Record ocean heat bleaching corals worldwide; EV charging roads in Indiana; Biden raising drilling, mining royalties for first time in a century; PLUS: A marine mystery in Florida...
10th hottest month ever in a row; Swiss climate inaction violates human rights; PLUS: EPA crack down on airborne chemical plant pollution, 'forever chemicals' in drinking water...
A CA three-way!; Polls shift toward Biden; RW scam artists pay the price; Trump rejected again in NY criminal case, facing trouble for phony $175M bond in NY civil case...
Big hurricane season coming; Colorado River used mostly for cattle; Good news for CA snowpack, for now; PLUS: Disney's Tomorrowland says goodbye to Yesterdayville...
No Labels out; Soft sentence for vote fraudster; WI reconsiders drop-boxes; NE nixes Elctrl College change; Biden v. Israel; Sanders, Biden tout drug price success...
Felony charges dropped against VA Republican caught trashing voter registrations before last year's election. Did GOP AG, Prosecutor conflicts of interest play role?...
State investigators widening criminal probe of man arrested destroying registration forms, said now looking at violations of law by Nathan Sproul's RNC-hired firm...
Arrest of RNC/Sproul man caught destroying registration forms brings official calls for wider criminal probe from compromised VA AG Cuccinelli and U.S. AG Holder...
'RNC official' charged on 13 counts, for allegely trashing voter registration forms in a dumpster, worked for Romney consultant, 'fired' GOP operative Nathan Sproul...
So much for the RNC's 'zero tolerance' policy, as discredited Republican registration fraud operative still hiring for dozens of GOP 'Get Out The Vote' campaigns...
The other companies of Romney's GOP operative Nathan Sproul, at center of Voter Registration Fraud Scandal, still at it; Congressional Dems seek answers...
The belated and begrudging coverage by Fox' Eric Shawn includes two different video reports featuring an interview with The BRAD BLOG's Brad Friedman...
FL Dept. of Law Enforcement confirms 'enough evidence to warrant full-blown investigation'; Election officials told fraudulent forms 'may become evidence in court'...
Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL) sends blistering letter to Gov. Rick Scott (R) demanding bi-partisan reg fraud probe in FL; Slams 'shocking and hypocritical' silence, lack of action...
After FL & NC GOP fire Romney-tied group, RNC does same; Dead people found reg'd as new voters; RNC paid firm over $3m over 2 months in 5 battleground states...
After fraudulent registration forms from Romney-tied GOP firm found in Palm Beach, Election Supe says state's 'fraud'-obsessed top election official failed to return call...
Last night on the Fox Business Channel, nine lucky Republican Presidential candidates gathered to in South Carolina for a debate in hopes of taking down Donald Trump.
So, on today's BradCast, we try to make some sense of it all. Wish us luck!
I'm joined today by our returning champions, Heather Digby Parton of Salon and Digby's Hullabaloo blog and Fred Karger, former longtime GOP political consultant and 2012 GOP Presidential candidate (the first openly gay candidate from either major party).
And, of course, we offer you some of the smartest (and, occasionally, snarkiest) post-debate analysis and insight you'll find anywhere, as Trump and Cruz (and a few other folks) face off just two weeks before the first votes of 2016 are finally cast and, maybe, counted in Iowa...
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On today's BradCast, guest host Nicole Sandler continues her year-end look back at the year almost ended.
Today, Nicole is joined by Cliff Schecter who discussed the insanity that is this nation's obsession with guns. He also painted an optimistic picture of the possibility of beginning to change our gun culture in 2016. We'll see.
Also today: Brad and Desi return to bring us the Green News Report's year in review, and Nicole has a quick correction about something she got wrong yesterday. (It doesn't happen often, but when it does, she likes to correct the record quickly.)
While we post The BradCast here every day, and you can hear it across all of our great affiliate stations and websites, to automagically get new episodes as soon as they're available sent right to your computer or personal device, subscribe for free at iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or our native RSS feed!
On today's BradCast, ownership of our nation's media gets more and more rightwing in advance of the 2016 Presidential elections.
First up, in Ohio, a newspaper owner/publisher fires the paper's editor, a 31-year employee, for daring to talk with staffers about an editorial critical of the NRA that the owner/publisher had spiked.
