First up, independent investigative journalist Arun Gupta, who has been in Burns, Oregon over the past week covering the "Patriot Movement" standoff for Raw Story, joins us with the latest. He is dubious about the FBI's explanation for the killing of one of the leaders of the occupation; explains how the Rightwing protesters are "essentially wanting to overthrow the U.S. Government"; and how the treatment of the armed demonstrators differed from the treatment of Occupy Wall Street protesters, which he had also covered.
"There's a lot of anger out there around this," Gupta tells me. "There's a lot of anger about land management issues, about a lack of economic development, and there's a lot of extreme Rightwing groups — many of them pretty racist, white supremacists — that can take advantage of this. So I don't think we have seen the end of this." Then, late news on the "debate debates" on both the Republican and Democratic sides of the aisle — with veterans groups hitting Donald Trump for hiding behind them while pulling out of Thursday's Fox "News" debate and Bernie Sanders playing hardball over the addition of new debates on the Dem side.
Next, while we've been working on this story for a while, it seems that everyone today has noticed that Microsoft has created a free app — two of them, actually — for the Democratic and Republican parties to use to help tally votes in the first-in-the-nation caucuses in Iowa next Monday.
Now that the Sanders camp has become "suspicious of Microsoft's influence in the Iowa Caucus," a lot of folks have begun freaking out about the matter. "You'd have to ask yourself why they'd want to give something like that away for free," a Sanders spokesman is quoted as saying, even as both the Sanders and Clinton campaigns have created their own apps for tracking local results at caucus sites next week.
I explain what the Microsoft apps do and don't do — for each of the parties — and if they, or you, should be concerned about it…no matter which candidate that you may or may not support in either of the parties holding caucuses next week in the Hawkeye State. Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report on Florida mayors calling out Marco Rubio for his climate change denial, an update on Flint and America's poor bearing the brunt of toxic pollution in the U.S., a win for coal miners in the fight against black lung disease, and much more in another busy BradCast today!…
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