On today's BradCast we attempt to make sense of last night's State of the Union Address. Wish us luck. [Audio link to full show follows below.]

The New York Times described Trump's SOTU on Tuesday as "veer[ing] between two moods --- combative and conciliatory." Democratic minority leader Chuck Schumer described it as "sort of like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the excitement and the enthusiasm was all in the Mr. Hyde parts."

A majority of Americans who watched it, however, approved of the Trump's remarks, at least according to early polling weighted towards self-identified Republicans and right-leaning independents.

Our two excellent guests today, award-winning opinion journalist HEATHER DIGBY PARTON of Salon and Hullabaloo, and author and political media critic ERIC BOEHLERT formerly of ShareBlue and Media Matters, now a contributor for Daily Kos, join us to make sense of both parts (all parts?) of Trump's at-times disjointed, at-times collegial, and at-times aggressive remarks as they veered conversely between out-and-out lies to something more closely resembling facts but shamefully lacking in context.

Did Trump meet the bar set for him by his own White House aides who'd promised new calls for "unity" and "bi-partisan cooperation" in his speech? Is Trump capable or even interested in that?

"These State of the Unions are typically the least awful thing Trump does in any given week," Boehlert observes, "because it's a prepared speech, it's poorly written, he delivers it poorly. But there are moments where he does appeal to independents. And then he goes back to the crazies."

Says Parton: "If the idea was to unify the Republicans, then yes, it obviously worked. By their measure, I think they probably did what they wanted to do. ... [But] there is no President in American history who is less authentic-sounding than Donald Trump when he's calling for unity and bipartisanship. And they know it."

Beyond those optics, we also dig into, among many other things in today's lively, very fast-paced hour: Trump's ridiculous threats against "ridiculous partisan investigations"; The striking image of a sea of new and veteran female Democratic Representatives dressed in suffragette white; Nancy Pelosi's triumphant new-again role as House Speaker; Trump's obsessive (not to mention graphic and largely false or misleading) continuing advocacy for a southern border just days away from another potential federal government shutdown; The stunning number of important issues (from the climate crisis to gun violence to the recent record-long shutdown and much more) that Trump didn't bother to even mention, for some reason; The misleading use of Venezuela's ongoing political crisis as an attempt to smear "socialism" in the U.S. in advance of 2020; and Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams' very smart, spirited and inspiring response to Trump's dark, long, and largely fact and substance-free SOTU...

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On today's BradCast: Some encouraging news for democracy (at least in Georgia), some predictable lies from the Senate Majority leader, a gentle rebuke for Trump from both parties, and a call for intervention from the Senate Minority Leader, among other things.

Just some of the many stories covered on today's program...

• Georgia Democrat and potential U.S. Senate candidate Stacey Abrams, who will be giving the Democratic response to the State of the Union Address on Tuesday, is set to run a television ad during Sunday's Super Bowl in Atlanta with a north Georgia Republican County Commissioner calling for HAND-MARKED paper ballots in the state!
  
  The ad is sponsored by Abrams' non-partisan voting rights organization Fair Fight, formed after Abrams is said to have very narrowly lost her contest to become the nation's first African-American female governor last November to Republican Secretary of State and champion vote suppressor Brian Kemp. Both he and his GOP successor are now calling for the state's 100% unverifiable touchscreen voting systems to be replaced with new, very expensive and also 100% unverifiable touchscreen systems that produce computer-marked, human-unreadable barcoded ballot summary cards, rather than hand-marked paper ballots which computer science and voting systems experts all agree [PDF] to be the most secure, auditable and overseeable way to carry out elections;

• In the U.S. Senate, Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell offered a huge lie about the Democrats' "For the People Act" (HR-1), recently introduced in the U.S. House to call for a series of major election reforms. Among the many provisions in the measure --- such as universal automatic voter registration, expanded early voting, ending partisan gerrymandering and yes, ensuring a HAND-MARKED paper ballot for every voter --- it also seeks to declare Election Day as a federal holiday. Naturally, McConnell lied about what the bill calls for on that point, and absurdly describes the measure as a "Democrat power-grab". We respond;

• Also in the U.S. Senate, Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer sent a letter to Trump's Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats calling for him and the other Administration Intelligence Chiefs to "stage an intervention" with the Commander-in-Chief, after Donald Trump described his own top intel officials on Wednesday as "wrong", "naive" and needing to "go back to school!" on a host of foreign policy issues. Trump's remarks came in response to the Intelligence Community's new annual "Worldwide Threat Assessment" PDF. The report, and Senate testimony from the chiefs about it on Tuesday, argues that Trump is essentially wrong on everything from North Korea, to Iran, to ISIS to Syria and Afghanistan, and on his claims about an imagined "national emergency" at the U.S. -Mexico board.

