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After taking a birthday day off from The BradCast on Monday, we’ve got more than usual to catch up with today. Most importantly, 105 days out from this year’s critical midterm elections (but who’s counting?, Trump’s entire SAVE Act is an act to save face when and if his party gets decimated by American voters, as currently predicted. [Audio to full show follows this summary.]
We get caught up on a whole lot today. Among our many news headlines of note…
- Primary voting was underway in Arizona on Tuesday. Noteworthy results or problem reports, where available, on tomorrow’s show. (And we’ve got an eye on the bitter internecine battle between Maricopa County‘s new election-denying Republican County Recorder, being represented by Stephen Miller‘s law firm, and the County Election Director’s office, as overseen by the not-insane Republican-majority County Board of Supervisors.)
- 18 U.S. service members have now been killed during Donald Trump‘s nearly 5-month old, never-ending, no-way-out Iran War. The Pentagon admits at least 500 have been injured, including 100 over the just past week or two alone. And your gasoline prices are spiking again.
- Climate chaos: Wildfires continue in Canada; Flooding ravages the U.S. East with more storms on the way; 32 million Americans are under tornado watches from the Ohio Valley to the Northeast tonight; Tropical Storm Bertha spins up in Gulf, threatens Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas with massive rainfall and storm surge.
- The CDC and FDA identified lettuce from Big Ag distributor Taylor Farms late last week as the source of the national cyclosporiasis outbreak affecting thousand of people in dozens of states…only to UN-identify the Trump-supporting company as the source, for some reason, by Sunday. The government claims the initial testing resulted in a “false positive”. We discuss some of the possible reasons for UN-identifying Taylor Fresh Foods, Inc. as the source of the parasite. None of the possibilities are good. All of them the result of living under a corrupt, kleptocratic, wannabe-authoritarian regime which has decimated federal public health institutions.
Then, it’s on to Donald Trump‘s lead balloon of a White House primetime speech late last week, pretending to claim evidence of some sort of fraud or foreign interference was discovered during the 2020 election to explain the reason that Trump lost. The corporate media actually did a decent job in quickly debunking pretty much all of the bullshit that Trump tried to sell in his remarks. But there is one point I specifically wanted to focus on today.
Trump deceptively claimed, with no supporting evidence, that “According to the DHS review, state voter rolls and public records, they identified approximately 278,000 non-citizens who are registered to vote in federal elections.”
Where do those numbers come from? He didn’t say. How many of those “non-citizens” actually cast votes in an election? He didn’t say. I suspect he would have, had it been any sort of substantial number, since it would be pretty easy to find out if the supposed “non-citizens” had actually been identified, as he claimed.
Non-citizen voting is incredibly rare. When it is done, it is almost always by someone who didn’t realize they weren’t allowed to vote. It is most definitely not done as an organized effort to steal elections with immigrants brought into the country by a “crazy” cabal of Democrats “SO THEY CAN VOTE, VOTE, VOTE,” as Trump has laughably claimed.
In fact, as a superb (and, occasionally heartbreaking) Reuters analysis over the weekend outlined, just 129 people have been charged under a federal “voting by aliens” statute in the 30 years since the 1996 law was adopted. Many of them were misinformed by county officials; most thought it was legal to do so; and many voted for…yup, Trump.
Tune in for many more details on this, from my 20+ years of covering election integrity issues and identical false claims by Republicans over those decades that hordes of non-citizens are voting in our elections. They simply aren’t. And they know it.
All of this comes on a day when New Jersey‘s Democratic Governor announced that a “serious software error” at the state’s DMV from June 2023 to June 2024 resulted in some 6,660 non-citizens becoming mistakenly registered to vote, despite informing the DMV that they were not citizens. 400 of the mistakenly registered ended up voting before the state’s new Governor Mikie Sherrill was informed last week.
Despite that huge number (400) being the largest such collection of non-citizen voters I’ve ever heard of voting, by far, in my two decades of covering this stuff, accidental or otherwise, it still only amounts to approximately 0.0093% of the votes cast in the Garden State in the 2024 Presidential election.
But, here’s the bottom line: The SAVE Act, which would disenfranchise thousands if not millions of lawful citizen voters due to its mandate for documentary proof of citizenship, can’t pass the Senate, despite GOP control, and wouldn’t be implementable, in any event, between now and the November midterms. Trump knows this. He knows it can’t and won’t pass. He simply wants something/someone to blame when and if his party takes its expected shellacking this year, because Americans hate Donald Trump and his Republican Party policies.
FINALLY, we close today with Desi Doyen and our latest Green News Report, on our worsening Iran War-caused oil crisis; public backlash rising against resource-hungry data centers; and the GOP supergeniuses hoping to blame Canada for recent, massive wildfires, instead of themselves…
