So, did anything of note happen over the past week or so while we were taking a holiday break from The BradCast? [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

As I've come to learn, a few things of note did happen. In fact, it was almost like coming back to a different nation today, largely thanks to the corrupt, radical, extremist, not-conservative-in-the-least U.S. Supreme Court's rightwing majority which invented new clauses in the Constitution out of whole cloth to appall the Founders by declaring Presidents to be Kings. I have a feeling we'll be catching up with the remarkable past 10 days or so for quite a while around here.

Today, however, at the top of the show, we first touch on a few of those news items of note from the past week, including, perhaps most notably for the immediate moment in history, remarkable pushback at the polls from the left in France, UK and even Iran against rising Rightwing fascism. Stunning democratic victories in all three nations serve as a valuable lesson in this country, at this time, particularly from France, where a broad coalition on the left came together to issue a surprise, blistering electoral upset to Marine LePen's far-right nationalist party which had been expected to win on Sunday.

That, it turns out, is helpful --- and hopeful --- context as we turn our focus today to the most immediate concern here: legitimate questions about the reelection candidacy of President Biden, one of the most effective (and, yes, progressive) Presidents in U.S. history, following his disastrous debate performance just after we signed off air before our holiday break about ten days ago.

With much of his party seemingly rallying behind him in Congress a week later, even as a number of noteworthy elected Democrats are calling for him to drop out --- and polling that is offering mixed messages --- we open the phones to our listeners today to learn where they are on this matter.

Should Biden stay in or drop out? And, if he drops out, who should replace him and how? All questions of great import given that, no matter who runs against Donald Trump this year, it is far more than a battle between Republicans and Democrats. It is now very clearly a battle between Fascism and Democracy, particularly after the corrupted Court has now horrified the Founders to decree that Presidents are above the law in virtually any action they choose to take while in office.

The Democratic National Convention begins in just over a month. Early voting begins for the November 5 election in about 90 days.

Needless to say, our phone lines lit up. To my surprise --- especially among our mostly progressive, live Southern California listeners --- they were almost all of a very similar mind. Truly. I would not have predicted the response.

You can listen to it in today's very lively BradCast linked below...

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Today on The BradCast we try and nip another completely false, outrageous rightwing Zombie Lie in the bud before it eats too many brains and becomes canon in the Wingnut Multiverse. Wish us luck. [Audio link to full show follows below.]

But first, a few news items today...

• Extreme, climate change-fueled weather is now pretty much just exploding everywhere. Today, the two latest chapters: a pair of deadly wildfires in New Mexico and "A" is for "Alberto", the first named storm of what is expected to be an exceptionally busy and intense hurricane season given the unprecedented record warmth of ocean waters. This particular storm, in the Gulf, appears to be heading toward Mexico, though its already grazing parts of Texas with a ton of water.

• Tuesday's Congressional Primary elections in Virginia, Oklahoma and Georgia appear to have gone off smoothly enough for now, with the biggest story coming out of Virginia in the Republican primary for the 5th U.S. House District. Far-right Freedom Caucus Chair Rep. Bob Good was thought to be all but done for, as he was targeted by both Donald Trump (because Good dared to support DeSantis in the Presidential Primary) and former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (because Good was one of eight Republicans who voted him out of the job earlier this year.) An even farther Right, well-funded state Senator by the name of John McGuire was set to easily unseat Good, and still might. But, as of airtime, there are just 321 votes between them out of more than 62,000 tallied to date. Counting of late mail-in will resume tomorrow between the two election deniers following a break for today's Juneteenth federal holiday.

• And, down in Louisiana today, far-right lawmakers and the state's new far-right Governor Jeff Landry have decided they don't care much for the U.S. Constitution's establishment clause, and have decided to mandate that the Ten Commandments must be posted in every public elementary, middle school, high school and college classroom in the state. That'll show those U.S. Constitution loving heathens! The effort is obviously an attempt to bring the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court in hopes that its corrupted rightwing majority will overturn decades of precedent respecting the separation of church and state. And I bet they will.

THEN... Last September, California's Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a new state law to increase the minimum wage for fast food workers at national companies with more than 60 stores from $16/hour to $20/hour. Before it even took effect on April 1 this year, Rupert Murdoch's rightwing media outlets (Wall Street Journal, NY Post, Fox "News") were working overtime in cahoots with an outfit calling itself the California Business and Industrial Alliance (CABIA) to claim that thousands of fast food jobs had already been cut after Newsom signed the bill into law.

A UCLA Economics Professor by the name of Lee Ohanian either went along with it or fell for it, detailing the supposed massive job loss in an article at the right-leaning policy think-tank called the Hoover Institution, part of Stanford University, citing WSJ's misleading employment statistics. It all offered a nice academic patina to the (false) claim that nearly 10,000 fast food workers had been laid off between last September and January, thanks to Newsom and California's Marxist policies.

CABIA then happily cited the "Hoover Institution" in a full-page advertisement in USA Today earlier this month, a mock obituary declaring "In Memoriam: Victims of Newsom's Minimum Wage". The ad cites Hoover for its claim that "nearly 10,000 fast-food jobs" were lost "after $20 minimum wage signed last fall." The ad details all the hard times for poor McDonald's, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Subway, Rubio's California Grill, and about half a dozen others. All victims of California's impossible idea that people who work should receive a living wage in exchange.

