As detailed on today's BradCast, the cost of healthcare for tens of millions of Americans is likely to skyrocket as of January 1. It is likely to be far worse than you've heard. Congressional Dems are fighting to prevent it. Republicans, including the President, seem to be just fine with it. Those are basically the terms as we barrel toward a likely federal government shutdown next week. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

We dig into the details, stakes, and positions of the two sides on that shutdown deadline (October 1) and the new costs for health care set to explode after December 31 with our guest today who knows a whole lot about all of the above. But first, a bit of news...

• Jimmy Kimmel returned to our public airwaves on Tuesday night, after a week-long suspension following threats by Donald Trump and his FCC Chairman, Brendan Carr, to revoke broadcast licenses from ABC affiliate stations if they didn't nix Kimmel. In the wake of public outrage (and cancelled streaming service subscriptions), Disney, which owns ABC, buckled and invited Kimmel back on air. To the hilarious despair of Trump, Kimmel received enormous ratings last night, and delivered a heartfelt, emotional, blistering, funny, courageous and important monologue. We play an extended portion of it today, given that tens of millions of Americans in dozens of major markets were not allowed to see it thanks to the Sinclair and Nexstar corporations, the nation's two largest local TV station conglomerates, which are refusing to reinstate the program.

• Democrats continued their winning streak in Special Elections on Tuesday by, once again, outperforming themselves by enormous margins as compared to last November. In Georgia, for example, in a special election for the State Senate in a very Republican district, while the Democratic candidate lost, she picked up about 18 points for Dems in that district as compared to last November. In Arizona, Adelita Grijalva easily defeated her Republican opponent in a special election to fill the U.S. House seat left vacant by the death of her 12-term progressive Democratic father, Rep. Raul Grijalva. But where Raul won reelection by 26 points last November, his daughter, on Tuesday, won by nearly 39 points. That's a 13-point swing for Dems. If you compare her Tuesday victory to the Presidential results in that same District last year, Dems improved by 16 points. Adelita has also vowed to sign the Congressional discharge petition to force a vote in the U.S. House on releasing the Epstein Files. Her signature is the last one needed to achieve a majority of House members signing on. That should allow the vote to finally proceed.

Little wonder then that House Speaker Mike Johnson has instructed Republicans to stay home next week, even though without a deal with Democrats to keep the Government open, it will shut down on Wednesday, the first day of the new federal fiscal year.

To that end, Democrats are desperately working to strike a deal with Republicans. But they are standing firm (so far) in demanding a permanent expansion of the enhanced premium subsidies for more than 25 million Americans who receive access to health care via the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or Obamacare) exchanges. Monthly premiums --- and health care in general for everyone, thanks to Trump's tariffs --- are set to go through the roof at the end of the year, without an extension. This will adversely affect millions of Republican constituents across the country, as well as Democrats and independents.

But where Democrats are trying to strike a deal, Donald Trump, who had agreed to meet with Democratic leaders to negotiate this week, abruptly cancelled the meeting on Tuesday night, citing all kind of false and, frankly, batshit insane phony reasons for chickening out of his first face-to-face meeting with Democratic Leaders since retaking office this year.

There is a lot on the line in the days (and weeks ahead), which could, in addition to scrambling politics in D.C. and putting government employees out of work, result in millions of Americans losing their access to health care.

We're joined today to break all of this down by CHARLES GABA, a longtime independent healthcare data analyst, who first began his work on this as a hobby in the early years of Obamacare. He is now regularly cited as a source by mainstream media. Most recently, Gaba has been publishing state-by-state breakdowns of how much ACA customers can expect to see their monthly premiums rise next year, if Republicans refuse to extend the enhanced premiums temporarily enacted by Democrats after Joe Biden took office in 2021.

"Basically," he tells me, some 25 million Americans are "kind of screwed" beginning next year, unless Republicans come around to extending the subsidies. "I am one of those," explains Gaba, whose family --- including himself, his wife and his child --- enjoy access to healthcare thanks to the ACA. "If they are not extended, then starting January 1st, if we are in the same policy that we are today, we'd be looking at around an $11,000 increase in our premiums next year. That's on top of what we're already paying."

Gaba's state-by-state analyses leads him to expect "90-95% increases on average" for monthly premiums next year without a renewal of federal subsidies. He underscores that that is an "average", and that while some might see less, "there are also going to be other households that are going to see their net premiums increase 200%, 300%. In theory they could be looking at going five or six times what they are paying now, which of course, nobody could possibly afford. A lot of people at the more extreme ends are going to have to drop their coverage entirely."

While Republicans have teased the idea of extending subsidies temporarily, for another year, Gaba, one of the first to warn about this potential healthcare-pocalypse, tells me today why he is rallying Democrats to allow the Government to shut down, if necessary, unless Republicans agree to expand the ACA subsidies permanently, roll back their recent massive cuts to Medicaid and include provisions in any budget agreement that would prevent Trump from simply rescinding any of the spending agreed to by Congress.

And, oh yes, all of this is likely causing huge problems health care company actuaries trying to set pricing for the Open Enrollment period beginning November 1. "I'm sure they are going through Pepto-Bismol and Tums by the bottle-full right now. The insurance companies, they actually started crunching their numbers back in March. This is a multi-month process. The final contracts [with state regulators] are supposed to be signed usually sometime in mid-September." And yet, on CNN today, Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune called for a seven-week Continuing Resolution to keep the government open at current spending levels, kicking the can down the road to figure out whether ACA subsidies will be extended beyond the end of the year.

Tune in for insight on the very high stakes, potential horrors, and almost certain chaos that awaits over the next few days and weeks, even while few Americans have even noticed any of this just yet...

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So much Team Trump criming, so little time to cover it all on today's BradCast. But we try. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Over the weekend, MSNBC broke the news, followed by confirmation from New York Times, that Donald Trump's so-called 'Border Czar', Tom Homan, was caught on tape last September accepting $50,000 in cash --- in a takeout food bag --- from undercover law enforcement officials posing as businessmen. The sting came about after the target of a separate corruption probe tipped off officials that Homan was accepting bribes in exchange for lucrative border security contracts in a new Trump administration, presuming he won last year's election.

After Trump took office, he tapped Homan to oversee his mass deportation of migrants, a scheme that, they had promised, would focus on removing "the worst of the worst" criminals. Instead, the majority of deportees have no criminal record, but the guy running the program has apparently been caught on tape accepting a cash payoff before returning to office.

The investigation into Homan, which reportedly began in the summer of 2024 under the Biden Administration's DOJ, was summarily closed after Trump returned to power by Trump's former criminal defense attorney turned Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche, and his FBI Director, Kash Patel. One of Trump's other personal attorneys, Emil Bove, who served as a top DOJ official until recently being confirmed by Republicans in the U.S. Senate as a federal judge, also reportedly had a hand in shutting down the probe of Homan.

A DOJ spokesperson described the investigation as "blatantly political" and an effort to target "President Trump’s allies rather than investigate real criminals and the millions of illegal aliens who flooded our country," claiming the investigation "found no evidence of illegal activity."

Over the same weekend that story broke, Trump sent what appears to have been meant as a private message to his Attorney General Pam Bondi, effectively ordering her to bring criminal charges against three of his top political foes, New York Attorney General Letitia James, former FBI Director James Comey, and California U.S. Senator Adam Schiff. The message addressed to "Pam", seemingly meant to be private, was instead posted publicly by Trump on his own failing social media website.

We're joined today for insight on all of this by RANDALL D. ELIASON, former chief of the DOJ's Fraud and Public Corruption Section at the U.S. Attorney Office in the District of Columbia. He now teaches white collar crime at George Washington University Law School and pens the Sidebars Blog newsletter.

Is there any reason to believe the DOJ and FBI were right to drop the bribery probe against Homan, in which it seems he was caught dead to rights taking a cash bribe according to multiple reports?

