I've got to post today's BradCast quickly a) before convicted felon Donald Trump speaks at tonight's RNC and b) before more political shoes (and/or earthquakes) drop. So, here's the quick skinny. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among our coverage today...

• Donald Trump critic-turned-toady J.D. Vance of Ohio, officially accepted the GOP's nomination for Vice President during his remarks at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night. His speech was long on hillbilly biography but very short (virtually bereft) of the horrifying policies that Vance actually supports. Helpfully today, we correct his oversight with actual facts and policy proposals from the ambitious Yale-educated Senator, including his push for a nationwide abortion ban with no exceptions; ending no-fault divorce; slashing Social Security and Medicare; embracing Project 2025, turning over Ukraine to Russia and much more!

• While leaving out his radical policy positions, Vance also dropped a few big lies about a number of things during Wednesday speech. When it comes to his lies about all-time record, world-leading energy production under Joe Biden, our own Desi Doyen has a few thoughts and a corrective that J.D. and his convicted conman running mate would prefer you didn't listen to.

• Self-proclaimed "Liberal Redneck" comedian Trae Crowder, who hung out with the GOP's new Veep nominee back in the days when Vance regarded Trump as "America's Hitler", also has a few insights on him today.

• What explains the complete lack of pressing by corporate media for any kind of official medical statement on the injury suffered by Donald Trump during last Saturday's assassination attempt?

• The Chief U.S. District Court Judge in Nevada tossed out a suit on Wednesday brought by the Trump Campaign, the RNC and the Nevada GOP seeking to block the counting of potentially tens of thousands of perfectly legal mail ballots in the battleground state, cast and timely post-marked by Election Day, but arriving up to four days after, as allowed by NV state law.

• With President Biden now battling COVID again, top Democrats, including former President Barack Obama, House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries have all reportedly been pressing the President, in various ways, to reconsider his insistence on staying in the race for reelection. If there is to be a change at the top of the ticket, it is believed likely to come (and would need to come) within days. Perhaps as soon as this weekend.

• In the meantime, President Biden has been continuing to present new, popular policies --- as all Democrats should be joining him in doing at this point. This week, for example, Biden is reportedly planning to issue a long-overdue proposal for SCOTUS reform to include term limits and an enforceable code of ethics for Supreme Court Justices. He will also be proposing a Constitutional amendment to counter the Court's recent corrupt ruling granting criminal immunity to Presidents. Also this week, Biden has called for a national rent control statute that would cap rent increases at 5% annually unless landlords choose to forego federal tax write-offs. These are the sort of things that Dems should be doing right now, rather than squabbling amongst themselves. (Not that anyone asked me.)

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, as Toronto is crippled by extreme storms and flooding; the cost of extreme heat is quickly escalating in the U.S.; and as Marathon Oil agrees to pay a record fine for pollution under the Clean Air Act...

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Welp, we've just been through about three political weeks in this country unlike any other, at least in my lifetime, as briefly summarized at the top of today's BradCast. And, before I'm even able to get today's show posted, that summary is already out of date, with the breaking news just after airtime that President Biden has COVID again. Good lord. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Other than that, to help me "hold on for dear life" amid the political whirlwind, I brought back our friends and fellow old school bloggers HEATHER DIGBY PARTON of Salon and Hullabaloo, and 'DRIFTGLASS' of The Pro Left Podcast to try and help us make sense of everything that continues to unspool this week. Among those things...

• The weekend's assassination attempt of Donald Trump by a registered Republican and how all of that has (or hasn't) affected the current state of the Presidential race.
• The temporarily-undergrounded and now-reemerging battle among elected Democrats as to whether Joe Biden should or shouldn't be replaced on the Presidential ticket.
• The "sign of weakness" in naming of Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as the GOP's Vice-Presidential pick and what Trump hopes to gain from selecting a former critic-turned-toady who opposes support for our democratic allies in Ukraine and seeks a nationwide abortion ban (even in cases of rape or incest) as his running mate.
• Other noteworthy observations from the Republican Party's "unity" convention, including the curious and controversial anti-corporate elite/pro-union speech delivered at the RNC by Teamsters President Sean O'Brien, why Republicans refuse to learn how to pronounce Kamala Harris' first name after more than 3 years in office, and the media's terrible job in covering the entire affair. (Especially MSNBC in this case!)