Meanwhile, in Nevada, the state's largest newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, is secretly purchased by casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, the GOP's largest single funder during the 2012 Presidential election cycle. After a week of mystery and lies from Adelson --- and investigative reporting by the journalists who actually work at the paper, who had no idea who they now work for --- the billionaire admits that, yes, it was his family that bought the paper...and a hugely inflated price.
Media Matters' Salvatore Colleluori joins us to explain why Adelson's mysterious purchase of the R-J is so disturbing on a whole bunch of levels. Among them: While the paper was already a right-leaning news outlet, the purchase could result in still more of Adelson's far rightwing political views making it into print in the key swing-state of Nevada in a Presidential election year. Moreover, as we discuss on today's program, the takeover could also serve to help keep coverage of Adelson's own highly suspect business dealings --- from China to The Vegas Strip --- out of the pages of the biggest paper in the state's biggest city all together.
"The other newspapers that he owns have very, very distinct stances that are very much in line with him," Colleluori tells me on today's program. "Owning the biggest newspaper in the state gives him a major mouthpiece going into, not only the 2016 election, but with a big Senate election coming in Nevada, there are going to be a lot of opportunities for him to throw his weight around in the state."
"As the old adage goes," he notes, "If you can't beat 'em, buy 'em."
Also today: Some thoughts on the rightwing talk radio outlet which CNN partnered with for this week's GOP debate, where, as we note in our latest Green News Report, CNN also completely avoided discussion of climate change and the largest world agreement ever struck just days earlier, and how a record warm December in the Midwest and North-East is ending what is now almost certainly going to be the warmest year ever recorded on Planet Earth...
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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Republicans hold another Presidential primary debate on national security, but host CNN skips right over energy and climate change; House Republicans lift crude oil export ban; 90 percent of disasters caused by extreme weather; PLUS:: November 2015 was the hottest November on 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): Toxic firefighting foam has contaminated U.S. drinking water; San Diego vows to go 100 per cent renewable in 20 years; Lakes are warming at an alarming rate; UK PM Cameron urged to rethink solar subsidy cuts; Denied: UK court rejects Trump's wind farm block; Cheap gas spurs SUV sales... PLUS: 2016 set to be hottest year on record ... and much, MUCH more! ...
Our analysis attempts to both decode the dog whistles and debunk the nonsense (and there was a lot of both!) from last night's Republican Presidential debate on the Fox Business Channel in Wisconsin. My guests will help you understand everything that the GOP-friendly Fox and Wall Street Journal moderators didn't bother to help viewers understand...and much more! (And, we also spend a bit of time trying to figure out what the hell the Democrats must be thinking by not holding debates and/or hiding them from the public on weekends!)
It's a very lively BradCast today, live from our flagship KPFK/Pacifica Radio studios in Los Angeles! Enjoy!...
Download MP3 or listen to complete show online below...
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Did someone or something flip election results last week in Ohio's statewide ballot initiative Issue 3 to legalize marijuana? We try to get to the bottom of that question --- and many others --- on today's BradCast. (Audio is linked below.)
As initially reported by Ohio's Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, and later by Steve Rosenfeld, screenshots captured from several different media outlets on Election Night last week show what appear to be impossible results on both Issue 3 and on Issue 1, a ballot measure for redistricting reform in the Buckeye State.
For example, according to screenshots from Dayton's WHIO-TV website, as published in the Fitrakis, Wasserman and Rosenfeld articles, Issue 3 reportedly had 969,662 "Yes" votes with 39% of precincts reporting. But later in the night, with 45% of precincts, there were only 614,866 "Yes" votes on Issue 3. That's a seemingly impossible drop of more than 300,000 votes in the initiative that is said to have ultimately failed, according to the unverified election night results reported by the OH Sec. of State.
Similarly, screenshots of results on Issue 1, which ended up reportedly passing, saw "No" votes drop impossibly from 990,555 to 486,596 later in the evening.
What explains these numbers? I spoke to Matt McClellan, Communications Director for Ohio Sec. of State John Husted (R) earlier today. He says that WHIO and the other media outlets whose screenshots were cited by Fitrakis, Wasserman and Rosenfeld, were all Cox Media outlets and "the problem was on their end."
"Someone was manually entering data," McClellan told me. "When they noticed the mistake, they made a correction." He went on to say that the Secretary of State's website had no such discrepancies or irregularities throughout the evening. His office does not take their own screenshots throughout the night, so we can't confirm that either way, at the moment, though McClellan says the office "went back and double-checked to make sure" after the issue was initially reported.
