That headline will make sense once you listen to the show. With the news "only" turned up to 11 today (as opposed to its usual 12 or 13), we're able to catch up on a whole bunch of important stories, breaking and otherwise, on today's BradCast. [Audio link is posted below.]

Among those many stories...

• Oregon U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former Senator, Sec. of State and 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton all announce they will not be running for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2020. That's mostly good news, as we discuss;

• A southern Indiana election board is considering using hand-marked and hand-COUNTED paper ballots in an upcoming local primary election. That's definitely good news;

• North Carolina's State Board of Elections announces the dates for the redo election(s) in the state's 2018 U.S. House race for the 9th Congressional District. The first one was nullified a week or so ago, due to Republican absentee ballot election fraud by a GOP contractor on behalf of the disgraced candidate and Baptist preacher Mark Harris. The Democratic candidate, Marine vet and businessman Dan McCready, has already announced he will be running again, and only one Republican, so far, has announced his intention to run in the do-over contest. That one candidate, Union County Commissioner Stony Rushing --- endorsed by Harris (ouch) --- turns out to be a real peach, as we explain with some help from Daily Kos' Jeff Singer;

• Also in NC, the judge who nullified two state Constitutional Amendments, one of which would have imposed disenfranchising Photo ID voting restrictions, stands by his recent ruling to nix the measures on the basis that the state legislature that placed them on the ballot had been "illegally constituted" by unlawful racial gerrymanders in several NC legislative districts;

• And, speaking of GOP election fraud, in Virginia, the criminal investigation into (now-former) Republican Rep. Scott Taylor and his paid campaign staffers who forged petition signatures to place an independent candidate on the ballot in 2018, continues. The GOP scheme, exposed before the election last year, included what a judge described as "out-and-out fraud" via forged signatures from people who had long ago died or moved. The failed scheme was meant by the Republicans to dilute the votes of Taylor's Democratic challenger, now-freshman Rep. Elaine Luria, in VA's 2nd U.S. House District;

• A huge majority of American voters now believe, 64 to 24%, that Donald Trump committed crimes before becoming President, with a smaller plurality believing he also has committed crimes since becoming President, according to new polling from Quinnipiac.

• Meanwhile, Trump characterized the new House majority Democrats' several burgeoning investigations into his and his associates myriad apparent crimes as a "big, fat, fishing expedition", "PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT!", "nonsense" and "a disgrace to our country" today. He charged the "real crime is what the Dems are doing." But, as we discuss today, the long, LONG overdue exercise of Congressional oversight into an unprecedentedly corrupt Presidency is anything but. We list an astonishing number of potential crimes now under the Democrats' microscope thanks to the House Judiciary Committee's massive document requests sent Monday to more than 80 Trump associates, family members, organizations and institutions. That, as we also note, is just the tip of the iceberg for what is still to come, thanks to voters who put Democrats back in charge in the House last November;

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report with tragic news out of Alabama, stupid news out of CPAC, and important news at the EPA and from the latest Democratic candidates entering the 2020 Presidential contest...

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The fight to block brand new, unverifiable (and, of course, hackable) voting systems continues as election officials in a number of jurisdictions (including some key Democratic-leaning ones) are rushing to implement them despite unambiguous warnings from experts and as the national media (after years of our own warnings) have finally begun to take notice.

But first, very quickly, some of the many news headlines from the weekend and today covered on today's BradCast. [Audio link to full show is posted below.]

• Former Attorney General Eric Holder announces he is not running for the 2020 Democratic Party Presidential nominee, but Colorado's two-term Governor and self-described "extreme moderate" John Hickenlooper declares that he will be joining the crowded field of mostly U.S. Senators;

• Bizarre extreme weather across much of the U.S. as one or more mile-wide "monster" tornadoes flattened parts of Beauregard, Alabama on Sunday, killing at least 23, including a still-unknown number of children, with dozens still missing;

• NBC reports the Pentagon is set to announce the U.S. is permanently ending annual large-scale joint-military exercises with South Korea and Japan following Donald Trump's failed summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un. The U.S. is, apparently, receiving no concessions from the North in return;

• Rand Paul became the fourth U.S. Senate Republican to say he will vote to block Trump's "national emergency" declaration, which diverts money military construction money allocated by Congress in order to build a southern border wall instead. Paul's vote, along with Democrats and a handful of other Republicans who have said they will also vote against Trump, would be enough for a majority in the Senate to pass the bill already adopted by the House. Donald Trump, however, has vowed to veto the measure;

• And, in far more embarrassing news for the President today, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee --- where any possible impeachment hearings would begin --- has requested a host of documents from more than 80 Trump officials, family members and organizations as it investigates impeachable issues of obstruction of justice, corruption and abuse of power by Donald J. Trump;

Meanwhile, our years-long attempt to wave a large, bright red warning flag regarding U.S. elections, especially in advance of 2020, continues today. But, over the weekend, I'm happy to say, we received a bit of help, finally, from the national media as Politico's Eric Geller ran a feature article summarizing some of the many warnings (see here [PDF] and here [PDF], for example) from cybersecurity and voting systems experts inveighing against new, touchscreen computer Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs) now being adopted or considered by jurisdictions around the country, including Georgia, Delaware, Philadelphia and elsewhere (including counties in Texas, Ohio and even here in L.A. County, the nation's largest voting jurisdiction.)

Officials are now rushing to adopt the new systems in advance of the 2020 Presidential elections. That, despite the mountain of evidence demonstrating that BMD systems cannot be reliably audited [PDF] after elections and will result in elections as faith-based and hackable-without-probability-of-detection as those on many of the older touchscreen systems they will be replacing. The boondoggle is set to be a bonanza for the private voting machine vendors, however, which stand to make hundreds of millions by forcing all voters at the polls to use unnecessary electronic systems, rather than much cheaper, verifiable, hand-marked paper ballot systems tallied by optical-scan computers or counted by hand.

Nowhere has the fight against these dangerous new systems been more contentious than in Georgia, where the state House has already voted, mostly along party lines, to move to the systems and as lawmakers in the state Senate are now on the brink of adopting the same bill, HR-316, as well. The measure would grant at least $150 million for the purchase of electronic touchscreen systems that produce an unverifiable, bar-coded (not human-readable), computer-marked "paper ballot" summary card which is no more verifiable than their 17-year old, oft-failed, easily-manipulated paperless touchscreen voting systems.

But, never mind that. The state's new Republican Governor and former Sec. of State (and infamous vote suppressor) Brian Kemp has long been pushing for such systems, as is his new successor, Republican Sec. of State Brad Raffensberger. A former official from ES&S, the nation's largest voting machine company, which will likely receive the contract to replace all current voting systems in Georgia, is also now said to be serving as Kemp's Deputy Chief of Staff.

We're joined again today by election integrity champion MARILYN MARKS of the non-profit Coalition for Good Governance with an update on the latest status of the battle in Georgia, where a Senate sub-committee held a brief hearing on HR316 on Monday. Marks, a registered Republican herself, reports in on the Peach State's partisan divide in this battle, with most Democrats and members of the public coming down against the new unverifiable systems and most Republicans and election officials pushing for them, contrary to the unwavering advice from cybersecurity and election experts offering a large and growing body of documented facts detailing the dangers of computer-marked BMD systems.