Turns out, as our guest today, Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist and author MICHAEL HILTZIK reports at the L.A. Times, the claim, the statistics used and the entire argument put forth by WSJ, NY Post, Fox "News", CABIA and Hoover is all "baloney, sliced thick." And Hiltzik has the receipts from the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Federal Reserve to prove it.

In fact, Hiltzik details, as it turns out, fast food employment actually went up from last September to this past January --- when using seasonally adjusted figures --- and even continued to go up after the law took effect on April 1, with employment in the sector outpacing April of 2023 (apples to apples!) by nearly 7,000 jobs.

"What we're dealing with here is the misuse of employment figures by essentially using non-seasonally adjusted figures, rather than what CABIA and the Wall Street Journal should be using, which is seasonally-adjusted," Hiltzik tells me, describing the scam. "When you have an industry in which employment fluctuates during the year for seasonal reasons, you have to use seasonally-adjusted figures. That's the case with fast food restaurants. Everyone in the restaurant industry knows this. Employment in restaurants peaks in September, year after year after year. You have to compare each month to the same month in other years, and that's why the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that, in fact, employment in the sector in California went up compared to the same earlier period."

"Any economist knows that you absolutely must use seasonally-adjusted figures. The Wall Street Journal didn't seem to know this, even though they're supposed to be experts in finance and the economy," he scoffs.

Hiltzik describes the Murdoch/CABIA/Hoover sleight-of-hand as "fabricated" and "false", and we discuss why it's happening --- an has been nationalized --- in the first place. He also debunks the lie that Rubio's Grill has had to close 48 stores across the state thanks to CA's new leftist law. (Spoiler: It was private equity, not the $20 min. wage, that dunnit.)

For the record, though Ohanian, the UCLA professor who laundered the Journal's purposely misleading numbers at the Hoover Institution, admitted to Hiltzik that he got it wrong, his April 24, 2024 article is still posted there without correction or retraction...

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Today's BradCast summary may be necessarily (or mercifully, depending on how you look at it) brief. As noted here yesterday, I've got COVID again. Did a show today anyway. For good or ill. There's just too much going on and standing down yesterday only made me feel like we were falling even farther behind. Plus, big news today out of SCOTUS. So bear with my gravelly, congested voice as we catch up with a few of things on today's show. [Audio link to full show follows below.]

Among those things..,.

• Tuesday's down-ballot primary elections in Maine, Nevada, North Dakota and South Carolina didn't offer many surprises or problems, so far, for voters or tabulation. But the Special Election for the U.S. House in Ohio's otherwise deeply red 16th Congressional District was certainly of note. The Democratic candidate, Michael Kripchak, lost the race to Republican Michael Rulli, as expected. But, continuing a pattern we've seen quite a bit of on Election Days since 2020, the Democrat wildly over-performed expectations by some 20 points! It's another good reminder to take nothing for granted this year, with the November 5th General Election Day now less than 150 days away!

• The packed and corrupted U.S. Supreme Court did (mostly) the right thing for a happy change today. In an opinion [PDF] written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the Court unanimously shut down a ridiculous case brought by legal forum-shopping anti-abortion zealots in Texas seeking a nationwide ban on the use of Mifepristone, the most popular and safest method of abortion in the U.S. The challenge, based on false claims about the drug, was rejected 9 to 0 due to a lack of standing by the crackpot doctors who brought the case (with the help of a rightwing extremist legal mill, in a lower court jurisdiction where they were guaranteed to get a favorable finding from Trump-appointed anti-abortion activist judge, Mathew Kasmaryk.) Kavanaugh's ruling, however, left the door open for future challenges by other plaintiffs to the FDA's 20-year old approval of the drug. The executive agency has repeatedly found Mifepristone --- used in about two-thirds of abortion in the U.S. last year --- to be extraordinarily safe and effective.

• Then, we're joined by AMANDA MARCOTTE, Senior Political Writer at Salon and author of Troll Nation: How the Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself. We discuss today's SCOTUS ruling and a related matter which she recently wrote about at Salon, which also highlights the corrupt anti-abortion Texas-to-SCOTUS legal activist pipeline. This case, like the Mifepristone case, is being brought, specifically, in Kasmaryk's North Texas federal court, where he is the only judge overseeing cases filed there. It involves two University of Austin professors, Daniel Bonevac and John Hatfield, who are plaintiffs in a suit challenging Nixon-era federal law that prevents them from mistreating people, women in particular, who don't behave to the professors' liking. They are claiming a violation of their Free Speech Rights in federal laws that prevent them from flunking female students who go out of state to obtain abortions or block them from firing teaching assistants who have had one or forces them to consider the hiring of employees who may be transgendered. It is all of a piece, as Marcotte explains, with the corrupt SCOTUS decision that overturned 50 years of legal precedent for the Constitutional right to abortion back in 2022, and the subsequent total abortion ban in the Lone Star State. As Marcotte identifies, this and a number of other cases, are being brought by the same far-right interests, including former Texas Solicitor General and Federalist Society activist Jonathan Mitchell and legal mill outfits packed with former (and future?) Trump staffers.

