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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: U.S. on verge of breaking its record for the most billion-dollar disasters in a single year; California insurers canceling homeowner policies due to record wildfires; PLUS: U.N. warns world must pick up the pace in cutting greenhouse gas emissions... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): It’s close but 2020 likely to end up hottest year on record; Biochar Traps Water and Fixes Carbon in Soil, Helping the Climate; Scientists Cheered By Bowhead Whale Recovery Despite Arctic Warming; The End Of Coal? Investors Aren't Buying Myth Of Industry's 'Renaissance'; Pollution, poverty and pandemic: A community on edge; FEMA seeks to slash disaster aid as Trump heads for exit... PLUS: Plastic pipes are polluting drinking water systems after wildfires, increase risk in urban fires... and much, MUCH more! ...

The unfortunately necessary debunkery of Donald Trump and his GOP's various embarrassingly desperate efforts to steal the election from Joe Biden continues on today's BradCast, even as the U.S. Secretary of State manages to shock with an extraordinarily offense comment and Republicans are now turning on their own in Georgia to appease the soon-to-be-former President. [Audio link to show is posted below this summary.]

Among the too-many stories covered on today's show...

• Even Fox 'News' is beginning to refuse to air the White House's "voter fraud" BS. It's not the first time Fox has refused to play along with GOP "voter fraud" lies since Election Day;

• Mitch McConnell supports Trump's right to legal challenges in the election (and so do we, as we explain);

• Sec. of State Mike Pompeo makes a wildly unfunny, dangerous and un-American "joke" from the lectern at the Dept. of State about a "smooth transition to a second Trump Administration";

• Corporate media continue to do a rather competent job of quickly debunking the endless and so-far evidence-free claims being made by duped Trump supporters and shameless Trump attorneys in court regarding "voter fraud". CNN's Donie O'Sullivan deserves special credit for one of his reports taking on Trump supporters directly at a "Stop the Steal" rally in Pennsylvania, with facts to debunk their false conspiracies regarding "Trump ballots being burned in bags" (they weren't), vote totals being inflated overnight for Joe Biden (they weren't), and much more;

• Separately, CNN also debunks Trump's latest Twitter tantrums regarding his evidence-free claims of fraud in Pennsylvania (no, GOP observers were NOT prevented from watching the ballot count), Nevada (no, 3,000 voters did NOT vote unlawfully from other states), Georgia (no, Trump did not "win on Election Night") and Wisconsin (no, Trump's campaign is not "looking very good" in the state they appear to have lost by more than 20,000 votes);

• Team Trump files yet another embarrassingly lame lawsuit in Arizona, falsely charging that 180 voters (out of 155,860) who cast Election Day ballots in Maricopa County (Phoenix) improperly had their ballots rejected as overvotes;

• Democrat Cal Cunningham concedes his U.S. Senate race in North Carolina to the very unpopular incumbent Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, in a race that Democrats should have won (and that his progressive primary opponent Erica Smith --- featured as a guest on our show earlier this year --- arguably might have);

• Short of an unlikely shocker in the still-uncalled Alaska U.S. Senate race, the last chance for Democrats to take back majority control of the U.S. Senate will now be in Georgia's two U.S. Senate runoff elections on January 5th. They will have to win both of them. And now, both of the state's Republican U.S. Senators, Kelly Loeffler (who is running against Rev. Raphael Warnock) and David Perdue (who is running against Jon Ossoff) are sucking up to their demented sore loser President by turning on GA's Republican Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger, hilariously "citing no evidence" in calling for his resignation.

  Longtime listeners of The BradCast will recognize Raffensperger as the corrupt dope who purchased the state's new, wildly-expensive, easily-manipulated, 100% unverifiable computer touchscreen Rube Goldberg voting systems made by Dominion Voting and forced on every county in the state for first time use this year. That, instead of a cheaper, verifiable, hand-marked paper ballot system urged by cybersecurity and voting systems experts alike.

  Republicans have been falsely accusing Dominion in recent days of being controlled by Democrats and responsible for "stealing" the election from Trump in Michigan and Georgia. While there is no evidence to support their claim, I have invited those Republicans worried about Dominion to join me in my call for getting the company out of Georgia's critical U.S. Senate runoffs altogether by turning to all hand-marked paper ballots to be publicly hand-counted in both races. The statewide election will feature just two races, with only two candidates in each, so hand-counting them on Election Night would be very simple and completely transparent.

  While my invitation to Republicans has become quite popular on Twitter, so far they have failed to join the effort to prevent the "Software from hell!" that folks like Eric Trump are pretending to be the cause for his father's humiliating re-election loss. Sad!

  While Raffensperger says he will not resign, a comment from former Republican Sec. of State turned illegitimate Governor Brian Kemp, along with an article from the far-right Federalist, suggests that state Republicans may try and move to ban mail-in voting altogether for the runoffs, despite the spiking deadly pandemic and the requisite reliance on unverifiable Dominion voting systems at the polling place, in hopes of returning to their years-long glory days of GOP voter suppression in the Peach State;

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report filled with (almost all) actually good news for a change, in the wake of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris' apparent election victory last week...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris win the pivotal 2020 Presidential Election; Biden's climate agenda faces huge hurdles in a Republican Senate; Tropical Storm Eta deluges Florida, as Theta brews in the Atlantic; PLUS: China to phase out gasoline cars by 2035... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Trump removes head of climate science report; White House races to wrap up rules before Trump exits; 9 Things the Biden Administration Could Do Quickly on the Environment; Scientists Watch As China Remote Glaciers Melt At 'Shocking' Pace; In First For Fed, US Central Bank Says Climate Poses Stability Risks; U.S. Military Responsible for Widespread PFAS Pollution in Japan; Arctic time capsule from 2018 washes up in Ireland as polar ice melts... PLUS: The Green New Deal Didn't Sink Democrats... and much, MUCH more! ...

