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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Historic storm slams drought-stricken Western U.S., as climate-intensified extreme weather threatens 90 million Americans across the nation; U.N. study finds greenhouse gas emissions hit new record highs in 2020; PLUS: New reports warn man-made climate change poses a serious and growing threat to national and global security... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): 2050: what happens if we ignore the climate crisis; The world needs to cut its emissions 7x as fast to hit climate goals, UN report finds; EPA deems 'forever chemical' toxic to humans; Total Oil accused of downplaying risk from fossil fuel for decades; Manchin pushes for more climate cuts from budget bill; Natural gas leaks in homes vastly under-reported; Unchecked oil and gas wastewater threatens CA groundwater... PLUS: Plastic's GHG emissions could outpace those from coal by 2030, report warns ... and much, MUCH more! ...

ExxonMobil picked the wrong guy to try and intimidate. That much was clear as day during our interview with him on today's BradCast. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

As the most powerful storm in history, with record breaking rain and winds, slams the West Coast, a nor'easter threatens the East Coast and powerful storms, including late season tornadoes, threaten the middle of the country and the Gulf Coast this week. Tens of millions of Americans are currently under threat of severe weather. In total, according to NBC, "more than 90 million people will experience dangerous weather in the form of high winds, flooding rainfall or severe thunderstorms through Wednesday."

Welcome to our climate change-fueled future, where record rains and mudslides are the "welcome" relief to seemingly endless drought and wildfires on the West Coast. And as other regions of the country, still recovering from summer hurricanes, are now staring the barrel of still more climate-related threats. Its going to get much worse from here, according to a new study published on Monday by the World Meteorological Organization. The report finds that greenhouse gas emissions, responsible for our quickly worsening climate crisis, hit a new record high last year and increased at a faster rate than the last decade's average, even amid temporary decreases during pandemic lockdowns.

That report, and several others warning that things are getting worse, not better, come as the nations of the world plan to meet beginning next week in Glasgow, Scotland for a critical, U.N. sponsored climate conference to figure out how to decrease emissions and stave off the worst of what is coming --- and what is already here.

But while some are trying to save the world, others are simply trying to save their own town by pushing back against the fossil fuel industry that caused this mess by lying, for decades, about the dangers of burning their products, while spending millions to lie about the reality of global warming.

On today's program we're joined by Imperial Beach, California MAYOR SERGE DEDINA, who has sued [PDF] ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP and 30 other fossil fuel companies to demand they cover the costs of saving his small, poor Southern California coastal town from the ravages of rising sea levels. According to The Guardian, "Imperial Beach commissioned an analysis of its vulnerability to rising sea levels which concluded that nearly 700 homes and businesses were threatened at a cost of more than $100m. It said that flooding will hit about 40% of the city’s roads, including some that will be under water for long periods. Two elementary schools will have to be moved. The city’s beach, regarded as one of the best sites for surfing on the California coast, is being eroded by about a foot a year."

Dedina has since been attacked by Exxon's attorneys and accused of "collusion" with other towns, some of whom, like Santa Cruz, have also sued the oil giant for fraud. The attorneys even demanded documents from Dedina's cell phone and computers which, apparently, turned up little more than videos of his son surfing.

"I think they're throwing lots of things at the wall to see if they stick," Dedina tells me. "The only thing I have in common with Santa Cruz is that I like to surf, and they have good waves there."

His small majority minority town, bordering Tijuana, has an annual budget of $20 million. That's just $5 million more than the ExxonMobil CEO was personally paid by the company last year alone. Now Dedina wants Exxon and the others to pay up for their dangerous and fraudulent lies about the climate, which are now costing the small coastal town much more than they can possibly afford to save it.

"They're grasping at straws," says the Mayor, in response to the harassment from the oil companies. "They spent millions of dollars on lawyer fees to take on a city that has nothing. Literally nothing. We have nothing to give. We've given it all already. We're just trying to have a decent life for our residents, who have little as well. God, what a waste of money and time."

But Dedina, a lifelong resident, award-winning environmentalist as well as co-founder and Executive Director of WILDCOAST, a non-profit ocean conservation organization, says he has no interest in backing down.

"We're still going to hold them accountable," he explains today. "We're not going to be intimidated. They can't do anything to us that the ocean hasn't already done."

"You grow up in our city, you have nothing. You learn how to be a scrappy fighter and stand up for what you believe in. You fight for what our city needs.  That's why I'm mayor, and why I was elected mayor. We're going to keep fighting these companies. They took on the wrong guy," warns Dedina.

Next, we catch up with the weekend "sausage making", as President Biden and Congressional Democrats continue to try and find accommodation for corrupt, obstructionist Democratic Senators Joe Manchin (WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), in hopes of passing the critical healthcare, education, child care, family leave and climate change legislation known as the Build Back Better Act. The weekend's accommodations including more scaling back of the bill and its wildly popular provisions, which are otherwise favored by largely the entire Democratic Congressional caucus and the White House. That, after Manchin already forced the removal last week of the measure's key provision meant to fight the ravages of climate change.

Still, as Desi Doyen reports today, there are enough provisions left --- at least as of now --- that, along with cooperation from states, individuals and private companies, it may still be feasible for the U.S. to meet President Biden's pledge to cut U.S. emissions by 50% overall by 2030, and to reach net zero emissions by 2050. But it ain't gonna be easy. And, even if successful, it may not be nearly enough.

Finally, callers ring in on all of the above, calling out who they blame for all of the various fine messes the nation, and the world, now find itself in.

