesler Asaf Garcia Lanza v. Kristi Noem in which the judge highlights the Administration's "trampling our system of laws...which has safeguarded this nation for close to 250 years."

THEN... In some of today's 2026 Midterm Election news that we didn't sideline for the breaking Noem news, Montana's sleazy, two-term, Republican Sen. Steve Daines --- at precisely 3 minutes before the legal deadline --- filed papers to withdraw from his reelection bid this year. He had only just filed for reelection at the end of February.

Making it all the more sleazy, Montana's Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Kurt Alme filed his papers to run for the seat just five minutes before Daines filed his own to drop out. Both Daines and Trump almost immediately endorsed Alme thereafter. Go figure.

We discuss what all of that means, and who, other than Alme and the Republican Party, may benefit from Daine's chicanery on today's program.

FINALLY... We're joined by Desi Doyen for our latest Green News Report, as Trump's expanding War on Iran continues to roil world markets and disrupt global energy supply chains, even as renewable energy may ultimately --- and ironically --- turn out to be the winner in all of this idiocy...

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To be clear, as we discuss briefly at both the top and bottom of today's BradCast, there have been virtually NO election years in all of American history in which the nation wasn't engaged in some sort of war or foreign conflict. So, for those who see Donald Trump's latest attack on Iran as some sort of scheme to try and undercut midterm elections this year, well, it ain't gonna work, it never has, and though he may try anything, don't be scared by his nonsense. That's what he wants you to be. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

To that end today, we cover both Tuesday's first primary elections of the critical 2026 Midterms and the growing debacle of Trump's deadly, ongoing misadventure in Iran, which has quickly devolved into a broad regional conflict.

FIRST UP... We covered many of the top-line (and some of the not so top-line) unofficial results out of Tuesday's primaries in three states today. Tune in for all of it. But, among the most noteworthy results detailed on today's program...

No real surprises in Arkansas' primaries Tuesday, though there was yet another Special Election triumph for Democrats there yesterday, with another "blue" to "red" flip in the state House, as the Democratic candidate won by some 60 points!

In North Carolina, Dems got the U.S. Senate candidate they were looking for in popular former Governor Roy Cooper, who is now set to square off against Trump-endorsed, election denying former RNC Chair Michael Whatley. Neither primary was particularly competitive on Tuesday, though some 200,000 more voters turned out for the D contest than for the R race. Make of that what you will. The November election will be to fill the seat of retiring Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, in what is perhaps this year's best opportunity for Dems to flip a Republican Senate seat.

After some late Primary Night chicanery by Texas' sleazeball Attorney General (and Republican U.S. Senate candidate) Ken Paxton in Dallas County, it appears the Democratic Party got much of what they wanted out of yesterday's contests for the U.S. Senate. Popular Democratic state Rep. James Talarico defeated progressive firebrand Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett by just a few points. But it was enough to win the Dem Senate nomination outright without heading to a runoff. Crockett gracefully conceded and called for party unity on Wednesday.

On the other side, four-term senior Republican U.S. Senator John Cornyn has been forced into a weeks long, very expensive, and likely brutally ugly runoff with Trump's wildly corrupt pal Paxton for this year's Republican nomination. Dems couldn't ask for anything more out of the Lone Star race at the moment. Runoff day is May 26. You'll need plenty of popcorn between now and then.

There is quite a bit more that we cover on this beat on today's program, from a number of interesting U.S. House primaries and the ousting of three GOP-friendly state House members by three progressive candidates in NC, to a fascinating contest between two very MAGA candidates in the same state, including a very powerful one endorsed by Trump, in a race where the current margin stands at just two votes!

Please tune on in!...

THEN... Back to the War in Iran, which continues to spread throughout the Gulf region and beyond, as it becomes clearer by the day that the Trump Administration had no clear objectives when launching the war, and even less of a clue how to get out of it, at this point.

We're joined to discuss a whole bunch of related matters by Professor JUAN COLE, longtime historian, author and Middle East expert at the University of Michigan. He is also founder and chief editor of the indispensable, long-running Informed Comment blog.

I've got a ton of questions for Professor Cole today. Among them, we discuss...

• How what Trump likes to describe as our 47-year history with Iran (going only back to the Islamic Revolution of 1979), actually goes back much further than that and yes, as Cole explains, "It's all about oil, my friend."

• Who is left to succeed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei following his assassination on day one of the latest assault by the U.S. and Israel? And is restoring the deposed Shah's son, Reza Pahlavi, any kind of real possibility (much less a good idea)?

• Isn't the targeting of civilian leaders both wildly illegal under international law and a horrible idea for a whole bunch of other reasons? ("You never want to take out the leadership that you're going to be negotiating with," notes Cole, observing that even Vladimir Putin seems to understand that much.)

• Cole has argued at Informed Comment that this war "is likely to be short", since neither the U.S. nor Israel have enough weaponry to carry out this type of combat for very long. In another piece today, he notes that Iran claims to have some 80,000 inexpensive weaponized drones that they are using in a "Techno-Guerilla War". They are to produce new ones at the rate of about 400 per day. They cost about $30,000 a piece, whereas the missiles needed to intercept them cost about $1.5 million per. The math is both unsustainable and the strategy unlikely to succeed, he tells me.

• And then there is "the reason that the U.S. has never waged an all-out war on Iran" before this week. It's because "the Persian Gulf region is the cockpit of the world economy" with 20% of the globe's oil and liquefied natural gas resources. Production has now all but halted in the region and, Cole warns, "if this thing actually managed to go on for any length of time, you're talking about a world recession."

Hopefully, that's enough to whet your appetite. But, if not, tune in for the good Professor's thoughts on what he sees as the real potential irony of this fine mess, and how it could end up boosting not just the fortunes of China, but electric vehicles and renewable energy, which Trump "hates like the Devil hates holy water"...

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As insane as it was, as you may have guessed, we're talking about Tuesday's night State of the Union Address on today's BradCast. But I can say with confidence that today's show is nowhere near as long or insane or angry or boring as that crazy speech last night! [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

As you also may have guessed, we are joined today by our go-to roundtable of progressive old-school bloggers, award-winning Salon columnist and Hullabaloo blogger HEATHER DIGBY PARTON, and co-host of The Professional Left Podcast, the one and only 'DRIFTGLASS'. They are with us for the full hour.

I'm not sure how much I need to tee things up for today's program, especially if you saw what happened last night. If you didn't, we'll give you a good summary at the top of the show, and you won't have to listen to more than a minute or two of Donald Trump's voice thereafter. (You're welcome).

It was, as explained, an angry, racist, ugly, hate-filled State of the Union Address that, at a record length, included astonishingly little of substance and even less that resembled truth or reality. By now, we've come to except no less from a 34-time convicted felon, adjudicate sex abuser and accused rapist of at least one 13-year old girl.

He called Somali Americans living in Minneapolis "pirates"; he called the Mayor of the nation's largest city a "Communist"; he repeatedly called Democrats "crazy" and "sick" and charged they, not he, were "destroying our country". But the most offensive point, at least to me, was likely when he described voting in America as a "privilege", as opposed to what it is: a right for every citizen and one that must be protected. From him.

As also noted, the most important news of Tuesday night may have been the fact that three more Democrats swept Special Elections for state Legislatures in Pennsylvania and Maine yesterday. In PA, in particularly, it was a route, with one candidate winning by 63 points, the other by 35 points. That amounted to two more huge over-performances by Dems, as compared to Kamala Harris' numbers in the same district in 2024. On Tuesday, the swing toward Democrats was by 34 and 17 points respectively, as this year's critical midterm elections are now just 250 days away, with primary voting already underway in several states.