• But if Schumer really wants to "stage an intervention" with this President, his Democrats in the Senate and House could be calling for an immediate Impeachment inquiry. As detailed by Ernest Canning at BradBlog.com this week, the Nixon impeachment process reveals that it is both unnecessary and, arguably, unwise for Dems to wait for a report from the Special Counsel investigation before exercising their Constitutional duty;

• Also today, Republicans and about half of Senate Democrats passed an amendment that (gently) rebukes the President by calling for U.S. troops to remain in both Syria and Afghanistan, in contrast to Trump's recent military directives;

• An upside to the recent federal government shutdown? A beach in Northern California that had been closed will remain closed, because elephant seals have taken it over;

• And, finally, Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report, with updates on the record bone-chilling --- and deadly --- Polar Vortex cold snap in the Midwest and Northeast, evidence that Trump's intervention in Venezuela is, of course, all about oil, and some good news out of Germany which is now on its way to quitting coal entirely...

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On today's BradCast, the Trump Administration continues to destabilize both the Korean Peninsula and the U.S. health care insurance markets. [Audio link to show follows below.]

President Trump continued to increase his threatening rhetoric against North Korea (and to play the victim himself, as is his wont) on Friday, even as experts on the region see little new in the North's own bluster and saber-rattling. Instead, they worry that the Trump Administration's own unpredictable rhetoric and instability could lead to a misunderstanding or miscommunication that could, itself, result in military action by either side, the results of which could be catastrophic.

Still, there remain diplomatic ways out, via Russia and China, from the seemingly deadly collision course, so long as those options are not closed off by Trump. There are even direct, ongoing back-channel communications between representatives of both the US and NK, as reported on our previous show and confirmed today by the Associated Press.

Then, on the heels of the recently failed Republican attempt in Congress to repeal and/or replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA or 'ObamaCare'), new polling finds the public strongly prefers that Congress and the President move on to other issues, shore up funding for the ObamaCare exchanges where needed, and will otherwise hold both Republicans and the Administration responsible for further problems with U.S. health care coverage.

Nonetheless, the Trump Administration continues to take deliberate measures to undermine the landmark federal health care law, even as those actions have resulted in double-digit increases in premiums rates for 2018 across the country --- including for non-ObamaCare customers --- according to insurers. To date, the Administration has sabotaged the ACA by cutting the length of the open enrollment period in half, has cancelled advertising to let the public know about it, has used those resources instead on propaganda to attack the federal law, has ended some $20 million in contracts for in-person sign-up assistance in 18 under-served cities, and has threatened to end Cost-Sharing Reduction (CSR) payments to insurers for low-income individuals which, according to my guest today, could "send the market into a tailspin" if the President makes good on those threats.

Today, we are joined by Congressional reporter ALICE OLLSTEIN of Talking Points Memo to discuss her new exclusive revealing yet another way in which the Administration appears to be radically undermining the continuing success of the ACA, this time in the vastly under-served Latino community.

In this case, Ollstein explains, "It's more about what they are not doing." She explains that, at this time last year, and in previous years in advance of the annual open enrollment period beginning in November, hundreds of health care advocacy groups "were really revving up with tons of outside groups, and corporations, and religious organizations, health organizations, to get the word out and work with the government to promote information about open enrollment."

This year, however, after speaking with dozens of such groups, she says "every single one said" they have heard nothing from the government. "And I found a very stark pattern, particularly with the groups that focused on Latino enrollment," she tells me. "Latinos have the highest rate of un-insurance out of any racial demographic. They also disproportionately live in states like Texas and Florida that did not expand Medicaid. Those partnerships for outreach, leading up to open enrollment, are so far not happening this year."