Oh...and one more thing! As mentioned during the show, I'm going to appear for a Q&A tomorrow (Tuesday) after the 7pm ET/4p PT free virtual screening of the award-winning 2006 documentary Murder, Spies and Voting Lies: The Clint Curtis Story. The screening is part of a new weekly series by SmartElection.us (where you can register for the Zoom event) and, of course, the film is based on my exclusive reporting of the stunning --- and, at times, terrifying --- story of a computer software programmer who testified in 2004 that he was asked by a sitting Republican congressman to create vote rigging software for touchscreen voting systems. Hope you can stop by and say hello!

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Fossil fuel production 'dangerously out of sync' with global climate targets, U.N. warns; Failure to act on climate change imperils millions of lives, new report finds; California expands emergency drought declaration; PLUS: New study finds cutting U.S. emissions is difficult, but doable, and will lower consumers' energy bills... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): What if Build Back Better builds back worse?; Summer 2021 sets new high for average land temperature; If the U.S. spends big on climate, the rest of the world might follow; COP26: Document leak reveals nations lobbying to change key climate report; Is the UK's green plan enough to halt climate change?; Wildland firefighters struggle with homelessness; Wildfire smoke harms more people in the Eastern U.S. than in the West; How big chemical companies avoid paying for pollution... PLUS: Dammit, coal is back... and much, MUCH more! ...

We've been cautiously hopeful for months on The BradCast about President Biden's landmark plan to replace fossil fuel power generation at the nation's utility companies with clean renewable electricity in his Build Back Better (BBB) Act. Those hopes came crashing down on Friday night when the New York Times reported the White House was redrawing its expansive social safety net and climate change reconciliation budget package to remove the landmark Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP) at the insistence of Democratic coal country Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. [Audio link to full show is posted at bottom of this summary.]

The program had been the centerpiece for Biden's vow to reach an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in the electricity sector by 2030, towards the goal of net zero emissions economy-wide by 2050. That was to have been accomplished with the key provisions of the CEPP's carrot and stick approach, offering major financial incentives to utilities for moving quickly to clean energy and financial penalties for those who did not. As climate and energy reporter David Roberts explained on this program over the summer, along with incentives to encourage the move to electric vehicles and the electrification of buildings in the Biden agenda, the result of the CEPP would have been a major cut in emissions over all, as those polluting sectors were also moved onto a newly clean electric grid.

Alas, Manchin, who makes millions of dollars from the fossil fuel industry --- both to his personal pockets and campaign coffers --- will reportedly have none of it. That leaves the White House and climate hawks now scrambling to figure out alternative ways to cut deadly greenhouse gasses fueling our climate crisis just weeks before the next U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, when the Administration had hoped to showcase the effort and call for similarly decisive climate action from other nations.

We're joined today by DR. LEAH STOKES, climate researcher and political scientist at UC Santa Barbara, following her testimony to the Joint Economic Committee in Congress last month on the necessity of the electrification of American homes and buildings, to curb fossil fuel usage, improve the health of Americans ("Children growing up in a home with a gas stove have a 42% increased chance of having asthma," she notes) while creating millions of good new jobs.

Stokes, ironically enough, is now literally on the edge of another major climate change-fueled wildfire in the canyons above Santa Barbara. "Yes, it was a bit of tragic symbolism that when the news was breaking that Manchin would not go for the most important part of the climate package, that we had a fire once again in Santa Barbara burning away," she tells us, before adding the encouraging news that the Alisal Fire is now mostly under control after scorching nearly 20,000 acres and burning several homes and buildings.

"In the Build Back Better Act, there are investments to help people transition and switch out gas stoves and gas furnaces for these kinds of new technologies --- induction stoves, heat pumps, etc.," Stokes explains. "Were that policy to make it through Congress, it would deliver some help for people to change to these kinds of new, cleaner technologies."

Of course, the question is what, if anything, will survive the approval of fossil fuel fan boy Manchin in the BBB. As Stokes details: "Within that package, there was supposed to be a really big chunk, $670 billion, for climate investments. That would be the biggest investment we have ever made in climate action. Unfortunately, $150 billion of that money, about 25% of it, was going to be for the Clean Electricity Performance Program," she says. "So the question is how can we ensure that we are still spending that $670 billion? How can we make sure that we have every dollar for climate spending, and we go and try to find every single ton of carbon pollution that we can cut?"

That, of course, is the question of the hour. "The thing about climate change is that we have to actually take it on at the scale that it's necessary. We can't say 'Well, we did two-thirds of it, and that was good enough.' We have to limit warming to 1.5 degrees [above the pre-industrial global average]. That's what scientists have told us we have got to do, and that means we have to cut carbon pollution by 50% this decade. That's what President Biden has pledged to do. But unless we fill the hole left by the Clean Electricity Performance Program, we're not going to deliver on that pledge."

So how can it and will it be done? The White House claims they have alternative ideas. But will they meet Manchin's demands? We discuss. Stokes also responds to Manchin's supposed reasons for objecting to the CEPP --- because it jeopardizes "America's energy independence" and because the government is not needed to pay for efforts that private utilities are already taking on --- detailing why both of those claims are simply nonsense.

"The $150 billion, which was about 25% of the carbon cutting investments in this package, that has got to go towards other programs," Stokes insists. "We can't just say, 'Well, we're going to magically find all these ways to cut carbon pollution for free. No. We need to have investments at the scale of the crisis. There can be other ways to cut carbon pollution, but they need to have real investments behind them. We cannot cut a dollar of the climate spending."

The ever-optimistic Stokes talks me off the ledge by noting that while none of this will be easy, "despair is not an option". She urges listeners to visit Call4Climate.com to help reach your members of the House and Senate, with a useful script to help pressure members to do the right thing for the planet, for humanity, and, if nothing else, for each and every family who will now face the ever increasing costs and dangers of our climate crisis.