When I ask Marks how state lawmakers could possibly approve these systems, given all that is on the public record against them, she tells me: "They are working in a fact-free environment right now...The Republicans are rushing this through so fast. They know that this stinks to high heaven, that there is no logical reason anybody would choose this over hand-marked paper ballots, when the technology is so uncertain, the price tag is enormous, and no one will take time to let the experts speak" at public hearings.

"It's absurd, but right now they don't care about the facts," she insists. "They don't care about the money, either. The numbers that the are throwing out --- $150 million dollars --- the thing is going to cost far more than that, it's clear. Their numbers are wildly off. They are rushing headlong to do this deal --- the facts, the voters, be damned."

Why? Well, we discuss that --- and what you can do about it --- on today's program. But I will note, that Marks tells me that many other jurisdictions followed Georgia after they adopted touchscreens back in 2002. She feels that is likely to happen again now. "So, this is important to try to stop this here. Conversely, if we stop it here, then in a lot of other places, they will look really hard. If Georgia turned it down when they were this close, then I think it will help stop it in other places." For now, however, unless something changes, it's looking more and more like Georgia voters are about to be saddled for another whole bunch of years of election results that can never be verified as accurate. Unfortunately, they won't be the only ones...

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It's happening way too slowly. But, if you haven't noticed --- it's unclear whether Republicans have yet --- their "strategy" of simply ignoring and denying very real problems, from a wildly failed and corrupt Presidency to Earth's climate now on the brink of disaster, is no longer working. You can only ignore and deny and delay for so long before things just fall apart. It's a theme that comes up in a number of stories on today's BradCast. [Audio link to show posted below.]

Among the stories we cover today...

• Fallout continues from Wednesday's bombshell Michael Cohen's testimony in the U.S. House Oversight Committee. According to conservative WaPo columnist Max Boot, evidence of at least five felony crimes by the President of the United States was offered under oath by Trump's former personal lawyer and fixer. Yet, Republicans don't seem to have a clue, according to Rightwing former NJ Governor Chris Christie, how to substantively respond. Describing it as a "fake hearing", as Trump did and hoping to tar Cohen as a "liar" only gets ya so far, particularly since Cohen already pleaded guilty to lying to Congress --- on behalf of Donald Trump! --- and is soon going to prison for it. His life would only gets worse if he lied to Congress again. So why would he? On the other hand, Trump has yet to face consequences for his unprecedented lies, cover-ups and felony crimes both before and after becoming President;

• Speaking of Trump and lies, his second Summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in Hanoi, Vietnam abruptly collapsed on Thursday, ending early with no deal and no agreement signed as planned. Trump claims it was because the North insisted the U.S. lift all sanctions in exchange for the closure of its main nuclear site. The North claims Trump is lying. Who to believe? It should also be noted that Trump, the self-described great deal maker, continues to fail to make virtually any deals at all with anybody over the two years of his woeful if tumultuous Presidency.

  He also failed, once again, to condemn North Korea's brutal and atrocious human rights record, and even publicly sided with Kim over U.S. intelligence agencies (yet again), this time regarding the death of 22-year old American student Otto Warmbier after his imprisonment there. Trump said Kim told him he knew nothing about Warmbier's death and "take[s] him at his word" on that. But, as long as the unbalanced Trump still believes he's friends with Kim, we'll take that over the "fire and fury like the world has never seen" that 2017 Donald Trump had been promising when he threatened to wipe North Korea off the map;

• Also today, in Israel, recommendations for felony indictments were announced by the Attorney General after a two year investigation of the dishonest, corrupt, Trump-supported, right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is currently facing a tough upcoming election. Despite the corruption allegations, Netanyahu says he won't step down as PM amidst what he describes as an "unprecedented witch hunt" by "the left". (Sound familiar?);

• Meanwhile, on Wednesday, while Cohen was testifying to Congress, McCrae Dowless and a number of his accomplices were arrested in North Carolina on charges related to absentee ballot election fraud on behalf of Republicans in the state. The long overdue accountability comes on the heels of last week's State Board of Elections hearing and unanimous vote for a new election in NC's 9th Congressional District. That, after Republican candidate and Baptist minister Mark Harris hired Dowless to run his absentee ballot campaign last year and lied about his knowledge of Dowless' tactics. The District Attorney who indicted Dowless and friends says more charges for "others", regarding the November 2018 general election, could be coming. Harris may want to do some heavy praying. The Board of Elections meets Monday to determine a date for the new election to fill the still-vacant U.S. House seat tainted by GOP fraud last year. Democrat Dan McCready says he plans to run again. The disgraced Harris says he won't;

• And, more good news for voters on Wednesday, this time in Texas. A federal judge has ruled the state may not purge as many as 98,000 voters from the rolls after Secretary of State David Whitley and (criminally indicted) Attorney General Ken Paxton declared them to be non-citizens fraudulently registered to vote in the state. As became apparent just hours after Paxton announced Whitley's flawed list in a "VOTER FRAUD ALERT!", tens of thousands of those listed were revealed to have been citizens after all. That didn't prevent Trump from tweeting out the fake news as "just the tip of the iceberg", in order to falsely declare that "voter fraud is rampant". But it has now earned a reprimand from a federal court and will likely block Whitley's state Senate confirmation as SoS, if Democrats in the chamber keep their vow to block Governor Greg Abbott's former aide turned nominee. The federal judge found that just 80 of the 98,000 names were actually non-citizens;

• Finally today, with the GOP's long-held Ignore and Deny strategy also falling apart on man-made climate change, Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report with news on that and much more, including some good news for solar power in Arizona for a pleasant change...

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On today's BradCast: As you may have heard, Donald Trump's former personal attorney and fixer Michael Cohen publicly testified under oath for some 7 hours in the U.S. House Oversight Committee on Wednesday. We're all over it today with special coverage. [Audio link to show is posted below.]

Among the "highlights" were Cohen's detailed allegations --- along with supporting documentation --- revealing that Trump committed felony crimes both before his election and since taking office, including secretly writing checks while President to reimburse Cohen for illicit hush-money payments made to Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 election. Cohen pleaded guilty last year to felony charges related to participating in that felony campaign finance conspiracy, which he says was "directed" by Trump to affect the election by keeping Daniels quiet about the affair she allegedly had with Trump.

Cohen also testified that Trump's son Don, Jr. participated in the conspiracy scheme in the months following the 2017 inauguration. Moreover, Cohen charged that Trump was told in advance by Roger Stone during the campaign that WikiLeaks' planned to release DNC emails said to have been hacked by Russia. He also offered evidence to suggest that Trump was well aware of the infamous Trump Tower meeting with Russians offering "dirt" on Hillary Clinton before it took place. Trump has previously denied both matters.

Cohen is set to soon begin a three-year federal prison sentence for his part in the hush-money conspiracy and for lying to Congress previously about Trump's plans to build a condominium project in Moscow.

In his damning and masterful opening statement [PDF], some of which we share at length today (and which you should read in full if you missed it), Cohen explains how he is seeking redemption and describes the man for whom he worked for ten years, in no uncertain terms, as a "racist, conman and cheat".

We're joined today by the great HEATHER DIGBY PARTON of Salon and Hullabaloo to discuss what we now know (and still don't), as well and how both Republican and Democratic lawmakers handled the day's astonishing and historic proceedings.

She describes Cohen's testimony as revealing how he "joined Trump's cult of personality and it destroyed him. The rottenness at the center of this cult of personality around Donald Trump was laid out, exposed. And [Cohen] looked in the eye of the Republicans sitting there on that panel who were defending Trump, saying to all these people, 'This will happen to you too. This is what happens if you follow this man.' It was almost a warning to the country [that] there's a rottenness surrounding this man on every level."

