It's a very green BradCast today, but don't let that scare you away from hearing Bernie Sanders shout "DUUUHHH!" at Anderson Cooper. [Audio link to show follows below.]

As the twisted Trump Administration is attempting this week to roll back helpful regulations that enforce a bipartisan statute adopted in 2007 under George W. Bush that has saved millions of dollars for Americans while reducing vast amounts of greenhouse gas emissions by lowering energy bills and usage with more efficient light bulbs, Democratic 2020 Presidential contenders had a few other ideas this week. In a first of its kind, town hall devoted to solutions to our global Climate Crisis, the ten current top contenders for the Democratic nomination --- Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Andrew Yang, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O'Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Julian Castro and Cory Booker --- were granted 40 minutes a piece by CNN to answer questions and discuss their plans in a marathon 7-hour televised event on Wednesday night.

The result, as discussed today on the program with one of our favorite, if usually very cynical energy and climate journalists, DAVID ROBERTS of Vox.com, was surprisingly engaging and informative! "I will say that what happened was a thousand times better than a debate would have been," Roberts argues, citing the DNC's refusal to allow a single-issue debate focused solely on climate, while allowing for forums such as CNN's where candidates do not appear on the same stage at the same time.

"A climate debate when they only had 30 seconds at a time would have been a shallow, ridiculous show. This event turned out a thousand times better than I expected it to be," he tells me. "I expected a super-boring cliché fest, a bunch of shallow questions and shallow, cliché answers. 'Global warming is real.', 'We need to rejoin the Paris Agreement.' While the moderators varied in quality --- and Wolf Blitzer remains an embarrassment to cable news and to humanity --- overall, it was incredibly substantive and serious, beyond my expectations. I loved it."

We do our best today to make sense of the 7-hour event given the difficulty of doing so in the time available, which seems to somewhat mirror the difficulty of taking on climate change as a whole and the difficulty candidates have in articulating meaningful answers as they attempt (some more effectively than others) to overcome the difficulty of answering questions framed by the media to reflect rightwing and/or fossil fuel industry talking points.

Roberts offers his thoughts on both the successes and failures of the CNN anchors, the candidates responses, and on the often incredibly smart and insightful questions posed by audience members. Those, he describes with delight, were often far more substantive than the questions posed by the "professionals".

As to the actual substance of how to tackle the climate crisis as offered by candidates at the forum, we discuss their thoughts on how and if nuclear energy must play a part in solutions to the climate crisis; how some of the candidates pushed back on the idea that solutions must involve painful personal sacrifice (no, driving electric cars is not a sacrifice. "We are all going to love driving our electric cars!," Yang had to explain, over and again, to Blitzer); how government mandates already effect our food supply (often, adversely, thanks to corporate, profit-driven control of government institutions); whether the Senate filibuster must be dissolved in order to ever see real action that meets the existential challenges posed by global warming; and how candidates for office must reframe so many of these issues when discussing them with public and media, given years of corporate misframing adopted by media and politicians on the left and right alike (though especially on the right).

By way of one example, in response to Yang's comment on electric cars and Blitzer's harangue, Roberts notes: "That's the whole point about electric cars --- they're better! They're more fun to drive, they operate better, they accelerate faster, they need fewer repairs. This notion that it's all sacrifice is just what Republicans want. That's how Republicans want to frame the discussion. That's how they've wanted and attempted to frame every discussion about environmental policy going back four or five decades now. That's why it's sunk in in cable news land so much. They hear that from Republicans --- who they feature on their shows disproportionately --- all the time, so it just sinks in as a kind of background assumption. But it's absurd!"

We discuss all of that and much more, including Roberts' observations --- and often delightfully snarky views --- on which candidates excelled during the town hall and which ones too often fell for the bait offered by some of the CNN moderators.

Finally today, on what we promised would be a very green program, Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report, with a bit more on the CNN Town Hall and coverage of Hurricane Dorian after the storm's two-day devastation of The Bahamas and it's current track threatening large swaths of the U.S. Eastern Seaboard....

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It's NICOLE SANDLER, one more time, filling in for Brad and Desi on today's BradCast.

After an update on the latest news, I'm joined by Blogger TOM SULLIVAN, aka BloggersRUs, who writes for Digby's Hullabaloo blog. After publishing a post about Lawrence O'Donnell's MSNBC report on Donald Trump and Deutsche Bank, Tom received a letter from Donald Trump's attorney demanding a retraction and an apology. He explains what happened.

Then we turn our attention across the pond to the UK, where the new Prime Minister Boris Johnson appears to have engineered a coup of sorts. The Queen approved his plan to suspend Parliament for five weeks to allow him time to push through a "no deal" Brexit. People have taken to the streets in protest. I'll speak with American ex-patriot DENIS CAMPBELL, an author, journalist and broadcaster, who does his best to explain what's happening over there.

