On today's BradCast, we offer a bit of a response to those who are still under the impression, for some reason, that Trump is a "different kind of Republican", or that he's a non-ideological populist "draining the swamp" and taking on Wall Street and the Big Banks, or --- perhaps most dangerously --- that he has no coherent agenda. We also dive into the upcoming November 7 race for Governor in Virginia and questions about the corrupt past (and future?) of the GOP nominee. [Audio link to show follows below.]

As chaotic as everything he is doing seems to be, Trump's agenda is, in fact, very coherent, and little more than radical George W. Bush right-wing Republicanism on steroids --- albeit without the educated and politically correct artifice. Among the exhibits in today's argument: His administration's attempt to physically (and emotionally) prevent a teen immigrant from receiving a Constitutionally lawful abortion by keeping her locked up, despite court orders; and the Republican Senate vote late Tuesday night, with a huge assist from the Trump Administration, to dismantle a key consumer protection reform that had been five years in the making following the 2008 mortgage crisis and subsequent global economic meltdown.

That big win for Trump and Wall Street will prevent American consumers from having the right to sue huge corporations even after being screwed by deceptive, fraudulent practices. Yes, elections have consequences. And there is another big one set for just under a week from now to replace the outgoing Democratic Governor of Virginia.

The polls are reportedly tightening in the race between Democratic Lt. Governor Ralph Northam and former RNC chair, corporate lobbyist and George W. Bush Administration official Ed Gillespie. We're joined from Capitol Hill today by muckraking ShareBlue reporter MIKE STARK, who has been covering the Gillespie campaign and recently plowed through Bush-era White House visitor logs during Gillespie's term as a White House advisor, to find several instances of meetings with executives and lobbyists for big banks and energy companies that Gillespie had previously represented. The very next day after those meetings, Stark reports, the Bush Administration changed policies on issues those companies had been lobbying for.

The revelations and concerns of quid pro quo corruption come on the heels of the last Republican Governor from Virginia, Bob McDonnell, having been convicted of multiple counts of public corruption related to expensive gifts and huge sums of cash received from the CEO of a company hoping to win favors from the Governor.

Stark details his findings from those 2007 White House logs; his attempts to press Gillespie on the stump regarding his corporate lobbying work for big banks, big tobacco, big energy, and big pharma; his ties to the NRA, which, along with the Koch Brothers' Americans for Prosperity, is making huge television ad buys on Gillespie's behalf; the GOP candidate's claims to oppose bigotry and racism in all forms, despite racist ads and disgraced former U.S. Sen. George Allen (R-VA), forced out of the Senate after racist comments, serving as Gillespie's campaign chair. We also discuss Trump's role in the race and whether Democrats may be on the verge of losing what should be an otherwise easy off-year election victory in Virginia.

Finally, Desi Doyen joins us to discuss the bizarre news regarding the tiny company from Montana that was, for some reason, granted a $300 million contract to rebuild Puerto Rico's energy grid after the devastation of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, and the report late today from the Wall Street Journal that a federal oversight board plans to install an Emergency Manager to takeover, and potentially privatize, Puerto Rico's state-owned power company. We get comment from a former Puerto Rico Power Commissioner who describes why the news is "unfortunate" for the island's 3.5 million struggling residents...

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Among the demonstrably real, not fake, news stories covered on today's BradCast [Audio link to show posted below]...

• A brief word about the mercilessly toxic and sad "debate" Donald Trump injected into the American body politic this week to divert from his failure to recognize U.S. special forces killed by ISIS during a still-mysterious ambush in Niger, the shameful lie told by his Chief of Staff, General John Kelly, in service of Trump's failure, and the White House doubling down on that lie despite video evidence to the contrary;
• Speaking of wishing reality away, the EPA removes more facts about climate change from its website, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt charges peer-reviewed climate science is biased due to grants from the EPA (and hints at a purge of scientists), while his highly-paid corporate cronies are appointed to top agency posts and begin their work in defiance of the U.S. Senate (and the Rule of Law);
• A federal judge rules the guilty verdict against federal criminal and former Maricopa County, AZ Sheriff Joe Arpaio will not be vacated despite Trump's Presidential pardon and a plea from his Dept. of Justice to ignore the Rule of Law;
• More apparent violations of the Rule of Law and lies about the income of Alabama's GOP U.S. Senate nominee Roy Moore (twice removed as state Supreme Court Justice for defying federal court orders) are unearthed in advance of the state's Special Election in December;
• And, so-called "conservatives" in the U.S. Senate pass a budget resolution to increase the deficit by $1.5 trillion dollars, while cutting nearly $500 billion from Medicare and $1 trillion from Medicaid over the next decade, in order to fund massive tax cuts for rich people...

Also today, a brief plea to stop by BradBlog.com/Donate to help Desi and me continue to bring you independent news from the Land of Reality (and the Rule of Law) over your public airwaves as long as we can! My continuing thanks to those who have already done so! To everyone else: Now is great time to help us out! (Pretty please?)

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On today's BradCast: Donald Trump declares the U.S. government response to the devastating Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico couldn't have been better, and a bi-partisan effort in the U.S. Senate gains support, but struggles to overcome the President's sabotage of ObamaCare and schizophrenic response to the measure. [Audio link to show follows below.]