"People should not lose hope. They should not feel like this is not a meaningful package, that we're not going to deliver on climate. We are," Stokes maintains. "We just need to make sure that the White House does not cut a dollar of spending, and that they make sure that they're going to make up for the lost pollution cuts from removing the Clean Electricity Performance Program...This is a really transformative bill. It's very close to passage, and people should keep the pressure up."

Next up today, some breaking news out of Brazil, where a Congressional panel there is set to recommend "mass homicide" and "genocide" charges against its very Trumpy President, Jair Bolsonaro, for his deadly mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic. Even if you don't follow Brazilian politics, you'll find the reasons for the panel's recommendations sound incredibly familiar, including Bolsonaro's unscientific recommendations for the use of hydroxychloroquine and the horse de-worming drug Ivermectin to prevent and treat COVID, his failure to deliver vaccines to the public, and his (an his sons') creation of disinformation networks to discourage masking and social distancing. Ya know, the same stuff that has resulted in wingnut radio host Dennis Prager, here in the U.S. this week, contracting COVID, after more than 700,000 have died from the disease in the U.S., many, just like in Brazil, unnecessarily due to the criminal negligence of our own former President. When will Congress recommend criminal charges against him for the very same thing?

Finally, just in case you didn't get enough environmental news (and worries) on today's program, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with at least one or two news items that may help you (and me) rethink the idea of throwing ourselves off a bridge...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin throws a hand grenade into Biden's climate agenda; Biden EPA to crack down on PFAS 'forever chemicals'; U.S. could have as many as 3.4 million polluting abandoned oil and gas well; PLUS: McDonald's finally to offer customers meat-free plant-based options (some of them, anyway)... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): It’s easy to feel pessimistic about the climate. But we’ve got two big things on our side; Satellites Reveal The Secrets Of Water-Guzzling Farms In California; Amid Massive Roundup Cancer Suits, Migrant Farmworkers Are Left Out; Environmentalists Secure Water Rights For Great Salt Lake; Russia Allows Methane Leaks At Planet’s Peril; COP26 in Glasgow: Who Is Going And Who Is Not?... PLUS: How Industrial Chicken Production Is Breeding The Next Pandemic... and much, MUCH more! ...

Most of the callers to today's BradCast were in favor of it, though a few were opposed and explained why. But, since many of our callers come from Dem-leaning Southern California, we stacked the deck a bit against our own "yes" position when it came to the callers we brought on the air in our limited time. Seemed only fair. [Audio link to full show is posted at the end of this summary.]

First up, however, a few quick thoughts on today's death of 84-year old, fully-vaccinated Republican former Secretary of State and Chair of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell. Though he (sort of) apologized for it and tried to make good in other ways, it's still difficult for me to shake his infamous presentation of lies at the U.N., falsely claiming that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. That presentation, which he later described as a "blot" on his career, arguably sealed the deal in favor of the U.S. going to war in Iraq. But our focus today is on those who are dishonestly using his COVID-related death to claim vaccines don't work. That is a lie that conveniently avoids the fact that Powell was battling multiple myeloma (a form of blood cancer) which greatly reduces the strength of ones immune system and is known to make vaccines less effective. It was, in fact, those who failed to get inoculated from COVID who helped kill Powell. We explain the facts and the math.

Next, before opening the phones to today's main topic, a few words on the news that broke late on Friday, reporting that the White House is now rewriting their sweeping Build Back Better budget reconciliation bill to not include the critical, landmark Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP) that was designed to provide financial incentives to utility companies to quickly transition from dirty fossil fuel use to clean, renewable energy. It also levied financial penalties on those power companies who failed to do so. The program was at the heart of the Biden Administration's climate plan and its vow to reduce dangerous greenhouse gas emissions in the electricity sector 80% by 2030, to reach net-zero in that sector by 2035, and to reach net-zero emissions economy-wide by 2050. If Friday's reports are accurate, the rewrite is a major blow to those plans and comes at the insistence of Coal Country West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, whose family has made a fortune on fossil fuels in the state. He also receives huge campaign funding from the fossil fuel industry. We discuss this troubling news with Desi Doyen and hope to have more on tomorrow's BradCast.

Then, we pick up the debate we left off at from last Friday's show with gerrymandering expert David Daley of FairVote.org. Daley literally wrote the book on the GOP's extreme partisan gerrymandering scheme after the 2010 Census and warns that it's about to get much worse as Republican state redistricting gets underway following the 2020 Census, particularly in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act to allow even more extreme partisan gerrymanders in even more states.

Despite the fact that, as Daley warned on the show last week, Republican state gerrymanders, on their own, will cost Dems control of the House even if America votes as it did in 2020 (when Dem House members received almost 5 million more votes than Republicans), he made the argument against Democratic states instituting similar extreme partisan gerrymanders in response.

As I explained on Friday, after many months of torturous consideration, I now favor Dem state gerrymanders to counter the Republicans in hopes of saving democracy itself in the bargain. It's an argument I hate making as a longtime election integrity and democracy champion, but I explain again today why the rising, anti-democracy Authoritarian Front (GOP) has changed my thinking as of now --- at least in lieu of passage of the Freedom to Vote Act by Congress, which would ban partisan gerrymandering in all 50 states.

Before we open the phones to listeners to hear their opinions on this contentious matter, we share Daley's argument explaining why he opposes Dem gerrymanders, along with my own, as I now advise against unilateral disarmament by the Democratic Party. All of which, of course, is only necessary right now, thanks to good ol' Joe Manchin's opposition to reforming the filibuster in order to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, a sweeping and long overdue election reform and voting rights measure --- actually designed by Manchin himself --- which would, among many other things, ban partisan gerrymanders all together.