Indeed. Our full special coverage follows below...

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This is the week that everything is now all happening at once, apparently. We do our best to cover as much of it as we can, and then some. How it all fits together, you'll have to tune in and find out. Among the stories covered on today's whirlwind BradCast whirlwind [audio link to show is posted below]...

• With the nation's top U.S. General for homeland defense telling a Senate committee today that there is no military emergency on the southern border, and scores of former national security officials and former GOP lawmakers declaring this week that Trump's "national emergency" declaration is unjustified and even unlawful and/or unconstitutional, the U.S. House voted on Tuesday to block Trump's "emergency" declaration that takes money allocated by Congress for other purposes in order to build his border wall. Prospects for similar passage in the Senate are currently unknown, but currently looking positive. Overriding a promised Presidential veto, however, will be much more difficult, so this is all likely to be decided by the courts and ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court;

• Trump landed in Vietnam today for the start of his second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, where senior Administration officials have reportedly said the President plans to stay up overnight to watch Wednesday's televised hearing in the U.S. House Oversight Committee with Michael Cohen. Trump's former personal lawyer and fixer is expected, according to reports today, to testify --- with documentation --- on criminal acts he claims to have been carried out by Trump both before and during his Presidency. He's also expected to detail Trump's history of racist behavior and lies regarding his own personal wealth, among other things. Incredibly, Trump partisan Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) issued an extraordinary threat against Cohen via Twitter just before airtime today, which experts immediately cited as a potentially unlawful attempt at criminal witness tampering and/or intimidation;

• Also in the Democratic-majority U.S. House on Tuesday, hearings on the Administration's policy of family separation at the southern border amid new reports today of thousands of children alleging sexual abuse during their detention;

• In North Carolina, disgraced 9th Congressional House District Republican candidate Mark Harris announced he will not run in a new election called for the district after the November 2018 race was tainted by absentee ballot fraud carried out by Harris' campaign. According to his Harris' own attorney, after stunning surprise testimony against him by his own son at public hearings held by the NC State Board of Elections, the candidate and evangelical minister lied about his knowledge of the scheme. Harris now claims his health is preventing him from running in the not-yet-scheduled do-over election, and is also the reason for his faulty memory about his knowledge of fraud by a campaign contractor he hired to run his absentee ballot effort in Bladen County. The Democratic candidate, Dan McCready, previously announced his intention to run again, and several Republicans have now expressed interest in vying for the nomination in what will be the GOP's second bite at the apple, after getting caught committing election fraud the first time out;

• Also in NC, a state court judge late last week nullified two state Constitutional amendments approved by voters in November after they were placed on the ballot by a super-majority of Republican lawmakers in both chambers of the legislature. That state legislature, however, is built on an unlawful racial gerrymander by those same state Republicans, as confirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court last year. Therefore, the judge ruled, the illegitimately constructed chambers do not have the lawful right to place state constitutional measures on the ballot. One measure imposes photo ID voting restrictions previously found in violation of the state Constitution and another lowers a state cap on tax rates. The extraordinary ruling has already been appealed by the Republicans and legal experts are dubious as to whether it will be upheld by higher courts, but it reminds us (again) how, even when they know its unlawful and will eventually be overturned, it pays for lawmakers to gerrymander;

• In Florida recently, an 11-year old student was arrested and charged at school after refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance;

• And, in Arizona, 12-year old journalist Hilde Lysiak of Orange Street News (who, three years ago when she was 9, broke the story of a murder in her Pennsylvania neighborhood!) posted a videotaped conversation with Patagonia, AZ Town Marshall Joseph Patterson lying to her about the law regarding taping cops. Patterson had previously threatened her with arrest and/or detention in juvenile jail on the basis of still more false claims when he reportedly said he didn't "want to hear about any of that freedom of the press stuff." We share the video of hero Lysiak's second encounter with Patterson. She has reportedly been interviewing local residents about border security in the state and Patterson has reportedly been disciplined;

• Also this week, kids from the Sunrise Movement have been turning up to demand action on climate change and passage of the Green News Deal in the U.S. Senate, where Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) talked down to the children who visited her in her office asking for her vote on the GND, and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)'s office had a number of protesters in the group that visited his office arrested on Monday;

• All of which leads us up to our latest Green News Report with Desi Doyen today, with details on a new Trump climate change Commission to be headed up by a climate science denier; very bad news in Antarctica; and children around the globe protesting and walking out of school to demand action on climate change...

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On today's BradCast, experts are worried about Donald Trump's summit this week with North Korea's Kim Jong-Un. But, given the overall menace to the world that our President represents, are those experts too worried about a deal that could, at least, keep Trump believing that he is "winning"? [Audio link to show follows below.]

But, first up today, the (non-nuclear) fallout continues in North Carolina, after the state Board of Elections last week voted unanimously for a new election in the state's 9th Congressional District following a Republican absentee ballot election fraud scandal tainted last November's never-certified 905-vote "victory" margin of Trump-endorsed Republican candidate and preacher Mark Harris over Democrat Dan McCready. State prosecutors on Friday disclosed their intentions to bring the matter --- along with evidence of similar GOP fraud allegedly carried out in the same district back in 2016 --- before a grand jury. It's still unclear who might be charged and for which crimes, given that GOP contractor McCrae Dowless is said to have carried out the scheme paid for by Harris, who also appears to have lied about it all under oath last week on the witness stand during the Board's week-long public hearings on the matter.

After last week's decision to hold a new election, McCready quickly announced his plans to run again, but the disgraced Harris has remained mum. During a press avail at the White House on Friday, after months of not mentioning it, Trump was finally forced to comment on the unprecedented election fraud scandal engulfing the candidate he campaigned for in NC last year. In world salad remarks, he offered a bunch of false, disproved, or otherwise evidence-free claims about supposed "voter fraud" in California, Texas, and Florida last year.

Meanwhile, on Monday morning, the President took off to Vietnam for his second nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un. Diplomatic, military and atomic experts --- and even senior Administration officials --- have reportedly been expressing concern for what Trump may give away during the upcoming meeting, as the North has only increased its nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities following the pair's first meeting last June in Singapore, after which Trump falsely declared: "There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea."

Given Trump's 2017 "fire and fury" threats against Kim, however, are experts overly worried about whatever "deal" Trump may try to make with Kim in order to walk away with something he can pretend to be a "win"? In exchange for promises of eventual "denuclearization" or less, they worry Trump, could "give away", among other things, a permanent end to U.S. military exercises in the region; a peace treaty to once and for all end the Armistice struck between the North and South at the end of the Korean War in 1953; or even a promise to bring U.S. troops home from South Korea, where they have been stationed for decades during the long, if tenuous truce in Northeast Asia.

But are those things bad, in and of themselves? And, more to the point, with a U.S. President as wildly unbalanced and unqualified as our current one --- along with the need for "nuclear security triage", given that fact --- should we all just be happy that at least he now believes Kim is his best buddy?

Analyst STEPHEN SCHWARTZ, former publisher and executive director, now Senior Fellow at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists --- keepers of the so-called "Doomsday Clock" --- joins us to offer his insight and perspective on all of this in advance of this week's summit where, as I argue a bit today, a bad deal for the U.S. may be better than no deal, given the greater danger that Trump, with his finger on the nuclear button, presents to the world.