"It's really impossible to know without knowing exactly what's on the tape. It would all come down to what he said and what he agreed to do in exchange for the cash," Eliason tells me today. "But I will say that accepting $50,000 in cash in a fast-food bag is kind of an indication of corrupt intent, that the recipient knows something shady is going on. So you've got to say at a bare minimum, there's a substantial basis to conduct additional investigation." Reportedly, that's exactly what DOJ was doing until Team Trump shut it all down.

"This line coming out from the White House and the DOJ that there was no evidence of any criminal wrongdoing, that doesn't hold water," he argues. "There's clearly something fishy going on here when you're taking fifty grand in cash in a Cava food bag. So there's certainly some smoke there." But, he further explains, "the Supreme Court has made the federal bribery statute so narrow" there are a number of ways Homan could get off the hook. Of course, the fastest way is to have friends at the DOJ willing to corruptly dismiss the entire matter.

We discuss that in detail, along with what Eliason describes as an extraordinary break from decades of norms and tradition with Trump's "private" message to his A.G. regarding bringing charges against his perceived political foes.

"Trump sees the Justice Department as a tool that he can use to punish his enemies and reward his friends," charges Eliason. "And this historical, very important norm that politics is kept separated, that the Justice Department is kept independent from the White House because we don't want politics to influence criminal investigations and criminal prosecutions, has just been flipped completely on its head and thrown out the window. It doesn't exist anymore under this administration."

"He is trying to use the Justice Department to go after his political opponents. And he also uses it to reward his friends. Whether it's Homan, or [Mayor] Eric Adams in New York City, or all the January 6 rioters, pardoning all of them. It's one of the most discouraging things that is happening in this administration --- the complete gutting of the law."

"This is really scary stuff," adds Eliason. "This idea that the President can order a prosecutor to bring criminal charges, and if he doesn't, he'll fire you and put someone in place who will. It's unthinkable to anyone who has worked as a federal prosecutor. It's directly contradictory to the mission and ethical obligations of a federal prosecutor. It would have been completely unheard of before now."

It is all of a piece, he explains, with "many things that are going on at the Justice Department that just breaks the hearts of those of us who worked there and love it."

Finally, breaking news just before airtime today on Trump's FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's outrageous threat last week against Disney/ABC and their affiliate stations to take away their broadcast licenses unless they cancel Jimmy Kimmel's late night show after comments Kimmel made that they didn't care for regarding the recent murder of Republican activist Charlie Kirk. After enormous public blowback against Disney following last week's "indefinite suspension" of Jimmy Kimmel LIve, news broke late today that Kimmel will now be returning to air as of Tuesday night. Looks like public pressure, a torrent of cancelled Disney+ subscriptions and the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment may have won this round, at least partly...at least for now. Since getting off air, Sinclair Broadcasting, a rightwing outlet that owns more than 35 ABC affiliate stations and is seeking favors from the FCC, has announced they plan to air news programming instead of Kimmel's show beginning on Tuesday night...

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It's your democracy at work, for better or worse, on today's BradCast! [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

FIRST UP... At a lively rally at the Democracy Center here in Los Angeles on Thursday, California's Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom unveiled the "Election Rigging Response Act", legislation meant to push back against Donald Trump and the state of Texas' attempted mid-decade gerrymander of its already-gerrymandered U.S. House map. The new TX map, if enacted, would steal five Democratic House seats from largely minority voters in the Lone Star State in next year's midterms.

"We can't stand back and watch this democracy disappear district by district all across the country," Newsom declared at the boisterous rally, announcing his plan to ask the Golden State legislature to quickly approve a ballot measure for November 4th that would allow CA to temporarily override the state's U.S. House map. Unlike in Texas, our maps are drawn by an independent redistricting commission. If Newsom's scheme overcomes several hurdles, a new map would be drawn by the Legislature to flip five currently Republican seats in CA. The Act must first be approved by two-thirds of the CA state Legislature. It would then have to pass muster with voters on November 4, and wold only take effect if Texas successfully rigs their map.

The attempted heist in Texas is currently on hold, with state Democratic lawmakers breaking quorum by leaving the state. But Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has insisted that he will call Special Session after Special Session until he is able to rig the map for Trump and Republicans who fear they will otherwise lose their slim U.S. House majority next year.

"We are not bystanders in this world. We can shape the future," Newsom told the crowd on Thursday, adding: "Donald Trump, you have poked the bear and we will punch back."

"We're giving the people of this state the power to save democracy, not just in California, but all across the United States of America. I hope we are waking up to this reality. Wake up, America. Wake up to what Donald Trump is doing," the Governor concluded. We share his remarks in full on today's show.

THEN... We're joined by veteran, award-winning journalist turned media reform champion SUE WILSON of the Media Action Center, for an update on a remarkable story she has been covering at The BRAD BLOG for at least five years.

Wilson initially reported in 2020 on a citizen Petition filed at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) seeking to deny renewal of Sinclair Broadcasting's TV stion license in Baltimore. The complaint alleged that Sinclair, one of the nation's largest (and most right-leaning) station owners, was violating FCC rules that limit the number of stations that can be owned in a single market by secretly controlling two other television stations in Baltimore. Those two stations are run, according to the well-documented Petition, by sock-puppet companies actually controlled by Sinclair.

Filed in late 2020, the Petition wasn't heard by the FCC during the remaining months of Donald Trump's first term. Over the ensuing four years, for reasons we discuss today, Joe Biden's FCC failed to review the matter as well. In the meantime, in 2023, the Petitioner passed away. Another Baltimore resident was quickly substituted on the paperwork.

Fast-forward to 2025 and the FCC in Trump's second term, now led by his hand-picked Chair Brendan Carr, dismissed the original complaint on the basis that the substitute Petitioner missed the chance to file a petition on her own back in 2020. Her substitution for the man who waited five years for a hearing --- and died waiting --- was not allowed, Carr ruled, even though the well-documented facts of the matter hadn't changed. The Sinclair stations in question have since been re-licensed, despite the companies apparent violations of both FCC rules and federal law.

The lawyer for both the late Petitioner and his substitute, has filed an Application for Review, hoping to appeal the Commission's absurd ruling. Wilson detailed the latest remarkable chapter in this long-running story at The BRAD BLOG this week, and joins us to both break it down, and light up a warning about the next scheme that the FCC's Carr now has in place to undermine federal ownership rules of local television stations nationwide.

FINALLY... Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with the usual litany of disturbing climate and energy news, as well as perhaps the dumbest, most disinformative comment ever uttered on Fox "News" regarding renewable energy --- and that's saying quite a bit!...

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Dead man tell no tales. But the evidence submitted to the FCC before he passed away, challenging dodgy, unlawful television station ownership by a major national broadcasting conglomerate, is still alive and well. Or, at least, it should be.

As covered at The BRAD BLOG in September of 2020, Baltimore resident Ihor Gawdiak and his attorney Arthur Belendiuk filed a Petition to Deny (PtD) the FCC license renewals of three TV stations controlled in Baltimore by Sinclair Broadcasting in apparent violation of both FCC ownership rules and federal law.

In brief, Gawdiak's petition detailed a complicated shell game carried out by Sinclair, one of the nation's largest owners of local television stations, to carry out the plot while staying beneath the FCC radar.

Sinclair claims ownership of Baltimore's WBFF-TV Channel 45, (which shares news reports from the Baltimore Sun newspaper, owned by Sinclair's Executive Chairman, David Smith, son of Sinclair's founder, Julian Sinclair Smith.) The David Smith family also controls both Cunningham Broadcasting and Deerfield Media which operate Baltimore's WNUV-TV and WUTB-TV, respectively. Both companies have very deep and direct ties to Sinclair. (Belendiuk found the "official" owner of Deerfield was Smith's personal banker, Stephen Mumblow, and the "official" owner of Cunningham is the company's former banker, Michael Anderson, who has no broadcast experience and actually served as a paid employee of Sinclair.)