The results, she reports, could be disastrous not only for the Latino Community, but for the health care market itself around the country. We also discuss what Trump and both Congressional Republicans and Democrats are considering for their various next steps regarding federal health care law.

[Update 8/14/2017: Ollstein follows up her exclusive with another, finding that it's not only Latino groups which had previously partnered with the government, but are now being ignored by the White House in the lead up to the open enrollment period.]

Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report before late-breaking news on Trump's announcement that he is now also considering military action against Venezuela...

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It's that time of the election cycle again. Happens every four years. (Every two, actually.) On today's BradCast: That moment when partisans on the Right declare Democrats are stealing the election with voting machines owned by George Soros and Democrats worry that Republicans are doing the same via private companies actually owned by big GOP supporters. [Audio link posted below.]

Both sides see votes flipping on touch-screen systems to their opponents. Both sides declare it only happens to their chosen party. Both sides have reason to worry about private ownership of our electoral systems. Both sides tend to be very selective about their concerns. And both sides do nothing about it until it's time to start freaking out again just before the next election.

The old, previously debunked charge that the progressive billionaire Soros is somehow controlling voting machines across the U.S. re-appeared yet again in the Rightwingosphere over the weekend, only slightly modified from its 2012 version. This time it has resulted in a petition to WhiteHouse.gov --- so far, signed by more than 70,000 since it was posted late last week --- demanding "congress meet in emergency session about removing George Soros owned voting machines from 16 states."

But, of course, as we noted back in 2012, when Democrats were concerned about the actual ownership of voting machine company Hart Intercivic by associates of Mitt Romney, Soros does not own any companies with voting machines in the U.S. He doesn't own any companies with voting machines used elsewhere either, to my knowledge. But the original seed for the persistently false rumor seems to have been planted, in no small part, by The BRAD BLOG's exclusive coverage way back in 2008 of a Venezuelan voting machine company named Smartmatic --- once believed linked to Hugo Chavez --- and their secret ownership of the Intellectual Property (IP) used in voting machines made by Sequoia Voting Systems. Many of those machines are still used in about 15 states across the country.

Sequoia has since been purchased by a Canadian firm named Dominion Voting, which, like Sequoia before it, lied about Smartmatic's ownership of IP used in Sequoia's machines. But, as I explain on today's program, it could hardly be further removed from Soros who, as it turns out, has absolutely no stake in Smartmatic or any of the other vote counting companies deployed in the U.S..

But, like Democrats, Republicans have every right and reason to be concerned about the obscene private corporate ownership of our nation's public voting and tabulation machinery. (Please petition Whitehouse.gov about that!) As I noted to a reporter seeking comment about the concerns about Romney's ties to Hart Intercivic around this same exact time before the 2012 Presidential Election...

And, like similar clockwork, once again this year we are now hearing the shouts about touch-screen voting machines flipping Democratic to Republican and Republican to Democratic --- and the claims from partisans on both sides that "this only ever happens to Republicans/Democrats!" --- as early voting gets underway in a number of states. Is there legitimate reason to worry about such votes flipping? The answer is both yes and no, with reason for all of us to be ashamed, as I explain on the show today.

Also, not unrelated on today's program: Volkswagen's record billion dollar settlement for programming their cars' software to cheat on emissions tests; GOP Senator in close election warms up to climate change; Desi Doyen joins us for the Green News Report as pipeline protests rage, China closes coal-fired power plants, Sen. Marco Rubio looks the other way as Florida faces rising seas, and the corporate media ignore all of it during each of this year's Presidential debates...

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Once again, voters headed to the polls and caucuses on Tuesday. This time in AZ, UT and ID. So, as you may have guessed, on today's BradCast we cover all of the reported results, historic turnouts and, yes, all of the problems faced once again by voters --- particularly in Maricopa County (Phoenix), AZ.

While Bernie Sanders won the night on the D side (not that the corporate media much mentioned that) and Trump, once again, won the R side, the biggest story was how election officials, yet again, failed the voters.

In Phoenix, longtime Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell (R), massively reduced the number of polling places from 211 in 2012 to just 60. She was able to do so after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013. Prior to that, she would have had to get approval from the federal government for such a change before thousands were inconvenienced and/or disenfranchised by it. The result was thousands of voters waiting in line --- for up to five hours in some places --- with the last votes finally cast after midnight on Wednesday.