So ddid Trump say anything of importance on Tuesday night? Does any of it really matter? Does the SOTU itself even matter at this point?

Digby doesn't seem to think so. It was "a reality show, a wrestling match, a game show," she argues. "Virtually everything he said was a lie. It was insane. The fact checkers looked like they'd been hit over the head by a 2-by-4."

"This was a spectacle," charges Driftglass. "But it was something out of Imperial Rome. Trump slowed down and reveled in all these gory images of blood and violence. This was ancient, ugly, awful, fascist stuff. This was blood and country and revenge."

Beyond that, we actually had quite a few laughs on today's program, even though we also had to wade through some pretty dark topics, including the news of Trump's DOJ attempting (though now failing?) to hide very serious allegations in the Epstein Files of Trump having raped and assaulted a 13-year old girl.

We also discuss the Democrats response to the speech in the chamber (which seemed to infuriate Trump as his marathon remarks went on...and on) and in Virginia, where, both Digby and Driftglass seem to agree, freshly minted Gov. Abigail Spanberger delivered a very well-considered response on behalf of the party.

"He's bad at fascism, bad at governing, but he's really good at chaos," quips Digby today, as we try to make sense of at least some of that chaos. Wish us luck, and tune in for much, much more...

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We getcha caught up on a whole bunch of news from over the weekend on today's BradCast, before opening up the phones to callers [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among that news...

• As we'd be warning, the federal Government is now in another partial shutdown. In theory, once House lawmakers get back to the Capitol amid climate change-fueled extreme weather across much of the country, they will adopt a package of bills approved in the U.S. Senate that set new funding levels for most of the Government, along with a two week extension of current spending levels for DHS, ICE and CBP, as Democrats continue to insist on new guardrails for the goons who have been terrorizing America under the guise of Donald Trump's deadly mass deportation campaign.

• Puerto Rico's pop/rap superstar Bad Bunny won a whole bunch of big awards at Sunday night's Grammy Awards and spoke out, movingly (much of it in Spanish), against the cruel deportation horrors of the Trump regime. Many other artists did as well. Trump is threatening to sue some o them. Bad Bunny --- a pretty good bunny, as it turns out --- will be making Trump and MAGA's heads continue to explode this Sunday, as the most popular artists on the planet headlines the Super Bowl halftime show.

• Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year old Ecuadorian boy used as bait by ICE officers to try and lure his mother out of her house in Minneapolis before he and his father were shipped down to an ICE detention facility in Texas, was ordered to be returned home, along with his father, over the weekend. In his ruling, some of which we share today, the federal judge excoriated the federal Government. Liam is now back in Minnesota, though his school was closed today due to a bomb threat. Moreover, a measles outbreak at the family detention center in TX has been reported. Hopefully, Ramos and his father will be okay.

• There were a couple of runoff Special Elections over the weekend in Texas. In one, for the U.S. House in a very "blue" Houston district, Democratic Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee easily defeated a fellow Democrat. Once sworn in to the seat held by Rep. Sylvester Turner until his death last year, the GOP's already incredibly thin majority margin will become thinner still. House Speaker Mike Johnson will be able to lose just ONE vote and still pass a measure on a party line vote.

• But, also in Texas on Saturday, in a state Senate seat in a very "red" district which Trump won in 2024 by 17 points, Democratic labor union leader Taylor Rehmet defeated his Republican opponent, who enjoyed a full-throated endorsement from Trump, by more than 14 points! That is a stunning 31-point swing for Democrats in a very Republican district near San Antonio, against a MAGA-endorsed candidate, deep in the heart of Texas. Think any GOPers are noticing yet? The day after the election, hilariously, Trump claimed that he knew nothing about the race. "I'm not involved in that, that's a local Texas race," Trump tried to gaslight a Fox "News" reporter, hilariously claiming, "I don't know anything about it."

• On Sunday night, in a long rambling post on his failing social media site, Trump announced he would be shutting down the Kennedy Center (he calls it the Trump Kennedy Center) for two years due to much-needed renovation. All of it, complete and utter lies, as detailed on today's program. In short, he is shutting it down, because it has collapsed after he unlawfully took control of it, as both performers and patrons have fled from his hot, obnoxious mess.

There is a lot of other news along the way today, before we then open up our public airwaves to callers, who also have quite a bit on their minds!...

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It's always about elections, as detailed yet again on today's BradCast, with a boatload of breaking news, and a concurrent trip through the twisted windmills of the mind of the President of the United States. Or whatever's left of it. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among today's many stories...

• Best idea of the week, perhaps of the year, to date: The editors of The Nation magazine nominate the City of Minneapolis for the Nobel Peace Prize. (Seconded!)

• Don't be fooled by Donald Trump swapping out Himmler-wannabe, Border Patrol commandant Gregory Bovino for $50,000 bribe recipient and architect of first term child separation policy Tom Homan as Chief Goon in charge of the federal government's assault on Minneapolis. As many are confirming, little has changed, to date, on the ground, after the rotation of lead stooges, even as Trump has become desperate to prevent another embarrassing government shutdown this weekend.

• Speaking of, we detailed the many moving parts of the threat of a new government shutdown on yesterday's program, as Democrats insist on new guardrails on ICE and CBP in exchange for fiscal 2026 DHS funding. While a brief shutdown is still likely to happen over the weekend, a deal brokered between Dems and the White House just before airtime today would split off the bill that funds DHS from five other spending bills which would be adopted in full. A Continuing Resolution, to keep funding DHS at current levels, would then be approved to allow two more weeks to negotiate reforms, such as an end to unconstitutional door-to-door patrols, a no-masking policy, mandatory body cams, etc., following the ICE/CBP murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, etc.

• As just one sign of Trump's desperation to prevent another government shutdown, with midterm elections looming --- and likely to be very bad for his party --- ICE has reportedly ended its surge into the state of Maine, where hundreds of arrests over the past week, including of legal immigrants has infuriated residents. News of ICE leaving just one week after its new campaign comes via the otherwise "blue" state's Republican Sen. Susan Collins, so take it for what it's worth. Collins --- Chair of Senate Appropriations --- has a very difficult election this year as the only Republican Senator facing reelection in a state won in 2024 by the Democrats. There is a lot to unpack regarding all of that today. But, with Trump desperate to hang on to control of the U.S. Senate this November, its not surprising that he is hoping to make life easier for Collins, despite previously calling on his supporters to vote her out.

• The guy hired to be the new chief artistic director of the Kennedy Center after its takeover by Trump thugs, has quit --- just two weeks after his hiring was announced.

• The U.S. trade deficit --- the amount of goods and services we export versus what we import --- grew sharply in November, with imports surging and exports plummeting, despite Trump's tariff scheme which was supposed to accomplish the very opposite.

• Picking up where we left off yesterday, as news was just breaking that Trump's FBI had raided the Fulton County elections warehouse in Atlanta, reportedly grabbing secured ballots from the 2020 election --- which Trump is still pretending to have won, more than five years later --- we've got several additional details today on what was taken; what the FBI was looking for; the clown show that the execution of the search warrant became; the federal prosecutor from an entirely different state brought in to obtain the warrant; the long-known failures of the three post-election tallies by Fulton County as overseen by the state's Republican Sec. of State; and how all of this has election experts very concerned about bad faith efforts by Trump and his supporters in advance of the 2026 midterms.

• In other bad faith news regarding Trump's false claims to have won states that he didn't, the ties between his reasons for surging immigration enforcers into Minneapolis and Trump's years-long false claims to have won the state of Minnesota three times (he won it zero times), has now become clearer than ever.

