Way back in January, we reported on “How Trump Attempted to Use DoJ to Steal the Election”. Why do our nation’s corporate media outlets, all these months later, still have so much difficulty reporting it as such, despite the growing mountain of evidence on the unprecedented attempted theft of a Presidential election by a sitting U.S. President? That’s just one of a number of stories and questions asked on today’s BradCast. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]
Among those many stories…
- What took the Coast Guard and Amplify Energy Corp — owner of the pipeline that spewed more than 3,000 barrels of crude oil into the waters and protected wetlands nearly Huntington Beach in Southern California last week — so long to respond to the spill? Residents smelled it, witnesses saw oil on the water and on boats, and even the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) called in their report to the Coast Guard of a possible spill spotted from a satellite. Still, it was almost 10 hours before the Coast Guard investigated, and almost 12 hours before Amplify shut it down. That, despite technology pipeline companies always (falsely) claim will immediately detect spills and shut down the system as soon as they occur. Someone needs to face criminal charges, and this nation needs to get off oil, ASAP.
- Some brighter news out of Texas, where a federal judge has temporarily enjoined the state’s S.B. 8 statute that deprives women of their Constitutionally-protected right to an abortion. The new GOP law in the Lone Star State inserts Big Government between a woman and her doctor to mandate that the medical procedure may not be carried out after 6 weeks of pregnancy, before most women know they’re pregnant. Even in the case of rape or incest, Texas Republicans are demanding that women carry their rapists babies to term under the new law. On Wednesday, a U.S. District Court judge shut that whole thing down. For now. He also refused to put his stay on hold pending the state’s appeal, because, as he wrote in his 113-page decision [PDF]: “The State has forfeited the right to any such accommodation by pursuing an unprecedented and aggressive scheme to deprive its citizens of a significant and well established constitutional right.”
- Yesterday, we reported that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and fellow Republicans blinked in their ongoing effort to block Democrats from lifting the nation’s borrowing limit to avoid the economic calamity that would ensue when the U.S. defaults on its debts, for the first time in history, on October 18th. Today, after McConnell blinked, he and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer agreed on terms for the legislative process that Republicans will allow to let Democrats avoid disaster, at least until early December, when the GOP threatens the same economic terrorism all over again. AP (and other national outlets) continued to mislead the public by reporting: “the Republican and Democratic leaders edged back from a perilous standoff.” But that’s not what happened at all. The “leaders” (plural) did not “edge back”, and it was not a “standoff”. As longtime journalist, author and media critic James Fallows has been expertly reporting for some time now, this was nothing more than a nihilistic Republican threat to tank the nation’s, and the world’s, economy. “To call it an ‘impasse’ or ‘standoff’ is misleading,” writes Fallows this week. “This is the same kind of ‘impasse’ as one between a kidnapper demanding ransom for a captured executive, and a company that believes it should not pay. It is not a level-playing-field difference of view.”
- The debt ceiling is hardly the only area where mainstream corporate media have been failing by ill-serving the public and our democracy. Today, they were joined in that disservice by the Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats, who released an otherwise very important report on how Donald Trump attempted to use the U.S. Dept. of Justice to STEAL the 2020 Presidential election. The 394-page report [PDF] was eight months in the making and is titled: “Subverting Justice: How the Former President and his Allies Pressured DOJ to Overturn the 2020 Election.” Media reporting on the new report has taken to echoing that language (as they have since last November) in explaining how Trump tried to “subvert” the election, or “question” its results, or tried to “undermine” its legitimacy. He used a “big lie” to try and pull off a “self coup”. Of course, Trump did all of those things, but it was all in service to one single criminal objective: An attempt to STEAL the election! Why do corporate media — and Democrats, for that matter — have such a difficult time calling it out as such? There is a mountain of hard, independently verifiable evidence to support that admittedly very serious charge, that I would never issue lightly. Today, Senate Democrats just added 394 more pages of said evidence to that mountain. Media need to start accurately calling out what happened here. A then sitting President of the United States abused the levers of his power to try and STEAL a Presidential election from the American people. It’s as simple as that. Media should begin reporting it as such.
- Trump’s attempted theft of the 2020 election continues, at least in hopes of stealing the next one. Despite the abject failure of the Cyber Ninjas in Maricopa County, Arizona (Sen. Dick Durbin called them “Ninja Turtles” today) to find any legitimate evidence of election fraud (or to even hand-count the results of the election accurately), the MAGA Mob is still continuing to waste tax payer dollars with phony “audits” and “investigations” of last year’s election in other states. In Wisconsin, as in Arizona, Republican legislators have hired someone completely inexperienced in elections to investigate their loss in last year’s election. In this case, the man placed in charge of the review is a former state Supreme Court Justice named Michael Gableman. This week Gableman admitted to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he does not have “any understanding of how elections work.” Great choice, Republicans! I’m sure he’ll very wisely spend the $676,000 in taxpayer money that you “conservatives” gave him. The effort may even be as successful as the Turtles’!
- Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with more on last weekend’s massive SoCal oil spill; a new study finding that, globally, the fossil fuel industry receives $11 million in government subsidies every minute (no doubt Joe Manchin will be furious about their “entitlement society”!); and another notorious pipeline company with high-tech spill prevention technology is charged with dozens of criminal counts for pipelines that leaked into Pennsylvania‘s drinking water…
(Snail mail support to “Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028” always welcome too!)
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Are you the same guy that investigated and was part of the Clint Curtis story?
Who knew (A Tale of Coup Cities – 14)?
Marietjie van der Wath @1:
Yup! That’s me. See BradBog.com/ClintCurtis for an index of my years of coverage of his story.
So you are aware that the voting machines are rigged but you think Trump wanted to steal the election?😱
Marietjie @4:
If you are actually aware of my reporting on Clint Curtis (and the hundreds if not thousands of other related stories I’ve reported on for the past 20 years), then you know his story was not about machines that “are rigged”, but about machines that can be rigged.
Simply because a machine is vulnerable to rigging, does not mean that it was, anymore than the fact that the lock on your front door can be picked means that your house was robbed.
The best way to determine if a machine was “rigged” is to hand-count the hand-marked paper ballots that were tallied by it. To date, despite hand-count after hand-count around the country since the 2020 election, there is no evidence of any machine having been “rigged” in the 2020 Presidential election. And, believe me, I follow these things very closely. If you have evidence you believe I have not seen, I’m sure you’ll feel free to share it with me.
As to Donald Trump’s efforts to steal the election, that is incontrovertible. We have a mountain of hard, independently verifiable evidence revealing him attempting to have done exactly that. From his phone call threatening the GA Sec of State if he didn’t “find” exactly the number of votes needed to flip the state’s results, to his attempt to order his DoJ to issue false claims that evidence of manipulated ballots was found, to his directions to his supporters to storm the Capitol to prevent the certification of the Electoral College votes. I could go on, but you get the idea. The sitting President of the United States tried to steal the 2020 election from the American voters.
If you are unaware of these independently verifiable facts, I strongly suggest you find better media outlets. The ones you are currently reading/viewing/listening to are clearly lying to you and playing you for a dupe.
Marietjie @4:
You couldn’t care less about establishing fair and accurate voting systems in this country.
You just want YOUR GUY to be installed as Prez, and that’s it.
‘Nuff said.