As I discuss near the top of today's BradCast, we are now in what amounts to a Cold Civil War on Democracy in this nation. The greatest direct threat we have ever faced to our Constitutional Republic since the Civil War is now playing out in our ongoing election. [Audio link to show is posted below this summary.]

As it turns out, that threat to what Joe Biden describes as "the soul of our nation", does not come from a foreign power, but from the President of the United States himself and his party of henchmen and supporters who are now attacking the very core of our Republic: the right to vote and to have that vote counted as cast. That right is now under direct assault in a way not seen since the Jim Crow era. And while the GOP has been using the guise of preventing "voter fraud" to wage similar battles in recent years, they aren't even trying to hide their direct assault on democracy anymore. They are simply using every (so far, peaceful) means possible --- legal and extra-legal --- to try and prevent legal voters from voting and lawfully cast ballots from being counted.

Unfortunately, they have packed enough stooges onto their stolen U.S. Supreme Court at this point, that they may pull it off...unless the pro-democracy forces simply overwhelm them between now and the close of polls next Tuesday night. Get busy, people. Only the fate of the Republic and...yes, human civilization, as Desi Doyen highlights yet again in our Green News Report today, are at stake.

Among the stories reported on today's show, as our trench warfare coverage continues...

• The very Trumpy Republican Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, goes to vote and finds someone has changed his address in the state's voter registration database. As Governor, he is able to order the Florida Dept. of Law Enforcement (FDLE) to take swift action to find the alleged culprit within hours. Of course, no such swift action was taken when Ann Coulter committed voter fraud in Florida years ago, nor when Donald Trump himself did the exact same thing this year;

• Good news for democracy in Minnesota! A federal judge has ordered a mercenary contractor hiring armed para-militia to stalk polling places to stand down after violating federal voter intimidation laws. The company, Atlas Aegis, must also reveal who has been funding their program. The case is a victory for plaintiffs including the Minnesota chapters of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and League of Women Voters, as well as the group Free Speech for People (FSFP) whose lawyers brought the case. We spoke with FSFP attorney Ron Fein last week on the show, the day after the voter intimidation suit was filed in federal court;

• Good news for voters in Texas! A Trump-appointed federal judge has found Gov. Greg Abbott's exemption for voters and pollworkers to his statewide mask mandate to be in violation of the Voting Rights Act. Masks must be worn inside of all polling places across the Lone Star state of today's ruling. The victory comes not a moment too soon, after several polling officials have already become sickened, poll sites were closed due to sick workers, and maskless poll watchers were said to have been using their presence to intimidate minority voters. That, in a state where the Republicans who have long controlled it went all the way to the Supreme Court to deny almost all voters under the age of 65 the right to request an absentee ballot due to fear of the spiking coronavirus pandemic. It's also another victory --- and a reversal of fortunes --- for the good folks at FSFP, including Senior Counsel Courtney Hostetler, who spoke with us on the show about their case in September, when its outlook then appeared grim;

• More good news for democracy in Texas! A $31 million effort to improve access to the polls in the nation's third-largest voting jurisdiction, Harris County, which includes Houston, appears to have paid off big time. NBC News reports that more voters have now cast ballots there during early voting than were cast in the entire 2016 election. The increased turnout is thanks to expanded and innovative voting options, such as Early Voting sites that stay open later, some that stay open for 24 hours, and drive-thru polling places. The County's stunning turnaround in a state with notoriously low voter turnout comes after Dems won every countywide office in 2018, increased the elections budget from $4 million under GOP control to $31 million now, and with the hiring of innovative, 33-year old County Clerk Chris Hollins in late summer. Naturally, state Republicans have been challenging virtually every innovation to make it easier for voters to vote in the state's largest county. And while Gov. Greg Abbott has succeeded in limiting ballot drop-off locations to just one per county (from a dozen previously planned for sprawling Harris County, which is larger than Rhode Island), GOP attempts to block drive-thru voting have been denied by the state's all-Republican Supreme Court. Another new case was filed by Republicans this week, however, seeking to actually invalidate the votes of more than 100,000 voters who lawfully cast drive-thru votes during Early Voting.

• On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court's issued an appalling ruling that blocks tens of thousands of lawfully cast mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day from being counted in Wisconsin if they arrive after Election Day due to, for example, slowdowns in U.S. Postal Service delivery by Trump's new Postmaster General. Criticism from legal experts and voting rights advocates of the embarrassingly error-riddled concurring opinion filed by GOP operative turned GOP activist Justice Brett Kavanaugh was swift. We discussed that factually deficient and laughable concurrence with Slate legal journalist Mark Joseph Stern in detail on yesterday's show. Among the egregious errors in the opinion was Kavanaugh's citing of Vermont's election laws. The Sec. of State of Vermont has now written a letter to the Court in response, demanding that the opinion be corrected to include actual facts about the state's voting laws, instead of the phony claims Kavanaugh made as he works toward using his lifetime appointment on the Court to steal this year's election on behalf of the man who appointed him to it;

• Finally, as mentioned, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, as a record fifth hurricane in a single season slams storm-weary Louisiana today; Trump opens the nation's last protected tropical rain forest to commercial logging; China and Japan vault ahead of the U.S. in their pledges to reach net-zero carbon emissions; and the case is made for Joe Biden to expand the Supreme Court if we are to have any chance of combating our swiftly worsening climate crisis.

• P.S. The charming animated video of the Lincoln Project "Fairy Tale" we played at the top of today's show is here.

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Hurricane Zeta slams into Louisiana, its fifth storm in a single season; Logging begins in pristine Tongass National Forest; China vaults ahead of U.S. on international climate pledge; PLUS: The case for court reform to protect climate legislation... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): The most important climate ballot initiatives to watch on Election Day; Trump Administration hardens its attack on climate science; No matter who wins, US exits Paris Accord the day after the election; Wyoming is using dark money to keep coal plants open in othe states; Trump Interior Dept. 'propaganda' video and tweets may violate ethics laws; St. Augustine, FL struggles to save historic landmarks from increased flooding; EPA OKs soybean, dotton farmers’ use of dicamba weedkiller... PLUS: Trump Administration buries dozens of clean energy studies... and much, MUCH more! ...

