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It's Constitution Day, and we're 46 days from the end of voting in the midterms. I open with YouTube's attempt to demonetize and block a Hamilton-cast get-out-the-vote video — over parody music, of all things — so I play it anyway, because getting people to check their voter registration matters more than YouTube's copyright bots. Then I dig into the "Democrats for Biggs" sign campaign spreading across Arizona: an AI-generated, deepfake disinformation operation from Turning Point USA meant to trick voters into thinking Democrats are backing Andy Biggs for governor. It's fake, their signs are everywhere in my neighborhood and I want to know if I can legally do something about it (a caller sets me straight).

Then Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jonathan Kaufman — director of the School of Journalism at Northeastern University — joins me to talk about his new book, When America Roared: How the 1980s Saved, Then Broke, The Country --and Led Us To Today. We trace how Reagan-era decisions on media deregulation, the Fairness Doctrine, and free-market ideology built the "invisible architecture" we're all still living in — from Fox News to Trump's own media instincts. It's a fascinating, sometimes uncomfortable look at how the 80s built today.

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Today has been one of those days when everything that could go wrong did. I'm finally posting this at 7pm because I had to fix the audio which was fubar on today's show. It seems the gremlins that I banished have come back. So I fixed today's show as much as I could, but I still must fix my studio so we'll have a show tomorrow. But do have a listen as Driftglass was excellent as usual. And of course, there was that Kash Patel bestiality discussion near the end. No, I'm not kidding. It's even in the Congressional Record. This regime is so classy... or not!

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Today's the day David Corn's new book, How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America, hits stores — and he joins me to make the case that this isn't the "Russia hoax," it's the Russia hoax hoax. We trace ten years of Russian interference in our elections that never actually stopped, the bipartisan Senate report (signed by Marco Rubio!) that already proved it, and the Trump Jr. wedding bankrolled by a Russian oligarch just weeks before Russia started meddling in the midterms again. Also on today's show: my ongoing health mess, the Anthropic researcher who quit over AI safety fears, and sound from today's Kash Patel Senate hearing.

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I'm back from vacation and diving straight into the deep end. Fifty days until Election Day — vote early, vote smart, and don't trust the mail with your ballot if you can hand-deliver it instead. I cover Trump's unhinged Labor Day meltdown, the $40 trillion debt milestone, No Kings rallies coming back on October 17th, and the ongoing Jimmy Kimmel/FCC saga. Then I do something I never thought I'd do again: play a Bill Maher clip I agree with, on a topic I know will make some of you furious with me. Fair warning, and please actually listen before you yell.

Dr. Art Jipson (University of Dayton) joins for a wide-ranging conversation about the national nightmare we're living through — rising antisemitism, the difference between explaining extremism and excusing it, and why treating people we disagree with as enemies is corroding our politics. We close things out talking music: the Alan Parsons Project's stunning 50th anniversary tour and an underrated songwriter named Chris Isaak and the god Todd Rundgren.

This week on the show: David Corn (Mother Jones, "How Russia Won") tomorrow, Jonathan Kaufman ("When America Roared") Thursday, and a special recorded conversation with musician and author Warren Zanes airing next Wednesday — Bruce Springsteen's 76th birthday.

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I'm on vacation this week, but dropping in a special show to commemorate 9-11, twenty-five years later with some personal remembrances, along with a song and a book! The book by Jim DeFede, "The Day the World Came to Towwn," is available at https://bookshop.org/a/1630/978006300.... I think you'll recognize the song by Five for Fighting, "Superman (It's Not Easy)". I'll be back Monday with all new shows...

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I apologize for the late arrival of this podcast, but my right hand is in severe pain which makes it very difficult to type. So, here it is. but this week the show will have to speak for itself!

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I awoke this morning after very little sleep due to extreme pain in my right hand thinking I'd take the day off when I learned that Gloria Steinem had died. So much for the idea of resting my ailing hand todaaay!

I called Amy Simon — Playwright & actress, cultural HERstorian, and author of the upcoming book"American Agitators: Five Centuries of Unstoppable Women Who Fought for Social and Political Justice" — because if anyone was going to help me do Gloria justice, it was her. Amy's been fortunate enough to have met her and even performed for her, and wrote about her for the book, No wonder she's able to go deep, talking about the Playboy Bunny exposé that launched her career, the founding of Ms. Magazine, her friendships with Dolores Huerta and Wilma Mankiller, what she gave up and endured to say what she said, and why a whole generation of young women today doesn't know her name — and needs to.

We end the episode with Gloria's own voice: her full speech from the 2017 Women's March on Washington.

Tomorrow, Marcy Wheeler joins me to wrap the week. Monday is Labor Day, and I might actually take some time off after that — we'll see what my hand says.

