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We Lost Gloria Steinem. We Cannot Let Her Be Forgotten.

I wasn’t going to do a show today.

My right hand has been in agony for days now — I’ve been icing it, taping it, using red light therapy on it, doing everything except actually resting it, which apparently is the one thing that would help. I’d made peace with taking today off to deal with it. I’m typing this with my left hand, in fact, which tells you something about my week.

Then this morning, when I awoke after very little sleep thanks to the pain, I saw it: Gloria Steinem had died. She was 92.

So much for the day off. My first thought was sadness. My second thought was: I need to call Amy.

If you’ve listened to this show for any length of time, you know Amy Simon — my friend of decades, going back to when I was in music radio and she was a record promoter for Virgin Records, back when we still called them records. Amy became a Cultural HERstorian first through a one-woman show about motherhood and Social Security called “Cheerios in My Underwear,” then through a play called “She’s History,” and now through a book — “American Agitators: Five Centuries of Unstoppable Women Who Fought for Social and Political Justice” — that she just, after four years and four deadlines, finished.

There was no one else I wanted to talk to today.

Amy actually knew Gloria a little, not intimately, but enough to have real stories: meeting her starstruck at a Beverly Hills fundraiser in 2008, getting a killer quote about Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin sharing “a chromosome,” performing as Bella Abzug at an anniversary event where half the room turned out to be Bella’s actual friends, and riding the subway with Gloria afterward like it was the most normal thing in the world. Gloria never wanted to be treated like a star. That, Amy says, was part of what made her so effective.

We talked about the parts of Gloria’s story that get flattened into trivia — yes, she went undercover as a Playboy Bunny for eleven days and wrote an exposé that launched her career, but that’s not the whole of her. She co-founded Ms. Magazine, the first magazine written by women, about women, for women, at a moment when the entire publishing industry expected it to fail. She organized the “We Have Had Abortions” petition when abortion was still illegal. She testified before the Senate on the Equal Rights Amendment in 1970 — a speech that, frustratingly, was never recorded, because this was before C-SPAN existed. But you can read it yourself, right here.

Gloria built real, complicated friendships across lines that were supposed to keep women apart — with Dolores Huerta, who didn’t originally see feminism as her issue, and who taught Gloria about farmworkers’ rights in return; with Wilma Mankiller, the first female chief of the Cherokee Nation, who officiated Gloria’s wedding at 50 and introduced her to the idea that patriarchy wasn’t some universal law of nature, just one particular, enforced arrangement.

And she took real damage for all of it. Amy told me about the mail Ms. Magazine used to get — vile, threatening, obscene. Gloria kept going anyway. As Amy put it, that’s the pattern with every woman in her book: the more people tried to silence them, the louder they got.

I don’t want Gloria Steinem’s name to fade into a vague, half-remembered footnote for younger generations — especially not now, when the very rights she spent her life fighting for are being stripped away in real time. A woman couldn’t get a credit card in her own name until the 1970s. That’s not ancient history. That’s within living memory, and we are watching people try to drag us back toward it.

We closed the show with Gloria’s own words — her full speech from the Women’s March on Washington in January 2017, the day after the first inauguration of a man she clearly saw right through. Give it a listen. It holds up entirely too well.

Rest in peace, and rest in power, Gloria. Thank you for everything.

Tomorrow, Marcy Wheeler of emptywheel.net joins me to wrap up the week. Monday is Labor Day — and I might actually, finally, take a little time off after that. I’ll see what the hand has to say about it!

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There was a whole lotta show packed into just over an hour today, and for good reason. Of course, Driftglass – the OG progressive blogger still doing his thing at driftglass.blogspot.com and podcasting with his equally lovely and talented wife BlueGal Fran at ProLeftPod.com – is here most Wednesdays, which is good reason enough… but to add to that, I had reached out to another dear friend, Jason Leopold to get an update on his latest FOIA filing return having to do with the Epstein ugliness, asking him to come on the show tomorrow. But he got back to me saying he was taking an extra-long holiday weekend, so asked if he could do it today instead. What am I gonna say, no? I don’t think so!

So Driftglass helped expand my mind for the first half-hour, and Jason took over for the second!

Even when I have Driftglass on for only 30 minutes, he still gets my mind working and, as always, we covered a lot of territory, starting with the Supreme Extreme Court quietly letting Trump build his underground bunker ballroom, with Chief Justice Roberts siding with the liberal justices in dissent — a move that changes nothing when the other five don’t care what the law says anymore. That, naturally, led into the “court packing” conversation, and a fact worth repeating: the Constitution never specifies a number of Supreme Court justices. It’s not sacred. It’s just where things landed.

Driftglass’s running theory is that every Republican in Congress who votes in lockstep with Trump is doing exactly what their district wants. “The problem is the voters,” he said, and it’s hard to argue with the data — a chart showing Republican views of Canada flipping overnight, right on cue, the moment Trump decided we should be mad at Canada. That’s not policy. That’s programming.

We also talked about the eerie parallels to 2006 — the last time a Republican president’s numbers collapsed this badly, this fast, was also over a war built on lies and an economy in freefall. Republicans started distancing themselves from Bush that September, almost exactly twenty years ago. Now it’s happening again, faster and uglier, with Trump about to hold the first-ever mid-cycle party convention — over two days, in Dallas, right as members of his own party are trying to put as much distance between themselves and him as possible before the midterms. He’s skipping the actual 9/11 memorial in New York, by the way, because politicians aren’t allowed to speak there anymore. He’s going to the Pentagon ceremony instead. Because he can speechify all he wants and play golf after.

None of that stopped us from talking about the uglier stuff too — Texas closing more than 100 polling places in Tarrant County, which happens to be trending bluer than the rest of the state, and a whistleblower alleging the Postal Service is still slow-walking ballot delivery despite court orders telling them not to. There are, thankfully, still people inside institutions — military officials among them — who understand their duty is to the Constitution, not to whoever’s currently occupying the White House.

And then, because Driftglass and I apparently can’t have a serious conversation without also having a deeply unserious one, I played a comedy bit sent to me by a radio friend in LA about “Mustang Meat” — beef made from wild horses, as a solution to rising grocery prices. I want to be extremely clear that I do not endorse this bit, and also that we do have real wild horses here along the Salt River in Arizona that our governor, Katie Hobbs, just signed another law to protect. So there’s a kernel of truth buried in the very, very wrong joke that also was so well-produced I couldn’t help but laugh.

After Driftglass signed off, Jason Leopold — the FOIA King, as I’ve now decided to call him, regardless of what the government calls him — joined to walk me through his latest fight. A year ago, right after Ghislaine Maxwell sat down for two days with Todd Blanche, she was abruptly transferred from a facility in Tallahassee to a lower-security prison in Texas. Jason filed a narrow FOIA request just asking for the justification. It took a year, and a lawsuit, to get a single page back — and that page is almost entirely redacted, with the actual explanation blacked out (or, in this case, whited out) under privacy exemptions. No account of what prompted the move. No indication of whether there was any leniency involved, any deal, any threat. Just blank space where an answer to a pretty basic public-interest question should be.

The actual redacted result of Jason’s FOIA request

We also talked about Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s remarks on the Senate floor about the FBI 302 witness statements — interviews in which a woman described being assaulted by Trump as a young teenager — three of which named Trump and were withheld from the disclosure required under the Epstein files law, while the one that didn’t name him was released. And about Rep. Thomas Massie, still a Republican, standing on the House floor reading 14 names included in the Epstein files into the record, a small act of transparency in the face of an administration sitting on more than 3 million pages of files it has no apparent intention of releasing.

If you haven’t already done so, sign up for Jason Leopold’s weekly FOIA Files newsletter right here. It’s free, so do it now!

It’s a lot to hold in one hour, honestly. But that’s the job right now — laugh where you can, stay furious where you need to, and keep asking the questions that keep getting hidden by redactions.

This really is the last “unofficial” week of summer and so many people are on vacation. I haven’t figured out what we’ll do tomorrow, but I’ll come up with something. I am leaning closer and closer to actually taking a staycation next week like Jason described he’s doing this week. So far, all I know is that I’ll share a Labor Day Music Show on Monday on the Progressive Voices network. One day at a time…

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If you listen to this show, there’s a good chance that you’re also quite familiar with Brad Friedman & Desi Doyen of the BradBlog, BradCast and the Green News Report. You probably know that we’ve been friends for a long time, but I don’t have them on the show that often. That’s because they also produce their show(s) when I’m on the air and it’s difficult to coordinate. But I know they’re predictable. They take time off, seemingly, around every holiday. So I figured they were off this week and that Brad would be available today. Voila!

If you’ve never heard the two of us together, here’s what you should know: Brad Friedman is one of the people in this business I actually, sincerely call a friend. Not “friend” in the fake industry way. A real one. We met more than twenty years ago when I was hosting mornings on a Clear Channel station in Miami and I’d read something he wrote about election integrity — his beat, long before “election integrity” got hijacked and turned into a lie about people who aren’t voting illegally. I called him out of the blue. He came on. I got fired from that job not long after (formats flip, that’s radio), moved over to Air America, and kept having him on. Eventually we ended up at Netroots Nation together and yes, he taught me how to play video poker in Vegas while I was on a scooter with a broken foot. None of that is exaggerated for effect. That’s just how this business works when you’ve been in it as long as we have.

We got into the ugly mechanics of that history today, too — how Clear Channel used to buy up progressive stations in every major market and then stick them on the weakest signal they could find, so you could walk off an elevator surrounded by ads for their number-one right-wing station and have no idea the progressive one existed one floor away. That’s not a competition liberal talk radio lost. That’s a competition it was never allowed to enter. And it’s worth remembering that history every time someone tells you progressive talk “failed in the free market.”

Then there’s the other anniversary nobody wants to celebrate. Ten years ago this week, I had cancer surgery. Also ten years ago, a certain orange menace made it into the White House and started what has been, objectively, one of the worst decades of my life and probably yours too. I got a decade of life out of that surgery — a gift, genuinely — and he’s spent the whole thing making it miserable. I don’t love that those two anniversaries share this year. Brad, for the record, does not think I owe him a thank-you note. Obama’s Affordable Care Act is why I had insurance in the first place. That’s not up for debate, no matter what secondhand story you’ve heard about somebody else’s cancer treatment.

We also got into what’s actually coming: whether the Supreme Court’s recent posture is cover for something worse, why Jim Clyburn coming out for court expansion matters more than it might look like, and Brad’s prediction — which he only half-jokingly asked me to keep off the record because “nobody watches this show anyway” — that November 3rd is going to be a bigger wave than anyone currently expects. I want to believe him. I’m working on it. I’ve earned my cynicism the hard way this decade.

And because no episode of this show is complete without total chaos, we also covered: a possible tropical storm about to hit Los Angeles, the javelinas dumpster diving outside my daughter’s apartment in Tucson, the baby scorpion I found in my house last night (barefoot, of course), the FCC’s Brendan Carr going after broadcasters — including, by name, Pacifica Radio, Brad’s other home — and the day I found out Spotify deleted fifteen years of my podcast archive because I dared to play small bits of songs on my show occasionally. Brad mentioned that the BradCast isn’t on Spotify, though for an entirely different reason — Joe Rogan. (I’m guessing just the fact that Spotify still pays that man who knows too little to be an authority on politics an obscene amount of money each year for his not very entertaining show.

One more thing, since people ask: no, I do not play AI-generated music on this show. And I’ve heard some that’s pretty good (though not much). I’ll happily play a human songwriter’s parody or an original topical song — Bruce W. Nelson, who performs as Mangy Fetlocks, does this basically daily and it’s genuinely good — but I draw a line at the AI stuff. I use AI tools in producing this show and I’m upfront about that. Music made by an actual person who sat down and wrote it is a different thing, and I’m not giving that up.