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for a Brad-free edition of Green News Report! With a warning for upcoming extreme heat across much of the country; seemingly unceasing extreme rainfall in Florida; a new law adopted by the New York legislature to hold Big Oil accountable for climate damage; and hundreds of billions of dollars in health benefits now being realized thanks to President Biden's renewable energy boom...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: May 2024 was the hottest May ever recorded globally; Earth just saw 12 straight months of unprecedented heat; Heat deaths in the U.S. hit a new record in 2023; The world's largest solar farm is now online --- in China; PLUS: The U.N. Secretary-General has a message for the world... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Big Auto and the death of traffic congestion reform; Misinformation poses a bigger threat to democracy than you might think; U.N. weather agency explains why it is "climate crunch time" after the hottest 12 consecutive months on record; Phoenix using ice immersion to treat heatstroke victims as Southwest bakes in triple digits; Sweden to ban bottom trawling in its waters; After Tesla, the surprising next best-selling electric vehicle in America is this electric bike... PLUS: Clean energy saves farms in bad years... and much, MUCH more! ...

Far-right Republicans in the Lone Star State are telling us about their extreme plans. Why are both state and national media downplaying them? We discuss on today's BradCast. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

BUT FIRST UP... The Presidential Primary season comes to a close this week, with Tuesday's contests in New Jersey, Montana, New Mexico, South Dakota, Iowa and D.C. (Though Democrats in Guam and the Virgin Islands still have a chance to ring in this weekend! And non-Presidential primaries will continue in many states in the week's ahead!) We've got some of your noteworthy results fron Tuesday today, such that there are any, including Presidential results reflecting small, if notable numbers of voters on each sides of the aisle who remain dissatisfied with both President Biden and convicted felon Donald Trump as their party's nominee.

THEN... This week, lawmakers in the very narrowly GOP-controlled chambers of Arizona's state legislature became the latest such body to try and pass new laws mimicking Texas' Senate Bill 4. That law, currently under federal challenge by the Biden Administration, grants unprecedented authority to state and local law enforcement officials to arrest people suspected of being in the country unlawfully and allows state judges to deport them. Those are roles traditionally played by federal, not state, officials. In Arizona, the Democratic Governor vetoed a similar effort earlier this year, so GOP lawmakers are now moving to place the measure on the state's already very long November ballot.

What happens in the increasingly radicalized state of Texas, unfortunately, does not stay in Texas, where Republicans hold solid majorities in both chambers of the state legislature, every single statewide office (since 1994), and every seat on the state Supreme Court. Those Republicans have only become more radical with each passing year, as evidenced by the state GOP's horrifying official party platform [PDF] adopted at their recent state party convention.

Just a few of the many planks, among others, call for doctors to be charged with homicide for carrying out an abortion; the Bible to be taught by chaplains in public schools; the deportation of noncitizens living lawfully in the country if they happen to participate in the wrong public protest; the withdraw of the U.S. from the United Nations and the organization's removal from U.S. soil.

Perhaps most disturbing (at least to me), the manifesto calls for a new law to mandate that statewide officials must win not only a majority in the state, but majorities in more than half of Texas' 254 counties in order to win office. That measure, if turned into law, would make it largely impossible for any Democrat to ever win statewide office again, given that the vast majority of the state's liberals are populated in a handful of large counties that are home to the state's major cities. Texas would become a one party state.

The Washington Post's Karen Tumulty this week described the TX GOP party platform as "hair-raising" and a sign that the state GOP has "gone off the deep end". But, at the same time, she marginalizes the document as "not a serious policy road map."

It is not only national media downplaying it. The Austin American Statesman describes the platform as little more "a wish list...than a road map that will be followed...by lawmakers in Austin or Washington". The otherwise excellent Texas Tribune similarly downplays the stated threats to democracy (and just about everything else) in their own coverage.

But our guest today, ANDREA GRIMES, an Austin-based journalist and activist who has been covering state GOP conventions since 2010, argued in an op-ed at MSNBC late last week that such views by major media outlets "aren’t merely outdated. They’re patently incorrect, contradicted by demonstrable evidence that the Texas GOP platform has been driving policy in Texas and beyond not just recently, but for several years."

She joins us to detail that case today, warning that while all of these planks may sound crazy, increasingly radicalized and extremist Republicans and their office holders in Texas "and beyond" are telling us exactly what they plan to do and have a record, going back years now, of enacting into law some of the state GOP party's most appalling measures. Once fringey ideas that began as little more than seemingly buffoonish platform planks dismissed by media outlets as sops to the party's most extremist elements have since become mainstream Republican party orthodoxy and enacted into law in Texas and many other states. The failure by mainstream media to notice and warn that "these people are not messing around" continues to ill-serve the nation.

Grimes details how the problem goes back to at least the "Tea Party" days and the "white racist reactionary political movement" that rose up in response to the nation's first Black President. But that has accelerated, she says, since 2016 "with the rise of Trump" and "a Republican Party that is living its best, most crazy life at this point, achieving win after win in terms of policy."

So why are these state GOP party platforms, much of which have become law in recent years, still being downplayed by editors at mainstream state and national media outlets, rather than being regarded as the warnings that they are?

"The phrase that continues to come into my head over and over is 'normalization bias'," Grimes tells me. "It's very difficult to come to grips with the true terrors of our political reality because they are outrageous. It is outrageous for Samuel Alito to be flying an upside-down American flag at his home. It is outrageous for Trump to foment an insurrection. It's outrageous for insurrectionists to storm the U.S. Capitol. These things are outrageous. And I think there's a sense among members of the mainstream media that, if they can strive to pursue the maintenance of objectivity and normalization, that things will somehow even out on their own, and they won't be asked to truly describe the world as it is. They won't be asked to go into this uncomfortable place of appearing biased, when in fact they would simply be describing reality."