First, the President met with Puerto Rican Gov. Ricardo Rosselló at the White House on Thursday, and gave himself a "10 out of 10" rating for his federal government's response to the disaster and ongoing humanitarian crisis following Hurricanes Maria and Irma on the island of 3.5 U.S. citizens. During the sometimes uncomfortable 30-minute press avail, Trump sought approval for the response from an on-the-spot Rosselló.

The official death toll after Maria stands at 48, though independent analyses put the number of dead at more than 400. The power grid is still down across the vast majority of the island, and many are still struggling for fresh running water, though CNN offers some good news today regarding the many desperate citizens who had been drinking from wells at toxic Superfund sites.

Then, following Trump's announcement late last week that he was cutting off subsidy payments mandated by the Affordable Care Act (or 'ObamaCare') to help cover out-of-pocket health care expenses for low-income Americans, a bi-partisan agreement was struck in the U.S. Senate to pay those Cost-Sharing Reductions (CSR) subsidies. Trump originally lauded the deal announced between Senators Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Patty Murray (D-WA) on Tuesday. But he has since flip-flopped on support of the bill by the Chair and Ranking Member of the Senate Health Committee in the 48 hours since. Trump's cut-off to those CSR payments has already resulted in health care premiums sky-rocketing around the country, including in states like Pennsylvania, where, its insurance commissioner announced Monday, rates are now set to soar some 30% for many in 2018.

We're joined by TPM's Congressional reporter ALICE OLLSTEIN from the Capitol today for the latest on what the Alexander-Murray measure, now co-sponsored by some 24 U.S. Senators from both parties, would actually do; how members are reacting to Trump's predictably unpredictable roller-coaster responses to it; how each party is attempting to sell the bill to its members; and whether GOP leadership will even allow the legislation to come to the floor for a vote, much less whether it can be passed by the Senate or the even more rabidly-opposed right-wing members of U.S. House.

Trump "has been all over the map on this," Ollstein explained, when I asked about the response on Capitol Hill to his ever-shifting statements. "Every time he opens his mouth, it's a new and confusing statement. No one has any idea, really, where he stands on this. So I think they're just trying to rally as many votes as they can, and worry about the President later."

"Keep in mind, this bill is coming kind of too late to make anything better for 2018," she says. "If they had gotten it done by mid-September, the insurers could have lowered their rates and prevented some of the big increases we're seeing. Now they blew past that deadline because they wanted to take one more whack at repeal, which failed. So now it's all about stabilizing the market, preventing additional chaos, and we won't really see the benefits of this until [the] end of 2018, beginning of 2019. That's right when the midterms are going to be. And so does the Republican leadership want their members to face re-election amid all of this healthcare chaos that they might get blamed for, as many polls indicate?"

Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report on the newest GOP scheme to allow drilling in the pristine Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to export oil to China; updates on the deadly wildfires in CA and storm disasters in Puerto Rico and US Virgin Islands; and some very good news indeed regarding electric vehicles...at least in Europe.

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Alaska National Wildlife Refuge on the chopping block --- again; California officials warn of toxic ashes from the state's devastating wildfires; Like Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands struggling without power or clean water; PLUS: Shell Oil opens electric vehicle charging network at gas stations --- in Britain... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Video: 1 million Americans without power in Puerto Rico; Paris talks set in awkward moment for Trump Admin; With fast-charging, electric cars will soon match or beat gasoline cars in every respect; Iowa governor: Trump 'committed' to ethanol; Hurricane Maria recovery requires extensive federal response; Trump abandons plans to help climate refugees; Developing world struggles with obsolete pesticides; EPA says higher radiation levels pose 'no harmful effect'; Company to pipe water out of Mojave desert to cities... PLUS: Trump voters in storm-ravaged county confront climate change.... and much, MUCH more! ...

On today's BradCast: Accurate reporting matters. So do accurately tabulated elections. So does accurately reporting about elections and their results and allegations made about attempts to "hack" American elections. [Audio link to show follow below.]

While the U.S. corporate media have ever-so-slightly improved since they fell hook, line and sinker for the George W. Bush Administration's government propaganda following 9/11 --- resulting in the Iraq War and all that has come, and is still coming ever since --- they're not doing much better when it comes to Trump's saber rattling over Iran's non-existent "nuclear weapons program", or their coverage of the government's claims concerning Russia's alleged "hacking" of election systems in 2016. (Or, as MSNBC's Rachel Maddow unhelpfully describes it over and over, "Russia's attack on our election!")

We try, today, to help clarify what the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security and the corporate media did not, when it came to DHS' erroneous allegation in late September that the "Russian government" attempted to hack voter registration systems in 21 states and that "no votes were manipulated or changed" in the 2016 election. (For example, as we noted at the time, days later, DHS admitted they were wrong about Wisconsin, and California's Democratic Sec. of State said further investigation revealed that claims "turned out to be bad information from DHS." As to whther any votes were changed in 2016, the DHS admitted over the Summer that they don't know, because they never actually checked!)

But, hey, if it takes concerns, accurate or otherwise, about "Russia hacking" our elections to wake up the nation and its government to the very real threats posed by electronic voting, tabulation and registration systems we'll take it! We've worked for nearly 15 years here at The BRAD BLOG and on The BradCast to warn about that threat --- whether it comes from Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, ISIS, France, Germany, some guy in Little Rock, Arkansas or any election official or insider anywhere in the nation!