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Our guest on today's BradCast, argues that representative democracy is facing a "major crisis." And he wasn't even talking about the Constitutional Crisis we are now seeing as Trump turns up his obstruction measures against the U.S. Congress to 11. But partisan gerrymandering underscores that crisis as well. [Audio link to full show is posted below.]

First up today, however, much of Texas and Oklahoma are under tornado watches and warnings today, as 10 million Americans were under flash flood warnings as of airtime today, following as many as 67 tornadoes over the weekend in in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Kansas and Nebraska. That, after more than a month of record flooding along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers in many states. There is good reason that the UK's Guardian newspaper updated its style-guide last week to reflect the existential climate crisis humanity now faces, thanks to the burning of fossil fuels. The Guardian is now recommending "climate change" be referred to by its journalists as "climate emergency, crisis or breakdown", and that "global warming" is better described as "global heating", with "climate science denier" to be used instead of the inaccurate "climate skeptic". It will be nice when US media decides to do the same.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., Ford Motor Co.'s CEO --- who personally received a 6% raise last year, bringing his total compensation package to nearly $18 million --- announced plans for a "smart organizational redesign process" on Monday. That's a nice way of describing the company's decision to lay off as many as 7,000 workers by the end of summer. So much for the $1.5 trillion GOP tax cut assuring jobs, jobs, jobs and putting our economy "on rocket fuel", apparently, as Trump promised.

But the biggest news over the weekend, no doubt, comes from conservative Republican Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, who announced and explained on Twitter why he believes "President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct" and why even the redacted version of the Mueller Report reveals Trump "engaged in specific actions and a pattern of behavior that meet the threshold for impeachment."

The courageous, staunch libertarian Tea Party Republican and co-founder of the hard right Freedom Caucus in Congress, also charges that Trump's new Attorney General William Barr "deliberately misrepresented Mueller's report", that "partisanship has eroded our system of checks and balances," and that "the risk we face in an environment of extreme partisanship is not that Congress will employ [impeachment] as a remedy too often but rather that Congress will employ it so rarely that it cannot deter misconduct." He went on to warn, as we long have as well, that "When loyalty to a political party or to an individual trumps loyalty to the Constitution, the Rule of Law --- the foundation of liberty --- crumbles."

Trump's impressive response was to call Amash "a total lightweight" and "loser". Ours is to bestow him with our much-sought after, if rarely bestowed, Intellectually Honest Conservative Award

Of course, there are other reasons that so few (exactly zero, at the moment) other Congressional GOPers have joined Amash in standing up for what they used to pretend to believe in. One is that Democrats have yet to present the case for impeachment to the American public, even as the Trump Administration invokes every form of unlawful obstructive measure to try and keep them from doing so. (Breaking news during today's program, for example, includes a federal judge finding Trump's accounting firm Mazars must turn over Trump's financial documents as lawfully subpoenaed by Congress, despite a lawsuit from Trump attempting to block them from doing so; and news that the White House has now ordered former White House Counsel Don McGahn to defy a Congressional subpoena requiring him to testify to the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.)

The other reason many Republicans in Congress feel no need to hold Trump to account is that the GOP's extreme partisan gerrymandering in state after state following the 2010 census has resulted in members of Congress who feel --- with no small amount of justification --- that they cannot be removed from office by voters in a general election. The radical imbalance of such obscene district maps have resulted, for example, in Democratic House candidates winning almost 50% of the vote last year in North Carolina, but ultimately taking just 3 of the state's 13 U.S. House seats. In Ohio, essentially 50/50 splits by voters for members of Congress have resulted in just 4 of 20 seats going to Democrats, year after year, over the past decade. We've similar stories in other key states such as Wisconsin, Maryland and Pennsylvania, with courts finding House Districts and state legislative districts alike to have been unconstitutionally gerrymandered, and orders by federal courts to draw new, fairer maps repeatedly blocked by the GOP's stolen U.S. Supreme Court.

That decade-long scam, as our guest today, DAVID DALEY of FairVote argued last week at New Republic, is precisely why GOP-controlled state after GOP-controlled state in recent weeks, have been able to adopt radical, extremist and even unpopular anti-abortion restrictions. Daley, author of the book RATF**KED: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy, lays out his argument, updates us on the recent partisan gerrymandering cases in North Carolina and Maryland now before SCOTUS (with a ruling due next month), and why, as he argues, the fight for fair maps, fair elections and democracy itself "is not going to be saved in this country by any given election," but needs to be "engaged and fought every single day" as we are now in "a war for the future of this country"...

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On today's BradCast, it's the 15th Anniversary of The BRAD BLOG! So --- in addition to the news of the day --- we take a precious few minutes on today's program to reminisce a bit with longtime BradBlog.com legal contributor ERNEST A. CANNING and Green News Report co-host and BradCast producer DESI DOYEN! [Audio link to full show is posted below.]