As noted, while the majority of our callers were in favor of my position here, we tried to put a bit of a thumb on the scale for those who opposed it, so we could hear out "both sides" as best as possible on today's program. And, yes, we will continue this discussion in the days and week's ahead, as the redistricting fights get underway in earnest, and while the GOP has left survival of American democracy itself hanging by a thread...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Supply chain disruptions spike global energy prices; Putin says Russia would never artificially limit natural gas deliveries to Europe; California bans gas-powered lawn and leaf blowers; PLUS: Biden Administration goes big on offshore wind... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Michigan tells majority-Black city not to drink tap water amid new lead crisis; Over 100 Nations To Adopt 'Kunming Declaration' To Boost Biodiversity; CA Alisal Fire forces new evacuations, closure of 101 freeway and Amtrak route; Pollution from N.C.'s poultry farms unduly harms communities of color; Will China beat Tesla at its own game?; Trumpist solution to sea level rise: get rid of boats; Coastal fog around the world is declining due to warming climate... PLUS: Solving Bali's rivers of trash... and much, MUCH more! ...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: 'No climate, no deal!' --- Democratic Senators demand climate policies stay in Biden's Build Back Better Act; A quarter of all critical U.S. infrastructure is at risk of failure due to flooding; Mounting costs of extreme weather disasters in 2021 already surpass all of 2020; PLUS: President Biden restores Bears Ears and two other national monuments... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Congress Might Blow Its Biggest Opportunity To Tackle The Climate Crisis; More Than 30 Countries Join U.S. Pledge to Slash Methane Emissions; Madagascar Prays For Rain As U.N. Warns Of 'Climate Change Famine'; New California Law Bans Gasoline-Powered Lawn Mowers, Leaf Blowers; Mass Floods Hit China’s Coal Hub, Threatening Power Supplies; Climate Action At COP26 Could Save Millions Of Lives, WHO Says... PLUS: Can the World’s Most Polluting Heavy Industries Decarbonize?... and much, MUCH more! ...

The good news is that one of the Southern California beaches hit hardest by last week's toxic oil spill reopened today. The bad news comprises the rest of today's BradCast.

The beach at the SoCal town known as Huntington Beach --- in the heart of "Surf City USA" --- was reopened on Monday, after last week's oil spill of anywhere from 25,000 to 144,000 gallons of crude. It leaked from a fractured, 17.5 mile pipeline terminating in Long Beach from a complex of platforms about 5 miles offshore in federal waters. It took anywhere from 10 hours to several days --- we still don't know --- to shut the pipeline down after it cracked, perhaps due to being dragged by a ship anchor along the ocean floor.

But, by the weekend, earlier than expected, there were no longer toxins associated with petroleum at detectable levels in the water off of Huntington Beach, according to officials, even as crews continued to remove tarballs from the sand onshore. That beach, at least for now, has been reopened. Neighboring beaches remain closed to the south, including those at Newport Beach and Laguna Beach. The Orange County Oil Spill was just the latest in a long series of disastrous oil spills that have fowled the CA coastline going back decades, and it has renewed calls to ban offshore drilling in the state.

We're joined today by REP. ALAN LOWENTHAL (D-CA), a member of the House Progressive Caucus whose 47th Congressional District includes Long Beach in Orange County and parts of western L.A. County. Last week, appearing at a news conference with Gov. Gavin Newsom in Huntington Beach just after the spill, Lowenthal called for "a plan to not only stop new drilling, but to figure out how do we stop all drilling that's going on in California." The Congressman joins us today to discuss just that. Long story short, but none of it is easy and for many reasons.

"In California, there have not been any new offshore pipelines in forty years, so there is no new technology. It's all old technology, it's all corroding, it's all waiting for the next disaster to occur," he tells me, before we dive into the murky waters of what would be required to end both leasing and drilling permits at the federal level --- in federal waters, 3 or more miles offshore --- as well as in California waters. Here, the Governor argued last week, it's easy to block new leases (the state hasn't issued any in decades), but shutting down existing platforms and pipelines, and replacing those jobs, is far more difficult.

Lowenthal, who has served in the House since 2013, after many years as a CA Assemblyman and then Senator, is calling for a Congressional probe into the OC Spill and fighting to keep language banning new offshore federal drilling leases in the Democrats' Build Back Better Act. But those provisions could be targeted by West Virginia's fossil fuel friendly Senator Joe Manchin, as Democrats battle with Manchin and Arizona's Kyrsten Sinema to pass Biden's agenda into law. In a best case scenario, the BBB Act would only ban new drilling leases off shore, while permitting existing leases to be developed. Back in the state, on the other hand, a bit more can and should be done, he argues. As we discuss, even the progressive Newsom Administration's oil and gas regulators have approved thousands of new drilling permits on existing leases since the Governor took office in 2019.

"There are two things that California can do," says Lowenthal. "One is to stop the pipelines that come from the federal waters. And the second is not to provide permitting. It's one thing when you say 'no new leases,' but once you already have an existing lease that's developing, there are permits to change the flow, to change the direction and California doesn't have to issue those permits. They can stop it."

There was much more from the Congressman, both enlightening and frustrating at various times. I'll urge you to tune in for the full discussion.

Then, we've been discussing on several recent shows how the media are failing to adequately sound the alarm bells about the terrifying and dangerous rise of rightwing authoritarianism in the U.S., as Trump threatens to run again in 2024 after blatantly trying, but failing, to steal the 2020 election. This time, according to a lengthy and very disturbing monologue from Bill Maher this weekend, he is laying the groundwork to avoid the mistakes he made last time. "He's like a shark that's not gone. Just gone out to sea," Maher warns of the "slow moving coup", before explaining why "we're gonna need a bigger boat," as the GOP is now playing along with his long con. That, as the media begin to repeat many of the very same mistakes they made before his 2016 election.