As new coronavirus infections spike to an all-time daily record in the U.S. on Thursday (and again today), with cases now on the rise in nearly 75% of the nation and hospitalizations increasing again in 38 states, our infected President, Donald Trump, and his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, faced off in Nashville, TN for the (mercifully) final debate of the 2020 season.

We've got full special coverage on today's BradCast with a very smart panel, including RICHARD "R.J." ESKOW of The Zero Hour; HEATHER DIGBY PARTON of Salon and Hullaballoo; and, of course, our very own Desi Doyen.

It's a rather lively hour today as we try to make sense of our collective Nightmare Before Halloween, which continued to play out on Thursday night at Belmont University, even while deftly moderated (with a helpful mute button) by NBC's Kristen Welker. As CNN's great fact-checker Daniel Dale explained on Twitter last night: "Biden was again imperfect from a fact check perspective. He made at least a few false, misleading, or lacking-in-context claims. Trump was, as usual, a serial liar," adding: "From a lying perspective, Trump is even worse tonight than in the first debate."

For our part, along with a bit of fact-checking, among the many issues we cover on today's program...

• Eskow offers insight --- as a former health insurance industry executive and Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign writer --- on the facts about both Biden and Trump's plans for healthcare coverage amid the worsening pandemic and a threat by the GOP's stolen U.S. Supreme Court to strike down the Affordable Care Act just days after the election. ("He keeps saying that 'my plan is that I'm going to have a plan.'");
• Parton, no stranger to deep dives into wingnut rabbit holes, helpfully decodes Trump's ginned-up Fox "News"-fueled "scandals" regarding Biden's family. ("This is about harassing Biden once he's elected. This isn't really about the election. Trump doesn't know that.")
• And Desi helps us make sense of Biden's newsworthy dose of reality offered near the end of the debate that, yes, we will have to transition away from oil and other fossil fuels, toward renewable, job-creating, emissions-free alternatives in the very near future...if we hope to survive on this planet.

You may also wish to buckle up for a bit of a scary ending today, as all three offer their thoughts to voters who may be under the impression that Biden has this wrapped up, and as Desi sagely warns: "The margin of victory [for Biden] must be greater than the margin of theft, suppression, and litigation." And that's not even the scary part!

Anyway, that's a tiny sample of today's offerings, during which you'll laugh, cry, and maybe even go to bed with nightmares. You're welcome! Please enjoy today's special coverage on The BradCast!...

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On today's BradCast: He wants you to be frightened. He wants to terrorize you. Don't let him. Vote instead. [Audio link to today's show.]

The fact that time is running out for the Trump Crime Family and their decades of fraud in New York --- as Eric also clearly knows --- is probably not helping, but Donald Trump is getting desperate. Hence, his refusal to commit, when when asked about it during a press briefing Wednesday at the White House, to a peaceful transfer of power after this year's Presidential election.

His excuse? "The ballots are a disaster...Get rid of the ballots....The ballots are out of control." While many have been discussing the disturbing options that some Republican controlled states may consider using to override the ballots by having their legislature select Electors to the Electoral College this year in defiance of voters, that's probably not what Trump was talking about yesterday when pretending "the ballots are out of control!"

He has been complaining for months about states that are automatically sending absentee ballots to all active registered voters this year. He is pretending this is "out of control" and a "scam" by Democrats to somehow steal the election. In fact, as we break down on today's show, Trump's complaints are, themselves, a scam.

In short, 5 states (Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Utah and Hawaii) have long sent all voters absentee ballots, whether they request one or not. Of those, only Utah is a so-called "red" state, and none of them are seen as anywhere close to likely to flip their Presidential vote from the way they voted in 2016. So, Trump is almost certainly not complaining about those five states.

But this year, due to the COVID-19 pandemic that Trump failed so disastrously to control, 5 other states (California, Vermont, New Jersey, Montana and Nevada) will also be sending mail-in ballots to all voters. Of those, the first three are very reliably Democratic states in Presidential elections. Trump won Montana by some 20 points in 2016. So, of those five, only Nevada (whose Republican Secretary of State is in charge of the election) could be considered, in any sense, a swing-state --- though it hasn't elected a Republican nominee for President since 2004, and a new Fox "News" poll out this afternoon shows Trump trailing Joe Biden there by 11 points.

If somehow, magically --- due to some imagined massive Democratic fraud --- both Montana and Utah suddenly flipped to Biden this year, but Trump managed to hold all the same other states he won in 2016 (none of which have instituted universal Vote-by-Mail this year), Trump would still win the Electoral College.

So what is he pretending to be so bothered by? Actually, nothing. He is simply desperate to win and, as his chances of doing so are dwindling, he's desperately grasping to pretend there is a massive Democratic scheme to cheat him out of that win with universal Vote-by-Mail. There isn't.

But make no mistake, he will do nearly anything to come up with a way to get a "win" --- as long as it's other people who will risk their lives for it. That, of course, is also why he is hoping to further pack an already stolen, 5 to 3 rightwing U.S. Supreme Court, and why he is signaling that there may not be a peaceful transfer of power in the event that he loses.

Despite his threats, Trump is a coward. Bullies want you to be afraid of them, when, in fact, they are terrified of you. As well he now should be.

This nation is about to be tested in a way that we haven't seen since at least the Civil War. But, as we discuss today --- and in agreement with both Nancy Pelosi's and Bernie Sanders' responses today to Trump's Briefing Room thuggery --- the solution is the vote. An overwhelming landslide of a vote, which is now completely possible if we all step up and do our duty to save this democracy. To paraphrase Barack Obama: Yes, we can!...But will we?

