It's one disaster after another on today's BradCast. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Last night, 67 people were killed when an Army Helicopter crashed into an American Airlines jet from Wichita, Kansas as it was coming in for a routine landing at Reagan National Airport in D.C. Everyone in both aircrafts is presumed dead.

Today, even as dozens of bodies were still unrecovered from the icy Potomac River, and before virtually anything was known about the cause of last night's deadly disaster, the President of the United States presented a sick, disgraceful, lie-filled, misinformation-fest, disguised as a White House press briefing. He blamed "diversity" hiring by his two Democratic predecessors for the disaster, while admitting he had no evidence to support his claim, other than his "common sense" and "high level genius." I've got a thing or two to say about all of that on today's program.

While I wouldn't normally have drawn such an inference this soon after such a national tragedy or in just week two of any Presidency, given Donald Trump's appalling comments today, I felt it necessarily to detail that, in his very first week on the job, Trump fired the leadership of the FAA and TSA, as well as the entire membership of an air security and safety commission. He named no acting Director in the meantime at FAA, which had been in the middle of a hiring wave for air traffic controllers --- until Trump ordered a hiring freeze on his second day in office last week. Early reports from the FAA found that the air traffic control tower last night at Reagan National appeared to have been short staffed.

We'll wait for the NTSB's investigation (much less for the recovery of all the bodies) to be complete. But if there is any President to be blamed for what happened last night, the first major air crash in 16 years, it would seem be the "high level genius" currently in office, who thought it appropriate to use racist, sexist, ableist slurs to avoid accountability for his own pathetic, irresponsible actions in the first week of his second shamefully embarrassing Presidency.

THEN... We're joined by JACQUELINE SIMON, Policy Director of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the nation's largest federal workers union. She's here to discuss the Trump Administration's scammy email sent to some two million federal workers this week --- clearly written by co-President Elon Musk --- offering what many in the media incorrectly described as "buyout" offers this week.

In fact, it's a trap. The emails from the federal Office of Personnel Management --- portending to offer seven months of severance in exchange for workers at scores of federal agencies responding with "RESIGN" in the subject field of an email before February 6 --- were little more than "a barely veiled threat" to federal workers, charges Simon. Sign it now or be fired later. Moreover, she notes, "there's no guarantee whatsoever that anyone would ever see any of that money, because Congress would have to approve it. They don't have the money."

The scheme, Simon tells me, also ignores the legally required process for contract buyouts and severance pay for federal workers, as written into law. But, she observes, "they aren't really worrying the rules. They're not really worrying about the law. And if they are challenged, and if they do have to pay judgments, it's going to be the American people that pay. It's not coming out of Elon Musk's pocket. It's not coming out of Trump's pocket. It's coming out of your pocket and mine."

AFGE and several other public service unions also filed a legal complaint this week against a separate, if related scheme launched by Trump with an Executive Order signed last week. It would, if allowed by the courts, make it easier for him to fire career federal workers without cause which, Simon confirms, he has already begun doing unlawfully anyway.

FINALLY... Desi Doyen is here with our latest Green News Report, with news on new data suggesting that a Southern California Edison high-voltage wire may have sparked the deadly Eaton Fire on January 7th in Altadena, California; the Senate confirmations of Trump's unqualified picks to head the EPA and Dept. of Transportation; Ireland is slammed by the strongest storm in its recorded history; and other troubling news for our climate changed world...

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Article Categories: BRAD BLOG Media Appearance, National Security, Rights And Freedoms, Accountability, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., EPA, KPFK, Donald Trump, Climate change, Extreme weather, BradCast, Ireland, Electric vehicles, Race, FAA, Pollution, Labor Unions, Dept. of Transportation, Elon Musk