After a few words on Canning's latest article at the blog on the "Political Revolution" embodied by the new freshman class of progressive U.S. House members and the many challenges they are now facing down in D.C., we discuss some of the lessons learned and important stories covered at our little, independent, reader- and listener-supported website over the past decade and a half.

Many of the stories we broke years ago --- too numerous to link here, on everything from electronic voting concerns and voting rights to climate change and much more --- have since become part of the national consensus as well as many popular calls for reform. That, even as much (but not all) of our independently verifiable, evidence-based news coverage was marginalized or dismissed by many in the corporate media years earlier. We discuss just a few of those stories today --- too numerous to detail here --- as we look both back and forward on this latest milestone. We also offer thanks to the many who have made all of it possible over the years, from our blogging contributors, to radio affiliate partners, to various whistleblowers (publicly known and unknown) over the years.

Of course, none of it could be done without those of you support our work via BradBlog.com/Donate. So, if you haven't hit that page in a while, please consider doing so, as we operate solely on the support of folks like you. Seriously. Please consider a one-time donation or, even better, an automated monthly donation of any amount you can afford. I hate haranguing folks for this, but it really is necessary in order for us to continue our work, which we now share on a daily basis with dozens of radio affiliates around the country and world for free! Your support alone allows that and so much more that we do at The BRAD BLOG, The BradCast and the Green News Report to continue. And if I can't ask on our 15th birthday, when can I? So click here please! And thank you!

And, yes, there was also a bit of news today for a change in Washington D.C., so we also cover that on today's program. Among those stories...

• Donald Trump's federal government shutdown nears the end of it's fifth record week, as he folded like one of his own cheap and poorly tailored suits on Wednesday night in his standoff with U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on delivering his State of the Union next week.

• At the same time, federal aviation unions issued a dire warning about the ongoing effects and potential critical dangers of the shutdown.

• We share a heartbreaking story about a 10-year old girl who suffered a broken wrist in stoic silence for a week, because she was frightened to tell her father, a Dept. of Homeland Security employee forced to work without pay.

• Billionaire crypt-keeper and Commerce Dept. Secretary Wilbur Ross took to the airwaves to, essentially, call 800,000 federal workers whiners for needing to use food banks to feed their families, when they could just go out and get a bank loan instead to cover costs until the federal government reopens.

• In the U.S. Senate, Mitch McConnell finally allowed votes on measures to reopen the government, one from Rs and one from Ds. Both failed to get the 60 votes needed to overcome filibuster, though the D version --- which did not include funding for Trump's border wall --- received more votes than the R version in the GOP-majority Senate.

• And Trump's former attorney Michael Cohen learned that he may have to appear before both House and Senate Committees next month, despite threats to his family by the President of the United States.

• Finally. Desi brings us the latest Green News Report, with more bad news about the shutdown and Greenland's melting ice shelf, but some encouraging news on a huge majority of Americans who now appreciate the threat of climate change and on the amazing teen climate activist taking on the corporate powers and millionaire/billionaires at Davos this week...

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On today's BradCast, I'm your host - Angie Coiro, host of In Deep with Angie Coiro.

Donald Trump's tweet fingers were a'twitchin', as he tried to keep up with the flow of Mueller investigation news while churning out headlines of his own. For starters, he made three key appointments/nominations:

• Army head General Mark Milley will move over to chair the Joint Chiefs of Staff;
• Former H.W. Bush Attorney General William Barr is up for confirmation as Trump's next A.G.;
• Former Fox 'News' talking head Heather Nauert is up to replace Nikki Haley as UN ambassador.

I've got the whys and wherefores on those for you. Also, Trump went into rage mode at word of his former Sec. of State Rex Tillerson's very frank discussion on Thursday at a public interview with CBS news veteran Bob Schieffer. Tillerson's explanation of Trump's incomprehension of basic issues, along with his trademark lack of discipline, provoked high-minded Trump tweets calling Tillerson "dumb as a rock" and "lazy as hell".

The BBC has a good basic rundown if you're trying to catch up with the case of Chinese telecom Huawei's alleged spying. I bring you the highlights plus updated news.

Meanwhile, a Swiss paper has published a conversation with Fox's Tucker Carlson who damned the White House occupant as "incapable" of fulfilling his promises. And he went further: "I don't think he's capable of sustained focus. I don't think he understands the system. I don't think the Congress is on his side. I don't think his own agencies support him."

Then, legal expert and journalist LARA BAZELON joins me to discuss her work on restorative justice for wrongly-convicted parolees. She's covered the topic for years for Slate.com, and has now released a book called Rectify. The full version of our conversation will be posted here over the weekend. Don't wait for that, though - I've brought you a big chunk of it right here on The BradCast!

Plus, so much more! It's a bellyful of news today. Check it out!...

Download MP3 or listen online below...