"In general, it's almost always a good thing when world leaders who are not seeing eye-to-eye on issues are talking rather than not talking, or arguing with each over Twitter, or setting up military confrontations up to and including war," Schwartz, who is also former editor of the Nonproliferation Review at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, tells me. "With Donald Trump, however, you can't really be sure, because he's very much a captive of the last person that he spoke with and tends to take their perspective. He's also pretty mercurial. He can turn on a dime and he's desperate for attention, desperate for a win, and therefore that makes it more likely he will try to strike some sort of deal that allows him, at least on the face, to come out of this looking like he accomplished something. And that could be problematic."

He goes on to explain why he believes "Kim Jong Un has Trump right where he wants him;" charges that Trump "in this instance, is both the arsonist and the fireman," having "inflamed an already tense situation with North Korea and made it much worse;" but seems to agree with my general theory that a placated Trump results in an ultimately safer world --- at least during the short term while he's still in office.

Schwartz also responds to Trump's repeated insistence that the U.S. would be at war with North Korea by now, had Hillary Clinton been elected in 2016 ("No, in a word," he tells me), and also comments on Trump's "very foolish and counter-productive" recent decision to withdraw from the otherwise successful, decades-old Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Russia, struck by Ronald Reagan with Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s, and much more.

Finally, before leaving for Hanoi, Trump found time to tweet in response to Sunday night's Academy Awards Ceremony in Hollywood, where director Spike Lee won his long-overdue first Oscar for the screenplay of the remarkably timely BlacKkKlansman. Even though Lee never mentioned him by name during his acceptance speech citing 400 years since slavery began in America, our racist President found a way to inject himself into the proceedings by tweeting out today that Lee, a descent of slaves, was actually "racist". We close by discussing both that and a few of the must-see films that got robbed by the Academy this year...

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On today's BradCast: Some maddening facts about what awaits when Robert Mueller's Special Counsel report is handed over to the Attorney General and what will and won't likely be in it. [Audio link to show follows below.]

But, first up today...in "lighter" news...some followup to our detailed coverage yesterday of the remarkable events leading up to the unanimous 5 to 0 vote by the North Carolina State Board of Elections for a new election in the state's 9th Congressional U.S. House District. The action was in response to what the board described as a "coordinated, unlawful, substantially resourced absentee ballot fraud scheme" in last November's election by the campaign of Trump-endorsed Baptist minister Mark Harris. The decision followed on stunning surprise testimony against Harris by his own son at the Board's public hearings on the matter this week.

Among our follow-up coverage today: the (not-at-all-shocking if wildly-hypocritical silence from GOP "voter fraud" fraudsters who've made their living for years lying about phony fraud to encourage laws that suppress the Democratic-leaning vote, while hoaxing Fox "News" brain-addled clowns like Donald Trump into believing there's an epidemic of Democratic voter fraud, rather than the insider election fraud which can easily flip the results of an entire election --- as seen in North Carolina. It was also nice to hear the NC Democratic Chairman finally explain the difference between "voter fraud" and "election fraud" to NPR's Steve Inskeep on today's Morning Edition. We'll see if NPR can remember that difference in the future.

And, speaking of GOP hypocrisy, long-time Trump-supporting billionaire and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft was charged today by Florida police for two instances of soliciting prostitution, as he was caught amidst a probe into human sex trafficking. Ironically enough, human trafficking has long been disingenuously used by Trump to support his "National Emergency" declaration to steal money from the military for use in building his border wall with Mexico. The news of the warrant for Kraft's arrest today raises a panoply of interesting issues which Desi and I take a few minutes to discuss.

Then, with several media outlets reporting this week that a report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller may be coming as soon as next week (and, at least one outlet today reporting that's not so), the question of what happens whenever that report is finally delivered to the Attorney General is coming to the forefront.

My guest today, Professor STANLEY M. BRAND, Distinguished Fellow in Law and Government at Penn State University, recently argued in a column at The Conversation that those hoping the public may see this report after it's turned over, by statute, to Trump's newly-minted AG William Barr may be in for some disappointment. Brand, who formerly served for eight years as General Counsel to the U.S. House, now teaches a course on the Independent Counsel at Penn State, explains how it differs from the Special Counsel statute that replaced it after the Clinton era. He suggests the public may never see any of Mueller's "confidential" report.

More frustratingly, he tells me why he believes that Mueller is unlikely to indict the President or recommend such an indictment and how the by-the-book prosecutor is similarly unlikely to recommend impeachment in his report. Unlike the old Independent Counsel statute in effect under Nixon and Clinton, the new statute, he explains, as written by a Democrat, is limited to criminal matters only (not legislative matters such as impeachment) and requires Mueller largely to issue a "confidential" report with little more than details on who was prosecuted and who was not, and what, if any, actions were blocked by the Attorney General overseeing the probe. What Barr then does with that report, he explains, is a separate matter.

Brand, who says he has worked with both Mueller and Barr in the past, says "you may see portions of it, or you may see selected excerpts, or representations of what it contains, if Bill Barr --- and I take him at his word --- wants to be as transparent as he can within the rules and regulations."

In somewhat more comforting comments, he also contends, in response to my query about the curious timing of Barr being seated just days before news (accurate or not) of the report's imminent release: "I have no notion why it's wrapping up --- if it is --- at this particular point, but I have confidence that, if it is wrapping up, it's because Mueller has decided he's finished." He adds, "Nobody is going to push Bob Mueller around. So if there's a conclusion to this, it's because Mueller has determined in his judgment that it's time and he has no further actions to bring."

Brand also offers his insight on whether Mueller would testify to Congress, if subpoenaed, about what was in the report if it's not released to the public or even to Congress. The central frustration at the core of this conversation, at least for me, is that Brand essentially argues that Mueller can't indict Trump (thanks to very debatable, if long-held DoJ "guidelines") and wouldn't cite evidence of impeachable offensives in his report, since that is not part of the new statute's mandate, as written in the wake of "excesses" under the old statute.

"Leon Jaworski, who was the Independent Counsel in the Nixon case, decided that he had sufficient evidence to indict but determined it was not something he should do, given the ongoing investigation into impeachment by the House of Representatives," Brand explains. "Ken Starr, for his part, determined that he could indict a sitting President but determined as a matter of discretion not to do that, because the statute provided a specific mechanism for referring that type of evidence to the House for impeachment, which he did, and which resulted in an impeachment proceeding of President Clinton."

But now, If Mueller can't indict or recommend impeachment, how is this current process supposed to bring accountability for a scofflaw President? There is a lot more to dig into in our discussion, as maddening as it may be at times. It does, however, raise the clear need for a long-overdue Congressional Hearing in the U.S. House Judiciary Committee into whether a sitting President can, under the Constitution, be criminally indicted (a hearing that would, on its own, likely bring some accountability for our current Executive). It also raises the question of why the hell Democrats are waiting for the Mueller Report to be issued before taking action to bring accountability through impeachment, especially since even they may never see this report! If not this President, then what President would ever merit impeachment proceedings in Congress?!

Finally, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced that a vote will be held in the U.S. House on Tuesday to block Trump's "National Emergency" declaration under the National Emergency Act. It'll likely pass in the Democratic-controlled House, but what are its chances in the GOP Senate, which much also hold a vote within 18 days of a resolution being adopted by the House? And, will EITHER chamber be able to overcome an almost-certain veto by the President?

That all remains to be seen, but satirist Randy Rainbow has a few musical thoughts on Trump's "Border Lies" to play out us out today at the end of another impossible week...

