The Nicole Sandler Show

It’s my birthday, and the blue tsunami is the best gift I could have asked for. As of this morning, Democrats had secured 54 Senate seats and 228 House seats, with a real chance at 240 or more. NBC News noted it’s the first time since 2006 that the minority party flipped both chambers in a single night.

Driftglass joins me to celebrate. We cover the Senate flips in Maine, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas, plus Michigan held. We cover the governors’ wins, including Georgia, Texas, Ohio and Nevada, and Arizona’s still-undecided congressional races, with Eli...

It's Election Day, so go vote! I'm back in the new studio, a little scattered and a lot bruised after yesterday's MRI (four tries to find a vein, in case you were wondering), and since there's no guest today, the phone lines are open. One caller from South Carolina informs me that Donald Trump is the most "philanthropic" president we've ever had. Not only was his sentiment wrong, so was his pronunciation. I ask for receipts. We'll see.

Then I turn to Israel, where last week's election has left things unsettled. I read from Ilan Goldenberg's piece...

After a week away to move, I’m back in the rebuilt studio, just in time for Election Day tomorrow. I open the show with J-L Cauvin doing his best D'ump impression with a bit on Haley Stevens and Mike Rogers. I took some calls (the phone works!) from Vereen in the Tampa Bay area and Charlene in Arizona about Florida’s governor’s race, rents, and gas prices. I caught up on some of the news I missed: the Michigan Senate fallout, the Cenk Uygur PAC ad, and Judd Legum’s report that most major outlets ignored a new alle...

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 toward Democrats, from Georgia to Mississippi to Texas.

We also talk about the Ohio ad that even some Republicans are running from, Elon Musk's money, Starlink and...

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 precincts: not scandal, but grocery prices, gas, housing, healthcare, and water. We dig into her opponent Mark Lamb's absence from the district and the debates, the reporting that's followed...

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 rebuilding my studio. I promise some good shows to run while I'm out. Charlie has yet to be convinced about the new pool.

The YouTube situation is still a mess, as the damn hackers...

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 psychologist Dr. Vincent Greenwood, author of Puppet on a String: Trump Is Ruled by an Ominous Psychological Condition. Dr. Greenwood explains why he says the right term is clinical psychopathy...

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 explains why the timing, the speech-and-debate issues, and the track record of the agents behind the affidavits all raise serious questions.

We also cover DOJ's escalating fight with California over voter...

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 song about Ukraine, then dig into the reports that Starlink went dark on Ukrainian drones just before Russia hit...

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-related scandals from the past two days, Hegseth's plan to livestream an execution, the Bronx shooting involving a DHS agent, the Supreme Court's new term, and the latest on the Broadview 6...

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 and how its immunity ruling and shadow docket decisions have emboldened Trump, then go back to Florida in 2000. Lisa walks through what Bush v. Gore...

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 list of conditions. Driftglass explains how he sees the fear-and-greed playbook, and why he thinks fear has stopped working. We also play rally audio of Trump basically suggesting that Iran take out Los...

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 truly frightening!)

Alex breaks down what the proposed commission is, why backers want to vote on it in the lame duck, and why he calls it a commission to cut Social Security. Then...

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-conspirators. Marcy explains why the Klan Act is such an interesting tool, and how a new suit from the Chicago protesters Benny Johnson called "domestic terrorists" fits the same story.

Then we...

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 decide it. We dig into Trump's Time interview, the Iran deal he rejected, Pete Hegseth's latest firings, and the AI (Arrogant Idiots) executives lining up at the White House.

With 33 days until the...

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 results).

Driftglass and I break down the whole fiasco: the staffer behind him who clearly saw it coming, the TMZ follow-up, and Amy Klobuchar calmly pointing out that S...

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 Atlanta Hawks game and perjuring himself. Turns out Smith had gone to see the Iowa Hawkeyes play Maryland, and Senator Klobuchar had to point out the mix-up. Ted Cruz delivered a long speech about Javert, John Kennedy...

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 problem, and one that has already flagged actual citizens as non-citizens) and a third refusal to let Missouri use its redrawn congressional map. I also shared how...

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, bond markets flashing warning signs, and a Senate map that now includes Kansas and maybe even Mississippi. Marcy walks through race after race — Roger Marshall's brutal OB-GYN lawsuit story, Susan Collins' bribery scandal, Mary Peltola's igua...

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 interview with Warren Zanes about the Nebraska album and movie.

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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 k...

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...

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 ov...

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 ye...

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...

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!

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 wrot...

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...

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...

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...

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 al...

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: Trum...

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"...

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 ta...

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...

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...

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!

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...

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 an...