Democrats held another 'secret' Presidential Debate over the weekend, but the DNC's effort to hide it from the public, yet again, hasn't kept us from full post-debate coverage and analysis on today's BradCast!

It was a very serious and substantive debate. Therefore, I've asked a couple of comedians to join me and Desi Doyen to help us make sense of it all! Incredibly enough, it is also the last scheduled debate before voters actually go to the polls and caucuses in Iowa and New Hampshire about two weeks from now to cast the very first votes of the 2016 cycle.

So, with all of that in mind, today, unlike on our debate coverage up until now on The BradCast, I've invited actual advocates for each of the two front-runners, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, to have it out and make their best case for their respective candidates.

Joining me on today's raucous, lively and occasionally very funny program...

• In support of Hillary Clinton: actor, comedian and radio broadcaster, the great Hal Sparks, formerly of E's Talk Soup, Showtime's Queer as Folk, currently of Disney XD's Lab Rats and the Hal Sparks Radio Program Mega-Worldwide on WCPT in Chicago!

• In support of Bernie Sanders: comedian, author of Your Country Is Just Not That Into You, host of The Jimmy Dore Show on KPFK and Pacifica Radio, and regular contributor for The Young Turks, the no-less great Jimmy Dore!

• In support of Martin O'Malley: Well, no one. But that doesn't mean we won't talk about him behind his back on today's hilarious, helpful and, hopefully, very insightful edition of The BradCast!

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On today's BradCast: How outrageous new fees imposed on behalf of Nevada's monopoly electricity company and the state's Big Government Republicans have suddenly resulted in thousands of lost jobs, ripped-off consumers, and a mass exodus of solar companies from the state where the industry had previously been booming.

What did GOP Governor Brian Sandoval --- whose top staffers are also lobbyists for the state's NV Energy company --- know and when did he know it? And how much did he personally have to do with his appointees on the state's Public Utilities Commission (PUC) ripping off solar customers by raising rates on them, while lowering the amount of money rooftop solar owners are paid for selling back unused, clean power to the grid?

Lauren Randall, manager of public policy for Sunrun, which describes itself as the largest dedicated residential solar company in the U.S., and a spokesperson for The Alliance for Solar Choice the rooftop solar industry's advocacy group, joins us to explain what just happened in NV and how it has resulted in Sunrun, Solar City and several other rooftop solar companies being forced to shut down entirely in the state. That, after Sandoval had previously offered incentives to encourage private consumers to invest in clean, solar energy.

"It's absolutely outrageous," Randall tells me on today's program. "The easiest way to understand this is it's a 'bait and switch'. Nevada passed incentives to attract residents to go solar, and then after baiting homeowners with incentives, the state switched the rules, penalizing solar homeowners to deliver basically additional profit to NV Energy."

She says there is a "tremendous amount of backlash from both sides of the aisle on this," after "the rules were changed in the middle of the game for over 16,000 customers who went solar to save money on their electricity bills and to move the country away from fossil fuels and on toward more clean energy."

During the interview, she details how her company is now suing the state to force Sandoval to release communications between himself and his staffers, the PUC and NV Energy, as the industry hopes to roll back the devastating new rules which were announced just before Christmas and took effect on the first of the year.

Sandoval's commission, Randall explains, "just presented the most anti-business, anti-solar rules that we've seen, really anywhere in the country. It's been just catastrophic for families in Nevada. What we're seeing now is upwards of a thousand job losses from this."

Randall is hopeful that public outrage may force the PUC to overturn their new rules that have otherwise just killed the solar industry in sunny Nevada. She charges that the effort is a "coordinated campaign" among fossil fuel-based utility companies in a number of states (and could be coming to a state near you!) and asks folks to sign up to help in the fight.

