Episodes
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The six Extreme Court injustices completed their task from the Federalist Society to kill our democracy. And no, that's not hyperbole. The month of July begins with such a travesty to close out the court's session.
I spent most of the first half-hour reading from Justice Sonia Sotomayor's and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's dissents.PLEASE read the whole thing for yourself. Or just read the two dissenting opinions which run from page 68 to 118.
Then we check in with Jonathan Larsen of The Fucking News to further examine this unprecedented assault on democracy and the crowning of King D'ump.
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It's time for our weekly get-together info download with Marcy Wheeler of emptywheel.net. And it's another week ending with out disbelief over what's happening in our corner of the world.... After last night's debate and this morning's group of SCOTUS rulings, I can't help but envy Marcy's living in Ireland.Today, we try to make sense of all that happened this week. Again, buckle in. It's a rough road ahead.
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Missing episodes?
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What a day! The Extreme Supremes this morning handed down four more decisions out of the dozen or so still tba... and then signaled that they will not get it all done by the official end of the term tomorrow. There will be at least one more decision day in July. We'll know more about that tomorrow.
Lisa Graves, the unofficial legal expert of the Nicole Sandler Show, returns for the first half of the show today to talk SCOTUS, which we somehow didn't get to yesterday. We'll discuss both the two and sneak peek at a third from yesterday, plus three more from this morning (and the one we got a look at yesterday), with some horrific consequences playing out.
Then Howie Klein joins in from Down With Tyranny as we count down to tonight's debate showdown. Buckle in...
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With the Extreme Court allegedly poised to hand down the final decisions for this term over the next two days, we're joined again by the Nicole Sandler Show's unofficial legal expert Lisa Graves. I had hoped that this morning's announcements would include more than the two they trickled out... and in a sense it did. Apparently accidentally, someone posted a draft of one of the still outstanding decisions-- this one in Idaho vs US. They quickly took it down, but not before Bloomberg News got it, converted it to pdf form and posted it online...
Julian Assange is a free man in Australia again, primary upsets abound and Aileen Cannon is still somehow presiding over a clusterfuck of Trump's criminal trial for stealing and hiding classified documents.
We'll talk about all of that and more... PLUS we'll tell you about Lisa's new podcast "GRAVE INJUSTICE"!!
**Postscript: Best laid plans and all that. Lisa and I didn't get to SCOTUS or Assange at all, but still covered some important territory. She'll be back tomorrow for the first half hour leading up to Howie Klein. Hopefully tomorrow morning, the Extremes will have given us more of the decisions we're waiting for.
One more thing, there was quite a bit of disagreement in the YouTube chat during the show about my comments regarding Jamal Bowman and why he was defeated in yesterday's primary. I've been highly critical of the one-sided coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. But I happened to see this article today about why Bowman lost, and they sum it up perfectly. Read it here:
"Jamaal Bowman Didn’t Lose Because of AIPAC: Their astonishing spending mattered less than how the congressman’s Jewish constituents weighed his words and actions."
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Yesterday, the HEALTH CARE un-covered Newsletter arrived in my inbox, sporting the headline "Fifteen Years Ago Today I Became a Whistleblower". It was from Wendell Potter who remains a hero to all of us in the US, whether you know it or not.
I was fortunate to first interview Wendell on Air America Radio in August of 2009, just two months after he testified before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, pulling back the curtain from around the industry for which he carried water and covered up unethical practices.
A few months later, he would testify before the House and became the most important voice for the masses, just as then president Obama was helping to push through the first health care industry reforms in decades.
Fifteen years ago. And though things are better for us mere mortals who will, at some point, need medical care, we're still fighting nefarious forces in the health insurance and so-called health care industries as well as in government. And Wendell continues to fight for us.
Wendell Potter has been a frequent guest on this program since that first appearance 15 years ago and I'm proud to consider him a friend. I invited him back to today to talk about the problems we're still faced with and to thank him, again, for standing up for us.
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After a rebound infection with COVID over the weekend (I'm not kidding), I'm almost feeling human today. The icing on the cake was a negative test this morning! Yippee!! So I'm back, trying to catch up on all that happened while I was delirious. One thing that did happen was TFG rambling like the demented old fool he is in Philadelphia Saturday night. I even have some audio...
And as it is Monday, Jonathan Larsen is here from The Fucking News to fill us in on the fucking news I missed while I was fucking sick...
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Marcy Wheeler is on holiday and I'm still on the mend from a nasty case of Covid, but we managed a fascinating hour of conversation about everything from Hunter Biden's trials to Aileen Cannon's and the Supreme Court's assaults on democracy and lots in between.Read Marcy at emptywheel.net, and hear her at the end of each week here...
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I'm back today, hopefully my voice will hold up for the hour.