Also: our landlord is trying to evict us for reasons he has never actually specified, so we’re suing him and we need a new house to rent in the next month or two. Chandler, Phoenix, Tempe, Ahwatukee, West Mesa — if you know of anything, I’m listening.

Tomorrow: Driftglass returns. For that, I am grateful!

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I’m not going to pretend today was a good day. I’m in pain. My hand is taped up because apparently my body has decided that on top of the gluteus maximus tendinitis running down my entire right side, my thumb needs to join the party too. Arthritis, carpal tunnel, who knows. I have an appointment with the hand doctor a week from tomorrow. The pain kind of started on Friday night when I was writing an angry letter longhand — but the pain got seriously bad yesterday.

I was writing to T-Mobile, by the way. Because of course I was. I won’t rehash the whole saga here except to say: if a company puts in a contract that you’ll pay $54 a month for 24 months for a new phone, but promises you verbally that you’ll actually pay $8, and then refuses to put that in writing anywhere on the six-page contract you’re signing — please tell me I’m not crazy for finding that insane. I don’t throw anything away, digital or paper, for exactly this reason. Does everyone sign that? I can’t imagine an attorney would ever say “just sign it.”

But here’s the thing I actually want to talk about. The thing actually upsetting me, when I should be celebrating. Yesterday marked 10 years since my lung cancer surgery. Ten years cancer-free. That means this last decade has been a gift. A gift of an extra decade of life that, if I hadn’t discovered the lung cancer so early, I likely wouldn’t have had. That’s supposed to be an unambiguous good thing, a gift, a milestone you celebrate without asterisks.

And instead I found myself doing the math on what those 10 years actually were. A decade I was lucky enough to get — spent watching one man try to dismantle everything decent about this country. I love my husband, my daughter, my dogs. That part of the decade was worth everything. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t furious that this is the backdrop I got for my second chance. I should be saying, “I love my life.” But the truth is I don’t. And it’s 99% because of that pile of orange shit destroying it. And having this moment to look back at the last ten years feels like a knife stuck right through what’s left of that left lung… a small piece of what was the upper lobe that’s probably just morphed into the right lung by now, useless on its own.

It’s also — small, weird detail — 18 years since David and I had our first date, that same weekend– the last Sunday in August, though in 2008 it was the day before Labor Day. That too was an election year… in the final stretch running up to the election of Barack Obama. So much possibility ahead of us. But now we’re here. JFC. So it’s a complicated anniversary stretch. Grief, gratitude, and rage, all tangled together, which honestly might just be what turning any corner in your life feels like right now.

I needed some levity, so on Thursday I found a phone book listing for Ontario, Canada, looked up my own last name, and called a stranger named Jeffrey Sandler to apologize on behalf of the country for Trump’s idea to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America.” Jeffrey did not need convincing. He hates the guy as much as I do, and it was oddly comforting to hear a total stranger, unprompted, tell me Iran isn’t scared of Trump — he’s scared of Iran. Sometimes the internet, or in this case, a Canadian phone book, delivers exactly what you need. I’m sorry I couldn’t have done more of that today.

Dr. Art Jipson came on for our back-to-school conversation, and it turned out to be the thing that actually got me through the rest of the show. He teaches at the University of Dayton, and he told me his students — freshmen and graduating seniors alike — are more optimistic than he expected. Not naive, not oblivious to how bad things are, but willing to roll up their sleeves anyway. His capstone class spent the semester talking about what it means to contribute to the common good instead of chasing the next paycheck. It’s easy for people like Art and me, who’ve been at this fight a long time, to get jaded. His students keep pulling him back from that edge. I needed to hear it too.

That said, we still went to some dark places, because that’s where the news lives right now. We talked about Hegseth running the military into the ground while somehow still managing to escalate with Iran — squandering the actual hardware and the goodwill of the world in the process. We talked about Trump trying to get Kristen Welker reported to the FCC over accurate reporting on his midterm endorsement record, which is just Brendan Carr doing Trump’s dirty work instead of, you know, regulating anything real. We talked about the FDA rollbacks — more than 50 things now off the “safe to eat” list, imported beef with no real inspection, my beloved frozen organic blueberries suddenly a question mark.

Art made a point that stuck with me: real adversaries of the United States don’t have to do anything right now. They can just sit back and watch us do it to ourselves.

We also talked about redemption — Art does research with extremists, people in white nationalist and patriot movement groups, and he says the through-line in any kind of de-radicalization is relationships. Seeing the humanity in someone you’d written off. I don’t know how much patience I have left for that particular kind of grace these days, but I believe him that it’s the only thing that’s ever actually worked.

And then, because the day demanded it, we talked about Charlie. My 100-pound chocolate lab who spent five years of his life as a breeding dog in a hoarding situation and never lived in an actual home until we adopted him. He’s basically a five-year-old puppy in a linebacker’s body, and all he wants to do is love people and eat. After the day I’ve had, I needed the reminder that he exists.

CHARLIE

As for tomorrow’s show, that’s a question mark — It all depends on how the hand and hip are behaving. If I’m not there, I promise whatever airs instead will be worth your time.

Take care of yourself. And maybe call a stranger and apologize for something today. It’s weirdly good for the soul.

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Friday means Marcy Wheeler is here for another edition of Emptywheel Friday. And finally, I’ve gotten my studio to the point where it behaved itself and kept the gremlins at bay! So it was just the usual mountain of insanity to get through.

We started, as one does these days, with something so stupid it almost distracts from how telling it is: Donald Trump signed some kind of document proclaiming that Lake Ontario will now be known as “Lake America.” Never mind that America is literally two continents.

Marcy’s read is that this is what it looks like when a man has no actual leverage left and keeps reaching for the only lever he knows how to pull — tariffs, threats, renaming things. It’s the same energy behind Scott Bessent’s tough talk on Iran sanctions, which only works if you can get India, China, and Russia to play along, and Russia and Iran share practically a backyard. Trump can’t fix the problems he made, so he makes noise instead.

Then there’s the question that might bug you all weekend: can Trump still walk? Marcy described watching him get off a plane, grabbing the platform railing before he’d even started down the stairs, then leaning on the railing halfway down. It sounds small. It isn’t. This is a man whose meetings are staged so he’s always seated, who doesn’t bike, whose only exercise is riding around in a golf cart while cheating at golf. Make of that what you will.

We talked about the strange trip John Ratcliffe took to see Putin — reportedly to warn him off NATO, but landing the same day Bessent rolled out his big Iran tariff plan. A Washington Post report suggests the real context is that Russia believes the U.S. is weak. And honestly? They might be right.

Trump gutted the National Security Council through Laura Loomer’s purges, taking out the Iran expert who had publicly and correctly predicted everything that went wrong. He also purged a CIA officer, Julie Curlee, whose Atlantic essay about being fired for being trans — after being one of Mike Pence’s most trusted briefers — is some of the best writing I’ve read in a long time. Go read it. (I know that The Atlantic is a pricey subscription - but my sister got one at half off and I share it with her, so you’re in luck. Here’s a gift link to that article: “The Wrong Kind of American” Now, go read it!

But the story that made me the angriest this week was about a 19-year-old sailor on the USS Lincoln. He was 8.5 months into a deployment — 255 days without touching land — when he jumped overboard. They fished him out, sent him home, didn’t get him a mental health evaluation for two weeks, and are now disciplining him and docking his pay, claiming he faked it.

He’s a teenager. He has a wife and two small kids at home. This is happening because Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon destroyed the naval infrastructure in Bahrain during the Iran war and hasn’t figured out — or won’t say — whether they’re rebuilding it or retreating from the Middle East altogether. Instead of dealing with that failure, Hegseth fired the Stars and Stripes editors who reported on it.

And in case that’s not enough, a new aircraft carrier that was supposed to honor Black Pearl Harbor hero Doris Miller is instead being renamed after Trump.

We also got into the manufactured outrage over Hakeem Jeffries meeting with Jared Kushner — which, as Marcy points out, is actually part of a minority leader’s job, and which conveniently distracted everyone from a much bigger story about Natalie Harp.

Ashley Moody in Florida has three separate corruption scandals hanging over her, any one of which should sink a Senate campaign. And in Minnesota, the “Antifa” prosecutions that Pam Bondi paraded as trophy arrests are falling apart one by one under discovery — it turns out the case was built on fabricated assault claims against ICE and CBP agents, run out of DC by a January 6th defendant.

We closed the show remembering Dolly Parton — who turned down the Medal of Freedom from every president who offered it, funded a Covid 19 vaccine, and quietly ran a literacy program that Republicans cut funding for. Trump’s response was to put out a fake photo of himself with her.

THIS IS FAKE BECAUSE D’UMP HAS NO CLASS

As Marcy said: let Dolly be your guide. It’s the best model we’ve got right now.

Elections are coming. Hold your representatives accountable — for the sailor, for the Great Lakes, for all of it. And go read Marcy’s work at emptywheel.net. She’s doing work that too few people are doing right now.

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I had an idea today, and like most of my ideas that begin with “wouldn’t it be fun if,” it did not go according to plan. But it was fun anyway, so let’s call it a win.

It started yesterday, in a conversation with Driftglass — who’s with me on Wednesdays these days, thank you very much, Driftglass — about the 77 million Americans who voted for Trump. Not the first time, mind you. The second time. After we’d all already seen exactly what he is. And Driftglass, in the middle of talking about the Trump voters now shocked, shocked, that their farms are getting screwed or their girlfriends are getting deported, landed on the line of the year: show me on the doll where the liberal hurt you. Show me exactly who said the mean thing, when they said it, and why you believed it enough to vote for a monster over it.

I loved that line so much I stole it for today’s show. I wanted to actually try it. Not metaphorically — literally. I wanted to talk to Republicans. Not the ever-elusive “reasonable Republican” I’ve been trying to find for years, because let’s be honest, that bar is basically unreachable these days. Just Republicans. Any of them. So I opened the phone lines and told you all: if you’ve got a Trumper in your life you don’t talk to much anymore, or if you’re a Republican slumming it over here with us liberals, call in. I promise to be nice. Mostly.

In between waiting for calls that mostly didn’t come, I brought you the news of the day, such as it was. Trump announced — with a straight face, in front of cameras — that he was renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America,” effective immediately, because he’d signed “all the papers.” Which papers, exactly, remain a mystery, along with the small detail that Lake Ontario is not entirely inside the United States and he does not, in fact, have the unilateral power to rename a body of water shared with another sovereign country. This is, of course, the same guy who tried it with the Gulf of Mexico. It also gave me an excuse to remind everyone, Trump included, that “America” isn’t even our name to unilaterally claim — it comes from Amerigo Vespucci, and it covers two entire continents, Canada and Mexico very much included. He’s out here trying to erase a Explorer’s mistake he doesn’t even understand while defending Christopher Columbus, a man whose main qualifications appear to have been showing up and getting lost.

Then there was the Department of Education’s social media account — yes, apparently there are still people working there — posting something that showed a clip from the film Darkest Hour, captioned “no one does it like us,” referencing a scene about a tiger that, in the movie, refers to Adolf Hitler. Make of that what you will. I certainly did.

But the real fun was the phone hunt. Since Republicans don’t exactly beat down my door, I decided to go find them myself, live, using online White Pages directories for red cities I picked essentially at random — Omaha, El Reno, Biloxi — trying names like Sandler and Stoner and Skinner because apparently I regress to about age twelve when I’m bored. Nearly every single number was disconnected, wrong, or simply didn’t ring, because it turns out nobody under seventy has a landline anymore. Which is its own little eulogy for an era, if you think about it.