We will find out over the next six weeks...and beyond. We offer both advice and encouragement to that end on today's show.

Also today, just a few more reasons for Trump's increasing panic, in addition to the New York State Attorney General and the Manhattan District Attorney both quickly closing in on Trump Organization crimes in two separate probes: A federal court this week tossed out the Trump/RNC lawsuit in Nevada seeking to block their Vote-by-Mail election, despite legislation adopted by the state legislature and signed by its Governor; And the news that even Texas could now be in play, with a record 1.6 million newly registered voters, Democrats spending millions on TV ads in a state long previously considered to be a Republican state, the Biden Campaign hiring on-the-ground staffers, and CBS' latest Battleground Tracker poll finding Trump leading Biden by just two points in a state that hasn't elected a Democratic nominee for President since 1976. Oh, and Republicans appear so frightened about what could happen if voters are allowed to cast their votes in Texas this year, that a bunch of them are suing their own Republican Governor to roll back his tepid expansion of Early Voting in response to the coronavirus.

Finally, Desi Doyen has quite a bit of "big" and, yes, very good news for us today (for a change) in our latest Green News Report...

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We warned you weeks ago to "buckle up" for what was to come between then and Election Day. On today's BradCast, a mountain of reminders as to why we issued the warning, as we hope that everyone remains buckled up until the madness comes to a full and complete stop. [Audio link to full show follows below.]

We begin today with the news that rocked the nation on Wednesday and continues reverberating today. Excerpts of audio recordings from Bob Woodward's eighteen separate interviews with Donald Trump for his new book revealed (among many other things) that the President was fully aware of the dangers of the coronavirus crisis as early as the beginning of the year, even while he was misleading the public about it. During one recording on February 7th this year, Trump told the Washington Post's Watergate journalist that the virus was transmitted through the air, was "more deadly than your strenuous flues" and was "deadly stuff". By March 19th, he is heard on tape telling the best-selling author that the COVID-19 disease was also affecting "plenty of young people" and that he "wanted to play it down" because, according to the recordings, he didn't "want to create a panic".

At the exact same time that he was telling Woodward one thing, Trump was lying about the virus publicly as more than 190,000 Americans have now died in the months since he first made clear to Woodward that the disease was wildly contagious and lethal. In mid-March, when he explained his strategy of down-playing the virus, only 150 Americans had died. Still, Woodward sat on the information until this week.

No doubt you've seen the reactions by now from many Democrats, including Joe Biden and even from anti-Trump Republicans. But what of the responsibility that Woodward himself had to warn the public about what Trump knew but was refusing to acknowledge publicly --- and, in fact, was lying publicly about?

We're joined today by investigative journalist DAVID SIROTA, former speech-writer for Bernie Sanders' 2020 campaign and now founder of the "Too Much Information" (TMI) newsletter. On Wednesday, in his TMI column, Sirota charged (as we long have) that Trump's actions constitute "a horrific crime against humanity," but, he adds, "it was aided and abetted by the popular face of investigative journalism: Mr. All The President's Men himself."

"The President of the United States said something to the nation's most famous reporter, and the most famous reporter sat on that information for seven months while tens of thousands of people died," Sirota says today. "Donald Trump committed a crime against humanity and Bob Woodward drove the getaway car."

Sirota is not the only journalist, progressive or otherwise, who has been highly critical of Woodward over the past 24 hours. So has Esquire's Charlie Pierce. So has The American Prospect's David Dayen. So has even the Washington Post's own Margaret Sullivan. And so are we.

"As a journalist, your job is to get the news from elected officials and to, at minimum, report what they say, and certainly report discrepancies in what they are saying," Sirota argues. "Your job is not to suppress that information, to hold that information while tens of thousands of people die, and to hold it to juice your book sales later on at a more opportune time. That is what happened."

Woodward has attempted to defend himself in several interviews since WaPo released the stunning recordings (which also reveal much more than Trump's secret views and/or knowledge about COVID-19). Sirota responds to Woodward's limp defense and to Trump's use of Woodward as "a human shield" today, when the President tweeted that Woodward's failure to release the information earlier was evidence that Trump's remarks were not "bad or dangerous," otherwise Woodward would have "immediately report[ed] them in an effort to save lives."

Sirota describes the entire fiasco as a "collision of both the corrupt political system and a deeply corrupt media culture" and tells me: "I genuinely believe that this is the biggest scandal in modern journalism."

As journalists, he asserts, we have "a duty to warn". Ironically, as the Poynter Institute, a journalism think-tank and fact-checking organization, reports in its own story asking "Was it unethical for Bob Woodward to withhold Trump’s coronavirus interviews for months?", Woodward himself is very aware of that duty --- if, perhaps, not for himself. "Woodward will be on CBS’s '60 Minutes' Sunday," Poynter's Al Tompkins reports. "In an excerpt of that interview, Woodward told CBS’s Scott Pelley, 'The president of the United States has a duty to warn.'"

Next up --- if you're still buckled in --- a new report from Microsoft today finds that Russia's military intelligence agency, the G.R.U., the same group alleged to have hacked and leaked email from the Hillary Clinton Campaign in 2016, is back at work in 2020 and has become more adept at covering their tracks. Moreover, the findings of the report contradict the Trump Administration's claims about both Russia and China. And for good reason. The Administration has corrupted U.S. intelligence to report what Trump wants the public to believe, rather than actual facts.

The new report alleges that Russia is attempting to access material from both the Trump and Joe Biden campaigns, and that China --- which Trump and the White House National Security Advisor and the U.S. Attorney General all claimed to be a greater threat to the 2020 election than Russia --- is actually focused on hacking Biden, not Trump. The Administration has claimed, falsely apparently, that China prefers Biden over Trump. Today's report, however, suggests just the opposite.

Given the extraordinary whistleblower report released on Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee from one of Trump's senior officials at the Department of Homeland Security, none of this should be a surprise. The official, Brian Murphy, details in his complaint how he was instructed to change intelligence to remove references to Russian interference and add threats from China and Iran instead, because Russian interference in the U.S. election "made the president look bad," according to complaint.