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On today's BradCast: It looks like it'll be several more months before we actually have a member of Congress seated in the 2018 U.S. House race in North Carolina's 9th Congressional district. But, as of dramatic developments last night and again today, at least we now know that a new election is finally on the way. [Audio link to show is posted below.]

After a stunning past 24 hours, the NC State Board of Elections voted 5 to 0 on Thursday to hold a new election, following dramatic, surprise testimony on Wednesday at a public hearing over the disputed results of last year's NC-9 House election. Republican Mark Harris is said to have defeated Democrat Dan McCready by just 905 votes out of more than 275,000 cast, but evidence of absentee ballot fraud by a Contractor hired by Harris prevented the Board from certifying the results.

On Wednesday, John Harris, an assistant U.S. Attorney and son of the Republican candidate, took to the stand at this week's public hearings to turn against his father by detailing warnings he had given his dad about the Republican absentee ballot contractor, McCrae Dowless, whose record of defrauding elections was clear long before he was hired by Harris for his 2018 campaign.

Today, we break down both the backstory from 2016 through the 2018 contest, as well as the astonishing key events from the past 24 hours in which John's testimony brought his father to tears in the hearing room [see photo above], and also stunned the McCready campaign which similarly not known in advance of John Harris' plan to take the stand to testify against his father's claims of innocence. "I thought what he was doing was illegal, and I was right," said John, discussing Dowless' record. In his own teary closing statements, he testified: "I love my dad, I love my mom, O.K.? I certainly have no vendetta against them, no family scores to settle, O.K.? I think they made mistakes in this process and they certainly did things differently than I would have done."

And with that, and a few other comments about the need to "transcend our partisan politics, and the exploitation of processes like this for political gain," we're happy to offer John Harris our coveted if more-rarely-than-ever-bestowed BRAD BLOG Intellectually Honest Conservative Award. We haven't given one of those out in years!

Moreover, just minutes before the testimony, emails and texts between father and son were released, detailing the warnings John had given his father Mark (a Baptist minister!) about Dowless, which undercut the Republican candidate's long-repeated, if never-believable public insistence that he'd known nothing about Dowless' penchant for forging absentee ballots.

In 2016, Harris lost the Republican primary by a very slim margin after losing an impossible number of absentee votes in Bladen County to the another candidate who had hired Dowless. In 2017 the state Board of Elections referred the election fraud case to the U.S. Attorney at Trump's Dept. of Justice. But the DoJ took no action, despite the mountain of election fraud evidence uncovered by state investigators from the 2016 GOP election fraud scheme. All before Harris hired him for his 2018 campaign and what state officials described earlier this week as a "coordinated, unlawful, substantially resourced absentee ballot scheme".

The 5 to 0 vote of three Democrats and two Republicans on the Board to hold a new election followed Mark Harris' own testimony in which he tried to distance himself from his son's damning testimony and attempted to defend his months of demands he be seated, before finally declaring today: "It's become clear to me that the public's confidence in the 9th District seat general election has been undermined to an extent that a new election is warranted."

Buckle up for the entire sordid and remarkable tale as it unfolded today and the many subsequent unanswered questions raised by this entire shameful mess.

Then, how hand-marked paper ballots were instrumental to uncovering the NC fraud scheme, how the recent report that Trump's DHS has moved resources from election oversight to immigration/border matters in advance of the 2020 race, and the disturbing story of the long-time Coast Guard official who, according to federal prosecutors on Wednesday, was a White Supremacist domestic terrorist plotting to murder "leftist" Democratic members of Congress (many of whom have been singled out by Donald Trump), along with MSNBC and CNN media figures "on a scale rarely seen in this country." That, on the very same day that Donald Trump tweeted, yet again, in all caps, that journalists are the "ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!"

Finally, Desi Doyen brings us the latest Green News Report on the Trump Administration punting on action to prevent incredibly toxic chemicals in our drinking water, another global heat record last month, and even a bit of good news out of Australia for a change....

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On today's BradCast: The crowded Democratic 2020 field gets crowded-er; The GOP's years of phony concerns about "voter fraud" are revealed as even phonier; And our own Green News Report meets another remarkable milestone. [Audio link to show is posted below.]

First up today, 2016 Democratic primary election second-place finisher Bernie Sanders announces he's running in 2020 and immediately raises a "yooge" amount of money in just hours. But the progressive independent Senator from Vermont faces a new set of challenges in his bid to win the nomination this year among a very crowded and already-quite-progressive field of candidates.

Then, the North Carolina State Board of Elections finally began their public inquiry into the Republican absentee ballot fraud scheme that apparently resulted in the 905-vote "victory" for Republican Mark Harris [pictured above at today's evidentiary hearing] in the state's 9th Congressional District race over Democrat Dan McCready last November. Neither candidate has yet been certified by the state Board as its investigation has been ongoing for months and as NC's Elections Director Kim Strach charged this week that GOP operative McCrae Dowless, a contractor hired by Harris and Bladen County Sheriff Jim McVicker, ran a "coordinated, unlawful and substantially resourced absentee ballot scheme" in two counties, with enough questionable ballots to have called the Harris/McCready 905-vote margin (out of some 275,000 votes cast) into doubt.

Dowless' scheme, according to public testimony at the hearing this week by Lisa Britt, one of his team of workers, included illegally collecting and modifying absentee ballots; paying workers to harvest those ballots; changing votes with attempts to match the ink used on each voters ballot; falsifying witness signatures and more.

While the state GOP is still backing Harris, national Republicans have remained mum about the coordinated election fraud conspiracy --- despite years of false claims about Democratic voter fraud. It's still unknown whether the 3-2 Democratic-majority State Board of Elections will ultimately certify Harris, call for a new election, or end in deadlock, since 4 votes are needed for either action. If deadlocked (or even if Harris is certified), the issue will be investigated and decided by the Democratic-majority U.S. House of Representatives. Shamefully, after state investigators found that Dowless ran a similar absentee ballot fraud scheme in 2016 and sought prosecution from the Dept. of Justice at the time, Trump's U.S. Attorney in the state ignored the matter, choosing instead to prosecute a handful of alleged non-citizen voters instead of the blatant fraud conspiracy that appeared, once again in 2018, to have stolen an entire election (or more.)

Finally today, we celebrate 10 years of the Green News Report! Desi Doyen joins us for the latest GNR in which we cover both the environmental news of the day and our milestone of a full decade of independent green news, politics, analysis and snarky comment over YOUR public airwaves!

As discussed, Desi has been covering dire warnings about global warming and connecting the climate change dots before even I fully appreciated the dangers. I learned thanks to her important, repeated coverage of these issues as I hope listeners around the globe have as well over these past 10 years. If so, it's all thanks to those of you who have supported our efforts to help get the word out over your public airwaves by donating to our work via BradBlog.com/Donate.

If you haven't done so lately, or haven't signed up for a monthly subscription of any amount you like, please consider doing so now, as we rely only on listeners (not corporate ads, foundational grants or political groups) to continue our work here after 15 years of The BRAD BLOG and a full decade of GNR! Thanks in advance for whatever you can spare to help keep us going!

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On today's BradCast, we revisit the mysterious case of tens of thousands of 'missing' votes from Georgia's 2018 midterm election, now that the case has become even more mysterious and disturbing, with investigators finding that African-American neighborhoods may have been specifically 'targeted' in some fashion. [Audio link to show posted at end of article.]