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I'm no longer testing positive for Covid, so I've got that going for me. Any my brain isn't as foggy as its been, so there's that too... But much news has transpired in the week and a half I've been gone, and I can't sit idly by.
And it is Thursday, so Howie Klein is here from downwithtyranny.com and the Blue America PAC... -
I'm slowly emerging from the Covid fog, but still have a way to go before I'm feeling fine. So today, I'll test the waters with a short live segment.
Then I'll fill the rest of the hour with the conversation I had with Heather Cox Richardson upon the release of her book, DEMOCRACY AWAKENING: NOTES ON THE STATE OF AMERICA, last September. She's one of the sharpest minds out there, so I'm happy to revisit this interview today.
I hope to return to the full show by tomorrow, and certainly by Friday. Fingers crossed, chicken soup ingested....
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I'm still out sick with Covid, but we couldn't let today go by without hearing from Marcy Wheeler! So with an assist from Spocko and LOLGOP aka Jason Statler, the show goes on.Hunter Biden was found guilty on all three of the gun charges this week, an FBI agent and others involved have gotten death threats and much more happened this week. Marcy will fill us in on all of it.
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Apologies for my absence yesterday. Husband somehow contracted Covid (first time in our home) and we spent the better part of the day at the Emergency Room. I'm doing my best to keep the virus at bay, but that hasn't stopped me from feeling lousy. Thankfully the tests keep reading negative!Good thing that today's show was pretty much in the can. I got to record a conversation with NY Times economic journalist and author Peter S Goodman last week in advance of today's release of his new book, HOW THE WORLD RAN OUT OF EVERYTHING.I'll share that today, along with a brief update on the news of the day -- Hunter Biden convicted after the jury deliberated for a whopping three hours on gun charges, new incriminating revelations from Extreme Court inJustice Sam Alito and more...One housekeeping note on the Peter S. Goodman interview... My producer needs a vacation. We had audio issues when we started recording, so I had to re-boot the software. Of course, I neglected to hit record on the video when it came back up, so the first 5 minutes or so of the interview is audio only. Then the video kicks back in.. (Won't make a difference to anyone listening to the audio podcast, but I needed to explain my screw-up.)Now back to our regularly scheduled programming....
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The amazing Marcy Wheeler, who keeps us informed about the news we need to know at emptywheel.net joins us every Friday to talk about what happened that week. As she does today.I must apologize to Marcy and everyone watching this. I started a new medication last night to deal with my RLS, and it completely knocked me out. I awoke in a fog this morning, somehow walked and fed Jaxson and made it in to the studio to record with Marcy. When we finished taping, I went back to sleep for a bit, but am still as out of it as I was early this morning.So again, I apologize. Thankfully Marcy didn't really need my input...
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Whoo boy, another crazy busy day in our world... Somehow it's fitting that today marks the 80th anniversary of D-Day.And since I took the day off yesterday, there's so much to cover before Howie Klein joins in at the bottom of the hour, today joined by Conor O'Callaghan, who's running for Congress in AZ 01.An appeals court in GA put a hold on the Fani Willis case against Trump as he can't decide whether or not she should be removed from the case for having an affair with a prosecutor in her office, Senate Republicans tanked a bill codifying women's rights to birth control(!), the MAGAt House sent criminal referrals for Hunter Biden and James Biden, while Hunter Biden's trial on gun charges continues in Delaware. Two MAGAts were added to the House Intelligence Committee by the MAGAt speaker. And Boeing successfully launched a manned rocket headed for the International Space Station. At least none of the doors fell out.And, oh yeah, Steve Bannon is headed back to jail for four months after he was found guilty of ignoring a subpoena from the Jan. 6 Committee. report to jail on July 1st, just in time to miss the Republican National convention. He'll be out 4 days before the election, hardly enough time for him to meddle in 2024's election.
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Americans have very short memories. For some unfathomable reason, there are millions of people with their heads in the sand who just don't (or won't) remember how bad things were under TFG. The years the orange one was in office were some of the darkest of my long life. Even after we voted him out, his specter continues to torment us as women's right to choose was taken away and threats of an even more evil and twisted Trump occupying the oval office is again a possibility. Also unfathomable.So today, we'll offer a bit of a reminder. I'm still struggling with my sleep issues and I lost the battle last night, with creepy crawly legs keeping me from getting any rest at all. So I will not be doing a new show today. Instead, I went back into the show's archives to four years ago this week. It was June 2, 2020. Here's the show description I wrote up for the program I'll re-play today that I titled "Awaiting the Locusts":"With each new day comes a new crisis, thanks to Donald Trump. The US leads the world in covid-19 infections and deaths. We've lost our standing in the world. We've alienated our allies, while the president aligns with strong men and dictators. And yesterday, he had military police fire tear gas and flash bang grenades at peaceful protesters to clear his way for a photo op at a DC church, where he used a bible as a prop. And America burns. On Tuesdays, I gather with my gliberal girlfriends GottaLaff and Amy Simon. Today, we'll try to figure out how our nation survives."