The one call that landed, though, made the whole experiment worth it. I dialed a total stranger named Jeffrey Sandler in Ontario, Canada — no relation, just a shared surname — to apologize on behalf of the United States for the whole Lake America nonsense. Jeffrey didn’t need the apology. Jeffrey has opinions of his own about Donald Trump, none of them printable in a headline, and it was genuinely lovely to hear a stranger across a border say, essentially, “I know exactly how you feel, and you don’t need to explain it to me.” Sometimes solidarity comes from the most unexpected two-minute phone call.

I also heard from Jackie, a listener in the Bay Area running her own informal polling operation on her Trump-voting friends and family, who’s noticed the same thing I have: the excuses have curdled into either denial (“the stock market’s fine, it’s not affecting me”) or straight-up stubbornness. She’s promised to get me her brother-in-law’s number for next time, which means round two of this experiment might actually have a real live Republican in it. Stay tuned.

Did I find my reasonable Republican today? No. Did I get anything resembling a real focus group? Also no. But I got a nice Canadian, a renamed lake that isn’t actually renamed, and confirmation that landlines are basically a historical artifact at this point. I’ll take it. See you tomorrow — Marcy Wheeler‘s here for Emptywheel Friday, and I promise to behave myself by then. Maybe.

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I Do the Rock

I’m still working the bugs out of my studio, but I knew that I’d be able to get on the air today and that Driftglass would be here. What else do I need? Nothing, really. When Driftglass is here, we just let it roll. He knows his shit and I’m pretty confident that I know mine. We speak the same language.

Just as we had breaking news right before showtime about Dolly Parton earlier this week, we had a similar experience today with the breaking news that Tim Curry died. I’ve always loved Tim Curry in a different way than I love Dolly Parton. I didn’t always love Dolly. I don’t much care for her kind of music, but as I grew older and wiser, I realized that she’s just an amazing person all-around as she genuinely loves and cares for people. And she puts her money where her mouth is.

Tim Curry was just hitting big as went off to college. The Rocky Horror Picture Show movie came out in 1975 (ok, so high school); but the song “I Do The Rock” was released in 1979, my first year in radio at WUSF – the station for the University of South Florida where I worked. I also hosted a weekly show across town at Tampa’s Community Radio Station, WMNF. The show was called Free Form Radio, an apt description of what we did there. Tim Curry’s “I Do The Rock” was probably one of my most-played songs because, well, you heard it. So when I saw the news that Tim Curry had died, there was no question what I’d start today’s show with, and rock we did!

Of course, the fact that Tim Curry died at 80 — the same age Dolly Parton was when she left us just days ago — wasn’t lost on me. And tell me I’m wrong all you want. In this case, I don’t care. But the universe blew it twice this week by taking the wrong 80 year olds from us.

I mean, really. if the Gods or the Dogs want an 80 year old, I can think of one very sickly 80 year old who’s more than ready to exit stage whatever.

Tim Curry had a stroke in 2012 that took a lot from him, and watching old clips of him afterward is a gut punch. But my God, the roles — Dr. Frank-N-Furter, Pennywise, the doctor in The Hunt for Red October who makes that whole movie work in about four scenes. Life’s too short, and we just lost two 80-year-olds in one week who couldn’t have been more different and somehow both mattered enormously.

Then Driftglass came on, and we did what we do: we got mad, and we got specific about why.

Here’s the thing that’s been eating at me. All these “reasonably former” Republicans — the Joe Scarboroughs, the Tim Millers, the Rick Wilsons, the Stuart Stevenses — are suddenly willing to look back past 2016 and say, huh, maybe this started earlier than we thought. Maybe it was Newt Gingrich in ’94. Maybe it was Sarah Palin. Maybe, just maybe, we built this.

I didn’t and Driftglass didn’t. And if you’re here, you probably didn’t either. We were the ones shouting from the rooftops. For decades. A chorus of us said there’s something rotten in the GOP, fix it or pay for it, and you called us partisan hacks and kept cashing the checks from Limbaugh and Fox and 40 years of telling your base that we’re the enemy. Driftglass had the metaphor of the day: it’s a coal ash pit. Unlined, toxic, leaching into the groundwater for a generation after the plant shuts down. That’s what 50 years of hate radio does. Trump will exit stage whatever eventually. The poison he was built on top of isn’t going anywhere.

And Trump himself — I lived in New York when he was just a Queens slumlord’s kid playing dress-up at Studio 54, calling in to Page Six pretending to be his own publicist. He was never good at business. He went bankrupt over and over and daddy bailed him out every time. Mark Burnett and NBC took that guy and turned him into a “brilliant businessman” for a reality show, and enough of the country bought the fiction that here we are. Reality TV. What a name for something with zero resemblance to reality.

Then there’s the stuff you can’t even make up: he wants aircraft carriers to launch planes with steam because someone told him steam was better (it is not — ask literally any engineer). He’s stripping the name of a Black Pearl Harbor hero off a Navy ship so he can slap “Trump” on it instead. He wants to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America” for reasons that exist nowhere in the vicinity of logic. And apparently Jared Kushner sat down with Hakeem Jeffries this week, and neither Driftglass nor I can figure out what either of them thought they’d get out of it. If someone books Jeffries, please, for the love of God, ask him what that was about.

We also talked about the Trump voters now discovering that the deportations, the tariffs, the chaos — it was always going to come for them too. I take a little dark satisfaction in that, and I’m not going to pretend I don’t. You don’t get to vote for cruelty and act shocked when it has your address.

And personally: this week marks 10 years since I had my left lung removed for cancer. Ten years cancer-free. Which means, math being math, cancer bought me a decade of Donald Trump. I’m still working out if that’s a fair trade.

Tomorrow, no guest booked — I’m calling Republicans who voted for Trump and still don’t regret it. If you know one who’ll talk to me, send them my way: nicole@nicolesandler.com or 480-442-6584. Let’s find out what “great job” actually means to them.

No paywall here, never has been, never will be. If you can chip in, it helps more than you know. If you can’t, share the show — that’s worth just as much... well, that sounds nice but it doesn’t pay the rent…

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I know exactly where to start this week, exactly where we started on the show, and the story that’s perplexing the nation. Natalie Harp. Everything about her is just strange.

Jon Ossoff dropped one line in a speech — something about Trump “traveling with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace” — and it set off a full-blown White House freakout. Marcy joined me for our regular Friday deep dive and we went all the way down this rabbit hole, because it turns out it deserves the attention. This isn’t some tabloid sideshow. Natalie Harp is Trump’s primary gatekeeper — she was in the room for the catering-cart escape in Turkey, she’s reportedly behind some of the ugliest content that’s come out of his accounts, and by all accounts she answers to no one. Not Susie Wiles. Not the communications team. Not the national security team. She’s slept in locker rooms to avoid being kept away from him. Foreign leaders reportedly reach Trump through her. If that doesn’t unsettle you, I don’t know what will.

And then, because nothing in this administration happens in isolation, we pivoted to the Iran war — which is going worse than you’ve probably heard. Sailors on the USS Lincoln have reportedly attempted suicide after eight months at sea without proper resupply, in part because Iran destroyed a base that Pete Hegseth is apparently still hiding. Missiles are running low. Oil prices are climbing. And Scott Bessent is doing backflips trying to prop up the economy while Trump keeps insisting everything’s fine.

Meanwhile — and I promise this connects — our food safety system is falling apart. Marcy read me a list of recalls that’s honestly hard to process: lettuce, blueberries, eggs, dog food, pizza, granola. Dozens of items. This is what happens when you gut the agencies that are supposed to catch this stuff before it reaches your kitchen table. But here’s the list I found that I think I said I’d post:

We also talked about newly unsealed court filings showing DHS spying on activists, unions, and even churches in Minnesota — built, Marcy explained, on assault allegations against DHS officers that have almost entirely fallen apart. It’s the same playbook we’ve seen in Chicago, LA, and DC: manufacture an “Antifa” threat, then use it to justify surveilling anyone who’s ever criticized ICE.

On the lighter-but-still-infuriating side: Davey Hearn’s reflecting pool case took some fascinating turns this week, Arizona is getting its first-ever lieutenant governor (Katie Hobbs picked former Mesa Mayor John Giles — a smart move, honestly), and Florida’s primary gave us Byron Donalds telling a crowd that people flee to Florida because they’re “stupid,” while Angie Nixon pulled off a genuine upset over Alex Vindman for the Democratic Senate nomination.

And then there’s the Eric Swalwell situation, which somehow ties together a college-age Katie Miller, a suspected Chinese spy, and a declassified FBI file that was sitting around for weeks before it conveniently became public. Marcy walked me through the timeline and it’s a lot.

We closed the show with a song — not a parody, an original — from a TikTok creator named Sam Hodgson14, imagining what it would take to stage “The Coup” in 2028. I found it on YouTube (I don’t do TikTok) – and was going to embed it here. But her has that function disabled. But added a note saying “The Coup” will be available everywhere on Sept. 4th. Just remember where you heard it first. But I can’t take all the credit. Allison Gill @MuellerSheWrote.bsky.social posted it at Bluesky and it blew my mind. You can watch it at the end of today’s show, posted at the top of this post. Or find it on YouTube here. Give it a listen and tell me it doesn’t hit a little too close to home.

Thanks for sticking with me through two weeks of computer hell to get this episode out. I am really, truly sorry for the mess that was the last couple of weeks. I think I finally have the studio fixed. I’m going to burn a pound of sage in here this weekend to eradicate the gremlins once and for all.

As always, you can find Marcy at emptywheel.net and on Bluesky at emptywheel.bsky.social.

I’ll see you Monday, if I don’t burn down the house first… Peace out.

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Due to technical difficulties, there is no video of today’s show, but thankfully we have audio! To hear the audio podcast, just click on the graphic below

Wow. Welcome to a Monday. I’ve made a new revelation: Mondays are inevitable, whether we like it or not. They will come. And boy, did this one come for me.

If you were trying to watch on YouTube today, I’m sorry — it wasn’t working. My website’s streaming wasn’t working. Everything was messed up. This is what happens when you run a show on a literal shoestring budget with no engineer and no money to hire one. I did the best I could, and thankfully progressivevoices.com and nicolesandlerstream.com came through for some of the folks who needed them (remember, no “s” — it’s http, not https, on my old streaming system at nicolesandlerstream.com, the reason it’s no longer working on my website). Others were as frustrated as I’ve been, but I promise you not more.

Before we even got into the news, Bruce W. Nelson — Mangy Fetlocks himself — brought two new songs. One eviscerating Todd Blanche’s middle-of-the-night confirmation as attorney general (and what it means for the Epstein files). The other, well, let’s just say it’s about Katie Miller and doesn’t hold back. The man cranks these out like it’s nothing. Must be nice to be retired.

Then it got worse before it got better. I had a pulmonary function test scheduled this morning — ten years out from lung cancer surgery, still chasing down whatever’s going on with me now — and I got there on time, waited behind two other patients at the check-in window, and was still marked a no-show because I walked in at 10:06 instead of 10:05. I liked that doctor. Now I have to start over with someone new. On top of that, our landlord notified us they’re not renewing our lease — no surprise, since we’re suing them, but a gut-punch on an already rough day.

Thankfully Dr. Art Jipson was there to talk me down, and to talk sense into the news cycle. We got into Blanche’s confirmation and swearing-in over the weekend, and how Thom Tillis and John Cornyn and one other (who I can’t seem to remember right now because my brain is toast)— who had no reason to cave — caved anyway, because they want lobbying money once they’re out of the Senate. It’s always about the money.

Then there was Max Miller. If you haven’t seen his video statement responding to the domestic abuse allegations against him, it’s worth listening to with the video off — just the audio. The breathing, the pauses, the “the truth will not come out that way” — Art called it exactly right: it has all the hallmarks of an abuser justifying what he’s done. And Trump backs him anyway.