Also on today's busy show: The Koch Brothers empire was built on Nazi money as well as communist Russian money; Martin O'Malley could decide whether Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders wins Iowa; and Desi Doyen joins us for Green News Report coverage of Obama's final State of the Union address...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: GNR Special Coverage: President Obama's final State of the Union Address. What he said about climate and energy. What he didn't say. And the Republican (lack of) Response... 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): Ted Cruz Pwned by Satellite; Global Warming Could Stave Off Next Ice Age For 100,000 Years; Unprecedented: Simultaneous January Named Storms in the Atlantic and Central Pacific; Duke execs knew of coal ash violations for year; Blown Away: 2015 Hottest Year by Far; Bid To Mine More Coal On US Federal Lands Tests Obama's Green Agenda; Global Mercury Emissions Down 30 Percent As Coal Use Drops... PLUS: Watchdog finds no evidence of bias in EPA Pebble Mine study... and much, MUCH more! ...

On today's BradCast, oil prices crash, Sanders surges in both Iowa and New Hampshire, the GOP tries to find an alternative to Trump, we're joined by the mathematician who says that the George W. Bush "Presidency" was his fault...sort of --- and we discuss why it all still matters today.

First up, Desi Doyen joins us to discuss the importance of and reasons for the plunging price of oil, which fell below $30/barrel today for the first time since 2003.

Next, new polling out of both Iowa and New Hampshire suggest the potential for very closes races, on both the D and R side of the aisle, this year. Bernie Sanders, who had been trailing Hillary Clinton in IA for months, has now overtaken her there, according to new numbers, and has increased his lead in NH over the woman still described by corporate media as "the Democratic front-runner". On the GOP side of the aisle, Trump retains his lead in NH, while IA tightens and the search for an "establishment" alternative takes a few surprising turns.

Then, speaking of close elections, we're joined by Dr. John Allen Paulos, professor of mathematics at Temple University to discuss the mother of all close elections, and why he believes his November 22, 2000 NYTimes op-ed helped lead directly to the U.S. Supreme Court stopping the ballot count in the Sunshine State, resulting in their (s)election of George W. Bush.

After I recount (pardon the pun), just some of the chicanery and still-unexplained anomalies that resulted in the exceedingly close tallies reported by Florida in 2000, Paulos, author of the New York Times best-seller, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences and, his latest, A Numerate Life: A Mathematician Explores the Vagaries of Life, His Own and Probably Yours, explains how he still "regrets" his mathematical analysis of the race at the time, which ended up being cited by the courts during the legal battle that eventually stopped the tally of paper ballots in Florida.

(For the record, yes, had Florida counted all of the ballots in the state at the time, as the Times reported on November 12, 2001 --- so you are forgiven, if you didn't notice --- Gore would likely have won the state, "no matter what standard was chosen to judge voter intent.")

"People talk about the 'Butterfly Effect' in dynamical systems [ed note: as opposed to the Butterflly Ballots in Palm Beach County, FL!], where tiny little initial differences lead to huge disparities down the road. This was, in a sense, a case where I was the little butterfly flapping its wings in South America leading, after many intermediate events, to a hurricane in New Orleans."

"In retrospect, obviously, I wish I hadn't done that," Paulos tells me about his op-ed, published 15 years ago last month, adding: "As a moral tiebreaker, Gore won almost half a million more votes nationwide. At the very least, they should have flipped a coin" and "Oh, yeah, they should have counted the ballots. That's what should have happened."

Finally, speaking of the consequences of elections and actually counting votes to determine the intent of voters, we conclude today's show by discussing how the George W. Bush administration allowed North Korea to obtain the atomic bombs that the rogue nation is once again using to threaten the world. Yes, more fallout from the disastrous Bush Administration, still affecting us today because we failed to count the voters' ballots.

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Today on The BradCast, new polls reveal Bernie Sanders far outpacing Hillary Clinton in head-to-head match-ups against all potential Republican challengers and public sector unions take a beating in the U.S. Supreme Court.

First up today, new pre-election polls from NBC/WSJ and PPP in both Iowa and New Hampshire echo recent national polling suggesting that, contrary to so-called "conventional wisdom", Sanders is more electable against the leading Republican opponents than Clinton is.