All of that and too much more on today's BradCast! Enjoy!...

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On today's BradCast: Boy, if Joe Biden's "weaponization" of the Justice Department against Trump and Republicans keeps going like this, there won't be any Democrats left who haven't been convicted of a crime! Too bad old Joe didn't realize he should have just packed the courts with corrupt judges, like Donald Trump did. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

First up today --- after a kick-off by TikTok's @DanasInspired; a few thoughts on Trump's appearance at the RNC on Monday night after the weekend's failed assassination attempt and his naming of Ohio's Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate --- we start with news about today's conviction, on all counts, of New Jersey's Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez. The three-term U.S. Senator and former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was found guilty by a jury on Tuesday after a nine-week criminal trial on charges related to abusing his office to protect foreign associates from criminal investigations and to help funnel money to Egyptian officials. In exchange, prosecutors alleged, Menendez and his wife Nadine Menendez collected millions in gifts, cash and gold bars. She was charged as well, though her trial has been postponed for the time being as she undergoes cancer treatment.

Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and NJ's Democratic Governor Phil Murphy each called for Menendez to resign following the verdict. He had previously vowed to run for re-election as an independent this year, while Democratic Rep. Andy Kim has been nominated by state voters to run for his seat in November against Republican Curtis Bashaw in the Dem-leaning state.

But Menendez' corruption doesn't hold a candle to Donald Trump's, thanks in no small part to the corrupt jurists Trump appointed to lifetime positions on the federal bench while in office, many of whom are now returning the favor at an alarming rate in recent weeks. On Monday, it was U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon's turn, apparently, to use her position to let Trump off the hook. In this case, dismissing his 40-count federal criminal indictment brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith in South Florida for Trump's theft of thousands of pages of highly classified national security documents upon leaving office; his repeated refusal to return them to the government; and his attempts to hide them from prosecutors and enlist Mar-a-Lago employees to help cover up and/or destroy evidence of the crimes.

In a remarkable 93-page ruling [PDF] issued on Monday, Cannon dismissed the entire federal case against Trump and his co-defendants on the basis that Smith's appointment as Special Counsel was somehow in violation of the Constitution and federal statutes. The argument made by Trump's attorneys and accepted by Cannon --- who had already been slow-walking the case for months --- was similar to those repeatedly rejected for decades by judge after judge, including appellate courts and, as our guest details today, unanimously by the U.S. Supreme Court in Nixon v. U.S. But Cannon, appointed by Trump at the end of his term and seated after he lost the 2020 election, appears to know more about the law than all of those other lesser judges.

We're joined today by former lifelong Republican and attorney KEITH BARBER, who writes on the law and Constitution for Daily Kos as "KeithDB", where he detailed Cannon's ruling yesterday. He explains why both the text of the Constitution and several federal laws written to allow Attorneys General to appoint Special Counsels in cases where it is important to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, prove Cannon's ruling wrong. But, as he argues today, being right on the law doesn't actually matter. "She just wanted to dismiss the case because her buddy Trump appointed her [and] gave her that job. It's time to return the favor, and so she has," he says.

Barber published a second article yesterday listing more than half a dozen Special Counsels and Special Prosecutors appointed similarly to Smith, from Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski in the Watergate matter to Ken Starr during the Clinton Administration to Robert Mueller's probe of Russian interference on Trump's behalf in the 2016 election to the recent probe of President Biden himself by Special Counsel Robert Hur.

"A lot of people have gone to jail as a result of special counsels appointed by the Attorney General" over the years, Barber tells me. "None of them got the benefit of a rogue judge saying, 'Nope, all of that is not valid.' The Republicans and the MAGAs like to talk about this notion of two-tiered justice and how unfair it's been to Trump. No court accepted the notion that Special Counsels weren't authorized by statute and weren't something Attorneys Generals could do until it came to Trump. That is what two-tiered justice looks like."