The heart of today’s conversation, though, was Art’s new piece at The Conversation, “Fauci’s COVID‑origins hearing shows how conspiracy theories became political weapons“ on the Fauci COVID-origins hearing — how conspiracy theories get transformed into political weapons once repeated by committees and partisan media. Fauci took the Fifth, exactly as any competent lawyer would advise, and Trump — who has taken the Fifth himself, hundreds of times, while actually guilty of things — used that against him. We talked about Rick Scott doing the same thing decades ago over Medicare fraud, and still getting elected governor and senator. The rules only ever seem to apply to some people.

We were also going to talk about another of Art’s articles, “Texas prosecutors are calling a teenage shooting spree ‘terrorism’ – the case could reshape American criminal law” but ran out of time. But you can still read it…

We also got into something more personal — how I’ve been using AI to help build outlines for these show notes, transcripts and all, and how much of it I still have to fix by hand. It saves me some time. It does not, and never will, replace the work of actually writing everything without any assistance.

Tomorrow, Lisa Graves is back after her vacation, and I’ve got a million questions for her. I hope I can get the video and video streaming working again. Question for you, if I can’t (and the audio streaming still isn’t working here), should I just blow it off? I guess I should still do it for Progressive Voices- but you’ll have to find them on TuneIn. Should I put a non-functioning YouTube player up so you still have the chat room?

In addition to this hell, and the hell at the doctor’s office today, and the hell with these shitty phones I’m still dealing with, and the hell imposed on all of us from DC, and the fact that we have to move again in three months, frankly I just want to turn it all off and disappear.

Thanks for bearing with me today — audio only, held together with spit and bubble gum, but here.

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As seems to be the case every week on Emptywheel Friday, it was another busy, chaotic one. Marcy Wheeler keeps up with it all week at emptywheel.net
as things happen, and on Fridays we try to remember what the hell we
went through each week and stick a fork in it. I figured we should start
in Michigan today, as they held their primary on Tuesday, and because
that’s where Marcy’s from, and where she still votes as an American
Overseas. I figured she had a few things to say… And I wasn’t wrong.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won the big one –the Democratic Senate primary to fill the blue seat that Gary Peters is vacating. But Sayed didn’t win by the eight points the polls predicted, because as Marcy reminded me, Michigan primary polling always sucks and this one had two strikes against it.

What matters more than the final number – which was just a one point margin- she said, is whether the party can actually come together.

Jocelyn Benson leading the ticket in the gubernatorial race, Mallory McMorrow (who dropped out early but showed up at El-Sayed’s victory announcement anyway) standing there as a unity signal, and a genuine test of whether Democrats can turn out both Black voters and student voters in the same coalition. Michigan is shaping up to be one of the first battleground states of the 2028 primary, and apparently everybody who wants to be president already knows it — Buttigieg, Newsom, Wes Moore, all making appearances there and showing solidarity.

And the big hug that Haley Stevens laid on Dr. Abdul El-Sayed at the Unity Breakfast didn’t hurt either. We hope. El Sayed now faces former MI Congressman Mike Rogers in November.

And then, because the universe has a sense of humor, Donald Trump’s endorsed candidate lost his race for the Republican nomination for Congress from Michigan’s 8th District. But wait, there’s more. That candidate, Amir Hassan not only lost, he lost to Tom Smith, who suspended his campaign last month! Smith, a retired engineer who dropped out in mid-July actually endorsed another candidate who placed third in that primary! So for now, I guess, he must have said “never mind”. Smith reversed his suspension, stated he was honored, and accepted the Republican nomination and jumped back in the race where he’ll run against the Democratic incumbent Congressman Kristen McDonald Rivet in November.

But Trump’s on a roll… a losing roll! Tennessee held their primaries last night…on a Thursday?! Whatever. But there, incumbent Rep. Andy Ogles also lost his primary despite Trump’s backing. Two states, two Trump endorsements, two losses, all in the same week. Marcy’s already needling Benny Johnson on social media about whether he’s going to admit Trump’s endorsement record isn’t what MAGA media claims it is. It’s almost just like Trump’s insistence that his polling is the best ever. Or his economy is the best ever. Yeah, right…

He can say what he wants, but the economy – despite his incredible lies – isn’t helping Trump either. The jobs report was ugly — a predicted gain of 80,000 turned into an actual loss of 23,000, with downward revisions to boot. New Fed chair Kevin Warsh refused to do the traditional “reassure the markets” dog-and-pony show that Wall Street wanted, and that refusal is rattling people more than the numbers themselves. Add in a GAO report that shredded DOGE’s “savings” claims — turns out their methodology only covers a quarter of what they’ve claimed, and the rest is just numbers pulled from somewhere we can only imagine — and you’ve got the receipts Elizabeth Warren will need to subpoena not just Elon Musk but Katie Miller when Democrats retake the Senate!

Then there’s Todd Blanche. Despite about a million reasons why he shouldn’t be, Blanche will be confirmed as Attorney General. After Thom Tillis made it official yesterday, and Bill Cassidy confirmed he has zero integrity and would also cave, that left only Murkowski and Collins (with permission) to vote no. Now every other Republican in the Senate will be on record voting to help cover up Trump’s corruption, help bury Epstein-related documents, and help free people who were legally adjudged January 6th seditionists. Trump has a track record of threatening to install someone even worse if the Senate balks, and that threat alone is often enough to get the “acceptable” nominee through. It happened with Ratcliffe in his first term. It’s happening again now.

Meanwhile the DC Circuit ruled that Trump’s White House “renovation” — the demolition, the ballroom, the helicopter pad with its own presidential seal — is flatly illegal, because you can’t manufacture your own “national security” justification for a hole you dug yourself. Two Democratic judges said so; Trump has two weeks to appeal.

And then there’s the Epstein stuff, which never stops giving. Katie Phang sued under the Epstein Transparency Act specifically, not FOIA, because — as Marcy laid out — that law is supposed to go well beyond FOIA’s protections. DOJ has apparently been trying to treat it like ordinary FOIA anyway, withholding things like the draft Florida indictment and notes from interviews related to allegations that Trump raped a 16-year-old. Judge Emmet Sullivan — yes, the same judge who wouldn’t let the Mike Flynn prosecution just disappear years ago — isn’t having it, and has a hearing scheduled for next week to make Todd Blanche explain himself.

While we’re on the subject of things DOJ would rather you not notice: it turns out they’ve been using customs summonses to get call records on journalists, including Don Lemon and Georgia Fort — and, in what might be my favorite detail of the week, Megyn Kelly. Apparently Harmeet Dhillon said some fairly damning things in an interview with Kelly, and now DOJ wants to know who was watching. Marcy went and told Megyn Kelly directly, on Xitter, that she’d been surveilled. I would pay real money to know how that lands.

Which gets us to something Marcy’s been tracking that I think matters more than it sounds like at first: the MAGA media ecosystem is genuinely splitting over the Iran war, the same way it split over Epstein. Megyn Kelly and Candace Owens are picking up audience share from Trump loyalists like Benny Johnson precisely because they’re willing to break with Trump on Iran. Marcy’s point is that Trump’s entire hold on power has always run through his ability to control the attention of the far right — and if the people opposing him on Iran start pulling bigger audiences than the sycophants, that’s a real structural problem for him, not just a messaging headache.

But the story Marcy wanted to end on, because we all need a little something uplifting to start the weekend, is Davey Hearn. (OK, not really uplifting, as what a damned ordeal he was put through… but at least it’s better than everything else this week!)

You remember former Olympic canoeist Davey Hearn: charged with vandalizing the White House reflecting pool, when the damage was actually caused by Trump’s own construction contractors. DOJ moved to dismiss the case last week, but — in a move Marcy correctly identified as a legal own-goal — Jeanine Pirro’s office moved to dismiss it without prejudice, meaning they could theoretically try again. Davey’s team, led by Norm Eisen (and as Marcy put it, you do not want to be in a lawsuit with Norm Eisen on the other side), asked the judge to dismiss with prejudice instead, and laid out exactly why: a photo taken nearly two hours before Davey Hearn ever showed up at the pool already shows the same damage he was accused of causing. DOJ had that photo the whole time. And according to Davey’s filing, they lied — in the grand jury and in a warrant application — about who actually took it.

Judge Todd Edelman dismissed the case, but he’s not done. He’s ordered briefing on whether the dismissal should be with or without prejudice, given Davey still wants the grand jury transcripts, and he’s scheduled the four defendants to come back for a status hearing. As Marcy put it: Davey gets the last word. Whether Judge Edelman gets the lastest word is still being determined.

It is, as I said on air, all of this is a story too implausible for a movie. And I’m talking about the entire Dump episode, from the escalator on down. Nobody would believe it. I certainly wouldn’t.

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I opened today’s show with a laugh, because frankly, we needed one before we got to the ugly news.

I started the show not with a song, but with a video, probably from Colbert or The Daily Show, that cuts between footage of Obama announcing the killing of Osama bin Laden and Trump rambling about Baghdadi being “a beautiful dog.” Watch them back to back and you remember what it used to feel like to have a president who could complete a sentence. I wasn’t Obama’s biggest fan when he was in office — I thought he had so much potential but didn’t live up to it — but my god, do I miss “normal.” I miss a president with a brain in his head and more than air between his ears.

And then I played a song sent to me by a friend. an AI-generated song of "the Living Presidents" telling people to get off their asses and vote. I generally refuse to play AI content — I have a real problem with it, and I've said so for a long time — but this one earned an exception. It was clever, it made its point, it would be very difficult to find four people who could pull off those harmonies for a silly online video urging people to vote. (Scratch the "silly". There's nothing serious about urging people to vote. This was important!) And there is a name attached to this one. Someone called Michael Kryton. Good job, Michael!

They can’t even leave Hiroshima alone

Today is August 6th. In 1945, the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb used in combat, killing more than 70,000 people in Hiroshima. We’re not the good guys in every chapter of our history, like this one. But here’s the kicker: someone in this administration — one of Trump’s “best people,” of course — apparently came across the name Enola Gay in historical materials and decided it needed to be flagged or scrubbed, not because it depicts the U.S. dropping an atomic bomb, but because the name contains the word “gay.” That’s where we are. They were scrubbing everything to make sure it didn’t violate their rules against D-E-I. It would be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic.

And on the exact same date in 1965 — 61 years ago today — Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, barring racial discrimination in voting. It enforced the 14th and 15th Amendments, the ones written after slavery. The 14th Amendment - the one that confers birthright citizenship, also guarantees due process before the government can deprive you of life, liberty, or property — the one Trump would clearly love to skip over entirely, the way some hotels skip the 13th floor. Due process only seems to matter to this administration when it’s protecting people with gobs of money.

Nebraska jumped the gun, and it’s ugly

Congress managed to pass exactly one significant piece of legislation this term: the One Big Ugly Bill. It was built deliberately so the worst of it — the Medicaid work requirements, the SNAP cuts and some other heinous provisions— wouldn’t take effect until after the midterms, so voters wouldn’t feel the pain before they had a chance to vote again.

Nebraska didn’t wait.

Our friend Spocko brought Angie Lauritsen from Nebraska for Us onto the show today, and what she described was genuinely alarming. Governor Pillen decided to implement the Medicaid cuts and work requirements early — ahead of the rest of the country, which starts in January 2027 . The first letters cutting people off went out August 1st. About 200 people so far, but that number is going to snowball. And it’s going to get more confusing because most people have no idea whether they’re on regular Medicaid or Medicaid expansion. Meanwhile, the state itself is drowning in confusion while operating under a hiring freeze and a $1 billion budget deficit.

