Now is the time that the nation and the world really need our corporate media to rise to the occasion. I suspect they won't. But we try to do our part as best as we can on today's (and every day's!) BradCast. [Audio link to full show is below this summary.]

Here's a quick description and some of the source material referenced in today's lollapalooza of a program...

• Corporate media are failing to meet the moment, failing to cover Donald Trump's disastrous War on Iran for the generational calamity that it is.

• They have also long failed to meet the moment in covering our climate crisis, which is set to wreak havoc and smash records across much of the country as we move into next week. Heat records in the West, blizzards in the North, and likely tornadoes in between. All part of the climate changed mess that Trump is ignoring --- and making worse --- every single day now.

• After Trump killed Mojtaba Khamenei's wife and father --- and more than 150 school girls --- on the first day of the war, Iran's new Supreme Leader vows vengeance, including the continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz now roiling global markets and spiking the price of oil, as well as on "other fronts in which the enemy has little experience and would be highly vulnerable."

• One of those "other fronts" could, I suppose, be the Trump FBI's irresponsibly reported and "unverified" claim (a word that ABC News left out of its initial reporting!) that "Iran allegedly aspired to conduct a surprise attack using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) from an unidentified vessel off the coast of the United States homeland, specifically against unspecified targets in California." Of course, if there were any truth to an imminent drone attack, it would be regrettable, to say the least, that FBI Director Kash Patel fired a whole bunch of the folks leading the Bureau's highly experienced Iran counterintelligence team just days before Trump launched his new war.

• It is also regrettable that, just yesterday, Republicans in the U.S. Senate blocked a bill by Democrats to reopen every single agency in the Dept. of Homeland Security other than ICE and CPB, as the White House continues to block any guardrails against the thuggery (and murders of American citizens!) by the nation's immigration law enforcement officials. The nearly month-long shutdown of DHS means that the U.S. Coast Guard is currently unfunded. That seems a bad idea if there is REALLY a concern about drone attacks by "an unidentified vessel off the coast of the United States homeland."

• It is similarly regrettable that Republicans refuse to fund DHS and the nation's cybersecurity watchdog along with it --- the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which is also shut down during the DHS funding fight. This week we have seen the first major attack by a hacker group tied to the Iranian Intelligence Ministry since the start of the war. The attack against Stryker, a medical equipment and technology firm in Michigan, has reportedly wiped out and stolen data from tens of thousands of telephones and other networked devices at the company this week.

• But the most regrettable of all may be that, just prior to Trump's attack against Iran's nuclear energy facilities last June, Iran is believed to have removed about a 1,000 pounds of uranium enriched to 60% of what would be needed to create a nuclear bomb, and 10,000 pounds of uranium enriched from 2 to 5%. All of it reportedly evacuated from the facilities in small, SCUBA-sized tanks and potentially now available to be used anywhere for anything Iran may want, including dirty bombs detonated by either them or any of their many proxy militias in the region.

  This enriched uranium was made possible by Trump's decision to unlawfully tear up the Obama-era anti-nuclear agreement with Iran that, by all measures, was working and had previously preventing the sort of enrichment that occurred after Trump ended it.

  That is just one of the reasons why University of Chicago's veteran international security and terrorism expert Robert Pape, author of "Escalation Trap", asked last night on MS NOW when discussing the likelihood of Trump needing to put American boots on the ground in Iran: "How else would you even try to get this enriched uranium? How are we gonna find that 10,000 pounds? That 1,000 pounds? When they could be in SCUBA tanks [in] a territory two and a half times the size of Texas?"

  "This is just a disaster in the making," he warned, adding: "I think we're probably only at the beginning of the disaster as it unfolds."

• Finally, speaking of disasters in the making...Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, as the price of oil skyrockets and our climate disaster continues with record heat melting California's snowpack and the rate of simultaneous heat waves and droughts having increased significantly thanks to global warming...

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Article Categories: California, BRAD BLOG Media Appearance, National Security, Iran, Mainstream Media Failure, FBI, U.S. Senate, Dept. of Defense, Republicans, KPFK, Donald Trump, Nuclear power/weapons, DHS, Climate change, Extreme weather, BradCast, Drones, Cybercrime, CISA, Kash Patel