While the corporate media have been somewhat beside themselves with effusive praise of Donald Trump's success at reading a speech from a teleprompter at his address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night, our guests on today's BradCast see it somewhat differently.

Suffice to say journalists Jacki Schechner and Gaius Publius were far less impressed. They both join us today to un-spin Trump's speech and some of the alternative facts he presented --- on healthcare, energy, the hate-crime epidemic, his exploitation of the widow of a Navy SEAL killed recently in Yemen and more --- as well as both the media's and Democrats', at times, beguiling response to it all.

Both also offer thoughts on the very happy "merger" of the Trump and Republican Party brands, as well as the DNC's election of a new party chair over the weekend --- and what all of it means going forward.

That's a very short description for today's very jam-packed BradCast!. Enjoy!...

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I'm back on today's BradCast! (Thanks to Angie Coiro for filling in recently!) But, don't worry, there's still plenty to stress about anyway. [Audio link to full show follows below.]

First up today, as we await whatever madness will come during tonight's Presidential address to a joint session of Congress, Donald Trump's Dept. of Justice makes it official and flips its position on the case against Texas' racially discriminatory Photo ID voting restriction law.

Also, another wave of bomb threats are issued against dozens of Jewish Community Centers and schools across the country this week. And nearly a full week goes by before the White House offers any comment at all on the triple shooting in Olathe, Kansas, where the suspect is said to have shouted "Get out of my country!" before opening fire on two engineers from India --- both men in the country for years on legal work visas --- because he reportedly believed they were Iranians here illegally. Do you suppose that tragic story would have received more attention from both the U.S. media and the White House had the shooter been a Muslim man shouting "Allahu Akbar!" before opening fire in the same crowded bar?

Then, we're joined by Dr. Vaile Wright, Director of Research and Special Projects at the American Psychological Association (APA), to discuss the group's new two-part survey [PDF] finding, for the first time in their "Stress in America" study's history, a notable up-tick in stress among Americans of all political persuasions in the wake of last year's election.

Wright breaks down which demographic groups are most likely to be suffering from what is now being called "Post-Election Stress Disorder"; how Trump's rhetoric against immigrants has serious consequences ("Words absolutely matter," Wright says); how social media and mobile devices seems to be making us all more stressed, depressed and angry; and what you can do if you are among the now-majority of the nation feeling overwhelmed by the constant and disturbing barrage of troubling news.

"Some of the things that have happened, post-inauguration, have had pretty swift and real consequences," Wright explains, while detailing a long list. In the meantime, she notes, "You've got a news media that is 24/7. You've got social media that is nearly constant for those who use it, where they refresh their feed over and over again. And you get to this information overload, where basically it's hard to separate out truth from non-truth, and it just increases everybody's anxiety level." Tell me 'bout it. But it's somehow comforting, nonetheless, to have some empirical statistics to demonstrate that this nightmare is more than just our collective imagination.

Finally, we close with a bit of encouraging news, as a new poll finds some two-thirds of Americans do not want to see the Affordable Care Act ("ObamaCare") completely dismantled. Moreover, huge majorities in the survey now, in fact, support the landmark legislation's key provisions, even as Congressional Republicans struggle to find a plan to "repeal and replace" it, and Trump declares: "Nobody knew healthcare could be so complicated!" Really, Mr. President?...

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On today's BradCast, I'll be your guest host, Angie Coiro. Would you like to sit at the bar? Maybe not a bad idea.

Have you had the Trump/Russia links up to here? You have a friend in RJ Eskow, host of The Zero Hour. He's not convinced; he advises skepticism and clear thinking when it comes to sorting the proven from the unproven.

With people fleeing America over the northern border in fear, with at least one report of a man who killed himself rather than be forced back into Mexico, with an Oscar-nominated cinematographer kept out of the US, and a Holocaust scholar from France almost deported --- it's time to take a long look at sanctuary cities, emboldened local police forces, and how to stay focused on resistance. Heralded civil rights attorney/activist Jim Brosnahan of Morrison & Forster in San Francisco, and Heather "Digby" Parton of Hullabaloo take on the many facets of that disaster.

Finally, Dave Johnson of Seeing the Forest and The Campaign for America's Future deconstructs Trump's promised tax cuts, and their connection to failing infrastructure.

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On today's BradCast, guested hosted by me, Angie Coiro, Donald Trump lies at CPAC and Sean Spicer excludes journos from hearing White House news --- just another day with the Trump administration. [Audio link posted below.]