Murphy's complaint also details how he and others were instructed to change intelligence assessments to match Trump's misleading claims and rhetoric regarding "antifa", to minimize the greater threat of White Supremacy groups, and to downplay anything about Russia all together. He says he was also instructed to change data to match the Administration's false narrative about terrorists coming across the U.S.-Mexico border, and about the dismal conditions in Central America that were undermining the Trump Administration's asylum policies. The result, Murphy charges, is intelligence assessments that "more closely resemble a policy document...than an intelligence document.”

As noted on today's show, this is decidedly not how intelligence gathering and analysis is supposed to work. In fact, it's the exact opposite. Murphy refused to make the changes mentioned, and he was eventually cut out from work on the national Homeland Threat Assessment and demoted from Deputy Under Secretary in the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis to a position in the agency's Management Division.

Finally, as if all of this wasn't nightmarish enough, the delightful Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report on the man-made climate change-fueled wildfires now exploding up and down the West Coast, the media's failure to tie them to our climate crisis, and Trump's pre-election flip-flop on offshore oil drilling to try and win votes in the battleground state of Florida...

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On today's BradCast, the grifts continue --- huge new ones that few yet know about --- but too many are focused on Donald Trump's latest distractions to notice. [Audio link to show follows below.]

First up today: Please stop taking Trump's bait. His tweet on Thursday suggesting the postponement of the November election was little more than an attempt to distract from the day's very real news, including the horrific numbers from the Commerce Department (finding that the U.S. economy had plunged a record, unprecedented, staggering annualized 33% in the second quarter.). It worked. Media fell for it, and so did you, even though the President of the United States has no power to change the date of the Presidential election. The tweet not only helped to flip the entire day's news cycle, it also further terrorized the nation and helped to reinforce his desperate narrative that the 2020 election will be "the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history."

Democrats need to stop cowering in fear at Trump's wannabe dictatorial pronouncements. As Josh Marshall correctly wrote in response, "I understand everyone is afraid. But this is loser talk." The anti-Trump Republicans at the Lincoln Project ain't buying it. And the co-founder of the far-right Federalist Society has called for Trump's immediate impeachment because of it. Media need to learn to stop allowing Trump to hijack the news cycle and Americans need to learn to stop cowering in fear of Trump, despite his only actual talent: masterfully tricking both you and the media into falling for his pathetic manipulation.

Next up, the powerful Republican Speaker of the House, Larry Householder, who was arrested and charged last week by federal prosecutors in a massive, $60 million bribery, money laundering and racketeering scheme, has now been removed from the Speaker position in a unanimous bipartisan vote of the Buckeye State's House of Representatives. Householder and four others (including a senior aide, a former state GOP chair, and two top energy industry lobbyists) were charged in a racketeering scheme funded by FirstEnergy. The scheme was used to force a wildly unpopular bill through the state legislature last year that raised electricity bills on Ohio ratepayers to bail out two failing, hyper-polluting coal plants and two failing nuclear plants, while gutting the state's successful renewable energy and efficiency programs.

Despite the felony charges and lost speakership, Householder has yet to resign, the corrupt $1.5 billion House Bill 6 is still on the books, and Ohio's Republican Governor, Mike DeWine, who quickly signed the measure, still has some explaining to do. But while that scheme, described by federal prosecutors last week as the "the largest bribery, money laundering scheme ever perpetrated against the people of the state of Ohio," allegedly netted Householder some $60 million in bribes from FirstEnergy, laundered through a non-profit front group, it may pale in comparison to what one good government group now charges the Trump reelection campaign is doing.

Earlier this week, the non-partisan watchdog Campaign Legal Center (CLC), headed up by a former Republican Chair of the Federal Elections Commission, filed a new complaint with the FEC charging that the Trump Campaign and a joint fundraising committee is violating federal law by "laundering" nearly $170 million in campaign spending through firms headed up by Trump's former campaign manager, Brad Parscale (pictured above). The money, according to my guest today, CLC's Director of Federal Reform, BRENDAN FISCHER, is secretly being funneled to Trump associates and even family members.

"We've never seen anything like this. The scope and scale of this secrecy scheme is unprecedented," Fischer says, explaining how tens of millions of dollars in campaign ad buys and other large campaign expenses are all being run through two companies created by Parscale. One is called American Made Media and the other is Parscale Strategies. The campaign has claimed the companies are being used to save money by cutting out middle-man vendors, but CLC has discovered that the companies are being used as pass-throughs, and that sub-contracted vendors are making ad buys on behalf of the Trump Campaign anyway. Moreover, those vendors are not being disclosed, as required by campaign finance law, on the Campaign's financial disclosure forms. That, as Fischer tells me, means that payments are being hidden for campaign work, including potentially millions of dollars siphoned to groups with whom it is unlawful for the Campaign to coordinate efforts, and even to Trump associates and family members like Lara Trump (Eric Trump's wife) and former Fox "News" host Kimberly Guilfoyle (Donald Trump Jr.'s girlfriend).

"These two Parscale firms are being used only as pass-throughs to disguise the ultimate recipients of the money," Fischer and the CLC complaint alleging civil violations of campaign finance laws charge. "If the Trump Campaign gets away with this, it's just going to become a common practice. It's going to get replicated by campaigns, both Democrat and Republican, to disguise all of their political spending," he warns, adding that "if there was evidence that the violation was knowing and willful, there potentially could be criminal penalties."

Fischer offers many more details on what CLC knows and, due to the purposeful obfuscation through campaign finance records, what they still don't know, but hope that FEC investigators will be able to find out. We also discuss the dysfunction of the impossibly broken FEC and how that may affect action on this new and very serious complaint.