The elaborate shell game, Gawkiak's complaint argued, is an effort to monopolize the information U.S. television viewers can access in their own local towns, by skirting FCC ownership limits in a single market. Petitioner Gawdiak's license challenge first went to Trump's Republican-controlled FCC during his first term, then was taken over by Biden's FCC. Now it is back in the hands of Trump's heavily-controlled Commission once again.

The FCC likely breathed a sigh of relief when Gawdiak passed away in 2023 before the matter was ultimately adjudicated. But then another petitioner, Baltimore resident Eleanor Goldfield, signed on to take his place. Finally, it would seem, someone at the FCC would have to take a formal look at the complex Sinclair scheme of forming sidecar companies under their complete control, designed to flaunt FCC rules with tacit approval of federal regulator.

After five years, Trump's Sinclair-friendly FCC finally responded formally to attorney Art Belendiuk on June 27, 2025, informing him that one FCC petitioner may not be substituted for another and, therefore, the Commission would not be taking up this longstanding case.

This is despite the FCC's own administrative law judge, in a related proceeding, demanding such an inquiry take place.

In 2018, Ajit Pai, Trump's Republican FCC Chair at the time, called an unprecedented public Hearing about deliberate untruths Sinclair made to the FCC in its effort to acquire Tribune Broadcasting. The hearing was scuttled after Sinclair went behind closed doors with the Commission. But it resulted in a stunning $48 million dollar fine. Still, the judge in that hearing, Jane Halprin, demanded these conflicts be thoroughly examined in a future hearing at the Commission, stating: "This alleged deception was ostensibly aimed at allowing Sinclair to bypass the Commission's multiple ownership limitations. ... the behavior of a multiple station owner before the Commission may be so fundamental to a licensee's operation that it is relevant to its qualifications to hold any station license."

The 2020 Petition from Gawdiak could have provided for the scrutiny Halprin called for in the earlier matter.

In 2021, Belendiuk filed a Freedom of Information Act request on my behalf to discover just what was said in those closed door meetings between the FCC Media Bureau and the FCC. It took two years, but following an appeal to the Federal District Court in Washington DC, the FCC finally caved and released those files, a treasure trove of an extremely complicated shell game. (I detailed the full story for Project Censored here.)

Later in 2023, Gawdiak passed away. In early 2024, Goldfield signed on to take his place in the case.

Lo and behold, on June 27, 2025, the FCC finally responded [PDF] by agreeing with the arguments from Sinclair's attorneys that "Goldfield missed her opportunity to participate in the proceeding when she failed to file by the September 1, 2020, deadline and that permitting the substitution here would 'make a mockery of the Commission's deadlines and processes.'"

(As if the FCC waiting four years 10 months and 27 days to respond to a legal petition doesn't alone make a mockery of Commission deadlines and processes.)

In the bargain, the FCC subsquently allowed Sinclair to renew its Baltimore licenses.

But it ain't over until it's over. July 28, 2025, Belendiuk, the original attorney on the case, filed an Application for Review of the FCC's "decision." He raises the following three questions:

1. Did the FCC Media Bureau err in denying the Motion, given Gawdiak's inability to survive the almost five years the Commission waited to act on the Petition?
2. Did the Media Bureau err in failing to address the Petition as an informal objection to the Applications?
3. Did the Media Bureau err in granting the Applications without addressing the substance of the Petition?

It is entirely possible the FCC will not be the ultimate arbiter of this case. It could go to the U.S. Court of Appeals. (If we live that long.)

Aside: In April 2025, public interest watchdog and advocacy group Frequency Forward and Wisconsin member Randy Bryce put still more pressure on Sinclair when they filed their own Petition to Deny the license transfer applications of Wisconsin and other TV station licenses held by Sinclair Broadcasting, using much of the information gleaned from my FOIA.

The FCC swiftly denied that challenge on July 1, 2025. Says petitioner Bryce, who ran for Congress in the Badger State in 2018 and is running again next year: "It's outrageous that the FCC has been changed from a nonpartisan entity to a political arm of the extreme right. Their purpose should be to protect free speech, not stifle it."

APTRA, RTNDA, PRNDI and Emmy-winning Sue Wilson worked at CBS, PBS, NPR and Fox before directing the documentary Broadcast Blues, writing the blog Sue Wilson Reports and founding the Media Action Center. Reach her at SueWilsonReports@gmail, or via Bluesky or Twitter.

On today's BradCast: As you know, much of what we hold dear in these United States is under assault right now, thanks to the man we were collectively dumb enough to elect as President last year. But, for countless reasons, no single institution may be more important to help protect than our nation's free press, which is under far greater fire than I think most Americans realize. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Sadly, that attack has now been joined by too many of the major corporate outlets that control far too many of our previously independent mainstream news sources, all the way down to the local level. And the worst of them, as we've recently learned, are all too willing to hoax their own customers into unknowingly joining the battle.

We've got a number of U.S. media-under-attack stories for you today, from international U.S. media to national media to local media.

First, a bit of encouraging news on the international level. On Tuesday, a federal judge ordered [PDF] the restoration of the 83-year old, Congressionally-mandated and funded Voice of America. The international news outlet, originally created by the U.S. to counter Nazi propaganda in Europe, had been broadcasting continuously since 1942, until Donald Trump ordered its parent agency, the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM) shut down last month. Some 1,300 VOA staffers and contractors were sidelined, as the airwaves of VOA and its USAGM-overseen sister networks such as Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting fell silent. A number of VOA journalists sued, and on Tuesday, the court ordered USAGM to return employees and contractors to their pre-March 14 status. That's good news, though VOA is not fully back yet, and the Administration is expected, of course, to appeal the ruling.

Nationally, corporate pressure super-charged by Trump is also threatening another American broadcast institution. 60 Minutes' longtime executive producer, Bill Owens, quit on Tuesday amid pressure from CBS' corporate owners Paramount, as the company is seeking approval from the Administration for a corporate merger with an outfit called Skydance. That approval, however, is threatened by Trump, who filed a laughable, $20 billion suit against the top-rated, long-running newsmagazine after he didn't like an interview they aired with Kamala Harris before last year's election. Since then, Trump has similarly bristled at tough reports from the notoriously independent new program, charging that they will "pay a big price" for daring to report accurately on his Administration. We don't yet know the full story of what happened at 60 Minutes. But as Paramount is hoping to settle Trump's ridiculous suit, Owens told staffers that the program's independence is threatened, so it was time for him to leave. That, even as he told the show's employees that it is "too important to the country" for them to quit in protest.

From attacks against the U.S. international free press to the national level, we finally arrive on today program at still more threats newly underway against highly-trusted local news outlets, thanks in no small part to collusion between giant corporate broadcasters and the Trump Administration's corrupted FCC.

Last month, Trump's newly-seated Federal Communications Commission Chair, Brendan Carr, announced a new initiative to gut FCC radio and television rules that he described in a notice seeking public comment as his "Delete, Delete, Delete" plan [PDF].

As The Desk detailed earlier this month, the nation's largest owner of local television stations, Nexstar Media Group --- which controls more than 200 TV stations in more than 160 markets across the country --- ordered the local newsrooms at all of the stations it operates (including affiliates of NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, CW, etc.), to create a "news" story from deceptive, misleading talking points that suggest that the FCC was seeking comment from the public on regulations that "threaten the growth of your local TV news stations". Each, nearly identical report, voiced by local anchors, aired on dozens of stations, instructing viewers to visit a weblink that resolves to a Nexstar-run page instructing them how to let the FCC know that viewers are "worried about the long-term health of my local television stations" and want to "eliminate the regulations that are threatening the growth of my local TV station."

As a number of employees at some of those stations told The Desk on background, however, they were uncomfortable running the reports as "news", but were given no choice by their corporate parents at Nexstar.

Given the national power company, which already rakes in some $5 billion per year, it's hardly a surprise that we haven't heard much about this story in the corporate media. We do our best to make up for that today.