So, on related matters, and what we will all look forward to as the 2018 election cycle begins, we're joined by longtime Orange County, CA Registrar of Voters NEAL KELLEY, following the first meeting of the new DHS Election Infrastructure Coordinating Council, created after President Obama's Directive in January declaring the nation's election systems, in all 50 states, to be recognized as "Critical Infrastructure" by the U.S. Government.

Kelley, a member of the new 27-member council which convened in D.C. over the weekend for the first time, joins us to explain what this panel actually is; what the designation as "critical infrastructure" actually means in practical terms for the nation's voting, tabulation and registration systems; how this commission was set up, who appointed its members, and how it differs from Trump's phony "Election Integrity" Commission; whether the "critical infrastructure" designation intrudes on states' Constitutional independence in running their own elections; whether the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (or EAC, on which Kelley is also an Advisory Board member) should be defunded, as Republicans in Congress have long sought; how DHS dropped the ball on 2016 and its aftermath; and, while we have him here, whether or not Orange County will ever replace its 100% unverifiable Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting systems with a verifiable paper ballot system. (See my own disastrous experience with the OC's voting system back in 2011 here.)

We also get Kelley's reaction to a newly-signed CA law (AB-840), supported by Democrats and virulently opposed by many Election Integrity advocates, that allows County Registrars to completely ignore millions of provisional and Vote-by-Mail ballots when conducting their state-mandated 1% post-election manual "audits".

Finally, speaking of Trump's phony voter fraud commission (which is decidedly distinct from the DHS panel that Kelley now sits on!), we've got several pieces of troubling news today, including the recently reported child pornography arrest of one of its researchers, and the sudden death on Monday of one of the Commission's very few Democratic appointees...

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On today's BradCast: Donald Trump's assertion at the White House on Monday that "ObamaCare is finished, it's dead, it's gone...There is no such thing as ObamaCare anymore" is a blatant, cruel and malevolent lie. It is also, along with Trump's other efforts to undermine the federal law, an impeachable offense. Also today, very real and proven effective solutions to gun violence, which do not receive attention or funding they deserve. [Audio link to full show is posted at bottom of article.]

First up, Trump's recent comments and actions to sabotage American health care are, as I argue, in violation of his sworn oath to "protect and defend the Constitution", which includes the Article 2 requirement that the President must "take care that the laws be faithfully executed."

Instead of faithfully executing the law, Trump is undermining it, and putting millions of Americans at risk of losing access to affordable health care, as provided by the Affordable Care Act. In addition to his unforgivable lies about ObamaCare on Monday, thanks to his announcement late last week that he will stop payments to help cover out-of-pocket expenses such as deductibles and co-pays for low-income citizens (as mandated by the ACA), insurance premiums have now sky-rocketed in a number of states, including in Pennsylvania, which, its insurance Commissioner announced on Monday, will see average increases of more than 30%. (Similar increases are also slated for Florida, Arkansas, Oregon, Alaska and dozens of other states, thanks to Trump and the GOP's attempt to gut the Obama-era law that has helped some 30 million obtain and pay for health care, while improving health care insurance plans for hundreds of millions of Americans.)

Despite Trump's dangerous and impeachable lie, ObamaCare still very much exists. Its Open Enrollment period runs November 1 through December 15 at HealthCare.gov. (Please spread the word, since Trump also cut millions of dollars of funding to do exactly that, so most simply don't know.)

At the same time, Republicans continue to block gun safety legislation, even after 58 were murdered and more than 500 wounded in a matter of minutes by a gunman in Las Vegas just over two weeks ago. But while such mass murders make momentary headlines and gun safety legislation continues to be mired at the state and federal level --- thanks to the arms industry representatives of the terrorist-enabling National Rifle Association (NRA) --- very successful efforts to curb gun violence in the areas that need it most go largely overlooked by both Democrats and Republicans alike across the country.

We're joined today by PASTOR MICHAEL MCBRIDE, National Director for the LiveFreeUSA.org campaign, comprising hundreds of faith congregations throughout the US committed to addressing gun violence and mass incarceration of young people of color. McBride explains how, despite the organization's remarkable success rate in curbing gun violence in minority communities (see his recent NYTimes op-ed), such programs are often shamefully overlooked or ignored by public officials.

"We have been able to, over the years, figure out strategies to target those at the highest risk of shooting and being shot. And help make sure that their lives are saved, their lives are redirected, they're behavior is transformed and changed," McBride explains. "And, most importantly, we have communities that are not over-determined, that are not traumatized, that are not filled with fear because of the prevalence of gun violence."

"We believe that these are the strategies that we can implement and fully resource at the local level, without having to change the policies or get bogged down in a 2nd Amendment argument," he tells me, explaining how it can be done without over policing as well. "Too often in the black community, in poor communities, brown communities, racial profiling is used as the primary tool to try and identify these individuals, and that creates a 'collective punishment' kind of environment, where everyone in the community who looks like a 'criminal' is then treated as one. And we have found that that is not only unconstitutional, but it is certainly not effective."

