New U.N. climate change warning; Fossil fuel air pollution kills 50,000 per year in U.S.; Bloomberg's new clean air initiative; PLUS: Wildfires force national forest closures...
U.S. wildfire risk doubling over next 30 years; Russia's energy and now food war; California hits 100% renewable electricity, as Texas struggles to keep the lights on...
Great Barrier Reef bleaching again; Global warming and new diseases; Interior cancels offshore lease sales; PLUS: AZ, CA move to enact more severe drought restrictions...
Felony charges dropped against VA Republican caught trashing voter registrations before last year's election. Did GOP AG, Prosecutor conflicts of interest play role?...
State investigators widening criminal probe of man arrested destroying registration forms, said now looking at violations of law by Nathan Sproul's RNC-hired firm...
Arrest of RNC/Sproul man caught destroying registration forms brings official calls for wider criminal probe from compromised VA AG Cuccinelli and U.S. AG Holder...
'RNC official' charged on 13 counts, for allegely trashing voter registration forms in a dumpster, worked for Romney consultant, 'fired' GOP operative Nathan Sproul...
So much for the RNC's 'zero tolerance' policy, as discredited Republican registration fraud operative still hiring for dozens of GOP 'Get Out The Vote' campaigns...
The other companies of Romney's GOP operative Nathan Sproul, at center of Voter Registration Fraud Scandal, still at it; Congressional Dems seek answers...
The belated and begrudging coverage by Fox' Eric Shawn includes two different video reports featuring an interview with The BRAD BLOG's Brad Friedman...
FL Dept. of Law Enforcement confirms 'enough evidence to warrant full-blown investigation'; Election officials told fraudulent forms 'may become evidence in court'...
Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL) sends blistering letter to Gov. Rick Scott (R) demanding bi-partisan reg fraud probe in FL; Slams 'shocking and hypocritical' silence, lack of action...
After FL & NC GOP fire Romney-tied group, RNC does same; Dead people found reg'd as new voters; RNC paid firm over $3m over 2 months in 5 battleground states...
After fraudulent registration forms from Romney-tied GOP firm found in Palm Beach, Election Supe says state's 'fraud'-obsessed top election official failed to return call...
On today's BradCast [audio link posted below], the historic nomination of Hillary Clinton for President of the United States on Day 2 of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, as Dems continue to seek unity in a still-fractured party, Republican nominee Donald Trump calls for Russia to hack and publicly release emails from Clinton's time as Sec. of State, and the latest data-based prediction from FiveThirtyEight.com finds Trump with a 55% likelihood of winning the Presidency, compared to Clinton's 45%, if the election were held today.
With all of that history and madness in mind, we turn to calls from listeners on all of the above. Many (though not all) say they still refuse to vote Clinton, despite Bernie Sanders' plea for them to do so. Others argue why Clinton (and even Trump) should be elected. Our friend and historian Jon Wiener, of The Nation and Pacifica Radio'sKPFK also calls in to (somewhat) refute FiveThirtyEight's prediction, and I do my best to challenge everyone to support their positions.
Suffice to say, it was a very lively caller segment today.
We then finish up with Desi Doyen and the Green News Report's wrap up of last week's Republican convention in Cleveland (including a fact-check on Trump's promise to burn much more coal), and new data on more record heat across the globe...
While we post The BradCast here every day, and you can hear it across all of our great affiliate stations and websites, to automagically get new episodes as soon as they're available sent right to your computer or personal device, subscribe for free at iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or our native RSS feed!
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On today's BradCast, just as we warned you on the day he entered the race back in June of 2015 (when everyone else told you his candidacy was a joke), Donald Trump will now be the 2016 GOP nominee for President of these United States. No joke. And, yes, Bernie Sanders is still both running and winning against the front-runner on the Democratic side.
We cover the reported results from Indiana yesterday, including the GOP dead-enders Ted Cruz and John Kasich who have seen the writing on the wall and both finally dropped out of the race. We also cover the upset victory of Sanders over the corporate media's presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, how he is likely to have more such victories in the weeks ahead, and how the MSM does an amazing job of not noticing.