Our guest is the longtime award-winning broadcast journalism veteran turned media activist SUE WILSON, who described some of this earlier today in an article at The BRAD BLOG headlined "Trump's FCC on Precipice of Ending All Limits on Corporate Control of Local TV News Stations". In it, she explains how Nexstar already controls two --- and sometimes three (with FCC permission) --- TV stations in virtually every major media market in the country. But now, with the FCC's Carr looking to "delete, delete, delete" as many regulations as possible, the company is hoping to do away with remaining restrictions on how many stations any single company may control both nationally and at the local market level.

Wilson details how Nexstar and fellow broadcast goliath Sinclair, a far-right outlet who ordered a similar "must-run" package for its nearly 200 stations in support of Trump back in 2018, have long been gaming the system meant to limit corporate control of local stations. Today she details how they are colluding with the new FCC Chair to simply gut regulatory ownership limits while ignoring, or somehow working around, those that have been implemented statutorily by Congress.

"What we are seeing more and more across the United States is that you can turn on your TV set, and you can watch a local news reporter do a report," she tells me today. "You turn to the next station and it's the same reporter doing the exact same report." And that, of course, is with the limits currently in place --- the ones that Nexstar are misleading their own viewers into helping them make it worse. Worse for viewers, anyway, if not more profitable for Nexstar, Sinclair and the others.

Wilson also details today --- as she did in her article earlier --- how you can, and should, respond yourself to the FCC's call for comments. But you will need to do it quickly. Final comments are supposed to be filed --- either by Twitter/X or via the FCC's Comment site --- by Monday, April 28.

"We are fighting a juggernaut in the Capitol. They want to deregulate the media. They want to take over the media, is what they are really after. We have to stop them," argues Wilson, urging listeners to remind the FCC in comments that the "publicly-owned airwaves belong to us."

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A tranche of newly unearthed documents offer a clearer understanding of Team Trump's failed attempt to steal the 2020 election on today's BradCast, in which we also cover yet another better-than-expected Special Election Day for Democrats on Tuesday. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

First, some of the breaking headlines on today's horrific mass shooting at the end of the victory rally for Superbowl champs, the Kansas City Chiefs. Not much is known as of airtime, beyond one dead, more than 15 injured and two (now three) said to be in custody, according to Missouri state officials.

Then, the House GOP, on behalf of the disgraced, twice-impeached former President was finally successful on Tuesday in passing Articles of Revenge Impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The do-over vote follows their embarrassingly botched effort at same last week. This week, they were able to pass the Articles by one single vote, 214-213, against three Republican defectors and a unified Democratic caucus for "charges" that are not even close to the "High Crimes and Misdemeanors" mandated by the Constitution. Both Articles are expected to die, one way or another, over in the Senate, where even Republicans have shown little interest in the charade.

GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson had to get those Articles passed yesterday, however, given what New York voters did on Tuesday, when the seat in the state's 3rd Congressional District, formerly held by disgraced, expelled and indicted con-artist, Rep. George Santos, was flipped from "red" to "blue" by former Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi. He easily defeated Republican Mazi Pilip by almost 8 points in Tuesday's hotly-contested Special Election, according to the latest reported numbers. That was almost twice the margin predicted by even the most optimistic pre-election polls. The Dem victory in New York (and another in Pennsylvania on Tuesday night --- by 36 points!), again underscores the dearth of issues that Donald Trump's dysfunctional Republican Party has to run on or offer voters this year. Had House Repubs waited just one more day to vote on Articles of Impeachment, they would have lost again.

More apparent good news for voters and Democrats this week in Wisconsin, as the Republicans who control the wildly gerrymandered state Senate and Assembly have passed legislation to adopt new legislative district maps in advance of the 2024 elections, as ordered by the state's Supreme Court. The new maps are ones created by Democratic Governor Tony Evers. And though they don't promise a Dem majority for this year's elections, they do appear to be much fairer for voters. For more than a decade the GOP's gerrymandered maps resulted in nearly twice as many Rs as Ds in the state legislature in the otherwise very closely divided state. State Republicans approved Evers maps because they fear if the High Court selects a map it will be even worse for them. Evers has suggested he plans to sign the legislation.

Meanwhile, as Democrats continue to out-perform in 2024 elections, Republicans are busy in court defending their criminal efforts to steal 2020. A fake elector in Michigan on Wednesday testified that he was lied to by party officials that state legislators could select the phony Trump slate of electors over those for Biden, who state voters actually chose. This particular fake elector has decided to cooperate with prosecutors while 15 others are now facing serious jail time for their alleged conspiracy to forge phony Elector certificates.

And this week, we've got new news from the man who invented the fake electors scheme in the first place. A massive trove of emails, text messages and other documents have been turned over to Michigan prosecutors by former Team Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro and obtained by our guest today, investigative journalist JOSH KOVENSKY of Talking Points Memo. He has been detailing the documents in a new multi-part series this week at TPM which explores the attempted coup, hoped-for chaos, and the plan to pressure friendly members of SCOTUS.

Chesebro first dreamt up the fake elector plot for his own home state of Wisconsin in 2020, before he was asked by Team Trump attorneys, such as the disgraced John Eastman and Boris Ephstyn, to apply the same scam for phony electors in about seven swing-states following Trump's loss in November. They would be instrumental to the Trump team's failed legal efforts to steal the election.

The Chesebro documents shed new light on the failed "legal coup" which, as Kovensky reports, was not meant to be a one-day insurrection on January 6th, 2021, but to result in enough legislative chaos and trumped-up "questions" about the veracity of certified election results to force the U.S. Supreme Court to eventually settle the election themselves, ala Bush v. Gore twenty years earlier.

"What they really wanted was a stalemate in Congress" on January 6th, Kovensky explains. "And in that time, they would have used that stalemate to draw the country's attention to Congress, and then use that attention to put forth the campaign's completely nonsensical theories of voter fraud. That was the idea."

"If you talk to people who were around this, they'll say, 'Yeah, the invasion of the Capitol on January 6th destroyed that plan. Because it did draw attention to Congress, but there were no members of Congress there to make the case that there was voter fraud in the election," he tells me.

"The way the legal coup was meant to proceed was by halting the count," as detailed in the new docs obtained and reported out by Kovensky. "That's the key similarity between what the rioters on Jan. 6 ended up achieving by violent means and what the lawyers were trying to achieve just by procedural means. Which was that the count would have been stopped, [but] it would have been stopped indefinitely until potentially the Supreme Court stepped in to act and appoint Trump the winner."

So how did Chesebro --- who, until now, has not appeared, at least, to be a hard-right partisan ideologue along the lines of Eastman and Ephsteyn --- find his way into the vortex of Team Trump and the "legal coup" they were hoping to pull off? What is he hoping to accomplish by turning over these documents to prosecutors in MI and elsewhere since pleading guilty to one felony charge with no jail time in Georgia last year in exchange for testifying against his fellow conspirators? Will Trump be able to use Chesebro's documents and testimony to help himself in his own trials regarding his attempt to steal the 2020 election?

All of those questions and many more asked and answered about "The Cheese" and his documents on today's BradCast...

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The quote in the headline for today's BradCast comes, according to one of our guests today, from former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal, who knows quite a bit about both Constitutional crimes and American history. Finally, Donald J. Trump is facing accountability for his worst (known) crime of all: Attempting to overthrow American democracy itself by stealing a Presidential election from the American people before our very eyes. Luckily, he was as bad at that as he is at everything else. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

"This is a momentous legal event. It's the most significant legal event of our lifetimes, one of the most significant legal events ever in the history of this country. It is up there with Marbury vs Madison, Brown vs Board of Education, Dred Scott as a defining case for the times," Katyal told MSNBC after the new indictment against the the disgraced former President was handed up in D.C. yesterday. "This indictment lays out a case that a guy who was President of the United States --- while he was President of the US --- leveraged his office, used his power to thwart the will of the people in the most solemn thing they do in our country, vote. This is the biggest constitutional crime in our history."

