The Nicole Sandler Show

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...

It's another Emptywheel Friday as Marcy Wheeler takes a break from emptywheel.net to join Nicole Sandler to recap the week's legal and political wreckage. Topics include the Michigan Senate primary and what it signals for 2028, Todd Blanche's now-assured Attorney General confirmation and the Republicans who voted to enable it, a federal court ruling that Trump's White House renovation is illegal, DOJ's use of customs summonses to spy on journalists, cracks forming in MAGA media over the Iran war, and the collapse of the criminal case against former Olympian Davy Hearn - the good guy in that mess...

The One Big Ugly Bill was designed so its cruelest provisions wouldn't hit until after the midterms — but Nebraska didn't get the memo, or rather, Governor Pillen decided not to wait. Spocko brings on Angie Lauritsen of Nebraska for Us to explain what happens when a state jumps the gun on Medicaid work requirements: confused patients, rural hospitals converting to emergency-only care, and a governor who's visited the White House more than any Nebraska governor in memory, up for reelection this year.

Before we get to that, August 6 has been a big day in history. In 1945 - 81 ye...

Last night was a big election night, and I'm still sorting out how I feel about some of it. Michigan, Kansas, and a few other states weighed in yesterday, and my old friend John Fugelsang — now doing his newly-rebranded John Fugelsang Show weekdays at noon Eastern on SiriusXM Progress 127 — joined me to help make sense of it all, because that's what he does best: he finds the laughs in situations that are objectively not funny, and to see things from another perspective.

We get into the endless Iran war nobody's talking about enough, the Pentagon somehow needing more...

Allison Gill of Mueller She Wrote joined me today with two huge stories she broke this week — and it's only Tuesday! First, the FOIA request she filed after ICE raided children's dormitories at the Dilley detention facility in Texas, confiscating letters, crayons, and drawings from kids after ProPublica published some of what they'd written. Six months later, DHS finally responded — and only nine of the ninety-one records they found. We went through them together, including a letter from a nine-year-old girl asking a federal judge not to deport her family.(Tissues needed here!)

Then Allison walked me thro...

If you didn't know that the Trump Crime Organization would pull off this scam too you've had your head in the sand. I'm running late this morning trying to pull all the pieces together as I do it all alone... But we'll go through the bullshit that will become official tomorrow as the Dumpster Fire and his evil spawn will be granted immunity from all of their tax fraud over the past 50 or so years... and yes, he'll wind up getting his slush fund to pay off his army of insurrectionists too -- using our tax dollars to do...

It's Friday, which means it's time to dig deeper with Marcy Wheeler of emptywheel.net. This week we're covering a lot of ground: Iran outmaneuvering a US military running low on munitions, the stalled confirmation of Todd Blanche for Attorney General, wild new details in Jim Comey's legal filings, domestic violence allegations against Rep. Max Miller and the Republicans defending him, Elon Musk's continuing election crimes, and the slow-motion unraveling of Trump's DOJ. Grab some coffee, or perhaps something a bit stronger (if that's your choice!) it's a full one today.

Today's news kicked off today's show: Todd Blanche's attorney general nomination gets pulled after he refuses to put in writing that Trump's IRS "slush fund" scheme is dead — and two Republican senators aren't buying it. Then, the never-ending question of whether Mitch McConnell is alive, dead, or somewhere in between, plus Trump's new AI "pre-crime" policing plan straight out of Minority Report, and Kash Patel's defamation lawsuit over being called "googly-eyed" gets thrown out of court. (Well, they ARE googly eyes and creepy too!)

In the second half, I talk with Erin Riley about her new book, Th...

Dr. Anthony Fauci took the Fifth Amendment today rather than let Senators Rand Paul ,Josh Hawley & others on the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committees bait him into a "gotcha" moment during a hearing designed from the start to manufacture a scandal. Driftglass joins me to talk about why — tracing Fauci's decades of public service back to the earliest, most frightening days of the AIDS epidemic, and explaining how the modern right's scapegoating of him follows the exact same playbook used against Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton before her.

Before we get into it, I catch yo...

Marcy's back! After a two-week break -missing one Emptywheel Friday - Marcy Wheeler and I dig into everything that happened while she was gone — and it's a lot. We spend most of this episode on press freedom, because two major stories are unfolding right now and only one of them is getting coverage: the New York Times subpoena mess tied to the "flying bribery palace" leak, and the far less-covered case of Minnesota journalist Georgia Fort, where the evidence suggests DOJ fabricated new claims against her after failing to get an arrest warrant the first time. And of course, a...

No news, no parody today — just a conversation I've wanted to have for a long time. Nona Lee spent over two decades as a trailblazer in professional sports law, becoming the first woman, first woman of color, and first openly gay woman to hold a string of executive positions with the Phoenix Suns, Phoenix Mercury, and Arizona Diamondbacks. She built the Diamondbacks' legal department from the ground up and was part of the first all-woman team to win an MLB salary arbitration hearing.