If Cannon's ruling on Monday is correct, Barber asserts, then as part of the Mueller probe, former Trump attorney Michael Cohen's three-year prison sentence would have been unconstitutional and Trump associate and convicted pedophile George Nader would need to be freed immediately from his ten-year prison sentence, among other cases convictions that would need to immediately be revisited.

Will this ruling hold up to appellate scrutiny by the conservative 11th Circuit Court of Appeal, much less Trump's corrupted, packed, stolen and activist U.S. Supreme Court majority? We discuss that and much more.

Finally today, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, as the misery and power outages continue in Houston, Texas following Hurricane Beryl, thanks in no small part to state Republicans refusal to harden infrastructure for a climate changed world, and as Trump appoints flip-flopping climate science denier J.D. Vance as his Vice-Presidential running mate...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Texas' electric grid infrastructure buckles under multiple extreme weather disasters; Damages from Hurricane Beryl now estimated at nearly $3 billion; PLUS: Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, Sen. J.D. Vance, was for climate action before he was against it... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Soaring insurance prices lead some Floridians to 'go bare'; How to power your home through an outage without a gas generator; Marathon Oil agrees to record penalty for oil and gas pollution; Vermont floods raise concerns about future of state’s hundreds of aging dams; What Project 2025 would mean for the fight against climate change;
... PLUS: Meet the Californians in the first class of the American Climate Corps... PLUS:

... and much, MUCH more! ...

Well, it's been several slow news days since we last spoke on The BradCast. Sigh... [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

On Saturday, a 20-year old registered Republican tried to kill Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania with the type of long-range, high-capacity, semi-automatic rifle that Republicans have spent years fighting to ensure are easily available to almost anyone in the country who wants one. Their only use is for mass shootings. Now we've had one at a Republican political rally. Thankfully, the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, barely missed the former President. Though he did kill one rally goer and critically injured two others.

Democrats, from President Biden on down, have since been calling for a cooling of political rhetoric, the type of which led to the assassination attempt on Nancy Pelosi's husband, the attempted kidnapping and murder of Michigan's Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and the attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, among too many other such recent incidents.

Republicans, on the other hand, from the new Republican Vice Presidential nominee and Trump critic turned toady, U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance on down, have opportunistically used the tragic shooting to blame Democrats somehow for the attempt on Trump's life. Some have gone so far as to blame Biden himself in one for somehow personally attempting to murder Trump. Republicans have also attempted to use the incident as a way to chill factual, peaceful political speech that is appropriately and accurately critical of their standard bearer and the party's efforts to undermine America's Constitutional democracy in favor of autocracy and fascism.

No actual motive has emerged for the shooter who was killed by the Secret Service and has so far been identified as a gun enthusiast and "definitely" a "conservative" by one of his former classmates.

We discuss much more on that story today which should have been our lead and only story today. Sadly, it wasn't.

Down in federal court in Florida, the corrupt Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon imagined up a reason to dismiss the entirety of Special Counsel Jack Smith's federal indictment of Trump and two co-conspirators on 40 criminal counts related to his theft of thousands of pages of classified documents when leaving the White House and his refusal to return them, in violation of the Espionage Act and other federal statutes. Cannon's reasons [PDF] for dismissing the case --- questioning the constitutionality of the Special Counsel's appointment --- has been rejected by court after court for years in many other cases where a Special Counsel was appointed (including the Robert Mueller probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election and more recently in the case against Hunter Biden) But, following recent instructions in a solo opinion issued by corrupt Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (signed by no other Justices) in an unrelated case, Cannon dismissed the entire stolen documents case. The Dept. of Justice has said they will appeal. Hopefully, when they do, they will also finally move to have Cannon removed once and for all from this case.

Finally, we open up the phone lines again today to listeners who have many thoughts on all of the above...

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Given Saturday's horrific assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a political rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, I am postponing today's Sunday Toons for now. The toons I had prepared on Saturday, prior to the shooting, can wait. It does not feel appropriate to publish at this hour.