It gets worse. Nebraska already dropped 6,000 people from SNAP in June alone — food assistance for kids, seniors, veterans — putting them near the top of the country for benefit cuts. And because school lunch reimbursement is tied to how many kids in a district receive SNAP, losing that assistance can cost an entire school its free and reduced lunch program, not just the kids who lost benefits.

Then there are the hospitals. Rural facilities running on razor-thin margins are converting from full-service hospitals to “emergent care only” facilities — meaning if you have a heart attack or a car accident, you may now be driving hours instead of minutes to get real care. Angie’s friend, a rancher in the panhandle, would go from a one-hour drive to a four-or-five-hour drive if her local hospital converts. That’s not a hypothetical. That’s Nebraska right now.

And of course, conservative Nebraska media is spinning all of it as good news — “look how many people got off SNAP and found jobs!” — when the truth is Nebraska has 2.9% unemployment and 45,000 open jobs nobody’s qualified for or available to fill. It’s not people finding work. It’s people losing healthcare and food.

Angie seems almost too nice for this work. I mean she’s perfect for helping people, but perhaps too nice to be the one pushing back on these horrific policies. At one point during our conversation today, she was explaining the devastating orders in the bill, the cutting and slashing of spending for programs and facilities that these people have no other way to access when she said,
we have to cut “we have to cut...” I think I interrupted her the second or third time she said something like that in that manner... “WE have to do this and WE have to do that. I think I interrupted her. I hope I didn’t scream at her. But I know I did, rather sternly say “WE don’t have to do anything YOU don’t have to cut anything. THEY chose to cut Medicaid and SNAP to pay for tax breaks for billionaires. THEY could have lifted the Social Security payroll tax cap so billionaires pay in on more than their first day’s earnings. THEY CHOSE NOT TO. I begged her, “Don’t let them off the hook by accepting their framing... or taking the responsibility for doing their dirty work!”

That goes for all of us. We need to get tough.

Nebraska’s governor is up for reelection this year, facing Democrat Lynn Walls, a former state senator, running with Ben Steffen, a rural farmer, along with not a third party challenger, but a nonpartisan one. I hope like hell the nonpartisan candidate doesn’t split the vote and hand this back to the people who did this in the first place.

The solution, as I said today, is not complicated: vote every single one of them out who voted for this bill. That’s it. That’s the whole strategy.

If you’re in Nebraska and need help navigating any of this — Medicaid, SNAP, the confusion by design — reach out to Nebraska for Us at nebraska4us.org. And if you know someone dealing with this anywhere, don’t let them be embarrassed to ask for help. That’s exactly what the evil ones are counting on.

Tomorrow, thankfully, is Friday! Marcy Wheeler joins for Emptywheel Friday! Yay! (Or is it yeah?) Either way, I prepare for every show, but I do some serious studying before Marcy days... I really hate sounding like I don’t know what I’m.. or she is talking about. And then there’s that elusive sleep... One of these days I’ll set up that new phone.

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Yesterday was Primary Day in five states: Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Virginia and Washington. I used to really love the primaries because that was when you could let your fantasies run wild. For years I would preach to the listeners to dig in and consider which of the candidates came closest to your dream. Don’t worry about their chances of actually winning. This is the one day to dream big.

Can you imagine if everyone did that? Perhaps there are enough people in your district that think as you do and could make your wildest dreams come true. Or not. Party pooper.

Ok, back to reality.

I won’t repeat my entire diatribe again, you’ve heard it enough as I’ve been quite diligent in driving home my message about just how important it is that the Democrats win back at least one of the chambers of Congress – preferably both- if we are to continue as a democracy, or even make it to election day 2028.

So, in Michigan yesterday, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed beat Congressman Haley Stevens by one point! Obviously the race was much closer than the polls projected. State Senator Mallory McMorrow had been in the race earlier, but suspended her campaign a few weeks ago when it was apparent she could only serve as a spoiler. But once the race was called for Dr. Sayed, all three came together in a beautiful show of solidarity, promising to work together to make sure the seat being vacated by retiring Senator Gary Peters would remain on the blue side of the Senate aisle.

The way this Michigan race came together at the end should be the role mode for all of the other states. Who wants to keep track and report on it? If you want to, just call in or email me and we’ll set it up, and I’ll make sure you get something special in return!

Now on to the show!

My old friend John Fugelsang joined me, fresh off his own show (now rebranded as The John Fugelsang Show, newly relocated to a noon Eastern slot on SiriusXM’s Progress 127, which makes him my lead-in now — small victories).

John has this gift I marvel at. He can take something genuinely dire — you know, like what we’re currently living through — and make us laugh at it, if not exactly make it funny. There’s a difference, and he knows it.

We started with Iran, because apparently we’re still at war there, months after the orange idiot in the White House thought he could pull off a quick “in and out” like he believed he did with Venezuela. Reuters is reporting on a proposed deal between Iran and Oman over the Strait of Hormuz, with Iran wanting fees of 5-7% on cargo, Oman countering at 3%, and Washington insisting on nothing at all because, D’ump thinks that if any money was to be exchanged, it should go to him, I guess.

Meanwhile the U.S. Army has reportedly burned through nearly all of its long-range precision missiles, and Houthi forces struck a Saudi tanker in the Red Sea. It’s a mess, and my head hurts trying to track all of it.

John’s take was interesting, obviously. He pointed out that Whiskey Pete Hegseth is up on Capitol Hill asking for tens of billions more, after supposedly already winning this war — a war John says is now historically unique for being the first ever where victory was declared before halftime and then Congress was asked for another $80 billion because, apparently, victory needs premium features. His line that stuck with me: “We gave a raccoon a blowtorch, folks. And that’s our foreign policy.”

Then we got into the primaries. I know some listeners get mad at me when I state my position, and for that I’m sorry. But I’m not going to change my position on this because some people disagree with me. And to be clear, I’m not sorry for my stance, I’m sorry that some who apparently enjoyed this show enough to listen and support my work in the past can’t or won’t accept that we have different opinions on some issues. That’s really sad.

I will say that life – and this show – would be pretty boring if we all marched in lock step on everything. I still believe our only job right now is stopping this administration from doing any more damage. Not because the progressive fights don’t matter. Of course they do! I’ve been fighting for Medicare for All, a living wage and the rest of them for two decades now, and they’ll still be there in two years. But if we don’t win back at least one house of Congress this November, none of the rest of it matters, because there might not be a fair election in 2028 to fight for it in.

That’s why I’ve been watching Michigan closely. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won his Senate primary against Haley Stevens by less than a point — and look, I like him, I’ve liked him since I had him on my show in 2019 after his run for governor. His message to Jewish voters this morning about self-determination and safety for everyone was genuinely moving, and John made a great point: let Fox News put him on air. Let people actually hear him instead of the caricature.

But I’m still worried, because Michigan is Michigan, and he’s not polling well against Mike Rogers, and I think Haley Stevens might have had the better shot in the general. That’s not a knock on him. It’s just where my gut is right now, with everything on the line. But the primary is over and it’s now time to get in line – along with Haley Stevens, Gary Peters, Gretchen Whitmer and all the other Democrats and elect Dr. Abdul El-Sayid to the US Senate.

Closer to my home, Arizona has its own drama. Katie Hobbs has to win against Andy Biggs, full stop, no notes. Elizabeth Lee — the nurse I’ve supported since the day she announced — won her primary, and now she’s up against a guy with a stack of sex-scandal allegations who apparently doesn’t even live in the district anymore. And next door, I was glad to see Greg Stanton hold his safe blue seat against a late-entering primary challenger, because right now, in a year like this one, we cannot afford to turn a safe seat into a risky one over ideological purity.

John pushed back on me a little, in the best way — he made the point that watching a Muslim doctor run a serious, competitive Senate campaign on the idea that Americans shouldn’t go bankrupt getting sick is its own kind of historic progress, regardless of how the polling shakes out. He’s right. Both things can be true. I can worry about electability and still recognize what it means that this campaign happened at all.

We ended on something John said that I keep turning over: authoritarians win because decent people don’t show up. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Whatever fights we want to have with each other about tactics and purity and who’s left enough — none of that matters if we don’t show up in November.

Stay in the game. That’s the assignment. And to be clear again, it’s one that I struggle with every day. You see – or hear it- playing out here on this show every day, But my struggle isn’t in the fight to wrest control of this country away from the crazies who stole it with their intent to destroy it. That’s mandatory, and my resolve is stronger than ever. My struggle is survival.

I used to make a comfortable living doing this work. And at that time, I really enjoyed it too. Sadly, today, neither is true. David and I aren’t as young as we used to be. Duh. And no one is out there looking to hire a 66 year old woman, much less a 74-year old man, despite the fact that we both used to be quite successful in our careers. But we’re both looking.

This show used to bring in enough to supplement our earned benefits. Social Security and Medicare. And I have a small pension from AFTRA from my radio work in Los Angeles. We were both hurt badly from the W. Bush 2008 depression. I lost my house and with it, all of my savings. We’ve shared this story on the air before and believe me, it wasn’t easy.

David’s house was paid for when he got divorced and he was too generous too his ex-wife in the settlement. When we left Florida almost three years ago, we walked away from that house with very little. As for our retirement savings, after 2008 and then the pandemic, it’s all gone.

So my distress that unfortunately you’ve heard way too often on the air comes from multiple sources.

And taking a financial hit here, on this show that I’ve been doing alone since Air America went off the air, will likely make the final decision for me. But I won’t compromise my integrity with the hope that I’ll win back some of the donations that went away because I don’t agree with some of my listeners (or former listeners) about the horrific things happening in the Middle East.

I took this to a place I didn’t intend to go and it’s very late. I need to try to get some sleep – something I don’t get nearly enough of these days (which seems to be at the root of all of my health problems lately).

But this fight for survival is what I do. It’s all the same battle. Hopefully we’ll survive.

I’ll see you tomorrow. Peace out.

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Allison Gill from Mueller She Wrote returned to the show today, and I told her right off the bat — I don’t know how she does it. Multiple podcasts, FOIA lawsuits, breaking two big stories in the same week, and it’s only Tuesday. I have a hard enough time getting through one show, one hour, a day.

She explained that she has help - especially from a great attorney who got her through the FOIA process.

Back in February, ProPublica published letters and drawings that children had made inside the Dilley detention facility in Texas — the one I’ve been calling a concentration camp, because that’s what it is. Some members of Congress saw them too, during a visit. Representative Walkenshaw read some of the letters on the floor. And then, within days, ICE and DHS raided the dormitories where these children and their families were being held and confiscated everything — the letters, the drawings, even the crayons.

Allison filed a FOIA request for whatever ICE had taken. DHS didn’t respond. So she sued in federal court in DC. Six months of scheduling and back-and-forth later, DHS finally answered — yesterday! They said they’d found ninety-one records. They handed over nine.

We went through them together on the show. A drawing that says “Libertad” — a cry for freedom.

Coloring book pages for kids, some marked as duplicates even though they don’t look quite duplicate — maybe colored differently because their crayons had been taken and all they had left was pencil. A drawing of clasped hands that could be handcuffs. A note in big block letters: AYUDA POR FAVOR. Please help us.

Coloring book pages for kids, some marked as duplicates even though they don’t look quite duplicate — maybe colored differently because their crayons had been taken and all they had left was pencil. A drawing of clasped hands that could be handcuffs. A note in big block letters: AYUDA POR FAVOR. Please help us.

And then the one that will stay with me a long time. A letter written by a nine-year-old girl, about her mom, her dad, her brothers — drawn behind bars. Their names redacted. Under it, a date: February 10, 2026. Allison pointed out that the evidence stamp on the document has the exact same date. They raided her dormitory, took her letter, and entered it into evidence the same day she wrote it.