"American journalism is so rooted in this conceit of objectivity. It is so beholden to this idea," she adds. We've got much more to discuss along these lines today, including whether there is any analogue to this phenomenon on the Democratic side (spoiler alert: nope, nothing even close) and what, if anything, can now be done by Americans to stem the tide of radicalism, particularly if media outlets continue to fail call it out for what it is. It's a great conversation, I think, that I hope you tune in for!

FINALLY... Just before the close of today's show, news breaks out of Georgia that the state Appeals Court has placed a pause on Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis' sprawling conspiracy indictment against Trump and 18 co-conspirators for their alleged criminal scheme to steal the 2020 election in Georgia, as an appeal by the defendants to remove Willis from the case moves forward. Upshot for now: The case was highly unlikely, at this point, to get to trial before November. Now it absolutely won't.

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Extreme weather unleashes disasters from Iowa to Mexico; Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signs 'Don't Say Climate Change' law; Oakland, CA first school district in U.S. to switch to all-electric school buses; PLUS: Study finds microplastics in human testicles... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Canada wildfires expand, threaten oil industry town of Fort McMurray, again; Climate change made extreme heat in Asia significantly worse; PLUS: Broadcast media ignored Donald Trump's blatant, billion-dollar quid pro quo offer to Big Oil... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): DeSantis signs law deleting climate change from Florida policy; A Trump win puts $1 Trillion in US energy investments at risk; How Alabama turned to restrictive deed covenants to ward off flooding claims from black residents; Oakland is now first in the US to have a 100% electric school bus fleet - and it's V2G; Impunity and pollution abound in DRC mining of critical minerals; Persistent Brazil floods raise specter of climate migration... PLUS: Don't fall for 'climate-friendly' beef... and much, MUCH more! ...

On today's BradCast: A new cybersecurity incident has emerged in Coffee County, Georgia. That's the now-notorious rural enclave in the southeastern part of the Presidential battleground state where Donald Trump allies and operatives, in January of 2021, unlawfully breached, copied and distributed the state's proprietary touchscreen voting system software after the 2020 Presidential election. Five participants in that breach were charged with felonies as part of the broad racketeering conspiracy case against Trump filed in Fulton County, GA. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Before we get there today, however, some quick news on Trump's New York criminal trial, where he stands accused of 34 felonies related to hush-money payments made just before the 2016 election to porn star Stormy Daniels. She took the stand today. We cover a few quick details, but will cover that and other related news in more depth on tomorrow's mid-week Trump Trial "Ketchup" program.

Also today, we're happy to announce another very rarely-bestowed BRAD BLOG Intellectually Honest Conservative Award. This one for Georgia's Republican former Lt. Governor Geoff Duncan. The prestigious honor comes in response to his courageous op-ed in the Atlanta Journal Constitution this week, in which he endorsed Joe Biden and encouraged fellow Never Trump Republicans to do the same, noting, "Unlike Trump, I’ve belonged to the GOP my entire life. This November, I am voting for a decent person I disagree with on policy over a criminal defendant without a moral compass."

Then, it's back to Georgia, where the Coffee County Board of Commissioners released a notice [PDF] late last month that they'd been notified by the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) and its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), 11 days earlier, about "unusual cyberactivity" on the County's local IT system. The terse statement from the County confirmed indications of "cyber-activity by an unknown malicious actor(s)". It claimed that "Steps have been taken to further secure the network and protect Coffee County's IT infrastructure", while noting that it had "informed Federal Authorities of the incident". (Yes, that would seemingly be the same incident that the very same press release says Federal Authorities, DHS and CISA, notified THEM about.)

We're joined today by longtime Election Integrity and Transparency champion MARILYN MARKS of the Coalition for Good Governance (CGG). Marks was the one who first learned about Team Trump's unlawful breach of GA's statewide voting system hardware and software in Coffee County that first took place on January 7, 2021 (the day after Trump's insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.) Her revelations resulted in the charges filed by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis against Trump attorney Sidney Powell (who pleaded guilty) and others involved in the Coffee County break in.

As Director of CGG, Marks is also the plaintiff in civil lawsuit in federal court, filed in 2017, seeking to ban GA Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger's mandated use of the state's easily-hacked, unverifiable touchscreen voting systems in favor of verifiable hand-marked paper ballots. The trial in that long-running case, known as Curling v. Raffensperger, was finally held in January of this year. As Marks explains today, plaintiffs are still waiting on a verdict from U.S. District Court Judge Amy Totenberg who oversaw the trial, which included demonstrations from plaintiffs' experts revealing that Raffensperger's systems can be hacked by any voter at the polling place with nothing more than a ballpoint pen.

Today, Marks charges that Coffee County appears to have "hid and concealed" information about the new cybersecurity incident from the Sec. of State's office "for some number of days." Though little is still known publicly about the new hack, she is troubled by the news. "This cannot just be coincidence that there have been two such cyberattacks this year on counties, one in Fulton and one in Coffee. That's it. The two counties that have a lot of information challenging Trump and his allies related to [the earlier breach in Coffee] and the theft of the [voting] software to begin with."

We also get an update from Marks on the status of the Curling case, where it is getting very late in the election year for the judge to issue a ruling that would require Georgia to make hand-marked paper ballots available to voters at the polls this November. Marks, however, remains ever hopeful, noting that the move to hand-marked ballots would require no new equipment above and beyond what is already available at each GA precinct.

