On today's BradCast: Will the 2016 Presidential election be publicly hand-counted (what some call a 'recount')? Should it be? Experts, citing anomalies in the reported results and other concerns, are beginning to say 'yes'. But action would need to be taken --- and a lot of money raised --- by one or more of the Presidential candidates quickly in order for that to happen. [Audio link to full show follows below.]

I haven't been the only one asking questions about the reliability of the reported results of the November 8, 2016 election and whether voters should have confidence in the computer-tallied results. As we've been reporting since Election Day, there are a lot of folks looking at the numbers and asking questions about what actually did --- or didn't --- happen. A number of world class computer science, voting system and election integrity experts are beginning to urge for a public count of the election in a number of key states.

With approximately 100,000 total votes (out of more than 13 million cast), reportedly separating Clinton and Trump in the states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania alone, I can confirm that a number of those experts believe it would be a worthwhile exercise to file for hand-counts to make sure the results are correct. (Remember, just 50,000 votes recorded for Clinton instead of Trump across those three states would mean she, not Trump, becomes the next President of the United States.)

Today we look at just a few of the anomalies that have been widely cited today by some of the nation's top election experts, such as more votes reportedly cast in the Presidential election than the "Total Votes Cast" in a number of Wisconsin counties --- at least according to the counties' initially reported results.

Author and long-time election integrity journalist Steven Rosenfeld of Alternet recently wrote about just some of the concerns being analyzed and noted by experts that both he and I have been speaking with in the days since the election. He joins me to discuss concerns and discrepancies in several states where hand-counted "recounts" could, potentially, flip the results of the Electoral College and the Trump/Clinton election along with it.

"The big point here is we don't really know --- still --- what the actual count is," Rosenfeld tells me. "I, like everybody else, would like to really know what happened. And I can accept the results if I know that they're true and accurate...so let's make sure that people's votes are accurately counted. "

We also discuss the challenges that would be faced by a candidate calling for such a count and the money (lots of it, about $2 million per state) that they would need to raise in a hurry in order to get such a hand-count and a forensic analysis of voting systems and tabulators in the states where experts are saying the effort may be well worth it.

NOTE: Since getting off air, where both Rosenfeld and I needed to talk around the record a bit, Gabriel Sherman at New York magazine offers some details about some of what is going on.

Also today: The effort some activists are making to urge Trump electors to change their vote before casting it in the Electoral College on December 19th.

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On today's BradCast, Donald Trump is well on his way to becoming the most corrupt U.S. President in history. And he's not even in office yet. For that matter, he's not even the officially winner of the election yet, as ballots are still be tallied and we're keeping an eye on three key battleground states (Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania) where less than 50,000 votes total (out of more than 13 million cast) remain the difference between a President Trump or a President Clinton. We continue to call for full hand-counts in those states and others to determine who actually won them. [Audio link to full show is posted below.]

Then, after Trump agreed to pay $25 million in a massive fraud settlement concerning his 'Trump University' scam late last week, the U.S. corporate media became immediately distracted by a his tweets about Mike Pence being booed at a Broadway play over the weekend.

We discuss today how the media --- and GOP politicians --- would have reacted differently if it was Hillary Clinton who had agreed to pay tens of millions of dollars to settle multiple fraud cases after the election. At the same time, word comes in from the foreign press that Trump has been cashing in since the election, on business deals in India, the Philippines and Argentina, while unconstitutionally receiving payoffs from foreign diplomats via his new Washington D.C. hotel.

So, what explains, if anything, the U.S. media's deferential treatment of Trump? Author Eric Boehlert of Media Matters joins us to discuss the extraordinary disparities between how the media cover Republicans versus Democrats and how they utterly failed the nation in the lead-up to the election.

Also today: Police unleash water cannons and tear gas in North Dakota overnight, against Native American protesters gathered to try and stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline and climate scientists are freaking out (for very good reason) as the Arctic is now an "insane 36 degrees" warmer than usual for this time of year and as global sea ice area is now way lower than it has ever been in recorded history. It is, in fact, off the charts from even previous record low years.

This is all very not good...

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What would Donald Trump do if the Exit Polls showed him winning key states before Election Results announced that he had actually lost them instead? It's an excellent question (that virtually answers itself), raised by my guest on today's BradCast. [Audio link to show is posted below.]