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, as humanity slips still closer to 'Doomsday'; as the U.S. is formally withdrawn, for the second time, from the Paris Climate Agreement; as Trump is blocked by a fourth court in a fourth state on his effort to halt nearly completed offshore wind projects; and as sales of EVs now now outpace gasoline cars in Europe...

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We've been warning about it on The BradCast ever since the government re-opened after the last shutdown, its longest ever, in October and November. There now seems to be no way to avoid another shutdown as of midnight Friday, a former White House and Senate budget expert explains on today's 'BradCast'. But, he also notes, "this is the right thing to shut down the government for." [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

BUT FIRST... A couple of other news items of note today...

• The first special elections since the murder of Veterans Affairs Intensive Care Unit nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis were held on Tuesday, to determine partisan control of the Minnesota state House of Representatives. Two vacant seats in very Democratic-leaning parts of the Twin Cities region were up for grabs. One featured a Democrat who ran unopposed. (Spoiler: she won.) The other featured a Democratic candidate running against a Republican who had run for the same seat, and lost, in both 2022 and 2024. It's a district where Kamala Harris won by 71 points. On Tuesday, the Democratic candidate, Meg Luger-Nikolai, won the election by more than 91 points! That's a 20-point swing for the Ds, as Luger-Nikolai garnered more than 95% of the vote. Her Republican challenger won just over 4%. If Republicans weren't worried about this year's midterms before, Tuesday night's results oughta put the fear of God into 'em.

• Speaking of elections, Donald Trump is still pretending he won the one that he lost in 2020 to Joe Biden. To that end, Trump has weaponized his FBI and today, they were ordered to raid the Fulton County (Atlanta) elections warehouse. Reportedly, the federal agents were there to collect ballots and other materials from the 2020 election, which have been retained by court order since then. Supposedly, this will finally provide Trump the evidence of massive "voter fraud" that he has alleged for so many years. If the Georgia Republican Sec. of State was unwilling back in January of 2021 to "find 11,780 votes" to help Trump steal the state's election that year, by golly, Trump is gonna "find" them himself now, five years later.

THEN... U.S. border patrol agents have fired shots 16 times over the course of the past year. In every instance, as WaPo reported yesterday, the Trump Administration declared the shootings to have been justified before any probe had been completed. Four U.S. citizens have been shot in those incidents. Two of them were killed over the past three weeks in Minneapolis.

While Trump is putting up a show of "softening" his stance on the federal government's invasion of the Twin Cities region by ICE and CBP, Greg Sargent argues that it's little more than posturing because Trump is now "frightened" that Democrats in Congress will shut the government down again unless serious restrictions are placed on funding for the Dept. of Homeland Security's immigration goon squads.

Senate Democrats, for their part, seem quite serious about doing just that, as the deadline for a new, 2026 government spending bill is midnight on Friday. With the House in recess, any changes made to the six funding bills they adopted before leaving, couldn't be voted on back in the House until they reconvene next week. That virtually guarantees at least a brief shutdown. To make things worse, Senate Republicans have been unwilling to decouple the DHS/ICE funding from the other funding bills, to keep the rest of the government open, until they can come to an agreement over new guardrails that Democrats are insisting on for ICE and CPB's clownish but deadly operations across the country.

"This is the right thing to shut down the government for," argues our guest, BOBBY KOGAN, today. He served as an advisor to the White House Office of Management and Budget under President Biden and, before that, as Senior Advisor on the Senate Budget Committee. He is now Senior Director of Federal Budget Policy at the Center for American Progress.

Kogan argues that "there is nothing more more quintessential than fighting government oppression." He tells me that he has long argued that nothing is more important to society than "shelter, food and healthcare. I'm the person who says that's the quintessential thing. But, actually, not being executed by the government is the most quintessential thing --- not being executed by the government for existing, and just filming them --- this is a thing you have to shut down the government for."

But at what cost? How many other unrelated agencies will also have to be closed for a time in the bargain? How many Americans will be harmed by those closures? And what exactly are Democrats insisting on in exchange for approving another $10 billion for ICE, after the Republicans' "Big Beautiful Bill" already established a $75 billion slush fund for the out-of-control agency just last Summer?

In addition to guarantees that they will follow the law and the Fourth Amendment's right to privacy with judicial warrants during raids of private homes, Kogan says that Democrats are coalescing on a number of demands, including mandated body cams during enforcement actions and DOJ civil rights reviews of federal government shootings. He also believes that someone, such as DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, will need to be fired, and that clawing back some of that $75 billion granted to ICE last year would also be "a good idea."

"We gave money to the IRS [during the Biden Administration], and as soon as they came to power," he explains, Republicans rescinded much of that money. He suggests Dems should do the same thing as well with the $75 billion that ICE received last year with no-strings-attached.

"There's not much leverage that the Democratic Party has because it is in the minority," Kogan concedes. "But you have to try. Because what else can you possibly do? This is one of the few must-pass bills that still exist. Government shutdowns cannot go on forever because eventually everything starts to break. So it's only a little bit of leverage, but you've got to use it."

Based on his conversations with Democrats in Congress, he tells me, they are not in the mood for "pinky promises from the administration that is busy executing U.S. citizens" when it comes to vows of course corrections. So, he assesses, "the most likely outcome is a six bill shutdown."

"Will it work? I don't know," Kogan asserts. "But Democrats owe it to the American people to do the best they can. Because it is not just political whims or whatever that matters. It matters to real people. And it matters to history. How we respond to this is going to shape what we are as a nation. So Democrats owe it to the American people to give it their all."

FINALLY... The legendary Bruce Springsteen released a new song today via social media called The Streets of Minneapolis. In his announcement, he explained that he "wrote this song on Saturday [the day Alex Pretti was killed], recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good." He added: "Stay free."

We share his moving --- and inspiring --- tune, in full, to close out today's program...

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Hey! Another busy day on The BradCast! What are the odds? [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

No, you're not hallucinating. Former Special Counsel Jack Smith did testify previously before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. It was back in December last year. But it was a closed-door hearing with mostly Committee attorneys on the Republican side doing the questioning on behalf of the Committee's Republican members. Smith had wanted to testify publicly last year, as all previous Special Counsels have done following Presidential probes. Republicans were so proud of that hearing that they waited until New Years Eve to release its transcript and audio, so as few Americans as possible would see it.

Today in D.C., in the same Committee, Smith was finally allowed to testify publicly. The man who secured two different federal, criminal indictments of Donald Trump --- one for his alleged crimes related to trying to steal the 2020 election, the other for stealing thousands of pages of classified national security documents upon leaving office the first time --- has nothing to hide. [Full video now here.]

As Smith told the Committee today during his opening remarks: “If asked whether to prosecute a former President based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat. No one --- no one --- should be above the law in this country. And the law required that he be held to account, so that is what I did. To have done otherwise on the facts of these cases would have been to shirk my duties as a prosecutor and as a public servant, of which I had no intention of doing."

The veteran, three-decade long Dept. of Justice prosecutor testified for about five hours today, and Republicans weren't able to lay much of a glove on any aspect of his election probe. Not that they didn't try, of course. (Smith was unable to speak about the stolen documents case beyond what has already been made public about it, as sycophantic Trump-appointed federal Judge Aileen Cannon still has his report on that matter under seal.) For his part, Trump was so bothered by it that he took to his failing social media cite to again call Smith "deranged", while instructing his Attorney General to bring charges against Smith.