Evidence for what? Nobody knows. That’s one of the questions Allison and her lawyer are still trying to answer, as part of the ongoing lawsuit for the rest of those documents — because DHS is calling 82 of the 91 records “duplicates” or “non-responsive,” and if that’s not true, it starts to look a lot like bad faith. And bad faith is the one thing that can pierce a FOIA exemption.

I asked Allison what her goal is here, beyond exposing what happened. She said she wants people to see the cruelty. Because it’s easy to be out of sight, out of mind about all of this. It’s easy to let concentration camps in Texas become an abstraction. But when you see a nine-year-old’s handwriting asking a federal judge not to deport her family, it stops being abstract.

We also talked about the story Allison broke on the money laundering side — Trump sued Capital One for closing three hundred of his bank accounts, insisting it was political. Capital One’s answer, in essence, was: you really don’t want to know why. Trump demanded discovery anyway. Turns out the “why” was money laundering, running through Trump steaks, Trump wine, Trump water, Trump golf courses, and a payroll company. And the lawyer representing him in that case is the same lawyer who was referred to the bar for a fraudulent settlement in Trump’s lawsuit against his own IRS. It’s all so incestuous.

On top of that, Senator Ron Wyden just put out a report showing JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, and Bank of America failed to report Jeffrey Epstein’s suspicious transactions for nearly twenty years, despite knowing exactly who and what he was. And this morning, Todd Blanche got voted out of committee toward a full Senate confirmation as Attorney General because Tillis and Cornyn caved, like they always do. You thought they were senators, turns out they’re spelunkers.

Every direction you look, there’s something coming out of this administration. I said on the show that this is why I trust independent journalists — Allison, Aaron Parnas, Marcy Wheeler — more than I trust a lot of what’s coming out of legacy outlets these days. Independent media is doing the heavy lifting of showing us what’s actually happening behind closed doors, in places most of us will never see.

Later in the show, my friend Spocko called in, and we talked about a question I think about a lot: what does accountability actually look like for people like Elon Musk, for the damage DOGE did? And we got into Nebraska’s new Medicaid work requirements — which are cruel, don’t save money, and hurt entire rural communities that depend on that coverage. Spocko made a point I want to sit with: the cuts get sold to the gullible as a “them versus us” story, dividing people who are “worthy” from people who aren’t. That framing is the lie. Healthcare being good for a community isn’t conditional on anyone proving anything.

Talking about healthcare brought me around to a subject that’s been on my mind lately, now that August is here. This month marks 10 years since I successfully fought lung cancer! I was diagnosed in the last week of July, 2016. And for most of that August, I was in the middle of tests, meeting with surgeons, trying to decide between chemo and surgery, between the robotic procedure and the kind where they open you all the way up to take out a lung. And the whole time, in the back of your mind, is that low hum: you’re going to die, you’re going to die.

I had insurance because of the Affordable Care Act. I was self-employed, an independent contractor, with pre-existing conditions nobody would touch before the ACA existed. That coverage is the reason I’m here telling you this story ten years later instead of not telling you anything at all.

So when I hear people arguing that Medicaid work requirements are just fiscal responsibility, or that healthcare should be something you have to earn twice — once through your taxes and again through proving your worth — I think about who I was ten years ago, and I think about that nine-year-old girl’s letter, and I don’t see two different subjects. I see the same instinct, dressed up different ways: decide who deserves care, and let the rest go without.

That’s not a policy position. That’s just cruelty with better paperwork.

That’s enough for today. Speaking of healthcare, I just returned home from another doctor’s appointment. Turns out, it was a pulmonologist- a doctor who deals with lungs. Ahh, memories. What a difference a decade makes.

Big thanks again to Allison Gill. Do check out her Daily Beans podcast. Somehow, it’s usually there on YouTube by the time I get up in the morning.

As always, this show runs on your support. If you can, and if you get something out of it, please consider a donation at nicolesandler.com/donate. If you can’t right now, don’t worry about it — that’s exactly why there’s no paywall here. Just leave a nice review, post it to social media, or tell a friend about the show!

Until tomorrow. My old friend John Fugelsang will be my guest. He has the uncanny ability to make us laugh about things that are inherently not funny!

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We knew this would happen. It was all bullshit theater! Two Republican senators who are headed for the exit doors at the end of the year, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of NC both showed a little backbone over Trump’s scam of a “lawsuit” an “settlement” with the IRS. The lawsuit was ridiculous enough when you think about it.

One year of Donny’s tax returns were leaked during his first term, allegedly by a contractor. So Trump said he was going to sue the IRS for $10 billion! Ten Billion Dollars? Sue his OWN IRS for that obscene amount of money? What about the other 300,000 or so American whose tax returns were also hacked and leaked by the same said contractor? Oh, nothing for them? Well, that doesn’t seem fair. NONE OF IT IS FAIR.

There was no hearing, no nothing... it never went to court, but lots of us were screaming about it, loudly! And then on May 18, a “settlement” was released. Huh? A settlement without a case? Smells fishy to me, but many say that’s just Grandpa DonOld’s natural aroma. In the so-called settlement issued May 18, 2026, the DoJ representing the IRS allegedly settle the case out of court, and the plaintiffs “voluntarily” dropped the lawsuit. The settlement involved establishing a $1.776 billion (an odd figure, I wonder how it was arrived at, hmmm) fund that would be distributed among individuals claiming that the DOJ had been weaponized against them. (So, I’m thinking that’s Hunter Biden, James Comey, the seven members of Congress who made a video explaining to members of the armed forces that they are required by the military code of justice NOT to follow illegal orders, and others who’ve similarly been targets of the DOJ, right?).

The next day, May 19, an addendum to the settlement was released. Why wasn’t it part of the original “settlement”? Who knows? Anyway, in that addendum, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche ordered the IRS to permanently end current and possible future audits and inquiries into the Trump family and businesses. That certainly doesn’t sound legal... and who exactly negotiated this so-called settlement addendum? Inquiring minds need to know!

It’s all a bunch of shit. You know that and I know that and THEY know that! This illegal and immoral bullshit “settlement” came under fire from members of Congress in both parties who asked lots of questions that were answered with Blanche refusing to rule out that insurrectionists who assaulted Capitol Police on Jan 6, 2021 could be eligible for payments from the fund, as could President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden. After the hearing, former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose existence as alive was not yet under suspicion, issued an actual statement that said,”So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong-- take your pick.”

But don’t forget, that’s the same Mitch McConnell who, on the night of Jan. 6, 2021, delivered a grand speech as the Congress re-convened to certify the election that the insurrectionists were attempting to interrupt and overturn, placing the blame for said insurrection firmly at Trump’s feet. Until the next day when he apparently suffered amnesia. Or something.

Under lots of pressure from all quarters, Todd Blanche eventually backed down on the slush fund, saying it would not go forward. But he remained steadfast in his demands that the agreement to end ongoing or future audits of the Trump gang would remain in force. He was challenged to put his position on backing down on the slush fund in writing -- and that became the demand of Tillis and Cornyn in exchange for their votes to confirm Blanche as US Attorney General.

More deal making and negotiations in and among the chambers of Congress ensued... and we come to this weekend and today, when Blanche announced and Tillis/Cornyn agreed that Todder would put his dropping of the slush fund in writing (as if that means a goddamned thing)... and that the IRS tax, audit and investigation immunity would “only” go to D’ump and his two older sons, and the Senate Judiciary Committee would convene again tomorrow to vote on moving Blanche’s nomination out of committee to the full chamber.

And now you know why I felt nauseated during today’s show, and likely will be tomorrow too. My old friend - and friend (not fiend) of the show, Dave Johnson - who’s been one of our players for a few decades now joined me via Zoom from his home of the last 3.5 years -- England -- to help me get through this idiocy without completely losing my shit. And he was successful until just about the end of the hour when I lost it anyway. BTW, you can read Dave these days at SeeingtheForest.substack.com.

And tomorrow, one of the current rock stars of independent news and podcasting from the “good guys” side, Allison Gill (aka @MuellerSheWrote.com) will be my guest for the first half hour of the show... She broke some news today too! And more over the past few weeks dealing with a FOIA lawsuit she filed about young children held hostage by our government at the Dilley concentration camp where a couple of prisoners just died, and another lawsuit she filed against the DOJ over its creation of the $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” saying the federal government failed to follow required public comment procedures.

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It was 96 degrees already at 9am here in Chandler, AZ, heading to 115 today, and apparently the heat is getting to Donald Trump too — every time the cameras catch him lately, he’s nodding off. He was even photographed sleeping through Lindsey Graham’s funeral. Now he’s using Lindsey’s death as an excuse to push new tariffs on Iran, claiming “that’s what Lindsey would have wanted.” Marcy Wheeler joined me, as she does each Friday, from the Emptywheel.net headquarters — a comparatively cool 75-degree Ireland (must be nice), and as always, we had a lot of ground to cover.

We started with Iran, because there’s a real story underneath the noise: the US has been burning through munitions in the region so fast that reports from CSIS, a defense-focused think tank, show supplies getting genuinely low — and the whole world knows it. Marcy laid out the theory that China may have simply been waiting this out, letting Iran draw down the American arsenal, knowing it would take years to rebuild. Meanwhile Iran hacked Minnesota this week, and Trump’s response was to blame Minnesota for being “incompetent” rather than acknowledge the hack — even though Iran previously got into his own 2024 campaign through Roger Stone, and we still don’t know what blackmail material they may have gotten in the process.

Then there’s Todd Blanche. His confirmation vote to be permanently named Attorney General got pulled this week because Senators Tillis and Cornyn — both lame ducks — wouldn’t vote yes without something in writing confirming that Trump’s “terrorist slush fund” plan is actually dead. Trump won’t put it in writing, which Marcy points out is basically an admission that they intend to bring it back. It matters more than it might seem: Blanche can stay on as Acting AG indefinitely either way, but not being confirmed opens him up to more scrutiny from judges — and there’s a lot of scrutiny coming. The New York Times subpoena case in front of Judge Subramanian, the tax fraud case in Florida in front of Judge Kathleen Williams, and now Jim Comey’s blockbuster new court filing are all closing in on him.

And that Comey filing — I have to tell you about this. The entire DOJ case against him hinges on the word “86,” which Comey included in a social media post by way of a photo he said he took on a beach of seashells arranged to read “86 47” which prosecutors claim meant “Kill Trump.” Everyone, including Rudy Giuliani himself, initially said it just meant the ordinary restaurant term (meaning “cancel” whatever item is referenced after “86”)— until Giuliani apparently changed his story.

So the FBI agent investigating this went looking for any evidence that “86” is mob slang for assassination. She checked old trial transcripts. Nothing. She asked retired FBI agents. Nothing. She asked ChatGPT. Nothing. So she went and interviewed Sammy “the Bull” Gravano — an actual mob serial killer — who gave a vague, contradictory answer, and then told her to go check with prosecutor John Gleason. She never did. But Comey’s team did, and Gleason submitted a declaration saying flatly that there’s no basis to believe “86” ever meant that in any mob context. This is what they’ve got.

Meanwhile the filing also revealed that Secret Service was ordered to surveil Comey and his wife — including a stop at their son’s grave — after being told to do so by “the number three at DOJ,” even though there was no number three at DOJ at the time. The most likely candidate is Emil Bove, now a federal judge.

Marcy and I also spent time on Rep. Max Miller in Ohio, who’s facing serious domestic violence allegations from his estranged wife, including that he scalded her, held a gun to her head, and fractured their toddler daughter’s collarbone. Jim Jordan went on CNN and, when pressed on it by Kasie Hunt, called it “a family matter” and said Max is “a good man” — this from the same Gym Jordan who eagerly piled onto abuse allegations against Graham Platner, a Democratic senate candidate in Maine the moment they surfaced. It’s always fine when it’s their guy.