We're joined today discuss that crime and Trump's latest indictment (his third in four months, and his second at the federal level) for it by two favorite BradCast special coverage guests. HEATHER DIGBY PARTON is the award-winning columnist at Salon and founder of Digby's Hullabaloo blog; and our old friend "DRIFTGLASS" is otherwise known as both @Mr_Electrico on Twitter and simply "Bill" at home in "Flyover Country, Illinois" where he has long and proudly produced The Professional Left Podcast.

Following the release of Special Counsel Jack Smith's new, very readable 45-page indictment [PDF] against Trump just minutes before airtime on Tuesday --- including four felony fraud, obstruction and conspiracy charges related to his attempt to steal the 2020 election before, during, and after the January 6, 2021 insurrection he incited at the U.S. Capitol --- we've had a bit of time to finally read the charges and evidence presented with them in full.

Also, we've had some time to learn about the judge assigned to the case, U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan. And, boy howdy, is Trump not gonna like her. She was appointed by President Obama, has been particularly tough on January 6 insurrectionists, and famously (and correctly) wrote, in a 2021 ruling allowing the bipartisan House Jan. 6 Select Committee access to documents from the Trump White House that "Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President."

As noted, he's not gonna like her one bit. Oh, well. Perhaps it balances out the Trump-appointed federal judge/stooge overseeing his federal indictment on 40 felony charges related to his theft and retention of national security documents and his attempts to obstruct the government's investigation and attempts to retrieve them down in Florida.

Among the topics discussed with "Digby" and "Driftglass" on today's special coverage...

• Why it took so long to bring this case, particularly as so much of it had already been revealed by the House Jan. 6 Committee last year.
• What either struck or surprised them about the new indictment.
• Who the still-unidentified "Co-Conspirator 6" might be.
• Will history better remember Mike Pence's moment of courage on January 6 or his pathetic turnabout ever since?
• Why this case feels so much different than the other two indictments filed against Trump.
• Why it seems that nobody in the media is able to describe what Trump did as an attempt to STEAL a Presidential election. (Though MSNBC's Joy Reid and Parton --- both of whom have long followed me on Twitter --- get well-deserved kudos for doing so today!)
• Whether, as folks on the Right like to claim, Tuesday's new indictment (and the others) actually help him in the 2024 election.
• And, would they support or oppose a plea agreement in which the disgraced former President was allowed to plead guilty, get some home confinement, pay a huge fine and, most importantly, drop out of the 2024 race and vow to never run for public office again in exchange for escaping prison time (akin to Nixon VP Spiro Agnew's deal with federal prosecutors)?

Answers to all of those questions and many others on today's BradCast Special Coverage! Enjoy!...

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On today's BradCast: The ongoing GOP effort to undermine American democracy by making it harder to vote and easier to cheat in elections continues amid the fallout from Trump's attempt to steal the 2020 election. While you might think Republicans would pay a price for joining him in that effort, its Democrats --- and voters in general and American democracy itself --- paying the price, even as the Big Lie continues to fall further apart with each passing day. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

As you know, Republicans have been using false claims of massive (and, apparently, evidence-free) "voter fraud" in the 2020 election as a pretext to adopt new voter suppression and election subversion laws in GOP controlled states. The fruits of those corrupt efforts are already paying off. In Texas, for example, County Clerks across the state are reporting that the state's new anti-voting law, S.B.1, is forcing them to reject hundreds of legitimate absent ballot applications in one of the most difficult states in the nation to vote by mail already.

New I.D. requirements for ballot applications have resulted in rejections of nearly half of the absentee applications in Travis County, home to the state's capital of Austin. Worse, the state's Secretary of State has yet to issue rules for how County Clerks may legally notify or help the rejected voters to cure their applications in advance of the state's March mid-term primaries. (The application deadline is Feb. 18.)

Many of the rejected applications are from voters that have been voting by mail for years. But the new state law now requires applicants to include either a drivers license number or state I.D. number or the last four digits of their Social Security number on the application. While some don't notice the new requirement and are rejected on that basis, others do include one of those numbers, but are still being rejected! Why? As Democrats had warned when trying to block the bill, the TX law now requires that whichever number a voter uses on their application must match the number on their voter registration form, many of them completed years ago. If the voter includes a drivers license number on their application, for example, but their registration includes a State I.D. number instead --- or no number at all (as is the case with millions of voter registrations in the Lone Star State) --- their applications must now be rejected. Mission accomplished?

Meanwhile, the GOP's Big "voter fraud" Lie continues to fall apart in Arizona, where Joe Biden has been confirmed many times over to have lawfully defeated Trump in 2020. On Friday, in the second largest county in the state, Pima (home to Tucson), the Pima County Attorney's Office determined that, of the 151 cases referred to them as possible cases of voter fraud after 2020, ZERO actually merited criminal charges. There remain a handful of possible fraud cases elsewhere in a the state (less than 50). But, of course, if all known cases of possible fraud in Arizona turned out to be actual fraud and all of those votes were somehow in favor of Biden, there still wouldn't be nearly enough fraudulent ballots to reverse his 10,000+ vote victory out of about 3.2 million ballots cast in the state. Nonetheless, in AZ as well, Republicans are using their lies about "voter fraud" to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat in elections.

But the biggest story on today's BradCast involves gerrymandering, perhaps the most critical reason our federal government and our democracy has become so seemingly irreparably broken. Democrats in the U.S. Senate this week have combined the combined Freedom to Vote Act (which, among many other critical election reforms, makes partisan gerrymandering unlawful in all 50 states) and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (which restores the requirement for federal pre-clearance of new election laws in states with a history of racial discrimination in elections after SCOTUS gutted the landmark provision) into one single bill called the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act. All 50 Democrats in the majority claim to support the newly combined bill. Zero Republicans do. But unless two Democratic Senators (Sinema and Manchin) agree to modify the Senate filibuster rule to allow democracy-saving legislation to be adopted with a simple majority vote, none of it will become law and the GOP efforts to game elections will be largely free and clear through 2022.

For several years, experts have been warning that, following the 2020 Census, the new round of redistricting was going to be very bad for Democrats in GOP-controlled states. That, after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and later declared that federal courts may have no say at all on the issue of partisan gerrymandering, But, with about half of the new maps now redrawn by states in advance of the 2022 mid-terms (with several being challenged in state courts), are they as bad as many pundits had foretold?

A number of redistricting experts of late have suggested that the new maps aren't nearly as bad for Dems as they might have been. But is that true? We're joined today by Brennan Center's Senior Counsel for its Democracy Program, MICHAEL LI, who serves as the non-partisan organization's redistricting expert.

Last week, in an op-ed for Washington Post, Li describes the notion that gerrymandering hasn't been too bad for Democrats this year as a "misleading narrative" for a host of reasons. Experts, he notes, had predicted a bunch of safe Democratic seats would be remapped into Republican districts. "They expected Democratic seats to fall," Li explains. "But instead, what Republicans are doing is shoring up the disproportionate advantages they already hold" following the extreme partisan gerrymanders from 2011.

"In Texas, under the old maps, Democrats have 36% of the seats. Under the new maps they have 37% of the seats, so very little change," he tells me by way of just one example. "But the competition is gone. So whereas under the old maps there were competitive districts, under the new maps, even if Democrats got 58% of the vote [across the state], they would still have the same 37% of the seats, which hardly seems fair. Even if Texas turned deep blue, Republicans would have almost a 2-to-1 advantage. That's the perniciousness of the state's gerrymander."

There are other examples, in North Carolina for instance, where the maps are currently being challenged in state courts. We also discuss how the Supreme Court's unwillingness to hear partisan gerrymandering cases has affected all of this and whether or not the Court will similarly begin to turn away racial gerrymander cases as well in the not too distant future.