On today's show, we call out the folks responsible (the ones we know of, at this time), call for an official investigation, and even call out those folks (talking to you, many Bernie supporters!) shouting "VOTER FRAUD!", when your concerns are actually election fraud or voter suppression. (Please leave the voters alone! They are doing fine and performed heroically on Tuesday! But I have much more to say about that, and about falsely charging people with fraud without evidence in support of those charges, on today's show.)

Also today, more disturbing details about the insane, 100% unverifiable and hackable "online caucus" experiment that the UT GOP subjected its voters to. (Here's the details on that spoof website of the UT GOP's Internet Voting scheme that I referenced on today's show.)

Also: Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report and I (barely) fit in a call or two and much more on today's BradCast!

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P.S. I'll be on the road for a few days with Nicole Sandler of RadioOrNot.com guest-hosting for me while I'm gone! Be nice until I'm back!!!

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"Some countries are willing to stand up to the United States right now," Michael Ratner told Amy Goodman earlier this week, as he heaped praise upon Ecuador, the nation which previously granted political asylum to Ratner's client, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Ecuador has defied the U.S. by saying it will consider NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's request for political asylum.

It is likely that Ecuador is already furnishing Snowden with some level of diplomatic protection. AP reports that, according to WikiLeaks, Snowden was being "escorted by diplomats and legal advisers" during his travels from Hong Kong to Russia last weekend. It seems likely that Snowden was met at Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport by Ecuadorian diplomats. A black BMW with diplomatic license plates assigned to the Ecuadorian Embassy was reportedly, waiting at the airport last Sunday in advance of Snowden's arrival.

Ecuador is not the only nation that is unwilling to cooperate, for differing reasons, with an apparently vengeful U.S. government which has sought to make an example of Snowden by charging him with espionage. Some, like Hong Kong, have a longstanding commitment to free speech and the right to due process. Others, like Russia, have an interest in closer political and economic ties to the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA) --- a group of socialist and social democratic Latin American and Caribbean nations that includes three potential Snowden destinations, Cuba, Venezuela and Ecuador.

In all cases, there appears to be a growing revulsion towards the overreach of the NSA's increasingly privatized, "Big Brother"-like intrusions and a growing recognition that the United States has long-since abandoned its mantle as a beacon of democracy and a nation devoted to "equal justice under the law"...

"Maybe"? Ya think?! From Chicago Tribune, on their recent interview with former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor about 2000's infamous Bush v. Gore case...

"Probably"?! Ya think?! The paper goes on to explain that O'Connor's "vote in the 5-4 Bush v. Gore decision effectively gave Republican George W. Bush a victory over his Democratic opponent, then-Vice President Al Gore." That, after the U.S. Supreme Court had stopped the public hand-counting of the votes cast by the people of Florida.

Had O'Connor and friends not stopped the state-wide hand count, they would have found, as a consortium of media and academics did afterwards, that Gore defeated Bush by every conceivable counting standard in the state of Florida.

Contrast O'Connor's thoughtful, if ridiculously-too-late response to the question of the controversial Bush v. Gore, with that of the still-serving U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who was seen over the weekend yucking it up with Bill O'Reilly of Fox "News" at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. When asked, in 2007, about the case which allowed five Supreme Court justices to install a U.S. President over the will of the people, he responded that it was "water over the deck", and Americans just need to "get over it."

Four years after Bush v. Gore, in 2004, Democrats vowed not to let that happen again, of course. Their Presidential nominee that time, then Senator John Kerry, promised he would not concede until every vote was counted. Despite massive reports of fraud, particularly in Ohio, and Exit Polls finding he had won in swingstate-after-swingstate, countering the still-unverified electronic results reporting that he had lost in many of those same states, Kerry flip-flopped and conceded the day after the election.

Remarkably, now that an unverified and unverifiable election in Venezuela has recently resulted in the U.S. Government's favored candidate being announced the loser, Kerry, now serving as Sec. of State, is calling for a full hand-count of "paper receipts" in that country because he claims to be concerned about the "confidence of the Venezuelan people in the quality of the vote," as our own Ernie Canning detailed earlier today. Yes, that's what Kerry really said.

Do you suppose he, like O'Connor, may someday realize that "maybe" he made a mistake too?