Republicans focused many of their attempted attacks against Smith on false claims that he "spied" on the phone calls of GOP members of Congress in the days before and after Trump's January 6th, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Neither Smith nor his team "spied" on anyone. They did, however, receive judicial warrants to obtain toll records for the phones of several members who Trump contacted while the Capitol was under violent siege, when the sore loser President hoped to delay Congressional confirmation of Joe Biden's 2020 victory, as he falsely claimed the election had been stolen from him. The toll records do not include information on the content of phone calls. They only detail numbers dialed or received, the date and time, how long they talked.

Several Republicans also took the old First Amendment "free speech" defense out for a spin today. It didn't work much better at denting the case against Trump. As Smith explained once again, Trump is welcome to lie about a stolen election all he likes. But when those lies are used in furtherance of a crime, it's a different matter.

You can lie to your friends that you are worth $10 million dollars, if you want, explains our guest today, former lifelong Republican and attorney KEITH BARBER. But you can't offer that same lie on your mortgage application. That becomes criminal fraud, not free speech.

Barber, who now contributes to the progressive Daily Kos website, joins us for analysis, with both legal and political insight on Smith's testimony, and how --- or if --- today's public hearing might move the political needle one way or another for those in his former party.

After observing that there was next to no coverage of today's historic hearing on the front page of the Fox "News" website this afternoon, Barber argues: "The opinions of MAGAs on this are intractable. It's a cult. There's nothing you can do about it. Everybody else is more open-minded and I think has already decided Trump is out to lunch on this. I don't think that these hearings are going to move the needle all that much."

Barber is with us for much of the hour today for both analysis of the Smith hearing and for legal insight on an extraordinarily disturbing story broken late last night by the Associate Press. The outlet reported on a secret memo instructing federal ICE agents --- in contradiction of the Constitution, decades of Supreme Court precedent and written training materials for new officers --- that they may enter a private home without a judicial warrant signed by a judge. Only an administrative warrant, issued by ICE itself, is needed, according to the memo revealed by two agency whistleblowers.

Similarly disturbing: though the memo, signed last May be the acting Director of ICE, is addressed to "all ICE personnel", it has only been distributed to "select DHS officials" who have then shared it with some employees "who were told to read it and return it," according to AP. The memo offers no detail on how this new legal determination was made nor any explanation for basis of reversing decades of longstanding guidance.

Barber published his own report on the troubling news earlier today at Daily Kos, in a piece headlined "Secret ICE Memo Trains Agents To Conduct Unconstitutional Home Invasions". He tells me that the secret change in guidance has resulted in more violence, as people are dragged out of their homes, believing the old rules, that a warrant signed by a judge is needed to enter a home. Then, their doors are smashed in and they are dragged out.

"It's really concerning because it is increasing the level of violence associated with these things, and because of the secrecy involved in it. And it's also just wrong under the law," says Barber. "That is not what the Supreme Court in multiple cases and certainly a host of lower courts have ruled the Fourth Amendment allows."

Finally, we close out another absurdly busy day with Desi Doyen and our latest Green News Report, as the Arctic's climate change-disrupted polar vortex returns to freeze much of the U.S. this week, and as our dumb President offers astoundingly stupid new lies about wind energy...

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It was another one of those everything, everywhere, all at once days, where figuring out how best and where to focus our coverage --- with news breaking and changing by the hour --- is always a Trump Era challenge (nightmare). We're happy to have you along for the ride on today's BradCast. [Audio link to full story follows this summary.]

FIRST UP... There were some state legislative Special Elections in Virginia and Georgia on Tuesday. Dems appear to be continuing last year's trend of radically outperforming their own results from 2024.

Also, Republicans are hilariously and hypocritically furious at Gov. Gavin Newsom selecting the latest possible date, August 4th, to hold a U.S. House Special Election in California to fill the seat left vacant by the death of Republican Rep. Doug LaMalfa earlier this month. We'll keep their crocodile anger in mind on January 31, when Texas holds its own U.S. House Special in Houston, to fill the seat left vacant following the death of Democratic Rep. Sylvester Turner, who will have died 11 months prior to this month's election, scheduled by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, to fill his seat.

The reverberations from Donald Trump's vow to takeover Greenland (which he repeatedly referred to as Iceland during his remarks today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland) continue to rattle Europe, world markets, and the NATO alliance.

On Tuesday, in Davos, Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney laid out plans to forge new alliances without the United States, given Trump's turn against our closest neighbor and largest trading partner. We share some of Carney's landmark remarks.

THEN... Our longtime European allies called an emergency meeting at the start of the WEF this week in response to Trump's declaration of punitive new trade tariffs imposed on the imports from those nations opposed to his promised takeover of Greenland, the semi-autonomous territory of Denmark.

The Europeans seem prepared to end their go-along-to-get-along footing of the second Trump term, now that the U.S. President seems hellbent on action against Greenland that would upend the longstanding NATO and the post-WWII rules-based order along with it. Even far-right populist parties who have benefited from Trump's support, seem to be distancing themselves from his latest behavior.

Today, during rambling remarks at Davos, Trump said, for the first time, that he would not use military force to takeover Greenland. "I don't have to use force. I don't want to use force. I won't use force," he claimed.

He then went on to falsely assert that NATO has never done anything for the United States, despite the fact that they came to our aid following 9/11. It was the first and only time in the 80-year history of the world's most successful military pact that the treaty's Article 5, mandating that an attack against one NATO member nation requires a response from all, had been invoked.

Several hours later and just before airtime today, as world markets continued to be rattled by all of the upheaval, Trump announced on his failing social media site, that he had struck what he described as “the framework of a future deal" with NATO's Secretary General, regarding Greenland. What that "future deal" looks like remains to be seen.

We're joined today for analysis of all of this madness by RYAN COOPER, Managing Editor of The American Prospect, on the heels of his story this morning on "How the Free World Can Fight Mad King Trump". In it, he details a number of ways that European nations can, and should, "stand up" to Trump, given Cooper's argument that "appeasement will only lead to him coming back for a second helping."

We discuss all of that and more today with Cooper, who notes, regarding whether anyone should believe Trump's vow to not use force against Greenland (or even Iceland): "You basically can't trust any word that comes out of Donald Trump's big, flapping, potty-mouth." Though he concedes that "it's notable that he said he wouldn't do it, because he usually doesn't do that," suggesting he has either been "talked into" or "convinced himself that it would be unwise to actually do a military operation."

Why is Trump so interested in Greenland in the first place? Tune in for Cooper's best guess, before we then dive into several actions that European nations could take to push back against Trump's bullying, including painful sanctions against him and his billionaire friends, akin to those that have been implemented against other militaristic tyrants, such as Vladimir Putin. And, there is also the "James Bond" option. Tune in for details. But all of these, as I note to Cooper, would come with considerable danger of U.S. blowback to the EU nations.

"The thing about that," he tells me, "is that you signal to the other party that you are willing to endure pain in order to stand up for yourself. At a certain point, if you're in something that is looking like a conflict, If you say, 'Well, I will not endure any pain myself,' you're just giving up. Europe should be ready."

"It would hurt to pull that lever," Cooper agrees. "But it is something you have to be ready to do to protect freedom and democracy around the world. Including in the United States."

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Some of the weirdness has been completely predictable, if not to many of his duped supporters. Some of it is a surprise. All of it underscores, yet again on today's BradCast, that we have a full-blown loser serving as President of the United States. [Audio link to the full show follows this summary.]

Among the many many stories supporting those points, as covered on today's program...