Li goes on to explain why the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act --- if Republicans or Manchinema were to allow it to be passed into law --- "would be a game-changer" on this issue. It "would transform redistricting. There would be a ban against partisan gerrymandering in Congressional redistricting. It would be easy to calculate and figure out whether a map violates that and, if a map does, then it's blocked from use pretty automatically, perhaps even in time for 2022 if Congress were to pass it soon."

But, alas, unless there are some surprises in the Senate this week, the bill is unlikely to pass anytime soon. So, what's left? Should Democratic-controlled states, in order to save democracy itself before the 2024 elections, gerrymander their own maps as aggressively as Republicans have? As much as it pains me to do so, I have previously argued that they should. Does Li agree? Tune in to find out!

Finally, before we go, the mid-show breaking news that Rudy Giuliani and a number of others who were very close to the disgraced former President as he was attempting to steal the 2020 election have now been subpoenaed by the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol...

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While I was researching a piece last September about Sinclair Broadcasting's illegal TV ownership shell game, I stumbled into a Supreme Court case. Donald Trump's Federal Communications Commission Chair, Ajit Pai, had filed a case at SCOTUS, Federal Communications Commission v. Prometheus Radio Project [PDF], which would allow one media conglomerate to own the local newspaper, 2 network TV stations, 1-2 additional TV stations, and 8 radio stations --- all in the same community.

The Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals had previously found, in 2017, that the FCC failed to adequately study the matter before making the rules change that would adversely affect ownership of media outlets by women and minorities.

But the danger of the scheme to all of us was immediately apparent. Imagine the potential for propaganda by allowing one company to control the local reporters in virtually every media outlet in a single town!

I had already discovered that Sinclair Broadcasting was illegally controlling three TV stations in Columbus, Ohio, and doing little more than duplicating local news content across all three stations. So, on advice of my colleague and friend Brad Friedman, I began writing an Amicus ("Friend of the Court") brief in the case to inform the U.S. Supreme Court of this and other related information.

My first step was to find the research papers the FCC had done on the topic before its Chair --- on behalf of we, the people --- filed its case with SCOTUS. To my surprise, however, I found there were none. Zip, nada, nothing. The FCC was literally taking a case to the Supreme Court in which it had done no independent research at all...

On today's BradCast: A good answer to the question of how the hell we got here. We have an FCC that appears fully captured by the very (rightwing) corporate entities it is supposed to be regulating while overseeing control of our public airwaves. [Audio link to show follows below.]

But first, before we get to our main story today, which is a scoop you probably haven't heard about elsewhere, Donald Trump's own FBI Director Christopher Wray testified in the U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee on Thursday that he is unaware of any evidence to suggest widespread absentee ballot fraud is underway. That runs completely contrary to the President of the United States' continued, persistent, repeated, evidence-free claims that Democrats are running some kind of massive absentee ballot fraud scam to steal the election from Trump.

On the other hand, Donald Trump was and is trying to steal the U.S. Census from the people of the United States. But on Friday, a federal judge ordered a stop to it, based on testimony and email from Census Bureau officials revealing that the Commerce Department's order for the Constitutionally-mandated decennial head count to be prematurely ended this month would result in fatally flawed headcount data. The Trump Administration has been trying to complete the tally in time to turn it over to the President for final approval by the end of this year, to avoid the current deadline of April 2021 when Joe Biden could be in office to approve it instead. The attempt to force an under-count, according to critics, would bastardized U.S. House seat apportionment, as well as thousands of state legislative seats and the distribution of some $1.5 trillion in federal spending for the next ten years. It would also result in the under-count of minorities and the shifting of political power to white, rural Republican districts.

And speaking of politically captured federal agencies, earlier this week at The BRAD BLOG, award-winning journalist turned media reform activist SUE WILSON broke the story of a "Petition to Deny" license renewals filed against three broadcast television stations in the Baltimore market. The petition, filed by longtime, D.C.-based Republican communications attorney and former FCC official ART BELENDIUK, charges that the giant, rightwing corporate TV station owner Sinclair Broadcast Group is unlawfully violating the Telecommunications Act [PDF] by secretly owning or controlling three stations in the Baltimore market, when they are only allowed to own one.

Belendiuk and Wilson join me on today's program to explain how the far-right Sinclair, which own Baltimore's WBFF, also secretly controls the ownership of Cunningham Broadcast, which nominally owns WNUV and Deerfield Media, which holds the license to WUTB in the same market. Belendiuk explains how that violates federal restrictions on media ownership, while noting that his "Petition to Deny", filed in Baltimore in hopes of blocking the stations' licensing renewals, is just the first such Petition, given that Sinclair is pulling the same corporate shell game scam with stations all across the country.

"You can have relationships with other stations in the market, but they're carefully regulated by the FCC," Belendiuk tells me. "But Sinclair has gone way beyond that, down to the point of setting the salary of the president of Cunningham. That's not the kind of thing you do at arm's length. Cunningham, which is the main partner of Sinclair, has twenty stations in twenty different markets and they're all paired with Sinclair. So this isn't a Baltimore problem, it's just that the petition had to be filed in Baltimore because of FCC reasons. The first place you could file was in Baltimore."

Wilson detailed in her recent report how, under the FCC's regulation of the Telecommunications Act, "In a single local broadcast market, one company may apply to own two stations --- if there are nine or more stations in that market. [But] Baltimore has just eight stations, and three of them are actually owned by Sinclair."

Sinclair, which officially owns almost 200 hundred TV stations across the county in more than 100 markets, largely in the South and Midwest, first came to national prominence when they mandated their hundreds of otherwise trusted local TV news anchors to read a script on air about "fake news" being a threat to democracy, back in early 2018. As their stations are affiliated with various networks such as ABC, Fox and The CW, local viewers often have no idea they are actually watching a Sinclair station, with a far-right corporate owner controlling the local station's newsroom.

"What's really at stake here are the diversity of voices that we the people get to hear on our local TV stations," Wilson explains. "Local television news is really the medium that most of us trust more than any other today for our news. This is really cutting away at that kind of trust, when you allow one company to own so many stations." She says "the law is clear," but the FCC, whose chairman Ajit Pai was appointed by Donald Trump, is failing to enforce it, even though the details of the sham ownership of the stations and companies controlled by Sinclair were discovered in both FCC and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) documents, according to Belendiuk's petition

"The commission is aware of this," Belendiuk insists. "Enough is enough. it's time for the FCC to stop looking the other way."

The self-described "political conservative" also shares the progressive Wilson's concerns about the dangers of the lack of diversity over our public airwaves. "In many markets --- take Columbus, Ohio --- they own two major network affiliates, Fox and I believe an NBC station. That means every day at 6 o'clock there are two local newscasts going out holding one political view. That's not what the Communications Act intended. The Communications Act intended that there should be a diversity of views. If there's a Sinclair with a clear rightwing view, there should be another station that has a middle-ground view, and one that maybe has a leftwing view. There shouldn't be one voice."

He goes on to discuss the serious "impacts" all of this has on our politics and elections. "It really, really matters to the people of Columbus, Ohio. And they're being deprived of the information they need to vote for the candidate of their choice. Whether you're voting Republican or Democrat, that vote should be an informed vote. When you control the local news, which is really what I see as the problem, then I'm no longer getting that kind of information that I need to make an informed decision."

Belendiuk notes that station license renewals, which come up every eight years, will also be happening soon in other markets around the country where, he says, "any citizen can file a petition saying why they don't serve --- and this is in the Communications Act --- 'the public interest, convenience, or necessity'," before he details how Sinclair has been repeatedly fined by the FCC for other violations over the years when they were found to not be acting in the public interest as mandated.

Sinclair has until October 1 to respond to the Petition, after which the matter will either be decided by the FCC or, if they ignore or attempt to whitewash the complaint, by a federal Appeals Court, Belendiuk vows.

There is much more on all of this in today's show, including information on how you can reach him and take action locally if you feel, like he does, that "enough is enough".

