Episodes
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We Did It: Celebrating Democracy’s Return and Our Birthdays with Driftglass
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...
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It's Election Day – Vote Like Your Future Depends On It
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...
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Back to the Future with the Nicole Sandler Show
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...
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Emptywheel Friday with Marcy Wheeler: Midterm Home Stretch, Stolen Elections, and 11 Days to Go
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...
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Elizabeth Lee 4 AZ - She Just Might Be the First CongressWoman from AZ05
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…
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Wednesday Driftglassing: No Kings, Evil Landlords, Damn Hackers!
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...
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The Clinical Term for Him Is Psychopath: Dr. Vincent Greenwood on "Puppet on a String"
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,...
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Emptywheel Fridays: A Week and a Half of Corruption Hitting the Fan and Lots More
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...
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I'm Back (Sort Of) with Driftglass, No Thanks to Hackers
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…
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Emptywheel Friday: Sanctions, Serbia, and Stephen Miller's Plan to Export Fascism
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…
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Lisa Graves Is Back! Roberts, Bush v. Gore, and the Fight to Protect Our Votes
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...
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Driftglass and Nicole Sandler try to make sense of a senseless world
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…
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Alex Lawson Making Good Trouble and Uncovering a Nefarious Republican Plan
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…
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Emptywheel Fridays on the Nicole Sandler Show 10-2-26
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...
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D'ump's AI-ARROGANT IDIOTS- with Digby on the Nicole Sandler Show
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…
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Schmitting the Bed with Driftglass plus Eric Schmitt, the Hawkeyes, and the Dumbest Gotcha Ever Attempted
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...
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Mr. Smith Told Off Washington
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…
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Taking on the Media & Giving Real News with Dan Froomkin
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...
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Emptywheel Fridays with Marcy Wheeler of emptywheel.net on the Nicole Sandler Show
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...
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Interview with a Non-Human: I Grilled Claude AI About Trump, War, and the Robot Uprising
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...
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Jonathan Kaufman Takes Us Back to the 80s, and I Remember Them All Too Well
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...
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Driftglass' & My Audio Fixed, but Patel Still has a Bestiality Problem
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…
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David Corn: It's Not the Russia Hoax, It's the Russia Hoax HOAX
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...
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Back to the Grind: 50 Day Countdown to Election Day 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...
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Twenty-five Years After 9/11 with a Song by John Ondrasik and a Book by Jim DeFede
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...
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Emptywheel Friday 9-4-26
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!
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Rest In Peace & Power with Our Thanks & Love Gloria Steinem from All American Women
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...
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Driftglass and the FOIA King on the Nicole Sandler Show
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...
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BradBlog's Brad Friedman's Vacation Interruptus (er them...)
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...
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A New Beginning And An Extra Decade For Me - For This?
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...
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Emptywheel Friday: No Gremlins, All Chaos: Marcy Wheeler on Trump's Collapsing Empire
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...
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Show Me on the Doll where the Mean Liberal Hurt You - A Focus Group Attempt
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...
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Driftglass, the Wrong Second Death and an Idea for Tomorrow
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...
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We're Back! Digby's Here, but Dolly's Gone
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,...
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Another Emptywheel Friday with Marcy Wheeler
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…
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Howie Klein Knew Angie Nixon was Great Six Years Ago!
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...
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Studio Still Not Quite Right, so Listen to Jon Ossoff Tonight
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...
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Emptywheel Fridays with Marcy Wheeler!
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...
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Inevitable Mondays: Some Things Are Unavailable
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…
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Emptywheel Friday: The Good Guy Gets the Last Word
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...
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The First Big Fugly Medicaid Cuts Hit Nebraska
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…
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John Fugelsang Still Helping Us Laugh So We Don't Cry
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 —…
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Mueller She Wrote's Allison Gill's FOIA Request Results Might Make You Cry
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...
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Scammers Keep Scamming- Trump, Blanche, the IRS & Dave Johnson visits
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…
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Emptywheel Fridays with Marcy Wheeler
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…
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Today's Worst News & Rocking the Memories from Philly's WMMR with Erin Riley
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…
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I'm Back to Praise Dr. Fauci & Driftglass Helps While the GOP Exposes Themsevles as the Morons They Are
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…
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Emptywheel Friday-- Marcy Wheeler is Back!
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...
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Nona Lee Broke Every Barrier in Sports Law — Now She's Fighting for Truth & DEI
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…
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Speaking Truth to Power from a progressive point of view with the irreverence it demandsNicoleSandler.com ( https://nicolesandler.com/ )
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Nicole Sandler
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