Marks also discusses a new Georgia law (signed by Gov. Brian Kemp this evening) that will eventually ban the use of tabulation via QRCodes on computer-marked ballots, requiring computer scanners to tabulate from the ballots' human-readable text that is supposedly verified by voters after it is printed and before its cast. Unfortunately, as she explains, that bill, even if implemented in 2026 as mandated by the legislation, will not make the state's touchscreen Ballot Marking Devices any less vulnerable to manipulation or any more verifiable by the public after an election.

Marks, whose organization found no evidence that Biden's 2020 victory in the Peach State was decided incorrectly, is also offering testimony this week to the GA State Board of Elections, advocating that recounts in the state must be carried out by hand, rather than by the same computerized scanners that tallied ballots in the first place.

"The state law is quite clear, a recount is to be done by hand, for obvious reasons such as the machine [used to tally ballots] is coded wrong," she explains. Otherwise, she adds, you're going to get the same incorrect results "if you just run the ballot back through the machine that is miscoded."

The reason that Trump supporters are still arguing over the 2020 tally in the state, she believes, is thanks to the lack of a public hand-count after that very close election. Raffensperger insisted on a machine tally instead. "All of that could have been solved if they had done a manual recount, as the law required. Which would have allowed Trump to appoint a counter at every table, handle every single ballot. And they would have had a hard time arguing then about counterfeit ballots, wrong counts, no transparency," Marks tells me. "A lot of the problems that we've lived with now over three years would have been solved if they had just followed the law and done a manual recount."

Finally today, we close with our latest Green News Report, with Desi Doyen's coverage of relentless rain and deadly flooding in both Brazil and Houston; the hottest April ever recorded on Planet Earth; and President Biden's unveiling of billions of dollars to spur clean energy production in rural areas and the removal and replacement of toxic lead water pipes across the nation...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Relentless rains trigger widespread floods in Houston and southern Brazil; April 2024 was the hottest April on record, on land and sea; Man-made global warming is supercharging heavy rains across the U.S.; PLUS: President Biden unveils billions in new funding for rural clean energy, and to remove and replace toxic lead water pipes... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Summer heat hits Asia early, killing dozens as one expert calls it the "most extreme event" in climate history; Kenya and Tanzania face 'humanitarian crisis' amid disastrous floods; EPA finally takes on abandoned coal ash ponds, but it might be too late; Climate change-driven insurance crisis threatens new US states; The GOP mega-donor who collued with OPEC; Big winner in Biden’s EV charging revolution: Gas stations... PLUS: Oil companies contaminated a family farm. Regulators let them walk away... and much, MUCH more! ...

We've got a lot of news from around the globe and right here at home on today's BradCast. Some of it is even not terrible! But, yeah, much of it is. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among our stories today...

• It will be eight years next month since the 2016 BREXIT referendum in Great Britain offered a foreboding omen in advance of that year's Presidential election here in the U.S. We'll hope this past weekend's election results for mayoral races in London and elsewhere in Britain --- where the Conservative Party suffered crushing defeats against the Labour Party --- offer a much brighter omen for the UK's national elections later this year and the 2024 Presidential election here in the U.S. in November.

• On the other hand, hopefully it is not Panama's weekend elections offering us an omen instead. A last-minute replacement for the country's former, popular, charismatic but criminal President --- who is barred from the ballot as he seeks sanctuary in the Nicaraguan Embassy after being sentenced to 10 years in prison for money laundering --- defeated three other rivals to win the Presidency on Sunday.

• In other foreign affairs, we've got a lot of news out of Israel today. Over the weekend, the government of rightwing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shut down the local operations of Qatar-based news agency Al-Jazeera in a crackdown being decried by world journalism organizations as an attack on press freedoms. Hamas announced on Monday that it had accepted a cease-fire proposal forwarded via the Egyptian-Qatari based negotiations with Israel, but Israel --- which says it is studying the proposal --- appeared to be rejecting it as they began striking targets in the southern Gaza city of Rafah. That, as the Biden Administration has been warning Israel of threatened changes in U.S. support if a ground invasion in southern Gaza does not include measures to insure the safety of hundreds of thousands of civilian refugees. And all of that follows on what Axios reported last week as a hold placed by the Administration on a shipment of U.S.-made ammo earmarked for Israel, which may now be caught up in President Biden's push for more guarantees about its use by Israel.

• But I thought the disgraced former President told us that the U.S. Justice Department has been weaponized by Democrats to go after Republicans?! If so, they've got a funny way of showing it. Last year, the DoJ indicted New Jersey's sitting Democratic Senator Bob Menendez (and his wife) on bribery and corruption charges. On Friday, the DoJ indicted Texas' Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar (and his wife) on bribery and corruption charges. Its almost as if Trump was lying about the justice system being "weaponized" by Democrats to go after him and Republicans.

• Speaking of our corrupt, lying, former President. Donald Trump was slapped with another fine on Monday for violating the court's gag-order against attacking jurors and witnesses. That brings the total number of contempt violations during his 2016 election interference case to 10. New York Superior Court Justice Juan Merchan once again warned that a jail sentence may be imposed after any more violations. As to the actual trial on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to hide a hush-money payment made to a porn star to help him win in 2016, the Trump Organization's former Controller and its Accounts Payable Supervisor testified for the Prosecution on Monday about how Trump, while serving in the White House, signed checks from his personal account, fraudulently logged as legal expenses, to reimburse his former attorney Michael Cohen for the hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels.