• Grocery prices see biggest spike in three years (Axios)
• Court finds Trump illegally blocked renewable energy grants to 16 "blue" states (AP)
• Bipartisan Senate Budget Committee restores almost all science funding cut by Trump (NYT)
• 5 Repubs join all Senate Dems in vote to block more military action in Venezuela (WaPo)
• 17 Repubs join all House Dems to pass bill restoring ACA health care subsidies (AP)
• Boebert slams Trump for veto of unanimously-approved CO drinking water project (DKos)
• 35 Repubs join all House Dems in failed effort to override Trump's CO water project veto (CO Politics)
• Treasury Sec. Bessent told Trump he's furious about DOJ's criminal probe of Fed Chair Powell (Axios)
• Six top Civil Rights Division criminal prosecutors resign over DOJ refusal to investigate ICE killing of Renee Good in MN (MS NOW)
• Six top DOJ prosecutors in MN resign over attempt to investigate Good's wife (NYT)
• Unhinged Trump warns: "DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING" in MN (Politico)

And, if all of that isn't enough for ya, we close with Desi Doyen and our latest Green News Report, with Trump losing his weird fight against wind power yet again in another federal court, among many other items of note...

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His pathetic lies about the 2020 election will apparently never end. He's a loser and can't get over it. Even now. But, as a longtime expert in election transparency, security and integrity --- and, specifically, Georgia's unverifiable touchscreen voting system --- explains on today's BradCast, there is still much to be worried about in the Peach State's 2026 midterm elections. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

FIRST UP TODAY... a few words on how Donald Trump, following his unlawful attack and invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of its President and his wife --- appears to be barrelling the world toward a full collapse of the post-WW2 order, with his recent threats against Colombia, Mexico, Cuba and even NATO-ally Greenland.

Also, you have by now likely heard Trump's Tuesday "victory" boast, as posted on his failing social media site, that Venezuela would be "turning over between 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels of High Quality, Sanctioned Oil, to the United States of America." A bit of perspective on that claim today. There is, of course, never any reason to believe anything he says about anything. But, even if one assumes it's true, that amount of oil, at the high end, is about what we produce in the U.S. all by ourselves in about 3.5 days. We currently consume (burn) that much in about 2.5 days.

So, yay! Totally worth spending billions of dollars to kill 80 people in Venezuela, capture its President, and set the world on a path toward toppling the post-WW2 order of decades of (relative) peace and prosperity.

On the other hand, none of this madness seems to be escaping notice of the American voters. That was demonstrated yet again in the final Special Election of 2025, in Iowa on December 30th, where the Democratic candidate for a state Senate seat outperformed Kamala Harris one year earlier in the same district by nearly 30 points! That, and pretty much every other Special and Off-Year contest last year suggests it is likely to be a very bad year in 2026 for Trump and his Republican Party. And, as revealed by some comments he made on Tuesday, he knows it.

TO THAT END... Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of Trump's failed attempt to topple the U.S. government with his January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in hopes of stealing the 2020 election.

Today is the fifth anniversary of the notorious, unlawful Coffee County, Georgia statewide voting system software breach by Team Trump. The long-under-the-radar criminal scheme, initially hatched during a late-night Oval Office meeting in December of 2020, was purportedly meant to discover evidence of election fraud in the battleground state that Trump lost that year by 12,000 votes to Joe Biden. We helped break the story on this program, and five of the participants in the plot to steal, copy and distribute the software used across the entire state of Georgia (and in parts of about a dozen other states) were charged as co-conspirators along with Trump in the RICO indictment initially filed by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. Several of the conspirators pleaded guilty to their part in the Coffee County scheme before the charges were eventually dismissed last month by a different prosecutor who took over the case.

In the meantime, the MAGA right is still pretending that the election was stolen from Trump in Fulton County (Atlanta). The latest ridiculous allegation to come to light in rightwing media, just before the holidays last month, is that 315,000 early votes cast in Atlanta were somehow fraudulent because poll tapes printed out by the ballot scanners were not signed by local officials. After Fulton officials confirmed last month that signatures were missing from those tapes, due to one of many administrative failures in Fulton County that year, rightwingers took to social media to pretend that meant that Trump actually won the election in Georgia.

"Massive voting fraud uncovered," declared Trump's buffoonish pal, Elon Musk, absurdly, as other rightwingers played along with claim that made its way just before the holidays into the supposedly non-wingnut media.

"This is the biggest bunch of nonsense," explains our guest today, MARILYN MARKS of the Coalition for Good Governance. She is a longtime voting system and Georgia election expert. "There is not one thing to suggest that they were fraudulent or there was a lack of certification for the election." She details why the claim is both "foolish" and "absurd".

She ought to know. Marks is the one who has legally challenged the state's 100% unverifiable touchscreen voting systems in federal court for years now, successfully resulting in the state's older Diebold systems being decertified by a federal judge, only to see them replaced by Republican Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger with equally insecure, unverifiable touchscreens made by Dominion. Marks is no fan of Raffensperger or the way Fulton ran its election in 2020. But she knows "crazy claims" when she sees them from MAGA rightwingers.

We discuss all of that, and what really happened with those poll tapes, along with her continuing concerns about the potential 2026 fallout from the Coffee County scheme's stolen software --- a matter which has been left hanging since Georgia abandoned the criminal indictments against Trump and 18 co-conspirators for his criminal attempt to steal the state's 2020 election.

As usual, there is much more today on all of this, as we barrel toward the critical 2026 midterms, with Georgia's U.S. Senate race potentially determining the partisan balance in the upper chamber of Congress next year. The race will be decided on 100% unverifiable voting systems run by Raffensperger across the entire state --- even as he will be overseeing his own attempt to become the state's next Governor.

"What makes Georgia so different [from every other state] is that the Secretary of State programs every single ballot, in every single machine, in every single county. So you have a central point of failure," Marks tells me. "He is not only programming the elections for his own ballots, he is counting his own votes, he is certifying his own election, and he is auditing his own election. What could go wrong?"

What could go wrong? Tune in to find out!...

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My ears are still ringing after the President of the United States spent about 20 minutes barking at me last night. But the show --- in this case, the final BradCast of 2025 --- must go on. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

VERY QUICKLY... Some final election results for the year, as a Democratic union leader and U.S. Army veteran won a special election on Tuesday for a state Senate seat in Kentucky in a more than 47-point landslide over his Republican opponent! Gary Clemons won almost 73% of the vote, according to today's unofficial results. Granted, it was in a Democratic leaning area of Louisville, but one where Kamala Harris won by just 6 points last year. So, it amounted to an approximately 42-point shift in favor of Team Blue. In Kentucky. That should help propel the Resistance into the critical mid-term election year of 2026.

THEN... Two of our favorite guests are here today for an end-of-year roundtable, of sorts, as we wrap up a...well...tumultuous year, to put it far too nicely, as we try to make sense of whatever happened last night during Donald Trump's weird, lie-filled, prime-time tirade and a whole bunch of other stuff at year's end.

We're joined once again today by fellow old-school bloggers HEATHER DIGBY PARTON of Salon and Digby's Hullabaloo, and 'DRIFTGLASS' of the Professional Left Podcast.

AP noted last night that Trump has frequently said he believes more Americans would back him if they simply heard him describe his track record. Well, I think everybody heard him last night. Even if they had their TVs off, since the guy was shouting so loud. What he was shouting, however, was mostly a string of ridiculous claims and a whole bunch of numbers, many of which were made up out of whole cloth.

In his mercifully brief, but endlessly angry remarks, he said "at levels never seen before" or "at record levels" at least 7 times; referred to at least 11 different "records" that he claims to have broken over the past year; cited "history" --- as in, "never before in American history" --- at least 12 times; and blamed Joe Biden for most of his own failures at least 7 times.

Whether anybody is more inclined to back him after hearing that "record" --- (new polling out yesterday from PBS/NPR/Marist found his overall support at just 38%, AP/NORC clocked him in at just 36% approval) --- than they were before last night remains to be seen.

