Hurricane Dorian, Yet Another TX Gun Massacre and DNC ‘Hack’ Nixes Remote Caucusing: ‘BradCast’ 9/3/2019

There were a number of bullets dodged in the past few days, literal and otherwise, and some that, tragically, were not. We cover them on today’s BradCast. [Audio link to show is posted below.]

Most of Florida appears to have dodged a bullet — though Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina aren’t in the clear yet — after the deadly and incredibly slow-moving Hurricane Dorian, once a Category 5, heads to the north, grazing the coast of the Sunshine State after catastrophically devastating several large islands in The Bahamas. We’re joined today by Atlanta-based, 30-year Weather Channel meteorologist GUY WALTON, who now tracks extreme weather and our worsening climate crisis at his website, GuyOnClimate.com. He offers insight into what has made Dorian such an unusual, deadly, and wildly unpredictable storm.

“Steering currents are being affected by climate change and, as more warmth gets put into the atmosphere, the weaker those steering currents are going to be,” Walton, who has written a children’s book on the climate crisis, tells me in explaining the “$250 billion question” about “where the storm is going to be going.” He says the weakened steering currents are what allow storms like Harvey in Houston two years ago and now Dorian to basically stand in place. “Dorian stalled over the Bahamas, and in this case, that was extremely bad for The Bahamas but good for Florida. It’s very unusual to have a system just stall like that.”

“We’re getting more Category 4s and 5s forming in the Atlantic basin, and they’re forming quite rapidly. Dorian formed near Puerto Rico and it did give them some tropical storm force winds, but it was only a Cat 1 at the time, and it really didn’t take it more than about 24 hours to become a Cat 5,” he observes, citing the increased effect of climate change on these storms. “We’ve had four out of the last five years seeing Cat 5s. We’ve had Dorian, Michael, Maria, Irma, and Matthew. And two of the storms — Michael and Maria — hit the United States as 5s.”

A number of Texas residents were much less lucky than Floridians over the Labor Day holiday weekend, as actual bullets were flying yet again in the Lone Star state in yet another mass shooting by another young American white man. This one in the West Texas towns of Odessa and Midland resulted in 7 killed, more than 20 injured, a cowardly, sputtering President of the United States who clearly hasn’t a clue what to do about it, and a cowardly Texas Governor who, after recently loosening gun restrictions in Texas to allow weapons of mass destruction in public schools and churches, suggests he might finally be willing to take action that might actually help protect Texans for a change by curbing the scourge of gun massacres in the state since he’s taken office. We wouldn’t hold our breath for that action, however. Texas Governor Greg Abbot, like Donald Trump, is a Republican who lives in fear of the terrorist-enabling NRA and places his own political career over the actual lives of the people he is sworn to protect and serve.

Democratic voters in the 2020 caucus states of Iowa and Nevada, meanwhile, may have dodged figurative bullets thanks to a few experts who managed to hack a recent closed telephone conference call by the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee as they were considering approval of plans by those two states to add unsecure remote telephone voting options to next February’s caucuses there. The new plans were being prepared in answer to the DNC’s mandate enacted after the contentious 2016 primary battle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in hopes of encouraging states to hold more inclusive primary elections rather than caucuses. If state parties chose to hold caucuses, however, the DNC is requiring them to add some form of remote voting option for those unable to attend hours-long, in-person caucuses. The remote voting plans in Iowa and Nevada, however, now appear all but dead, at least for 2020.

And, as we were just finishing up today’s show, some more good news for Democrats — and for all voters who believe in fair elections — as North Carolina’s State Superior Court issued a 357-page [PDF] ruling finding the state’s GOP-gerrymandered legislative districts are unconstitutional and ordering new maps to be drawn before the 2020 elections in the closely divided battleground state. (Much more on that last story, undoubtedly, on tomorrow’s BradCast!)

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