Then, constitutional law expert Ian Millhiser joins us to report on today's "brutal" oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, a case which threatens to gut public sector union funding.

Millhiser, author of the new book, Injustices: The Supreme Court's History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted, was at the Court for today's hearing, and the news is not encouraging. As he explains, the case challenges the federal government's allowance of "agency fees" charged to non-union members in public sector union shops to help defray the costs of union negotiations. That fee makes sense, since non-union workers must receive the same wages and benefits at such shops as their union colleagues. Non-union workers benefit from those negotiations, he says, since "workers in unionized shops on average receive about 12% more pay than workers in non-unionized shops."

"As a general rule," Millhiser wrote after today's oral argument, "the First Amendment does not permit the government to compel someone to say something they disagree with, and the plaintiffs claim that requiring non-union members to subsidize collective bargaining by a union that they may not agree with essentially rises to the level of compelled speech."

He tells me today that striking down the right to charge these agency fees "creates what's called a 'free rider' problem. If I get something, whether I pay for it or not, a lot of people are going to say 'Well, why would I pay for this when I get it for free?'" That, in turn, threatens the viability of such unions entirely.

Millhiser goes on to say: "It was pretty clear today that there were five votes that are ready to strike down these agency fee agreements --- and that's going to be not great for the future of many public sector unions."

We also discuss how an adverse decision for the public unions here may also potentially be used by the Right to go after private unions as well. "What we've seen from conservative movement attorneys over the last seven or eight years is an extraordinary entrepreneurship. They've been really, really clever in coming up with creative news ways to try to convince courts to implement their policy preferences," he says.

Citing both that point and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's new call for nine, incredibly radical (and regressive) amendments to the U.S. Constitution (which Millhiser describes as the new Republican governor's "plan to repeal the 20th century"), I ask why it is that Democrats and progressives don't show similar "entrepreneurship" in pushing forward their own agenda.

In response, Millhiser defends Dems and progressives by noting a peculiarity about this particular moment in history: "I think conservatives right now increasingly believe that the last 80 years of American history are illegitimate. They believe that our society has started to go off the rails and we have to fundamentally rethink what our government does. Democrats are now in the unfamiliar position of being the nation's conservative party. I don't mean in the sense that they are now to the right of the Republicans. I mean 'conservative' in the sense that Democrats are conservative in the sense that it wants to preserve the gains that we already have."

The result is that Dems are put on the defensive, instead of pushing new, progressive programs forward, as I argue in return, leaving voters less than clear about what it is Democrats hope to do when and if they are elected to office.

Finally, we offer a short goodbye to David Bowie and receive late breaking word from the the U.S. Supreme Court concerning imprisoned former Gov. Don Siegelman (D-AL)'s final appeal for a new trial...Neither of those news items are encouraging either, unfortunately.

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On today's very busy BradCast...

• A top-ranking lottery official was recently convicted of gaming the main lottery computer's random number generator for years and the investigation is now expanding to several other states. But, of course, while the Lottery Association's top security official got away with it for some six years, you needn't be worried at all about election insiders gaming computer results tabulators, right?

• Speaking of which...Half the country's voters would be embarrassed to have Donald Trump as President, though not many Republicans, according to a new Quinnipiac poll. That same poll also finds Bernie Sanders walloping Trump in a head-to-head match-up by nearly twice the margin that Hillary Clinton would beat the embarrassing GOP front-runner.

• A ruling by the WTO just succeeded in forcing the U.S. to scrap its extremely popular Country of Origin Labeling [COOL] requirements for beef and pork, even though President Obama recently told us that "no trade agreement is going to force us to change our laws." We're joined by Lori Wallach, Director and Founder of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch for details on that and on how the incident should serve as a chilling warning about the TransPacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement. That pact has yet to be approved by Congress, where it faces opposition from both Democrats and Republicans.