We all still very much need the occasional relief of finding humor in the god awful churn of news events this nation is facing. Perhaps now more than ever. But, for now, for this moment, that can wait. Maybe for a few hours. Maybe a few days. Or maybe until next week. We'll see.

What happened on Saturday was nothing but disgusting and shameful. I am glad --- and we are all very lucky --- the outcome was not even worse.

Though we don't yet know the full circumstances of whatever occurred, it is appalling that a would-be assassin was able to obtain what appears to have been a long-range semi-automatic rifle with which so many rounds could be fired in a matter of seconds and with such deadly precision at such a distance. (Reportedly from outside of the venue's perimeter, from about 150 yards away from where the former President was speaking.) Such a weapon is a weapon of war. It should come as little surprise then that they are now regularly being used in such a fashion. For a political war.

The political violence that has been fostered, and that we have seen play out in too many incidents in recent years, must end. The assassination attempt on Trump reveals America at its shameful worst. Despite his disgusting repeated mocking of a similarly grotesque attempt to assassinate the husband of Nancy Pelosi in October of 2022 --- repeatedly treated as a literal joke by Trump and his supporters --- there is nothing amusing about what happened on Saturday. We should all condemn such behavior, no matter who carries it out and no matter who the victim or attempted victim may be.

We must also continue to speak the truth --- always peacefully but clearly --- and not allow this incident to be used by opportunists as an attempt to chill accurate, fact-based political speech at one of the most critical moments in American history. Our toons --- and that free, peaceful, critical political speech --- will return...

We went to air on today's BradCast prior to Joe Biden's several-hours-delayed post-NATO Summit press conference, allowing us to catch up on an item or two that we've otherwise been trying to get to all week. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among our coverage today...

• Yet another poll is out today, in this case from WaPo/ABC, finding President Biden and Donald Trump tied nationally. (It also shows Vice President Kamala Harris actually leading Trump by 2 points.) That said, the survey also finds some 67% of Americans, including more than half of Democrats, currently believe Biden should end his re-election bid. What should we take from that? And is there reason to believe that Biden can outlast the seemingly never-ending drip-drip-drip of former supporters calling for him to step aside? We discuss.

• While Biden was busy completing the NATO Summit he has been hosting this week in D.C., Donald Trump was planning a previously unannounced meeting with Hungarian strongman and Christian Nationalist Victor Orban down at his Florida resort. The meeting between the autocrats comes just days after Orban's surprise meeting with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin in Moscow and Chinese strongman Xi Jingping in Beijing.

• New Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers released on Thursday once again beat expectations and offer still more good news for the American economy and, specifically, inflation in the U.S. Among that good news, the annual inflation rate fell to just 3% as of June with consumer prices actually falling overall from May to June for the first time since May of 2020. The Biden Administration touted its anti-inflationary policies for the good news, including the easing of gas prices and items such as cars, appliances, airfare and groceries.

• On Tuesday, Oklahoma's long-serving U.S. Senator James Mountain Inhofe died at the age of 89 following a stroke he reportedly suffered on July 4th. The five-term Senator --- who notoriously described global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels as "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people" --- was instrumental in blocking critical climate reforms in Congress over decades, helping to lead the nation and world into the deadly climate crisis we are now facing. He abused his position of power to spread lies and misinformation about climate science for which our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren (including his own) will now pay the price for decades to come.

• After Inhofe repeatedly and falsely warned that America could not survive without fossil fuels, California has been steadily proving otherwise. The most populous state in the union has already had nearly 100 days this year when renewable energy, largely from solar and wind, has exceeded 100% of the state's entire electricity demand for at least some part of the day. In fact, CA is now producing more solar energy than it is able to use on many days, thanks largely to rooftop solar and a lack of transmission lines and battery storage. It is now producing so much clean renewable energy, in fact, that, so far this year, the state has had to waste more than enough renewable energy to power every home in San Francisco for a year. Transmission capacity and battery storage is now being furiously added. But, at the same time, the state's Public Utilities Commission has enacted wildly controversial new rules for selling back solar energy to the grid from rooftop solar installations via net-metering. We discuss.