In response to the Sec. of State office's assertions (we offer more detail on them during the show), Fitrakis shared pre-election tracking poll results with me, that suggest the marijuana initiative should have passed, rather than lost, by a 2 to 1 margin. "Tracking polls suggest more that [results] were flipped than not flipped," he told me today. Fitrakis was is skeptical of the explanation from Husted's office, while adding that if Cox is manually entering results on the fly on Election Night, "then they need to stop, because it's absurd."
For the record, our calls to try and confirm the OH SoS' claims with WHIO and/or Cox Media have not yet been returned. But, again, much more detail during the program.
Finally on today's show, Desi Doyen joins us with the latest Green News Report on the fossil fuel industry's no good, very very bad week...
Download MP3 or listen to complete show online below...
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It is a primal scream of a BradCast today, following what happened --- once again --- on Election Day yesterday. We see, again, the nightmare scenario I've warned about for so many years: a U.S. election where all of the pre-election polls suggest Candidate X is set to win, but Candidate Y ends up winning by a huge margin instead and nobody even bothers to verify that the computer tabulated results accurately reflect the intent of the voters. (Audio link to today's full show is below.)
That's exactly what happened in Kentucky on Tuesday, where Democratic Attorney General Jack Conway was leading by a fair margin (about 3 to 5 points) in almost every pre-election poll in his race for Governor, but then ended up being announced as the loser to 'Tea Party' Republican candidate Matt Bevin by a landslide (almost 9 points) --- according to the state's 100% unverified computer tabulation systems.
As detailed on today's program with my guest Karoli Kuns of Crooks And Liars, there are a number of reasons to question the reported results. Among them, as Kuns points out today at C&L, the Democrats running in the down ballot races --- for Secretary of State, Attorney General (Conway's current job) and even state Auditor --- each reportedly received tens of thousands more votes than Conway did at the top of the ticket!
Bev Harris, of BlackBoxVoting.org, who I spoke with earlier today, described the higher vote totals in the down ballot races as a "significant anomaly". She tells me that, at least until more records are requested and examined, the KY-Gov's race "has to be looked at as a questionable outcome, particularly because of the discrepancies in the down ballot races. More votes in those races and not at the top...that just doesn't happen."
(Here is a link to a helpful Public Records Request toolkit [PDF] from Black Box Voting for those of you who may be interested in helping to try and obtain some transparency in this race, as we also discussed on today's program.)
There are many other reasons for supporters to question the reported results in the KY-Gov's race, as I detail during the show. Of course, the reported results could also be completely accurate. But, without public, human examination of the hand-marked paper ballots (which, thankfully, now actually exist across most of the state!) and other related records, we have yet another unverified, 100% faith-based election to leave supporters wondering if they really won or lost.
We've seen this before, of course. Too many times. We've seen malfunctioning paper ballot op-scan systems report losers as "winners" until a hand-count corrects the record. We've seen how easy it is for hackers to game election equipment. We've seen election insiders, even as recently as last week, breaking in to computerized central tabulators. And we've even seen high-ranking election officials in Kentucky (including County Clerks, Circuit Court Judges and School Superintendents!) convicted for decades of insider election fraud, including the manipulation of electronic voting systems.
We've seen both Democrats and Republicansalike fall victim to similarly anomalous and unverified results. And, while none of it bodes well for 2016 and beyond, neither does it bode well for those immediately and directly impacted by Tuesday's elections --- such as the 400,000 Kentuckyians who stand to lose health care under a new Republican Governor who has vowed to shut down the state's expansion of coverage under ObamaCare by the very popular if term-limited and outgoing Democratic Governor.
Also today: More election results from races around the country, from the attempt to legalize marijuana in Ohio, to campaign finance reform in Maine, to the recall of Koch Brothers-funded school board officials in Colorado...
Download MP3 or listen to complete show online below...
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It's Election Day on The BradCast, so, naturally, that means voter disenfranchisement throughout the country. Early reports today find e-pollbook systems failing at polling places in a number of states, which means voters are being turned away. (And, for some reason in Ohio(!) folks who were registered are finding they no longer are...for some reason.)
But, with more Election Day problems sure to come to light soon, we turn for the moment to the obscenity that has become judicial elections in the U.S. --- on a day that finds a record $15.8 million has been spent on today's Supreme Court election alone in Pennsylvania.