Finally today, because this week has been more than "enough", we end with the overdue return of one of our favorite Trump-era musical satirists! Randy Rainbow sends us off into the weekend with a tune that we dare you to get out of your head after you hear it...

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Baltimore's crowded TV market highlights the shell game that media goliath Sinclair Broadcasting plays across the nation to illegally dominate the information Americans can consume over our public airwaves. The agency tasked with overseeing those airwaves, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has long turned a blind eye to allow Sinclair, the very powerful purveyor of rightwing propaganda, to violate US law.

Congress passed the Telecommunications Act [PDF] so no single television company could dominate the news and information available to "We the People" in any single market or even nationwide. Under the law, a single TV company is permitted to reach no more than 39% of viewers in the United States over all. In a single local broadcast market, one company may apply to own two stations --- if there are nine or more stations in that market.

Baltimore has just eight stations, and three of them are actually owned by Sinclair: WBFF, WNUV, and WUTB.

Sinclair lawyers (who also represent Cunningham Broadcasting and Deerfield Media) will say Sinclair owns WBFF, Cunningham owns WNUV and Deerfield owns WUTB. But, in a September 1 legal Petition to Deny the renewal of all three stations' licenses, due to both the shell game and the lies Sinclair has told to protect its unlawful ownership, Republican attorney Art Belendiuk researched Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) documents to prove that both Deerfield and Cunningham are actually both controlled by Sinclair.

"Sinclair controls three television stations in Baltimore, while the FCC rules do not permit it to control more than one," the petition, filed on behalf of local viewer Ihor Gawdiak, argues, while detailing how the shell game of nominal ownership by the other two companies is simply meant to mask Sinclair's violation of federal law...

We're getting our sea legs back n today's BradCast, after a few days off (thanks, Nicole Sandler for filling in for us!) Luckily it's been a slow few new days since we last spoke. Sigh... [Audio link to full show is posted below summary.]

Anyway, among the stories covered on today's program...

• How pathetic is malignant narcissist, Donald Trump? So pathetic that he completely made up an invitation to throw out the first pitch at a Yankees game after the nation's top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was invited to toss the first pitch at the Washington Nationals' home opener last week;

• Well, that didn't take long. Now 17 members of the Florida Marlins are said to be infected with the coronavirus, leading Major League Baseball to suspend the Marlins' season through at least this Sunday along with the cancellation of three games this week between the Yankees and Phillies. All of this comes just days after MLB opened for a truncated 60 game season. They didn't make it past Day 3 without an outbreak;

• If MLB and its billions of dollars can't keep its player safe, how do you suppose your local school district is gonna fare next month if they are ordered to re-open for in-person classes? That is still the plan for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis who is bravely risking the lives of his state's children and their teachers in hopes that somehow that will help Donald Trump get re-elected in 98 days. We wonder if he's noticed that the infection and hospitalization rate for KIDS in the hot-spot Sunshine State is now exploding, with more than 31,000 cases of COVID-19 for Floridians under the age of 18 as of late last week --- a 34% increase in cases and a 23% increase in hospitalizations since the week prior. More than 300 children in Florida are now hospitalized with the virus, with one-third of them between the ages of 14 and 17, and 67 cases of hospitalization for those younger than one year old. That, after Donald Trump told the nation last week at a White House coronavirus briefing that school age kids "don’t catch it easily; they don’t bring it home easily";

• Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, the nation's most corrupt Attorney General in history, Bill Barr, testified for the first time ever before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, as federal troops wreak chaos on American streets and after interceding in criminal cases on behalf of Trump's convicted felon friends, former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and GOP dirty trickster Roger Stone. Both were found guilty of lying to federal investigators during Robert Mueller's Special Counsel probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election. It was a contentious hearing that seems to have accomplished little. Though it did include a moment when Barr, who pretended to be concerned about the rule of law, seemed to suggest it might be just fine for the President to solicit and/or accept foreign assistance in an election. For the record, that remains illegal --- at least for those who actually do care about the rule of law --- whether Barr actually enforces such things or not;

• Then, the disinformation wars continue, as led by the President of the United States and his more-than-willing accomplices. One of which, naturally, is his eldest son and namesake Don Jr., who ended up in "Twitter Jail" today for retweeting a video by Breitbart "News" that Twitter, Facebook and YouTube consider to be "false information about cures and treatments for COVID-19."

• But, of course, Trump Sr. has many such accomplices in the rightwing media. Unfortunately, that isn't limited only to wingnut propaganda cable channels like Fox "News" or Internet propaganda outlets like Breitbart. It also includes the second largest owner of local television stations in the nation. Late last week Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which is allowed to own nearly 200 local stations in more than 100 markets, was shamed into temporarily pulling an episode of American This Week, as hosted by disgraced and fired Fox "News" personality Eric Bolling. (While texting unsolicited photos of one's genitalia is apparently enough to get ya fired by Fox, Sinclair doesn't seem to mind it all!)

  The episode in question featured an interview with a dubious, self-proclaimed "expert in virology" who, among other thing, claims that wearing a mask causes COVID-19, that Dr. Fauci "manufactured" the virus and sent it to Wuhan, China for some reason, and that an eventual coronavirus vaccine will "kill millions". After light was spread on the false claims featured in the episode, Sinclair pulled it for retooling. Today, CNN reports, they will not be airing it at all anymore. The Media Matters Senior Researcher who first exposed the Sinclair conspiracy propaganda, ZACHARY PLEAT, joins us on today's show to explain what happened and why Sinclair's pro-Trump propaganda --- hidden in plain sight, often coming out of the mouths of your favorite trusted local news anchors --- is arguably more insidious than even Fox "News".

  Moreover, that rightwing propaganda is being spread over OUR PUBLIC AIRWAVES in dozens of mostly southern and midwestern states across the country, on stations owned by Sinclair with frequencies licensed (for free) to them by the federal government in exchange for serving "in the public interest". Hopefully the FCC, during the next Administration, will take a long hard look at Sinclair's licensing agreements next time they come up for renewal;

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with two surprise hurricanes in two different U.S. states over just one weekend; more environmental destruction by the Trump Administration on (hopefully) their way out the door; and the installation of the world's largest battery now set to power tens of thousands of homes with clean, renewable energy in Southern California...

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Every. Single. Vote. Matters. Or, at least it's supposed to. On today's BradCast we've got a bevy of stories, almost a month after the midterm elections, to prove it. Also, a rightwing broadcast media behemoth --- the nation's largest single owner of local television stations --- faces new blowback for offensive, anti-immigrant commentary they forced their local news outlets to carry. [Audio link to today's jam-packed show is posted below.]

First today, in Kentucky, where nearly half a dozen state House races were determined by half a dozen votes or less, a Republican incumbent has now filed a contest in House District 13 after reportedly losing to his Democratic challenger by just one single vote. No matter how that challenge ends, and it may take a while, Republicans will still hold super-majority control in the Bluegrass State.

But, in Alaska --- which, incidentally, was struck by a major earthquake today --- one single still-uncounted "mystery ballot" in one single state House race may determine control of the entire body for the next two years. We explain.

Meanwhile, in Georgia (the nation's apparent new headquarters for mass voter suppression) the midterms aren't over yet either, with two statewide runoffs set for Tuesday in the Secretary of State and Public Service Commissioners race. But, on Thursday, the state Democratic Party sued the state to allow absentee mail ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted. Their complaint charges that many counties in the state failed to timely send out requested vote-by-mail ballots until just one week before next week's December 4th runoff. That, they say, will not allow enough time for many voters to receive their ballots and mail them back to the county by Election Day, when state law says they are due.

Dems note that overseas and military votes are tallied, as long as they are postmarked by Election Day and arrive no later than three days after the election. They want the same rules applied to all absentee by mail voters, thanks to the Secretary of State and Counties' delay in sending out tens of thousands of ballots. The GA Sec. of State's office, incredibly, blames the delays on Democrats for trying to ensure all votes were tallied from the November 6th general election! [Post-air update!: GA agrees to count ballots that arrive by December 7th, if post-marked by Election Day!]