How can we, in the media, avoid those mistakes and do a better job of informing the nation about the unprecedented assault on democracy itself that we all now face? I really don't know. But we discuss that and open up the phone lines to listeners at the end of today's show to at least begin that critical, much-needed conversation...

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Way back in January, we reported on "How Trump Attempted to Use DoJ to Steal the Election". Why do our nation's corporate media outlets, all these months later, still have so much difficulty reporting it as such, despite the growing mountain of evidence on the unprecedented attempted theft of a Presidential election by a sitting U.S. President? That's just one of a number of stories and questions asked on today's BradCast. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

Among those many stories...

• What took the Coast Guard and Amplify Energy Corp --- owner of the pipeline that spewed more than 3,000 barrels of crude oil into the waters and protected wetlands nearly Huntington Beach in Southern California last week --- so long to respond to the spill? Residents smelled it, witnesses saw oil on the water and on boats, and even the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) called in their report to the Coast Guard of a possible spill spotted from a satellite. Still, it was almost 10 hours before the Coast Guard investigated, and almost 12 hours before Amplify shut it down. That, despite technology pipeline companies always (falsely) claim will immediately detect spills and shut down the system as soon as they occur. Someone needs to face criminal charges, and this nation needs to get off oil, ASAP.

• Some brighter news out of Texas, where a federal judge has temporarily enjoined the state's S.B. 8 statute that deprives women of their Constitutionally-protected right to an abortion. The new GOP law in the Lone Star State inserts Big Government between a woman and her doctor to mandate that the medical procedure may not be carried out after 6 weeks of pregnancy, before most women know they're pregnant. Even in the case of rape or incest, Texas Republicans are demanding that women carry their rapists babies to term under the new law. On Wednesday, a U.S. District Court judge shut that whole thing down. For now. He also refused to put his stay on hold pending the state's appeal, because, as he wrote in his 113-page decision [PDF]: "The State has forfeited the right to any such accommodation by pursuing an unprecedented and aggressive scheme to deprive its citizens of a significant and well established constitutional right."

• Yesterday, we reported that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and fellow Republicans blinked in their ongoing effort to block Democrats from lifting the nation's borrowing limit to avoid the economic calamity that would ensue when the U.S. defaults on its debts, for the first time in history, on October 18th. Today, after McConnell blinked, he and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer agreed on terms for the legislative process that Republicans will allow to let Democrats avoid disaster, at least until early December, when the GOP threatens the same economic terrorism all over again. AP (and other national outlets) continued to mislead the public by reporting: "the Republican and Democratic leaders edged back from a perilous standoff." But that's not what happened at all. The "leaders" (plural) did not "edge back", and it was not a "standoff". As  longtime journalist, author and media critic James Fallows has been expertly reporting for some time now, this was nothing more than a nihilistic Republican threat to tank the nation's, and the world's, economy. "To call it an 'impasse' or 'standoff' is misleading," writes Fallows this week. "This is the same kind of 'impasse' as one between a kidnapper demanding ransom for a captured executive, and a company that believes it should not pay. It is not a level-playing-field difference of view."

• The debt ceiling is hardly the only area where mainstream corporate media have been failing by ill-serving the public and our democracy. Today, they were joined in that disservice by the Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats, who released an otherwise very important report on how Donald Trump attempted to use the U.S. Dept. of Justice to STEAL the 2020 Presidential election. The 394-page report [PDF] was eight months in the making and is titled: "Subverting Justice: How the Former President and his Allies Pressured DOJ to Overturn the 2020 Election." Media reporting on the new report has taken to echoing that language (as they have since last November) in explaining how Trump tried to "subvert" the election, or "question" its results, or tried to "undermine" its legitimacy.  He used a "big lie" to try and pull off a "self coup". Of course, Trump did all of those things, but it was all in service to one single criminal objective: An attempt to STEAL the election!  Why do corporate media --- and Democrats, for that matter --- have such a difficult time calling it out as such? There is a mountain of hard, independently verifiable evidence to support that admittedly very serious charge, that I would never issue lightly. Today, Senate Democrats just added 394 more pages of said evidence to that mountain. Media need to start accurately calling out what happened here. A then sitting President of the United States abused the levers of his power to try and STEAL a Presidential election from the American people. It's as simple as that. Media should begin reporting it as such.

• Trump's attempted theft of the 2020 election continues, at least in hopes of stealing the next one. Despite the abject failure of the Cyber Ninjas in Maricopa County, Arizona (Sen. Dick Durbin called them "Ninja Turtles" today) to find any legitimate evidence of election fraud (or to even hand-count the results of the election accurately), the MAGA Mob is still continuing to waste tax payer dollars with phony "audits" and "investigations" of last year's election in other states. In Wisconsin, as in Arizona, Republican legislators have hired someone completely inexperienced in elections to investigate their loss in last year's election. In this case, the man placed in charge of the review is a former state Supreme Court Justice named Michael Gableman. This week Gableman admitted to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he does not have "any understanding of how elections work." Great choice, Republicans!  I'm sure he'll very wisely spend the $676,000 in taxpayer money that you "conservatives" gave him. The effort may even be as successful as the Turtles'!