But, first today: Donald Trump and Beto O'Rourke held dueling rallies near each other and near the border in El Paso, TX on Monday night, after the President had been offering a series of lies about the effectiveness of an existing border wall in the city. During the Monday rally, Trump also lied about his rally's crowd size and that of O'Rourke's, which appears to have been larger than Trump's.

More tellingly, however, the President also failed to let his supporters know about a deal struck before the rallies by Republican and Democratic negotiators in Congress to avoid another government shutdown this Friday at midnight. The agreement, reportedly, includes less money and less fencing than Trump could have had if he'd agreed to the deal he backed out before Christmas last year, losing leverage with his subsequent record-long 35-day government shutdown and the Democratic takeover of the U.S. House. That's "The Art of the Deal"? We detail the tentative agreement and whether Trump will be harangued again by rightwingers into not signing it and shutting down the federal government yet again at week's end.

Then, we're joined once again by longtime election integrity bulldog MARILYN MARKS of the Coalition for Good Governance with a disturbing update to the group's election contest filed in state court last year to challenge the inexplicable reported results from Georgia's 2018 Lt. Governor's election. Marks had joined us previously to detail some 127,000 ballots cast last November found to have "missing" votes in only that race and only on ballots cast via the state's 17-year old, easily-manipulated, 100% unverifiable touchscreen voting systems. Democrat Sarah Riggs Amico is reported by those systems to have lost the race to Republican Geoff Duncan by 123,172 votes out of almost 4 million counted, according to the final certified results.

The 4% undervote in the contest seems impossibly huge, given that other statewide contests even further down the ballot (e.g. for Sec. of State or Agriculture Commissioner) saw a far smaller rate of ballots with no vote recorded --- an average of about 1% or less in those other races. Moreover, votes cast in the same race for Lt. Governor on verifiable hand-marked paper ballots revealed an expected, similarly small undervote rate. So, this appears to clearly be machine related somehow.

But, while the group's initial analysis revealed a disproportionate number of undervotes in Democratic-leaning areas, a newer analysis [PDF] by a number of top-flight election data analysts --- as detailed exclusively over the weekend by Michael Harriot at The Root and today (sadly, behind a paywall) by Kim Zetter at PoliticoPro --- finds that African-American neighborhoods and precincts, specifically, had an even higher disproportionate rate of missing votes in the Lt. Governor's race. Experts are having trouble coming up with non-nefarious reasons for the numbers and, as Marks tells me, state and local officials appear curiously uninterested in what is clearly a massive disenfranchisement of their own voters.

"We have had all sorts of statisticians all over the nation, from academics to those who work for political data houses, and everybody's coming up with exactly the same answer --- that African-American neighborhoods were the ones highly impacted by this," Marks tells me. "There's something wrong across the state. The state has too many missing votes, no matter what county we look at. However, it is exacerbated greatly in the heavily African-American precincts, no matter where you look."

"I've never worked on a case one-tenth as important as what I believe this is," she says. "While you and I and others, for years, have known about the dangers of electronic voting machines, and we've warned about them, I swear I never thought I would see machines used in a way that had racial disparity as a result."

We discuss the possible reasons --- nefarious and otherwise --- for such an alarmingly disproportionate undervote rates and the Coalition's several ongoing lawsuits in Georgia challenging the Lt. Governor results on the state level and the state's entire unverifiable touchscreen voting system on the federal level. Marks also discusses whether either case will soon allow for an independent forensic investigation of the computer-voting and tabulation systems used in the state in 2018, as the Coalition is demanding via discovery.

It's also worth noting here that Georgia's new Governor, Republican Brian Kemp --- who was reported to have narrowly defeated popular African-American Democrat Stacey Abrams last year --- oversaw all of the 2018 elections (including his own) as Secretary of State while repeatedly being excoriated by federal courts for voter suppression tactics. At the same time, counties in key states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Iowa and even in California, are now preparing to moving to similarly 100% unverifiable touchscreen voting systems in advance of the 2020 Presidential election. The latest news from Georgia's shameful 17-years of disastrous elections is troubling on its own, but this incident serves as yet another object lesson and warning for the entire country, as even many Democrats are now supporting the move to such completely unverifiable voting systems. (See Los Angeles, for example.)

"If there is anything good that can come out of this whole mess that we're in, surely it is that people are going to be able to see we have to stop it with this electronic voting. Here we are, months after the election, we don't know if any of those numbers can be trusted. We can't run elections this way!," Marks argues. "So, hopefully this will have some benefit to the nation in saying, 'Look, you gotta quit using touchscreen machines. End of story.'"

Finally, we're joined today by Desi Doyen with our latest Green News Report, for special coverage of the landmark Green New Deal resolution introduced in Congress last week by Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (MA)...

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On today's BradCast: Yes, Virginia, there is a problem with race (and hate) in the Commonwealth. But Democrats would be wise to take a breath and notice what's really going on there before making critical political decisions out of fear. [Audio link to show follows below.]

The media are all over the astonishing crisis that has overtaken VA state politics in the past week, since a Republican website revealed a racist photo on Governor Ralph Northam's 1984 yearbook page, and a serious sexual assault allegation leveled against Lt. Governor Justin Fairfax, while Attorney General Mark Herring subsequently announced that he had donned blackface while dressing as one of his favorite rappers for a party 40 years ago when he was 19. The political futures of all three Democrats now hang precariously in the balance, with top Dems (and media elite) both inside and outside of VA demanding Northam resign, despite the complete lack of evidence to suggest he is a racist in the 35 years since the photo was published. As we discussed on Monday's program, Northam claims he knew nothing about the photo until last week, as he hadn't purchased the yearbook.

But with Fairfax --- an African-American and first in line to succeed the Governor, should he step down --- facing a serious assault allegation (which he has repeatedly denied) and some calls for Herring --- second in the line of succession --- to step down, echoing those leveled against the Governor, the next state official in the line of succession is Republican House of Delegates Speaker Kirk Cox.

Cox is in that role, thanks only to a questionably "tied" Delegate election in 2017 that left the GOP in control of the House, after a Republican election judge changed his mind in order to create the tie, and a subsequent lot was drawn from a ceramic bowl to break it.

Far more notably, and far less reported, is that a decade of unconstitutionally gerrymandered House of Delegates districts drawn by the GOP to dilute the voting power of African-Americans gave Republicans as many as 8 more delegates in the House than they likely would have won with fair districts. One of those districts was "won" by Speaker Cox himself, according to a new district map ordered for use in this year's 2019 House elections by a panel of federal judges just weeks ago. Without the racial gerrymander, he likely wouldn't be in the House at all, much less in a position to become the next Governor, replacing a guy who admitted only that he put shoe polish on his face to dress as Michael Jackson in a dance contest 25 years ago.

We break down the entire mess today to, hopefully, shed some light on the FULL story of what's going on there, and how Democrats' fearful and breathless rush to avoid charges of hypocrisy may be serving to simply do themselves in for no good or even smart reason.

Also today: Republicans are freaking out about wildly popular ideas such as increasing taxes on the wealthy and a "Green New Deal" (a resolution officially introduced today by Democratic freshman Rep. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez [D-NY] and veteran Senator Ed Markey [D-MA]). They are so alarmed that over at Fox "News", anchors are describing increased taxes on rich people as an attack on Capitalism itself, and programs like the Green New Deal as "Venezuela-styled socialism". But the laugh out loud part is when one wingnut Fox personality explains why, he claims, that such programs are now so popular among voters of all political persuasions. AOC's Twitter response was priceless.