Yes, once again, according to several analyses, the disparities between Exit Polling and Election Results, as reported by unverified computer tabulators, suggest that one or the other of those two sets of data may be wrong. The first Exit Polls released by the media consortium on Election Night suggested that Hillary Clinton won in key battleground states, such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan and North Carolina, that she ended up reportedly losing.

Figuring out what did or didn't happen, of course, remains very important. Had just about 50,000 votes across the three states of WI, PA and MI alone been recorded for Hillary Clinton instead of Donald Trump, she would be the President-Elect today.

Dr. Jonathon Simon, author of CODE RED: Computerized Election Theft and The New American Century, and the man who originally documented almost identical disparities during the 2004 President Election, joins me to discuss his latest analysis of the still-continuing problem in 2016 and what needs to be done about it --- hopefully before the Electoral College meets to make it official by casting their votes next month.

"There are huge disparities, way outside the margin of error, pretty much all in the same direction and, yeah, outcome reversing," he tells me. "So the question becomes, what do you believe? I'd be the first to say we're not going to prove anything with exit polls. But what we really have is two sets of really lousy evidence. We have exit polls --- you could ask, 'Why would you believe them?' --- and you have the vote counts. And you could also ask, 'Why would you believe them?' They're concealed, they're computerized, they're outsourced, they're privatized --- whoever is programming them has the basic control over how those votes are counted or how fictitious it could be. They're also subject to outsider hacking, as well as insider rigging."

"Let me put it this way," Simon continues, "the question that I would want to put to anybody keeping score at home would be, 'What would Trump do?' If these same numbers came out, only they were reversed --- in a parallel universe, he won the popular vote, and Hillary Clinton won the Presidency and the electoral college, and there were all these states in which the exit polls favored Trump and somehow the vote counts favored Clinton --- you can bet your bottom dollar, based on what he said going into the election, based on the attitude he had about not conceding, about making sure if he felt there was any suspicion that he would challenge, that they would be challenging these results."

But what of the response from Edison Research, the sole provider of Exit Polling data for the national media, that the methodology used for Exit Polling in U.S. elections, unlike polls designed for use in other countries, should not be used as an indication that the reported vote counts are fraudulent or otherwise in error? And why do these apparent "red shifts" in vote counts, as Simon describes the difference in the two data sets, tend to happen mostly to Democratic candidates (or, in the case of the Democratic Primary, to the more progressive candidate, Bernie Sanders) rather than to Republicans?

Simon, a longtime election integrity advocate, and I discuss all of those questions and much more, including the real problem with this type of analysis between Exits and Results: the data that create both are still kept secret from public scrutiny, leaving everyone guessing --- and serving to further undermine U.S. democracy as a result.

"The system is set up to be concealed, and the government and the media are working pretty hard to make sure it stays concealed," Simon explains. "And you've got a bunch of people with democracy in their hearts who are working just as hard, if not harder, to try to un-conceal it. It's an uphill battle, but that's what we're doing right now."

Also today, speaking of undermining U.S. democracy, more on the problem of fake news versus real news in a 'post-truth' world, and how fake, pro-Trump/anti-Clinton news stories received more exposure on social media in the run-up to the Presidential Election than news from actual news outlets did. But, as we also report, even the real, theoretically legitimate new sites continue to undermine democracy with fake news, even today...

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On today's BradCast, I'm back after a brief health scare over the weekend, and apparently I've got a lot to talk about concerning the reported results of last week's election! [Audio link to show posted below.]

First up: The difference between fake news and real news in our new "post-truth" world, and what the hell can be done about it when fake news comes from even supposedly legitimate corporate news outlets.

Next: North Carolina's awful Republican Gov. Pat McCrory appears to have lost his re-election bid in a reportedly very close race to Democratic Attorney General Roy Cooper. But the GOP is demanding a 'recount' following the failure of a very popular (if oft-failed) paper ballot optical-scan computer tabulation system...and his voters deserve one.

Then: Should Americans have confidence in the reported results of the Presidential election? Some explanations for disparities between the results and the pre-election polls are not holding up. Voter suppression likely played a role. But what about those magical computer voting and tabulation systems? Were they manipulated? Did they fail? How would we know if they did? Why do the same-day Exit Polls results, once again, differ from the reported election results? And will Americans ever demand that hand-marked paper ballots be publicly counted by actual human beings, instead of by vulnerable computers which often fail and/or report results incorrectly?