McBride, who served as an Advisor on President Obama’s Faith Based Advisory Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, explains "we have found, consistently in cities across the country where this is done, decreases in violence in the first 18-24 months that can be as low as 30% and as high as 60%. Those numbers are unprecedented." He adds those numbers are achieved "without more arrests, without more incarceration" and even result in drops in police shootings, misconduct charges and complaints.

As to why such strategies are too often overlooked by politicians of all stripes, McBride argues that "'tough-on-crime' [policies] and growing police departments and building more prisons has been a bipartisan slam-dunk for those who want to seem they are being responsive" to neighborhood gun violence. But, these "very much underfunded" programs work and are far less expensive than too-often tragic alternatives. He describes it as "the cost for peace vs. the cost for death".

Please tune in for this highly informative conversation with more details than I can properly relay here.

Finally today, Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report with a remarkable amount of news on, among other things, the record hurricane that smashed into Ireland this week, the post-Hurricane crisis in Puerto Rico, the historic deadly wildfires in California (and elsewhere) and coal plants being shut down in both China and Texas...

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On today's BradCast,something's happening here. Or is it? [Audio link to full show follows below.]

On the climate front, something is definitely happening. As of air time, three were killed in Ireland --- yes, Ireland --- from what, over the weekend, had been a Category 3 hurricane named Ophelia. It is the farthest east and north that a major Atlantic hurricane has ever been recorded. We also explain why the storm turned the blue Irish sky into an eerie orange as it came ashore.

In California, at least 40 are dead with nearly 200 still missing as of airtime and some 5,700 houses and commercial structures completely incinerated after more than a week of record wildfires have ravaged Northern California's wine country and other areas. The blazes follow California's record drought, then wettest winter ever, followed by its warmest summer ever --- all symptoms of the global warming which helped fuel the conditions that thousands of fire officials are still battling across the state. Donald Trump made his first public remarks about the deadly CA fires today, over a week since they broke out, when pressed at a hastily convened White House press conference (with hostage Mitch McConnell at his side.)

In related news over the weekend, an oil rig platform blew up in Lake Pontchartrain north of New Orleans, injuring seven (three critically), with one worker still missing. And the US-armed and trained Iraqi army faced off against the US-armed and trained independent Kurdish army in battles over oil fields in Northern Iraq. The US arms industry is, no doubt, rejoicing in the wake of Trump's increasingly chaotic and incoherent foreign policy, even as Iraq's Prime Minister had just days earlier described a possible military confrontation with the Kurds as "fake news". (Sound familiar?)

Then we're joined by the one and only HEATHER 'DIGBY' PARTON of Salon and Digby's Hullabaloo blog to discuss whether something is actually happening inside the White House and among Republicans in Congress as Trump's Fox "News"-fueled (read: largely fact-free) versions of both foreign and domestic policy have begun to catch up with him, and as his fury is reportedly increasing with his failure to enact any substantive legislative policies nearly nine months into his Presidency.

"This is like a cry for help that's coming from inside the White House," she tells me, citing numerous reports from dozens of sources, "that the man is losing it." But, she warns, if "cowardly" Democrats in Congress are waiting for their Republican counterparts to actually do something about it, they may be waiting a while. She descries the GOP as "the worst-of-all-possible-worlds cowardly. 'Sure, let's threaten nuclear war, let's have the entire world look down on us, let's have all soft power by the United States be completely destroyed because, you know, I might lose my seat and that's just too much.' I mean, these people are really, really cowardly."

Also over the weekend, Trump spoke at the far-right Family Research Council's so-called "Values Voter Summit" in D.C., where the "alt-right" has apparently merged with the "religious right". It was as insane as you might expect, but the question Parton speaks to is why Trump's so-called "religious right" base still buys the immoral nonsense and lies he keeps selling them.

"The idea that these Christians are seeing him as some godly creature who somehow has a biblical world view," she muses incredulously, "this is not what I had ever thought, growing up, was the standard Christian world view. They're not living in that world."

Finally, speaking of "fake news", Trump himself unleashed some remarkably fake news regarding the Affordable Care Act (ACA or "ObamaCare"), by blatantly lying about it before a cabinet meeting today at the White House when he asserted to the gathered media: "Obamacare is finished. It's dead. It's gone. You shouldn't even mention it. It's gone. There is no such thing as Obamacare any more."

Despite Trump's unforgivable lie, the ACA is still very much federal law. Open Enrollment for 2018 begins at HealthCare.gov, where tens of millions have signed up for and received access to health care and federal subsidies to help cover its costs, on November 1...

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On today's BradCast: At the end of another hectic (and deadly) week in our now Dysfunctional States of America, Donald Trump has decided to turn his self-loathing and rage over his own failing Presidency into chaos unleashed on the citizens of the nation and the world. [Audio link to show follows below.]

Just hours after his Executive Order on Thursday, issued in hopes of paving the way for worse health care policies to be sold to Americans, the White House announced it would no longer pay subsidies to health insurance companies meant to help cover out-of-pocket medical expenses for low-income citizens. Over the Summer, after months of Trump threatening to cut off the so-called Cost Sharing Reduction (CSR) payments defined by the Affordable Care Act ('ObamaCare'), the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that doing so would raise premiums by 20%, result in lost health care for 1 million in 2018, and increase the federal deficit by nearly $200 billion over the next decade.

So, of course Trump did it anyway.

