Sure, I admit today’s BradCast is a bit breathless, but you try and keep up with all of this madness happening, breaking, changing and then changing again all at once while trying to make calm, cool, collected sense of it all for listeners in just under an hour! As usual, we do our best. Wish us luck. [Audio link to full breathless show is posted below the summary.]
Somewhere amid the mayhem of our latest program you will find coverage of…
- New charges brought today against the four Minneapolis police officers responsible for killing George Floyd last week. (BRAD BLOG’s Ernie Canning foreshadowed as much in his report on the results of a new independent autopsy of Floyd earlier today.);
- Protests against Floyd’s ghastly murder-by-cop continue around the country for a tenth day;
- Trump (as we predicted yesterday) begins to back away from his tough guy threats to send U.S. military troops to cities across the country to “dominate” peaceful American protesters;
- Trump’s Secretary of Defense Mark Esper claims he didn’t know where he was going when he joined Trump’s pathetic photo-op with a bible iin his hands in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church on Monday, after federal storm-troopers were ordered to clear out peaceful protesters and church staff with tear gas, rubber bullets and other violence to take the shot. Esper now says that he opposes using federal troops against Americans, even though he described American cities as “battle spaces” during a phone call with Governor’s on Monday;
- A senior Pentagon adviser resigns, charging that Esper “violated” his oath to protect and defend the Constitution;
- Even Pat Robertson tosses Trump under the bus after all of this;
- U.S. troops deployed to D.C. from Fort Bragg in NC on Tuesday to quell protests are reportedly sent back to their bases…and then reported NOT being sent back to their bases just a few hours later, right before air time today’;
- Some protesters managed to breach a temporary fence near the White House and cowardly Trump is reportedly scuttled back into his underground White House bunker by Secret Service;
- Also, Trump claims to now be pulling the August Republican National Convention out of Charlotte, North Carolina because the state’s Governor won’t let him create a shoulder-to-shoulder viral super-spreader event out of it. We’ll see if President Bluffer keeps that threat (he usually backs away from most), and we’ll see how it may harm his odds of winning the very closely divided Tar Heel State this November. He really needs it to go “red” again if he wants a chance at re-election;
- And, oh yeah, all of this as primary elections were held in about a dozen states and D.C. amid protests, curfews and a pandemic that continues and has, so far, killed more than 105,000 Americans in just the past 90 days.
Unofficial results from Tuesday are slower than usual in coming in, due to the expansion of absentee voting in most states to help keep Americans safe during the pandemic. Lines to vote in-person were also much longer than usual in many places, due to the consolidation of polling places, also thanks to the coronavirus. That resulted in many forced to wait in very long lines, sometimes for hours after curfews around the country. But there was some noteworthy news in the few results we do have.
Of course Joe Biden continues his march toward the required number of delegates to formally win the Democratic Presidential nomination. But, of more note on Tuesday…
- Ferguson, Missouri — where the killing of a young African-American man by a white cop sparked national protests six year ago — elected Ella Jones as the city’s first woman and first African-American Mayor!
- Nine-term white supremacist Republican Congressman Steve King was defeated in the GOP primary in Iowa‘s 4th Congressional District by another rightwinger who will go on to face progressive Democrat J.D. Scholten (a guest on this show just a few weeks ago) in November.
- Republican Congressman Greg Gianforte, who beat up a journalist (and tried to lie about it) the night before winning his first term in Congress three years ago, won the GOP nomination for Governor in Montana. He will now run against the state’s Democratic Lt. Governor Mike Cooney to fill the seat being vacated by the popular term-limited Democratic Governor Steve Bullock in a state which Trump won by 20 points in 2016. That year, however, Bullock won his second term as Governor on the same ballot, and on Tuesday he secured the Democratic nomination to take on incumbent Republican Sen. Steve Daines, who could very well be in trouble this year.
We’re joined today by progressive Congressional campaign expert and advocate HOWIE KLEIN of the “Down With Tyranny” blog and the BlueAmericaPAC to discuss all of the above and much more, including a number of other progressive wins (some a surprise) and losses (not as surprising) on Tuesday.
Klein also handicaps a few upcoming races and offers what he regards as some “exciting” contests next week in Georgia which, with West Virginia, will be holding their own primary elections on June 9th. If you can keep up with everything that happened on today’s show, much less today overall, you win a prize. Other than that, color me breathless…again…
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[audio:http://BradBlog.com/audio/BradCast_BradFriedman-NewChargesGeorgeFloyd-EsperFlipFlop-TrumpDCPanic_HowieKlein-PrimaryElectionResults_060320.mp3]
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