"I couldn't guess about his supporters, because I've lost all sense of anything making sense amongst the American electorate," quips an enjoyably cynical Digby today. "These people are crazy. And so is he. I am just looking at this and thought what kind of person watched that gibbering clown last night and thought, 'Wow, that is a great president'?"

"It is clear that Donald Trump has made a career out of lying to people. Now he's just a living sales pitch. But you can't out-shout kitchen table math," argues Driftglass in regard to last night's speech, before somewhat countering himself. "On the other hand, if you've ever read 1984, it's just a matter of telling the rubes what you want them to think. They are so sunk-cost bought-in to Donald Trump, they know if they don't believe it, the whole thing crashes down."

"There's a thing in aeronautics called the Jesus Nut," he continues. "It's this bolt-nut combination that holds the entire helicopter assembly together. Without it, you'd better pray to Jesus because you're going down. Donald Trump is that to them. He is the thing holding it all together. So whatever crazy crap he says, they have to believe it, they have to go along with it, because the alternative is the abyss."

When we move to the topic of whether Republicans are going to accept the Democrats latest attempt to help save them from themselves by extending the Affordable Care Act subsidies that Trump and the GOP cut --- with monthly premiums now set to skyrocket for tens of millions of Americans in the new year --- Digby believes that "Republicans are not coming to their senses."

"I think that the vast majority of the Republican caucus, in both the House and Senate, are happy to let the subsidies expire because they know they are going to lose next fall. They see the writing on the wall. And they figure, 'The one thing we did was we destroyed Obamacare.' That's been on their agenda from the very beginning. If they get nothing else out of this whole mess, they get that. They destroyed Obamacare. They don't care about how many people suffer, because this is their Great White Whale. Or Great Black Whale, I guess, in the case of Obamacare."

Driftglass, who explains that his ACA monthly premiums are set to quadruple next year for him and his wife thanks to the GOP's cuts (from about $700/month this year to more than $2500/month next year!), believes that Trump's own supporters "are going to take a huge hit, but they are going to go look for scapegoats, not solutions. And that is tragic. And it's dangerous."

He is also wistful about what has happened over the past year. "This country is now a different country than it was in 2024," he observes. "We have become a different place. We've lost our innocence. This happened after the Viet Nam War, the Civil Rights Movement. Fundamentally, this country has changed in ways we do not understand yet. And whatever happens after Trump, it is going to be a different place than you and I grew up in. And part of that is that there is now a solid block of 36% of the American public who are just insane."

We have much more insanity to try and make sense of on today's program. From the house of cards that Speaker Mike Johnson is barely hanging on to; to the release of the Epstein Files that, by law, is supposed to happen tomorrow (both Digby and Drifty are dubious, to say the least); to why it is that Indiana Republicans actually stood up to Trump's threats and refused to gerrymander their U.S. House map; to what could possibly reverse Trump's seemingly quickly sinking fortunes (and health) next year.

FINALLY... Desi Doyen helps us close out the show with our final 'Green News Report' for 2025, at the end of a program that hopefully gives you lots to chew on, worry about, think about, plan for, fight for or laugh about until we return in 2026...

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Today on The BradCast: It's difficult to notice --- or trust your own eyes --- when it all happens in slow motion. At least until it happens quickly. But, yes, the wall continues to crack. Day by day. Brick by brick. [Audio to full show follows this summary.]

Among the many stories covered on today's program...

• One of the worst headwinds that House Speaker Mike Johnson and his Congressional Republicans will be facing next year, in their hopes of hanging on to their narrow majority in the lower chamber, is their cuts to Affordable Care Act (ACA, or Obamacare) subsidies that are set to expire at year's end. It will skyrocket the cost of premiums for millions of Americans beginning on January 1. Today, Johnson announced his own caucus in the House could not agree on a fix, all but guaranteeing there will be no such fix until next year earliest. Congress will be recessing until 2026 at the end of this week.

• On yesterday's Rachel Maddow Show, she was somewhat misleading in her suggestion that last night at midnight, December 15th, was the last chance to sign up for a health care policy under the Affordable Care Act to ensure health care coverage next year. In fact, the Open Enrollment period for Obamacare --- for both new policies or to change a current one --- continues until January 15th next year in most states. Though, depending on which state you are in, coverage may now not begin until February under a new policy. In several states, however, which run their own exchanges (rather than forcing resident to purchase policies via the federal exchange), including California, New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Washington D.C., you can still sign up for policies (or change current ones) before the end of the year to see them take effect as of January 1. Costs are going to go up either way for millions of Americans, thanks to Republicans in Congress refusing to extend subsidies that would prevent monthly premiums for policies purchased via the Obamacare marketplaces from doubling or tripling in many cases from what they were this year.

• Donald Trump and the U.S. Military's murder spree on the high seas continued on Monday with three new attacks on three supposed drug boats near the coast of Venezuela, bringing the number of people killed by our completely unlawful attacks to at least 95. In related news on Monday, Trump signed an Executive Order "designating fentanyl as a Weapon of Mass Destruction", in hopes of adding some --- any --- legal justification to both his murder strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, and a promised eventual attack on supposed "narco-terrorists" in Venezuela (even though fentanyl is not produced or trafficked from there.) Also relatedly, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday said he will not release video of the unlawful second strike on an alleged drug boat from September 2nd, when the U.S. fired on two shipwrecked survivors following an attack earlier in the day, a huge violation of both U.S. and International law.

• Trump's not-insane, very powerful, and very low profile White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, had a whole bunch of pretty shocking things to say about Trump, his policies (both foreign and domestic), his top appointees (from Vance to Bondi to Vought), his retribution campaign against political foes, and much more in some ten interviews reportedly given over the past year to an author who has written a book about WH Chiefs of Staff over the years. A number of Wiles' eyebrow raising remarks from those interviews were published by Vanity Fair today and D.C. is abuzz trying to figure out what it all means.

• As still more bricks in the wall appear to be falling out, a number of Republicans, including MAGA loyalists past and present, have seemingly turned --- gently or otherwise --- against Donald Trump's deranged, repulsive remarks on Monday about the murder of Hollywood legend Rob Reiner, who was killed just hours earlier on Sunday along with his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, in their Los Angeles home.

• Finally, Desi Doyen is here with our latest Green News Report as climate change-fueled torrential rain, flooding and levee failure plague the Pacific Northwest; Trump continues his very selective and political approval for federal disaster aid; and as New York City's congestion pricing program (which Trump opposes, natch) continues to clear the air in Midtown...

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It's difficult to fathom. But, we've got hard evidence on today's BradCast that Congress was actually in session today. Both chambers! Doing oversight. Holding votes and stuff! And, when it comes to the Republicans who control those chambers, natch, voting against the best interests of their own constituents. All of that, as Trump continued to lose one battle after another today --- in the courts and even in the state Senate of a very Republican state. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

There was also quite a bit of breaking news both right before and during today's hour. Among the stuff we covered...

• Just before airtime, news broke that yet another federal grand jury has, for a second time, rejected an attempt by the Trump Administration's corrupt Dept. of Justice to revenge indict New York Attorney General Letitia James. If you're keeping score at home, that's one indictment tossed out by a federal judge, followed by two attempted indictments rejected by two different grand juries, against the woman who successfully held Donald Trump to account actual fraud to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in both criminal and civil court last year.

• Also just before airtime, Republican lawmakers in the Indiana state Senate voted to reject a new U.S. House map that would have gerrymandered the Hoosier State's two remaining Democratic seats out of existence, defying Trump's orders, death threats from his supporters, threats to primary those Senators next year, and even his last minute message that he would cut off all federal funding to the state if they didn't obey! To their credit, the state Republicans did not!