Finally, we're joined by Desi Doyen for our latest Green News Report on Trump's visit to Texas to help sell dirty oil while undermining the state's growing wind industry and lying about Joe Biden. Also, we cover the latest storm now barreling towards Florida as this year's record Hurricane Season continues and those "mystery seeds" that many are reporting as showing up in the mail from China...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Trump in Texas expands fossil fuel infrastructure, lies about clean energy; New study finds target of 100% clean electricity by 2035 would generate 25 million US jobs; Central U.S. wind energy capacity alone could power entire US electric grid, without harming wildlife; PLUS: Agriculture officials alarmed by 'mystery seeds' in the mail... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Dr. Michael Mann: It's time for America to reassert climate leadership. It starts with voting; Offshore wind power ‘so cheap it could return money to consumers’; 'Tidal Wave' Of Power Shut-Offs Looms As Nation Grapples With Heat; 'Coal is over': the miners rooting for the Green New Deal; Fossil fuel industry levy should pay for bushfire impact, climate action group report says; Oil and Gas Groups See ‘Some Common Ground’ in Biden Energy Plan... PLUS: Pollution Is Killing Black Americans. This Community Fought Back... and much, MUCH more! ...

On today's BradCast: Five arrests and a massive, $61 million criminal bribery scheme allegedly headed up by Ohio's Republican House Speaker in cahoots with GOP lobbyists and dirty energy company payouts help explain, yet again, why we can't have nice things. That's especially true for residents of the Buckeye State who keep electing Republican officials who play them for chumps, take all their money, and make them sick in the bargain. It's also true for Floridians, Georgians, Texans and now Missourians, but we'll get there as well today. [Audio link to show follows below.]

"We're here today to announce the arrest of Larry Householder, the speaker of the House of the state of Ohio and four other defendants for racketeering in relation to what is likely the largest bribery, money laundering scheme every perpetrated against the people of the state of Ohio," announced U.S. Attorney David DeVillers during a news conference in Columbus on Tuesday afternoon. "The conspiracy was to pass and maintain a $1.5 billion bailout in return for $61 million in dark money that was used for various things. One: to line the pockets of defendants. Two: to build a power base for Larry Householder. And three: to further the conspiracy. That is to further the affairs of this Enterprise."

The explosive story is rocking Ohio today, though many should have seen it coming. A year ago, in July of 2019, Vox's longtime energy and climate reporter David Roberts wrote a must-read deep-dive article on the passage of House Bill 6 (HB 6) --- the legislation at the center of this massive con --- describing it at the time as "the most counterproductive and corrupt piece of state energy legislation I can recall in all my time covering this stuff."

The measure forced Ohio's ratepayers to subsidize bailouts of two supposedly failing nuclear plants (the Davis-Besse plant near Oak Harbor and the Perry plant east of Cleveland) owned by FirstEnergy and two failing coal plants owned by the Ohio Valley Electric Corporation (a collective owned by several large utilities), while wiping out previously successful state incentives for renewable energy and efficiency projects that saved the state's ratepayers both money and lives.

"Despite a tsunami of dark money supporting the bill," Roberts reported last year, "HB 6 was overwhelmingly opposed by ratepayer groups, business groups, free market conservative groups, environmental groups, and Ohioans generally. Its only support came from its only beneficiaries: the utilities that own the bailed-out plants, the employees of the bailed-out plants, the communities where the bailed-out plants are located, and possibly President Trump, who doesn't want to see coal plants closing during his reelection campaign."

Well, apparently there were a few more "beneficiaries": Ohio's House Speaker Householder and his political allies inside and out of the state legislature. That "tsunami of dark money", as it turns out, was used to blanket the airwaves with propaganda in support of HB 6 --- describing it misleadingly as a fight for jobs and "clean energy" in a battle between "Big Oil and Ohio" --- by a group calling itself Generation Now. That dark money group, as it turns out, was run by Householder himself with "bags of cash" from the nuke plants' supposedly bankrupt owners, FirstEnergy of Ohio. According to today's criminal complaint [PDF], his "Enterprise" used a series of unregulated passthroughs to move millions and "freely spent the bribe payments to further the Enterprise's political interests and to enrich themselves" with "unlimited" funds that came in to Generation Now from FirstEnergy in payments described by one of the defendants as "Monopoly money."

Despite the wildly unpopular HB 6's narrow passage in the state legislature, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed it quickly after passage. He was not indicted today, though he did cancel a scheduled COVID-19 press conference after the announcement, before calling for Householder's resignation.

It's an incredibly sordid story which we report in detail today. It's also one that should remind everyone exactly what they can expect when they put corrupt politicians like this in power who did the bidding of major corporate interests, rather than the public's.

In not entirely unrelated news today, Couy Griffin, the idiot who heads up a group called "Cowboys for Trump", is calling for Americans to take their masks off because they --- as opposed to the coronavirus --- are making everybody sick. And while we'd love to ignore Griffin and the "Cowboys," it turns out he's also an elected Republican official in New Mexico and the same jerk who posted a video back in May which began by announcing that "the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat." And while we'd love to ignore that as well, that video was then retweeted by the President of the United States that month, along with the message "Thank you Cowboys. See you in New Mexico!"

Idiot elected "cowboys" and Presidents of the United States may be one thing we've come to expect by now. But with the coronavirus smashing records in at least 31 states, we'd hoped we'd get better from the Governors who have been left to handle the pandemic after Trump decided he had better things to do, despite some 4 million infected Americans and 144,000 U.S. deaths now from COVID-19 over the past six months.

But our hopes have been dashed. By Florida's very Trumpy Governor Ron DeSantis who's made a jackass of himself over the past month as cases, hospitalizations and deaths skyrocket in his state --- now overwhelming hospitals with at least 50 having run out of ICU beds --- while ordering kids back to in-person classes next month; By Georgia's Trumpy Governor Brian Kemp, who is suing cities in the state for instituting mask mandates as the Peach State also breaks single-day case records and death records; By Texas' Trump-loving Governor Greg Abbot, who wonders where he went wrong in reopening up the state so early, now that hospitals in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and elsewhere are overwhelmed and calling in refrigrator trucks to serve as overflow morgues to hold all of the extra dead bodies.

