It's NICOLE SANDLER, filling in for Brad & Desi, guest hosting today's BradCast once more so they can enjoy a long Labor Day weekend. [Audio link to show is below.]

Our main guest today is author and historian RICK PERLSTEIN who’s just released his fourth and final book in a series on the origins of the modern "conservative" movement in the US, Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980. It's fascinating to hear the history of the American Right from Perlstein, a true progressive.

I also spoke with ANDREA VALDEZ today. She's Editor-in-Chief of a new non-partisan, non-profit news organization, run by and skewing towards women. It's called The 19th, in honor of the 19th Amendment, which codified women's right to vote, adopted 100 years ago last month.

As usual, we began with a look at the latest news. And today, it's a bombshell dropped last night by The Atlantic magazine. It's a story detailing Donald Trump's horrifically disparaging remarks about the military headlined "Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are 'Losers' and 'Suckers'". Maybe this will open some eyes to who our President really is...

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It's NICOLE SANDLER, back in to give Brad and Desi a Labor Day break, guest hosting today's BradCast.

Just when you thought Donald Trump had reached rock bottom, he goes even lower. This time, in his efforts to invalidate the upcoming elections (because he knows he's going to lose badly), he actually suggested his supporters vote twice-- once by mail and once in person. As bad as that is, I could easily come up with another dozen or so infractions that would make any sane person cringe.

Although there's a policy within the American Psychiatric Association that says a doctor cannot diagnose the psychological condition of someone they've never examined personally known as the Goldwater Rule, in this case it doesn't apply. That's because we know more about Donald Trump than any other president in history, thanks to the 24/7 news cycle, Trump's proclivity for talking incessantly about himself and his Twitter addiction.

Today, I spoke with DAN PARTLAND, Producer/Director of the new film, Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump. The documentary opened Tuesday everywhere; it's available now on virtually every streaming channel available. It makes the case (as if you didn't already know) that if there's one person for whom the 25th Amendment was likely written, it's Donald J. Trump...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Environmental champion Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) wins tough primary challenge; Trump Administration racing to dismantle even more environmental protections; PLUS: Sign of the times --- ExxonMobil dropped from the Dow... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Arctic wildfires emit 35% more CO2 so far in 2020 than for whole of 2019; The Sitting President Has No Climate Plan. Why Isn’t That Headline News?; House Democrats Demand Climate Be ‘Centerpiece’ Of 2020 Presidential Debates; Will Clean Energy Projects Face Troubles That Have Bedeviled Pipelines?; UN Urges Probe of Trump Arctic Drilling Plan for Human Rights Abuses... PLUS: To solve everything, solve climate: A conversation with Varshini Prakash, leader of the Sunrise Movement... and much, MUCH more! ...

On today's BradCast: The gears of American democracy continue to grind and wheeze toward November 3rd. On Tuesday, Massachusetts held its late season state primary elections featuring at least two noteworthy races. One, a somewhat bizarre challenge by an ambitious 39-year old Rep. Joe Kennedy III for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination against incumbent, 74-year old progressive climate champion Sen. Ed Markey. The other, a challenge by the 31-year old progressive Mayor of Holyoke, Alex Morse, against powerful, 16-term establishment Democratic Rep. Richard Neal in the state's 1st Congressional District. One progressive won, the other lost. Both races were fascinating for different reasons. [Audio link to show follows below.]

To help us understand both races and more, we're joined once again today by HOWIE KLEIN, creator of the enduring "Down With Tyranny" blog and co-founder of the progressive BlueAmericaPAC. He's been helping us in recent weeks to make sense of results from a number of key, late season primary races. (There are still three states left to go --- Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Delaware --- over the next two weeks.) The Markey/Kennedy contest, however, was one of the most curious this season.

Markey, who has served in the House and Senate for some 45 years, remains one of its most progressive and beloved lawmakers as a supporter of Medicare for All and the Senate sponsor, with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the House, of the landmark Green New Deal proposal. Kennedy's attempt to unseat Markey, as endorsed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, unsettled a number of Democrats and appeared, for a while, that it might have been successful. Alas, Markey appears to have won the day, and fairly easily, on Tuesday against the first Kennedy to ever lose an election in Massachusetts.

Klein explains why Kennedy was running in the first place and why he ultimate lost.

He also walks us through the challenge against Neal, a long-serving Democratic corporatist in the House who faced criticism from many Dems for slow-walking the Congressional attempt to review Donald Trump's tax returns. As the powerful Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, Neal has the exclusive, statutory right to review the tax returns of any American in the nation. He took months, however, after Democrats regained the majority in the U.S. House in 2018, to even begin the process. Bu that's hardly the only critique of Neal by progressives, as we discuss today with Klein.

Nonetheless, Neal easily defeated Morse in Tuesday's primary, after what appear to have been dubious, if ultimately effective, charges of sexual misconduct whipped up against him by questionable sources. Klein explains that ugly campaign, as well as why his BlueAmericaPAC decided not to endorse Morse or either of the two progressive candidates running in the crowded field for the nomination to fill Kennedy's vacated seat in the state's 4th Congressional District.