Scott Greytak of JusticeAtStake.org joins us to discuss his new report --- Bankrolling the Bench: The New Politics of Judicial Elections 2013-2014 (with Brennan Center for Justice and the National Institute on Money in State Politics) --- on the record amount of cash now being spent, "legally", to buy judges and state Supreme Court Justices via elections around the country. Millions of dollars now flow in to these contests from outside interests and political parties as well as lawyers and lobbyists.
"This is something that's, unfortunately, unique to America," Greytak explains. "It's really the United States and one other country in the world that decides to elect their judges." What began as "a populist impulse" about 100 years ago, "when folks were trying to break up big machine politics, trying to attack corruption," has now become a nightmare in the post-Citizens United age.
Judicial elections "which typically used to be pretty low-key affairs" are now being "targeted by politicians, legislators, or special interest groups that are hoping to shape the bench [or] targeted as sort of a referenda on big decisions that the court has heard or, more often, just opportunities for partisan groups to try and make political plays with these courts."
"It's deeply concerning," Greytak tells me. "Our data from this cycle found that about a third of all contributions to state Supreme Court judicial candidates came from lawyers and lobbyists. Another third came from business interests which, of course, are going to have cases that come in front of these courts, or have interests that come in front of these courts."
"When judges have to run for office, the folks who are closest to the courts, who know what's at stake, are often the lawyers and lobbyists who operate in them," he says. "So they turn and rely on the lawyers and lobbyists as a funding system. It becomes a reproducing cycle of conflicts of interests and this is what judicial elections has left us with."
With mostly Republican, but also Democratic groups spending millions in these races and using them as political bludgeons, jurists become vulnerable to offering rulings based on partisan interests rather than the rule of law. As discussed on today's program, what is happening in the state of Wisconsin right now has become a fantastic example of how judicial elections have become disastrous for those of us who believe in good government.
Finally today, big news in our latest Green News Report with Desi Doyen, as a hurricane heads to Yemen (of all places) and the Keystone XL pipeline is finally dead...for now anyway...thanks in no small part to unrelenting citizen activists and organizers who stood up to the most powerful corporate interests in the history of civilization!...
Download MP3 or listen to complete show online below...
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As we've noted many times over the years, problems with voting systems on Election Day don't necessarily come to light until after Election Day --- sometimes months (or even years) after --- and they are frequently marginalized as little more than "hiccups, glitches, snags and snafus," by election officials and media alike when they do occur, rather than the outright failures that they actually are.
Today, however, in a number of states where elections are being held around the country, problems with electronic pollbooks, rather than voting machines themselves, seem to be popping up early and are resulting in voters walking away without having been able to cast a vote.
Here are a few examples today out of Virginia, Texas and Ohio, so far (emphasis ours)...
It was a 'Rocky Mountain Mess' to many, but we try to make sense of CNBC's GOP Presidential Debate in Boulder, CO last night on today's BradCast anyway!
"Digby" has joined us for all of our post-debate coverage so far this year and offers smart insight yet again today. Tomasic shares his on-the-ground perspective after covering the goings on inside and outside of the Coors Event Center before, during and after yesterday's debate(s).
Was anything learned from either the 'Kiddie Table' or 'Main' debates? Is Jeb finally done for? Did Kasich's gambit work? Did Trump accidentally make sense again? Does Jindal have a magic wand he doesn't know about? Is Social Security really a scam?
Were the CNBC moderators as awful as the GOP would like us all to believe? Why was a Republican debate held in the liberal "Mecca" of Boulder in the first place? And why were the students at CU-Boulder kept from attending it?
We search for reasonable answers to all of those questions and more on today's BradCast! Wish us luck!...
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On today's BradCast...the Republican Party may appear to be falling apart on one level --- because it is (and we cover quite a bit of their various disasters in advance of tonight's Republican Presidential debate in Boulder, CO today) --- but on another level, the GOP still controls not just both chambers of the U.S. Congress, but also the vast majority of statehouses and Governor's mansions across the country.
So, while the Democrats' Presidential prospects may be encouraging for them, are they actually in denial about their real problems? And/or is there another way out of their current morass?
Ian Millhiser, journalist, Constitutional law expert and author of the new book, Injustices: The Supreme Court's History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted, joins us to discuss what may be the Democrats' best way out of the mess: The U.S. Supreme Court and as many as four vacancies that may occur on the bench during the next Presidency. "The Future Of The Democratic Party," he wrote recently, "Will Be Decided By The Supreme Court."