• Record flooding from climate change-fueled downpours in a wealthy section of Brazil is being described as among the worst disasters in its history, leading to chaos, the shutdown of highways and airports, hospitals without power, widespread looting, helicopter rooftop rescues, 20,000 left homeless and, so far, at least 83 deaths. "This was the third record flood in the same region of the country in less than a year," lamented Brazil's President, decrying his nation's lack of preparedness for the worst effects of climate change and for the "historic debt" that wealthy nations who caused this problem through the unfettered emission of climate warming greenhouse gasses owe to poorer countries who emitted little of it, but are now suffering the worst of the global consequences nonetheless.

• Brazil's weekend disaster reportedly evoked scenes from post-Katrina New Orleans and post-Harvey Houston here in the U.S. But, over the same weekend, new scenes from Houston itself evoked the same thing, following days of downpours that pummeled the region and left residents stranded on rooftops requiring hundreds of rescues. Again. Some 23 inches of rain fell in Harris County over the past week, as floodwaters are finally beginning to recede in the nation's third-largest county today. Flood insurance has become all but unaffordable for many residents after years of ever-worsening storms as our global climate crisis continues to tighten its deadly grip. A disaster declaration was issued by the state's Governor in 91 counties impacted by the latest round of extreme weather in Texas.

• Finally, with increased heat and moisture in the air, traditionally mosquito-free Los Angeles County is mosquito-free no more. County officials are now unleashing tens of thousands of irradiated male mosquitos (which don't bite), as part of a pilot program to target the female population (which do) for a particularly aggressive strain of bugs that have grown more aggressive in recent years, and are now said to be a vector for a number of deadly diseases. All thanks to climate change. Happy Spring!

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As it is said, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." It continues to bend mostly in that direction on today's BradCast.

Among our many stories today...

• Donald Trump finally coughed up a bond for $175 million --- of the $454 million plus interest that he still owes in full --- in his New York civil fraud case as his appeal continues.

• The judge in Trump's New York criminal trial related to hush-money payments to a porn star to help him win the 2016 election, has expanded his gag-order [PDF] against the disgraced former President to cover family members of jurors, witnesses, prosecutors and the judge himself, whose daughter had been repeatedly (and fraudulently) attacked in recent days by the GOP's Presidential front-runner. His trial, on 34 felony counts, begins on April 15.

• Gov. Ron DeSantis' packed state Supreme Court in Florida tossed out decades of state constitutional precedent to allow his Big Government 6-week abortion ban to take effect. At the same time, the court also narrowly allowed a Constitutional Amendment to protect reproductive rights on this year's general election ballot in the Sunshine State. It, like a measure to allow the sale of recreational marijuana that the Justices also approved for the ballot on Monday, will need to receive support from more than 60% of voters this year to take effect. Democrats are hopeful that the ballot measures could help them win back the former swing-state for the first time in years this November.

• GOP state legislators in Arizona are on the verge of adopting a ballot measure for this November which would end most early voting and vote-by-mail in the state where more than 80% of voters currently take advantage of such conveniences as well as end the use of convenient Voting Centers in the state's two largest (and most Democratic-leaning) counties. Since the resolution will result in a ballot measure, if passed next by the state Senate, it can't be vetoed by the state's Democratic Governor. On the other hand, it'll be something for voters to think about as Dems are now just two swing-seats away from flipping each chamber of the state legislature from "red" to "blue".

• Ever since Republicans decided to pretend the Presidential election was stolen from them with massive --- if evidence-free --- voter fraud in 2020, almost every case of such fraud that has been found has been carried out by Republicans. Today, we've got two more examples of GOP officials caught having committing such fraud. One is from a state Representative in Alabama who was forced to step down after lying about his residency (his seat was filled last week by a Democrat in a Special Election), and another was by a high-ranking state Republican Party official and rightwing talk show host in Georgia who was voted illegally 9 times. Both got off with largely slaps on the wrist.

  Whenever these stories have come to light in recent years, we've found ourselves comparing the velvet glove treatment of white, Republican voter fraud criminals to the years-long hell on Earth faced by Crystal Mason, the black Texas woman [pictured above] who was sentenced in 2018 to five years in prison for unknowingly casting an unlawful provisional ballot that was never even counted back in 2016. Last week, at long-last, Mason was acquitted of the charges she never should have never faced in the first place.

• Finally, Desi Doyen is back with our latest Green News Report, as an iconic cliff-side coastal road collapses amid heavy climate-change fueled rains in California; Republicans protest federal funding to rebuild the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore; a new report finds our man-made climate crisis is taking a brutal toll on the economy; and the Biden Administration's EPA makes some major moves on methane leaks and truck pollution...

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From top to bottom, the Federal Judiciary, as evidenced several times this week alone and discussed in detail on today's BradCast, seems to be coming undone. [Audio link to full show follows below this summary.]

But, first up today, a quick review of Tuesday's Primary and Special Election results in Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Ohio and California. Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump have already won enough delegates to clinch their respective party's nomination, but there are still a several interesting data points of notes to be gleaned from Tuesday's results.

Among them, Trump is consistently losing a far larger share of Republican votes than Biden is losing on the Democratic side. On Tuesday, for example, Biden's reported margin of victory in the states where he was on the ballot was anywhere from 74 to 88 points, while Trump's margin never cracked even 70 points, ranging from 59 to 67. In short, Biden seems to be far more popular among Democratic primary voters than Trump is among Republicans.