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You know the old adage, 'Sticks & stones my break my bones but words can never hurt me.' As I often say, the scientific term for that is "bullshit." Words can and do immense damage. And as today's guest Annalee Newitz explains in her new book (out today) STORIES ARE WEAPONS: PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE AND THE AMERICAN MIND, this really is war.They open the preface to the book writing, "It's hard to write about a war while it's raging. Especially when there are no craters in the ground, no missiles streaking overhead - just words and images that are inflicting a form of psychological damage that is impossible to measure, impossible to prove."Such is our challenge as these words and stories continue to misinform, pervert and harm both people and our democracy, fragile as it is.Her words and stories from our history show just how dangerous these PsyOps are and how we must defend against them.
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Like death and taxes, there's no stopping Mondays. They come every week whether we want them or not. But there's a silver lining... we get The Fucking News every Monday from Jonathan Larsen who writes the fucking news every fucking day... Then again, there are some weeks when there's good fucking news, like Trump being convicted and like Mexico electing its first woman President -- a Jewish woman at that! But don't fear newsfuckers, there's some fucked-up news to talk about too...
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The verdicts are in! Donald J Trump found guilty on all 34 counts, but you already knew that.However, today is Friday, so Marcy Wheeler of emptywheel.net is here. We discuss the verdicts, the hypocrisy and worse from the right, the fact that they're out for revenge, and that Hunter Biden's gun charges trial gets underway on Monday.Never a dull moment!
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Literally ten minutes before hitting the air, the word came down that the jury had reached a verdict in the first criminal trial of the former guy. Needless to say, everything I had planned for today's show was thrown out the window.... but Howie Klein still joined me to help celebrate the news that our justice system works.
We were going as history was made today. Of course, the fight isn't over. Trump is playing the victim, trotting out his "it was rigged" tourettes. He doesn't know how to say anything else.
Tomorrow, Marcy Wheeler will be here for a postscript, and a preview of the revenge they'll want to take out on Hunter Biden. Strap in...
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ur favorite legal expert Lisa Graves returns to the show to bring some clarity to the surreal legal news we've been dealing with the the past few weeks. First, there's the Trump trial - the one of four criminal cases that he should be standing trial for. Closing arguments were delivered yesterday; the judge gave the jury instructions this morning and the first day of deliberations are done. Of course TFG went out to the microphones and continued his normal practice of lying about everything.
The second big story that's broken over the past few weeks involved Supreme Court *justice* Samuel Alito. We now know that he and his wife (he blames his wife, whatta guy!) have flown flags supporting the insurrection and Trump at their VA home and their beach home, yet he refuses to recuse himself from any case dealing with Jan 6. Yeah, we have a few things to talk with Lisa Graves about today...
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The title of today's episode is taken from a line in a commencement address delivered this weekend by filmmaker/historian Ken Burns to the graduating class at Brandeis University. I heard enough plaudits about it to seek it out, and I must agree. In fact, so much that I'm going to share the final 8 1/2 minutes or so of it on today's show. I'll also post the entire thing on my website where I'll post today's show (nicolesandler.com/5-28-24) so you can easily find it to watch the rest of it.With the spectacle of the first criminal trial of a former president coming to and end, and the amount of disinformation and propaganda warping the minds of the gullible, i've been having flashbacks to 2016 when our world was falling apart. Some idiot on Facebook defending TFG posted a response to something I wrote with "we survived Trump once, we will again"... a sentiment with which I wholly disagree.This, if he succeeds in lying, cheating and stealing his way back into the oval office, will be the end of our democracy as we know it. Ken Burns chucked his longstanding policy of neutrality in this speech when he said, "The presumptive Republican nominee is the opioid of all opioids, an easy cure for what some believe is the solution to our myriad pains and problems. When in fact with him, you end up re-enslaved with an even bigger problem, a worse affliction and addiction, 'a bigger delusion', James Baldwin would say, the author and finisher of our national existence, our national suicide as Mr. Lincoln prophesies. Do not be seduced by easy equalization. There is nothing equal about this equation. We are at an existential crossroads in our political and civic lives. This is a choice that could not be clearer."It's with that in mind that we'll hear the rest of that address today, and I'll bring you the latest on the closing arguments, the newest roadblock to justice thrown up by one of TFG's appointees to the bench, the latest outrage over the fact that our Supreme Court is sickeningly compromised and that we are, to put it bluntly, fucked. And not in a good way.
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