Follow @GreenNewsReport...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: A turn in the weather is good news and bad for California's wildfires; The state's disaster evacuees underscore affordable housing crisis; Trump Administration uses California's tragedy to push for logging in forests; PLUS: Network TV news mostly fails to connect the dots between historic fires and climate change... 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): How pointless is my life?” – Journalist has rare moment of self-awareness on climate; ‘Like a terror movie’: How climate change will cause more simultaneous disasters; Palm oil was supposed to help save the planet. It unleashed a catastrophe; Largest Newfoundland oil spill yet speaks to offshore risks; Coast Guard orders new efforts to stop 14-year-old Gulf Oil leak; No penalties for 90% of pipeline blasts; U.S. Navy nuclear fleet’s dry docks threatened by storms and rising seas; Bernie Sanders to host a climate town hall... PLUS: As inmates, they fight California’s fires. As ex-convicts, their firefighting prospects wilt.... and much, MUCH more! ...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: The impacts of Hurricane Florence ain't over yet, with new evacuations underway; As predicted, Florence flooding spills toxic coal ash waste in North Carolina; National TV media failed to connect the dots between Florence's impacts and climate change; PLUS: Endangered species and more hang in the balance as Republicans rush to get their nominee onto the U.S. Supreme Court... 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): Kavanaugh confirmation fight is also about the future of economic and environmental regulations; At this rate, Earth risks sea level rise of 20 to 30 feet, historical analysis shows; Hurricane Florence blows hole in Trump team's case for helping coal and nuclear power; ARPA-e seeks an energy holy grail: long-term energy storage; Super Typhoon Trami explodes in strength on its way toward Taiwan; Will Florence force a hog waste reckoning in N.C.?; Donald Trump called himself an environmentalist; Federal judge restores grizzly protections, canceling bear hunt; National parks are getting hotter and drier. What’s the outlook for 2100?... PLUS: The fracking industry's water nightmare is coming true... and much, MUCH more! ...

On today's BradCast: The first day of hearings in the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee for Judge Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump's very unpopular nominee to fill the U.S. Supreme Court by "swing vote" Justice Anthony Kennedy last month, started with tens of thousands of documents withheld by the White House over the weekend, kicked off Tuesday morning with pandemonium from Democratic committee members objecting to the proceedings, and continued with protests and arrests of some 70 observers in the chamber throughout the day. Just another unprecedented day in the U.S. Senate in the Trump Era. [Audio link to show follows below.]

Today we cover much of the havoc with extended excerpts from the hearings, and then a visit with columnist, Zero Hour radio host and former Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign writer RICHARD ESKOW, who joins us to try and help us make sense --- any sense --- of it all.

With some 100,000 documents from Kavanaugh's time in the George W. Bush White House (where he served as legal adviser and Staff Secretary during some of Dubya's most consequential decisions, on everything torture to marriage equality) being withheld at the instruction of the Trump Administration late on Friday night and some 42,000 documents dumped on Committee members on the Labor Day Monday evening before hearings were to begin on Tuesday morning, we discuss whether Democrats should have shown up at all for today's hearings for the longtime Republican Party operative turned federal judge turned SCOTUS nominee.

Kavanaugh, who appears to have lied to the U.S. Senate during his 2006 Senate hearings for the D.C. Court of Appeals, is now being rammed through in what appears to be a desperately mad dash by Republicans to seat him with a bare majority before they may lose control of the U.S. Senate after this November's midterms. So, should Democrats have even played along with what some are describing as an "illegitimate" process or should they simply have refused to show up altogether?

"Even the strongest statements [from Democrats] today were not strong enough. They were good, they were fine, but every debater knows that as long as you allow your opponent to establish a phony premise or a phony setup for the debate, you're going to lose," Eskow argues. "By showing up --- even by voicing their objections --- the Democrats, by the way they are handling this, are legitimizing the process, in my opinion."

We also discuss the media coverage of the nomination and subsequent hearings, and the dilemma we in the media face in how (and if) to cover the substantive issues and related concerns about Kavanaugh's hard-right record as a jurist. On one hand, we are legitimizing an illegitimate process in doing so. On the other, if seated on the GOP's already-stolen U.S. Supreme Court, Kavanaugh will almost certainly serve as the fifth vote to rollback and/or reverse decades of hard-fought civil rights victories and much more for at least a generation. So, we do need to cover it, right? (That's a very real question that I've been debating for quite a while. Would welcome your thoughts in comments below!)

And all of this, mind you, for a potential Justice nominated by a President facing a serious criminal investigation, and who will almost certainly, if seated, sit in judgment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe into the same President who nominated him for a lifetime position on the nation's highest Court.

"It's Alice in Wonderland," charged Vermont's Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy, who has been in the Senate for 44 years, overseeing the Judiciary Committee's confirmation hearings for every single Justice currently on the Court, during his opening remarks on Tuesday: "Today, the Senate is not simply phoning in our vetting obligation, we're discarding it. It's not only shameful, it's a sham...And any claim that this has been a through transparent process is downright Orwellian...This is the most incomplete, most partisan, least transparent vetting for any Supreme Court nominee I have ever seen...and I've seen more of those than any person serving in the Senate today."