Wallach explains how the U.S. was slammed with a $1 billion/year sanction from the WTO, based on complaints about COOL from Canada and Mexico. "Within a week of the sanctions being authorized, Congress slipped into that huge omnibus bill the revocation of the Country of Origin meat labels --- including ground beef, which is particularly horrifying. So the WTO has gotten rid of one of our most popular consumer labeling policies," Wallach tells me. But, she goes on to explain, the mechanisms for forcing the U.S. to change our own consumer trade and safety laws are even more disturbing in the TPP, which she describes as "considerably worse."

"The TPP is privately enforceable by individual foreign companies and investors, through the very controversial Investor to State Dispute Settlement system," she describes. "And that lets any individual company drag a sovereign nation that signed that agreement --- away from its own courts, outside of its own laws --- in front of a foreign tribunal of three private sector lawyers, who the TPP would empower to order the signatory government to pay unlimited sumsof taxpayer money for any policy, government action, or inaction that the investor believes violated its new privileges as a foreign investor and would undermine its expected future profits."

• Finally today, Desi Doyen joins us as temperatures rise to record levels in parts of the country --- in the 70s in some places in Pennsylvania, for example --- on Christmas Eve! But why worry? That and much much more in our latest, chocked-full-o'-news Green News Report today.

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: ABC News hosts a presidential debate, but climate change and energy aren't invited; President Obama warns Republicans the world is moving forward on climate; Officials knew Flint, MI's water contaminated with lead; Massive natural gas leak continues in Southern CA; PLUS: British court rejects Donald Trump's wind farm objection... 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): Internet has revelation that climate change action won't kill the economy after all; Obama says climate deal with outlast GOP denial; U.S. power grid hacked multiple times; Oil industry lobbyists succeed in opening Alaskan refuge to drilling; U.S. issues biggest energy efficiency rules ever; Oil prices slump to 11-year lows; Opposition builds to offshore drilling...PLUS: 'Intersex' male bass fish found throughout protected U.S. waters... and much, MUCH more! ...

The DNC seems to have wanted their Democratic Presidential Debate in New Hampshire over the weekend to remain a secret. Otherwise, why would have they have scheduled it on the Saturday before Christmas?!

On today's BradCast, we spoil the secret by talking about that and everything else that actually went on during Saturday's debate on ABC between Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley.

Joining me are financial journalist David Dayen of The Fiscal Times, Salon, The Intercept and everywhere else and health care reform advocate and journalist Jacki Schechner, formerly of CNN and CurrentTV.

Among the issues covered in today's post-debate coverage and analysis:

• Do voters actually care about last Friday's database breach by the Sanders campaign?
• Is the DNC 'in the bag' for Hillary Clinton?
• Do Democrats play into GOP/corporate media narratives by spending so much time discussing ISIS and terrorism?
• Is there any real daylight between Clinton and Bernie Sanders' positions on gun safety reform?
• Does Martin O'Malley bring anything to the contest that Clinton and Sanders don't already have covered?
• Why did ABC News spend so much time on Republicans during Saturday's Democratic debate?
• Does the math really work for Sanders' plan to provide free college tuition to all public colleges and universities by instituting a tax on Wall Street transactions?
• Does the math really work for Sanders' call for a single payer health care system?
• Did ABC's Martha Raddatz completely misinform America in her question to Clinton concerning Obamacare?

All of that and much more on today's BradCast, as expertly answered by Dayen and Schechner! Especially helpful to those of you who might have had something else to do on a Saturday night before Christmas...like, I dunno, go see Star Wars!

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On today's BradCast, Congress and the President leave D.C. for the holidays, but not before coming together to pass a huge, bi-partisan(!) spending and tax bill.

Peace on Earth? Not quite, but its a start, as Obama noted in his year end press conference today.

In the meantime, another massive reporting failure from the New York Times (once again) creates confusion for the nation following the recent terror attack in San Bernardino, prompting its Public Editor to call for "systematic change" in the way stories are reported at the nation's so-called "paper of record".