Guest Scott Dworkin of The Democratic Coalition Against Trump tackles the massive tangle that is the Trump family's business relationship with Russia. He saves the best for last: why he thinks the FBI's James Comey will ultimately weigh in on the side of justice.

Then, sociology professor Jonathan Martin makes the case that yes, we should look at a third-party break with Democrats.

Gender Spectrum's Joel Baum joins us to talk about supporting transgender children and teens under an administration that works to take their rights away --- and what parents, teachers, and other loving adults can do.

Then, what went down as journalists from established news organs first had to sign up for a White House press gathering, then one by one got turned away. And, finally, a spotlight on Steve Bannon's appearance at CPAC, and his alleged script for "The Singularity: Resistance Is Futile." (Not. Kidding.)

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On today's BradCast, guest hosted by moi, Angie Coiro, we dive down the rabbit hole into the alternate reality that is CPAC.

My guest is Peter Montgomery, Senior Fellow at Right Wing Watch. Going beyond the highlights, he checks out some of the lower-profile breakout sessions. And he proves he's got the "FAKE NEWS!" shout down hard.

A review of the news includes the bizarre taped exchange between a terrorism expert and a guy in White House obsessed with Twitter - no, not him. Another one.

The Anne Frank Center has pretty much had it with Trump and his surrogates giving lip service to uprooting antisemitism - and their executive director isn't hiding it.

Finally, how today's activists hitting the streets can learn from the pros: veterans of MLK marches and voter suppression court battles share their street-tested wisdom.

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On today's BradCast, as dark as yesterday's show was, today is somewhat the opposite, with a whole bunch of encouraging news from the courts and the people across these United States. [Audio link to show follows below.]

Attorney and legal journalist Mark Joseph Stern of Slate joins us to break down the full 4th Circuit Court of Appeals' potentially landmark decision upholding the state of Maryland's ban on semi-automatic "weapons of war" and the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling today on a race-based death penalty case out of Texas.

On MD's ban on military-style assault weapons, enacted by the legislature following the 2012 Sandyhook Elementary school massacre, the full court's majority ruling, including a number of Republican-appointed judges, soundly rejected the opponents argument that, as Stern says, "once enough people own a certain type of gun, the 2nd Amendment magically begins to protect it." He explains what may happen next with this case as it moves toward the Supreme Court and offers his thoughts on why GOPers and the NRA are suddenly unconcerned with their "states rights" arguments when it comes to guns.

On the SCOTUS death penalty case, granting a repreive, for now, to a Texas man on death row since 1997, Stern explains how the case underscores that "people who are sentenced to death in this country get the worst lawyers sometimes...It's really quite shocking." Incredibly enough, Chief Justice John Roberts eloquently agreed --- at least in this case.

And more encouraging news also covered today...

• A federal court in Texas blocks the state's attempt to defund Planned Parenthood;
• North Carolina's Democratic governor moves to withdraw the state's appeal to SCOTUS, filed by his Republican predecessor seeking to overturn a federal appeals court finding that the state's election reform law unconstitutionally discriminated against African-Americans "with surgical precision";
• An FEC commissioner refuses to back down in the face of legal threats from Koch Brothers'' funded group after her demand to see Trump's alleged evidence of thousands of illegal votes cast in New Hampshire's 2016 Presidential election;
• Another new poll finds Trump's approval ratings "sinking like a rock";
• A Muslim group raises $90 thousand (so far) to help repair the desecrated Jewish cemetery in St. Louis, MO;
• A people continue to exercise democracy, whether Republicans and Donald Trump like it or not, by showing up in huge numbers at Congress member town halls across the country...

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It's a dark day on today's BradCast, as hate crimes continue to rise across the country and Donald Trump's Administration issues new, radical guidelines on the detention and deportation of immigrants. [Audio link to show posted below.]

Wendy Feliz of the American Immigration Council joins us to help unpack the Department of Homeland Security's disturbing new instructions to law enforcement regarding the arrest and deportation of virtually any undocumented immigrant at any time for any reason, including the most minor of crimes or even just a suspicion of such crimes.

The memos issued today are "sort of our worst fears realized," she explains, before detailing the "very stark and very punitive" measures that are "broader than is almost imaginable."

"Essentially, they've done away with all the priority enforcement memos that were written under the Obama Administration, whereby they were trying to narrow down who was deportable. That's just basic Law Enforcement 101 --- the idea that if you go after jaywalkers with the same force that you go after bank robbers, then you're not really doing a good job of stopping people that pose a real threat to society."