But now we now have Missouri's woeful Governor Mike Parson declaring he's just fine with kids in his state becoming infected in the classroom. "These kids have got to get back to school," Parson told a local radio station recently. "They're at the lowest risk possible. And if they do get COVID-19, which they will --- and they will when they go to school --- they're not going to the hospitals. They're not going to have to sit in doctor's offices. They're going to go home and they're going to get over it."

Whether Parson, who replaced the state's previous Republican Governor after he resigned in a sexual coercion, abuse and blackmail scandal, realizes that those kids go home to parents and grandparents who they will infect in turn (not to mention all of the teachers and staff at those schools) is unclear. Hopefully Missourians, however, understand it by now, and will consider replacing Parson this November with state Auditor Nicole Galloway, the Democratic candidate for Governor. Maybe then the good folks of Missouri can begin to have nice things again.

Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with a few too many disasters than we can possibly detail at the end of a summary like this one...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Record rains and floods threaten world's largest dam; Siberian heat wave 'impossible' without man-made climate change; Study implicates higher air pollution levels in COVID-19 death rates; PLUS: Remembering civil rights icon Congressman John Lewis, champion of environmental justice... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): FBI raids Ohio house speaker's farm amid alleged investigation into nuke plant bailout; Climate Change Poses 'Systemic Threat' to the Economy, Big Investors Warn; Australia's environment in unsustainable state of decline, major review finds; Facebook's Science Denial Loophole... PLUS: Supreme Court decision declaring half of Oklahoma Indian land raises big questions for oil drillers... and much, MUCH more! ...

On today's BradCast: There is one thing that Donald Trump excels at: screwing up. Despite his promises to his nativist racist base to end the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, even his stolen U.S. Supreme Court had to concede his attempt to do so was unlawful and unconstitutional [Audio link to full show is posted below]

It was the second such defeat for the haters this week, after Trump's own appointee, Justice Neil Gorsuch, found it unlawful in his 6-3 majority opinion to fire someone simply because they are gay or trans, as had been legal in most states before this week's landmark ruling. Today's defeat for our feckless President was found in the 5-4 majority opinion [PDF] authored by Chief Justice John Roberts who, with the Court's four Democratic appointees, held that, in Trump's haste to end the program that protects from deportation nearly 800,000 people brought here by their parents as children, the Administration did so in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act (APA).

No, Roberts isn't turning into a liberal squish, despite the blustered outrage from rightwingers today. The APA statute requires a reasonable explanation for overturning Executive Actions by previous Presidents, and the Roberts majority determined --- as with Trump's botched attempt to add a citizenship question to the Census last year --- the Administration couldn't even muster up one.

We're joined by SARAH PIERCE, policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, to describe the "surprise", if narrow, opinion, that protects DREAMers for now, but allows Trump to try again if his Administration can figure out how to do it legally. "No one expected the Supreme Court to rule against the Trump Administration and how it went about ending DACA. We're all extremely surprised by this decision --- and happy, because this is a large group of young people we're talking about in the United States that contribute a lot to our country, and society, and economy. So it's good news all around," she tells me.

In addition to the good news that these folks --- some 20,000 of whom are now working in the health care industry during the pandemic, many others in the U.S. military, many more now married with U.S. citizen children --- will not be ripped out of their communities and sent back to countries they don't remember or even speak the language, the economy will also not have to suffer another $300 billion blow. That is just one of the costs cited by Roberts in his opinion as unlawfully ignored by the Administration when they violated the law in trying to reverse DACA.

Naturally, Trump played the victim, describing this week's two SCOTUS verdicts that did not go his way as "horrible & politically charged decisions" and "shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives." He then pitifully asked: "Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn't like me?" No. But pretty much nobody else does.

For his part, President Obama lauded the decision, citing DACA as having "protected young people who were raised as part of our American family from deportation." He called for Joe Biden to be elected with "a Democratic Congress that does its job, protects DREAMers, and finally creates a system that's truly worthy of this nation of immigrants once and for all."

As Pierce explains on today's show, Congress has, for years, been on the verge of passage of an immigration bill to protect DREAMers. Those efforts, however, are inevitably scotched by Trump and the GOP, who seem to prefer a political issue they can raise money on to an actual permanent solution to the problem.

"We've always gotten a lot of mixed messages on this, not only from Donald Trump's statements but from his actions, as well," says Pierce, referencing his 2017 tweet when he asked: "Does anybody really want to throw out good, educated and accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military?," followed by his tweet two years later when he referred to some DREAMers as "far from 'angels" and "very tough, hardened criminals."

"Both the Senate and the House took time to seriously consider passing legislation on DREAMers," Pierce notes. "And the White House really torpedoed that, both times, by adding a bunch of demands that were just unsuitable for Democrats to take on. So we have them moving one step forward, clearly with the interests of DACA recipients interests in mind, and then taking two steps back. They're all over the place."

Whether these failures harm or hurt Trump's reelection chances remains to be seen. He is already demanding "more Justices or we will lose our 2nd. Amendment & everything else." But, of course, as his former National Security Advisor John Bolton's new book makes clear --- according to reporting on copies obtained by media before next week's official publication date --- everything Trump does, every decision he makes as President, is not based on how it might help Americans, but on how it might help his reelection chances. That includes an attempted quid pro quo scheme, according to Bolton, to lift U.S. sanctions against China in exchange for their purchase of soybeans and wheat to help voters in the Midwest that Trump believes he needs to win in 2020.

The conversation described by Bolton between Trump and Chinese President XI Jinping mirrors the extortion scheme with Ukraine's President that resulted in Trump's impeachment last year. Shamefully, though Bolton would have bolstered the Democrats' case against Trump in the impeachment trial, he chose to hold his revelations for his new book. Please don't buy that book, even as everything so far described from it regarding Trump's failures and fecklessness as both a President and a human being sounds 100% plausible.