"A big reason why Democrats are so far underwater when it comes to state legislative races, when it comes to House races, is because of the Supreme Court," Millhiser tells me on today's show. "The Supreme Court has ordered the lower federal courts not to even look at partisan gerrymandering cases. They're not allowed to even consider them under existing Supreme Court doctrine."
Millhiser goes on to explain how the Court's recent rulings on voting rights have also made things far more difficult for Democrats. SCOTUS, he argues, "isn't enforcing the Constitution and at other times its mangling the Constitution."
"The situation Democrats find themselves in is due to a number of problems layered on top of each other, many of which are at the fault of the Supreme Court. Many of these problems could be solved if we had a Supreme Court that was prepared to give us fairer elections," he notes. With as many as four --- four --- seats potentially becoming vacant on the Court during the next Presidency, the party that controls the White House as of 2017 will have an enormous opportunity to affect what happens in this country for generations.
While both major parties often use the potential for Supreme Court vacancies to underscore the importance of controlling the White House, Millhiser explains the reasons --- and there are many --- why the 2016 election really is different from recent elections where that argument has been offered. "If the Supreme Court gets even more conservative," he warns, "then you're looking at an apocalypse for the Democratic Party."
Also today: Elephants murdered in Zimbabwe; GMO labeling hypocrisy; Colbert takes on vegetarians after bad news about smoke meats; And much more...
Download MP3 or listen to complete show online below...
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On today's BradCast, first a rant about the nonsense that is the Benghazi "investigation", and then on to a real investigation concerning an anti-fracking initiative on the ballot in Mahoning County, OH, questions about the results reported by the county's electronic tabulators, and an election official or two who are caught on tape going kinda nuts when asked about it.
To talk about our latest example of "Election Officials Behaving Badly", I'm joined on today's show by Dr. Ray Beiersdorfer, the voter who asked a simple question at a recent Mahoning County, Ohio Board of Elections meeting, before the officials accused him of accusing them of a crime in response!
And, since the Mahoning County election officials --- the ones caught on tape responding so outrageously to Beiersdorfer's reasonable request for a hand-count --- failed to reply to our multiple requests to join us on the show, we are joined instead by Virginia Martin of the Columbia County, NY Board of Elections to comment on all of this. (Our invitation remains open to Mahoning County election officials David Betras (D) and Mark Munroe (R) if they'd like to respond to today's program.)
Beiersdorfer is a geology professor, fracking expert and supporter of the ProtectYoungstown.org anti-fracking initiative. As you'll here, at the meeting of the Elections Board, he politely asked for a hand-count of paper ballots regarding the ballot initiative, after a post-election poll appeared to offer contradictory results to those reported by the unverified computer optical-scan tabulation systems used in the county. (An electronic tabulation system, I'll note, which has failed in election after election elsewhere.) In response, Betras freaks out and charges that Beiersdorfer has accused him of "rigging an election".
"You just basically accused this board of elections of election fraud!," Betras, a Democratic, snaps in outraged response, as caught on tape. "I find it highly offensive you’d accuse me of a crime!" His fellow election commissioner, Munroe, a Republican, takes similar offense.
All of that, simply because a voter wished to oversee the results of an election to confirm that computer-reported results were accurate --- in a town with a history of election problems and where some of the same election officials reportedly spent some $30,000 of tax-payer money in a failed effort to keep the initiative off the ballot in the first place (before being overruled by the state Supreme Court.)
"I certainly wasn't accusing anyone of a crime," Beiersdorfer tells me today (and as the tape confirms). "I just pointed out the discrepancy and I asked for a public, open, transparent hand-count of the ballots. I was a little bit surprised at how he reacted to that --- and basically attacked me."
Unfortunately, it's not an isolated case. We've seen similar responses from election officials elsewhere. Martin, the Democratic co-chair of the Columbia County, NY Board of Elections --- one of the few counties in the nation to publicly hand-count every paper ballot before certifying any election (my recent interview with Martin and her Republican co-chair on that specific topic is here) --- explains on today's show: "We election officials often find ourselves in the crosshairs. There's always somebody in the public who's not happy about something that's transpired at the Board of Elections. There's a winner and there's a loser, so we often are in a position of having to defend ourselves. I can understand why they would be very sensitive."