• Finally, as the nation is suffering from the deadly fallout of the record Hurricane Beryl, including massive power outages, flooding and record tornadoes from Texas to Michigan, and suffocates under stifling heat and humidity from the West Coast to the East, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report on all of that and much more, including Republicans in the U.S. House spending their time fighting to ensure that appliances like refrigerators and dishwashers cost Americans much more than they need to...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Flooding, power outages, sweltering heat --- fallout from Hurricane Beryl wreaking havoc across U.S.; New federal flood risk standards will finally incorporate future climate impacts; PLUS: House Republicans tackle the real enemy: energy saving appliances!... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): A guide to Project 2025, the extreme right-wing agenda for the next Republican administration; Shuttered auto plants will become EV factories thanks to $1.7 billion Biden program; The Pacific Northwest is littered with ‘deadbeat dams’; Wildfire ‘burn scars’ bring repeated flash floods to Ruidoso, New Mexico; Canada’s 2023 wildfires burned nearly 30,000 square miles of forest, spewed heat-trapping gas into the air... PLUS: CA v. FL: Two governors confronting extreme heat take opposite approaches to worker safety rules... and much, MUCH more! ...

Well, this is all going well. Though, somehow, today's BradCast made me feel moderately better about it all for the moment. (See?! He's a moderate!) Anyway, I'm hoping you'll feel somehow marginally better as well after listening to today's program. [Audio link to full show follows this brief summary.]

We begin with a few noteworthy news items for helpful, or at least interesting, context...

• A new survey from a Democratic pollster finds that while Donald Trump is currently beating Joe Biden nationally by one point in head-to-head polling, Kamala Harris is actually ahead of Trump by a point in the same poll. A different Dem, who nobody is talking about (for good reason?) also leads Trump in the same survey.
• Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she stands behind the President, though offered a less than full-throated endorsement for his continuing candidacy on a cable new interview this morning, though she absolutely did not say that Biden should either "Reconsider Decision to Stay in the Race" or "consider dropping out" as New York Times falsely reported before correcting their headline, without explanation, after being called out (and after more than 200 articles focused on Biden's performance in the two weeks since the debate.)

And then we're joined for some much-needed common sense --- and a few similarly much-needed belly laughs (between tears) --- by two of our favorite roundtable guests: HEATHER DIGBY PARTON of Salon and Hullabaloo, and 'DRIFTGLASS' of The Professional Left Podcast.

You'll never guess what we're discussing today! But we've got a lot of it to talk about, and both Digby and Drifty are on their game.

"I will fight like hell for whoever is the top of the Democratic ticket come November," Driftglass (occasionally known as Bill) tells us. "The threat from Donald Trump outweighs every other consideration. Thus far, for the last three and a half years, [Biden] has governed the country remarkably well, steered through many crises, and done right by me. I think it's time we buckle down and say, 'Look, whoever the Democratic nominee is, is better than Trump.' Period. Full stop."

For her part, Digby concurs with the sentiment, but notes that, although there is no indication yet he plans to do so --- even with support on Capitol Hill for him to continue being lukewarm at best --- if Biden does decide to drop out: "I think that I would really, really like him to do it on the night that Donald Trump is going to accept the nomination for his party, and just stab him as hard in the back on his way out as he can, because you know that Donald Trump would do the same to him."

Now we're talking. And there is much more both insight and snark where that came from today, including discussion of...

• Wildly unhelpful and misleading corporate media coverage.
• What we should learn from the election in France on Sunday.
• Whether he can serve four more years or not, can Biden still actually win in November?
• Would Harris have a better shot?
• The disconnect between elected officials, media "experts" and actual Democratic voters on the ground.
• If Biden were to step down, is there time and process for a reasonably non-chaotic way to transition to a new candidate?
• Would Digby and Driftglass vote for George W. Bush or even Dick Cheney if one them became the Democratic candidate to take on Donald Trump?
• And who is this "Johnny Unbeatable" guy? And where should Democrats find him?