The Bernie Sanders campaign files suit against the DNC after being shut out from their own voter database following charges that his campaign inappropriately accessed Hillary Clinton's voter data after a firewall went down on the DNC's server. Sanders' supporters are crying foul against the Democratic Party, just one day before the next 2016 Democratic Presidential Debate (which is, again, being hidden on a Saturday --- this one, just before Christmas --- and on the same weekend the new Star Wars movie opens.)

And finally, the nation continues to cower in fear --- making GOP Presidential candidates very happy, no doubt --- as another entire school district gets shuts down on Friday over something even more absurd than what led to the shutdown of the L.A. school system earlier this week. Are we becoming South Park Nation? That news (and much more) at week's end may suggest as much.

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Once again, it's the smartest post-debate analysis you'll find anywhere on today's BradCast, following last night's fear- and war-mongering "national security" GOP debate in Las Vegas (in which neither climate change, nor guns, two of the actual greatest threats to national security, were even discussed.)

Yes, it's now Trump and Cruz' GOP world. All of the other candidates --- and the entire Republican Party (and maybe even you and me) --- just live in it.

I'm joined for today's coverage by our returning champion, the great Heather Digby Parton of Salon and Digby's Hullabaloo blog. And, for the first time, I'm also joined by actor, comedian and radio broadcaster Hal Sparks, formerly of E's Talk Soup, Showtime's Queer as Folk and currently of Disney XD's Lab Rats and the Hal Sparks Radio Program Mega-Worldwide on WCPT in Chicago!

As our theme song says, we're "tryin' to make some sense of it all," once again on today's program. No easy feat. But we go well beyond the "horse race" in our analysis, as usual, and as the 2016 Republican Presidential candidates (that's the year they're hoping to win the nomination, not the number running...it just seems that way) worked hard on the stage last night at Sheldon Adelson's Venetian Hotel and Casino to be the manliest-man and bombiest-bomber of them all!

Parton and Sparks offer incisive and lively commentary and fact-checking on what has seemingly now become a two-man race for the nomination. And I try to explain why Democrats ought to be very very careful what they wish for. Enjoy!

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Today on The BradCast we catch up with a lot of incoming from over the past week (or two) as Republicans officially begin to freak out about the likelihood of Donald Trump becoming their nominee and the possibility (perhaps, their hope) for a contested nominating convention, and as the U.N. climate conference heads into its final hours towards an agreement that might save the planet.

We cover quite a bit of ground on today's show, as you'll hear, so I'll just let you listen and make of it what you will, rather than go into great detail here.

Suffice to say, we call out not just Republicans for the mess we're all now in --- from the rise of money in politics to to the rise of Trump to the rise of fear and fascism to the rise of global temperatures --- but also the mainstream corporate media. Had they not consistently failed to do their job over the past decade (or two), they might have kept this entire fine mess from happening in the first place.

But why would want to? They are now the biggest winners of all. And the Democrats don't seem to be laughing about it any of it anymore. Enjoy the show.

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Crunch time in Paris at COP21 United Nations climate talks; Sen. Bernie Sanders proposes a national carbon tax; Goldman Sachs predicts 'exponential growth' in renewable energy; PLUS: Good news (for a change!) global greenhouse gas emissions declined in 2015, and not because of global economic recession... 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): ExxonMobil Warns of Catastrophic 7°F to 12°F Global Warming Without Government Action; Fox News' Glaring Hypocrisy On The UN Climate Summit's Carbon Footprint; COP21: Let's not talk about liability; The Chennai Floods Are a Devastating Preview of Unnatural Disasters to Come; It’s time to let Lake Powell go... PLUS: Bye, bye, bananas ... and much, MUCH more! ...

On today's BradCast, mass shootings come home here in Southern California as 14 are confirmed dead by airtime with many more injured at the Inland Regional Center facility in San Bernardino.