The matter now moves to the federal courts, where state Attorneys General have announced they will file suit (along with the insurance companies who will likely do so as well, since they are still legally required to give customers the discounts, whether Trump reimburses them or not) and to Congress, which could pass legislation to mandate the payments be made. We explain what it all means, what Republican lawmakers may do next, and who will be most harmed by the President's attempted murder of the Affordable Care Act, as he tries to hoax his own gullible voters into believing it was a 'suicide'.

On Friday, Trump similarly injected even more chaos into U.S. foreign policy by falsely declaring that the seven-nation agreement that prevents Iran from creating nuclear weapons was not in the U.S. interest and that they had violated "the spirit" of the deal. In order to do so, he offered a litany of straight-from-Fox-"News" propaganda about Iran and the deal that would likely embarrass even those from the George W. Bush Administration who falsely sold the case for war in Iraq claiming that they were developing weapons of mass destruction.

That issue, on whether to officially end the long-sought pact --- which all other parties (Germany, France, Britain, China and Russia) all agree has been working well --- will also now goes to our broken Congress to determine its fate.

But, it's a Congress with Republicans like Rep. Scott Perry (PA) who accused CNN of "making up" the still-ongoing humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico.

Amidst all of this, one leading Democrat, for what its worth, has an "urgent" idea that might end up saving the world if the otherwise impotent elected members of Congress can ever come to terms with the dysfunction they've sown and the monster they've given rise to: Take away his nuclear button. Immediately.

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On today's BradCast, one climate change bullet dodged on the Gulf Coast, even as another explodes on the West Coast, and Donald Trump, despite his distracting buffoonery, continues to move his far-right agenda forward as my guest today details in no uncertain terms. [Audio link to show follows below.]

New Orleans and the Gulf Coast appear to have averted another catastrophe with Hurricane Nate, the fourth hurricane to make landfall in the U.S. in the past six weeks, bringing heavy rains, but less damage than feared to the region. (Reminder: there are still two more months left in the official hurricane season!) But, millions are still struggling to rebuild from the recent storms Harvey, Irma and Maria, especially in Puerto Rico, where most of the power remains out over two weeks since Maria made landfall, despite Trump's rosy scenarios and the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) offering a disturbing remark over the weekend.

Even as Nate dissipates, however, the U.S. received yet another troubling reminder of the deadly perils of climate change over night Sunday and into Monday. As of air time, at least 1,500 homes and commercial building have been completely destroyed by wildfires that broke out late Sunday night across eight counties in Northern California wine country, sending tens of thousands of residents fleeing for their lives, many of them dodging flames and wildly gusting winds in the middle of the night. 10 have now been pronounced dead, in a toll that is expected to rise.

Another massive blaze erupted and is threatening homes and businesses in Southern California on Monday as well. All signs of a warming planet, not only being ignored but actively exacerbated by the Trump Administration which announced plans on Monday --- even as all of this was going on --- to reverse Barack Obama's 'Clean Power Plan', instituted to meet U.S. commitments to the Paris Climate Agreement between some 200 nations. Trump announced the Administration's intention to drop out of the Paris accord to curb man-made greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming, earlier this year.

So, even as the media, Congress, and the public remain continuously obsessed and distracted by Donald Trump's obnoxious Twitter feed, his radical hard-right Republican agenda stays on target on issues both foreign and domestic. We're joined to discuss that issue and more today by journalist JOHN NICHOLS of The Nation, author of the newly published Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse: A Field Guide to the Most Dangerous People in America and his new report for the non-profit Rosa Luxemburg foundation titled "Donald Trump's Dangerously Coherent Agenda".

"The greatest strength that Donald Trump has in American politics --- his number one strength --- is that he is not taken seriously. And, for so long as he is not taken seriously, he is able to continue to entertain, to control the discourse, because people are just looking for what more cute, adorable, horrifying, freakish thing that he does," Nichols tells me, explaining why, despite his low approval ratings, "he knows how to survive. And his survival instinct is locking in a very coherent agenda, which is the agenda of the hard, hard social right."

"I'll be blunt with ya," he adds, "I see very little evidence of Democrats figuring out the play, either."

Among topics of our conversation, in addition to his new book and disturbing new report, are the chilling recent comments from Trump regarding "the calm before the storm"; underwhelming responses to his Twitter attacks on members of his own party (and own Administration) in recent days; the temptation (and accompanying dangers) for Democrats in making deals with Trump as his approval ratings falls; and efforts by Bernie Sanders supporters in Texas toward flipping some of the most reportedly "conservative" Congressional districts in the state from "red" to "blue". Nichols checks in today from the Lone Star State, where he is currently reporting for his upcoming cover story at The Nation on what he describes as impressive organizational work in advance of 2018, now being carried out there by members of Sanders' Our Revolution group...

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On today's BradCast, the future of American democracy itself is once again in the hands of a now-stolen U.S. Supreme Court, in what democracy advocates describe as a case that is likely to help determine the partisan balance of Congress and state legislatures for decades.

But, first up today: Updates on Donald Trump's embarrassing Tuesday jaunt to hurricane-torn Puerto Rico, where the official death toll has now doubled from 16 to 34 and is expected to go much higher as 3.4 million U.S. citizens on the island still face desperate circumstances with food and water shortages and 95% of the island remains without power two weeks after Hurricane Maria (despite Trump's bizarre claims to the contrary.) Also, a few updates on what little more we now know about the massacre in Las Vegas on Sunday, the lack of a known motive for the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, and the shamefully transparent attempts by both the White House and Congressional Republicans to avoid any legislative policy action in its wake.