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with more on last weekend's massive SoCal oil spill; a new study finding that, globally, the fossil fuel industry receives $11 million in government subsidies every minute (no doubt Joe Manchin will be furious about their "entitlement society"!); and another notorious pipeline company with high-tech spill prevention technology is charged with dozens of criminal counts for pipelines that leaked into Pennsylvania's drinking water...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Ship's anchor appears to have caused devastating Southern California oil spill; Fossil fuel industry receives $11 million in government subsidies every minute, new report finds; PLUS: Pennsylvania Attorney General files criminal charges against notorious pipeline developer... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): WHO slashes guideline limits on air pollution from fossil fuels; White House outlines plan to overhaul Trump NEPA rules; DOJ investigating Trump’s probe of car companies; City In Michigan Urged To Use Bottled Water Due To Lead Risk; Canada Invokes 1977 Treaty With US As Dispute Over Pipeline Intensifies... PLUS: Burning Wood (Biomass) Is Promoted As A Carbon Neutral Fuel. But Is It?... and much, MUCH more! ...

Wait. Even the so-called "audit" results from the Cyber Ninjas that appear to confirm Joe Biden's 2020 victory in Arizona over Donald Trump were phony?! Yup. "The Ninjas made up the numbers out of whole cloth," says our guest on today's BradCast, after examining and sharing the actual evidence in support of that claim. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

But first, the partisan, wingnut audit by the Ninjas in Maricopa County, AZ, is hardly the only epic fail by Trump MAGA Mob dead-enders who have been unable, in almost a year, to show any evidence of any substantive fraud or manipulation of the 2020 election results. The latest epic fail comes out of the deep red state of Idaho, where Trump was certified to have defeated Biden by more than 30 points. Nonetheless, loony tunes deep-pocketed pillow impresario and deep state Trump stooge, Mike Lindell, claims that those numbers were also wrong! He charges, in a new document titled "The Big Lie", that votes were flipped electronically in all 44 counties in the state, for some reason, to help Joe Biden (who, again, lost in Idaho by more than 30 points!)

Idaho's Republican Secretary of State, however, suspected that Lindell's claims may have been wrong, especially given that 7 counties in the state use no computers at all to tally their ballots. They hand count them! Nonetheless, his office went about doing full, transparent, video-taped hand-counts (and posted them on YouTube) in front of Democratic and Republican Party officials in two small Idaho counties, just to be safe. What did those recounts show? You guessed it, Biden's margin increased. He received the same number of votes in each counties' recount, but Trump lost about 9 votes in one county and picked up one single vote the another. Lindell, however, refuses to accept those publicly hand-recounted results by the Republican Sec. of State in Idaho, in his continuing drive to make himself the nation's number one laughing stock.

But Lindell has competition on that score from the Cyber Ninjas and its CEO Doug Logan in Arizona!

A week and a half ago, The BradCast was the first in the nation to detail to the findings in the long-awaited final report from the Ninjas' 5-month long secret "audit" of the 2020 Presidential election results in Maricopa County (Phoenix). Rather hilariously, the Ninjas reported that their hand-count of 2.1 million ballots cast in the County matched up almost perfectly with the original, certified, computer-tallied results from the county's Dominion Voting Systems tabulators. In fact, the Ninjas claimed to have found that Trump actually lost 261 votes in their hand-count, while Biden picked up 99 votes.

But never mind even those numbers! Because a group of actually experienced, bipartisan election auditors, who call themselves The Audit Guys, say the Ninjas' numbers are completely bunk. "An epic hoax" according to their own review of the Ninjas' "audit". Those results were "fiction," they told New York Times. "The reality is they just made up the numbers," they explained to Arizona Republic. In fact, The Audit Guys' own report charges that "the entire exercise in hand counting ballots on lazy Susans for two months, was a hoax." Moreover, they say, the GOP President of the AZ Senate who arranged the entire audit and selected the inexperienced, conspiracy theorist company, Cyber Ninjas, to carry it out, is now part of a "coverup" to try and hide the scam.

We're joined today by Audit Guy, LARRY MOORE, founder of the Clear Ballot Group, which audits elections around the country. Since retiring from the company, Moore has teamed up with prominent Pima County (Tucson), AZ Republican data analyst Benny White and Clear Ballot's retired Chief Technology Officers Tim Halvorsen to independently check the Ninjas efforts.

Moore explains today how they determined that the Ninjas numbers were "made up out of whole cloth". Specifically, when the state Senate released the Ninjas' three-volume report, they appear to have accidentally left a number of pages in it that detailed discrepancies in the hand-count of ballots carried out by the Ninjas versus a separate, independent machine count of ballots done by the Senate at the end of the process, to try and reconcile numbers that were reportedly way off. In fact, as Moore details, the data released by the Senate revealed that their machine count of ballots (not results, just the number of ballots) matched almost perfectly with the County's originally certified totals. But the Ninjas' hand-count of the number of ballots was off by a mile.

The Senate report revealed (apparently accidentally) that one pallet of ballot boxes actually contained 48,371 ballots in 40 boxes, according to the Senate's machine count. That number matches the County's originally tallied numbers. But the Ninjas hand-count of that same pallet of ballot boxes was off by 15,692 ballots! And, as Moore explains today, that was no more than 2.5% of the 2.1 million ballots cast in the County last year and theoretically hand-counted by the Ninjas on those colorful lazy Susan tables.

"In short," The Audit Guys' report notes, before they lay out their full findings and evidence, "with this enormous discrepancy, any discussion of vote counts --- including Biden's 99 vote gain and Trump's 261 vote loss --- is meaningless."

On today's show, Moore explains how his team was able to confirm the numbers they compared with the Senate's machine-count. Randy Pullen, one of the Senate's liaisons to the count, oversaw that late, independent machine count of the numbers of ballots. He now has "some 'splaining to do", Moore tells me. Extrapolating out the numbers from the single pallet of ballots that Pullen's report accidentally revealed, results in "about a 300,000 ballot discrepancy" if averaged with the rest of the 2.1 million ballots the Ninjas supposedly counted.