In North Carolina, the U.S. House election mystery in the 9th Congressional District has now fairly clearly become a GOP election fraud case. We've got new details today, based on affidavits from voters in Bladen County who describe an unlawful scheme, apparently by a GOP contractor for the Republican candidate, to collect absentee ballots and either alter them before delivery to the County or not deliver them at all. This follows on the surprise State Board of Election decision on Tuesday to not certify the NC-9 race, as previously expected, between Republican Mark Harris and Democrat Dan McCready. Until the new revelations of apparent election fraud, Harris had reportedly won the race by just 905 votes out of more than 280,000 cast. However, as recent analyses have revealed, Harris apparently received a virtually impossible number of absentee by mail votes in Bladen County. On Friday, the NC State Board of Elections decided to delay action until after a a hearing to review evidence in the matter on 6 December 21. They have the authority to, among other things, order a completely new election in the Congressional District.

Finally today, in a widely-reported skirmish at the U.S. southern border with Mexico near San Diego last weekend, U.S. officials fired tear gas into Mexico, sending many women and children migrants from Central American running for the lives. 42 arrests were made by U.S. Customs and Border officials, but AP reports this week that none of the migrants detained will actually be charged with any crimes!

Nonetheless, in the wake of the U.S. use of tear gas on asylum seekers, former Trump staffer Boris Epshteyn, who is now Sinclair Broadcast Group's Chief Political Analyst, offered a commentary in response which local news outlets at hundreds of Sinclair-owned television stations around the country were told to run. Epshteyn's offensive "must-run" commentary charges that migrants were "attempting to storm" the U.S. border in an "attempted invasion of our country. Period." The commentary, as usual, echoed the politics and rhetoric of Epshteyn's far-right nationalist fear-mongering former boss who had sent thousands of U.S. military troops to the border in the days before the midterm elections to, purportedly, help propel the so-called "invasion" by men, women and children fleeing violence and poverty in Central America by foot.

We're joined today by PAM VOGEL of Media Matters who has been documenting Sinclair's abuse of our public airwaves at otherwise-trusted local media outlets, which are now required to carry Epshteyn's "must-run" commentaries as often as five times a week. While Sinclair initially distanced themselves from their own Chief Political Analyst in a "tepid response" after public outrage emerged following Epshteyn's offensive "invasion" commentary, the company has since come out in his support, turning their efforts to false attacks on Media Matters instead. Vogel details the shameful story and how Sinclair could --- and indeed may --- face license renewal problems from the FCC for their abuse of our public airwaves with biased, false and far-right propaganda on their nearly two-hundred television stations across the nation.

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On today's BradCast, it's like deja vu all over again. But with a Commander-in-Chief who is completely clueless about any of it and powerful adversaries who claim they are prepared to shoot back. [Audio link to show follows below.]

The President of the United States has no idea what he's doing, and is simply making up policy from minute to minute, according to a Washington Post report last night, detailing how White House aides are forced to scramble each day to either explain Donald Trump's actions "or clean them up."

"There is no proactive strategic thinking," one staffer told the paper. Another senior administration official conceded that aides are often forced to "reverse-engineer a policy process to match whatever the President said" on any given day. That may be workable, sort of, when it comes to something like Trump's announcement today that, after years of bashing the Trans-Pacific Partnership and pulling the U.S. out of it shortly after taking office, he is now considering rejoining the TPP after all.

But when it comes to sending the U.S. to war, Trump's erratic behavior poses a very serious danger. To that end --- as Trump has flip-flopped over the past week between demanding the U.S. pull its troops out of Syria within 48 hours, to publicly warning Syria's main ally Russia to "get ready" for incoming missiles, to reversing positions yet again to declare a U.S. attack on the war-torn nation "could be very soon or not soon at all" --- his Defense Secretary Gen. James Mattis was busy conceding to lawmakers in the U.S. House on Thursday that the Pentagon lacks evidence of the alleged chemical attack in over the weekend, reportedly carried out by the Syrian government against its own citizens in one of the last rebel-held areas near Damascus.

While noting that he "believe[s] there was a chemical attack," Mattis told lawmakers on Capitol Hill today "we're looking for the actual evidence" and admitted that even if inspectors from the international Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) get access to the site of the alleged attack, "we will not know who did it. They can only say that they found evidence or did not."

It's not the first time that Mattis has conceded we've attacked Syria in response to purported chemical attacks for which the U.S. had "no evidence".

Nonetheless, the media continue to report the weekend attack in Syria --- said to have killed more than 40 civilians with some form of poison gas --- as having been carried out by the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Even as Mattis was admitting the lack of evidence the U.S. has to support the charge, NBC News was busy reporting breathlessly and unskeptically, in an eerie echo of the run-up to the U.S. war(s) against Iraq, on claims from two unnamed "U.S. officials" citing "blood and urine samples from last Saturday's deadly attack in Syria that have tested positive for chemical weapons." It's like deja vu all over again, but with a clueless President and powerful countries like Russia and Iran already having warned that they are prepared to retaliate against any attack against the Syrian government by the U.S. or its allies.

In not-entirely-unrelated news today, as Trump continues to lie about "voter fraud" in the 2016 election (and about everything else), an alarming new study from Politico finds that voters with less access to local news voted in larger numbers for Trump in 2016 than they did for Mitt Romney in 2012. At the same time, the study reveals, those with more access to such news sources voted in higher proportion for Hillary Clinton.

The findings come as the rightwing Sinclair Broadcasting Group, the nation's largest owner of local TV news outlets, attempts to receive FCC approval to buy up enough local stations to reach some 72% of American households. While public push-back against the effort builds, the pro-Trump broadcast behemoth is revealed to be using the public airwaves at their own currently-owned stations (and websites) to lie about the mounting criticism against their practices.

Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report on Shell's recently revealed decades long knowledge that their products cause global warming, and the mountain of scandal that continues to engulf Trump's embattled EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt...

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On today's BradCast: While everything still sucks, there are, nonetheless, a growing number of encouraging signs that Americans --- even those in so-called "red" states --- have had just about enough of the rightwing Republican corporate takeover and ravaging of this country and so much that we hold dear. [Audio link to show is posted below.]

Among the stories covered towards that end on today's program...

• A record-breaking number of women are now running for Congress, and the filing deadlines haven't even passed in half of the states;

• Sinclair Broadcasting Group's insidious misuse of our public airwaves for rightwing pro-Trump propaganda purposes finally begins to catch the attention of Democrats in Congress, as company executives mouth off with pathetic excuses, former employees speak out, some staffers resign in protest, and others, while embarrassed by being forced to read on-air nonsense from their owners, find reasonable excuses for not quitting (such as outrageously onerous contract terms) at once-respected TV news outlets now controlled by the nation's largest owner of television stations;

• Teachers in so-called "red" states like Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona and West Virginia continue walkouts to push back against state education budgets that have been slashed in recent years to pay for huge tax cuts to wealthy corporations in failed experiments with supposedly "pro-growth" Reaganomics;

• And while Republican officials in those states have made clear they were only pretending to give a damn about kids, their pretend love for coal miners has also been exposed as a lie in Kentucky, where lawmakers just made it much more difficult for miners to receive compensation amid an epidemic surge of deadly black lung disease cases;

• The jaw-dropping corruption scandals of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt continue to be revealed on a daily basis. So, will Donald Trump finally find the courage to fire him?;

• And, finally, Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report, in which Mobil Oil joins Exxon in being revealed as having been fully aware, decades ago, that the burning of fossil fuels is causing civilization-threatening climate change, and Americans tell Ryan Zinke and his Interior Department to take a hike over huge proposed increases to entry fees at our national parks...

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Choose monthly amount... $10 : $10.00 USD - monthly$20 : $20.00 USD - monthly$50 : $50.00 USD - monthly$100 : $100.00 USD - monthly	(Snail mail support to "Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028" always welcome too!)