Then we move on to what democracy advocates describe as one of the most important cases to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in years. Oral arguments in Gill v. Whitford were heard on Tuesday. That is the case where a three-judge federal court determined the state of Wisconsin had used severe (and secret) partisan gerrymandering to redraw district maps after the 2010 census. In so doing, despite receiving a minority of votes (48.6%) after the new maps were drawn, Republicans gained an extraordinary 60-to-39 majority in the State Assembly.

The GOP is now appealing that federal court ruling to SCOTUS, which has held racial gerrymandering to be unconstitutional in the past, but has never ruled on whether purely partisan gerrymandering, as in this case, violates the Constitutional rights of voters.

We're joined by the man who wrote the book on modern-day gerrymandering, DAVID DALEY, author of Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy. Daley, formerly Editor-in-Chief at Salon, now Senior Fellow at at FairVote.org, spent the night on the sidewalk outside the Court on Monday, to get one of 50 seats at Tuesday's hearing.

He explains how high the stakes are in this case (which could result in court challenges to electoral maps in virtually every state in the union), the arguments presented by both sides in the matter, and how everyone --- attorneys and Justices alike, were focused on making their case to Justice Anthony Kennedy, who will most likely determine the course of U.S. democracy for decades to come, thanks to the Republicans' stolen 5 to 4 majority on the Supreme Court itself.

"This case is everything," Daley tells me. "If this case is not decided on the side of democracy, on the side of competitive elections, there will be nothing to stop Republicans, who are likely to be holding the pens in all of these states in 2021 from doing the same thing, only with more sophisticated technology that's developed over the last decade, with better data analytic skills than they had in 2011, with stronger predictive algorithms to try to figure out where people are going to live and how they are going to vote for the next decade. It will be 2031 before Democrats get another shot at the maps if this case is decided the other way."

Daley sees the case now before the Supremes as "potentially bigger" than either 2010's Citizens United, which gutted campaign finance laws, or 2013's Shelby County, which gutted the Voting Rights Act. "This is the future of our democracy right here."

"Republicans reinvented the gerrymander in 2010 and 2011. This is not the same kind of gerrymander that you had 'back in the day.' This is different," he insists, as I press him on whether Democrats are carrying out the same type of partisan maps in states that they control. "This is space-age extreme gerrymandering on steroids. It has given Republicans huge advantages in all of these states that they control. Ohio, a very swing state, is represented by 12 Republicans and 4 Democrats. Michigan is 9-5, even though Democrats in 2012 got a quarter of a million more votes. These are 50-50 states and it has made our politics deeply uncompetitive. There's no swing in these swing districts. You have not had a single seat go from red to blue in any of those swing states. On these maps, no seats have gone from red to blue this entire decade."

Incredibly, the Republican Justices other than Kennedy seem to believe the matter should not be decided by the courts, but should be left to the same rigged legislatures which created this mess in the first place. "In Michigan, this last decade," he notes, "Democrats have gotten more total votes every time. Republicans have kept control. This is the case in state after state. They have enshrined this problem. We need the Court here to come in and fix democracy"...

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On today's BradCast, we move from the "too soon" moment and on to the GOP's "mental health reform" ruse, in hopes of avoiding any actual legislative action to curb gun violence after another record mass murder in the U.S. [Audio link to show follows below.]

We have some good news, however, following the Sunday night massacre in Las Vegas, which killed 59 and wounded more than 550 others in a hail of automatic weapon fire rained down from a casino onto concert-goers on the streets below: The House GOP has put off plans to make silencers easier to purchase! For a while anyway. Feel better? Other than that, it's either "premature" to discuss legislative changes to help curb America's 30,000+ gun deaths per year, or time to pull out the old "mental health reform" scam again, as House Speaker Paul Ryan did today when pressed for what action Congress might take after the latest "worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history."

While toy guns are illegal to carry on the streets of Vegas, real ones are not. Not even fully automatic machine guns. And even a statewide ballot measure passed by Nevada voters last year to expand background checks has been declared unenforceable by the Republican, NRA-owned state Attorney General Adam Paul Laxalt. So, if the only thing that the terrorist-enabling NRA will allow to be enacted in order to prevent a man who was allowed to lawfully amass 42 military-style assault weapons and thousands of rounds of ammo from committing mass murder is "mental illness reform", are Republicans even serious about that much?

We're joined by veteran journalist ART LEVINE, author of the new book Mental Health Inc: How Corruption, Lax Oversight and Failed Reforms Endanger Our Most Vulnerable Citizens (and next week's Newsweek cover story) to discuss Republican hypocrisy after Vegas, and how the hopes of forcing mandatory medication by the Right and concerns about stigmatizing the mentally ill on the Left, have all helped to prevent real mental health reform.

That, even as the American College of Physicians calls for an assault weapon ban in response to the "public health crisis" of our gun death epidemic in the U.S., existing laws to prevent gun use by the mentally infirmed that go unenforced or are otherwise being repealed altogether, and a mental health reform bill which was already passed by Congress and signed by President Obama last year.

