Another BradCast necessarily, but not wholly, derailed today by our climate crisis. We were able to open the phone lines to hear from a number of callers with their thoughts in advance of Tuesday’s Vice-Presidential Debate. [Audio link to full show follows below this summary.]
We sidelined our planned coverage of Kamala Harris‘ address late last week on border security and immigration reform in Douglas, Arizona — and Donald Trump‘s appalling response, calling her “mentally impaired” and “mentally disabled”, before going on to lie (again) about crime statistics, and the fact that violent crime has plummeted under the Biden-Harris Administration — in order to focus on the unspeakable disaster that continues to unfold in much of the U.S. Southeast.
The devastation and tragedy continues today, following Thursday’s monster, Category 4 Hurricane Helene. It came ashore in the Big Bend region of Florida‘s panhandle, the third major tropical storm to do so in 13 months, and the second over the past two months alone. But Florida was hardly the only state affected, as death and destruction overtook parts of Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina and North Carolina as well. The latter, perhaps, having weathered the most damage, to date.
With over one hundred killed and more still missing, millions of survivors in the Southeast remain without power today. Some, particularly in Asheville, NC, remain physically cut off from the rest of the world, as the County’s water treatment facility has failed and may be down for weeks.
Desi Doyen joins us for insight on the impacts and government response, and how denial of climate change by many elected officials from these states has exacerbated the destruction they are now hoping to claw their way out of today.
Then, there is the question of how this will affect the ability of voters in the most damaged areas — particularly in NC, but in a number of other states as well — to be able to cast their vote in this year’s upcoming Presidential elections. In battleground NC, the U.S. Postal Service announced the suspension of service in a bunch of areas, making delivery of vote-by-mail ballots to voters and back again to the county, a question mark right now. That’s particularly disturbing since state Republicans killed the the three-day grace period for ballots that were postmarked by Election Day to arrive at County to be counted after Election Day.
All of this also comes after NC Republicans spent years fighting to implement draconian Photo ID restrictions, despite a federal court describing the effort as targeting Black voters in the state with “almost surgical precision”. So, what happens to those voters whose IDs blew away or were washed away in the wind and flooding? We’ve got a few details on all of the above today, and will continue to monitor the situation voters in the days and weeks ahead.
Then, we open up the phone lines to listeners in advance of Tuesday night’s upcoming Vice Presidential debate between Democratic candidate Tim Walz and Republican J.D. Vance, asking what listeners expect and/or hope for from what appears to the last face-to-face debate between the Harris-Walz and Trump-Vance tickets. (Harris has agreed to another debate in October but, so far, Trump has declined. Probably smart considering the drubbing he took at their first and, so far, only debate in early September.) The debate host, CBS News, has announced good news for the Trump-Vance ticket, their moderators will not be fact-checking the candidates, both of whom, unlike Trump, are actually pretty good debaters…
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