Also on today's show (albeit very quickly!): Voters head to the polls for primary election day in Massachusetts on Tuesday, Delaware on Wednesday, and fast-moving Hurricane Gloria now threatens the Gulf Coast...

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Today on The BradCast: On the 47th anniversary of the Nixon White House creating its then-confidential "enemies list" featuring, among others, many members of the media, Donald Trump's intensifying attacks on the press have now resulted in a majority of Republicans (51%) believing that the press is the "enemy of the people" rather than "an important part of democracy", according to a new Quinnipiac poll finding just 36% of self-identified GOPers agree with the latter. [Audio link to show is posted below.]

(Though I've also got a few thoughts and, perhaps, a warning on today's show regarding what to make of polling of self-identified Republicans these days. I think it's very possible our polls may now be broken, as we discuss a bit today.)

In response to the repeated and worsening attacks on the press by the President of the United States, some 350 newspapers today issued editorials in support of press freedoms. We join them in calling for support of media outlets --- particularly local newspapers and independent outlets --- who are struggling to stay alive and, yet, are needed more now than ever. (Yes, we too welcome your support for the same reason.)

That, as evidence continues to come to light underscoring the lies told to the American people by Donald Trump and the GOP while selling their tax cuts for the rich and corporations to the American people. In fact, those tax cuts won't not "pay for themselves" (the federal deficit this year will now be close to $1 trillion, thanks to plummeting revenue to the government in the wake of the cuts to the wealthy and corporations), nor have they increased wages for members of the working class (who are now making less than they did before the cuts, thanks to inflation and pay that has remained largely stagnant for workers.)

Less than three months out from the crucial 2018 midterms, Trump's tariffs and trade wars are continuing to worsen their toll on workers as well. Factories are shutting down or moving jobs to Mexico and other "off shore" locations in order to survive new added costs of tariffs on imported manufacturing supplies from China and elsewhere.

And, speaking of con jobs by this President, a new report finds his planned military parade, scheduled just days after the upcoming midterm elections, is now estimated to cost taxpayers some $92 million. That is some $80 million higher than a report on the parade's estimated cost last month, which was "only" $12 million at the time. That lower price tag is almost as much as the cost of military exercises with South Korea that Trump cancelled after his recent summit with North Korea's Kim Jong Un because, at $14 million, they were "tremendously expensive" and, he tweeted, "we save a fortune" by not holding them. (Shortly after we got off air today, new reports suggest the military parade will now be postponed until 2019...if it's ever held at all.)

Also today, before we get to today's Green News Report', a brief tribute to the life and civil rights legacy of Aretha Franklin, the beloved "Queen of Soul", who died today at the age of 76.

Then, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest GNR, in which --- among many other stories --- Interior Dept. Secretary Ryan Zinke is revealed as a liar for promising, upon taking office, that public lands would not be sold off. In fact, as reported this week, his Department has now drawn up draft plans to do exactly that.

So, if you're keeping track this week, the President of the United States has called the press "the enemy of the people" and "very disgusting", while the head of his Interior Department has called mainstream environmental groups "terrorists". But it's Democrats, we are told, who are being uncivil in their response to this Administration.

Finally, a disturbing follow-up to today's GNR for people who eat food, after last week's $289 million jury award to a man with terminal cancer, after determining that Monsanto knowingly sold toxic RoundUp weed killer despite studies finding that it causes cancer. And, in related news, recently obtained internal EPA emails reveal that its disgraced and now former chief Scott Pruitt's staff were very concerned about formaldehyde used in a desk they were considering purchasing for his newly remodeled office, even as the agency blocked the release of a public report highlighting the dangers of the very same carcinogen in public drinking water...

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On today's BradCast, as the President of the United States continues his tweets and rally cries targeting the free press as "the Enemy of the People", we offer another stark reminder of the danger of those attacks. Then, another reminder of the inevitable move toward "Medicare-for-All" in the U.S. and the mighty forces pushing back against it. [Audio link to today's show is posted below.]

First up, early Sunday morning, just hours before another one of Donald Trump's tweets targeting the media as "purposely caus[ing] division and distrust", characterizing them as "dangerous and sick" and, yes, "the Enemy of the People", a masked gunman opened fired inside of WORT-FM 89.9FM, a long-time progressive radio station (and Pacifica Radio Network affiliate) in Madison, WI. Luckily, among the three hosts in the studio at the time, there was just one, non-life-threatening injury. But the gunman is still on the loose and the volunteers who work at the station are lucky to be alive today.

Of course, progressive radio outlets have long been targets of violence by right-wingers --- long before Trump --- and we don't yet know what the motive was for the attacker at WORT in Madison. But with more and more folks in the mainstream corporate media receiving death threats now as well, as CNN's Brian Stelter noted over the weekend, citing a right-wing columnist at the New York Times, "we are approaching a day when blood on the newsroom floor will be blood on the President's hands". That could already be the case in Madison, WI.