Ryan "apparently doesn't know that the Congress --- he is the head of the House --- actually passed a bill called 'Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act'. In other words, it's such a trope, and such a nostrum that's thrown out --- they throw it out like a tic --- when in fact there was a law [already] actually passed! That is one of the areas of hypocrisy about it," Levine tells me, as he cites the hypocrisy of those who oppose improved gun safety laws and claim to support mental health reform while voting for ObamaCare repeal and cutting back Medicaid. "They are moving forward [with] a war on people with mental illness, opioid addiction and chronic pain."

Levine cites a program by Los Angeles County which he writes about in his book, and describes as "a world-class preventative outreach program that stopped over 50 campus attacks." Yet, he goes on to explain, the successful program is "a political orphan" because the Right won't cite it as a national model ("their big golden goal is mandated drug and outpatient treatment") and neither will liberals and mental health progressives ("it stigmatizes people" as being potentially violent, even though the mentally ill, he says, are far more likely to be the victims of gun violence, rather than perpetrators of it.)

Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report as Trump finally goes to Puerto Rico for a few hours (to blame the victims of Hurricane Maria) and as China finally forces GM to get back into the electric car business. Also today: Rock in Peace, Tom Petty...

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On today's BradCast: Trouble in TrumpLand continues, but we're all paying the price for it --- and likely will for decades to come. [Audio link to show follows below.]

Donald Trump's Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tom Price is out. He’s just the latest top Administration official to be fired or to resign during the first eight chaotic months of this Administration. Price, who claimed to be a fiscal conservative during his years in the U.S. House, had come under fire for spending hundreds of thousands of tax-payer dollars on chartered private and military plane travel since taking office, even while working to take health care away from millions of Americans. Several other top Trump cabinet officials (EPA’s Pruitt, Treasury’s Mnuchin, Interior’s Zinke) are also now under the spotlight for similar travel issues, even though Price's corruption, while in the U.S. House, was an open secret completely ignored by the GOP Senate during his confirmation.

Meanwhile, in Puerto Rico, the situation on the ground following Hurricane Maria continues to deteriorate, despite Trump and his Acting Director of the Dept. of Homeland Security declaring the recovery effort "a good news story", to date. The Mayor of San Juan urgently and desperately disagrees.

Then, speaking of U.S. Senate Republicans rubber-stamping Presidential nominees no matter how extremist, crazy or corrupt they may be, we're joined by Slate's legal reporter MARK JOSEPH STERN to discuss what he describes as the Trump Administration's attempt to lay the groundwork for overturning marriage equality. Yes, really.

While it seems impossible to imagine, Stern makes his case --- a disturbing one --- after we discuss whether a High School principal in Louisiana has the legal right, as threatened, to suspend student football players for taking a knee in peaceful protest during the national anthem.

The letter sent this week to students and parents by Parkway High School's Wayne Bates "made my jaw drop to the floor," Stern says, going on to detail well-established SCOTUS rulings on the First Amendment in schools. “You just can't do that. Students have a fundamental free speech right to take a knee during the anthem. And if this principal goes any farther with this crazy campaign, he's gonna get slapped with a lawsuit that is going to make his hair fall out.”

But, how interested are Trump’s judicial appointees in maintaining “settled” law? Stern warns that with some of Trump’s lifetime appointees still likely to still be serving on the federal bench as late as 2067, a long list of extreme Rightwingers now been confirmed by Senate Republicans, same-sex marriage rights are not nearly as secure as many of us may think.

“Republicans are completely ruthless in their endeavor to stack the court with wackadoodles,” he says. “And Democrats need to get their act together, or the world is going to be incredibly bleak in 2067 --- so bleak that Trump judges may be the least of our problems.”

Finally, Stern has a few choice thoughts on the unapologetic rightwing extremism of illegitimate Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, as the Court returns for its first full new term with a stolen Republican majority...

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On today's BradCast, we open the phone to callers to discuss another very busy news week, though most want to talk about election integrity. That's good. [Audio link to show follows below.]

Among the stories we cover before we get to listener calls: The Trump Administration is blocking members of Congress --- both Democratic and Republican --- from taking military flights down to Puerto Rico, for some reason, where the disaster for 3.5 million U.S. citizens following Hurricane Maria is said to be quickly deteriorating. Meanwhile, Trump continues to sing his own praises for his handling of the disaster, while using his Twitter account to tweet about the NFL instead of offering help or support for the storm victims.

Then, the state of Wisconsin finally decertifies its terrible, two-decade old Optech Eagle paper ballot tabulators which will only read marks in pencil (not pen). That, despite many WI municipalities which used those same machines to both tally and then 'recount' the 2016 Presidential election, rather than ever count ballots by hand. Those machines may well be replaced by 100% unverifiable touch-screen systems. Also, though the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security informed the state late last week that Russia attempted to hack their voting system last year, it turns out DHS now admits has no such evidence.

Here in California, where DHS told the state the same thing last week (and apparently got it wrong there as well), Democrats in the state assembly recently passed a bill, AB-840, that will make stealing elections easier, by removing nearly half of the ballots cast from the state's 1% post-election hand 'audit'. Governor Jerry Brown (D) is now deciding whether to sign the bill, which election integrity advocates and voting system experts are begging him to veto instead, describing AB-840 as a "roadmap to fraud". You can contact the Governor with your opinion on whether he should sign or veto right here.