All of that and much more on today's unbeatable BradCast...

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We're still catching up from last week's earth-shaking news week on today's BradCast, from the Supreme Court to our ever-worsening climate crisis. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

With understandable concerns about Joe Biden's candidacy following his debate performance almost two weeks ago, followed quickly by the July 4th holiday, I'm not sure that Americans yet fully appreciate the way in which our corrupted, extremist, radical, not-conservative-in-the-least U.S. Supreme Court has now upended the American experiment with its horrific, unjustifiable, anti-textualist, anti-originalist 6 to 3 ruling [PDF] last week on the previously unimaginable concept of "Presidential Immunity".

In short, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor detailed in her scathing, 30-page dissent and point-by-point rebuttal and evisceration of the corrupt, activist majority's ridiculous invention of a heretofore unknown "Presidential Immunity Clause" somehow hidden in the U.S. Constitution, the "decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency. It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law."

She describes, on behalf of her fellow liberal Justices, the majority's opinion as "just as bad as it sounds," describing it as "baseless" and "nonsensical", in which "Argument by argument, the majority invests immunity through brute force.” It is "deeply wrong", "illogical" and "unprecedented," she warns, adding that it will "have disastrous consequences for the Presidency and for our democracy".

Her dissent details how the Framers of the Constitution understood the concept of "immunity" quite well when adopting our founding document. They even gave a bit of it to the Legislative Branch, while denying same to the Executive, even as several state Constitutions had, by then, granted it to their own Governors. Nonetheless, "Relying on little more than its own misguided wisdom about the need for 'bold and unhesitating action' by the President, the Court gives former President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more."

In doing so, with this decision and a number of other radical, not-conservative-in-the-least opinions at term's end, the Roberts Court, according to today's guest, has also given itself unheard of power, placing the Judicial Branch above its otherwise Constitutionally co-equal Legislative and Executive Branches.

We're joined today by CHRIS GEIDNER, veteran legal journalist of LawDork to discuss that, and to help decipher whether this ruling is really "as bad as it sounds," as Sotomayor charges.

Is a U.S. President --- be it Donald Trump or anyone else --- at this point, actually now immune from criminal prosecution should he or she orders Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? ("Allowed," says Geidner, according to "the plain text of the ruling.") How about if they order the assassination of Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court? ("It is hard for me to read in the ruling where that is not allowed.") How about if they sell Presidential Pardons for $1 million a pop? Would it really be "unconstitutional" now to bring criminal charges against a former President who asked his Secretary of Defense to "bring in the troops" to "shoot protesters...in the streets of our nation's capital," as Trump's former SecDef Mark Esper alleged that Trump actually did in 2020?

The answer, it turns out --- at least according to the ruling --- is pretty much, yup, he (or she) would now be immune from criminal prosecution for all of those supposedly "official acts". According to Geidner, however, those questions would ultimately need to be answered yet again by the Supreme Court. Depending on what the make-up of that Court looked like and, crucially, which party the President in question belonged to, their decisions might be very different on a case-by-case basis. It's good to be King. But it might be even better to be a Justice in the Supreme Court majority.

"Let's assume we get through this moment in time, relatively no more scathed than we already are," Geidner posits, before predicting, "this is a ruling that is going to fall in on itself over time."

"In the meantime," as Sotomayor notes, "The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law."

"Moving forward, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such immunity," she concludes. "If the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop."

And finally, for those listeners who haven't yet jumped out of a window, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report after returning from our holiday break, with more deadly climate catastrophes and, yes, more horrific, history making opinions (Yay! More gifts for polluters!) from our fully corrupted, captured, activist and more powerful than ever rightwing SCOTUS majority...

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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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The June 27 Presidential Debate provided but the latest display of Donald Trump's dangerous xenophobic propaganda, even as it was overshadowed by a Dem Party/Media freakout over other matters.

The presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, a convicted felon, falsely claimed that President Joe Biden "is letting millions of people from jails, from prisons, from insane asylums, from mental institutions; drug dealers pour in." He claimed that the U.S. was being inundated by "migrant crime".