There’s a lot more in this episode — Elon Musk’s ongoing election crimes and where he’s targeting his money next (Ohio, Alaska, Iowa, and yes, he’s staying out of Arizona for reasons Marcy has theories about), the Ashley Moody Medicaid scandal in Florida, the Politico poll showing just how much MAGA voters are willing to forgive, and Trump’s tax immunity deal that may not survive contact with the law. Give the full episode a listen — it’s a long one, but they always are these days.

As always, huge thanks to Marcy Wheeler. Follow her work at emptywheel.net, and if you can, support her there — independent journalism like hers is what’s actually keeping track of all of this while the rest of the media plays catch-up. And if you’d like to throw some of that support my way, there are many ways to contribute both on my donate page right here, or by starting a paid subscription here on Substack!

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There’s a little bit of good news today, which feels rare enough that I want to flag it before it evaporates: Todd Blanche’s nomination for Attorney General has been pulled — at least for now — because it doesn’t have the votes. Senators John Cornyn and Tom Tillis, both outgoing, both on the Judiciary Committee, won’t vote him out of committee unless he puts something very specific in writing: that the so-called “settlement” of Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS is actually dead.

If you don’t remember this story, here’s the shape of it. Trump sued the IRS — the agency he nominally runs — after a contractor leaked his tax returns along with those of roughly 300,000 other Americans. Who was president when that leak happened? Trump himself. So he’s suing himself, but the taxpayers would be the ones footing the bill. The “settlement” attached to that lawsuit wasn’t a settlement at all — it was a one-page addendum declaring Trump and his family immune from IRS audits or investigations, past and perhaps also future, known or not yet known. Todd Blanche, who was Trump’s personal attorney before he became acting attorney general and who just last week once told a court under oath that he IS Donald Trump’s attorney — a very telling slip — says that provision is dead. Fine. Then put it in writing. He won’t. So Cornyn and Tillis won’t budge, and Trump’s response was to announce he’ll just wait them out until they’re gone from the Senate and bring Blanche back up again. Because as he’s told us over and over, he’s the president and he can do whatever he wants. He doesn’t care what any of us think.

Speaking of things nobody can quite confirm: is Mitch McConnell alive? I genuinely don’t know. Nobody will put him on the phone with a single reporter, though apparently a rotating cast of Republican operatives has each had an oh-so- very convincing 20-minute conversation with him on the same day. We got a “proof of life” photo of him in a hospital room. We’ve also got a slew of parody proof-of-life video making the rounds. And then Blair Erskine — remember her? —put out one of her videos posing as an assistant or someone related to the subject at hand. She’s so naturally funny, and she hadn’t released one of these in about a year, so it was a nice laugh.

And then there’s this news item, which I promise I’m not making up: the Trump administration is building an AI system for “pre-crime” policing. Reason Magazine got hold of procurement documents showing the FBI’s Threat Screening Center soliciting vendors for predictive AI that analyzes “similarity, pattern alignment, and attribute correlation” across federated government data to flag people before they act. This would supercharge a watchlist that already has close to two million names on it. Minority Report was fiction. This is procurement paperwork. The FBI declined to comment, probably because Kash Patel is busy with his own legal troubles — his $10 million defamation suit against a man who called him a “googly-eyed Kremlin bitch” and an “incompetent chud” was tossed by a federal judge this week. Obviously, that was the correct call because no one can prove he’s neither.

After all that, I needed the second half of today’s show, and I got it. Erin Riley joined me to talk about her new book, The Mighty WMMR: An Oral History of Philadelphia’s Rock Radio Revolution. Although while Erin was working in Philadelphia radio, I was in Los Angeles doing radio there. We never met during those years… We were introduced about five years ago by a mutual friend, Pam Edwards. Although Pam did her time in radio (in San Diego), she then moved on to the record promotion side. They’re the ones who know ALL the radio people.

Anyway, in case you couldn’t tell, I’m getting quite burnt out doing this type of work – reporting on one of the most horrific people of the past century and all of his dastardly deeds, so hearing Erin tell the story of WMMR — 58 years running as a live, local rock station, still the top music station in Philadelphia — was the exact kind of escape I needed.

She wrote the book as an oral history, in the voices of 60 people who worked there, because as she put it, who was she to speak for John DiBella or Michael Tearson? We talked about how WMMR gave Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel their first real airplay, the wild story of how “Captain Jack” got Billy Joel discovered after he’d basically given up and was playing piano bars under a fake name, and the sense of community that comes from real, local, live radio — the kind where the person in the next car over is singing the same song as you.

We also talked about AI, since I recently spent eight brutal weeks trying to help launch an AI-infused radio station here in Phoenix before I couldn’t take it anymore. The music was great. The computer voice that was supposed to be me was not. Erin said she uses AI for business emails and research and says the same thing I’d say: she’s smarter than it is, just slower, and she has to catch its mistakes constantly. I don’t know where AI is taking radio, but I don’t think it’s anywhere good, and I don’t think it’s anywhere close to what made WMMR, or any real radio station, actually matter.

Tomorrow, Marcy Wheeler joins me from Ireland for our Emptywheel Fridays, and I already know I’ve got studying to do tonight as I spent the past week actively trying to avoid the shit she so completely reports on and knows inside and out. So, see you tomorrow… peace out.

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Fauci Took the Fifth. Good For Him.

I got home from a long weekend in Tucson with my daughter — Mt. Lemmon, a day trip to Bisbee, saguaros everywhere, and a half-hour drive from the Mexican border that I will admit tempted me more than once to just keep going. When I awoke this morning, as usual, I turned on the news.

I should know better by now than to do that.

There was Dr. Anthony Fauci, sitting before a Senate Homeland Security and General Services committee, invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Not because he did anything wrong. Because after 54 years at the NIH, 38 of them as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and well over 200 appearances before Congress, he finally recognized what the rest of us have known for a while: this wasn’t oversight. This was a trap.

Driftglass joined me on the show today, and between the two of us we tried to make sense of how we got here — how a man who spent his career elbow-deep in the AIDS epidemic, back when it didn’t even have a name yet, back when it was just called GRID and it was killing gay men while the country looked away, became public enemy number one to people who wouldn’t know a peer-reviewed study if it bit them.

Fauci did the same thing during COVID that he did during AIDS: he followed the evidence, he adjusted his guidance as the evidence changed, and he told people the truth even when it wasn’t the truth they wanted to hear. That, it turns out, is unforgivable to a movement that treats certainty as a virtue and correction as a weakness. Trump was president in 2020. Trump wanted the cameras off the cruise ship passengers. Trump wanted the case counts to stop climbing on paper, even as they climbed in reality. And when the reckoning came, they needed someone else to blame. A guy with a “funny name.” A scratchy voice. A scientist.

Watching Josh Hawley try to trip Fauci up by asking him what color tie he was wearing — just to get him on record invoking the Fifth over and over, so it would look damning in a thirty-second clip — was its own kind of instructive. This is the same Josh Hawley we watched raise his fist in solidarity with the crowd outside the Capitol on January 6th, then run — literally run, in a mask, down a hallway — when that crowd broke in. That’s the tie I want people to remember him by.

We talked about the DNC too, because of course we did. Ken Martin is the chair, and somehow, in a moment when small-dollar donations to individual candidates are apparently pouring in at record levels, the DNC itself is millions of dollars in debt — debt serious enough that the building was reportedly put up as collateral. I don’t understand how an organization sitting on this much energy manages to be this broke and this rudderless at the same time. Driftglass made a point I keep coming back to: a party’s whole job is raising money, communicating, and recruiting good candidates. That’s it. That’s the job description. And right now, I don’t feel like anyone up top is doing it.

Then there’s the widening gap between the Democratic Party and the Jewish community I grew up in — a community that was reliably, overwhelmingly Democratic for generations, mine included. I don’t have easy answers here, and I said as much on the show. It hurts to watch it happen from both directions at once.

I’ll be honest with you, the way I try to be honest with everyone who listens: my audience is smaller than it used to be. I’ve lost a good chunk of it over the last six months, mostly because of how I’ve talked about what’s happening in the Middle East — and mostly because people hear what they’ve decided I think, not what I actually say. I’ve called Netanyahu a war criminal. I’ve said he belongs in front of The Hague, right alongside Trump. I’ve also said “genocide” is a loaded word that deserves precision, not slogans. Apparently there’s no way to say any of that without someone deciding I’m the enemy. I’ve made peace with that. I’d rather lose listeners telling the truth than keep them by staying quiet.

Tomorrow’s a lighter day — Erin Riley is joining me to talk about her new book on the history of WMMR, the legendary Philadelphia rock station she helped run for years. No politics, I promise. Or at least, I’ll try.

Thanks for listening, thanks for reading, and thanks for sticking with me even when I make you uncomfortable. That’s kind of the whole point.

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Two weeks. That’s all Marcy Wheeler was gone — she only missed one Emptywheel Friday episode, but somehow it feels like a decade of news happened without her. So we spent today trying to get our arms around most of it, which is all anyone could handle in one sitting!

Let’s start with the story everyone’s talking about: the New York Times subpoena fight. Back on July 8th, Trump swapped his gilded “flying bribery palace” for the actual, missile-defense-equipped Air Force One on a trip to Turkey — and immediately the entire world started asking the obvious question: why doesn’t the new plane have the same defenses? This wasn’t some secret. NPR reported on it. The Air Force basically confirmed it back in April. It was, as Marcy put it, about as “closely held” as a rumor at a diner. And yet DOJ’s response was to send armed FBI agents to serve subpoenas on five journalists working the story — and then, almost as an afterthought, subpoena their phone companies, sweeping up two spouses and a mother in the process. One of the mothers is a lawyer. Another is a mental health counselor. You know, people you generally don’t subpoena.

The Times lawyered up hard, including bringing on a former DOJ Espionage Act expert, and argued this violated basic rules: the information has to be classified, has to be genuine national defense info, and has to have actually been closely held — none of which applies when literally everyone including Qatar already knows what’s going on. At Thursday’s hearing, the judge came close to threatening contempt, DOJ withdrew the subpoenas, and the whole episode ended in a very “say less” kind of way (that’s literally what the White House told Trump on social media, because he keeps confirming the leaked info himself).

But here’s the story that isn’t getting anywhere near the same attention, and Marcy thinks it should: Georgia Fort, an award-winning Minnesota journalist swept up in the Don Lemon case. A magistrate judge already found no probable cause for an arrest warrant against her. The Eighth Circuit mostly agreed. So what did prosecutors do? According to Fort’s attorneys, they went back and invented three brand-new claims — that she was chanting with protesters, that she intimidated a pastor, that she blocked a car — none of which appeared in the original arrest affidavit, and got a grand jury indictment based on them. Even the alleged victim, the pastor, reportedly told investigators he wasn’t worried about her because he knew she was a journalist filming for the public record. On top of that, prosecutors have reportedly been using DHS customs summonses — tools meant for investigating illegal imports — to pull her phone records, and reportedly kept sending them out even after other subpoenas in the case were withdrawn in May. One attorney apparently told Fort’s lawyer he wouldn’t put any of it in writing.

We also touched on the ongoing Epstein fallout (still not resolved, no matter how much certain people want it to disappear), the increasingly baffling Saudi Arabia nuclear deal Trump apparently negotiated solo in a room with no diplomats present, the resumed hot war with Iran, and Pete Hegseth getting handed his hat by Senator Jon Ossoff over whether his “we destroyed Iran’s capabilities” claims were, you know, true.

And because it’s primary season, we caught up on Arizona. In my district, AZ05 — my pick Elizabeth Lee- a nurse who specializes in reproductive health who’s spent her live helping people - won her primary by a wide margin. The Republicans picked another truly sickening candidate — Mark Lamb, the former sheriff of Pinal County (to the east of me), who’s saddled with tons of sexting, swinging, threatening and disqualifying allegations if the Republican party gave a shit about men like him who abuse power in such heinous ways..