Then, we're joined by our old friend Heather Digby Parton of Salon and Digby's Hullabaloo. She was with us this year for a ton of our debate coverage, but was also with me on the show last year on Day 1 of the Trump campaign. At the time she joined me in my belief that Trump was going to receive huge support among the thoroughly brainwashed and fact-addled Rightwingers that now make up the Republican Party following years of fact-free propaganda passed on to them by wingnut talk radio and corporate "news" outlets.
Now that we know Trump will, barring "an act of God", as Parton says, be the GOP nominee, it seemed a perfect time to talk about what it all means and how the mainstream corporate media was so wrong for so long about Trump (and even about Sanders). As Parton notes: "He is the sort of zenith...He is the id of that conservative 'essence' over the course of the last thirty years. And without the media having prepared people for believing that this was normal, that this represented America, I'm not sure [he would have done this well]."
"Let's not forget," she adds, "this was supposed to be the deepest bench, the most awesomely prepared group of Presidential candidates in American history...and it came down to Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. Out of that entire group, that's what we were left with. And that is a legitimate reflection of the Republican Party."
But does Parton share my concern that Trump could do a helluva lot better in the general election than many gleeful Democrats currently believe? And will the Democratic electorate think twice about selecting Clinton as their nominee, now that Trump will almost certainly be the GOP's? For all of that, you'll have to tune in.
We close out the hour with a few more reminders of how the mainstream corporate media completely misinformed the American electorate about both Trump's rise and his likelihood of securing the Republican nomination. (They told you over and over he'd never win. We warned you over and over otherwise.) And then, finally, we end today's show with a fantastic story about some ballots and a boat and some folks in Rhode Island who helped make democracy possible for a few lucky voters last week...
While we post The BradCast here every day, and you can hear it across all of our great affiliate stations and websites, to automagically get new episodes as soon as they're available sent right to your computer or personal device, subscribe for free at iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or our native RSS feed!
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Please help support The BRAD BLOG's fiercely independent, award-winning coverage of your electoral system --- now in our ELEVENTH YEAR! --- as available from no other media outlet in the nation...
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It's been happening for years now. On the day after elections like last Tuesday's, media figures begin navel gazing to figure out how pre-election polls, created by dozens of independent pollsters using dozens of different methodologies, could all find the same thing but turn out to be so wrong once the election results are in.
The presumption is that the results are always right, and if they don't match the pre-election polling, its the polling that must be wrong, as opposed to the election results.
On Wednesday morning, after Tuesday's mid-term election surprise in which Republicans reportedly won handily in race after race despite pre-election polls almost unanimously predicting much closer races or outright Democratic victories, FiveThirtyEight statistics guru Nate Silver declared "The Polls Were Skewed Toward Democrats".
His analysis of aggregated averages from dozens of different pollsters and polls this year found that the performance of Democrats was overestimated by approximately 4 percentage points in Senate races and 3.4 points in gubernatorial contests. Silver's assessment relies on a "simple average of all polls released in the final three weeks of the campaign," as compared to the (unofficial and almost entirely unverified) election results reported on Tuesday night. He doesn't suggest there was anything nefarious in the polling bias towards Dems this year, simply that the pollsters got it wrong for a number of speculative reasons.
Citing the fact that nearly all of the polls suggested Democrats would do much better than they ultimately did, when compared to the reported election results, Silver asserts it wasn't that the polls were more wrong that usual, per se, but that almost all of them were wrong in a way that appears to have overestimated Democratic performance on Election Day.
"This year's polls were not especially inaccurate," he explains. "Between gubernatorial and Senate races, the average poll missed the final result by an average of about 5 percentage points --- well in line with the recent average. The problem is that almost all of the misses were in the same direction."
Silver is much smarter than I when it comes to numbers; I'm happy to presume he has the basic math right. But he seems to have a blind spot in his presumption that the pre-election polls were wrong and the election results were right. That, despite the lack of verification of virtually any of the results from Tuesday night, despite myriad and widespread if almost completely ignored problems and failures at polls across the country that day, and despite systematic voter suppression and dirty tricks that almost certainly resulted in election results (verified or otherwise) that were skewed toward Republicans...
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About Brad Friedman...
Brad is an independent investigative
journalist, blogger, broadcaster, VelvetRevolution.us co-founder,
expert on issues of election integrity,
and a Commonweal Institute Fellow.