Feliz goes into the troubling details of the orders --- which, she charges, are "going to be very disruptive, and potentially disastrous to the economy" --- and the madness of attempting to allocate law enforcement resources for the expulsion of 400,000 people for 11 million instead. Those numbers will now include both children and those who came here as children and had received legal federal work permits under Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. We also discuss what is likely to be an explosion of litigation in response to the orders ("Make American litigate again," Feliz quips) and what it is that those directly affected by these new mandates must now do in order to try and both defend and protect themselves.

Also today, the unprecedented string of bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers across the nation continues, with the organizations now reportedly targeted in at least 26 states since the first of the year, and some 200 headstones desecrated in a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri (the one where my grandparents are buried, in fact).

On the upside, Donald Trump has finally spoken out, sort of, against the string of anti-Semitic events and has also appointed someone who is not insane to be the next National Security Advisor following last week's resignation/firing of Michael Flynn.

Desi Doyen joins us once again for the latest Green News Report on the confirmation of EPA enemy Scott Pruitt as the next head of the EPA and with some good news on wind energy. Finally, we close with a bit of breaking good news from the courts concerning guns...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: What to expect from the EPA following the rushed confirmation of EPA-enemy Scott Pruitt; Three fossil fuel explosions in two weeks; Alaska officials say they can't shut off leaking natural gas pipeline; PLUS: The Midwest sets U.S. wind energy record... 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): Mattis: No plan to seize Iraqi oil; California Senate leader's new bill: 100% clean energy; Norway moves to reach 100% electric cars in just 8 years; Scientists Rally in Boston to Highlight Threats to Science; China steel mills caught on the hop by North Korea coal ban; Appeals court rules in favor of Virginia keeping moratorium on uranium mining; Coal magnate thrilled as Trump trashes Obama rules; Republicans Try a New Tack on Climate Change; As Standing Rock Construction Restarts, Pipeline Fights Flare Across US... PLUS: 'The wild west of wind': Republicans push Texas as unlikely green energy leader... and much, MUCH more! ...

On today's BradCast: 75 years ago this past weekend, FDR issued Executive Order 9066, sending 120,000 Japanese-Americans to concentration camps in one of the most shameful moments in American history. Today, we fight to keep history from repeating itself as Trump offers big lies about terrorism, voter fraud and the media, among other things --- for a reason. [Audio link to full show posted below.]

While Trump's Executive Order attempting to ban Muslims and refugees from seven different countries has been blocked by the federal courts, another one is promised to take its place soon. And in order to do so, the Administration continues to offer lies about terror attacks to justify its actions, this time with the President citing a non-existent terror incident in Sweden --- fake news that he heard about (and misreported) from Fox "News" the night before his campaign rally in Florida on Saturday.

That dangerous lie comes on the heels of a week of another big lie from Trump and his top advisers concerning false claims of "thousands" of cases of "voter fraud" in New Hampshire and elsewhere --- and as Trump declares the media to be "the enemy of the American People."

While the lies are now non-stop, ridiculous and, at times, hilarious, the insidious reason behind them is chilling, dangerous, shameful and about as un-American as possible. Why all of it matters, and more, on today's BradCast...

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On today's BradCast, it's a Trumponanza, guest hosted by yours truly, Angie Coiro.

First a roundup of the latest threats and inanities, including the Trump camp's denial of a darned convincing report from AP about setting the National Guard loose to sweep out undocumented immigrants. Scott Pruitt scores both a win and a loss within twenty-four hours; Arlene's Flowers' claim that it can discriminate against gay couples on the basis of art (!) falls down. And: why a Rasmussen poll and a Pew Research poll can be so far apart, and why that matters at all; and the Case of the Sudden Trademark Protection, a suspicious gift from China to our equally suspicious president. That emoluments case is practically building itself at this point.

And that's just in the first ten minutes! Then Lisa Graves from the Center for Media and Democracy goes into detail on Pruitt developments. She says the Center's victory over Pruitt in an Oklahoma court --- mandating that he turn over thousands of emails from during his tenure as the EPA suing Oklahoma Attorney General --- has a direct connection to his lightning-fast ascendancy to the EPA chair.

Sarah Jaffe, host of the Belabored podcast, explains why Trump's relationship with union workers is so complex.

Finally, a suggestion for organizers of the upcoming Day without Women protest: think ahead about the women who can't afford to take a day off.

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On today's BradCast: Donald Trump holds his first solo press conference as President...and it's a doozy. But just before that presser was going on at the White House, so was another at the National Press Club in D.C. to announce that nearly 1 million signatures calling for Trump's immediate impeachment were being delivered to Congress. [Audio link to complete show follows below.]