Sadly, this much shit is typical for this regime. But that’s why we do this every Friday — so we can make sense of it together before we all go lie down for the weekend.

Thanks for listening, thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media that isn’t beholden to anyone.

Just as this show is supported by the generosity of listeners, viewers and readers, so is Marcy’s work. You can support her at emptywheel.net and my work by clicking the Donate tab above.

A programming note: I’m taking a long weekend with my daughter, so I’ll be off on Monday, back on Tuesday. And Marcy will be back here with me next Friday.

Peace out!

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Helpless, But Not Hopeless: A Conversation With Nona Lee

Today’s show didn’t start with a silly song parody or even the news. I jumped right in, because I was too excited about today’s guest to do our usual routine.

My husband David gets full credit for this one. When I booked Nona Lee, he made me promise he’d get to introduce her, and once he told the story — how Nona helped him years ago, when she had absolutely nothing to gain from it, at a moment when almost everyone else he called gave him nothing but stonewalling — I understood why he’s been singing her praises to me for years.

Nona spent more than 22 years in professional sports law, becoming the first woman, the first woman of color, and the first openly gay woman to hold a string of executive positions with the Phoenix Suns, Phoenix Mercury, and Arizona Diamondbacks. She built the Diamondbacks’ legal department from nothing. She was part of the first all-woman team to win a Major League Baseball salary arbitration hearing. She worked on international deals, sports betting agreements, the first spring training facility on tribal land. It was, by her own account, a dream job — maybe the only job where she ever really felt at home.

And then, at the height of all that success, she walked away.

It started in 2020, after George Floyd was murdered, when the Diamondbacks decided to get serious about diversity, equity, and inclusion. Nona, the only person at the executive level who wasn’t a cisgender white male, asked to lead those efforts. She had all the lived experience in the world but none of the formal training, so she put herself through Cornell’s DEI certification program during the pandemic and taught herself how to do the work properly. She fell in love with it — more than she expected, in a way she said was almost impossible to describe.

Eventually, doing both jobs — the legal work and the DEI work — became too much. So she made a decision most people would consider insane: she left a dream job to found a consulting company from scratch, built around exactly the kind of work this administration has spent the last year trying to criminalize.

She called it Truth DEI Consulting. Then last year (after D’ump got back in office), potential clients started quietly telling her they couldn’t hire her with “DEI” in the name — not because of anything about her work, but because of what that acronym has become under this administration. She resisted changing it for a while, but eventually asked herself what good it did to plant her flag on a name if it kept her from actually doing the work. So now it’s called Truth is. Consulting — period included, because, as she put it, the truth just is.

We talked a bit about her book, The Truth About Us: A Call to Confront Bias, Embrace Empathy, and Build a More Inclusive World. One idea in it stuck with me since I read it: that we all carry two truths — the highlight reel we show the world, and the truth we battle with every day, alone. I told her honestly that these last two terms have worn me down in ways I don’t always say out loud on the air. She didn’t try to fix that for me. She just said something I keep coming back to: we can feel helpless, but we can’t let ourselves become hopeless. Because if we do, what’s left?

We also got into stadium politics, unconscious bias, “othering,” and — because I couldn’t help myself — the current state of Arizona politics, including the open congressional seat in my own backyard.

Nona was careful to note, and I want to honor that here, that everything she shared about her personal opinions reflects her own views, not those of the law firm she now practices with. She’s speaking as herself — as the founder of Truth is. Consulting — not as anyone’s representative. An interesting thing I noted after the show ended is that Lisa Graves, one of our regular guests who is also an attorney, tends to make that same point every time she joins me on the air. Great minds and all that…

If you want to find Nona’s work, go to truthisconsulting.com. And if you want the fuller version of everything she’s thought through on truth, bias, and empathy, pick up her book, The Truth About Us: A Call to Confront Bias, Embrace Empathy, and Build a More Inclusive World. It’s not a fast read — I found myself going back over passages more than once — but I think it’s exactly the kind of read we need right now.

Tomorrow, Marcy Wheeler is back with me for our regular Friday segment after being off last week. She writes at emptywheel.net from her home in Ireland, and if Nona brought the heart today, Marcy brings the information. Between the two of them this week, I feel a little more armed for whatever comes next.

Be good to each other. Be good to yourselves. And if you can, be with the people you love this weekend — I’m heading to Tucson to see my daughter, because she centers me in ways I badly need right now.

Keep plugging away. Peace out.

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Local News Told You About the Sheriff. Let Me Tell You About the Nurse.

Last night, David and I sat down after dinner to catch the primary results here in Arizona. We flipped on Channel 3 — “Arizona’s Family,” whatever that’s supposed to mean — and watched a guy talk for a full segment about Mark Lamb winning the Republican nomination in my district, the 5th.

Let me tell you about Mark Lamb, because Channel 3 sure didn’t.

He was sheriff of Pinal County for years, running on some version of “God, guns, and getting some.” That’s how I recalled it, but I looked it up and it turns out he’s got a few of them… The main one is “God. Family. Freedom.” Oh, please. He also uses “America’s Sheriff” as his primary personal brand identity across media and merchandise. Which all makes perfect sense when you learn that he’s a former county sheriff “accused, among other things, of sexting women outside his marriage and of threatening to sic state law enforcement on one of the recipients to keep her from posting about it online,” according to the NY Times.

Actually, the allegations were first unearthed in an investigation by the Arizona Republic, the biggest daily paper here in Phoenix, which “aid out a complex web of allegations against Lamb. It cited women who alleged that he had sent intimate photos outside his marriage, had flirted using a campaign social media account, and had facilitated an affair between his wife and a friend who worked on his campaign and for the sheriff’s department. The Republic also reported that he made racist jokes over text, and that he seemed to be spending a lot of his time at a ranch in Tennessee 1,500 miles away. The Republic also reported that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, of which Lamb is a member, had examined claims of impropriety against him.” And, of course, with credentials like that, you know that he’s endorsed by Trump, the orange one.

Regarding the wording of his “spending a lot of time on his ranch, the word around here is that “he doesn’t even live in Arizona. He’s got a $3 million ranch in Tennessee.” This is the guy the Republicans voted overwhelmingly to represent my district.

He won his primary 58% to 42%. Solid win, no question. Channel 3 made sure you knew it, and made sure you knew he’s all but guaranteed to win the general in this deep-red seat.

What Channel 3 did not mention, not once, at least in the segment we watched: my candidate- the winner of the Democratic primary. Elizabeth Lee is a nurse who I met almost a year ago when I read a small newspaper item about her jumping into this race. I found her number, called her up, and put her on my show that same day. We’ve stayed in touch ever since. She had two opponents. She beat them with 65.2% of the vote — 25,866 votes to their combined total of about 13,700. That’s not a squeaker. That’s a landslide.

And local news didn’t say her name in the same segment where the talking head on the TV said Lamb would win in the general. Not “probably.” He said, “he will win in the general.

I don’t know the reporter’s name yet — if I did, I’d already be on the phone with the station. David told me to let it go. I’m still thinking about it.

This is Arizona in a nutshell right now. We’re not Florida, but we’re right there with them for sheer political weirdness — I told Driftglass today (after realizing it yesterday) that Arizona needs its own Carl Hiaasen to capture this desert flavor of weird.

Andy Biggs, who’s held my current district for years, is now running for governor after trouncing Schweikert in his primary. If he wins the governorship, God help us, because Katie Hobbs — who I think has genuinely been a good governor, just not a natural campaigner — needs a second term to keep that from happening.

Driftglass joined me today for our regular Words of Wisdom Wednesday, and we got into all of it: the Arizona primaries, why I was telling people to vote for an imperfect incumbent Democrat over a primary challenger this cycle (short version: we can’t afford to lose safe seats right now, we can and do work on policy continuously), and how the Republican Party’s obsession with the Cyber Ninjas and endless “audits” here in Arizona left them broke and humiliated by the time real elections rolled around — which is part of why Democrats have had an opening.

We also swapped disaster stories. I told him about riding out Hurricane Andrew in my father’s house in Florida — my dad, newly quadriplegic after being pushed by an employee he was firing, and me alone with him as the storm bore down before it veered south at the last minute. And about the Northridge earthquake, which I survived only because I’d impulsively taken a rare day off the day before — a decision that meant I wasn’t in the shower when a full-length mirror shattered into the bathtub where I would have been standing. Yes, both absolutely true and terrifying.

Driftglass tells some of his own stories, as does his wife Blue Gal Fran. The two of them together host the twice-weekly Professional Left Podcast at ProLeftPod.com.

Tomorrow I’m talking with Nona Lee, a genuinely remarkable woman — first Black woman and first gay woman to serve as general counsel for a major sports franchise, the Arizona Diamondbacks, plus an Olympic basketball player and swimmer. Her new book, “The Truth About Us,” is about why DEI actually makes everyone and everything stronger, in spite of what’s coming out of DC right now. Don’t miss it.

He’s been accused of sexting women who weren’t his wife, of threatening to send law enforcement after one who planned to post about their interactions online, and of extramarital affairs in real life too — his wife included, by some accounts. And here’s the kicker: he doesn’t even live in Arizona. He’s got a $3 million ranch in Tennessee. This is the guy representing my district.

He won his primary 58% to 42%. Solid win, no question. Channel 3 made sure you knew it, and made sure you knew he’s all but guaranteed to win the general in this deep-red seat.

What Channel 3 did not mention, not once, in the segment we watched: my candidate. Elizabeth Lee is a nurse who I met almost a year ago when I read a small newspaper item about her jumping into this race. I found her number, called her up, and put her on my show that same day. We’ve stayed in touch ever since. She had two opponents. She beat them with 65.2% of the vote — 25,866 votes to their combined total of about 13,700. That’s not a squeaker. That’s a landslide.

And local news didn’t say her name.

I don’t know the reporter’s name yet — if I did, I’d already be on the phone with the station. David told me to let it go. I’m still thinking about it.

This is Arizona in a nutshell right now. We’re not Florida, but we’re right there with them for sheer political weirdness — I told Driftglass today we need our own Carl Hiaasen to capture it. Andy Biggs, who’s held my old district for years, is now running for governor after trouncing Schweikert in his primary. If he wins the governorship, God help us, because Katie Hobbs — who I think has genuinely been a good governor, just not a natural campaigner — needs a second term to keep that from happening.

Driftglass joined me today for our regular Words of Wisdom Wednesday, and we got into all of it: the Arizona primaries, why I was telling people to vote for an imperfect incumbent Democrat over a primary challenger this cycle (short version: we can’t afford to lose safe seats right now, we can work on policy later), and how the Republican Party’s obsession with the Cyber Ninjas and endless “audits” here in Arizona left them broke and humiliated by the time real elections rolled around — which is part of why Democrats have had an opening.

We also swapped disaster stories. I told him about riding out Hurricane Andrew in my father’s house in Florida — my dad, newly quadriplegic after being pushed by an employee he was firing, and me alone with him as the storm bore down before it veered south at the last minute. And about the Northridge earthquake, which I survived only because I’d impulsively taken a rare day off the day before — a decision that meant I wasn’t in the shower when a full-length mirror shattered into the bathtub where I would have been standing.

Tomorrow I’m talking with Nona Lee, a genuinely remarkable woman — first Black woman and first gay woman to serve as general counsel for a major sports franchise, the Arizona Diamondbacks, plus an Olympic basketball player and swimmer. Her new book, The Truth About Us, is about why DEI actually makes everyone and everything stronger, in spite of what’s coming out of DC right now. Don’t miss it.

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