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Driftglass returns for our weekly check-in, and things go sideways fast — straight into the Supreme Court's bunker-ballroom ruling, the "court packing" talking point, and why Trump's first-ever mid-cycle party convention in Dallas has vulnerable Republicans bolting for the exits ahead of the midterms. We also dig into Texas closing more than 100 polling places in a county that's trending blue, and reports of a Postal Service whistleblower on mail ballots.

Then Jason Leopold — the FOIA King himself — joins to walk through his year-long fight to get answers on why Ghislaine Maxwell was quietly moved to a lower-security prison after her interview with Todd Blanche. What he got back after suing the government: one page, almost entirely redacted in white space. We also cover Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse's floor remarks on the suppressed FBI 302s naming Trump, and Rep. Thomas Massie reading 14 names connected to the Epstein network into the Congressional Record.

And yes, there is a comedy bit about "Mustang Meat" that I want to be very clear I do not endorse. But I'll admit that I did laugh.

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I crashed Brad Friedman's vacation. Again. I've done it before, but only because it's difficult to get him on my show when he's knee deep in recording his own show each day. So I take him when I can get him.

Brad — from BradBlog and the Bradcast, one of the people I actually call a friend after twenty-plus years in this business — was supposed to be off the grid this week. Instead he's on my show telling me his theory that November is going to be a bigger wave for Democrats than anyone's predicting, and I'm telling him why I don't quite believe him yet.

Along the way: the ten-year anniversary of my cancer surgery coming 10 years after the orange mess entered politics (he did not steal credit for saving my life, no matter what Brad heard secondhand), a possible tropical storm bearing down on Los Angeles, a scorpion in my house, the FCC coming for broadcasters who tell the truth, and the actual story of how Brad and I met back when I was hosting mornings in Miami and he was just some guy with a blog who actually knew what he was talking about.

We also get into the weird coincidence of Air America radio going dark the exact same day the Supreme Court handed down Citizens United — and why I will personally hunt down the woman who got my old KPFK show canceled. (No, I won't. I can't even remember her name. But karma will get her...)

Honest, unscripted, occasionally profane, always independent. That's the show.

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I started the show recounting my ongoing beef with T-Mobile - a diversion from what I'm really mad about. Yesterday marked my 10th anniversary of being cancer-free, but I realized that this gift of 10 extra years was made up of a demented madman hell-bent on destroying everything good about this country. That's what this past decade has been, and I'm realized that it's affecting me in pretty awful way, when I should be celebrating.

Dr. Art Jipson returns for the back-to-school check-in, bringing surprising optimism from his students, before we dug into military mismanagement, press intimidation, food safety rollbacks, and whether people can actually be pulled back from extremism. Plus, a replay of my Thursday phone call to a random Canadian named Jeffrey Sandler, in the name of international diplomacy.

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It's Friday, so it's Emptywheel Friday with Marcy Wheeler of emptywheel.net — and for the first Friday in a few weeks, no technical gremlins. We dig into Trump's plan to rename Lake Ontario "Lake America," his failing tariff strategy against Canada, Mexico, and Iran, and whether he can even walk down a staircase reliably anymore. Marcy breaks down the strange Ratcliffe trip to Putin, why Russia has good reason to think the U.S. is weak, and the human cost of Pete Hegseth's Pentagon: a 19-year-old sailor punished for jumping ship after 8.5 months at sea without touching land. We also get into the manufactured Hakeem Jeffries/Jared Kushner "controversy," Ashley Moody's corruption problems in Florida, the collapsing Minnesota "Antifa" prosecutions, and our thoughts as we bid farewell to Dolly Parton.

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Today I decided to run my own one-woman focus group. Not with liberals — with Republicans. Because nobody who actually voted for this guy calls into my show, so I figured I'd go find them myself: phone lines open, an actual White Pages search underway live on air, all in pursuit of the question Driftglass gave me yesterday — show me on the doll where the liberal hurt you. Spoiler: landlines are basically extinct and my "focus group" mostly consisted of one very charming stranger in Ontario, Canada, who wanted nothing to do with Donald Trump either. Also in this episode: Trump tries to rename Lake Ontario "Lake America" (he cannot just do that), a quick history lesson on why this country isn't actually called "America," and a Department of Education social media post that may have compared our president to Hitler — accidentally or not, you decide. Plus a caller from the Bay Area running her own Trump-voter poll on her friends and family, and my ongoing feud with T-Mobile.

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Tim Curry died. He was 80- making it the second death of the wrong 80-year old so far this week, and there was only one way to open the show. Driftglass joined me for this Wednesday venting session: the Republicans who are suddenly "shocked, shocked I tell you" that the party they built for 40 years turned into this; Trump as a made-up TV character who was never actually good at anything; a Navy ship losing a Pearl Harbor hero's name so it can be renamed after Trump instead; steam catapults on aircraft carriers because someone whispered "steam was better" in his ear; and Kushner reportedly having a sit-down with Hakeem Jeffries that nobody can explain. Also — it's been 10 years since I had my left lung removed for cancer. Ten years cancer-free bought me ten years of Trump. I'm workshopping the cost-benefit analysis. No paywalls, no ads, just the truth as I see it. If you can support the show, I'd appreciate it. If you can't, share it with someone who can.