It's a racist refrain that dates back to his initial Presidential campaign, when, in 2016, on multiple occasions, Trump described Mexican immigrants as "drug dealers, criminals [and] rapists". (Psychologists might well describe the "rapist" allegation as "projection" given that a civil trial jury, according to Judge Lewis Kaplan, found that Trump "raped" E. Jean Carroll in 1996.)

More troubling, Trump has emulated the racist, dehumanizing rhetoric of Adolf Hitler. He's referred to immigrants as "animals" and "vermin" who are "poisoning our blood". While in office, Trump referred to an influx of asylum seekers as an "invasion".

Like "Stop the Steal", MAGA Cult immigrant-bashing is a "Big Lie", one that not only ignores hard data that demolishes the existence of a "migrant crime" wave but also ignores the significant contributions immigrants have made and continue to make towards the safety, security and economic well-being of these United States...

It is well above my paygrade or knowledge base to determine if Joe Biden is fully unfit to run for a second term, whether his debate night performance was an unfortunate one-off bad night or, if as seems more likely, his age is outrunning him.

But if those who know him best and work most closely with him (Congressional leaders, family members) believe it is time for him to step aside for the good of the nation, in service of ensuring the threat that Donald Trump represents and promises does not come to pass --- and, crucially, if Joe Biden himself agrees --- there is a reasonably simple, orderly, largely drama-free path for him to do so in the short time now left before both the Democratic Convention and general election...

It's our last BradCast before time off for travel over the holiday next week. Unlike years past, it looks like SCOTUS will be late in releasing all of their opinions for this term before its normal end this week, so we won't be here to comment immediately on some of the biggest decisions (or on tonight's Presidential Debate) until after our return. But we've got plenty to cover from the corrupted rightwing Court already this week, including with a guest today who suggests the analysis by many legal experts on yesterday's ruling striking down yet another part of federal public corruption law has been somewhat misleading. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among the big SCOTUS decisions still to come, is a case regarding the "Chevron Doctrine" which, for decades, has given legal deference to federal agency experts over judges or corporate challengers, when it comes to the interpretation of federal laws through rules and regulations promulgated by those federal agencies. That could all be about to change, with enormous consequences first for the EPA, but also across the entirety of the federal government --- or, the so-called "Administrative State" as rightwingers have taken to deriding it. We explain the doctrine and some remarkable ironies behind the Court's upcoming ruling, whatever it may be, today.

But the corrupted, stolen and packed rightwing Supreme Court did manage to issue several rulings today. Among them....

• The Court rejected a multi-billion dollar nationwide opioid settlement with OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma and its owners, the Sackler family.
• In a clear win for corporate interests, they gutted the SEC's ability to carry out in-house proceedings on civil fraud complaints, requiring federal jury trials instead in an opinion likely to have far-reaching effects on other regulatory agencies as well.
• SCOTUS also kicked a Presidential election year hot potato down the road for another day by allowing Idaho hospitals, for now, to perform emergency abortions under federal law, even though the procedure is barred under state law.
• And, as we also discuss with Desi, the High Court blocked, for now, to the EPA's "Good Neighbor" rule which limited air pollution from power plants and other facilities that pollute downwind states. While the regulation has already substantially lowered pollution --- and saved lives --- in the states where it is in place, the Court prevented the EPA from enforcing it until after lower court challenges by largely Republican-controlled states and several industries are completed.

NEXT... On yesterday's show we critically covered the Wednesday SCOTUS ruling in Snyder v. U.S. [PDF], an opinion which overturned the conviction and 21-month prison sentence of an Indiana Mayor who received a $13,000 check from a company just two weeks after his city had granted them a contract worth more than a million dollars. The Court's rightwingers determined that the federal statute in question only applies to out-and-out bribery cases, where a quid pro quo was agreed upon before a public action. After-the-fact "gratuities", the Court's six Republican-appointees ruled, are apparently just fine. Or, at least, not unlawful under their reading of the federal statute in question.