If a manual hand-count is needed to determine for certain who voters selected to become NC Governor, don't U.S. voters deserve no less in determining who will be the next President of the United States? We review what we (so far) know and don't about legitimate questions some voters (and electronic voting system experts) have about the results of the Trump/Clinton race, as currently reported by computers without virtually any verification by actual human beings.

Finally: With me out sick earlier this week, Desi Doyen joins us for a slightly less snarky Green News Report today!

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Donald Trump has now been declared President-Elect of the United States. The unthinkable has happened. Except that we've been thinking it --- and warning about it --- virtually day in and day out on The BradCast since the moment he descended that escalator to call Mexicans rapists and declare his candidacy in June of 2015.

On today's show [audio link posted below] we look briefly at how voter suppression may have affected the reported results that even the RNC didn't see coming. "For example", as Ari Berman points out, "27,000 votes currently separate Trump and Clinton in Wisconsin, where 300,000 registered voters, according to a federal court, lacked strict forms of voter ID" as now required by state Republicans to vote there at all. "Voter turnout in Wisconsin was at its lowest levels in 20 years and decreased 13 percent in Milwaukee, where 70 percent of the state’s African-American population lives," he adds. Oh, and there is the also the non-transparent voting machines and tabulators that may have effected the stunning reported results --- as we have also been warning for years.

Then, we open the phone lines to a lot of callers on this very grim day, to ask who and what they blame or credit for what happened on Tuesday. Was it racism? Sexism? Xenophobia? Third-Party voters or candidates? The Constitution and its electoral college scheme? Citizens who didn't bother to vote at all? FBI Director James Comey? Wikileaks? The corporate media? The independent media? The pollsters? The voter suppression? The voting machines? The candidate (Hillary Clinton)? The Democratic Party for putting its thumb on the scale against Bernie Sanders? The Republican Party for not doing more to keep its party from becoming the party of Donald Trump? Something else I haven't thought of?

Listeners ring in with many thoughts on all of the above, as we all go through this national nightmare together...

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On today's BradCast: Documenting trouble for voters at polling places from coast to coast today on Election 2016 (Yes, it's finally arrived!) as Americans struggle to take part in their own democracy. [Audio link to today's program is posted below.]

Among the breaking news stories covered on today's program...

• After Hillary Clinton wins the first contest of Election Day...
• Broken voting machines, electronic pollbooks and shamefully long lines are reported in parts of Arizona, New York, North Carolina, Illinois, Kentucky, Texas, Ohio and elsewhere.
• Misinformation about ID needed to vote and polling place closing times and registration requirements in a number of states is being reported as well.
• North Carolina's NAACP calls for poll hours to be extended in Durham County.
• A judge in Nevada firmly rejects the Trump campaign's claim that polls were improperly left open during Early Voting over the weekend (in Hispanic areas.)
• The woeful Governor of Maine Paul LePage lies about student voting requirements in his state, hoping to intimidate them, after fliers are posted at a local college doing the same.
• An Idaho county elections office also wildly misleads to discourage student voting.
• Trump and his campaign misinform voters.
• Rightwing disinformation expert and dirty trickster James O'Keefe pretends to find "voter fraud" in Pennsylvania.

And many other developing shameful stories (and occassional hopeful ones) from Election Day 2016 --- as a glimmer of light may be shining at the end of our long national tunnel...or is that just an oncoming train?...

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On today's BradCast, the last one before Election Day(!), we debunk a lot of nonsense --- and out-and-out lies from the Donald Trump Campaign, in several instances --- from over the weekend and in to today. [Audio link to show is posted below.]