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Dolly Parton has died, and before anything else today, I had to sit with that — a woman who somehow made everybody love her, right and left, gay and straight, country fans and people who'd never touch country music. Digby (Heather Digby Parton) joins me to talk about what made Dolly so singular, then we dig into the genuinely strange moment we're in: the Natalie Harp bubble around Trump, the Wall Street Journal's reporting on how the Iran war really unfolded, the blowup with Canada over trade, and whether pundits declaring "the resistance is dead" have any idea what they're talking about. I also mark ten years since my lung cancer surgery — a milestone that's got me thinking hard about what the last decade actually cost us. It's been a day.

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Marcy Wheeler joins me for our weekly deep dive, and this Friday's episode is a doozy. We unpack the Natalie Harp saga — how one line from Jon Ossoff exposed just how much unsupervised access this woman has to a president with an increasingly shaky grip on reality, and why that should scare all of us. We also cover the Iran war's mounting toll on our military, a food safety system falling apart in real time, newly revealed DHS spying on churches and activists in Minnesota, the latest in Davy Hearn's reflecting pool case, a shake-up in Arizona's governor's race, a chaotic Florida primary, and the twisted Eric Swalwell story that somehow involves a suspected Chinese spy. We end on a song parody that's funnier — and darker — than it has any right to be.

As for the last two weeks, I can see the sunlight ahead.. I don't care what it takes this weekend. I'll have my studio and everything on this end working by Monday. I promise.

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I apologize for being away for the past week or so, but I've been in studio/YouTube hell. I'll explain on another day... But given the huge win in Florida's Primary on Tuesday by Democrat Angie Nixon, blowing out Alex Vindman to take the nomination for Senator, I couldn't help but remember the first time I met her. It was July 9, 2020. A Thursday. The late, great Howie Klein did my show every Thursday, and around election time, he'd bring on some of the candidates his Blue America PAC had endorsed.

Angie Nixon had just declared her run for the Florida state legislature, and Howie brought her on the show that day. She was spectacular. So, today, I played back that show.

We lost Howie Klein on Christmas Eve last year. It was so wonderful to hear his voice again too.

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Well, the speech was last night, but wow, it was really good. I do think he could someday be president. He should be. Anyway, I'm still having studio troubles and still not feeling well, so we talked about all kinds of things, mostly in the news. And at the end, I played Jon Ossoff's speech last night from Atlanta. And yes, it was excellent!

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Happy Emptywheel Friday! This was the week from hell. Not only in the news, courtesy of the Orange-man regime - which Marcy Wheeler & I discuss on today's show- but in my life and studio. On Monday, the software that I use to stream video lost its robotic mind and went kaput. I spent the rest of the week, after installing a new program, trying to learn it, with a little help from the Google machine's AI. I know, I know. But the AI was truly helpful in this case. However, this software is overly complicated and, although I made good progress, I didn't want today's show to get messed up. Ha!

So with what I learned from the new OBS software, I was able to fix the Wirecast enough to get it up & running again... except for the multitude of problems that cropped up as I tried to get on the air today... and throughout the livestream. ARGHH!

This podcast is a clean version of today's show so you won't be interrupted by the mic suddenly cutting out or any of what felt like dozens on issues plaguing the show. BTW, when I say clean I don't mean language-wise. Both of our potty-mouths were working quite well, thankyouverymuch.

I do apologize for being off for most of this week. I actually did shows, which were mostly comprised of me asking the live show listeners, "can you hear me now?" and equally titillating questions which wouldn't make for good podcasts.I will be working on my studio all weekend with the goal of being up and running as it should by Monday.

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Everything that could go wrong technically did today — but I somehow pushed through anyway. We had no video working, but I got the audio, so regular podcast listeners won't hear anything different in a big way. Thanks for bearing with me. I hope to get everything working by tomorrow, though I can't make any promises!

Bruce W. Nelson (Mangy Fetlocks) brings two new songs, on Todd Blanche's AG confirmation and the Katie Miller/Eric Swalwell gossip. Dr. Art Jipson joins for a conversation ranging from a maddening doctor's office no-show policy to Blanche's confirmation and swearing-in, Tillis and Cornyn caving on their votes, Max Miller's strange non-denial of domestic abuse allegations, and Art's new piece at The Conversation on how the Fauci COVID-origins hearing turned conspiracy theories into political weapons. Plus: a flashback comedy bit on Dr. Debbie Birx, and a candid conversation about what AI is actually useful for in content production — and what it gets wrong.

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