Our live breaking coverage of the shootings and its aftermath --- all taking place just a few miles from our KPFK/Pacifica Radio studios here in Los Angeles --- includes coverage from KPFK News Director Ernesto Arce, live from the scene and much more...

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On today's BradCast, guest host Nicole Sandler of Radio or Not speaks with Howie Klein of Down with Tyranny and the Blue America PAC.

They spoke about just about everything - from Alan Grayson's endorsement of Hillary Clinton (and the reported strong-arm tactics her campaign is employing to gain those endorsements) to Trump's dangerous rhetoric to medical marijuana. And, as if we didn't already know, Bernie Sanders' constituents love him!

And since so many are embracing the 'F' word as it relates to the GOP's frontrunner, Nicole brought out "The 14 Characteristics of Fascism", just to review.

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Today on The BradCast: Two big election wins for Democrats in the Deep South; More opportunism following the Paris attacks; And mass GOP delusion. (Audio link for the complete show is below.)

After a quick welcome to our newest terrestrial affiliate --- KSOW 106.7FM in Cottage Grove, Oregon --- it's on to the huge victory over the weekend for Democratic gubernatorial candidate John Bel Edwards in his runoff against Republican Sen. David Vitter in the race to replace Louisiana's outgoing Governor and Presidential candidate Bobby Jindal (R).

Also, Democrats held off a Republican supermajority in the Mississippi state Assembly over the weekend by the luck of the draw, literally, as a reportedly tied race for a statehouse seat was settled by drawing straws. The losing Republican candidate is filing a challenge to the election in the Republican MS legislature. Both states, LA and MS, force their voters to vote on 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting systems. So, who really won and who really lost the races? Your guess is as good as mine...at least in the MS case.

Then, while elected officials and Presidential candidates shamefully continue their attempt to block Syrian refugees from coming to the U.S. after the Paris attacks, a number of current and former U.S. intelligence officials are just as disingenuously using the tragedy in an attempt to undermine encryption technology on your phone and computer.

Trevor Timm, attorney, columnist, activist and co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation joins us to discuss his recent column at the UK's Guardian calling out U.S. intelligence officials for their appalling and misleading opportunism in the wake of the November 13th attacks.

Despite the fact that the Paris attackers were known in advance and communicated with each other via unencrypted text messages and Facebook, top intelligence officials are still fighting to be entrusted with the keys to unlock any and all encrypted communications in all software across the world.

"They're saying, you can use encryption as long as you give us the key," Timm tells me today. "That's the law that they would like to pass. Unfortunately, security doesn't work that way. Put aside the fact that if this was a power given to the government they would inevitably abuse it --- because, as we've seen over and over again in history, they constantly abuse their surveillance powers --- but let's just say, they will only use it when they have a warrant for information. The problem is that key is still vulnerable to all of these other actors who will try to steal it. They will try to steal that key from the U.S. government, which, we have seen, is not that hard to do."

He charges that this effort would result in the government helping us to be less secure by undermining technology that is meant to make all of our lives more secure. "That, to me, sounds like a crazy idea."

Timm also helpfully explains how encryption actually works, for those who don't know, and how some of these same officials --- (talking to you, current CIA Director John Brennan, and you, former CIA Director James Woolsey and others) --- are also, outrageously, actually blaming the Paris attacks on privacy advocates and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden!

"This is a scapegoat that former and current intelligence officials are using to hide and cover up their own failures," says Timm. "When they're out there blaming Snowden, no one is asking them questions about what they could have done better or where they failed. To be honest, it was a pretty masterful PR tactic by them and unfortunately the media took it hook, line and sinker."

Finally, as we were reminded again over the past couple of days, GOPers from Trump to Fiorina to Carson and beyond are now, apparently, completely debilitated by mass hallucinations about 9/11, Planned Parenthood, and just about everything else they've been told to believe is real on Fox "News". I explain how these delusions mean big trouble for the country, the world...and even your Thanksgiving dinner...

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