Among the stories and avalanche of news covered on today's BradCast:

• FBI Director James Comey confirms there is nothing in newly discovered emails (most of them duplicates they'd seen before) that would lead to an indictment of Hillary Clinton;
• And, no, there is no "murdered FBI agent" involved, no matter what you saw on Facebook over the weekend;
• There was also no "assassination attempt" on Trump in Reno, NV over the weekend by a Republican sign-holder despite his campaign suggesting otherwise;
• There was, however, a Trump supporter with a gun intimidating voters outside a VA polling location;
• There appears to be record early voting turnout in dozens of states, and notably in Hispanic areas, where Trump's campaign blatantly lied over the weekend about polls being kept open "illegally" after hours;
• Nathan Sproul, a long-time GOP operative whose companies have a checkered past related to voter registration fraud in several states, was secretly hired by the RNC in 2012 and then fired once more fraud allegations became public. He's now been quietly hired again by the RNC and Trump camp in 2016;
• Dems lose several 'voter intimidation' lawsuits against Trump (but may have actually won anyway);
• There will be at least 868 fewer places to vote in 2016, thanks to SCOTUS gutting Voting Rights Act
• Kansas Sec. of State Kris Kobach is ordered (yet again, and hopefully once and for all!) to allow all registered voters to vote in both state and federal elections;
• North Carolina is ordered by a federal court to restore all unlawfully purged voters to the rolls before Election Day;

And, much more, as we head into Election Day together, near the end (hopefully?) one of the darkest and most insane cycles in U.S. history...

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On today's BradCast, it looks like "Giant Meteor" could win after all! With one week to go, the race could be back up in the air, as polls tighten, Democrats sue Republicans in federal court, and we take a look at some key statewide ballot measures in California and elsewhere. [Audio link for show is posted below.]

The reverberations from FBI Director James Comey's unprecedented and (so far) evidence-free announcement last week concerning a potential new aspect of the agency's investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails continues to rock the 2016 Presidential Election, just one week before Election Day. Polling is moving back in Donald Trump's direction and we discuss other concerns that are not reflecting by polling numbers. Oh, and it turns out there is "voter fraud" at the polls, at least in Iowa, and you'll never guess who the alleged perp was caught voting twice for! (Sound familiar? Seems to happen a lot this time of year.)

Then, attorney and Vietnam veteran Ernest A. Canning, long time BRAD BLOG legal analyst now back from his Primary advisory role with Veterans for Bernie, joins us to discuss a number of California ballot initiatives he's been writing about here, as well as the several lawsuits filed by Democrats over the weekend charging "voter intimidation" by the Trump campaign and state GOP operations in Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, in violation of both the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.

All of that follows on a decades-long consent decree barring the Republican National Committee from certain racially targeted "poll watching" and "ballot security" activities. That is a restriction they agreed to after getting caught using race-based intimidation tactics at polling places in the early 1980s, when one of the named defendants, Roger Stone --- a long time advisor to Trump and GOP dirty trickster going back to the Nixon era --- actually worked on the "ballot security" operation that got the RNC in trouble in the first place back in NJ in 1981.

Then, Canning details a number of state initiatives on the California state ballot next week --- and some well-funded lies about them --- which could have a major effect on prescription drug prices, legalized marijuana (and ending the disastrous "War on Drugs"), the death penalty (two different, competing measures), Citizens United and much more...even porn is on the CA ballot this year!

Speaking about one of the initiatives, Prop 61, which he wrote about over the weekend, and which the pharmaceutical industry is spending tens of millions to defeat by falsely claiming that it will harm veterans, Canning explains: "This proposition, more than any other, shows you the problem with money in our political system. They put these [false] ads on --- and naturally, the TV station should say, 'We should fact-check that. That's not true.' But they're not going to do that because that would be like biting the hand that feeds them. These ads have become a major source of revenue for our commercial media" which, he ads, are "the ultimate beneficiaries of Citizens United, which is perhaps one of the reasons why they don't ask questions in the debates about repealing Citizens United!"

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(Or use "Click here to listen..." link below.)

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Leaked audio exposes utility companies' deliberately deceptive anti-solar ballot initiative in FL; Court rejects eminent domain for natural gas in PA; New ruling allows future climate impacts to be used to protect threatened species now; One weird trick could drastically cut methane emissions from cows; PLUS: Massive settlement approved in Volkswagen's emissions cheating scandal... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Energy poverty is a real problem. Coal is a bogus solution.; Air pollution more deadly in Africa than malnutrition or dirty water, study warns; Renewable energy capacity overtakes coal in new capacity generation; Sandy's Lessons Lost: Jersey Shore Rebuilds in Sea's Inevitable Path; Antarctica's Ice Sheets Are Melting Faster — And From Beneath; Resettling China’s ‘Ecological Migrants'; Whaling Nations Block South Atlantic Sanctuary Plans... PLUS: 'The atmosphere is being radicalized' by climate change... and much, MUCH more! ...