In any event, please consider this a reminder to support the progressive media outlets --- many of them community stations run by volunteers --- who enable you to hear The BradCast every day, in any way that you can!

Next up, a lawsuit was filed against the Trump Administration late last week, alleging that it has failed to honor the Constitution's "Take Care" clause, requiring the President "faithfully execute" the laws of the land". The complaint, filed by the cities of Columbus and Cincinnati, OH, along with Baltimore, MD and Chicago, IL, charges that the Administration is unlawfully undermining and attempting to "sabotage" the Affordable Care Act (or, ObamaCare).

That suit was filed by the four cities, even as many progressives continue to push for a single-payer, universal, "Medicare-for-All" style healthcare system like the one Sen. Bernie Sanders has long called for. With such a plan growing in popularity among both voters and leading Democrats alike, a Koch Brothers-funded think-tank last week came out with a report that they'd hoped would undermine the prospect of a government-run, single-payer insurance program available to all Americans.

The report, misleadingly headlined "'Medicare for All' Plan Would Cost Federal Government $32 Trillion", was picked up by many media outlets who failed to highlight the more salient fact that the $32 trillion cited is actually $2 trillion LESS than Americans already spend on healthcare, even as millions are still without insurance and tens of millions more --- even if they are covered --- are still without access to important items like vision and dental care.

We're joined today by former insurance industry executive turned progressive blogger, columnist and broadcaster RICHARD "R.J." ESKOW to discuss his Los Angeles Times op-ed last week rebutting the misinformation that Charles Blahuas of the right-wing, Koch-funded Mercatus Center attempted to hoax American with.

Eskow, who hosts The Zero Hour podcast and also worked on Sanders' 2016 Presidential campaign, explains how the type of system that the Vermont Senator and, now, many leading 2020 Democratic Presidential contenders are endorsing, would both save Americans money and provide better and more complete care to tens and perhaps hundreds of millions.

"What the Koch Brothers and people who work for them are trying to get us to do is to only think about what the government spends," he tells me, explaining the sleight-of-hand the report uses to make families think such a plan would cost them more money than they are paying already. In fact, he explains, the average family of four would actually save $13,000 a year in healthcare costs.

"This guy who wrote this report unintentionally shot himself in the foot," Eskow argues, "Because even though I believe he stacked the deck against Medicare-For-All by under-estimating the savings and over-estimating the costs, he still couldn't avoid the conclusion that it would save $2 trillion over 10 years. I think it could save more than that, while giving people much better coverage. But even by his standards, the conservative standards, the right-wingers' standards, he has to admit it saves money!"

"We've been brainwashed into thinking that paying a nickel in taxes is worse than paying a dollar to some exploitative health insurance company. I don't think you make that sale anymore. I think people are getting wise to the truth."

Eskow also offers his insight into the fear that some "centrist" establishment Democrats have about such a system, and whether progressive voters should continue to push the party to be more in step with its own voters, or whether those voters need to look elsewhere...

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On today's BradCast, we're joined by our old friend CENK UYGUR, host and founder of the wildly popular online news outlet, The Young Turks and the entire TYTNetwork. [Audio link follows below.]

We have a wide-ranging conversation on a host of important topics, beginning with the chaotic mid-term primaries coming up next Tuesday in California, where, for example, 32 candidates, from all parties, are vying in the same race for the top two slots to go on to the November general election in the fight for longtime Democratic U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein's seat.

Of even greater concern to Democrats hoping to win back one or both chambers of Congress, are seven Republican U.S. House seats thought to be flippable in the Golden State this year. However, thanks to the state's "Top Two" primary system and a glut of Democrats on the ballot, the progressive vote could be split in a number of those races, resulting in no Democrats qualifying for the November ballot at all in several of those contests next week.

Uygur discusses the pros and cons of California's strange primary system and much more, including how both corporate and independent media ought to be covering the "insanity" of Donald Trump, who he describes as "the monster in office...on fascism's doorstep".

The corporate media, he argues, "are afraid of offending Republican viewers. Their business imperative to not lose a certain percentage of their audience is coloring how they cover the truth of the matter. In reality, they should go out there and do what we do, and say: 'If you believe this, you are nuts. It's not remotely true.' But they're afraid they are going to turn off 30% of the country, and lose advertising dollars."

"We are a news outlet that is proudly activist," he tells me when I ask whether TYT is a political organization. "The rest of mainstream news and corporate news say 'Hey, relax, don't do anything. Do the news, but don't care about it, don't try to fix anything! Fixing anything is bad!' And we don't agree with that. We think that you can present the news and say, 'Now here's what you can do to fix it.'"

As to independent outlets, he charges, "we're not emphasizing enough that the President of the United States is a combination of mentally unhealthy, certainly unstable, incredibly dumb and, most importantly, fascist."

