The Nicole Sandler Show

Marcy Wheeler joins me for Emptywheel Friday from an undisclosed location in Ireland and, as usual, we cover a lot of ground: ICE killings in Houston, the collapsed Iran ceasefire and Trump's humiliating plane-swap on the way to NATO, the reflecting pool/canoeist indictment, Musk's antitrust settlement, the Graham Platner fallout and what it says (and doesn't say) about the GOP's r...

Graham Platner withdrew from Maine's Senate race, and I share my reaction early in the show — but today's episode is really about a primary challenge happening right next door to me in Arizona's 4th Congressional District. Incumbent Democrat Greg Stanton is facing a challenger, Kai Newkirk, who presents himself as a progressive organizer and activist. I went looking for more informatio...

Randy Rainbow's "Demented" opens the show today, and it's a fitting soundtrack for a day where Trump referred to Iran as the "Islamic Republic of Japan" and mixed up Zelensky for Putin at a NATO press conference — audio included. Driftglass joins me for our Wednesday get-together, which wanders from the collapsed Iran ceasefire into a long, honest look back at the 1976 Bice...

Heather 'Digby' Parton joins me today, and we start with something genuinely moving — a reworked "Star-Spangled Banner" from the Marsh family in England that stopped me in my tracks. From there we go through the wreckage of Trump's July 4th/250th weekend: the Patriot Front marching on the Mall, Doug Burgum's strange comments about it, and the wave of goodwill for America po...

It's Emptywheel Friday on the day before the 4th, and Marcy Wheeler and I have plenty to dig into. Top of the list: Trump's "Freedom 250" — the private, secretive operation that hijacked America's real 250th birthday commission and turned it into a money-laundering vehicle for his cronies, according to a new House Natural Resources Committee report. We also cover the record hea...

I'm still not feeling great, but today's guests and subject matter were too important to postpone. Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer are the authors of the brand-new book On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear . Julia's a longtime tech journalist, Ami worked on tech policy in the Biden White House, and together they interviewed over 100 people across five continents about...

With the Supreme Court ending their term yesterday with what I call the sequel to Citizens United, NRSC v FEC, which will make things exponentially worse than its predecessor, and I'm not feeling great today, I thought I'd reach back 16.5 years to the day when the Extreme Court handed down that devastating opinion in Citizens United v FEC. It was January 21, 2010. They didn't even wait...

The Supreme Court actually finished its term on time this year — and handed down four rulings on the very last day. Our favorite legal expert Lisa Graves joins me to walk through all of it: birthright citizenship surviving by a shockingly narrow margin, a cruel ruling against trans athletes, and a campaign finance case that makes Citizens United look modest by comparison. We also get into Clarence...

It's the penultimate day of this Supreme Court term and it wasn't as bad as they've been lately. Dr. Art Jipson from the University of Dayton joins me to help us sort through they four new opinions they gave us— including a mail ballot ruling that actually went our way. But, as usual, they saved the worst for last, so tomorrow is birthright citizenship and transgender athletes, and I&#...

It's Emptywheel Friday, and Marcy Wheeler of emptywheel.net is back to help us wrap up another ridiculously absurd and awful week. We cover the Supreme Court's TPS ruling — which strips protection from hundreds of thousands of Haitians and is dressed up by Alito as something other than what it plainly is: racism with a legal fig leaf. This ruling has a human cost that people need to unders...

It's Alito's world and we're just living in it. The formerly Supreme, now Extreme Court handed down four of the remaining 12 opinions this morning, and three of them came from the pen of Samuel Alito — all 6-3 decision. The fourth was a 7-2 written by Kavanaugh, with the bizarre twist of Ketanji Brown Jackson and Neil Gorsuch dissenting together. We'll run them down today, along wi...

It's Wednesday, which means Driftglass is here — and today's conversation went deep and wide. We started with Trump's "deflecting pool" — his preferred name for what used to be the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool before a no-bid contract turned it into an algae-choked disaster, and the administration started blaming "antifa" with a knife. Senator John Hickenlooper of C...

