It's Emptywheel Friday and Marcy Wheeler of emptywheel.net is joining me LIVE from a Paris terrace instead of her usual place at home in Ireland

Today: the White House demolition derby, Iran falling apart in real time, Delaney Hall hunger strikes, DOJ corruption, the Texas primary's real story, and why Trump's birthday concert has Milli Vanilli as a headliner. (No, really.) Or is it FloRiDa?

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These last few weeks have been insane. About three weeks ago I ended up in the hospital for four days after what looked like a cardiac event. My arteries are clear, we still don't know exactly what happened, and I've been kind of scattered ever since.

But Digby was here today and we had so much to talk about that I almost forgot to be tired.

Here's what we covered: Trump is literally building a coliseum on the White House lawn for a UFC fight on his 80th birthday. He tried to strongarm Arab leaders into the Abraham Accords during a ceasefire call — as an afterthought — and there was dead silence on the line. The Iran war is over and we lost. Ken Paxton, one of the most corrupt politicians in America, just won the Texas Republican Senate primary because Trump endorsed him and his cult followers said "good enough for Trump, good enough for me."

AND — there may actually be a path for James Talarico to win that Senate seat. We talked about what Nate Cohn is seeing in the numbers, and it's more hopeful than I expected. I'll take whatever I can get, at this point!

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I'm playing catch up with the news, so today I'm covering Trump's third hospital visit this year, the alarming details about his daytime somnolence (falling asleep in the Oval Office, possibly at Arlington on Memorial Day — yikes), and his midnight rhino meme that makes zero sense. Plus the Texas Senate runoff — Cornyn vs. Paxton — and how Trump just torpedoed a nearly-done Iran ceasefire deal by throwing the Abraham Accords in at the last minute like an afterthought.

Then my guest Mark Malkoff — author of Love Johnny Carson and a veteran of the late night world — joins me to talk about the end of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. 33 years of the CBS late night franchise, gone. We cover it all: the joke that supposedly got the show canceled, Colbert's brilliant post-finale appearance on Monroe Community Media's public access channel with Jack White, Eminem and Jeff Daniels, the CBS copyright freakout, what happens to the Ed Sullivan Theater now, and whether we'll ever see late night TV at this scale again. Spoiler: probably not.

And I close with one more gut punch — the Trump administration wants every federal employee to sign an NDA. Because why not finish off what's left of free speech?

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Today, I have a different kind of Memorial Day show for you. Instead of the usual music, I'm honoring two dear friends we lost too recently — Boca Brit Summers, the comedic genius behind so much of this show's best imaging and parody music, and Howie Klein, former president of Reprise Records and my weekly guest for nearly 15 years. We revisit a 2023 show Brit and I did together when she was finally feeling well enough to come back on the air, featuring some of her greatest hits. Then Howie, in his own words, remembering his close friend Lou Reed just days after Lou's death in October 2013. Grab a tissue. Or maybe a laugh. Probably both.

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Every week feels like an eternity, and this one seemed worse than normal. On today's Emptywheel Friday, Marcy Wheeler and I covered a lot of territory.

🏰 Trump's billion-dollar ballroom got killed by the Senate parliamentarian and some help from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse — because Republicans forgot which committees have jurisdiction over the White House. Oops.

💰 The so-called "terrorist slush fund" — a $1.8 billion bounty that could, allegedly, pay pardoned January 6th rioters, cop assaulters, and at least one convicted child sex abuser who used the promise of a payout to try to silence his victim. And Todd Blanche lied his face off about it in front of the Senate. There are a few lawsuits already challenging this travesty.

⚖️ The Broadview 6 case is OVER — dismissed with prejudice after a judge discovered the DOJ had hidden grand jury misconduct with redactions. This is a pattern.

🎸 The Late Show's final night was last night, with Paul McCartney helping Stephen turn off the lights. Oh, and the right wing billionaires who killed off one of Trump's biggest TV critics is also shuttering the original news authority - CBS News Radio no longer exists after today. For someone whose entire career has been in radio and who spent a few years in the CBS building on Sunset Blvd in Hollywood, this is a true punch in the gut, and just plain wrong.

Plus — what YOU can do this Memorial Day weekend while your representatives are out in public. Listen now!

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A LOT going on today on the Nicole Sandler Show ...

Trump created a $1.776 billion slush fund to pay off his Jan. 6 insurrectionists (yes, that number was chosen on purpose — cute, right?). And now the Pillow Guy wants $400 million from it, a Proud Boy leader wants $5 million because his "life was messed up," and actual Republicans in Congress are starting to say... wait, what? We cover the pushback from Rep/ Brian Fitzpatrick and Sen. Bill Cassidy, and Todd Blanche's testimony that makes less sense the more you listen to it.

Ryan Cooper from The American Prospect joined me to talk about all of it — plus the military getting run into the ground, the Ebola outbreak nobody's prepared for, and the DNC's post-election autopsy that somehow forgot to mention inflation OR Gaza.

Oh — and tonight the Late Show ends, thanks to the right-wing takeover of our media. Bruce Springsteen was on last night and had a few things to say. And as usual, I have feelings.

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I'm Nicole Sandler, and today I nearly lost my mind before I even got to my guest. Between Trump dropping his IRS lawsuit only to magically produce a $1.776 BILLION "weaponization fund" to pay off his convicted cronies — oh, and a little addendum granting himself and his whole family immunity from tax prosecution forever — I needed someone smarter than me to talk me off the ledge.

That someone is Driftglass — brilliant OG Progressive political blogger and co-host (with the incomparable Blue Gal Fran) of the Professional Left Podcast. And he delivered.

We trace exactly how we got to this insane moment in history: from Bill Clinton's budget surplus (say it with us — surplus) to George W. Bush blowing it all up, to Republicans meeting at a DC restaurant the day Obama was inaugurated to plot his destruction, to the rise of the birther king himself, to here. It's a long story. But Driftglass tells it better than anyone.

Also: eight Senate Democrats voted to confirm a judicial nominee who wouldn't say Biden won in 2020. We have thoughts. Many thoughts.

Subscribe. Tell your friends. We'll keep going as long as we can.

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Today's show was one I didn't plan. I woke up to watch the Senate grill Todd Blanche over Trump's $1.776 billion slush fund (yes, 1776 — he literally can't help himself), and then I got the news that my dear friend and radio comedy legend Boca Britany Somers passed away last night. So I did what I always do — I showed up, played her bits, cried a little, and kept going. That's what she would've wanted. Come listen.

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So Trump flew to China, brought Eric and the Nvidia guy instead of any actual China experts, accomplished nothing on Hormuz or Taiwan, got a lecture from Xi about Sparta and Athens, and came home. Marcy Wheeler of emptywheel.net and I spent an hour plus breaking down what it all means — plus Kash Patel snorkeling a war grave, which is exactly as bad as it sounds.

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I've been waiting to talk with my favorite legal expert Lisa Graves about this latest, most despicable outrage from the Extreme Court. Just last week they gutted what was left of the Voting Rights Act. Lisa breaks down how we got here- from Roberts, who started his career as a Reagan revolutionary attacking the VRA's effects provisions, to the neo-Confederate legislatures that instantly moved to bleach Black representation out of Congress the moment the ruling dropped. We also talk Leonard Leo's sudden billions, C. Boyden Gray's deeply troubling family history, Linda McMahon calling teachers non-professionals, Trump literally saying on camera that he doesn't think about Americans' financial situation, and — most importantly — what we can actually DO about all of this.

Spoiler: it's court reform. And Lisa makes the case better than anyone.

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