On today's BradCast: Will Hillary Clinton's apparent lead in national polling and turnout to date translate into a Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate? Poll watchers and analysts, at least Democratic leaning ones, seem to think so. For now. But just barely. [Audio link for show posted below.]

More early voting numbers in several states continue to suggest a potentially banner year for Democrats. In addition to those new indicators today, Hillary Clinton's poll numbers continue to rise, even as Donald Trump argued over the weekend that all the polls are "phony", not to be believed, and are meant to do little more than suppress the vote. (Though someone may want to let his own campaign manager know about that.)

But, will the hints of success for the Clinton campaign translate into Democrats taking back control of the U.S. Senate? David Jarman, editor of Daily Kos Elections, joins me to explain what the polls currently suggest about the likelihood of a Senate majority for Dems, the races in 9 states that he believes will determine that balance and, specifically, the 3 states he believes will ultimately be the tipping points for control of the upper chamber of Congress over the next two years.

While Daily Kos is a website meant to support Democrats, Jarman explains the roll of the analysts at Daily Kos Elections: "We're sort of the quantitative side of Daily Kos, but we also do more qualitative analysis of where we feel the chances are in the Senate and the House, looking at it race by race, doing the sort of old-fashioned scouting approach of 'this is a toss-up, this is lean-Democratic', that kind of thing. We also compile a lot of the data that eludes other people, about where the ad dollars are going, what the topics of ads are, every poll, we collect those in our daily digest."

Jarman and I also discuss, among other things, how and if things like voter suppression are included in his predictions; how large a majority Democrats would need in order to be able to bypass some of the more conservative/corporatist members of its caucus; whether Democrats could also retake a majority in the U.S. House, and some serious havoc that may occur for House Speaker Ryan even in the likelihood that they don't; and, also, some of the gubernatorial races that may end up going "blue" this year as well.

Finally, Bernie Sanders responds to Wikileaks' release of emails from Clinton staffers painting him in a less than favorable light, and Donald Trump says that he has plans to rethink freedom of the press, as defined by the Constitution's First Amendment, should he become the next President.

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On today's BradCast, as a major, mysterious automated Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack took huge Internet sites like Twitter, Netflix and Amazon offline for hours today, Democrats and Republicans, including the President, continue to mislead the public about the vulnerability of our voting, tabulation and voter registration systems. [Audio link to show posted below.]

Just weeks ago, as you'll recall, the U.S. Departments of Justice and Homeland Security were warning of the vulnerability of U.S. election systems to intrusion, manipulation and attack from outsiders (and all but ignoring the more direct threat from election insiders). Now, as Donald Trump has ramped up his claims that the election is being "rigged", Democratic and Republican officials alike are claiming the opposite is true, that "there's no way to rig an election in a country this big". They are either misinformed or lying. Take your pick. Either way, they are misinforming the American people. I explain in detail on today's show.

Speaking of disrupting the election...

• "Unnamed intelligence officials" float yet another warning of how bad actors could cause havoc during the elections in November. (And recent evidence suggests that route would be quite easy.)
• A federal court ordered Ohio this week to allow millions of unlawfully purged voters to be allowed to cast a provisional ballot this November, after the state's Republican Sec. of State Jon Husted (who also claimed this week that the election can't be rigged) fought an earlier court order to restore those voters to the rolls;
• Republicans in Tarrant County, Texas may have violated a federal court order by targeting Democratic polling places with an "EMERGENCY VOTER FRAUD ALERT";
• The state of Utah (Utah!) has been moved into the toss-up category in the Presidential contest;
• Early voting numbers look promising for Democrats;
• Evidence that Donald Trump loved both Bill and Hillary Clinton very recently...at least until he ran for President, started losing "big league" and decided she was a "nasty woman";
• And, finally, the GOP Presidential nominee offered a little noticed admission during the final debate that Democrats have been right all along the necessity of regulations on businesses.

All of that and much more on today's BradCast, as our Shocktober Spooktacular continues...