Finally today, Desi Doyen joins us for details on all of that and with the latest Green News Report, on Trump's "disgraceful" failure to mention climate change at this week's State of the Union Address, despite hundreds of Americans killed and displaced over this past year alone, which is now, officially, the fourth hottest year since record-keeping began...

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On today's BradCast, should Virginia's Democratic Governor Ralph Northam resign after his 1984 medical school yearbook was revealed late last week to have featured a photo of a man in blackface standing next to a man in a KKK costume? Don't answer that too quickly. Or, at least listen to today's show first. [Audio link to show follows below.]

After apologizing on Friday night for the appearance of the photo --- calling it "clearly racist and offensive", but failing to specify which of the pictured two men he actually was --- the Governor said at a bizarre Saturday press conference that he was neither man and that he had never even seen the photograph before, since he hadn't purchased that year's yearbook. He says the photograph hit him "like a ton of bricks" on Friday night. However, he told the media that he did remember an instance around the same time when he darkened his face to dress up as Michael Jackson for a dance contest. He said he remembered the contest outfit very specifically, discussing it publicly for the first time on Saturday, while insisting that he never recalls dressing up in either minstrel show blackface or as a Klansman, as depicted in the mystery photograph.

One of the two African-Americans in the same medical school class that graduated with Northam told AP the explanation is plausible, as he didn't purchase the yearbook either and found the racist photo on Northam's page to be out of character. Despite Northam's record of working closely with the African-American community and still being a member of a predominately black church in the town where he grew up, top Democrats from Virginia to D.C. and beyond continued their loud calls on Sunday for him to step down and allow his Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax --- an African-American Democrat --- to replace him.

But should he? And should he be shunned for something that may have never happened? Or, if it did, happened 35 years ago and appears completely inconsistent with his record since then? The answers to those questions are both "absolutely yes" and "no, not so fast", as we discuss with callers today, focusing on Northam's remarks at the strange, yet seemingly earnest Saturday presser in which he stated that acquiescing to calls to step down would allow him to "spare myself from the difficult path that lies ahead," adding: "I could avoid an honest conversation about harmful actions from my past. I cannot in good conscience choose the path that would be easier for me."

We endeavor to have a least part of that "honest conversation" with tons of callers on today's program, including some discussion about key civil rights figures (from Lincoln to Justice Hugo Black to LBJ) whose own histories of racism arguably allowed them to lead on a number of landmark civil rights issues from Emancipation to Brown v. Board of Education to the Civil Rights of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Also today: While I was happy to see MSNBC, on Friday night, highlight a Super Bowl ad buy in Georgia markets by former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams' voting rights group Fair Fight, calling for "hand-counted paper ballots," the news outlet's Rachel Maddow Show maddeningly cut the :30 commercial off when reporting the story, just before the crucial line calling for "hand-marked paper ballots"! (Made, in the spot, by Republican Commissioner of Habersham County, GA Natalie Crawford, by the way.) Maddening. Especially since, unless the voters rise up to protect overseeable elections and stop them, the state of Georgia, along with counties in key states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas --- not to mention Los Angeles County and neighboring Ventura County! --- are all now planning moves to expensive, unauditable touchscreen Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs) before the 2020 Presidential election. Those systems print out computer-marked and barcoded paper ballots which are 100% unverifiable after an election has ended.

Add MSNBC's failure there to a list of disappointments over the weekend from the mess in Virginia to the loss of the L.A. Rams at the Super Bowl...

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No, we're still not done with the 2018 elections on The BradCast, even as we begin to turn towards the hell that awaits in 2020...because someone's got to. We've got several follow-up stories today, and some new ones. All of them maddening for those of us who believe in fair and overseeable public elections. [Audio link to today's show is posted below.]

First today, an update to a story we covered in detail yesterday. Florida's new Republican Governor Ron DeSantis recently suspended the elected Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections, Susan Bucher, falsely charging the 10-year elections official --- one of the most knowledgeable and respected in the nation --- with "incompetence". Her suspension followed on another by Rick Scott, the previous Republican Governor, of the Supervisor of Elections in Broward County. In both cases, the officials in two of the most Democratic counties in the closely-divided swing-state have now been replaced with Republicans in advance of 2020. These are extraordinary partisan power grabs.

While Bucher had vowed last week to fight her suspension, about an hour after we got off air yesterday she decided to resign rather than challenge her case to the partisan GOP-controlled Florida state Senate, her only option under state law. Here's the full statement [PDF] on her decision to resign that Bucher sent me earlier today.

An outrageous decision by Republicans in Iowa's state legislature on Monday illustrates a similar concern in the Hawkeye State. There, Republicans in the state House of Representatives won a party-line vote to reject 29 absentee ballots cast in an Iowa state House race last November that was reportedly won by the Republican candidate by just 9 votes out of more than 14,000 cast. The unopened ballots in question were missing a postmark --- the Postal Service acknowledges they don't always postmark absentee ballots --- but had barcodes on the envelopes confirming that the ballots were sent and received by the Post Office in time to be included in the tally. Nonetheless, GOP state lawmakers refused to open the ballots and include them in the count, denying the voters their right to vote and ensuring the 9 vote "victory" by the incumbent Republican Rep. Michael Bergan, The Democratic candidate who filed the election challenge, Kayla Koether, says she's considering a lawsuit with some of the voters in response.

Speaking of rejected challenges, we're joined once again today by MARILYN MARKS of the Coalition for Good Governance for several maddening updates to at least two election cases that her organization has filed in Georgia. One, which we initially covered with her when it was filed last year, is an election contest to the results of November's Lt. Governor's race. That contest featured an inexplicably huge undervote rate, but only in that race (not in any other races much farther down the ballot) and only on the state's 100% unverifiable touchscreen voting systems (the undervote rate was as expected, in line with other contests, on hand-marked paper ballots sent via mail or at the polls during early voting in the some race.)

That contest, however, was recently dismissed in an remarkable ruling by Cobb County Judge Adele Grubbs. She found the plaintiffs offered no evidence that votes were cast illegally or that legal votes were rejected, after refusing to allow discovery that would have permitted an expert forensic investigation of the state's unverifiable, easily-hacked, oft-failed touchscreen voting systems. Marks' organization is now appealing Grubbs' ruling to the state Supreme Court and is hopeful the higher court will allow the discovery investigation that was denied, but that voting systems experts say is warranted.

Marks says the Secretary of State's office refused access the systems and the judge "forced us to go trial without the first shred of discovery, which is our legal right to have. She also denied our right to a jury trial. So the state and the court has nailed the doors shut to make sure that we don't get to find out what is behind this clear machine misprogramming, defect, malfunction, whatever it is."

At the same time, Marks has also been leading the charge in an uphill battle against former GOP Sec. of State, now Governor Brian Kemp and his Republican successor Brad Raffensberger to replace the state's unverifiable touchscreen voting systems with hand-marked paper ballots. Computer scientists and voting systems experts strongly recommend such systems [PDF], along with voters in the Peach State who have spoken out loudly and clearly in favor of hand-marked paper ballots.

And yet, the private voting system vendor lobbyists, elections officials and elected state Republicans continue to call for newly designed and expensive unverifiable touchscreen systems which produce a barcoded ballot summary card instead of a verifiable record of voter intent. It's impossible to carry out legitimate post-election audits of computer-marked ballot summaries. Nonetheless, jurisdictions around the nation --- counties in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas and even Los Angeles County, not to mention the the entire state of Georgia --- may soon be voting on such unauditable, unverifiable systems in the 2020 Presidential election, unless they can be stopped.