But, she adds, that type of concern simply doesn't come up in her county, given that the public is invited to oversee the hand-count of paper ballots for every election. As an election official, she insists on hand-counts, she says, because: "I wasn't comfortable with trusting what the computer said, because I know computers can make mistakes. I know that computers can be programmed incorrectly --- inadvertently. I also know they can be manipulated, they can be tampered with. I personally can't know how a computer counts anything, because I don't get to see that. So how am I going to know that the result is correct?"
I think it's a fascinating show today --- as this is a problem that occurs more and more, as election officials and electronic voting and tabulation systems make it far more difficult for the citizenry to oversee their own elections --- but you'll be the judge. Give it a listen below!...
Download MP3 or listen to complete show online below...
[You can watch the complete, exclusive Mahoning County, OH video from which we played audio clips today, here. And the full video of Pima County, AZ Election Supervisor Brad Nelson caught on tape similarly freaking out back 2007, which we played a bit of as well today, can be seen here.]
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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: President Obama makes powerful case for climate action on the edge of the melting Arctic; 2015 hurricane season enters weird, record-breaking territory; Huge news for electric cars; PLUS: Rightwingers apoplectic over renaming of nation's tallest mountain... 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): VIDEO: Rick Santorum Demonstrates the Technique of Fake Science; Behind Tianjin Blasts, Flouted Regulations and Corruption; UN Climate Talks: the Sticking Points; U.N. Climate Talks Begin Divided, But With Hope for Paris Accord; Massive Cleanup Plan Emerging For U.S. Steel Site in Duluth; Japan Nuclear Power Outlook Bleak Despite First Reactor Restart... PLUS: Docs: Koch Industries Backed Effort to Undermine Renewable Energy in KS... and much, MUCH more! ...
IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Toxic mine spill contaminates waterways across three Southwest states; Only one mention of climate change in both Fox 'News' debates last week; Ohio Gov. John Kasich backtracks on global warming; PLUS: Shell Oil breaks up with ALEC... 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): US Carbon Pollution From Power Plants Hits 27-Year Low; Scotland To Ban Growing of Genetically Modified Crops; Hot Enough for You? This Is Just the Beginning; Inside Shell’s Extreme Plan to Drill for Oil in the Arctic; Toxic Algae Blooming in Pacific from California to Alaska Is Affecting Your Seafood; Japan Restarts Reactor After Break Due To Fukushima... PLUS: Australia unveils emissions reduction target ahead of Paris talks, is immediately criticized... and much, MUCH more! ...
First up, Kansas Sec. of State Kris Kobach (R) continues his years-long phony "voter fraud" crusade, but now he's been given more authority to cause even more damage to the fundamental right to vote! After years of blatantly lying about "voter fraud" in the state (which we document in detail), he has now been given prosecutorial authority by the state's Republican Governor to personally clean up his pretend scourge in Kansas.
His first act? Setting up a webpage to allow the public to report instances of fraud on the SoS website (since he's been unable to find any on his own during his five years in office since being elected to "Stop Voter Fraud!"). But, conveniently, he's left off the option for the public to report on Kansas' much more pressing problem: voter suppression --- especially by guys like Kobach, who, since taking office, has successfully blocked tens of thousands of legal Kansas voters from being able to vote in state elections.
Then, former FBI Special Agent, 9/11 whistleblower and TIME Magazine's 2002 Person of the Year, Coleen Rowley joins us to explain why Dylann Roof, the alleged Charleston, SC shooter and avowed racist, was charged with hate crimes this week, but not terrorism. What's the difference between terrorism and hate crimes? And does the SC shooting now prove (once again) that the term "terrorism" has become little more than meaningless propaganda?
The term "terrorism", Rowley tells me, is now "uniquely set for Muslims, or for Arab nations that we have had agendas with in the past. The media is primed for that message."
"The definitions have a propaganda value, but they are not clear, and they're not good for purposes of law enforcement at all because they're not even making sense. In fact, I think that's all they are serving now --- as propaganda," she explains, before citing one of her favorite quotes: "A poor man's war is terrorism. A rich man's terrorism is war."
Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report with the climate position of the latest entrant into the 2016 GOP race and how a Democratic candidate has made Fox "News" heads explode by telling the truth about the relationship between climate change and the rise of ISIS...
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About Brad Friedman...
Brad is an independent investigative
journalist, blogger, broadcaster, VelvetRevolution.us co-founder,
expert on issues of election integrity,
and a Commonweal Institute Fellow.