Well, we’re back live on today’s BradCast, like it or not. With so much going on we’ve got no choice but to run right into the middle of the freeway and pray for the best. The result? Not a bad show, if I say so myself. [Audio link to full show follows this tweet.]
After a quick round-up, needed for context today, of just some of last week’s madness while we were otherwise off for a much-needed break, we pick up with…
- The opinion [PDF] of the very conservative Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, who, last week in the case of the mistakenly-deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia warned that the Trump Administration’s refusal to bring the man home to Maryland from a gulag in El Salvador “should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.” Judge Wilkinson goes on to warn, among other things, that “The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order,” and that “If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?”
- But Donald Trump‘s tyranny is now here, in full flower, which one Republican U.S. Senator admitted recently has all of her colleagues “afraid”, even if most are still too afraid to say as much out loud.
- SCOTUS was literally forced to awaken from bed over the weekend to issue an extraordinary, 7 to 2, middle-of-the-night order PDF to the Trump Administration, clarifying that no Venezuelan migrants being held in Texas may be deported under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 “until further order of this court.” (If you’re wondering who were the two Justices in favor of sending migrants to foreign gulags without benefit of any Constitutional due process, that would be Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas, of course.)
- And, by the way, Washington Post reported over the weekend that the 18 intelligence agencies comprising Trump’s own National Intelligence Council concluded in an assessment earlier this month that the Venezuelan government is not directing an invasion of the U.S., as Trump has lied about in unlawfully invoking the Alien Enemies Act to deport migrants without due process.
- Trump’s fiscal policies continue to be disastrous as well. The U.S. stock market plummeted yet again on Monday in response to Trump’s tariff and trade war and his new threats of firing his own Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who Trump is now blaming for the fact that he crashed the U.S. economy with his own dumb trade war that few if any countries are apparently willing to negotiate with Trump about.
- Pope Francis, the world’s first Latin American pontiff and a great champion of progressive causes including the fight against climate change and for environmental justice — as Desi Doyen details today — died on Monday at the age of 88 after a months-long illness and a brief meeting with Vice President J.D. Vance on Easter Sunday.
- That’s not all we cover today, but it gives you an idea before we open up the phones to callers, callers, callers. Lot of them, including some with some very interesting thoughts and questions! Please tune in!…
(Snail mail support to “Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028” always welcome too!)
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There’s the warming commentariat (The Warming Science Commentariat) and then there’s this:
(The Looting of the Earth: Toxic Soils, Elite Extraction, and the Unraveling of Civilization).
Not to mention the contributing factor of micro-plastics inside brains (Nature, Medicine).