• A federal judge on Thursday found that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was being held unlawfully held by ICE in immigration detention and ordered that he be freed immediately. Despite foot-stomping and promises by Trump's DoJ to appeal, Abrego Garcia was released before today's show ended. He is, of course, the Maryland resident, father and Salvadoran national who was wrongfully deported back to El Salvador earlier this year, before being ordered to be brought back to the U.S. by a federal judge. DoJ then indicted him on seemingly trumped-up charges, which he still faces, and ICE unlawfully tossed him into detention. Until today.

• Speaking of immigration, Dept. of Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem embarrassed herself and the Administration under questioning from Democrats in the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee on Thursday. We share some of the sharp questioning for DHS Barbie from Democratic Reps. Dan Goldman (NY) and Seth Magaziner (RI). Also testifying today was FBI Director of Operations Michael Glasheen who similarly embarrassed himself and the Administration when trying (and failing) to explain to the Committee's Democratic Ranking Member, Bennie Thompson (MS), why the non-existent "Antifa" organization is now absurdly regarded by the Bureau to be the nation's top domestic terror threat.

• Over in the U.S. Senate, Republicans blocked a Democratic bill to restore premium subsidies for more than 20 million Americans who receive access to health care via the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or Obamacare). Monthly premiums are now almost certain to skyrocket for millions at years end, leaving many Americans without health care at all. Four Republicans joined the Democrats' attempt to restore the massive GOP cuts, but it wasn't enough to overcome a Republican filibuster. For their part, a ridiculous Republican bill to give Americans about $1,000 per year in a so-called Health Savings Account to somehow cover health care needs, went down in flames. Several pending discharge petitions in the House may force votes next week on the matter in the lower GOP-controlled chamber.

• "Catastrophic" flooding is forcing evacuations for as many as 100,000 residents in the Pacific Northwest over the next several days, following as much as 18 inches of rain over the past 72 hours in some areas. The Skagit River in Washington, which reaches major flood stage at 32 feet, is now expected to crest at a record 47 feet! All consequences of the climate change disaster which most Republicans pretend is not happening, and pretend to not be caused by the man-made burning of fossil fuels.

• With increasingly dangerous floods, droughts, storms, fires, etc., it is disappointing to learn that Zillow, the nation's largest real estate listing site, is removing a feature, added just last year, that allowed home buyers to learn about a property's exposure to the climate crisis. Making climate risk data more difficult to find and use, does not make its reality disappear, however. "The risk doesn’t go away,” says Matthew Eby, founder of the non-profit financial climate risk modeling site, First Street, which supplied the scientific data previously used for the Zillow feature. "It just moves from a pre-purchase decision into a post-purchase liability." Good luck, home buyers!

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, on the U.S. seizure of an oil tanker near Venezuela; the Trump EPA's deletion from their website of humanity's roll in climate change; Exxon Mobil pleads for help from the corrupted SCOTUS Six; And a U.S. court strikes down Trump's Executive Order blocking wind energy projects...

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Today on The BradCast: If Democrats don't put up a candidate for every goddamn contest on the ballot next year --- in every state, county, city, town, village and hamlet in the nation --- they are out of their flippin' minds. If things continue as are seeing week after week at year's end in 2025, they could well be in a position to win any race, almost anywhere in the country in 2026. (Though they may need to demand a few ballot hand-counts to ensure the correct winner, if a disturbing new report out today is any indication.) [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Following up on huge shifts toward Democrats by the electorate in Special Elections across the country all year; an outright Blue Wave in state after state during the November 4th off-year elections last month; and another Special Election in a deep-red GOP-gerrymandered U.S. House district last week; Democrats racked up more stunning victories on Tuesday night in several Presidential battleground states, as the American electorate continues a remarkable shift toward the Left, even in races that Dems don't win outright.

Among the unofficial election results from last night, what they all mean moving forward into the critical 2026 mid-terms, and one great big red flag that voters from all parties need to watch out for next year...

• A Democrat won the Miami, Florida Mayoral runoff for the first time in nearly 30 years, defeating a Republican candidate endorsed by both Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis. She won by nearly 20 points in a city that narrowly went to Trump in the Presidential contest just last year. Eileen Higgins will also make history by becoming the city's first-ever female Mayor in a city not much more than an hour's drive from Mar-a-Lago. She ran on affordability agenda, vowed to protect the immigrant community threatened by Trump, and to take on many of the city's worsening climate change-related challenges ignored by both Trump and DeSantis in South Florida. She also promised, to roars from supporters during her Tuesday night victory speech, to build a city where "immigrants feel welcome and respected".

• There were also two Special Elections to fill vacancies in the Florida state House on Tuesday. One seat was previously held by a Democrat and the other by a Republican. While neither seat was flipped, the Democratic candidate improved on last year's results by about 11 percentage points in one case, and 15 points in the other. It was an incredibly good night for Dems in the Sunshine State, which had been moving farther and farther to the right over the past decade or more.

• In Georgia, Democrat Eric Gisler flipped a GOP state House seat on Tuesday, in a Special Election in a district that went for Trump by more than 12 points last year. He defeated his Republican opponent by just under 2 points, according to the latest unofficial tally, notching a 14 or 15 point swing for Democrats in the previously "red" state House District. The victory comes after what the state's Democratic Party described as "22 years of failed Republican leadership."

• In Albuquerque, New Mexico, two-term Democratic incumbent Mayor Tim Keller became the first Mayor in city history to win a third consecutive term. As he vowed during his victory speech on Election Night: "We are not going to allow ICE in. We are not going to let Trump come into Albuquerque." Democratic wins also appear to have flipped the City Council.

• Even in Iowa, where a Democratic candidate lost her race last night in a landslide Special Election for a vacant state House seat by nearly 40 points, the electorate shifted about 11 points toward the Democrat in the otherwise extremely "red" state House District. It was the fifth Special Election for a state legislative seat in the Hawkeye State this year. In each of them, the electorate shifted to Dems by anywhere from 9 to 15 points.

• In all, as a Bolts Magazine analysis of all 2025 state legislative elections finds today, "Democrats gained 25 state Senate and House seats that were held by the GOP, out of the 118 that were resolved this year in regular or special elections." That number outpaces the party's wins in 2017, before 2018's mid-term Blue Wave during Trump's first Presidency. Republicans flipped exactly ZERO such races over the past year. Moreover, the outlet notes, "the GOP may have gotten lucky this year: Most of the legislative elections that occurred in 2025 were for seats that Democrats already held, which limited their opportunity for gains."

• With all of that in mind, Republicans should be terrified ahead of next year's mid-terms. Even --- and, perhaps, especially --- in GOP-controlled states that have recently gerrymandered their U.S. House map (at Trump's orders) in hopes of flipping "blue" seats to "red" ones. To do that, they must make safe "red" seats a bit less safe. In Missouri, where Republicans recently adopted a new map designed to remove one of two remaining Democratic U.S. House seats, opponents are trying to block the new map by putting it on next year's ballot as a citizen's veto referendum. Yesterday, organizers of the effort let me know that they have "delivered over 300,000 signatures --- three times what was required" to MO's Sec. of State in order to force a referendum on the gerrymandering measure next November. "Under the Missouri Constitution," they said, "once those signatures are submitted, the map cannot take effect unless voters approve it." But, they are also warning that Republican state officials are "signaling they may ignore that constitutional requirement and attempt to implement the map anyway." The group, People Not Politicians, tells me they are ready to go to court immediately, if necessary, to file a challenge if, in fact, the state is "considering the nullification of its own constitutional check on legislative power."