If that's true, why did the Ninjas' claim that not only their count matched the County's, in general, but that Biden's margin of victory actually increased a bit? Moore offers his explanation on today's program.

We also discuss the response, so far, from both Pullen and Sen. Fann to the Audit Guys' findings ("Crickets," says Moore) and how Fann herself now appears to be participating in a coverup to hide the real numbers and much more. A state court judge has ordered the Senate to release all records from the "audit" and communications with the Ninjas and other contractors as part of public records requests. Fann, however, has refused to release thousands of pages of documents, including the rest of Pullen's and the Ninjas' box-by-box, batch-by-batch reconciliation data. (Longtime progressive AZ election transparency advocate John Brakey, who was allowed inside much, if not all, of the "audit", also recently confirmed on this show that documents were being withheld, when he explained how many of his own communications with Fann were not included in an earlier tranche of documents released as part of the original court order.) There is a hearing scheduled before the judge this week to force the rest of the documents out of Fann.

We also take a few minutes to discuss the concerns that some, including Moore, have about all of these demands for post-election audits in the wake of Trump's evidence-free Big Lie that the election was stolen from him. I don't personally mind such audits, as long as they are done publicly, with the cooperation of election officials (unlike the offensive clown show carried out by the Ninjas in Maricopa). Moore has a different view, however. We discuss.

Finally, we're joined by Desi Doyen for our latest Green News Report, much of which focuses on the weekend's massive oil pipeline rupture off the coast of Southern California, and on the big bucks that Big Oil is now spending to try and block Joe Biden's Build Back Better agenda in Congress...

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UPDATE, 6/6/2023: Confirming our reporting from a year and a half ago, text messages finally obtained by the Arizona Republic, via court order, from Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan confirm that, as Moore explains in the show detailed above, Logan simply made up the numbers for this "audit" after being unable to add up or reconcile tabulation sheets created during the Ninjas' months-long "counting" spectacle at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum. Full details now here...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Massive oil spill off Southern California coast despoils fish and fowl; SoCal beaches closed, with calls renewed for total offshore drilling ban; PLUS: Big Oil spending big bucks to block climate provisions in Biden's Build Back Better agenda... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): An "attack on American cities" by the natural gas industry is freezing climate action in its tracks; National Audubon Society calls for 'Lights Out' after 'mass mortality' event of migratory birds; Babies are full of microplastics, new research shows; What climate change requires of economics; 14 percent of world's coral lost in a decade; Oil spills plague Venazuelan coast; Urban heat is getting more dangerous... PLUS: The Dimming of Planet Earth... and much, MUCH more! ...

With a long history of fossil fuel disasters up and down the California coastline, another one erupted over the weekend here in Southern California, as we discuss at the top of today's BradCast, along with the latest on the Congressional GOP Caucus threat to tank the U.S. economy by defaulting on trillions of dollars in debt they long ago agreed to incur.

First up, at least 126,000 gallons (approximately 3,000 barrels) of crude spilled into the ocean waters near Huntington Beach, California over the weekend, about 30 minutes south of Los Angeles. The full extent and cause of the damage is currently unknown as we went to air, but it includes a 13-square mile oil slick, dead birds and fish washing ashore, and sensitive ecological preserves along the coastline having been sullied by thick oil and tarballs.

The oil appears to have leaked from some part of a 17.5 mile pipeline which has extended, since the 1980s, from oil drilling and production platforms more than 3 miles offshore, in federal waters overseen by the U.S. Dept. of Interior. The pipeline is one of hundreds running up and down the oil rich CA coastline, where the state has banned new fossil fuel infrastructure, but where, as our guest notes today, the Trump Administration attempted to open up still more dangerous oil production over the past four years. The U.S. Coast Guard is now investigating whether a ship anchor dragging on the ocean floor may have caused the rupture.

We're joined on the program by LAURA DEEHAN, State Director of the non-profit Environment California, for the latest on the state's most recent fossil fuel disaster and what can and should be done about it moving forward.

"We need to get to the bottom of what's happened here," she tells us, adding: "I think our immediate concern is let's protect the wildlife, let's minimize the damage to our beaches and coastline as much as we can right now. But ultimately, of course, we're calling for a permanent end to this activity. Because clearly enough is enough."

Similar disasters have been killing wildlife and covering Southern California beaches in sticky, toxic tarballs for decades. The current spill has now shut down the tourism rich beaches of Huntington Beach, resulted in the cancellation of the third day of an air show on Sunday featuring the Blue Angeles and some 1.5 million spectators, and may similarly affect other beaches in the area from Long Beach to Newport Beach in Orange County in the coming days.

Deehan confirmed that the sensitive, 25-acre Talbert Marsh ecological reserve near Huntington Beach has now been sullied, threatening the lives of dozens of rare and endangered birds and other species. "We clearly need to end our dependence on oil to power our lives as fast as possible. So, we're calling for an end to drilling of the California coast," she explains. "Our coastline is too precious, it's too vulnerable, and we need to prevent anything like this from happening ever again."

So, who is to blame here? The private companies who run the platforms and pipelines (the Elly platform near where the leak occurred is run by a company named Beta Offshore, which is owned by another named Amplify Energy Corp.) Or is the state and/or federal government to blame? It took nearly 24 hours after residents smelled petroleum fumes and reported boats coming into docks with oiled hulls before a response was mounted and the pipeline, eventually, shut down. Dolphins and whales have reportedly been seen swimming through the oil slick ever since.