Finally, we're joined by Desi Doyen for our latest Green News Report, as the corporate person known as California utility company PG&E admits guilt to 84 counts of manslaughter (don't worry, despite all the deaths they admit to causing, nobody will actually go to jail); as new analyses find the nation could move to 90% renewable electricity in just 15 years and save money doing it; and as the 2020 wildfire season sparks up with an ominous beginning...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: 'Unsurvivable' heat, projected for decades into the future, is already occurring now; Despite crashing oil demand, Trump Administration speeding up drilling expansion on public lands; Air pollution increasing again as coronavirus restrictions lift; PLUS: New study finds natural gas stoves are a major source of indoor air pollution... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Renewables can preserve the economy, drive the recovery; Tesla's secret batteries aim to rework the math for electric cars and the grid; FERC order could bar offshore wind from U.S. power market; Covid-19 crisis will wipe out demand for fossil fuels, says IEA ; Trump's grid security executive order will create vendor 'black list'; US fossil fuel giants set for a coronavirus bailout bonanza; Ocasio-Cortez to co-chair Biden-Sanders campaign Climate Task Force... PLUS: America’s meat shortage is more serious than your missing hamburgers... and much, MUCH more! ...

On today's BradCast: Yes, it is as bad as we warned it would be. And it is getting even worse. And the way some state officials are now behaving, even upcoming elections may be unable to reverse much of this madness. [Audio link to full program is posted at end of summary.]

On Thursday, the U.S. Labor Department released gobsmacking statistics revealing that a record 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits in the past week. That follows more than 3 million doing so the week before. Both weeks blow to smithereens the previous all-time record high for weekly jobless claims since such records have been kept. That numbers was of 695,000, as set in 1982. We are quickly blowing past the disastrous economic tailspin of the 2008 Great Recession and moving into Great Depression territory.

In response, House Dems are attempting to move to another relief bill, in the form of a $2 trillion infrastructure plan to follow up last week's $2.2 trillion stimulus/corporate bailout bill. But Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is, so far, rejecting Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's proposal to do so, while telling her to "stand down" as the GOP does nothing instead. That, as NBC News reports today that Americans may be waiting as long as five months for the paltry $1,200 check promised them by last week's emergency relief bill.

But, of course, Congressional Republicans aren't doing absolutely nothing. McConnell has vowed to continuing packing the federal courts with unqualified judges, even among this disaster. And several GOP members of the House and Senate are proposing a bill to punish those who disseminated false information about coronavirus or who profited from it --- so long as those people are from other countries. Luckily, Donald Trump's months of repeated and purposeful and deadly disinformation that he and his Administration fed to the American people about the pandemic is all cool! So, apparently, are any U.S. Senators who may have profited from early information about the virus by trading millions of dollars of stock based on insider information, including Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Kelly Loeffler (R-GA). Presumably, they will not be held to account by the GOP's proposal to punish anyone who "financially benefits from acts intended to deliberately conceal or distort information about a public health emergency of international concern."

In the House, at the same time, Pelosi has announced the formation of a new bipartisan Select Committee to oversee the Trump Administration's response to the pandemic and its use of the $2 trillion allocated by last week's relief package. The committee, she says, will have subpoena power. So, if there are any questions the panel may have for members of the Administration dolling out that record amount of tax payer funds, we're certain that all of the President's men will undoubtedly respect any lawful Congressional subpoena they may receive.

Meanwhile, we continue to keep our eyes on how to help to begin to end many of these ongoing nightmares, somehow, via the ballot box. Toward that end, the Democratic National Committee announced they are postponing their national nominating convention, previously scheduled for Milwaukee, Wisconsin in July, back to August instead, in hopes that it will be possible to gather in person by that time (it likely will not be.) It would be held the week before Republicans plan to hold theirs in Charlotte, North Carolina, which Trump has vowed to hold with delegates gathered in person in the final week of August.

But, we're still in utter disbelief that Wisconsin is actually --- seriously --- going to hold their Presidential Primary, statewide Supreme Court election and municipal contests NEXT TUESDAY on April 7, despite, as we noted yesterday, the ongoing unprecedented health emergency, statewide stay-at-home order, and "a massive shortage of poll workers across the state, with more than 100 communities having no poll workers at all as of [this past Tuesday, and] an overall shortage of some 7,000 workers in 60% of the state's municipalities."

As we reported Wednesday, the only thing set to stop this madness with both the state's Democratic Governor and Republican heads of the state House and Senate also on board, is a federal lawsuit filed by voting rights advocates. Well, U.S. District Judge Mark M. Conley issued his ruling on Thursday, declining to postpone the election, while making clear that though he disagrees with the state's decision to move forward, he does not have the authority to postpone it due to a health emergency in which, he suggested correctly, residents could die. "That may be something that happens," he said during closing arguments, adding "that would be outside my jurisdiction. But it will be on the hands of the legislature and the governor."

Yes, it will. Judge Conley did, however, extend a few deadlines for absentee balloting, which has also reportedly already overwhelmed local elections officials who are having trouble keeping up with incoming ballots as well as sending out a record number of requested ballots. The Wisconsin Election Commission has already stated that it is very likely, barring a legislative change by the Republican-controlled legislature, that many votes will not be able to be counted at all in time for the state's statutory deadline. Republicans appear to be very happy about that. Conley suggested he may rule again, if voting rights are seen as imperiled on Election Day.

Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with the U.N. cancelling its critical upcoming climate conference due to the corona virus pandemic; a bankrupt U.S. coal company attempting to pass its obligations to retired miners over to tax payers instead; several states use the COVID-19 crisis as an excuse to pass laws criminalizing pipeline protests; and Trump's Interior Dept. keeps national parks open despite worker illnesses and their pleas to close the parks in the name of public safety...

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