While many legal analysts and experts have derided the ruling since it was issued on Wednesday, our guest today, RANDALL D. ELIASON, former chief of the Fraud and Public Corruption Section at the U.S. Attorney's Office in D.C., now a white-collar criminal law professor at George Washington University Law School, had a different take that he posted to Twitter yesterday: "I have no problem with the Snyder decision, that 18 USC §666 covers only bribes and not gratuities. I think that makes sense."

Really? Why? Today Eliason joins us to explain why the law --- which, as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson notes in her dissent with the Court's other liberals, "imposes federal criminal penalties on agents of those entities who 'corruptly' solicit, accept, or agree to accept payments 'intending to be influenced or rewarded'" --- can arguably be interpreted as applying onlyto before-the-fact bribes, as opposed to after-the-fact "gratuities", as they are described by the Court's majority.

"I'm not happy about the outcome," Eliason concedes today. "You're right that there's been a pattern of decisions over the last more than a decade narrowing public corruption laws, and I've been critical of a lot of them. And I've been on your program being critical of a number of them in the past."

"So I'm not happy about the outcome. But I don't think the majority is being unreasonable in this particular decision. Because what this decision is about is not whether the conduct of the Mayor is a good thing, or whether it should be prohibited. It's just about the language in this particular criminal statute that Congress drafted. And it's really a badly drafted statute. It's poorly written. It's confusing. And even though the lower court in this case had upheld his conviction, several other federal courts of appeals had said the same thing, that this law does not apply to gratuities, and agreed with Snyder."

He explains that there is "a real legal distinction between a bribery and a gratuity", and that other federal statutes prohibit them both. But in this case, §666 is less than perfectly clear. And, when there is a "tie" in legal interpretation, the tie is supposed to go to the defendant who, the Court noted, can still be held accountable for accepting a gratuity under state and local laws.

"You see a lot of headlines in the wake of this decision: 'Supreme Court says bribery is okay.' No, the whole point was it wasn't bribery. It was a gratuity, which is something far less serious. And the issue was does this particular statute cover this kind of gratuity? The answer is no. I think, based on the way that statute is written, it's a reasonable outcome."

While I'm not sure I fully agree --- and even he notes that Justice Jackson makes several good arguments in her dissent --- Eliason's expertise and insight into the laws in question shed welcome light on this otherwise seemingly corrupt ruling.

On a related note, we also discuss how all of this might apply to the arguable millions of dollars in "gratuities" that members of SCOTUS, like Clarence Thomas, have accepted over the years and whether that might play into the Court majority's opinion. And how Congress, had they not become completely dysfunctional in recent years, could easily clarify this issue through simple legislation.

On one other matter before we finish our conversation with Eliason today, he offers his thoughts on SCOTUS' upcoming Fischer decision regarding whether the statute used to charge hundreds of January 6 defendants --- including Donald Trump --- with "obstruction of an official proceeding" may be struck down by the Court. Eliason is "pessimistic" about what is likely to happen, though believes that even if the Court strikes it down for use against many of those charged for the J6 insurrection, that "there's a good chance that the charges against Trump would still survive."

FINALLY... Before we disappear for the next week, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest 'Green News Report', with more thoughts on the imperiled Chevron Deference Doctrine; Climate disaster upon climate disaster this week for a New Mexico town; and some very good news indeed for President Biden's job-creating climate law...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: New Mexico town grapples with cascading consequences of simultaneous weather disasters; Environmentalists on edge awaiting critical US Supreme Court ruling; PLUS: Good news! Biden's climate law has created more than 300,000 clean energy jobs... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Environmental rulings to watch at the Supreme Court; Summer heat brings new misery to Palestinians in Israel's war on Gaza; We've been accidentally cooling the planet - and it's about to stop; Rising sea levels will disrupt millions of Americans' lives by 2050, study finds; Second wave of devastating floods hits Bangladesh in less than a month; Next-generation geothermal will soon power Southern California's grid; Trump says clean energy is a scam, and that could benefit China... PLUS: Scientists found another way we're exposed to 'forever chemicals': Through our skin... and much, MUCH more! ...