Music is the medicine I needed today. Variety 's senior music writer and chief critic Chris Willman joins me for a wide-ranging conversation about Bob Dylan 's current tour — which I'm catching tonight in Phoenix — the legacy of Clive Davis, Bruce Springsteen's Land of Hope and Dreams run, Taylor Swift, and the new artists worth paying attention to. We also cover Keir Starmer's...

I don't like Mondays. Yeah, it's a song but it's also a general rule. It hit 114 degrees here in Chandler, AZ today, I wasn't feeling great, and the news was its usual dumpster fire self. But I showed up, because that's what we do. I started with a Jonathan Pie clip that had me cackling despite myself — his breakdown of Trump's Iran "victory" is one for the ages. Th...

It's Emptywheel Friday — the one day a week where Marcy Wheeler of emptywheel.net and I sit down to connect the dots and try not to lose our minds. This week we dig into Trump's Iran capitulation: what's actually in the 14-point MOU, why the $300 billion "reconstruction fund" is a payoff to Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff and their Gulf state clients, and why the Strait of Horm...

Today's show opened with the split screen to end all split screens: the dedication ceremony for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago — featuring Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, and a stunning speech from Michelle Obama — running simultaneously with JD Vance's press conference trying to sell the world on Trump's Iran "deal" that is, in fact, a memo of understanding signed...

My friend Driftglass is best-known as one of the OGs of the Progressive Blogisphere. Today I helped him mark the eve of the Professional Left Podcast's 1,000th episode with a wide-ranging Wednesday that covers everything from the 40-year history of right-wing media radicalization to Trump's Iran "deal" - actually just a memorandum of understanding that doesn't understand anythi...

Today's show started out chaotic — I discovered live on air that Arizona had quietly changed my voter registration to "inactive." I have my registration card right here. Correct address. Everything. And yet.. So yes, I'm going to say it again: go to vote.gov and check your registration right now. Arizona's primary is July 21st and you need to be registered 29 days out. Don'...

On Sunday night, the evil orange guy who occupies the White House hosted a UFC fight on the South Lawn. With a branded octagon. And military honor guards as ambiance. And a fighter who, after winning his match, grabbed the mic to announce to smear Michelle Obama by saying she's better than he is (that's what he meant, right?). While Joe Rogan grinned next to him like a golden retriever who...

It's another Emptywheel Friday, when Marcy Wheeler brings her vast knowledge from emptywheel.net to the Nicole Sandler Show, and we covered a lot of ground today.  Elon Musk's paper trillionaire status and the fact that he's ALSO currently inciting far-right riots in Belfast (third time in the UK, by the way). The stolen election scanner situation in Maricopa County. The terrorist slus...

I warned you. I've been talking about the coming El Niño for weeks while the corporate media looked the other way — and then the AP runs the story the same morning I'm finally doing a show on it. Of course! On today's show, I bring in two essential guests: Kurt Cobb , energy writer and author of the peak oil novel Prelude , breaks down just how precarious the global oil situation is —...

Driftglass , one of the OG progressive bloggers left, and co-host of the Professional Left podcast — is back on the show! Tomorrow, episode #999 of the Pro Left Pod drops, and next week, their 1000th! A milestone worth celebrating. And today, Driftglass returned for his first of a Wednesday "residency" on my show on Wednesdays. To mark the occasion, we actually got to Driftglass's face...

America's 250th birthday is just weeks away and Trump is using the occasion as if the nation is celebrating his birthday. And he's doing it in a truly sickening manner, skirting convention with a commercial moneymaking UFC violent and bloody fight on the South Lawn, no-bid contracts for his golf buddies, and a fleet of propaganda trucks with content created by PragerU and Hillsdale College...

I've been a bit skeptical of my senator, Mark Kelly. I've said so on this show plenty of times. But yesterday David and I went to a "Kick Out Corruption Tour" event at ASU, organized by Stand Up America and End Citizens United, and… I came home genuinely impressed. Kelly talked Citizens United, congressional insider trading, Trump's insurrectionist slush fund, the weaponization...

It's another Emptywheel Friday in which Marcy Wheeler of emptywheel.net helps us figure out what went on this week. Today, we got into Todd Blanche literally telling Congress that Trump can't be held accountable for accepting a bribe... and then getting named acting AG the next day. We talked about the DOJ "fraud task force" that's really just a scheme to chase people on SNAP w...