Also today: The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has announced it is taking up a case filed by the state Democratic Party seeking to expand and clarify the state's new mail-in ballot law amid the coronavirus pandemic. The Trump Campaign and state Republicans are challenging absentee voting in the battleground by, for example, suing to prevent the use of secure drop-boxes for absentee ballots.

And, in Texas, a federal judge has, for the second time, found the state in violation of the National Voter Registration Act for refusing to make online voter registration available along with online drivers license applications as required by the NVRA. And, in another court case, Texas' Republican Sec. of State and Attorney General are now suing the Harris County (Houston) County Clerk to prevent him from sending out absentee ballot applications to the county's more than 2 million registered voters...

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We've got a lot to get to on today's BradCast, as voters in Massachusetts go to the polls today with a couple of very interesting primary races (results tomorrow!), and as the rest of us are now counting the days (63 of them), until general Election Day, with both hope and trepidation. [Audio link to show is posted below summary.]

Among the mountains o' stuff covered on today's program...

• After years of our reporting on the very successful, perhaps irreversible, decades-long effort by the Right to brainwash its followers, we open today with a few thoughts about a similar, if not quite as successful (though it's getting closer), effort to brainwash those on the Left. That effort to brainwash the Left, like the scheme on the Right, is also carried out by folks on the Right or those who support them. (And yes, that means we have a few words today about the still-misreported facts regarding the Hillary/Bernie race from 2016);

• We have more evidence of attempts to manipulate the Left in today's announcement from Facebook that, based on a tip from the FBI, the social media outlet has shut down several fake accounts created to support a Russia-related propaganda scheme targeting the Left in hopes of undermining Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The operation reportedly included a phony media outlet calling itself "Peace Data", in hopes of appealing to progressives in advance of this year's election;

• Information of that sort, as we discuss, is --- or should be --- useful to voters. Nonetheless, with just over two months until Election Day, with Donald Trump's top intelligence officers having recently warned that Russia is taking active measures, once again, to undermine the Presidential election in support of Trump, his recently-appointed Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe notified Congress over the weekend that he will no longer offer in-person briefings to lawmakers regarding foreign attempts to interfere in the election. The claim, offered by Trump himself without facts to back it up, is that members of Congress were illegally leaking certain information from the intelligence community, and that the information leaked was also "wrong". No evidence was given to support that charge, and while Trump claimed the decision to end intelligence briefings to Congress was made by him and Ratcliffe, evidence suggests that it was, instead, a directive from Trump himself. For some reason;

• Speaking of the November 3rd election, the dirty tricks are now underway, as revealed by a new robocall to some Democratic-leaning Michigan voters falsely warning that signing up to vote by mail will result in voters contact information being added to a database for tracking down arrest warrants, credit card debt collection and "mandatory vaccines". None of that is true. Though you should expect much more of it in the weeks ahead;

• Also in Michigan, the state's Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, recently won a court case filed by rightwingers attempting to prevent her from sending absentee ballot applications to all of the state's 7.7 million voters. The ruling --- in a state which Trump is said to have won by just over 11,000 votes in 2016 --- comes in the wake of his misfired threat to withhold federal funding from Michigan in a tweet in which he falsely claimed the "rogue Secretary of State" was planning to send out actual ballots (as opposed to applications) to all voters;

• And while Trump and his minions have been suing in state after state in (usually failed) efforts to make voting more difficult during the global pandemic that he failed to control --- even attempting to block the use of secure absentee ballot drop-boxes in key battleground states like Pennsylvania --- another newly elected Democratic Sec. of State, Jena Griswold in Colorado, announced today that her state will offer "at least 368 mail ballot drop boxes for the General Election, an increase of 49% since I was elected in 2018!";

• Also today, a somewhat bizarre comment from a reader/listener in response to our coverage yesterday of L.A. County's disastrous, unverifiable new touchscreen voting system, in which the commenters offers several odd allegations amid of my nearly 20 years of critical coverage of e-voting and asks "whose side are you on?";

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report in the wake of catastrophic week for the climate and the Republican National Convention...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Long road to recovery for Louisiana after Hurricane Laura's devastation; California and Colorado burn, while Phoenix bakes; PLUS: Amid multiple record-breaking weather disasters, Republicans ignore climate change at Republican National Convention... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Hurricane Laura and the California Fires Are Part of the Same Crisis; An Oil Giant’s Wall Street Fall: The World is Sending the Industry Signals, but is Exxon Listening?; Trump E.P.A. Relaxes Rules Limiting Toxic Waste From Coal Plants; Trump administration proposes easing oil and gas permitting in national forests; US South could save money by cleaning up its power grid; Microplastics in Farm Soils A Growing Concern; Big Oil Is in Trouble. Its Plan: Flood Africa With Plastic... PLUS: Sea level rise from ice sheets track worst-case climate change scenario... and much, MUCH more! ...