"There is just no reason that such machines should be legal in this country, given what we know now about the dangers of electronic voting," Marks tells me, while noting that computer Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs) cost about three times as much as hand-marked paper ballots systems. "There's too much money involved, and therefore a lot of people are not looking at what's best for the state. I'll just say it that way. Too many people have probably received too many favors."

"Unfortunately, for some of the decision-makers, having an unauditable system is a feature, not a bug," she opines, while remaining hopeful that "people are catching on" that a barcoded ballot system is not the same as a verifiable hand-marked paper ballot system, despite how elections officials are misleading voters around the country.

Finally today, speaking of 2020, Desi Doyen joins us with the latest Green News Report as Democratic candidates begin taking positions on a "green new deal", as hundreds are dead or missing in a mining dam collapse in Brazil, and as a powerfully frigid Arctic polar vortex descends on much of the U.S. (thanks, in no small part, to climate change)...

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On today's BradCast: how Florida Republicans are brazenly stripping elected Democratic election officials of power (their jobs, in fact!) in advance of the 2020 election, and callers ring in on Donald Trump's shutdown capitulation and what happens next. [Audio link to show follows below.]

Florida's new Secretary of State Mike Ertel, appointed at the end of last year by the state's new Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, was forced to resign late last week after photos of him dressed in blackface at a 2005 Halloween party, making fun of Hurricane Katrina disaster victims in New Orleans, were surfaced by a Florida newspaper.

But, far more troubling is that two elected county Supervisors of Elections have now been suspended and forced out of their job in the two most Democratic areas of the state. Former Governor Rick Scott pushed out Broward County's Brenda Snipes last year, after the midterm elections. And a week or so ago, the new Governor DeSantis subsequently suspended longtime Palm Beach County Supervisor Susan Bucher. Both suspensions used false pretexts.

Scott falsely claimed that Snipes added fraudulent ballots to the totals last November. DeSantis claimed that Bucher's failure to deliver results on time from last year's unprecedented four statewide "recounts" (including ones that Scott won for the U.S. Senate and DeSantis won for Governor) justified the removal of the popular --- and elected! --- Supervisor Bucher. [DeSantis and Scott are pictured above with Trump.] While Snipes has had a number of failures as Broward's elections chief over the years, Bucher is one of the most dedicated and knowledgeable election officials in the nation.

As we reported before Florida's ridiculously short deadline for machine "recounted" elections last year, the older tabulation system still used in Palm Beach was simply, and physically, incapable of re-tallying ballots from four different statewide races in the 5 days or so allotted by state law. Bucher's removal, as described on today's program in detail, is nothing short of an outrageous GOP power-grab.

As the Palm Beach Post editorial board described in a scathing editorial, the removal of Bucher "plunged a dagger into the election process". They argue it "smacks of overreach and an abuse of power". Bucher, the board accurately notes, is "highly respected by her peers," has been "a hard-working public servant," before concluding: "[S]he has never shown anything but dedication and integrity to the voters of this county. She doesn't deserve this blatantly partisan bum's rush from a fledgling governor."

But, it's not just a Florida outrage. It should be a national one, given that two Republican lackeys have now been installed by Republican Governors to oversee elections in the two most Democratic-leaning areas of the closely divided Sunshine State in advance of the 2020 Presidential election. And, in both cases, they were removing officials who were (small-"d") democratically elected by their constituents!

Also today...

• The billions lost to the U.S. economy, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, thanks to Trump's shutdown;

• How federal contract workers are currently screwed without promises for back-pay, unlike furloughed federal employees;

• The population of monarch butterflies has absolutely plummetted in California (and elsewhere). Not a good sign.

• And callers ring in on why they believe Trump finally decided to fold on the shutdown on Friday --- at least for three weeks, until it may happen again, or he decides to declare a fake "national emergency" to justify stealing billions of tax-payer dollars allocated to military spending in order to build his unnecessary and unwanted southern border wall...

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On today's BradCast, it's the 15th Anniversary of The BRAD BLOG! So --- in addition to the news of the day --- we take a precious few minutes on today's program to reminisce a bit with longtime BradBlog.com legal contributor ERNEST A. CANNING and Green News Report co-host and BradCast producer DESI DOYEN! [Audio link to full show is posted below.]

After a few words on Canning's latest article at the blog on the "Political Revolution" embodied by the new freshman class of progressive U.S. House members and the many challenges they are now facing down in D.C., we discuss some of the lessons learned and important stories covered at our little, independent, reader- and listener-supported website over the past decade and a half.

Many of the stories we broke years ago --- too numerous to link here, on everything from electronic voting concerns and voting rights to climate change and much more --- have since become part of the national consensus as well as many popular calls for reform. That, even as much (but not all) of our independently verifiable, evidence-based news coverage was marginalized or dismissed by many in the corporate media years earlier. We discuss just a few of those stories today --- too numerous to detail here --- as we look both back and forward on this latest milestone. We also offer thanks to the many who have made all of it possible over the years, from our blogging contributors, to radio affiliate partners, to various whistleblowers (publicly known and unknown) over the years.

Of course, none of it could be done without those of you support our work via BradBlog.com/Donate. So, if you haven't hit that page in a while, please consider doing so, as we operate solely on the support of folks like you. Seriously. Please consider a one-time donation or, even better, an automated monthly donation of any amount you can afford. I hate haranguing folks for this, but it really is necessary in order for us to continue our work, which we now share on a daily basis with dozens of radio affiliates around the country and world for free! Your support alone allows that and so much more that we do at The BRAD BLOG, The BradCast and the Green News Report to continue. And if I can't ask on our 15th birthday, when can I? So click here please! And thank you!

And, yes, there was also a bit of news today for a change in Washington D.C., so we also cover that on today's program. Among those stories...

• Donald Trump's federal government shutdown nears the end of it's fifth record week, as he folded like one of his own cheap and poorly tailored suits on Wednesday night in his standoff with U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on delivering his State of the Union next week.

• At the same time, federal aviation unions issued a dire warning about the ongoing effects and potential critical dangers of the shutdown.

• We share a heartbreaking story about a 10-year old girl who suffered a broken wrist in stoic silence for a week, because she was frightened to tell her father, a Dept. of Homeland Security employee forced to work without pay.

• Billionaire crypt-keeper and Commerce Dept. Secretary Wilbur Ross took to the airwaves to, essentially, call 800,000 federal workers whiners for needing to use food banks to feed their families, when they could just go out and get a bank loan instead to cover costs until the federal government reopens.

• In the U.S. Senate, Mitch McConnell finally allowed votes on measures to reopen the government, one from Rs and one from Ds. Both failed to get the 60 votes needed to overcome filibuster, though the D version --- which did not include funding for Trump's border wall --- received more votes than the R version in the GOP-majority Senate.

• And Trump's former attorney Michael Cohen learned that he may have to appear before both House and Senate Committees next month, despite threats to his family by the President of the United States.

• Finally. Desi brings us the latest Green News Report, with more bad news about the shutdown and Greenland's melting ice shelf, but some encouraging news on a huge majority of Americans who now appreciate the threat of climate change and on the amazing teen climate activist taking on the corporate powers and millionaire/billionaires at Davos this week...

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

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