Then, in the middle of all that success, she walked away to found what's no...

One of the progressive blogosphere's originals, Driftglass always has terrific wisdom to share, whether on a Wednesday or not. Today, we dug into Arizona's primary results — my district's new Republican nominee Mark Lamb is a "God, guns, and getting some" (as best I could recall) former sheriff with a few swinger, sexting and plain old sex scandals ongoing, who appears to live on his Tennessee ranch, which does not seem to be in Arizona. Meanwhile, while my pick, Nurse Elizabeth Lee, won with 65% of the Democratic vote yet got zero mention on the tiny bit of local news I ha...

It's primary day in Arizona, and the characters -er- candidates on the ballot could fill a Carl Hiaasen novel. I dig into the AZ-04 primary between Rep. Greg Stanton and progressive challenger Kai Newkirk, why the local DSA guide warned about risking a "fascist ghoul" taking the seat, and why I've been urging a vote for Stanton despite my meh opinions about him. Then there's Mark Lamb, the AZ-05 Republican frontrunner facing a serious sex scandal & more that Turning Point USA allies tried to silence at a recent district meeting. There's the Biggs vs. Schweikert race to challenge Gov...

Today was Day Two of the Senate confirmation hearings for Todd Blanche in his quest to be our next Attorney General. I could have told you it wasn't going to go well, and probably did. But once again, I'm truly sleep deprived and that set the tone for the day today, which began by watching the early morning hearings --but then I had to leave to get an ultrasound. And, of course, Medicare and the imaging center set the tone for the rest of the day, in a not-good-way.

I finally got home and started the show...

Today was a Senate confirmation hearing double-header — Todd Blanche in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee for his Attorney General confirmation, and Jay Clayton in front of Senate Intelligence for Director of National Intelligence. I had five monitors going and I still barely kept up. Blanche early on said the quiet part out loud by literally calling himself Trump's lawyer, got lost in a circle of double negatives while talk about the Epstein survivors (and insisted on calling them victims), and got pressed hard on a $50,000 payment to Tom Homan nobody will explain. Clayton, meanwhile, spent his hearing refusing — repe...

Jason Leopold — executive producer of the new Paramount+ docuseries "The Real Wolf of Wall Street," premiering today — joins me to talk about the FOIA documents he spent over a decade sitting on before they became the backbone of this project. We get into what the Scorsese film got right, what it dramatized, and what really happened, including Jordan Belfort's activity at a Trump casino while out on bail.

After Jason moved on to other interviews, I cover Trump's reaction to Lindsey Graham's death, the ongoing fight over election administration in Maricopa County, the truth about who actually dama...

Today I'm digging into a story that hasn't gotten the attention it deserves: the ugly power struggle inside Maricopa County's elections office, where an election-denying recorder is trying to seize control from the Board of Supervisors — with Stephen Miller's law firm involved and a ballot scanner mysteriously "borrowed" in a pickup truck. Then my old friend Sue Wilson from the Media Action Center joins me to talk about the Trump FCC's assault on ABC's broadcast licenses and why our public airwaves are worth fighting for. Plus, my honest take on why this is not the moment to primary safe De...

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 rapists, the Maine and Michigan Senate races, my own frustration with the AZ-4 primary challenge to Greg Stanton, Mitch McConnell's mysterious absence, Trump's rollout of new ways to cheat elections, and Marcy's ongoing obsession: Harmeet Dhillon's apparent frame...

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 information on him and found a long, in-depth investigative piece from DC Media Group, archived via the Wayback Machine, detailing his history leading other organizations and campaigns. I read most of it on air today because early voting is un...

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 Bicentennial, growing up during Vietnam, and how differently college and careers worked back then versus now. We wrap up with this year's Emmy nominations, plus a few words about a soap opera that just might have a Daytime Em...

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 pouring in from other countries while our own government turned the anniversary into a spectacle. We talk about the World Cup controversy Trump inserted himself into, the healthcare system's ongoing failures (including my own frustrating search for re...

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 heat descending on the whole country and especially DC this weekend, Trump's nearly $2 billion in stock trading profits while in office, Jeanine Pirro's ridiculous prosecution of an Olympic canoeist, the ongoing fight over the Epstein files, and NYC Mayor Zo...

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 what it actually takes to resist authoritarianism — and it's not what you think. We talk about building a "political home," the concept of a "belief cascade," and why the celebrities going quiet on...

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 until the end of the term! To add insult to injury, later that afternoon, I lost my job along with everyone else who worked at Air America Radio. At about 5pm, they pulled the...

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 Thomas's corruption, retirement speculation, and what a Trump SCOTUS pick might look like next.

After the break: a caller helps me sort out the confusing 6-3 vs. 5-4 reporting on th...