Journalist, author and activist Norman Solomon of Roots Action --- who, with Free Speech for People, have created the ImpeachDonaldTrumpNow.org campaign --- joins us to explain the grounds for the remarkable effort to begin Congressional proceedings to remove Trump from office, not even one month into his Presidency.

"This is a very long process, but not as long as many people think. This could be a lot quicker than we might have imagined just a few weeks ago," Solomon tells me, detailing what he sees as crystal clear violations of the U.S. Constitution's foreign and domestic "Emoluments" clauses, as well as a number of statutes as well.

Solomon charges that "It's such a dangerous precedent to have a President willfully, flagrantly, violating the Constitution," why he believes this can be done even with Republicans in control of both the House and Senate, and why the question of whether Vice President Mike Pence would be even worse for progressives, if he were to ascend to the Presidency, does not matter.

"If we shrug and say 'Well, we don't think it's practical', or 'We don't like the result of the Vice President becoming President', then we've bought further into what, frankly, is moving towards dictatorship," he argues. "If we say this is okay, that the President is above the supreme law of the land, then that opens the floodgates to autocracy and the antithesis of democracy."

The author of War Made Easy: How President and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death also discusses what he sees as the "big danger" of "Democrats attacking Trump with over-the-top extreme rhetoric" concerning Russia.

Then, Desi Doyen joins us for our 8th Anniversary(!) episode of the Green News Report! And, finally, I respond to some listener mail which disagrees with my take on the Logan Act (as detailed during Tuesday's BradCast), and how some believe it should be used to prosecute former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn in regard to his conversation about sanctions with Russia's ambassador prior to the Inauguration...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Trump repeals anti-corruption regulation for the fossil fuel industry; From the folks bringing you the Dakota Access Pipeline, another major pipeline spill; Good news for breathers, bad news for coal miners in Arizona; US emissions still declining; PLUS: Scientists discover man-made toxic chemicals in the deepest part of the ocean... 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): Climate Change Plus Aging Infrastructure = Multiplying Disasters; Oroville Is a Warning for California Dams, as Climate Change Adds Stress; Scientists have just detected a major change to the Earth's oceans linked to a warming climate; Indigenous People Should Have Rights Over Their Land, Pope Francis Says; Endangered Species Act heading for the threatened list; 'A large blowtorch': worker missing in Paradis pipeline explosion; Ohio GOP targets clean energy standards, efficiency rules... PLUS: India's polluted air now kills 1.1 million people per year... and much, MUCH more! ...

On today's BradCast: There may appear to be chaos right now at the federal level of lawmaking --- in both the Executive and Legislative branches. But that disarray may be working out just fine for Donald Trump and his supporters, as my guest today explains. [Audio link to show is posted below.]

First up, however, Senate Democrats win one for a change, as Andrew Puzder, Trump's labor-hating billionaire nominee to head the Department of Labor removes himself from contention after a number of Republicans threaten to vote against his confirmation. At the same time, however, Congress sends a bill to the President that will kill an Obama era regulation, instituted in the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, that would have made it slightly more difficult for some with mental disabilities to purchase fire arms.

Then, while the "unbelievable turmoil" surrounding this insane White House right now may be alarming to many Democrats and progressives and other reality-based individuals, for Trump supporters living in their own versions of "reality", they may be hearing and seeing exactly what they had hoped from this President --- even as chaos continues to keep both critics and the non-wingnut media off balance and on edge.

D.D. Guttenplan, editor-at-large at The Nation, joins us to explain how much of the on-going chaos is being purposely deployed, not unlike a military strategy developed to avoid anti-aircraft fire during World War II. "I think it's deliberate, and I think it's working," he tells me. And while the temptation to respond to every outrage from this White House may be "satisfying, in the long run it's going to exhaust us."

He makes the case, based on his reporting in the industrial rust belt, that many Trump's supporters are quite pleased with his Administration so far, and that until Democrats begin to focus on winning back those otherwise Dem-leaning voters, they will continue to be overwhelmed by the "barrage of comments, and picked fights, and scandals, and daily assaults on whoever is most vulnerable among us."

"As long as we're being reactive, we're not prioritizing, and we need to prioritize," Guttenplan contends, before going on to detail what he believes some of those priorities need to be in order for Democrats to both win back their voters and the White House along with it.

Finally, speaking of avoiding distractions, last week, while everything else has been going on, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) arrested and detained a man who came here from Mexico with his parents illegally when he was seven years old. Despite legal work permits from the federal government's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program under Obama, no criminal record, and claims by Trump that immigrants like him would not be rounded up, he has been detained for the past week in Tacoma, Washington, according to his attorneys, in the first such case reported since the new President took office...

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