The Nicole Sandler Show

Happy Friday, everyone! I got my YouTube channel back, so we are officially back in business. Today's Emptywheel Friday with Marcy Wheeler of emptywheel.net is a big one. We're 11 days from Election Day, and Marcy breaks down what DOJ is up to in Alaska and California, a week of indictments and complaints landing right before the vote, and what she's seeing in the races that are moving...

Elizabeth Lee , the Democratic nominee in Arizona's 5th Congressional District, is back on the show 12 days before Election Day. A year ago she was an underdog nobody gave a chance in an R+10 district. Today, she says, her opponent has lost 19 points of ground even while outspending her 10 to 1, and the race is a toss-up. We talk about what she hears when she knocks on doors across all 173 pre...

Happy Wednesday! Driftglass and I did our weekly hour today, and it's my most enjoyable of the week. We talked about No Kings, the Arizona and Illinois races, and the Republicans who've suddenly decided they were "independent" all along (spoiler: we aren't letting them off the hook). Also, we finally found a house. So, I'll be out next week -- packing, moving, and rebuildin...

It's Monday, October 19th, and I'm still locked out of my YouTube channel, so this week the show lives on Twitch, Vimeo, and the audio stream at NicoleSandler.com and NicoleSandlerStream.com. And, of course, the podcast can always be found here. On today's show, I update you on the hack, the move, and the logistics of doing this with no producer. Then I'm joined by clinical psychol...

It's Friday, so national security journalist Marcy Wheeler of emptywheel.net is back to connect the dots on anoother week that felt like a year. We start with the White House's new press secretary and her rocky debut, (the news broke about 30 minutes before air time that she's OUT!) then dig into the raid on Rep. Ilhan Omar's home less than 60 days before an election. Marcy explain...

I apologize for being MIA for the past two days, but I do have a good excuse.. Actually, a few! Hackers took my YouTube channel and my main Google account and my house hunt is down to the wire, but the show must go on, and Driftglass is here to help. Of course, I got the audio stream back up on my website and working again, except it didn't today. I started the show with the Marsh Family's...

Marcy Wheeler of emptywheel.net joins me after landing back from Vilnius, Lithuania, where she attended the Disinfo conference. She explains how two panels naming the United States, one on U.S. disinformation and one on attacks on researchers, drew the State Department's attention, and why she sees the whole effort as part of a plan to export fascism through big tech. We also cover four oil-re...

Lisa Graves is back on the show, and so much has happened while she was away. Lisa is my go-to legal expert and the author of Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights . In her day job she leads a watchdog group, but on her own time she appears here as a private citizen, speaking for herself. We start with the Roberts Court...

It's Wednesday and Driftglass is in the house. We start with a satirical "betting app" ad about Ken Paxton that made both of us laugh out loud, then dig into the Texas Senate race and James Talarico's campaign. Then: the bribes. Trump is promising $5,000 checks if Republicans win, $500 for some ACA exchange enrollees in red states, and $90 for Medicare beneficiaries who meet a long...

Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works, flew to Dallas to confront a House Budget Committee field hearing, and what he found was something else entirely. The public was kept out (three people got in), seniors and people with disabilities waited in 103-degree heat, and the hearing took place on billionaire Harlan Crow's property, in a replica of the U.S. Capitol. (That's t...

Emptywheel Friday: Klan Act Lawsuits, Chicago's Reckoning, and Georgia's Ask It's Emptywheel Friday, and Marcy Wheeler is here to connect the dots on a week that kept piling up. We open with two new lawsuits from Renee Good's family, one a wrongful death claim and one under the 1871 Klan Act that names Jonathan Ross, several Trump administration officials, and a list of alleged co-...

Heather 'Digby' Parton and I go back more than 20 years, to the early days of the progressive blogosphere, and today she helps me look past the Trump spectacle to what's happening underneath it. She walks through Russ Vought's rescission and impoundment push, a test of whether the executive branch can seize Congress's power of the purse, and why the Supreme Court may get to dec...

It's another Wednesday with Driftglass, and what a Wednesday it was.  Mangy Fetlocks kicks things off with a song about Senator Eric Schmitt, who tried to spring a gotcha on Jack Smith over a basketball game and instead sprang one on himself. Before the good stuff, it's the Mal-Lady segment: my latest medical news (carpal tunnel, an ulcer, and thankfully some very welcome benign biopsy res...

Jack Smith testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the theater was almost as remarkable as the testimony. In his opening statement, Smith said the evidence proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Donald Trump committed serious crimes, and that he'd bring the same case against a president of either party. Then came the questioning. Senator Eric Schmitt accused Smith of attending an A...

Welcome to a new week in opposite world. I opened today's show with a video that put a smile on my face (and apologize for playing something created by AI which I said I wouldn't do). Then I got into Friday's Extreme Court shadow docket rulings: a 6-3 unsigned order letting the administration use the SAVE database to check voter rolls (which, as I explain, is a solution in search of a...

It's Empty Wheel Friday, and Marcy Wheeler is here to make sense of an absolutely chaotic week. We start with Trump's underwhelming state visit with Xi Jinping — the press bans, the Thucydides trap reference, and the trade detente that buys us two more months before the real reckoning. From there it's straight into the numbers that should terrify Republicans: diesel prices spiking, bon...

Today I did something I've never done before — I interviewed Claude AI, live, about all the unsettling stuff happening with AI right now (blackmail tests, hacking incidents, hallucinations nearly causing an international incident). Mixed feelings, honest conversation. Also: Trump's UN speech was something else. Tomorrow, in honor of Bruce Springsteen's 76th birthday, you'll hear my...

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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" s...

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 us...

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 alrea...

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 t...

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&#3...

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! Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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 a...