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There's been a lot of talk of "rigged" elections this year, but not only from Donald Trump and his supporters. Democrats, until recently, have also been warning that our electoral system was under threat of manipulation by outsiders. But, today, the President offered a very different message to voters, arguing that "there is no serious person out there who would suggest somehow that you could even rig America's elections."

Huh? Well, that's confusing. So, we try and get a bit closer to the facts on all sides of this issue on today's BradCast. [Audio link to show posted below.]

While Hillary Clinton appears to be opening up a substantive lead in a number of nationwide polls, Trump's rhetoric of a "rigged" election grows more desperate and incendiary each day. Oddly enough, however, his message does not appear to be winning over many converts. In fact, evidence suggests his own supporters are not growing less confident in the election, but his rhetoric may actually be improving confidence among Dems that votes will be counted as cast.

But, is that confidence warranted? Just weeks ago Democrats were warning us about the possibility of voting, tabulation and voter registration systems being hacked by foreign entities like Russia. But now, many Democrats and Republicans alike, including the President in the Rose Garden today, are making the case that our election systems are secure and cannot be hacked. So which is it?

I'm joined today, to try and figure it all out, by Pamela Smith, president of VerifiedVoting.org, a non-partisan organization which closely tracks voting and registration systems --- and their well-documented vulnerabilities to manipulation --- in all 50 states and at the federal level.

As longtime BRAD BLOG readers know well, yes, our voting and registration systems --- in every state --- remain vulnerable to error and tampering by outsiders and, more directly, election insiders. Because we use computer tabulation systems, it's often impossible (as with touch-screens) or unlikely (as with op-scans) to know that results accurately reflect voter intent. That alone remains a threat to confidence in our electoral system, no matter how confident many would like voters to be today.

"The challenge we have when we use electronic systems is that some problems that can be introduced into those systems are difficult or impossible to detect," says Smith. "Evidence-based elections is a really important standard for us to have nationwide. It builds confidence when jurisdictions can demonstrate that votes were counted correctly."

Smith and I discuss all of that, examine some of the most vulnerable areas (Hello, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Nevada!), and talk about what, if anything, can be done to try and assure that votes will be counted as cast in Election 2016 for President, Congress, the U.S. Senate, state and local contests as well as ballot measures and everything else. Much more detail than I can effectively summarize here. So, please give it a listen for yourself.

Near the end, however, with voting already under way in many states and Election Day just three weeks from today, Smith adds this important thought: "The one way we know for sure that your vote won't count is to not show up. And, whether or not you have full confidence in the voting system you're going to use, you still need to make the effort to make your voice heard."

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On today's BradCast, the savior of the working class and "Great Negotiator" refuses to even sit down with union workers at his own property in Las Vegas, even as his party comes apart at the seams and the South-Eastern U.S. buckles up for another deadly storm. [Audio link posted at bottom of article.]

In advance of tonight's Vice Presidential debate, we speak with Bethany Khan of the UNITE HERE Culinary Workers Union Local 226 in Nevada, where workers at the Trump Hotel Las Vegas voted to unionize last December. Nonetheless, the Trump Organizations has refused, to date, to even begin negotiations with some 500 now-unionized workers at his 1,200-room, 64-story five-star luxury tower in Sin City. The union is therefore calling for a North American boycott of all Trump properties (hotels, casinos, golf courses, etc.), using the hashtag #BoycottTrump.

Khan explains the action and how the GOP nominee for President has been using every available tool to challenge the lawful union vote, despite claims to represent the working class in the course of his campaign.

"Mr. Trump and his company is legally required to bargain with the Culinary Union and with the workers. The workers are fighting for fair wages, job security, good health benefits," she tells me. "They filed a series of objections --- the way the vote was counted, or who voted --- a host of things to try and tie this up in court. This practice of expansive litigation is one the union workers have beat --- soundly --- and we won. So there are no more objections they can file on the election. The hotel is certified as a union hotel. It's a union property. The only thing that's missing is a union contract."

While the Culinary Workers have endorsed Hillary Clinton, Khan says their organizing campaign started "before Donald Trump announced he was running for President," but adds that "The path to the White House goes through the Las Vegas Strip."

"There are 550 workers in his hotel here in Nevada. They're working people, living paycheck to paycheck. Culinary Union members comprise a majority of the middle class in Nevada. Mr. Trump, who says he wants to make America great again, has a great opportunity to start here in Las Vegas with his workers and give them a contract."