Callers ring in on all of that today, and challenge me on a point or two regarding voting and election fraud, before Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report, on the rapidly devolving humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico, and even some good news about coal for the Pacific Northwest (and for all of us, in truth)...

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Buckle up for today's BradCast. It's a humdinger, from first to last. [Audio link to show follows below.]

First up: In written testimony this week to the U.S. Senate, Gen. Joseph Dunford, the Chairman of the U.S. Military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, agreed with Donald Trump's Sec. of State Rex Tillerson and European diplomats that Iran was in compliance with the 2015 anti-nuclear agreement between Iran, the U.S., Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany. He also argued that, in lieu of a breach of the treaty, pulling out of it, as Trump has continually threatened, would provide a disincentive for other nations, like North Korea, to enter any such agreements with the U.S. Also, Iran's Foreign Minister blasted the U.S. President today for tweeting fake news over the weekend charging they had test-launched an intercontinental missile.

Next: It was Special Election Day on Tuesday in several states and, once again, Democrats continued to pick up state legislative seats previously held by Republicans. They've now notched eight such wins (in FL, NY, NH and OK) since last November, while the GOP has failed to take over any Democratic held seats in 2017. At the same time, Alabama's far-right religious extremist Roy Moore --- who was twice removed as a Justice from the state's Supreme Court for violations of law, the Constitution and federal court orders (regarding the Ten Commandments and Marriage Equality) --- defeated Trump's endorsed candidate Sen. Luther Strange in Alabama's Republican Primary Runoff election to fill the U.S. Senate seat vacated by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The win by an openly homophobic and Islamophobic candidate has led to shock-waves for establishment Republicans, deleted tweets by Trump, and questions for Dems as to whether their candidate, former U.S. Attorney Doug Jones, might have a shot at picking up the U.S. Senate seat in the deeply "red" state in this December's general election.

Finally: Speaking of radical religious extremists who place their personal religious beliefs above protecting and defending the U.S. Constitution, we're joined by the indefatigable founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, MIKEY WEINSTEIN, to discuss a U.S. Air Force Reserve Chaplain who appears to be doing exactly that. Weinstein, a registered Republican and former White House legal counsel for Ronald Reagan, details his group's legal complaints against Capt. Sonny Hernandez (pictured above), whose recent writings declare that Christian service members who support the Constitutional rights of those who follow other religions are, in fact, tools of Satan. Yes, really.

In a recent article, for example, headlined "Christian Service Members: Avoid Supporting or Accommodating Evil!", Hernandez writes that "Christian service members who openly profess and support the rights of Muslims, Buddhists, and all other anti-Christian worldviews to practice their religions --- because the language in the Constitution permits --- are grossly in error, and deceived." He goes on to charge that "Counterfeit Christians in the Armed forces will appeal to the Constitution, and not Christ," which, he writes, "will lead them to hell."

Weinstein, whose group offers legal representation for thousands of clients in the military, predicts that, despite the Air Force Inspector General's current investigation of Hernandez, he will likely be promoted from Captain to Major, rather than being "administratively discharged and, if possible, court-martialed."

"When you write, on a Christian Nationalist blog, a column telling military people 'you better not be showing respect to people that don't follow my particular version of Christianity...because of this silly thing called the Constitution, you are not only erroneous but you are stirring the dark evil of Mephistopheles --- Satan,' and you're writing it to the military community, it's beyond unconscionable. From our perspective it's actionable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice."

As Weinstein details during our conversation today about Hernandez, who he describes as an "anti-Semitic, homophobic, misogynistic, Constitution-hating individual," the military has attempted to come to his defense, which Weinstein characterizes as "a kill-shot to the head with regard to stupidity by the Air Force, or willful ignorance." Nonetheless, he explains that Hernandez is hardly the only one in the U.S. military violating their sworn oath to protect the Constitution in such a way. Weinstein charges that the problem of theocratic "Dominionism" --- "which is an attempt to try to replace our democracy with this weaponized version of Christianity" --- has exploded in the U.S. Armed Forces following Trump's inauguration, and already far outpaces the same concerns that led to the formation of MRFF during the George W. Bush Administration.

I can't possibly do full justice to the impassioned case that the extremely colorful Weinstein offers on today's show here, (he also rings in on Trump's national anthem "controversy" and much more), so please tune in for this one, if you can...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Calls grow to accelerate aid for humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria; Adding danger to desperation, major Puerto Rican dam now at risk of total failure; Good news and bad from toxic Superfund sites flooded by Hurricane Harvey in Texas; PLUS: Unusually warm ocean fueling record Atlantic storm season... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): 2017 foreshadowing hurricanes to come; Textbook example of how climate misinformation spreads through right-wing media; Park Service: Obama water bottle ban had 'significant' benefits; Tioga oil pipeline spill cleanup still ongoing after 4 years; Houston approves buy-out of 200 flood-damaged homes; Duke Energy will post coal ash disaster maps after all; EPA sued to implement stormwater plan; Hundreds of industrial plants discharging pollutants into OH waterways; France reaffirms opposition to weedkiller glyphosate... PLUS: SC regulators investigating failed S.C. nuclear project for 'looking to cut corners'... and much, MUCH more! ...