We've got other noteworthy tales of the tape today, along with Senate Primary results out of Ohio, where both Democrats and Donald Trump appear to be very happy that Trump-backed Bernie Moreno will be the GOP's nominee running against three-term progressive Democratic U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown in November. And, in California, Democrats are no doubt happy to see that nobody won more than 50% of the vote in the Special Election to fill the seat left vacant by ousted Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday. That means his seat in the closely divided U.S. House, which will almost certainly go to a Republican eventually, will remain empty until at least the Special Election runoff in May.

Also of note today, what the Washington Post is describing as the Biden Administration's "biggest climate move yet". Desi Doyen joins us to explain the EPA's new final rule that is set to increase the speed of the nation's transition to cleaner Electric and Plug-in Hybrid Vehicles; how rightwing media are already lying about the EPA's new rule; and how Republican states and the fossil fuel industry will soon be seeking out friendly judges in the federal judiciary to try and undermine the new rule and its billions of dollars in life-saving new vehicle emissions standards for the American people and the planet.

Then, speaking of friendly rightwing judges, two cases that came before the corrupted U.S. Supreme Court this week --- when, in fact, neither of them should have --- serve to highlight our increasingly brittle judicial system and how it is being gamed by the far-right.

We're joined today by Slate's great legal journalist, MARK JOSEPH STERN to discuss both cases and what they might tell us about a court system, and perhaps a U.S. Supreme Court, nearing a breaking point.

We originally invited Stern for today's show to discuss Monday's absurd case brought by Republican-run states falsely claiming the Biden Administration is somehow violating First Amendment free speech rights by forcing social media companies like Twitter and Facebook to take down posts they don't like regarding COVID, election fraud and more. Of course, the government is not doing that at all. Stern describes the case at Slate --- Murthy v. Missouri (originally Missouri v. Biden) --- as "brain-meltingly dumb", "asinine", and "what happens when a lawless judge and a terrible appeals court embrace the dopiest First Amendment claim you’ve ever heard out of pure spite toward a Democratic president."

The case should never have even made it out of the lowest District Court, but for a Trump-appointed judge who "completely butchered the record and, I think, willfully misrepresented a huge amount of communications between federal officials and social media companies," Stern tells me. "He would pluck individual little clauses from those emails, rearrange them to make it sound like coercion, and then use that to develop what is frankly a conspiracy theory that the federal government strong-armed these companies into silencing their users and censoring speech. It's just not true." (See this article for just some of the gobsmacking examples of ways in which U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty "butchered the record" by falsely representing the evidence record in his ruling.)

Making matters worse, the nation's most extreme appellate court, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, further butchered the record to accomplish what corrupt Supreme Court Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch laughably described when the case came up to SCOTUS as "extensive findings of fact" that "showed the existence of ‘a coordinated campaign’ of unprecedented ‘magnitude orchestrated by federal officials that jeopardized a fundamental aspect of American life.'"

Monday's Oral Argument at SCOTUS, however, pulled the rug out from under pretty much all of that, as the phony allegations met skepticism from even the bulk of the Court's rightwingers. But before we could get to that case today, as previously planned, we had to get through the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals' other recent clown show (which the rightwingers on SCOTUS were happy to play along with last night): their attempt to allow Texas' new law that overturns a century of legal precedent and the U.S. Constitution itself to grant powers to state and local police that override federal immigration law, allowing them to arrest and deport suspected undocumented immigrants.

Stern unpacks the bizarre twists and turns the case has seen over the past 24 hours, and charges that the procedural nonsense from the 5th Circuit and subsequent acquiescence by SCOTUS simply "boggles the mind."

So, what might we learn from all of this --- and all that has come before it --- regarding corrupt Trump-appointed judges, a corrupt 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, a corrupt and increasingly volatile SCOTUS, and the rightwing judge shopping that exploits all of it? We discuss all of that and more with Stern who details "a kind of terrifying intramural war within the judiciary," as some of the courts are pushing back against an attempt by the U.S. Judicial Conference (headed up by Chief Justice Roberts) to rein in judge shopping, and, ultimately, how restoring confidence in the High Court itself may "all come down to what Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett want to do with the courts and want their legacy to be."

"Until they take a harder line here, it's going to remain just as broken as it looks," Stern asserts. "It's going to be even worse behind the scenes, based on what I'm hearing about how these judges' relationships are breaking down over this stuff --- and we're going to have different factions within the judiciary that are fighting for power, not unlike the Kremlin at the height of Soviet-era madness"...

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On today's BradCast, some much needed "context" for what will absolutely be the most important election in U.S. history this November. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Donald Trump is now running on the promise of political violence --- whether he wins or loses. He made that clear (again) during this past weekend's rallies, interviews and social media postings as he continues to up his violent rhetoric with each passing day, embraces strongman tropes and celebrates his supporters' deadly attempt to overthrow the Constitution and U.S. Government on his behalf on January 6, 2021.

The real context of Trump's weekend rally in Ohio, threatening a "bloodbath for the country" if he loses this November, should be clear by now to anyone who hasn't already drunk his Kool-Aid. If it isn't, we attempt to rectify that today. And it has little to nothing to do with cars from China as his Kool-Aid drunk cultists and apologists are attempting to argue. Historians like Timothy Snyder (author of On Tyranny and The Road to Unfreedom) and Jason Stanley (author of How Fascism Works) are shouting from the rooftops to make that clear. So are folks like conservative attorney George Conway and progressive journalist Josh Marshall.