Also today: Tonight's Veep Debate offers an excuse to reminisce about the first BRAD BLOG story to make into the national press and get under the White House's skin back in 2004; The 2016 election is driving the country mad, but particularly the Republican Party (we've got some of the latest insane examples); And, finally, Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report' with two massive and unusual hurricanes making landfall today and the Paris Agreement on climate change meeting key thresholds at the U.N. in record time, in hopes of "Trump Proofing" the landmark pact before the U.S. Presidential election...

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On today's BradCast, Trump's "charitable" foundation gets shut down by law enforcement, two major (unusual) hurricanes threaten millions, and actual fact-checks from one side of this nightmarish election to the other. [Audio link posted below.]

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

• "The Trump Foundation must immediately cease soliciting contributions or engaging in any other fundraising activities in New York," according to the letter from New York state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's office, warning that the GOP nominee's charity "shall be deemed a continuing fraud upon the people of New York" unless it provides required paperwork regarding fundraising activities within the next 15 days.
• Two major hurricanes threatening island nations in both the Atlantic and Pacific.
• Much-needed fact-checking on the misreporting and purposeful mischaracterization of comments made at a February fundraiser by Hillary Clinton.
• More much-needed fact-checking on the misleading (and potentially illegal) comments made by Trump regarding long ago debunked 2012 "voter fraud" in Pennsylvania (which even Philadelphia Republicans are getting sick to death of) and details on why Trump is now being so careful about the words he is using to urge supporters to go to "certain areas" and "watch" the polls.
• Updates on the state of Wisconsin's failure to follow federal court orders concerning their discriminatory Photo ID voting restrictions. (More on this in last Friday's show.)
• More concerns about the possibility of hacked voting, voter registration and tabulation systems resulting in potential chaos this November 8th.

So many pants on fire, so little time before Election Day to try and help put them all out...

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Today on The BradCast: Where the Presidential race stands as we head into the debates and how an ingenious GOP scheme in 2010 may have served to undermine (small-d) democracy in the U.S. for a decade or more. [Audio link posted below.]

As Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump prepare to face off in their first Presidential debate, national polls are now, largely --- and amazingly --- a dead heat, with Trump beginning to take the lead in several key states that would give him the Presidency.

Meanwhile, as Dems struggle to hold on to the White House and fight long and longer odds to regain control of the U.S. Senate, a majority in the U.S. House, once again, remains seemingly out of grasp entirely for Democrats despite their candidates and policies being far more popular amongst the national electorate.

David Daley, until recently the Editor in Chief at Salon, now a Fellow at the University of Georgia's Grady School of Journalism, joins me on today's BradCast to discuss his new book, Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy. In it, Daley documents "Operation REDMAP", the insidious (and brilliant) Republican scheme carried out with a few million dollars and a handful of GOP operatives back in 2010 that succeeded in putting the U.S. House out of reach for Democrats for a decade --- while they were still celebrating their 2008 victory and barely paying attention to what Republicans were up to.

"It is nothing short of the most audacious political heist of our time," Daley tells me. "The Republican State Leadership Committee, they realize that 2008 might have been a wipe-out for the Republicans, but that did not matter if they could win in 2010. Because the census requires that you redraw every district line in every state legislature and in the Congress every ten years they came up with a brand new idea."

That successful idea in 2010 resulted in Democrats receiving 1.4 million more votes than Republicans for their U.S. House candidates in 2012, while still losing control of the chamber to Republicans by 33 seats. "The party completely fell asleep at the wheel," he says, allowing "an overwhelming avalanche of dark money and negative ads, into these small little towns" that would determine control of state legislatures, followed by an unprecedented computer-aided gerrymander of every GOP controlled state in the nation. That, in turn, led to the seemingly uncrackable Republican majority in the House that has served to bastardize so much of our national politics through today.

"The Democrats didn't have the imagination to come up with this idea," Daley argues. "It is entirely legal. However, it is also entirely and deeply undemocratic." The GOP came up with "a partisan hammer to take control and hold it," in what Daley describes as nothing short of a "political moneyball" plan that would "lock in partisan control of a chamber [of Congress] for a decade or more."

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