Today on The BradCast: Never mind 60 days. I’m not sure this lame Iran deal will even make it through the weekend. At least based on the way his most ardent supporters are summarily rejecting it. [Audio to full show follows this summary.]
BUT FIRST… some related-ish and not related-ish news…
- Facing unanimous, bipartisan opposition in the U.S. Senate, Donald Trump‘s corrupted and captured National Science Foundation has said it will reverse its plan to dismantle the critical $368 million ocean monitoring system known as the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI). The Administration announced last month it was removing hundreds of surface buoys and subsurface moorings that monitor weather, ocean currents, marine ecosystems, coastal flooding and the effects of climate change. The scheme was a stunning act of self-sabotage that the NSF says they will now pause and begin redeploying removed equipment, pending advice from a panel of “experts” they plan to convene.
- Donald Trump’s Reflecting Pool boondoggle on the National Mall in D.C. is going from bad to worse. Not only has an algae bloom turned the water neon green just days after reopening the refurbished pool, but now the “American Flag Blue” paint is peeling off as well. According to the anti-Trump Republicans at The Bulwark, however, the entire mess, and his defeat at the hands of a brainless single cell organism, serves as a “striking metaphor”, perfectly illustrating how Trump makes everything — “like America’s trade deficit, or Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon, or the national debt, or an algae-ridden reflecting pool” — “worse in four easy steps”.
- And we can apparently toss in his beloved vanity Ballroom into the mix of dreadful failures. Or, at least, his inability to tell the truth about it. Earlier this week, WaPo reported that the $400 million ballroom, which Trump vowed to build with private donations and “not ten cents” of taxpayer money, was actually set to cost $600 million, half of which was going to come from taxpayers. Today they report that the White House quietly shifted $352 million appropriated for Secret Service training and recruiting — 10% of the agencies annual budget — to the ballroom project.
THEN… It’s on to Trump’s “Memorandum of Understanding” boondoggle with Iran, in which the Islamic Republican comes out as the very clear winner in virtually every aspect, despite what the supposed Master Negotiator and his Administration are trying to sell the public. Even the longtime rightwing loyalists at Fox “News” aren’t buying it. They are pushing back hard against the temporary deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for hundreds of billions in reconstruction costs, the lifting of sanctions preventing the sale of Iran’s oil, and a promise to discuss Iran’s nuclear program which had been in check under the 2015 JCPOA agreement overseen by Barack Obama…until Trump tore it up. That 2015 agreement made clear in its introduction: “Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.”
Trump appears to have won nothing in the MOU that the U.S. didn’t already have before he launched a war that killed thousands and cost the U.S. tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars.
Even Trump seemed to recognize the failures of the deal, as his remarks — and bedraggled appearance — at the G7 Summit in France seemed to suggest. We step through some of those markers, raising the question of whether this agreement will survive any longer than his Reflecting Pool in D.C. did.
FINALLY… Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, on the pollution consequences of Trump’s war on Iran; Weather whiplash in the U.S. Southeast; and a few lessons on solar energy that we should have learned nearly 50 years ago from Jimmy Carter…