We also talk about the continuing internecine battle between the progressive and establishment wings of the Democratic Party, whether they can and will and should come together this November, and we even chat a bit about the sad story of Roseanne Barr who, Ugyur believes, "similar to Kanye West, similar to Glenn Beck, similar to Alex Jones...all have mental health problems."

Uygur, who is also a founder of Wolf-PAC (fighting to get all money out of politics), and a former founding member of Justice Democrats (fighting to put progressive Democrats into office), also makes the case for a number of progressive U.S. House and Senate candidates in California endorsed by one or both of those groups.

Also on today's show: While the economy is supposedly doing great, according to Donald Trump and the GOP, wages are failing to rise commensurately, even after the massive tax cuts passed last year, largely for the wealthy and corporations. Now why would that be? And, some encouraging news today out of Virginia, which is poised to finally expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act ("ObamaCare") to some 400,000 residents, thanks to voters who turned out last November to flip enough seats in the state legislature from "red" to "blue" to finally assure health care to hundreds of thousands in the state. And, finally today, a bit more good news for Democrats, as new polling finds a majority of young voters plan to turn out to vote in this year's mid-terms, and they are far less Republicans than the population at large...

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On today's BradCast, Trita Parsi helps us make sense of the Israel/Syria attacks. I'm Angie Coiro of In Deep sitting in the host chair today.

Trita Parsi from the National Iranian American Council helps us get through the "they started it" claims around yesterday's attacks. We spend some time deconstructing media reports and voices on the issue. He talks, too, about the Americans still held hostage in Iran, and potential long-term consequences of Trump pulling out of the nuclear agreement.

Then Brad Adams of Human Rights Watch talks about the release of American hostages from North Korea. I ask him about Israel kicking a Human Rights Watch employee out, based on his support of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Then it's back to Gina Haspel, as more news came out today about inaccuracies in her Senate testimony. Daphne Eviatar of Amnesty International details Amnesty's call for Haspel's CIA bid to be rejected.

Finally, we dig to the source of all those troublesome Scott Pruitt emails with Elena Saxonhouse, senior attorney with the Sierra Club. It was the Sierra Club's dogged insistence on getting 24,000 pages of emails that opened up all those tales.

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On today's BradCast: Listen for yourself to the speech that top politicians and corporate journalists have claimed to be furious about since the annual White House Correspondents Dinner on Saturday night. Then ask yourself: What the hell are these people talking about? [Audio link to full show is posted below.]

Over the weekend, we learned that the U.S. Department of Justice has literally rewritten their prosecutorial guidance manual for U.S. Attorneys in order to, among other things, remove the section on the "Need for [a] Free Press". That, just a week or two after we learned, via memos [PDF] written by then FBI Director James Comey immediately after several private meetings last year with Donald Trump, that the President seemed obsessed with the idea of arresting and throwing journalists in prison. "They spend a couple days in jail, make a new friend, and they are ready to talk," Trump reportedly said to Comey, according to one of the contemporaneous memos.

Despite all of that, many elite journalists in the corporate media, from the New York Times to NBC News to Fox "News" and beyond, have spent much of their last two days claiming to be outraged by a comedian's routine at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner. The (somewhat grotesque) annual event, which usually features the President (but hasn't in the two years since Trump took office and has refused to attend) is specifically, according to the first several hours of the event and the huge banner on the wall behind the dais, meant for the purpose of "CELEBRATING THE FIRST AMENDMENT".

Nonetheless, NBC's Andrea Mitchell and the NYTimes' Maggie Haberman among others in the media, joined high-ranking Republicans to blast that comedian, Michelle Wolf, in the days since the event, demanding an apology for Wolf's jokes that, they claimed, were divisive and, worse, attacked the physical appearance of White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee-Sanders. Only problem with that: Wolf didn't attack her physical appearance. She appropriately roasted Sanders (and many others) for lying to the press and the American people every day.

As many have probably heard about Wolf's outrageous "attacks" and what a "bomb" her routine was --- (Trump tweeted as much, along with the journalists, many times since) --- we thought it might be useful and informative to actually celebrate the First Amendment by playing Wolf's entire WHCD routine in full, so listeners can decide for themselves about the corporate media's bizarre response to it...at an annual event where thousands of the country's "access journalists" hobnob and back-slap with the very elected politicians they are supposed to be skeptically reporting on.

Then, we open up the phone lines to callers, just in case they heard the offense to Sanders' physical appearance that I must have missed. (Spoiler alert: Listeners didn't hear it either, even after I played Wolf's sometimes raunchy and satirically biting remarks in full! Go figure. But, listeners do have a few thoughts on why many elite politicians and members of the corporate media may have heard it that way.)

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On today's BradCast, it's like deja vu all over again. But with a Commander-in-Chief who is completely clueless about any of it and powerful adversaries who claim they are prepared to shoot back. [Audio link to show follows below.]