• But here's something that Democrats and Republicans alike need to be aware of next year. The computer-tallied results from several ballot propositions in upstate New York's Rensselaer County appear to have gone sideways during last month's November 4th elections. Thanks to the tenacity of supporters of the Stephentown Memorial Library in tiny, rural Stephentown, just three miles from the state's border with Massachusetts, a hand recount of the county's hand-marked paper ballots was carried out. After a hand-recount, it was discovered that a measure to fund the town's library, initially reported as having lost 528 to 60, was actually found to have been adopted by voters 540 to 279! Several countywide measures were also mistallied as well by the County's optical scanners made by Clear Ballot. One of them, a measure that would have ended funding for a local volunteer rescue squad, was not adopted as originally reported by results of 517 to 505. In fact, the local measure was found to have been defeated --- 2,381 to 2,250 --- following the hand count! So, how could the original results have been so wildly wrong? We explain today, based on the few details we've been able to gather from local media reporting and some input from several longtime voting system and election integrity experts we reached out to.

• Finally, at the end of another very busy show, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, as climate impacts accelerate in the Middle East; Repubs give another big gift to Big Oil; a MAGA v. MAHA feud breaks out over Trump's EPA rollback of toxic chemical rules; and as deployment of utility-scale solar operations sets a new record in the U.S., despite Trump's efforts to kill development of cheap, clean, reliable, renewable energy...

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Yikes. Quite a news day. We do our best to keep up on today's BradCast. But our conversation about the political fight to avoid falling over the GOP's massive health care funding cliff at year's end, may be the most immediately important news of all today for tens of millions of Americans. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Okay, we begin first with a few headlines. And there are a lot of them today, most still developing and several breaking just before and during the show. So, in short for the moment...

• The Dept. of Justice arrested and charged a long-sought suspect today in the case of the unexploded pipe bombs left near the Democratic and Republican Committee headquarter buildings on the eve of January 6, 2021. They gave no details yet on how the Virginia man identified today was caught, nor what his motive may have been.

• A Dept. of Defense Inspector General's report [PDF] was released today on DefSec Pete Hegseth's "Signalgate" scandal. Despite claims yesterday by Team Hegseth that the IG report offered him "TOTAL exoneration", it offers quite the opposite. It finds, among other things, that Hegseth "created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed U.S. mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots" by detailing an attack on Yemen on the unsecured Signal app on his personal phone with high-level Cabinet members and an accidentally invited national security reporter. He also appears to have destroyed evidence in the matter.

• Following a classified briefing at the Capitol today, several high-ranking Democratic members of the House and Senate Intelligence and Armed Services Committees said they were "deeply disturbed" after viewing "one of the most troubling things" they'd ever seen. They had just watched unreleased, still-classified, unedited footage from the September 2nd U.S. military rocket strike on two shipwrecked survivors of a previous strike on a supposed "drug boat" in the Caribbean. The unlawful order to carry out the second strike was previously reported to have been issued by Pete Hegseth. Such an attack is in strict violation of U.S. and International law, as well as the DoD's own Rules of War Manual. The Commander who reportedly carried out the double-tap strike, Admiral Mitch Bradley, is said to have claimed during today's briefing that the order to kill the survivors wasn't given by the SecDef. Still many unanswered questions here.

• BREAKING just before airtime: After a federal judge last week tossed out Donald Trump's revenge indictment of New York Attorney General Letitia James, finding Trump's personal insurance lawyer, Lindsey Halligan, was unlawfully appointed as U.S. Attorney, a new prosecutor --- said to have actual prosecutorial experience --- was brought in from Missouri to file a new grand jury indictment today. The grand jury, however, rejected the new indictment!

• BREAKING late in the show today: The corrupted, activist Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, as somewhat expected, overruled a lower appeals court ruling (written by a Trump-appointed judge) that had blocked the state of Texas' mid-decade Congressional gerrymander. State Republican lawmakers drew the map over the summer, at Trump's urging, in hopes of flipping five U.S. House seats in the Lone Star State from "blue" to "red" next year. The lower court found the new map to be an unlawful racial gerrymander and blocked its use. The SCOTUS majority, however, while offering little to no reason for their 6 to 3 "shadow docket" ruling, suggested the new TX map was only a partisan gerrymander --- which is now allowable since their horrible 2019 ruling in Rucho --- as opposed to an unlawful (for now) racial gerrymander. They are now allowing the new gerrymander to be used in the 2026 midterms.

• Thanks in no small part to the Trump Administration's shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) earlier this year, the global child mortality is now on the rise for the first time in decades. Nearly a quarter of a million more kids under the age of 5 are expected to die in 2025 than in 2024, according to a new report.

NEXT... Speaking of health care and both children and adults unnecessarily dying...we're joined today by Politico's Senior Heath Care Reporter ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN as America heads toward a Republican-caused health care crisis cliff as of January 1.

Over the summer, Donald Trump and his Republicans in Congress passed their so-called "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" to give a trillion dollars in tax cuts mostly to the wealthy and added $2.4 trillion to the national debt, resulting in about half a trillion dollars in automatic cuts to Medicare. In the bargain, they also slashed a trillion dollars from Medicaid and hundreds of billions from the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or Obamacare), which will subsequently spike monthly health care premiums for some 24 million Americans as of January 1.

This is why Democrats refused to vote with Republicans to keep the government open for a record 43 days in October and November. At least until seven rogue Democrats and one independent who caucuses with them in the Senate, undermined their own party to vote with Republicans to reopen the Government. The only thing they received in exchange was the promise of a vote in the Senate this month on restoring the GOP cuts to the Affordable Care Act subsidies. That vote is scheduled to happen next week, but will require 60 votes for passage in the 100-seat Senate. No vote is currently scheduled for the U.S. House on this, as premium bills will otherwise be doubling and tripling for millions next year.

Ollstein, a longtime Capitol Hill reporter lays out the political and policy landscape and stakes as we barrel toward what is now quite likely to be a very serious health care crisis in the U.S., unless Republicans come to terms with the electoral tidal wave that otherwise awaits them next year. Her reporting this week suggests that the bulk of the GOP Congressional caucus either doesn't yet understand the concerns or doesn't care about what is about to happen.

"There's nothing like a looming deadline to juice Congress into action," she quips. "Although that action may not lead anywhere --- especially this time."

"There are a bunch of Republicans who do want to cut a deal," she stresses. "They are very anxious, about both the concrete ramifications of letting the subsidies expire --- that millions of their constituents will have higher bills, become uninsured, etc. --- and they are worried about the political consequences, that this will backfire in the 2026 midterms." But, Ollstein also notes, for many in the party, the otherwise now very popular "Obamacare" is still a dirty word after years of the GOP trying and failing to kill it "root and branch" or even offer any alternative to it.

We've got lots to sift through here today, in trying to make sense of the current political lay of the land, with many Republicans "afraid of a primary challenge from the right attacking them for 'supporting Obamacare,'" even if millions of their own Republican constituents now rely on it for their health care.

Tune in for all the details on this one. Too many to cover in a quick summary here. But the fight in the weeks ahead is going to affect all of us, including your health care prices, even if you are not an ACA customer, as Ollstein also explains.

FINALLY... Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, as the Trump Administration rolls back fuel economy standards, which will increase the cost of everyone's gas; as the Administration's threats against Venezuela become more obviously about oil by the day; as youth climate activists sue to block new fossil fuel development in Utah; and as one boy from fire-ravaged Pacific Palisades here in Southern California rolls out a quickly blossoming idea to seed the area with wildflowers...and love...

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