Over the past decade, The BRAD BLOG, has become one of the nation's largest repositories of articles documenting the folly of e-voting. Thousands of articles at this site, written over the years by multiple journalists, computer experts, scientists, whistle-blowers and election integrity advocates, have pointed to academic and government studies, electoral train wrecks in election-after-election and out-and-out system crashes resulting in long lines, lost votes and denial of both service and democracy on Election Day.

We've even documented instances in which the official results were not merely absurd, but in some cases, virtually impossible --- from the negative 16,022 votes registered for Al Gore by a Volusia County, Florida optical-scan system during the contested 2000 Presidential Election to the thousands of electronic votes which simply disappeared after election night in Monroe County, Arkansas' 2010 state primary, just to mention a couple.

With rare exception, these very real, scientifically-based and independently verifiable concerns about the threat to democracy posed by a lack of transparency in how, if at all, votes are counted within the confines of computer vote tabulators, have, at best, been all but ignored by the mainstream corporate media, or, worse, scoffed at by the likes of "journalists" like Chuck Todd, NBC News' supposed election expert, as little more than "conspiracy garbage." With rare exception (e.g. last year in Palm Beach County, FL where, as a result of a 100% hand-count of paper ballots, several "losing" candidates, as initially determined by the Sequoia optical-scan tabulators, were actually found to be the winners) election-after-election has been decided in this nation without so much as a single ballot having been counted by a human being before results, right or wrong, are announced to the public.

The extent to which the U.S. government has ignored these scientific concerns was encapsulated by the fact that, last Fall, the President of the United States saw fit to cast his early vote on the oft-failed, incredibly-vulnerable, easily-hacked and 100% unverifiable Sequoia AVC Edge Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) touch-screen voting system in Chicago --- a system manufactured by the same voting machine company which, according to its former employees, deliberately sabotaged the punch card paper stock that was bound for use in Miami-Dade, Florida during the 2000 Presidential Election. That same tabulation system, relied upon by the President in Chicago, was also the one which declared the wrong "winners" in three different races in the Palm Beach County elections held earlier last year.

President Obama, in an apparent reference to the secrecy of the vote, said "I can't tell you who I voted for." He either didn't realize or didn't care how ironic that statement was given that it is scientifically impossible to ever know if his vote, or anyone else who cast a vote on that same 100% unverifiable e-voting system, was recorded accurately, or at all. It disappeared into the electronic black hole on equipment now ostensibly owned by Dominion Voting Systems, the Canadian corporation which purchased Sequoia in 2010. The Sequoia-manufactured, Dominion-owned e-voting machine Obama used to cast his vote last year was the trade secret Intellectual Property of yet another company: Smartmatic Voting Systems, a Venezuela-based, international e-voting systems manufacturer and supplier which had long ago been tied to the late President Hugo Chávez.

But a funny thing happened after the results of Venezuela's recent Presidential election were announced by the country's National Electoral Council (CNE). According to the electronic central tabulators of the country's 100% unverifiable Smartmatic DRE e-voting systems, Chávez protégé, Nicolas Maduro, had narrowly defeated the U.S.-backed Henrique Capriles.

At that moment --- and only for Venezuela's election, clearly --- both the U.S. government and U.S. mainstream corporate media suddenly became election integrity converts.

They insist on a 100% hand-count of the DRE-produced paper receipts because, as observed by ABC News, the CNE results are based upon "information that is sent electronically from each voting machine to the central vote counting hub," and not "from a manual count of the voting receipts deposited in ballot boxes." That, of course, is almost the exact same way that President Obama's vote in Chicago was tallied, either accurately or not, last year.

When asked by the AP's Matthew Lee whether the U.S. would recognize the Maduro government now that the election had been certified by the CNE, the State Department's Patrick Ventrell said earlier this month: "We're not there yet." His sentiment would be echoed by Secretary of State John Kerry, ironically enough, in an appearance before Congress. Both Ventrell and Kerry claimed to be concerned about the "confidence of the Venezuelan people in the quality of the vote."

Setting aside the fact that there is no way to know whether any computer-printed paper receipt accurately reflects the will of any voter in any election, the event underscores, once again, the striking duplicity of both the U.S. government and the corporate-owned mainstream media on the subject of democracy...