In other largely related news today...

• Former Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro, a key player in the disgraced former President's false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, reported to a federal corrections facility in Miami today to begin a fourth month sentence, becoming the first Trump White House official to go to prison on charges related to Trump's failed attempt to steal the 2020 election from the American people.

• Election denying Michigan MAGA attorney Stefanie Lambert, charged on four counts related to the unlawful breach of voting systems in the state, was arrested in D.C. on Monday after a hearing in a separate case in which she is defending billionaire election denier Patrick Byrne who is being sued for defamation by Dominion Voting Systems. Her arrest by U.S. Marshals was related to her failure to show up for a hearing in her own case back in MI, even as she improperly released discovery documents from the Dominion case to the public.

• The corrupted U.S. Supreme Court allowed a Texas law to take effect today that overturns more than a century of federal immigration authority and the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution which has long held that federal law trumps state law. The TX statute, which allows state and local police to arrest people they suspect have violated federal immigration law, is similar to Arizona's 2012 "Papers Please" law that was blocked at the time by SCOTUS. But neither Court precedent nor the Constitution appear to mean much anymore to the current, far-right supermajority on the High Court.

• There is a movement among Congressional Republicans to prevent Joe Biden from giving a State of the Union Address to Congress next year under the premise that his speech two weeks ago was "divisive" and "hyper-partisan". (And you know how much Republicans hate that sort of thing, especially at SOTU!) At the same time, Republicans are pretending that polls suggest Biden's SOTU was not "well received". Actual numbers from viewers of the speech before and after strongly suggest the contrary.

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with the EPA finally banning all uses of toxic asbestos; extreme heat in Africa; the Biden Administration's investment of billions of dollars to rebuild under-privileged communities that were broken into pieces decades ago by highway construction; and the remarkable climate change deniers in a wealthy coastal community in Massachusetts who want millions of dollars from the state, in perpetuity, to save their beaches and property values, despite the ravages of global warming and rising seas.

All of that and a whole lot more on today's BradCast!...

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On today's BradCast: Given all of the ongoing madness, this story has not yet broken through all of the noise. But there is a concerted effort by several large corporations underway right now to undermine nearly 100 years of labor law in these United States. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

After some news headlines from today and the past several, we're joined by longtime, award-winning labor journalist STEVEN GREENHOUSE, formerly of the New York Times, now at The Guardian, and author of the new book, Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present and Future of American Labor.

At The Guardian last week, Greenhouse reported on the disturbing effort now under way by a number of major corporations, including Amazon, Starbucks, Trader Joe's and Elon Musk's SpaceX, to have the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) --- established as part of the 89-yeard old National Labor Relations Act --- declared unconstitutional by the federal courts.

The NLRB is critical to the survival of workers' rights and the unionization of workplaces. "The NLRB functions, essentially, as a referee, as an umpire, when workers seek to unionize. It tries to get workers, unions and companies to follow certain rules," Greenhouse explains today. "It's illegal, for instance, for companies to fire workers for supporting a union. Starbucks is accused of this. Companies fire the leaders of unionization efforts to decapitate, to kill the effort. The NLRB comes in as the empire and blows the whistle, saying, 'You can't do that. You can't fire people for supporting a union.'"

That said, the Board and its team of Administrative Judges who make determinations about violations of labor law, don't have the power to do much more than make findings. "It doesn't have the power to fine companies one penny for firing ten or twenty or thirty workers for supporting a union." Thus, companies like Starbucks have been in violation of the law more than a hundreds times over the past year, but clearly see the largely non-existent "penalties" for doing so, worth the crime.

The NLRB tends to side with management when Republicans are in the White House and control the Board, and with labor when a Democrat occupies the Oval Office. Greenhouse explains that Democrats have made efforts over the years to give more muscle to the NLRB, but have been blocked, for decades, by Republicans.

Still, as weak as the NLRB is, it plays a vital role in American labor law and workers right to collectively bargain for better pay and working conditions. "Corporations have long gloated at how weak the NRLB is. But what's really different now is that corporations, instead of just shrugging when they're slapped on the wrist, they're really taking a bazooka and going to court trying to have the NLRB declared unconstitutional," Greenhouse tells me.

Even though the NLRB has "been found constitutional time and again" over the past century, now that the federal court system --- including the Supreme Court --- has been so thoroughly captured by rightwing judges, these companies appear to be trying to gut the entire apparatus. And they may get away with it. Unions "fear that the Supreme Court and many judges have moved so far to the right that they are ready to blow up the system of federal agencies that generally has worked very well, over the past 90 years, protecting workers, protecting consumers, protecting investors."

But, Greenhouse warns, these companies "should be careful what they wish for." Finding the NLRB or the Act itself unconstitutional could return labor law to "the law of the jungle", as one labor expert cited in Greenhouse's report suggests. It could also work out much worse for the companies themselves than they may be realizing.

Tune in today for much more on all of the above.

Then, we dive into a bit more detail on some of the news of note since last week, including dictator Vladimir Putin's illegitimate reelection over the weekend to a third term --- and third decade --- of rule in Russia, and Donald Trump's claim that he is unable to come up with a bond to cover the $464 million fine he, his company, and his top execs (including his two eldest sons) now owe in New York after being found liable for years of massive bank, tax and insurance fraud...

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