The President of the United States has no idea what he's doing, and is simply making up policy from minute to minute, according to a Washington Post report last night, detailing how White House aides are forced to scramble each day to either explain Donald Trump's actions "or clean them up."

"There is no proactive strategic thinking," one staffer told the paper. Another senior administration official conceded that aides are often forced to "reverse-engineer a policy process to match whatever the President said" on any given day. That may be workable, sort of, when it comes to something like Trump's announcement today that, after years of bashing the Trans-Pacific Partnership and pulling the U.S. out of it shortly after taking office, he is now considering rejoining the TPP after all.

But when it comes to sending the U.S. to war, Trump's erratic behavior poses a very serious danger. To that end --- as Trump has flip-flopped over the past week between demanding the U.S. pull its troops out of Syria within 48 hours, to publicly warning Syria's main ally Russia to "get ready" for incoming missiles, to reversing positions yet again to declare a U.S. attack on the war-torn nation "could be very soon or not soon at all" --- his Defense Secretary Gen. James Mattis was busy conceding to lawmakers in the U.S. House on Thursday that the Pentagon lacks evidence of the alleged chemical attack in over the weekend, reportedly carried out by the Syrian government against its own citizens in one of the last rebel-held areas near Damascus.

While noting that he "believe[s] there was a chemical attack," Mattis told lawmakers on Capitol Hill today "we're looking for the actual evidence" and admitted that even if inspectors from the international Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) get access to the site of the alleged attack, "we will not know who did it. They can only say that they found evidence or did not."

It's not the first time that Mattis has conceded we've attacked Syria in response to purported chemical attacks for which the U.S. had "no evidence".

Nonetheless, the media continue to report the weekend attack in Syria --- said to have killed more than 40 civilians with some form of poison gas --- as having been carried out by the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Even as Mattis was admitting the lack of evidence the U.S. has to support the charge, NBC News was busy reporting breathlessly and unskeptically, in an eerie echo of the run-up to the U.S. war(s) against Iraq, on claims from two unnamed "U.S. officials" citing "blood and urine samples from last Saturday's deadly attack in Syria that have tested positive for chemical weapons." It's like deja vu all over again, but with a clueless President and powerful countries like Russia and Iran already having warned that they are prepared to retaliate against any attack against the Syrian government by the U.S. or its allies.

In not-entirely-unrelated news today, as Trump continues to lie about "voter fraud" in the 2016 election (and about everything else), an alarming new study from Politico finds that voters with less access to local news voted in larger numbers for Trump in 2016 than they did for Mitt Romney in 2012. At the same time, the study reveals, those with more access to such news sources voted in higher proportion for Hillary Clinton.

The findings come as the rightwing Sinclair Broadcasting Group, the nation's largest owner of local TV news outlets, attempts to receive FCC approval to buy up enough local stations to reach some 72% of American households. While public push-back against the effort builds, the pro-Trump broadcast behemoth is revealed to be using the public airwaves at their own currently-owned stations (and websites) to lie about the mounting criticism against their practices.

Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report on Shell's recently revealed decades long knowledge that their products cause global warming, and the mountain of scandal that continues to engulf Trump's embattled EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt...

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On today's BradCast: While everything still sucks, there are, nonetheless, a growing number of encouraging signs that Americans --- even those in so-called "red" states --- have had just about enough of the rightwing Republican corporate takeover and ravaging of this country and so much that we hold dear. [Audio link to show is posted below.]

Among the stories covered towards that end on today's program...

• A record-breaking number of women are now running for Congress, and the filing deadlines haven't even passed in half of the states;

• Sinclair Broadcasting Group's insidious misuse of our public airwaves for rightwing pro-Trump propaganda purposes finally begins to catch the attention of Democrats in Congress, as company executives mouth off with pathetic excuses, former employees speak out, some staffers resign in protest, and others, while embarrassed by being forced to read on-air nonsense from their owners, find reasonable excuses for not quitting (such as outrageously onerous contract terms) at once-respected TV news outlets now controlled by the nation's largest owner of television stations;

• Teachers in so-called "red" states like Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona and West Virginia continue walkouts to push back against state education budgets that have been slashed in recent years to pay for huge tax cuts to wealthy corporations in failed experiments with supposedly "pro-growth" Reaganomics;

• And while Republican officials in those states have made clear they were only pretending to give a damn about kids, their pretend love for coal miners has also been exposed as a lie in Kentucky, where lawmakers just made it much more difficult for miners to receive compensation amid an epidemic surge of deadly black lung disease cases;

• The jaw-dropping corruption scandals of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt continue to be revealed on a daily basis. So, will Donald Trump finally find the courage to fire him?;

• And, finally, Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report, in which Mobil Oil joins Exxon in being revealed as having been fully aware, decades ago, that the burning of fossil fuels is causing civilization-threatening climate change, and Americans tell Ryan Zinke and his Interior Department to take a hike over huge proposed increases to entry fees at our national parks...

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