We discuss all of that and how the Biden Build Back Better agenda, supported by almost the entirety of the Congressional Democratic Caucus, might help to begin making all of these recurring disasters a thing of the past. Eventually. If Dems can overcome a handful of party obstructionists, which largely amount to two Senators, Joe Manchin from West Virginia coal country and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.

"When you think about the consequences of NOT ending our dependence on oil, I really think the costs to our society are so much greater," Deehan argues. "We can no longer afford to have these significant negative events, like a massive oil spill off our coast. There are economic impacts from that, too. The coastal communities, the people who want to be able to go surfing, the people who want to visit our Southern California beaches, the tourism industry, the fishing industry. All of these industries are going to lose a lot from this event."

As you might imagine, we'll be keeping our eye on that mess. But, next today, we head back to D.C. for the latest in the GOP's threat to tank the entire U.S. economy --- and the world's with it --- by obstructing Democratic efforts to lift the debt ceiling in order to continue paying off our already existing debt (including $8 trillion in deficit spending approved by Congress during the Trump Administration). The stakes are nothing less than the avoidance of a global fiscal calamity if the U.S. defaults on its debt for the first time in history, as of October 18. President Biden called out Republicans at the White House today for their brinkmanship, asking them to "get out of the way" if they won't help, and arguing that a "meteor is headed to crash into our economy" while the GOP plays "Russian Roulette" with it. Over the weekend, Democratic Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois called out Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for "playing games with a loaded weapon".

We open up the phones to discuss all of the above and more with listeners today...

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Hopefully today's BradCast is at least slightly less chaotic than Capitol Hill right now. We do our best to help you make sense of the Democrats' attempts to move four critical bills through to law, as they all come due at about the same time, and all must overcome obstructionists from both the Right and the Left. One bill today, has made it through. The fates of the other three --- and those of the nation, the economy, the Presidency and the Democrats --- are less than clear at this hour.

Among the stories covered, discussed, referenced and/or ranted upon on today's program...

• We start with some listener email in response to our interview last week with NASA climate scientist Dr. Peter Kalmus, who argues that our planet's climate emergency is far worse and more immediate than many other climate scientists are willing to say. Emailer RC concurs, and explains why current plans to curb carbon emissions by both the US and EU are not nearly enough to meet the moment, and entirely unfair to the rest of the world.

• With those thoughts underscoring much of the rest of our coverage today, we move to the ongoing mess in D.C., where Dems must pass four different pieces of critical legislation in the next few days and/or weeks for various critical reasons. One is a bill to keep the government open and operating after midnight tonight. After a Republican filibuster and a decoupling of that measure from the lifting of the debt ceiling before the government runs out of the ability to borrow money on October 18, the bill to keep the government open was passed by both chambers today (and signed by the President tonight). That Continuing Resolution will keep the government operating until December 3rd, when this ridiculousness will happen again, and Republicans are sure to create still more chaos and uncertainty...just because they can. Their filibuster of raising or suspending the debt ceiling, however, continues to march toward fiscal calamity [PDF] and deep recession as of October 18, unless they relent or Dems come up with some other idea.

• As we went to air today, it was still unclear whether a vote would be held in the House on the bipartisan $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill, which all Democrats in both chambers agreed to couple for passage with the much larger, very popular $3.5 trillion Build Back Better social spending and climate change bill that encompasses the bulk of the Biden agenda. At least it had been coupled until a small handful of shameless corporatist Dems in the House and Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in the Senate reneged on the original agreement. Now, they are trying to force Pelosi into calling a vote on the smaller bill, which was already passed by the Senate, and which House progressives have vowed to vote against unless the larger bill is adopted along with it. And though we hadn't seen anyone else make this point before airtime (Josh Marshall mentions it tonight), while House Repubs have been whipping against the smaller bill in the House, if they really wanted to muck things up for the Dems, they could vote in favor of the measure that many of their Republican colleagues in the Senate have already approved. That would replace the votes of the objecting progressives and remove pretty much all of the leverage they currently have to force passage of the larger reconciliation bill. So don't tell Republicans.

• The log jam on that larger bill, of course, has been Manchin and Sinema. And while neither Democratic Senator had made their objections to the measure particularly clear --- other than they didn't want to spend that much money (even though, unlike the deficit spending of the bipartisan infrastructure bill they supported, the larger one is actually paid for with tax increases on corporations and the wealthy!) --- at least Manchin was open to negotiation. Sinema, who is a terrible person, has said she wouldn't negotiate on the larger bill at all until the smaller one was passed. That is, apparently, still her position. But as of shortly before air today, we now know a bit more about Manchin's position. That, based on a bullet-point memo [PDF] obtained by Politico, which he gave to Chuck Schumer in late July, detailing his demands. Among them, the bill can't spend more than $1.5 trillion, and the coal state Senator (whose family makes millions on fossil fuel extraction each year) really really wants to undermine the critical climate components at the heart of the Biden agenda. We discuss.

• While Democrats are trying to move their wildly popular agenda forward, despite the obstructionism from both the Right and Left, Republicans and their media machine are busy lying to the public about the effort. We do our part to correct the record today with more information on what Democrats are actually hoping to do --- so you can help be the media and counter the rightwing lies on social media and elsewhere. (Pretty please?) Among those lies, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) offered a whopper today, describing the Biden agenda as "Marxism" on Twitter. And fake news site Newsmax is lying to their gullible viewers about the bipartisan infrastructure bill including an 8-cent per mile "driving tax". It doesn't. We try and help correct the record on both scores.

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report. Today, we have yet another California utility company coughing up billions to settle with residents after their negligence led to disaster following the largest methane leak in U.S. history; New polling finds a dramatic spike in concern among a majority of Americans regarding our climate crisis; And another major automaker makes another major bet on our electric vehicle future...

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